27 July 2021 I use the term ‘Hot Turkey’ to refer to an abrupt switch from negative dependency to a positive force. If Cold Turkey is a phrase conventionally used to describe sudden stopping of smoking or spirits, by an addict, then Hot Turkey would be an abrupt taking up of a substance by a […]
27 July 2021 One never imagined that President Xi would prove to be what he has…like the proverbial chess board where the knights advanced with pawns only to retreat and make space for bishops and rooks, castling to create a fortress, rather than the initially ferocious advance across the white half, he has actually made […]
A Break That India Needs
25 July 2021Not very much in terms of how the state of play is, yet, when you are hoping that flux will reveal a pathfinder, and you end up nearly a year later with more of the dreaded flux, your worst case scenarios fructifying in unedifying manner, it would seem that an ageless civilisational nation, […]
20 July 2021 A mythical winged steed that was per legend born from the union of Poseidon a Varuna equivalent who was also the God of Horses, and a Gorgon Medusa, one of three such hideous creatures that had serpents for strands of hair, who were winged females human like. So if we don’t delve […]
19 July 2021 What must convince the ‘folk’ that climate change is catastrophic, than a few gallons of rain that wash away their very life time’s efforts to build a ‘nest’? In Germany and Belgium, reeling from ‘unprecedented’ deluge in 48 hours, valleys were washed away, well laid towns were converted into mud slats, intersecting […]
Remembering Danish Siddiqui 17 July 2021 What the Taliban did not know, was the backlash of killing a journalist? That as war correspondents and photographers of conflict areas and conflicting narratives, did Danish Siddiqui not know how much he was putting himself to risk? Deep within the various tributes that are now flooding Twitter about […]
16 July 2021 To paraphrase a popular quote on soldiering, for leadership, let us say, that Angela Merkel is one person about whom generations to come will write that ‘never has history owed so much to one person’! Like the Queen of England, yet not temporally a forever figure, as she remits office this year, […]
Eastern Stirring: A Meiji redux?
15 July 2021 Japan as a country and polity is no stranger to self imposed isolation. The last pre industrial isolation was broken when the shogunate was replaced by what is popularly termed as the Meiji restoration. In the decades immediately after the 1868 restoration, Japan transformed herself, by placing telegraph lines, railways, forming a […]
13 July 2021 Prior to the Bismarck concept of nationhood, where culture and language populated ideally by a mono-ethnic people demarcated the nation state, it was rather common to see multi ethnic and multicultural in fact multi linguistic commons as a nationhood. Even if one takes the narrowest example of the British Isles as a […]
13 July 2021 The ancient concept of Chakravartikshetram uses a judicious mix of economic, social, cultural and military powers as attributes of one who desires to establish a chakravartam, which Sanskrit allows us to describe as sphere of influence. The concept of overlordship is actually more geopolitical in the Tamil concept of ‘mudi venthan’ with […]