Emmanuel Macron did not feel destined for a career in politics. As a young man, he hoped to become a philosopher, then a senior civil servant, then a business banker. To help him on his way, he frequented Uncle Sam’s fairy godmothers - the French-American Foundation and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. It was in this milieu that he met Henry an...
For Thierry Meyssan, by taking to the streets, the French have become the first Western population to take personal risks to oppose financial globalisation. Although they do not realise it, and still imagine that their problems are exclusively national, their enemy is the same force that crushed the region of the African Great Lakes and a part of the Greater...
The recent resignation [1] of Urjit Patel, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, due to “personal reasons” has, as expected, generated lot of discussion. The RBI was in the news recently for its apparent tussle with the Government of India (GoI) on several issues, including deployment of the central bank’s reserves. The media had a field day speculating on ...
A series of Gulf and Middle East-related developments suggest that resolving some of the Middle East’s most debilitating and devastating crises while ensuring that efforts to pressure Iran do not perpetuate the mayhem may be easier said than done. They also suggest that the same is true for keeping US and Saudi interests aligned. Optimists garner hope from t...
Commenting on the recent issue on Sabarimala, Dharmasthala Dharmadhikari D. Veerendra Heggade observed that austerities at the shrine are observed for self-control and age-old traditions must be preserved. He adopted a firm stand against the state government’s position which has led to turbulences at the shrine. Veerendra Heggade also said that if allowed in...
There is a lot of media coverage which presents climate change as the story of two warring factions: the first, being the intelligent and educated majority; and the second, the knuckle-dragging, red-necked supporters of corruption and environmental degradation. Now, why would the global media want to promote such an unlikely contest of entities? The answer w...
Having boldly dissolved the Jammu & Kashmir Assembly to prevent horse-trading, and repealed the Roshni Act, it is hoped that Governor Satyapal Malik will continue with bold reforms and not be intimidated by political parties. The decision to make the largely State-owned J&K Bank a public sector enterprise was welcome, as was the reported plan to review the i...
On December 10, the world will celebrate Human Rights Day. This date coincides with the adoption and proclamation of the universal declaration of human rights by the United Nations General Assembly’s in 1948. In Kashmir, the day is normally marked by protests orchestrated by the Hurriyat Conference, a miniscule separatist segment in the Kashmiri political la...
There was a high-five from Vladimir Putin. And for Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi it was business as usual. At home, Saudi Arabia’s media trumpeted Mohammed bin Salman’s meetings with world leaders, tweeting pictures of his encounters, which also included the presidents of South Korea, Mexico, and South Africa. However, Western leaders appeared to avoid the cr...
In May 2018, a Portland, Oregon-based company, NuScale Power, announced that its design of a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) had completed the Phase 1 review of its design certification application (DCA) by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. According to analysts, Phase 1 is the most intensive phase of the six-phase review, taking more hours and effor...
There are many apparent reasons why the United States has virtually abandoned its nuclear power generation growth. One is that the US attitude to industrial development has undergone a sea-change over the last three to four decades. In the 1950s, electricity consumption grew at an annual rate of almost 12 percent. Throughout the 1960s through 1970s, that gro...
On November 15, when we took the body of Superintendent of Police, Tahir Dawar, with public and official protocol from Jalalabad to Torkham, the convoy was stopped about one km from the crossing point on the Durand line. I and three colleagues walked to the crossing point where we met Mohsain Dawar, MP and senior member of Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), acc...
In the recently launched book, “Brief Answers to the Big Questions”, by that immortal theoretical physicist, late Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking, there is a chapter titled, “Will we survive on earth?” In January 2018, a journal founded by some physicists who had worked on the Manhattan Project to produce the world’s first hydrogen bomb, the...
The Russian world is caught up in a drama. Its leading Orthodox Church faces a schism over the Ukraine’s drive for its own independent church. If Kiev regime succeeds, the split between Russia proper and its breakaway Western part, the Ukraine, will widen. The Russian Church will suffer a great loss, comparable to the emergence of the Anglican Church for the...
Lance Naik Nazir Ahmed Wani, an ethnic Kashmiri serving the Indian Army, attained martyrdom on November 25, 2018 while engaged in a counter terrorist operation at the Kapran Batagund area of Shopian in South Kashmir. The brave heart belonged to village Cheki Ashmuji of Tehsil Kulgam. A highly decorated soldier, he had been awarded Sena Medal for gallantry tw...
The Hindu Faustian deal was first struck by Hindus with the colonial government soon after the inception of the Indian National Congress. Allan Octavian Hume with great foresight invited affluent and influential Hindus and Parsees into his parlour and successfully sold them the lemon of an idea called the Indian National Congress. Hume and Wedderburn launche...
Referring to Harvard’s motto ‘Veritas’, Solzhenitsyn prefaced his hard-hitting Harvard lecture in 1978 with the Hindu-like aphorism, “Truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on its pursuit”. And then he went on to take the American dream apart piece by piece. "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside obser...
America and Europe did not expect Putin’s Russia to rise up from the ashes of the Soviet Union; a Russia that looked increasingly like her old self – not only putting the steel of national pride and resolve back in the spines of her people but also asserting herself in world affairs. This Russia did by surmounting a self-inflicted suicidal handicap of loss o...
The seed of Huntington’s brilliant essay on the clash of civilizations which he penned in 1993 is contained in Solzhenitsyn’s no less brilliant talk that he delivered in Harvard in 1978. At America’s holiest of academic holies, Solzhenitsyn analyzed in unsparing language what he saw America and Americans as representing - intellectual cowardice, decadence of...
It is generally accepted now that Russia lost one-third of its people within the first three decades of communism; and this included the best among its thinkers, writers and political opponents - “in a rich, flourishing country, before the extermination of millions of our people, an extermination, moreover, that was no blind mass killing, but rather involved...