A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. A lot of good material has been published this week. I am a bit on the busy side, so the usual long winded responses will be replaced in favor of one-sentence summaries. THE REPUBLIC How Trillion Dollar Deficits Were Created New York Times. 9 June […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. THE REPUBLIC America, the Land of Limited Opportunity. We Must Open Our Eyes to the Truth. “Fabius Maximus”. Fabius Maximus. 31 March 2010. Fabius Maximus points to a painful truth: increasing inequality of income and declining social mobility is tearing our America apart at the […]
Last month Arundhati Roy published an incredible piece of investigative journalism in The Guardian. Roy spent more than a week “embedded” with Naxal insurgents in Chhattisgarh and her piece is a rare window into the hidden world of India’s Maoist insurgency. I heavily recommend that all readers with an interest in international insurgencies or Indian […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. There are quite a few this time, so I thought it would be best to organize them by topic. GRAND STRATEGY New Delhi, Washington: Who gets what? Ashley Tiller. Times of India. 30 January 2010. I do not know how I missed this essay when […]
A question: Why is it that when one of India’s more influential English-language policy journals devotes an entire issue towards “stepping up in Afghanistan”, nobody in the rest of the English speaking world notices? India’s role in the region means something, right? Now, the Indian Army quickly shot the idea down, but I find it […]
After a few weeks hiatus, I am now able to devote some time to blogging. The world has not held still in my absence; over the course of the last month the Lisbon Treaty was ratified, Washington decided to send 30,000 men to Afghanistan, Andhra Pradesh fragmented into two parts, MEND rebels drove Shell out […]
East vs. West — the Myths that Mystify Devdutt Pattanik. TED. November 2009. I endorse this presentation with some hesistance. Pattanik’s presentation is convincing, even brilliant, but there are limitations to the argument he makes. It has been 30 years since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism. The book’s publication brought about the collapse of […]
Prime Minister Mahoman Singh has called them “the single biggest security challenge ever faced by our country”. Fourteen Indian states are struggling to battle the insurgency waged by their 20,000 fighters. Over the last three years some 2,600 people have died by their hands. These are the Naxalites, the source of India’s scariest security challenge. […]
TOP BILLING: The Ultimate Burden Bob Herbert. New York Times. 24 August 2009. Bob Herbert writes a disquieting Jeremiad against the American people for allowing their best men to have their limbs and faces torn off without giving a damn. By far the best opinion editorial I have read this year from the New […]
I am continually fascinated by the greatest anomaly of our times, the Republic of India. In an age dominated by ethnonationalist states, India’s existence is a modern mystery. It is a hundred nations contained in one, a crucible of religions, cultures, and peoples whose history is as old as recorded history itself. That such a […]
