Passionate About India

I will first talk a bit about Russia before coming to India-Pakistan. Exactly about a year back, Russia started its war on the ISIS in Syria! That was what the world needed desperately. Almost like the Cold War era, Russia took America head on without caring… smashing the USA-backed extremists in Syria, while additionally destroying ISIS; bombing them in a manner last seen maybe 70 years back. From stateof- the-art bombers and missiles to absolutely brilliant sea-to-land missile attacks from a distance of 1500 km to deploying the ‘Blazing Sun’ – heavy flamethrower 24 barrel missile launchers capable of flattening eight city blocks, not just by sheer heat but also by sucking up the oxygen in that area and creating a near vacuum – Russia spared no effort. Expectably, after years of near silence and efforts to demean Russian existence, the Western media has woken up to its power. And the West and its media have unleashed a huge campaign to make Russia look evil as a way to downplay t...

Each discovery and innovation comes at a cost. The gift that Tim Berners-Lee gave the world in 1990 is no exception. While, the World Wide Web has revolutionised the very ways the global economy, various national governments and ordinary individuals function, the price tag it bears is significant. What are the focal points of dispute that I’m referring to here? Two questions. Are acts of espionage over the Internet healthy? Is surveillance over the web a necessary component of some greater good for a society, one that claims to be democratic? As per a 2013 report published in Web Index (the annual journal of the World Wide Web Consortium), the surge of online censorship and surveillance is a potential threat to the very “future of democracy”. That incidences related to spying and surveillance (on the web) are causing tides that the Internet was not originally expected to influence is no surprise. The Internet threw open an age of information, where flow of information was expected ...

I had been quite upset over the completely politically motivated Oscar award for the Best Picture to a rank ordinary, non thrilling, slow paced, average film called Argo, specially in the year when Lincoln was released, and Django Unchained – with its heart in a similar place and with film making par excellence – was released! So when a friend of mine suggested to me that we watch a slightly older film called Charlie Wilson’s War, saying that it was based on a true CIA operations story, I was least interested. I thought that it was one of those films that had been again made to lobby for American ‘heroism’ at the cost of putting another nation down. I couldn’t have been wronger. After seeing the movie, I wondered how I had missed this gem when it was released! Never too late I guess. Charlie Wilson was an American Congressman (elected 11 times from Texas to the US House of Representatives, from 1972 till 1996) who became the first civilian to be decorated with the Honored Colleagu...