book-reviews, books, international-affairs, politics, uncategorized

NIXON, INDIRA AND INDIA: Politics and Beyond

At a time when India is seen, rightly or wrongly, as intensely  engaged in an effort to get closer and closer to United States, it is useful  read this book by the well- known journalist and author Kalyani Shankar. The principal theme is how Indira Gandhi was crafty enough to outwit Richard Nixon ,himself a superb practitioner  of the wicked  art of real politik, in the context of the 1971 war between India and Pakistan bringing into being Bangladesh. Those of us who are old enough do  have an idea of how Indira Gandhi did it. But Shankar by accessing the declassified US material and using her contacts with some of the major actors, including Henry Kissinger, has given us a  reasonably  comprehensive account of what happened and why it happened the way it happened. (more…)

November 10th, 2010 | category:book-reviews, books, international-affairs, politics, uncategorized |

book-reviews, books, international-affairs, politics, uncategorized

Book Review: CHILDREN OF ABRAHAM AT WAR

A clash of prejudices As I finished reading the book, I thought of two other books — Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. All three authors look for the big picture. Unlike the other two, however, the book under review is free from any trace of civilisational ego-centricism. Both Fukuyama and Huntington assume without providing much corroborating evidence the essential, inherent superiority of the western civilisation over others. Ambassador Talmiz Ahmed, currently posted to Saudi Arabia, is refreshingly free from such an ego-centric predicament, as historian Toynbee put it. Why is it that Ahmed is free and the other two are not? The answer is fairly simple. In addition to being an industrious scholar, the author has spent most of his 35-year career in West Asia. He has had the advantage of talking to a wide spectrum of people there, observing their behaviour and the interaction between the West and Islam. (more…)

November 10th, 2010 | category:book-reviews, books, international-affairs, politics, uncategorized |

book-reviews, books, international-affairs, politics, uncategorized

Book Review: A JOURNEY

Apologia for a war Given that 92,000 copies were sold in the first four days, Tony Blair has felled a large number of trees to argue a case that is seriously flawed. By sheer coincidence, as soon as the reviewer finished the book, the new Labour Party leader Ed Miliband came out with a categorical statement that the Iraq war was “wrong, wrong, wrong”. I had always thought that Tony Blair was really Tory Blair. I felt vindicated after reading the book written in the style of Christian apologetics to defend a position, not primarily to narrate what happened, how and why. (more…)

November 10th, 2010 | category:book-reviews, books, international-affairs, politics, uncategorized |

book-reviews, books, international-affairs

Book Review: THE INHERITANCE

Difficult Legacy There is a frank admission that Bush messed it up. There is hope that Obama will undo the mess if he can get his act right. Is he getting it right? DAVID E. SANGER is eminently qualified to write about what President Barack Hussein Obama has inherited from his predecessor. As the chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times, Sanger accompanied President George W. Bush on his official visits abroad and has had access to many of the world leaders Bush met with during his tenure. Candidate Obama's words "Yes, we can", symbolising the paradigm shift he would make as President, resonated not only through the United States but also the rest of the world. The subtitle of the book reads The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power. (more…)

October 29th, 2009 | category:book-reviews, books, international-affairs |

international-affairs, uncategorized

Aristotle vs. Greenspan

Even as the global economic crisis aggravates, all that the governments have done so far is to inject money into the market. According to the Bank of England, the global financial firms have lost $2.8 trillion and governments have pumped into them $5 trillion of tax-payers’ money. Yet, the banks are not lending. The White House has urged them (October28) to start lending. Clearly, the band aids have failed to stem the hemorrhage. (more…)

October 04th, 2009 | category:international-affairs, uncategorized |

book-reviews, books, international-affairs

Book Review : JINNAH : India-Partition Independence

As I completed the enjoyable navigation through the ponderous, pompous, and pontificatory prose of Jaswant Singh, I was reminded of three other famous writers: Oscar Wilde: The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. Benedetto Croce: All historiography is contemporary historiography. Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. To put the last quotation in context, Voltaire is said to have said this to Helvetius after his book De l’esprit was burned in 1759.That was 30 years before the French Revolution began. One wonders whether Gujarat under Narendra Modi is in a pre-Revolutionary situation. (more…)

October 04th, 2009 | category:book-reviews, books, international-affairs |

international-affairs, speeches

President Obama: Plans and Impediments

Let us learn our lessons .Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that any one who embarks  on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent or arrogant Commanders ,untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations-all take their seats at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war.(Winston Churchill, My Early Life,1930).

Whether Churchill was President George Bush’s favorite author or not, it is obvious that he disagreed totally with  the British Prime Minister. However, what was written  in 1930  applies with painful pertinence  to the wars started by   the 43rd President of the United States in his eight years of office. (more…)

April 15th, 2009 | category:international-affairs, speeches |

international-affairs, uncategorized

Most unpopular war in history

Why did the leaders of the international community choose the Azores islands, almost midway between Europe and America for a summit? In order to underline the importance they attach to trans-Atlantic solidarity? No. The choice was made in order to escape from anti-war demonstrators. Even as the leading lights of the ‘coalition of the willing', the chiefs of government of United States of America, United Kingdom, Spain, and Portugal were meeting and taking the world perilously close to a big war, Jose Saramago, the Nobel laureate Portuguese writer taking part in one of the many demonstrations throughout the world said: "We are marching against the law of the jungle that the United States and its acolytes old and new want to impose." (more…)

March 05th, 2009 | category:international-affairs, uncategorized |

international-affairs, speeches, uncategorized

India at sixty

We shall, and we should celebrate the first sixty years of our political independence. It is natural to celebrate. There is much to celebrate. At the same time ,we should also do something that is not so natural to us: to introspect. What have we as a people done with the sixty years that have elapsed? How have we filled them? Could we have done better? Such introspection that we have in mind should be undertaken with humility and objectivity. We should exaggerate neither our failures nor our successes. As Shakespeare put it: This above all :to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. (more…)

March 05th, 2009 | category:international-affairs, speeches, uncategorized |