THE Venerable Lobsang Norbu, a 77-year-old monk who presides over one of several Tibetan Buddhist hilltop monasteries in Arunachal Pradesh, in north-eastern India, recalls the “very horrible” war that China launched 50 years ago this week. Flares lit up the night, then gunfire erupted. Terrified villagers and monks fled through the pine and rhododendron forests […]
The world economic downturn and upheaval in the Arab world might grab headlines, but another big problem looms: environmental change. Along with extreme weather patterns, rising sea levels, and other natural hazards, global warming disrupts freshwater resource availability — with immense social and political implications. Earlier this year, the Office of the Director of National […]
Fifty years ago, on the morning of October 20, 1962, China’s People’s Liberation Army assaulted Indian military positions along their disputed frontier. The Chinese attack, justified domestically and abroad as self-defense, resulted in the only major armed conflict in modern times between the world’s two most populous countries. The Indian military, poorly prepared and naively […]
On the southern outskirts of the city Zaranj, where the last derelict shanties meet an endless, vacant country — beige desert and beige sky, whipped together into a single coalescing haze by the accurately named Wind of 120 Days — there is a place called Ganj: a kind of way station for Afghan migrants trying […]
India’s remarkable growth figures have, however, successfully masked a far less appealing set of statistics which shows that, despite the success of India’s middle class, when you look at government delivery of basic services to the poor, India has been struggling against being hyphenated less with China than with its more desperate and impoverished neighbours […]
As China’s ruling Communist Party prepares for a once-in-a-decade leadership transition next month, it is planning a daunting step – breaking up the monopolies enjoyed by its gargantuan state-owned enterprises. The monopolists have other ideas. One of the most powerful of all Chinese state-owned giants is the power-grid operator, State Grid Corp, led by the politically […]
Horrible history can make for poor diplomatic and political tiesdoesn’t always make for bad business. India and China are as good an example of this adage, as China and Japan are too. Henry Kissinger’s book On China begins with a fascinating snippet of what is being discussed fiercely in India these days – a border war 50 years […]
To call yourself a state, a government, you must have people you can deploy to carry out the functions of government. In an earlier column, i shared with readers the abysmal figures in India. The Indian problem is not too many officials; it is, instead, that we have too few to deal with the millions […]
Signs of potential private sector participation in cyber security has opened new and unchartered territory in India’s national security regime. The first hint of such collaboration came from Deputy National Security Adviser Vijay Latha Reddy, who, in her opening remarks at an Internet governance conference last week, spoke of a deeper engagement with the private […]
The latest cover of the Economist, the weekly news magazine that likes to call itself a newspaper, featured inequality, which it believes is the new big problem facing the world at large. Belatedly, the world is finally beginning to acknowledge an endemic problem, which is so anecdotally visible in the new India defined by glitzy malls […]
looking beyond borders 