Kautilyan Kronicles
Asia’s balancer, Bangladesh
Remember those expansive aphorisms, “Britannia rules the waves” and the “empire where the sun never sets”?
Oscillating Anglo-American relations
A rolling stone, as the cliché goes, gathers no moss. According to musician Robert Zimmerman, it is “like a complete unknown,” indeed, “with no direction home.” Under his more popular identity, Bob Dylan, he penned “Like a rolling stone,” often regarded the crème de la crème song in its genre. It might also be the swansong of a fabled bilateral relationship. Gone awry, that relationship arguably symbolises the upended global status of two partners.
A Giant Retreat for Mankind
Remember those first words ever spoken from the moon? In the half-century since Neil Armstrong uttered them, the space race has invited many other countries—from the rich to the poor, from the developed to the developing—and even attracted private-sector
‘Clash of civilisation’ or crash: Environmental doomsday?
What do the following civilisations have in common: Mesopotamia four millennia ago; the 8th-century Viking Greenland settlement; Mayas from the 10th century; and the Khmer empire in the 15th century?
Angela Merkel’s legacy: ‘Holy Roman Empress’?
Historians are often bemused by how the millennia-old Holy Roman Emperor was not holy, nor Roman, nor even an emperor.
GPA and beyond: Time to break out of old pedagogical models
Grumpy” was her name. In the flower-filled month of May, the world’s most famous cat of the same name bid her ever-cheering audience a sad adieu. Perhaps not the best of analogies, but it highlights grumpiness in another area, that, fortunately, we can do something about.
Galloping Bangladesh: Emperor with no clothes?
Don’t judge a book by its cover.” So goes a popular cliché, though appraisals become more sanguine the more one opens the volume. Recent (April) reports about the country’s top-flight economic growth-rates expose why heeding that message helps keep us on track.
There goes the neighbourhood: Sri Lankan spillovers
"Tragedy” only mildly describes Sri Lanka’s bombing spate. It was heinous, stirring the wrong juices, pitting the wrong spiritual brethrens against each other. It was evil, not only fanning flames between two religious groups...
Forster's third democratic cheer: Mahathir (as a symbol)?
EM Forster, almost a lone-wolf democracy crusader between the two world wars, confronted as unpalatable a European playground as many African, Asian, and Latin American countries striving to convince others of their democratic claims face today: an uphill battle in which the institutionalised forces against democracy, such as extreme rightists/leftists and militarism, were usually at least as strong as those
Jerusalem - “A day which will live in infamy” (. . . if history is any guide)
US President Donald J Trump did not mince his words: President Harry S Truman, a Democrat, made the United States the first country to recognise Israel's statehood (May 14, 1948), yet his own December 6, 2017 decision to shift the US embassy to Jerusalem, the first country to do so, on May 14, 2018, may have converted the logical 1948 recognition decision into a 2018 conflict invitation.
Lighting Marx's Fire - Revolution or romance?
FEW, if any, people/philosophers get as bashed up on their 200th birthday anniversary as Karl Heinrich Marx did on May 5, 2018. Whether it is the neo-liberal atmosphere or a guttural reaction to his opposition to private property rights, this German philosopher's 21st Century portrait as a punching bag is woefully deficient.
Wuhan woos: China and India rewriting future history?
Behind the brouhaha of the recent Macron-Trump and Moon-Kim summits, the Modi-Jinping rendezvous may have made less noise, but could make more substantive global changes. A multi-layered appraisal at the local, regional, and global levels examines the proposition.
A Korean Super Moon?
If 2018 was meant to be the year of the “moon”, we have not been disappointed. There was the March 31 Blue Moon, that is, when the full moon appears for the second time in a month.
Britain's un-Commonwealth
The British Commonw-ealth Heads of Government Meeting (BCHOGM) unfolding in London this week faces some underlying questions: What is it that binds 53 disparate members? How does it blend into 21st Century international relations? Why is it important?