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History has been in love with Lahore since forever. It was not its only admirer. The Mughals remained enamoured of it. Akbar made the capital of his kingdom for fourteen years, from 1584 to 1598. Jahangir chose to be buried within sight of it. Shah Jahan embellished its fort. Aurangzeb commissioned a magnificent mosque opposite […]

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

Few writers can occupy Theodore White’s seat on the balcony of history. White is more famous for his quartet of books, each titled The Making of the President, covering the election campaigns of John F. Kennedy (1960), Lyndon B. Johnson (1964), and Richard Nixon (1968, re-elected in 1972). Less well-known was his memoir In Search

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

At the height of the Roman empire, all roads led to, and from, Rome. In Britannia alone – a province conquered in 43 AD and held for 400 years – the Roman legions built about 8,000 miles of roads. The historian Plutarch records that these roads ran ‘perfectly straight through the countryside’. Remnants of them

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

The West and Russia are two cyclops who have never been able to see eye to eye. Over centuries, they have grown into giants with ambitions beyond their borders and power beyond their dreams. For the rest of the world, they are a nightmare. The present conflict in and over Ukraine is more than a

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