Passionate About India

The People’s Republic of China may have initially missed out on industrial revolution that made the western nations what they are today and constrained China to an emerging economy in spite of its mercurial economic growth for the last three-and-a-half decades. But learning from the past, it is all set to become a front-runner in the virtual revolution, and is very ready to leverage maximum possible benefits out of it. In fact, it has gone a step further to set off cyber warfare with other countries in the congested and tightly competitive virtual world. And this time, it won’t settle for being a laggard, for it is heading fast towards its most cherished goal of becoming a global superpower! Undoubtedly, the modern warfare is no more about the number of casualties or destruction of physical property. The new doctrines of war is all about attacking a nation economically and paralyzing it for years to come. An economically broken nation would not only destroy its human capital in t...

The former US president George W. Bush called Hugo Chavez of Venezuela a “devil” and allegedly backed his opposition in the subsequent elections, to the point that there were rumours, confirmed by Chavez, that the Americans had hatched a plot to kill him. Reports alleged that organisations like FBI and CIA were all primed up wanting to get rid of Chavez. There were numerous other assassination attempts, ranging from attempts by Gov. Manuel Rosales (his arch rival in domestic polity belonging to Un Nuevo Tiempo) to those by the Columbian secret police. However, all those attempts were foiled by the mercy of his fate, before he eventually died bravely fighting cancer on March 5, 2013. As his coffin, draped in the national flag, was passed through the streets of Caracas, the very sight of swelling crowds flocking in for the last glimpse of their beloved leader spoke volumes of his popularity and larger-than-life image. And why not! He was a socialist leader who had the guts to take US ...

The Economist, in an unbelievably futuristic cover story titled Who killed the newspaper, way back in 2006, had written that the last American will throw the last piece of newspaper into the dustbin by the year 2050! I trusted The Economist and its Intelligence Unit’s researches far too much to outrightly reject its forecast, but surely had thought that that would be crazy, since I came from a family where I grew up seeing my father read about a dozen odd newspapers daily; and us reading the leftover pieces – because, after he had finished reading a newspaper, it would be full of holes due to his cutting out various articles. He had a wall-sized cupboard with hundreds of drawers with articles on every possible topic in the world... well-documented and stored alphabetically. So naturally, The Economist piece set me thinking about the ramifications for and of a world without newspapers, echoing the line of thinking of my father that after all, newspapers were where we got our knowledge,...

With the 2014 general election staring us in the face, the Finance Minister, Mr. P Chidambaram, presented a budget that resembles a financial bulwark for the masses – but where defence, like others, has been a casualty in the bargain. India had always been an important export destination for weaponry and defence equipment, areas which were monopolized by USSR during the greater part of the Cold War. Even after many entry barriers were removed allowing Western nations to penetrate the Indian defence market, the lion’s share of the defence pie continued to be controlled by Russia – a trend that is still as much in vogue as it was yesteryear! And this budget gave India all the more reason to continue the said trend – a glimpse of which is displayed every year during our Republic Day celebrations where our government showcases the country’s military might as tableaus in front of the entire nation. This year, most of the defence weapons displayed were either imported or were assembled ...

With another forgettable budget being presented in India, let me show how real commitment for the downtrodden can alter a country’s economic landscape! When the capitalist West won the Cold War against Soviet Union and Eastern European nations, it became an underlined conclusion among political pundits and in fact a common perception that capitalism was the real path for success – rather than socialism, which was made to appear as a sure shot road to economic doom! However, this self-ratified superiority of capitalism and the entire Western chest-thumping exercise that existed during those times and even the succeeding decades are all but gone. United States is grinding it out through an extended recession streak and Europe is literally struggling to keep the eurozone in one piece, with the entire eurozone on the verge of collapsing like a broken jigsaw puzzle. The recession in Europe and North America, which started in 2008, is like a never-ending nightmare with no sight of revival w...

“Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.” So wrote Daniel Lyons some years back, in a classic Forbes cover story titled ‘Attack of the Blogs’. As the Senior Editor of Forbes then, Dan was simply expressing his extreme frustration at the utter nastiness of the Internet community, which seemed to have a super-majority of calumnious commentators, who thrived on the faceless protection that the net provided in order to leave shamefully slanderous and defamatory comments left, right and center. Cut to the present, and the situation has sickeningly worsened. Not just globally, but perhaps more so in the Indian perspective. Take a quick ‘surf’ across various pages of the Internet and it would not be hard for one to realise that every fourth or fifth page is filled up with some or the other pejoratively aberrant content against respectable individuals and compa...

Kasab was a terrorist from across the border – a man who was seen killing innocent Indians, by millions, almost live on TV! He had to be hanged and announcing it in advance could have created international cross-border tension. His secret hanging was understandable though the political calculations in the times of a fast rising pro-Narendra Modi wave and an intention to extract credit was apparent. Although there was euphoria around the Kasab hanging, the fact is that the hanging didn't benefit the government – it at best reduced ammunition in the hands of the BJP to criticize Congress. The government apparently didn't learn lessons from that episode. With the intention of creating another wave of euphoria, this time they executed Afzal Guru in a similar fashion. Guru, however, can by no stretch of imagination be equated with Kasab. In fact, his is a case where the veracity about his very involvement has been questioned by far too many intellectuals, Arundhati Roy included. In...