As far as Gulf leaders are concerned, President Donald J. Trump demonstrated with his announced US troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan that his insistence that the “world is a dangerous place” has never been truer. The troop withdrawals coupled with Mr. Trump’s praising of Saudi Arabia’s alleged willingness to foot the reconstruction bill in Syria, ...
Vedas are many and only some of them have been compiled by Vyasa (Krishna Dwaipayana), so goes the tradition. Even this compilation was very huge, but what we have today is just 99.1% of what Vyasa had compiled. Of them Rig Vedic hymns in the form of 1028 sūktas are available now. At times, we do hear about discovery of some Rig Vedic sūktas with someone, bu...
President Donald Trump is probably the most vilified White House tenant, yet in their desperate search for ways to evict him, the Justice Department and the media have passed over his encouragement of Neo-Nazi violence, his racial ‘dog whistling’, his widely publicized affairs - and the payments made to keep the women quiet - his shady business dealings arou...
The world is being fundamentally transformed by the impact of the Information and Communications Revolutions of the last three decades. The following five aspects of change require a reinvention of global governance (set out inUN-GLOBENET). A world in which telephone service was an elite luxury has been transformed in three decades into one with mobile...
For the past few years, we have been observing that an innocent person is held guilty while the guilty remain free; there have been adequate examples of such politically motivated conspiracies. A decade-long analysis of the working of Hindu leaders and organisations shows tremendous apathy by politicians and indicates the urgency of reforms in governance and...
A disagreement between major Indonesian religious leaders and the government on how to respond to China’s crackdown on Turkic Muslims raises questions about the Islamic World’s ability to sustain its silence about what amounts to one of the most concerted assaults on the faith in recent history. Rejecting a call on the government by the Indonesian Ulema Coun...
When a scientist who basked for decades in the glory of a technology that ‘rescued’ India from starvation says the green revolution was a failure and the claims made for Generation Next genetically modified (GM) crops are utterly bogus, the shock waves are likely to resonate for a long time. Unsurprisingly, “Modern technologies for sustainable food and...
The arrest of the CFO of China’s largest telecoms equipment company, Huawei, carries hallmarks of deep state or behind-the-scenes sabotage designed to rupture recent progress between US President Trump and China President Xi Jinping on strategic issues. Here are some elements of the case that smack of insider sabotage from the US side, with complicity of Fiv...
The arrival of the USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier group in the Gulf to deter Iran from further testing ballistic missiles is likely to dampen Indian hopes that the Trump administration’s exemption of the port of Chabahar from sanctions against the Islamic Republic would help it tighten economic relations with Central Asia and further regional integrati...
The French are the best. The men don’t get fat. The women don’t sleep alone. The kids are well-behaved. They have the best architecture, the best way of living, best bread, best wine, best olive oil, best cooking, some of the best writing, films, painting, poetry, perfume – and women. They also excel in revolutions. Each revolution of theirs is a peach, perf...
The heavy loss of life in an encounter at Pulwama, South Kashmir, on Saturday, December 15, has evoked multifarious responses. While there is universal expression of grief over the lives lost, the situational dynamics have created differing perceptions. A cursory study of the responses indicates an attempt from some quarters to politicise the tragedy. The me...
Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), one of the most popular Hindu philosophers who introduced yoga and Vedanta to the West, made a place for Hinduism in the cultural map of the world. Meera Nanda accuses Vivekananda of glorifying occult powers (siddhis) mentioned in Patanjali yoga sutras. Siddhis are obtained when yogis practice intensive meditation for many year...
Yoga, especially the asanas of Hatha Yoga, is very popular. Though it is generally accepted that yoga originated in India, Meera Nanda questions the Vedic origins of Hatha Yoga and claims that yoga is non-Vedic in origin. Meera Nanda claims to have a rational, scientific temper, but, as noted archeologist, B.S. Harishankar, points out: “Meera Nanda was...
From the point of view of developments in the “game” of global politics, the most interesting thing about the recent Group of Twenty (G-20) summit, held in Buenos Aires from November 30- December 1, was not so much the forum itself, but the moves made by the main participants on the sidelines of the event. These moves were made in the course of two- and thre...
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...