Tag: Pakistan

Tango in Mamallapuram

Two burly, senior citizens – Prime Minister Modi and President Xi doing a tango on the beach at Mamallapuram doesn’t quite evoke the carefully synchronised but fiercely intense passion of this Argentinian dance form. Even the cool looking, athletic Barrack Obama was left with two left feet when he was led onto the floor for a […]

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A Shah is born in India

Four decades ago on January 16, 1979, Iran’s last “Persian” ruler Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi fled his palace near Tehran never to return, thus ending a divisive rule of nearly four decades. The fallout, which occasioned his political demise, was a mass outpouring of anger against entitled westernised elites; State led dilution of traditional cultures and lifestyles; […]

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The Parsi who abducted Jinnah

BOOK REVIEW : Reddy, Sheela. Mr and Mrs Jinnah: The Marriage that Shook India Penguin Random House India, 2017. 464 pp. Sheela Reddy has a winner in this deftly crafted and diligently researched work on the life and times of Rattanbai Petit Jinnah. But this is not a racy read to be completed on the flight from […]

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Some more onions please

Onions comprise less than 1% by value of India’s agricultural production. The average Indian consumes less than 800 grams of the stuff per month. Onion is a seasonal fruit. Supply traditionally dips during July to September as only the stored winter crop, harvested around March, is available for consumption. No dearth of onions photo credit: […]

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Well run, PM Modi

(photo credit: http://www.iosipa.com) Reposted from the Asian Age May 25. 2015 < http://www.asianage.com/columnists/well-run-modi-690> Should it worry us that Modi sarkar resembles the Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie, the greatest long-distance runner ever and not Usain Bolt, the 100-metre thunderbolt from Jamaica? Not really. The 100-metre dash, whilst spectacular and crowd pulling, is a good tactic for disaster mitigation […]

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PM Modi’s Foreign Policy “Trilema”

(photo credit: http://www.financialexpress.com) Reposted from Asian Age May 15, 2015 http://www.asianage.com/columnists/modi-s-trilemma-1 India’s bland foreign policy has traditionally been based on the principle of “please all and offend none”. Things changed under Indira Gandhi when we pivoted to the Soviets and teamed up against the “capitalists” in the West. But post-1990, once the Soviet dream evaporated, […]

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Will Ashraf Ghani be Afghanistan’s Manmohan Singh?

(photocredit: dnaindia.com) It is unlikely that the national coalition in Afghanistan, which the US has stitched together, will last. More likely, the Unity Government provides a convenient cover of artificially generated “peace” allowing the US to withdraw, with “honour”, from the “graveyard of invaders”. Once it leaves, the US shall make all efforts to secure […]

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Spicing the Pak-India “Punjabi Tango” with Gujarati Dandia could yield results.

    (Photo credit: outlookindia.com) The Pak-India affair is almost as tiresome as the Israeli-Palestine impasse.   Neither party can pull apart nor do they live together in peace. Successive governments on both sides start a peace initiative at the beginning of their terms, only to lapse into status-quo near the end-defeated by the inertia of […]

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Reclaiming a strong India

What is common between the ongoing events in Crimea (2014), the British action against Argentina in the Falklands under Maggie Thatcher (1982), the war against Tamils in Sri Lanka (1982 to 2009), Kashmir (1947 onwards) and Sikkim (1975)? All five incidents are text book case studies on the dos and don’ts for the exercise of […]

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