Passionate About India

I had decided to delay this month’s editorial for   The Sunday Indian   till 11/9 (writing 9th of November the American way) because i wanted to write the edit on the next American President. But as the jokes go, Modi decided to upstage the American excitement, at least in India! But before coming to Modi, let me finish writing on why Trump as POTUS makes me reasonably happy! I followed the elections in the US with maximum enthusiasm till Bernie lost. Have written earlier too that I wanted Bernie to get the Democratic nomination like no one else ever, including Obama! And had it been Bernie, today most likely, Democrats would have been the guys celebrating! Post Hillary getting the nomination, all excitement died. Yes, I would have loved to see a woman finally breaking the Presidential glass ceiling! But did that mean supporting Hillary? When Susan Sarandon was asked why wouldn’t she support Hillary when the man she supported – Bernie – wanted support for Hillary, she s...

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...

The resounding victory of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in the recently held Duma elections was a sort of a referendum for Putin and his style of functioning for the last eight years. Putin, undoubtedly, has emerged a victor. His anointment of Dmitri Medvedev as the new Presidential candidate in next year’s elections also makes sure that the legacy of Putin and his policies are here to stay. This might be good news for Russia – and many of its allies – but certainly not for the US. With the disintegration of USSR in 1990s and the subsequent end to the Cold War, the world had gone through a dichotomy of feelings – relief on one hand, and paranoia on the other. Relief, because the end of the Cold War meant a virtual annihilation of a possible nuclear clash between the two giants (US and USSR). The sense of paranoia however persisted as the end of Cold War also meant that the world became unipolar with the US emerging as the sole superpower and entering into prolonged of war-monger...