15 February 2022 The Quad which was rebooted with great fanfare during this pandemic by its first heads of government summit virtually now has fresh eyes to look at it after the AUKUS disruption of last year.Indeed, in the midst of the current heat over Ukraine and Eastern Europe, few indications have emerged that inform […]
Category: China
31 January 2022 The much awaited first ever summit between the Central Asian Republics and India happened virtually on 27 January 2022. There are many key take aways, the first being, that this was the first time the present government has made a substantive engagement with this neighbourhood, with Mr Modi restricting himself earlier with […]
24 January 2022 What diplomacy does is to dilute the harshness of truth or reality with sophistry of word play, couched with jargon and ceremony that attempts to insulate it. The problem with diplomacy is not that it misunderstands it’s role, but that it takes its role too seriously. The problem currently besetting Western Diplomacy […]
Imran: A Captain’s Knock?
Few will understand that what is happening in Pakistan is most unusual. From its early floundering foundational days, Pakistan as a ‘nationhood’ has been captive to a larger concept of persona unlike no other. In her initial days itself, the country became captive to vested interests, an elite that initially claimed her inevitability as a […]
24 December 2021 China has had a very exciting year. On the face of it, she finally managed all the markers for her ascendency to the Summit of Global Affairs, where she is now Equal with the reigning power, USA. Consider these events- 1 Anchorage Summit at Alaska 2. Exchange of ‘prisoners’ over the Huawei […]
22 December 2021 It is always that time of the year when you like to wrap things up, sort of Christmas gift wrap them, if you will, and hope that Santa will haul away to deliver…The biggest event of this year was supposedly the return of America from the wilderness President Trump had confined her […]
20 December 2021 If there was a lesson in how the West lost the war of keeping the peace after winning the battle defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, it has been on relentless play for close to three decades now. If the Cold War denouement was a rare opportunity for America to […]
15 December 2021 There is always so much to deliberate about the vivisection of India as a composite commons into a partition of Islamic and ‘secular’ Hindu majority state by the British when they offered her Independence. There are volumes written about the aftermath of Partition, the deadly dance of death that visited the subcontinent […]
6 December 21 It is not something that one could expect from many leaders, but Putin as President has always been exceptional. This is what he does and where he makes his daring do such a normal feat of his presidency so far. Akin to riding bare horse, bare chested, or what have you, Putin’s […]
3 December 2021 Taiwan is in the news for some time now, yet, for stranger tides that we are in, it is actually the beneficiary of much happening, which is not of its making. If there is something called ‘Universal Conspiracy’ which Paulo Coelho wrote about in his ‘Alchemist’, then it is working now to […]