Passionate About India

Woodrow Wilson once said that, “A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted, but it brings a pressure upon the nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.” Rebutting the same, decades later, Omar Bongo, former President of Gabon, argued against the use sanctions, commenting, “...It is important to observe that when Europe or the United Nations impose sanctions that are supposed to be aimed against a certain regime, usually millions of people end up being directly punished.” With time, the very objective of sanctions has undergone a full transformation – today, sanctions are used mostly for strategic gains than anything else. The United States and its allies (particularly Israel) are closing in on Iran! With a thumping majority (100-0), the US Senate last month approved sanctions...

I still remember the early morning of November 4, 2008, as the US Presidential election results started pouring in, I realized that something unbelievably historic was happening in America. I just couldn’t stop wondering how a Black – African American (since so many mails and messages have told me!) – could become the President of the United States of America; the same country that had earlier re-elected George Bush as the President! The whole experience was so tumultuous! I couldn’t help recall old books about America that I had read. Books about the Civil War that President Abraham Lincoln had presided over; the war that eventually resulted in the emancipation of blacks. As I wrote in my editorial in The Sunday Indian on November 9, 2008, my favourite book, of course, was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book – which passionately documented the immense pain of black slaves – is perhaps the greatest read for any human wishing to understand the meaning of the term ‘depth of character’, and is gu...

On 24 March when news started pouring in that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have taken into custody 15 British marines (from the British frigate HMS Cornwal) off the Persian Gulf, it sent shivers across the world. The pandemonium peaked as neither Iran nor the United Kingdom was ready to budge. While on one hand, the Iranian authorities claimed that the marines in their speedboats had crossed over into Iranian territorial waters, the British authorities, on the other hand, as usual, had been strongly refuting this claim. Finally, Iran’s announcement of releasing the hostages eased the mounting tension, at least for now. Otherwise, it could have led to Gulf War III or, who knows, an eventual World War III. I wonder for how long can Iran avert the impending war. The most significant, yet unanswered, questions in this episode were – Was it mere coincidence that the British marines crossed over into Iranian territorial waters around this time? Or was it that this incident was made to happen?...

The war on terror was never on terror. With every passing day come more revelations, humiliating and embarrassing, on how the entire concept of weapons of mass destruction was manufactured to suit US President George W. Bush’s plans to capture the Iraqi oil fields . . . and now as the US-dictated dummy government runs Iraq, and almost all oil and infrastructure building contracts are pocketed by American companies (Bush and Dick Cheney it seems had started deciding on the companies like Bechtel, Flour Daniel etc. for awarding of the contracts even before they started the war on Iraq) . . . the result is quiet evident . . . oil prices at one time all set to touch the $100 per barrel mark are now hovering around the half way mark. And Americans are happily guzzling oil in their heavy duty SUV’s . . . after the destruction of the twin towers instead of finding out the al-Qaeda terrorists, Bush started focussing on all those who, according to him, were evil including the Saddam Hussein-led...