Pandemics are not created in a vacuum. A whole mix of ingredients makes up the conundrum. When the coronavirus pandemic wanes, China should become a case study and warning to the rest against a government that suppresses people brutally, a thieving autocratic dictatorship indulging in excessive surveillance and propaganda, and of how all these create conditions that endanger not just one country, but all of humanity.
Davinder Singh – the man who helped bring two nuclear powers to war twice
What the arrest of senior Jammu and Kashmir police officer Davinder Singh with two Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists purportedly on way to Delhi to carry out a terror attack on Republic day does, is put a spotlight on the hidden world of Indian secret service operatives because the list of unanswerable questions emanating from his arrest is long.
50 Years of R&AW – Is India’s foreign spy agency dreaded or dreadful?
Is R&AW dreaded or dreadful, effective or affectlessly irrelevant, a proactive shaper of India’s history and foreign policy or a bumbling reactionary force? As R&AW turns 50 today, it is worth investigating its past in search of an answer. Like everything else about it, R&AW’s origin is shrouded in mystery.
Forgetting the most influential non-political Indian on his 100th birthday
This column is not to recount R N Kao’s successes or failures; he saw both in good measures. For despite the paucity, there have been some books both by his colleagues and some by later spies, one of whom had the good sense of recording him for posterity. Instead, this column is just to inspire us Indians – in a world where history is being slaughtered daily - to study our gradually eroding past.
Fight against corruption: A letter to my fellow Indians
The current anti-corruption agitation is nothing but that pill that will not weed out corruption or the nation’s illnesses. You have just popped a pill and it will take care of the symptoms, not the malady.
Peepli Live: A brilliant farce on India, its Politics, Media and People
Peepli Live (a pun on ‘People Live’) is not fiction, but a mirror to our disgusting society, politics, government, media and each one of us. It stamps a hard slap at the bloated sense of existence of each.
And like a good satire, it is filled with brilliant observations like the contrast between an obnoxious Hindi media and the uncaring, elite English media.