Columns

COULD one lunch in Washington cause so much dyspepsia in Delhi, or indigestion in Islamabad? On June 18, 2025, President Donald Trump invited Field Marshal Asim Munir for a private meal in the White House’s Cabinet Room. He set five places: for himself, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his aide Steve Witkoff. The field […]

These are perilous times for homo sapiens, regardless of whether you believe in the predictions of Nostradamus or the epiphanies of Baba Venga. Thanks to a trio of psychopathic megalomaniacs, we are being pushed to the edge of extinction, one lie and tweet at a time. Drones and rockets are raining down in Russia and

A RELIABLE enemy is as difficult to find today as a loyal friend. In modern geopolitics, the first is a sine qua non, the second a fickle firefly. In its 250-year-old history, the US army has faced a range of foes. The list is long and open-ended — from Germany, the (former) USSR, Vietnam, Cambodia,

India, we are told, has now entered a “New Normal” after that little “menage a trois” with Pakistan and China in the first week of May in which we still don’t know who came out on top, as it were.  And there is certainly plenty of evidence to back this claim, viz. that we have

One has to be either a fool or in government not to fear a nuclear conflict. Fools need not worry; they live in their own paradise. Governments make provision for their safety in case sirens blow. It is we – the vulnerable citizenry of nuclear states – who are unprotected, when the doomsday button is pushed.

CHINA is India’s real-time nightmare. India’s paranoia is discussed in Ram Udhav’s book Uneasy Neighbours (2014). He quotes a prediction that India’s threat will come not from Pan-Europeanism but from “Pan-Islamism and Pan-Mongolianism”. He repeats the warning given in 1950 to Pandit Nehru by his home minister Vallabhbhai Patel: “In the guise of ideological expansion

Press Release & Video: India is becoming a nation of duffers and we’re evolving back to the neanderthal stage: Avay Shukla, Author ‘Holy Cows and Loose Cannons: The Duffer Zone Chronicles’ to Karan Thapar for The Wire. In an interview to mark the publication of his recent collection of blogs called ‘Holy Cows and Loose

THE whereabouts of Hitler’s charred remains are still a mystery. His spirit though has been reincarnated in numerous elected dictators, most recently in B. Netanyahu and N. Modi. No two modern leaders have shown such a flagrant disregard for societal norms, religious precepts, and legal undertakings. They deserve a Nobel Prize — for ethnic cleansing.

Despite the military’s technological prowess and tactical victories, India’s international standing collapsed under the weight of reckless media sensationalism, diplomatic overreach, and the unchecked proliferation of communal hate speech that alienated potential allies. Going beyond the nitpicking about the number of “assets” lost by India and Pakistan, it is now clear that we have inflicted