I know this column has been focussing too much on Ukraine off-late at the cost of other conflict theatres (like Taiwan for example), but to its defence, intel and information about Ukraine – both the interesting and the highly interesting types – keep flowing in with no signs of ebbing. And in this flow […]

  As the world waltzed through 20th century riding high on tech progress and application, there was a general concurrence among most of the political thinkers of those times that geopolitics would be redundant by the end of the century. After all, flying bombers and missiles did make geography fairly passé in the different theatres of […]

The US Ambassador to Georgia has been trying hard to drag Georgia into the Ukrainian crisis to take the West’s side. This has been under two assumptions: 1. Georgia does not enjoy a good relationship with Russia post 2008 Georgian War; and 2. The EU had promised Georgia candidate status in the Union. One naturally […]

Profound global changes happen long before human beings realize them. The world, for example, went multipolar before a lot of us could even guess what multipolarity truly meant. It initiated multipolarity when the West, in its attempt to ‘connect’ the globe through globalisation, literally shipped out its different lifelines to different corners, without a thought […]

  Central Asia has been witnessing a flurry of demonstrations, agitations, and mass protests since the beginning of 2022. The resultant deaths, detentions, and injuries have focussed the spotlight on the different governments of the region in a manner that has the potential to undermine their legitimacy in the medium run. In January, Kazakhstan witnessed […]

  The beheading of a tailor in Udaipur by two local, homegrown Islamist radicals adds yet another name to an extremely long list of murders in the name of Islam in the Indian subcontinent. This atrocity follows a TV debate and a resultant outrage; one that got manufactured in social media courtesy the woke-media combine […]

  Why should we treat Ukraine as a model? Ever since 2019, with the BJP government getting re-elected, the western media has been shouting hoarsely about the ‘right-wing Hindutva movement’ in India. But more pertinent than ‘Is India really a right-wing country now’, is the question: Does the US have an issue with right-wing ideology? […]

Shooting your own foot Let us begin with a clip from an article in CBS titled “Russia’s Ruble is the strongest currency in the world this year”: “Commodity prices are currently sky-high, and even though there is a drop in the volume of Russian exports… the increase in commodity prices more than compensates for these […]

Out of the stated highlights of the Agnipath Scheme, to me, the two big ones are: A) 25% of the top performers at the end of their 4-year stint get a chance to enrol in the Indian Army. That is a decent proposition, considering that only the best of all the regular applicants to the […]

There are three questions about the Nupur-Naveen incident that are making rounds: 1. Were the Middle East and OIC response a result of a nudge by the USA? 2. Could New Delhi have responded in a better fashion? 3. Is there a bigger picture there somewhere? Let us try to address them one by one. […]