Avay Shukla

Going beyond the nit picking about the number of “assets” lost by India and Pakistan, it is now clear that we have inflicted significant losses on the latter. In doing so our defence forces have also demonstrated the technological and air power to enforce the Prime Minister’s stated resolve to extract a heavy price for […]

First, the context. It’s not working. The planet is headed for armageddon in this century itself if we continue with our present unsustainable life styles. The Paris Accord red line of 1.5* C temperature increase has been breached, CO2 levels have gone up by 125% above pre-industrial levels and at 425 ppm are approaching the

The jury may still be out on whether India is an elected dictatorship, but it should be unanimous on the fact that it is a bureaucratic diktat-orship. For the last few few years our Ministries and their pen-pushers, denuded of any role in any sane policy formulation, have been passing their time in issuing all kinds of

Elon Musk has just declared that there will be one million humans living on Mars by 2045. Perfect timing, you will agree, because by then Trump would have digested Greenland, Panama, the Gaza Riviera, maybe even Canada, and would, like Alexander the Great, be shedding tears because by then there would be no new real

The generally received wisdom is that international affairs is so arcane a subject that it should be left to experts and diplomats to interpret. Which they usually do in language that no one understands. But even that is fine so long as we can make sense of the moves on the global chessboard. That is

Sometime back the Union Minister for Labour and Employment, Shobha Karandjale, blamed the spread of education in the country for the high unemployment rate: we have far too many graduates, she added, in case you missed it the first time. This immediately caused a huge uproar on social media and various liberal groups, with someone

Marx missed the full picture when he described religion as an opiate of the masses. so did George Carlin when he claimed that God was a fiction. For today Neo-Capitalism and right-wing fundamentalism have assigned God a new role and turned Him into an FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Good): far from being an opiate He

“There’s a new Sheriff in town,” was what the newly minted TD Vance, Vice President of the USA, informed Europe in his typical hillbilly way on his first visit there. He was, presumably, referring to Trump and not to the federal marshal, Musk, who appears to be riding shotgun for the former as the American

Unlike our Prime Minister or Mr. Narayan Murthy, I do not labour for 18 hours a day; in fact, I don’t labour at all- having toiled for 35 years I have now left it to others to clear out the mess I’ve created during that period. But this doesn’t mean I don’t put in many