Navtej Sarna

Donald Trump’s teflon is wearing thin. He’s at 33 per cent approval, the lowest of his second term; his disapproval ratings are 64 per cent, just lower than Richard Nixon’s at the time of his resignation. With the mid-terms around the corner, alarm bells are ringing. A Trump endorsement, as recent primaries show, is no longer a coronation but the cold kiss of death. Shenanigans no longer pass for governance: Americans are tiring of bluster, lies, cronyism, vanity projects and

Ruskin Bond wrote in his 1991 essay—and eponymous book—that Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. Saddened by what creeping modernisation was doing to the idyllic Dehradun of his youth—the town of “green hedges and grey heads”—he clung to the faint hope offered by surviving old trees: these trees, hoped Mr Bond, would preserve the past, be repositories of memory in the face of indiscriminate development. The wise chronicler of the Mussoorie hills was only consoling himself. Even in

Enver Hoxha, Albania’s communist ruler for over four decades, trusted nobody. Not the Soviets, not the Chinese, not the Yugoslavs, and certainly not his own people. Albania, already a mountain fastness, was turned into an ideological one during the Cold War. Europe’s most isolated country, primed to frustrate invaders since the Ottoman times, peered nervously at the world from behind self-imposed walls. Its coastline bristled with military installations, tunnels disappeared i

When I attended the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner in 2018, President Donald Trump gave it a miss. Nothing personal between us. Just that the presidential skin, though younger, was even thinner than it is now. In fact, Trump did not attend any WHCA dinner during his first term, unwilling to exchange champagne toasts with networks that he regularly slammed and sued. In the event, the 2018 dinner was a disappointment. The comedian Michelle Wolf laboured t

Even during my time in Tehran nearly three decades ago, a jagged chasm had opened up between the people and the regime. The revolutionary fervour had paled; resentment with an oppressive cleric regime, clothed in religious righteousness, muscled by a ruthless security system and supported by shadowy financial structures was evident. The invasion of private space, the curtailment of personal freedoms, economic hardship and growing estrangement from the world deeply troubled th

It was the magical hour at the Golden Temple. The sun was taking its leave discreetly; the early winter twilight was settling in unobtrusively. The kirtan , sung in classical ragas , was floating over the sarovar , the holy pool. Hundreds of pilgrims waited to enter the sanctum sanctorum or sat by the sarovar savouring a moment of peace. It was a time to withdraw, to reflect, perhaps meditate. This serenity was not always a given. During the persecution of the Sikhs in the 1

My memories of Iran in the nineties tinkle with the sound of water. Of streams running down the slopes of the Alborz mountains above Tehran, fed by the snows of Mount Damavand. Of chinar leaves floating in the water channels that raced along Vali Asr, the long avenue that slopes through the city. Of sipping black tea from thin glasses under the Si-o-se Pol (the bridge of the 33 arches) in Isfahan as the Zayandeh Rud (literally, the life-giving river) flowed past. But today, n

Every once in a while, the archives deliver a nugget. Your columnist came across an essay in The Statesman of August 15, 1947, by a certain H. St. John Bridger Philby, an ICS officer whose son, Kim Philby, born in Punjab on New Year’s Day 1912, would become the iconic Cold War spy. Philby nicknamed his son after the eponymous hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel; the nickname stuck, as did the spying habit that the two Kims shared. Philby Sr. spent eight years in Punjab and then

Alice, if she had wandered into our wonderland, would have found things getting “curiouser and curiouser”, particularly at the Honourable...

These are times when the mind struggles to make sense of things. The old measures are discarded, and the new ones unacceptable. Humanity...

Sharks famously circle their prey, waiting for the right moment to move in for the kill. Landsharks do the same, circling the piece of...

It’s as if 17 years have not passed: I recall clearly the day when I first drove up Israel’s Route 1 from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem past...

When posted to Moscow as young diplomats in the early 1980s, we were warned, by gruff men in dark glasses, against the famed KGB...

Several narratives have emerged from the Donald Trump-Volodymyr Zelensky-J.D. Vance dust-up in the Oval office, the most disturbing being...

Good morning, Gaza Get up, drink my coffee and rise. Our funeral has arrived—Mahmoud Darwish. The two-state solution to the...

There’s no denying it. Donald Trump is a prince among real estate developers, known for his pushy, winner-takes-all approach. Trump...

When fences erode, or nobody is at home, neighbours tend to take advantage. A nibble at a patch of land, a fence post pushed a yard away,...

The world is still coming to terms with Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Many had no doubt predicted, even feared, this outcome,...

There are no other countries like Spain,” says Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bells Toll . The same belief propelled...

Each new morn New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows Strike heaven on the face….” Shakespeare’s lines, which once described...