It is hard to say if Erdogan is running out of choices, friends, time, or all of the above; and his stands on various issues and the contradictions he ploughs through are making his situation increasingly untenable. For the benefit of readers who haven’t heard this before; Erdogan is juggling being a Turkish Muslim reformer who parades under the photos of Tu...
Shocking news just in from India is enough to make one’s blood run cold. A professor of Molecular Biology in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Anand Ranganathan, and his colleagues published a preprint (which has not been peer-reviewed as yet) about their research on the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from China. They discovered a possible link between...
Few postmodern political pantomimes have been more revealing than the hundreds of so-called “international decision-makers,” mostly Western, waxing lyrical, disgusted or nostalgic over “Westlessness” at the Munich Security Conference. “Westlessness” sounds like one of those constipated concepts issued from a post-party bad hangover at the Rive Gauche during ...
For two decades, US troops have been imposing their law on the broader Middle East. Entire countries are now without a state to defend them. Populations have been subjected to the dictatorship of the Islamists. Mass murders have been committed. There have been famines as well. President Donald Trump has forced his generals to repatriate their soldiers, but t...
All ideology is a lie. For to make an impression, to win converts, it must simplify the true nature of things. It reduces the complex to the simple, the profound to the fathomable, the contradictory to the reconcilable. It must portray an ideal and make that ideal, or something akin to it, seem reachable. How much of a lie depends on its target audience: how...
Truth supposedly is the object of our desires. Yet the supply always exceeds the demand. That anomaly is the point of departure for this collection of thoughts. Everyone talks about the truth, but most shy from it when presented. Puzzles of this nature prompted me to reflect on how truth, in its manifold forms, figures in the social psychology of individuals...
It’s a shame that even 73 years after Independence nothing substantial has been done for agriculture. Governments have come and gone but none of them have been able to understand the real problem of the farmers; suicides continue unabated. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced doubling of farmers’ income by 2022. But has he drawn up a blueprint for doin...
Whereas the mainstream western and Arab media have been claiming a ‘serious rift’ between Russia and Turkey over the death of Turkish soldiers in a Syrian offensive in Idlib, this is far from the case. While there is no gainsaying that Russian and Syrian interests do not always converge fully and that there are some contentious areas, this then is also quite...
US President Donald Trump confirmed his intention to end nearly two decades of war in Afghanistan and reduce the number of US troops in the country in his State of Union address to Congress on February 4. About 14,000 members of the US military are currently deployed in Afghanistan, as well as 17,000 troops from 39 NATO member states. However, according to t...
The appearance of a new strain of coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan last month, which has since spread to more than 20 countries, has sparked social media-driven panic around the world. People are scouring the Internet for information about this coronavirus outbreak, which the World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency, and they ...
Historically the greatest economic depressions have started with unexpected events on the periphery of major financial markets. That was the case in May 1931 with the surprise collapse of the Austrian Creditanstalt Bank in Vienna which brought the entire fragile banking system of postwar Germany down with it, triggering the Great Depression in the United Sta...
Even if we overlook the facts about which nation is “occupying” Kashmir, by stating that there is “no difference between Gallipoli and occupied Kashmir”, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan unambiguously signalled his intention to emerge as “imam” of the new (pseudo) Caliphate he hopes to lead by 2023, the centenary of the Turkish Republic. Addressing a...
This year, Imran Khan, the “selected” Prime Minister of Pakistan, chose to celebrate the infamous “Kashmir Solidarity Day” in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK). Predictably, a major part of his speech at Mirpur was directed against India and specifically against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He said, “200 million people of Pakistan and its battle-hardened army...
In the last week of January, US Special Representative for Syria, James Jeffery, travelled to Europe to step up US economic pressure on Syria due to its ‘attacks’ on Idlib. While it may sound strange why the US would sanction Syria for its resounding successes against al-Qaeda jihadi groups, the fact of the matter is that these rouge groups remain US allies ...
Recently, an ever increasing number of countries have started distancing from the United States. This process became particularly noticeable a couple of years ago when Donald Trump announced a new policy that he dubbed America First. It’s noteworthy that in the aftermath of the Cold War the US assumed a dominant role on the geopolitical stage, claiming...
Last fortnight, there was a major counter-terrorist operation near the Nagrota cantonment [Jan. 31, 2020]. Pakistani terrorists, who probably infiltrated from Hiranagar in District Kathua of Jammu region, were accosted at a poll plaza near Nargota cantonment. Three terrorists were killed while one security person was injured. It is understood that there were...
Ron Unz, the fearless disturber of established dogma, has published a long essay connecting together some of his earlier texts under the title Mossad Assassinations. I like his natural style, his lack of pathos and drama. He does not lecture you, but shares his progress with you; what did he discover today, and how did he discover that. Reading him is like...
A decade of anti-government protests in the Arab world have thrown popular trust in the military into the garbage bin and undermined the military’s position as one of the most trusted institutions. Long gone are the days when protesters on Cairo’s Tahrir square chanted “the military and the people are one.” In 2011 it was the barriers of fear that protesters...
Having just recently celebrated the annual reductive canonization of Martin Luther King by deservedly extolling his work for human solidarity but with hardly anyone quoting his criticisms of capitalism, his fellow revolutionary Malcolm’s words are still timely as well in going far beyond current identity group divisions and addressing humanity as a whole. At...
The suspense is over and we now know the names of all the members of the new Russian government. You can, for example, take this good summary published by RT. What is important right now is not only what did happen, but also what did NOT happen. I will begin with two extremely important things which did NOT happen: First, the Russian government has NOT remai...
On January 15, 2020, a pastoral letter by Syro-Malabar Media Commission under the Syro Malabar Church Major Archbishop, Cardinal George Alencherry, urged the priests and laity to take serious note of Christian girls getting trapped in love and being killed in Kerala and other States by Islamic State organizations. The media commission has Bishop Joseph Pampl...
There is a glaring dichotomy in the Modi government’s performance. On the political front, it knows its objectives, can devise effective strategies to achieve them and implement these strategies in the teeth of severe opposition. The economy, however, stubbornly refuses to do its bidding. To be sure, the economy has many things going for it under NDA-II....
Under the cascading roar of the 24/7 news cycle cum Twitter eruptions, it’s easy for most of the West, especially the US, to forget the basics about the interaction of Eurasia with its western peninsula, Europe. Asia and Europe have been trading goods and ideas since at least 3,500 BC. Historically, the flux may have suffered some occasional bumps – for inst...
Whenever there’s an examination of Russia’s resurgence in Middle Eastern and African affairs, the narrative is always about weapons, economic competition, and Cold War-era detente. Few analysts or reporters examine the non-transactional elements of the policies of Vladimir Putin. To really understand the recent successes of Mr. Putin and Russia, we must unde...
“Pakistan is not an enemy country, our armies are alike too, their army kills their people and our army kills our people, there is no difference between them”. These words were spoken by Tapan Bose, an activist and film maker from West Bengal. For good measure he added that “the ruling class of India and Pakistan is alike”. The statement is best ignored as...
As agitators show fatigue with the unending Delhi-based protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, sending feelers for face-saving talks, Western media busybodies have rushed to the cause, alleging a sinister plot to render 200 million Muslims stateless. In a vacuous article, “Intolerant India”, The Economist of London alleges a plot to “transform...
In its commitment to detente in various parts of the globe, Russia is increasingly focused on the complex situation, in danger of transforming into an armed conflict, in the Persian Gulf region. It has, therefore, come up with a concept aimed at ensuring collective security. And we are not simply referring to an attempt to avoid a flare-up in the region here...
On 28 December 2019, the inauguration of the 80 Indian History Congress at Kannur University, Kerala, witnessed unruly scenes with Left delegates staging a protest against the Kerala Governor Arif Muhammad Khan, while he was delivering the inaugural address. As per the programme, Marxist historian Irfan Habib was not among the speakers at the inaugural funct...
At just a time when the world holds its collective breath over risk of a World War over the US assassination of Iran’s leading general and other provocations, Israel has chosen to sign a natural gas pipeline deal with Greece and Cyprus that is the equivalent of tossing a loaded hand grenade into the hyper-tense region. Until some months ago it was doubtful w...