If all goes according to pre-stated schedule, before this year is over most American and NATO troops will leave Afghanistan, keeping close to 10,000 troops stationed there for an unstated number of years. How many of the multitude of bases that NATO has set up during its stay will remain under its control and how few will be handed over to the Afghan authori...
Pakistan’s policy of nurturing militias as strategic assets came home to roost on December 16 when Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) jihadis shot 148 persons, including 132 students, at the Army Public School in Peshawar in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. The victims, mostly offspring of military personnel, were killed as revenge for Zarb-e-Azab, the Army action...
Western nations have explained their support for Kyiv’s new post-coup regime by claiming they are trying to prevent Russia from destroying Ukraine as a single, unified state. However, it is increasingly evident that it is in fact Washington, Brussels, Bonn, and now Warsaw that are setting the stage for Ukraine’s...
Among the shows airing on the new EPIC channel the scurrilous sitcom Yam Kise Se Kam Nahin sitcom is not exceptional. Other shows are also offensive and some are historically misleading.
One feature length movie, Shaheed Udham Singh, tells of the communist Sikh revolutionary who, in revenge for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919,...
The latest examples of the eternally stupid politics of religion come in the call to give official status to the Bhagavad Gita and a dump on Hinduism by the new Hindi language Epic channel. The first is stupid because the Gita is so far above the government’s poor power to add or detract that giving it official status is somewhat like endowing it on the...
The sanctions on Russia could lead to realignment of geo-politics and global economy. The momentum of this change away from their dominant position is not unnoticed in west. The events around Ukraine suggest they are manifestation of western fear of loss of dominance. It appears that the sanctions are a final desperate measure to threaten and bully Russia in...
Russia is reacting to the economic war which NATO is waging against her in the way she would have reacted in a conventional war. She allowed herself to be hit by unilateral “sanctions” in order to better lead the opponent to a battleground of her own choosing. Simultaneously, she has signed agreements with China to safeguard her future and with Turkey to dis...
Last week I flew into Moscow, arriving at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 8. It gets dark in Moscow around that time, and the sun doesn’t rise until about 10 a.m. at this time of the year - the so-called Black Days versus White Nights. For anyone used to life closer to the equator, this is unsettling. It is the first sign that you are not only in a foreign country, which ...
The Dec. 11 summit in New Delhi between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi resulted in the signing of 16 bilateral agreements, including one that ensures supply of more Russian nuclear reactors to India over the coming years. More importantly, the summit was a joint statement by the leaders of the two powerful nations, o...
President Putin has come and gone. President Obama is expected here as chief guest at the Republic Day celebrations. The emerging economic power, India, being strategically located has become a favoured choice for both Russia and US. Russia faces a compulsion in global geopolitics after being expelled from G-8 over its action in annexing Crimea. Further the ...
The world is still hell-bent for hydrocarbon-based energy. Russia is the world’s largest producer of energy. Russia has recently announced that in the future she will no longer trade energy in US dollars, but in rubles and currencies of the trading partners. In fact, this rule will apply to all trading. Russia and China are detaching their economies from...
An aberration and how it was defeated by KP Ratnam: In 1953, when All India Radio at Thiruchirapalli, under the chairmanship of H.H. Kunrakudi Adigalar, organised a programme to celebrate on Vaikaasi Anusham, Tamil Scholar Shri Ki.Aa.Pe. Vishvanatham participated along with Pandit KP...
Geopolitical analysis, the art of explaining power relationships through the prism of impersonal geography, can be a helpful tool for observers of the Great Game – but it also has its limitations. A case in point is the renewed US-Russia confrontation. Think tanks and policy insiders easily sell the narrative that from the dark days of the Cold War to our...
The formation of the Thiruvalluvar Thirunal Kazhakam (Thiruvalluvar Day Forum) paved the way for spreading the message of Thiruvalluvar’s birth anniversary. The forum was formed by various scholars about 80 years ago, when Shri V Subbaiah Pillai, who was in charge of Tirunelveli Thennindhiya Saiva Siddhanta Kazhagam, shared his idea with his friend Shri Kaaz...
On December 16, 2014 seven gunmen affiliated with Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) assaulted the Army Public School in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. The gunmen entered the school and opened fire on school staff and children. The attack claimed 141 lives, including 132 school children aged between eight and 18 years; nine fatalities were staff members. An...
BJP Member of Parliament Tarun Vijay has been advocating pan-India recognition for the Tamil language. Greatly influenced by Thirukkural, considered a “Universal Veda” on Humanity, he spoke about the greatness of Sage Thiruvalluvar and his monumental work Thirukkural in Parliament and urged that the birth anniversary of the sage be celebrated nationwide. The...
There is a lot of talk of bringing back black money of Indians stashed away in different tax havens abroad. The ruling BJP had made this an issue in the election campaign before coming to power. It had accused the then Congress-led UPA government of being unable to bring back the black money which according to its estimate ranges between $500 billion and $1,...
Has the Modi government bitten off more than it can chew on black money? Black money is a vast issue, but the current public debate is centred on the illicit wealth stashed away in foreign banks; more accurately on BJP’s promise to bring it back. No doubt this was among the most titillating promises made by Narendra Modi while campaigning for the election th...
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brief visit to India last week was a rewarding climax to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s international outreach this year, deepening ties forged at the BRICS and other summits, satisfying some national security needs, and aligning with Mr Modi’s signature project, Make in...
Political economy has to be an expression of core philosophical outlook of a society. Philosophy not integrated and practiced in life is mere mental confabulation. So the question arises, is modern economic organisation compatible with core philosophy of Hindu dharma? Can our values survive with an economic model opposite to its core philosophical outlook?...
At a time when the country is witnessing a spree of creative interventions on almost all fronts of governance, be it the interlinking of various ministries and departments through a thematic classification and functional deliverance point of view, or the domain of geo-political relations which have been overhauled and catapulted to forge a new world order, o...
The West’s failure at the G20 has been concealed from the European and US populations through a vast propaganda offensive which spotlighted Putin being scoffed by his peers over his Ukraine politics. However, it must be noted that the name of Ukraine was not even once pronounced during the summit. The Atlanticist propaganda created a confusion between the ag...
Thierry Meyssan, who was the first to predict Chuck Hagel’s possible appointment as Defense Secretary, ponders the reasons behind his dismissal. They are not to be found in Hagel’s acts, but in the President’s change of policy. Moreover, he observes, Washington no longer has a specific policy and the Obama administration is carrying out dangerously contradic...
The reaction to the cancellation of the South Stream project has been a wonder to behold and needs to be explained very carefully. In order to understand what has happened it is first necessary to go back to the way Russian-European relations were developing in the 1990s.
Briefly, at that period, the assumption was that Russia would become...
In an reluctant admission that the brutish, well-funded, and well-equipped Dawlat al-Islamiyah f’al-Iraq w Belaad al-Sham (Daesh) or Islamic State (IS) cannot be defeated without the cooperation of Iran, the United States has tactfully shelved plans to oust Syrian President Basher al-Assad, a close ally of Teheran, and has since early...
“The problem in the world is not that small countries, who are under siege, are unwilling to change. Rather, it is that the bigger countries are piling on like bullies in the school yard – and they don’t know when to stop.” Vladimir Putin
The current global monster, Putin, so designated by corporate USA, is a heroic figure to much of the world. Russia’s sta...
If anyone is passing sleepless nights in the country, it is Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. Caught in the cobweb of several alleged scams and scandals – from CoalGate to MineGate to land scandal to relief scam to ponzi scam – the Naveen government has been trying to distance itself on each occasion from each problem. Trying to prove innocence and to co...
Anyone reading the mainstream media will have difficulty connecting the dots and getting the big picture so as to arrive at the right conclusions. A tremendous amount of information needs to be collated and analysed before we get a vague idea of what have transpired. We need also to analyse the actions of global leaders and compare and contrast with their pu...
The International Film Festival of India (IFFI), the 45th edition of which concluded its ten-day run in Goa on 30 November, allows each delegate a maximum of three tickets a day. The 28 films I saw have left me dizzy with cinema. I saw only a fraction of the films on offer and missed Leviathan, the Russian production that won the Golden Peacock. As most of t...
“Another chapter gives an exhaustive enumeration of all the testimonies … for the tradition that the Babri mosque had replaced a Hindu temple. It includes pre-colonial European testimonies as well as reports by colonial officers, but most numerous are the testimonies by local Muslims. It also cites the verdicts and internal correspondence of the...
Prime Minister Narendra Modi spelled out his vision for India in his Independence Day address on August 15 at New Delhi. From this and from his speeches at various national forums, major components of the vision would appear to be:[1]
a) Boost India’s industrial growth by inviting investors and manufacturers from all over the world to invest to infras...
The Asia-Pacific region has emerged as a global epicentre for trade and economy, politics and diplomacy, and has thus raised concerns for security. Recognising its importance, the superpower, the United States, has termed the region a “pivot” and expressed its intention to “rebalance” in this theatre. The emerging power, China, too, has made substantial fora...
Article 370 has been distrusted from its inception; but until now it could never be discussed seriously because the vested interests in favour of retaining it seemed invincible. Now, however, though it is far from being expunged from the Constitution, a serious debate has been joined. Last December, the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi visited Jammu...
An astonishing aspect of the Assembly elections in Jammu & Kashmir is not the controversy over Article 370 but the revelation that the Bharatiya Janata Party may itself be conflicted over this constitutional provision. After sharply raising the ante, infusing life into the lacklustre National Conference and increasing the dogmatism of an ascendant People’s D...
Jashodaben Modi’s RTI application to find out what she would be entitled to in the event of the assassination of her husband means only one thing, that people more politically savvy than her, perhaps the Prime Minister himself, has warned of a looming threat.
Where would that threat emerge from and...