I recently discovered Rock ‘n Roll – a relatively unknown stage play from 2006 by Tom Stoppard, an intellectual playwright. Set in the period between 1968-1990, it addresses the struggle with communism waged by students in Eastern Europe. The play tells the story of brutal censorship in Stoppard’s native Czechoslovakia, where young people are fighting for th...
During the quarter of Western lockdown, the map of the Middle East was profoundly transformed. Yemen has been divided into two separate countries, Israel is paralysed by two Prime Ministers who hate each other, Iran openly supports NATO in Iraq and Libya, Turkey occupies northern Syria, Saudi Arabia is close to bankruptcy. All alliances are being called into...
Some recent events have captured the attention of the mainstream media to such an extent that other events of arguably greater importance have not received the attention they deserve. The events getting extraordinary prominence are the riots in the United States and the coronavirus outbreaks. Neither will be given more than a brief discussion because at the ...
Societies are shaped by technology. That’s always been true. Be it: fire, the wheel, the stirrup, the printing press, the internal combustion engine, air flight, the computer. The applications and management of technological innovation trace a more complex trajectory than the techniques themselves. Nothing is compelling or automatic.
These days, the most ...
As the world battles the COVID-19 pandemic and law enforcement finds itself directed towards public health measures, the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) has pointed out that one of the key challenges nations face relate to criminal enterprises taking advantage of the crisis to jeopardize governmental responses as...
For thousands of years, India has been home to a civilisation that has historically been tolerant and inclusive; independent India is gripped by the westernized idea of ‘Secularism’. Successive governments have bent over backwards to cater to the whims and fancies of minority communities for votes during elections. This twisted ‘secularism has caused much su...
We made it! As a man after prolonged illness gets up on his feet, slowly and uncertainly, and makes his first steps, so mankind is rising from its sickbed. There are nurses, doctors, heirs and lawyers who want to keep the patient in bed forever so they will enjoy a free run, but he is rising, his own master, despite their frighteners. Now is exactly the...
The unbearable tragedy at Galwan Valley has little to do with territorial claims and is instead a distraction “with Chinese characteristics”, to cover the fact that President Xi Jinping’s flagship project, Belt and Road Initiative, is floundering. At the National People’s Congress in May 2020, Beijing announced a military budget of $178.6 billion for 2020...
Western Europe (we’ll define as France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, and Austria) shows how regions of the world with existing socioeconomic problems have seen Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) simply amplify them while in other regions where fundamentals have been stronger (China and ASEAN), have simply been temporarily setback. Even within nations,...
As the world struggles with Covid 19, our nation is fighting this pandemic with a clear vision and firm steps. Individuals, volunteer organisations and other institutions have come together to support the government in this war-like effort, to help conquer this calamity. At the same time, we are witnessing illegal and completely anti-Hindu activity being car...
A second wave of the coronavirus pandemic is raising its ugly head. It is putting Middle Eastern leaders at a crossroads as they struggle to contain the disease and tackle its economic fallout. The question is whether they are getting the message: neither containing and controlling the virus nor economic recovery is a straight shot. Both are likely to involv...
China’s priority infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), faces enormous problems just seven years after it was proclaimed in 2013. Serious problems and charges of China luring poorer nations into what a leading Indian analyst termed “debt trap diplomacy,” began to appear already in 2018 when Malaysia and Pakistan, under new governments,...
As the Coronavirus pandemic continues to devastate many nations of the world, the global community and media outlets have been increasingly focusing on questionable activities being carried out at biolabs financed by funds from the US Department of Defense budget. There have already been a number of publications expressing concern about the collection of...
At a time when India is facing rising cases of Covid-19 cases and its political capital Delhi and financial capital Mumbai is battling with collapsing medical system, India is struggling to manage its aggressive adversaries. On Monday night, India lost the Commanding Officer of an Infantry Battalion stationed at the Galwan valley in north Ladakh during a...
India has begun the process of gradually unlocking the lockdown with the hope of reviving the ailing economy that was showing a downward trend even before the countrywide lockdown was announced on March 24. The GDP recorded 4.2 per cent in 2019-20 as compared to 6.1 per cent in the previous year. This was the lowest in 11 years. Even in the last quarter of 2...
A fierce confrontation between the United States and China, which has further intensified during the Coronavirus era, has become a staple in recent years. In order to exacerbate this conflict, Washington has employed numerous tools, such as pulling out of a number of bilateral and even international agreements; aggressively using sanctions; ramping up propag...
There is no doubt that colonialism and racism sit at the root of America’s domestic problems. The push to dominate others abroad is directly linked to the belief that those who are different at home should also be dominated. There are still Americans alive today that remember segregation laws that denied black Americans their basic rights and dignity....
Who could have guessed that the Floyd protest is the best Coronavirus vaccine? The same people that warned us that the virus is the deadliest plague and staying-at-home is the only escape, now commanded us to march amongst throngs, shoulder-to-shoulder against police! It appears they have the dreadful pandemic under their command, on tap: now it’s coming, no...
As expected, the Indian government announced what will be the fifth phase of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown on the last day of the phase four (18 – 31 May), which is going to last until the end of June. No matter how much people are yearning for India to be unlocked completely, with all restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the coronavirus lifted, ...
For a decade or more, the world has seen riots that weren’t riots at all, Maiden Square, Hong Kong, Tripoli, Cairo and they have seen terror attacks, Paris, Boston and others. All have been staged. Now the US is in flames. Is there something in common here? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Ukraine was overthrown by a CIA plot or that the Arab...
A notable feature of public discourse at the present time is the one most rarely remarked upon. I refer to the peripheral role of academe. There were periods when ideas, persons and even institutions in the university world were significant parties in debates about central issues that preoccupied the nation. Think of the 1930s, the 1960-70s, and – to a...
The grim impact of the coronavirus, lockdown, cyclones Amphan and Nisarg that lashed both coasts have cast a shadow over the first year of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second term. Still, it was an eventful year, beginning with the defanging of Article 370, scrapping of Article 35-A, and bifurcation of the State of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union...
With the specter of a New Great Depression hovering over most of the planet, realpolitik perspectives for a radical change of the political economy framework we live in are not exactly encouraging. Western ruling elites will be deploying myriad tactics to perpetuate the passivity of populations barely emerging from de facto house arrest, including a massive ...
China and the Gulf States are in the same boat as they grapple with uncertainty about regional security against the backdrop of doubts about the United States’ commitment to the region. Like the Gulf States, China has long relied on the US defense umbrella to ensure the security of the flow of energy and other goods through waters surrounding the Gulf in wha...
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa completed six months in office on May 18. The Sinhala majority voted him to power after they were disillusioned by the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government’s failure to deliver on their promises. The last straw was the failure to take decisive action to stop the Easter Sunday massacre by Jihadi terrorists in spite to getting advanc...
The headline says it all – why even write the article? Journalism has – of course, and with universal unanimity – become merely the relaying of the statements of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci is not just an immunologist – he’s an economist, historian, judge, legislator (national, state, county, city and village), manufacturer, landlord, employer, son, daughter, m...
The Covid-19 outbreak took by surprise politicians who had lost sight of their primary function: to protect their fellow citizens. Panicked, they turned to a few gurus. In this case the mathematician Neil Ferguson of Imperial College [1] and the physician Richard Hatchett of CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), former collaborator of the U...
“Desperate men do desperate things”. These words ring in one’s ears with regard to the series of misadventures China is indulging in the critical COVID-19 environment. Apart from its international isolation due to its management of COVID-19, China is facing an existential crisis on several fronts including shortage of food for its huge population, falling de...
The economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic for Gulf States has done far more than play havoc with their revenue base and fiscal household. It has propelled massive structural change to the top of their agenda in ways that economic diversification plans had not accounted for. Leave aside whether Gulf States can continue to focus on high-profile, attenti...
A few days back I received two messages through WhatsApp from an activist friend of mine. One of them was about the ordinary folks’ penchant for cheap stuff, even in the matter of food stuffs which may be injurious to their health. He specifically mentioned coconut oil. He has a coconut farm and says that it costs Rs 250/- to market a kilogram of pure cocon...