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All Writings


Climate change is upon us; not just a looming threat
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...
May 183 min read


How the famed secret agent Oleg Gordievsky escaped the Soviet Union and certain death
When posted to Moscow as young diplomats in the early 1980s, we were warned, by gruff men in dark glasses, against the famed KGB...
Apr 203 min read


International rules of engagement in diplomacy are no longer sacrosanct
Several narratives have emerged from the Donald Trump-Volodymyr Zelensky-J.D. Vance dust-up in the Oval office, the most disturbing being...
Mar 233 min read


Gaza: Home is not a building
Good morning, Gaza Get up, drink my coffee and rise. Our funeral has arrived—Mahmoud Darwish. The two-state solution to the...
Feb 233 min read


Why Donald Trump covets Greenland
There’s no denying it. Donald Trump is a prince among real estate developers, known for his pushy, winner-takes-all approach. Trump...
Jan 263 min read


Good fences make good neighbours
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,...
Dec 22, 20243 min read


How to do business with Donald Trump in his second term
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,...
Nov 17, 20244 min read


Hemingway’s four-decade-long love affair with Spain
There are no other countries like Spain,” says Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bells Toll . The same belief propelled...
Oct 27, 20243 min read


When widows howl and orphans cry
Each new morn New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows Strike heaven on the face….” Shakespeare’s lines, which once described...
Oct 6, 20243 min read


Soviet Union of yore had a straightforward way of naming places
The Soviet Union of yore had a straightforward way of naming places. Moscow’s railway stations, for instance, are named after...
Sep 8, 20243 min read


Fact-checkers and US presidential elections
The recent presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was a sorry spectacle that ended with two old men being childish about...
Jul 7, 20243 min read


World is losing it; we are fundamentally broken
A tour d’horizon—a global survey of hotspots—is standard ambassadorial practice. Conducted usually over lunch with a counterpart in some...
Jun 16, 20243 min read


Biden-Trump rematch lacks punch
In March 1971, I spent several hours in a dentist’s waiting room, dreading the impending torture of the drill. The only compensation were...
Mar 24, 20243 min read


Mirza Ghalib’s dilapidated haveli offers only heartbreak
Ballimaran, contrary to a minor urban legend, is not the quarter of cat-killers. It is where once lived the makers of ballis, or the long...
Feb 20, 20243 min read


Too clever by half in Dubai
School athletics taught us that anyone can be good at high jump; the trick is to keep the bar low enough. The same, it appears, is true...
Dec 31, 20233 min read


The curious case of Rwanda
In 2016, just before the Brexit referendum, a South Asian immigrant in the British Midlands was asked for his views. He was fervently in...
Dec 3, 20233 min read


Day of Judgement is already here, and verdict is—guilty
It is early morning in the hills beyond Shimla around Mashobra. The world is fortunately not yet awake; the sun just about is. Its first...
Nov 5, 20233 min read


Kim Jong Un's love for train
There’s something about Kim—the Jong-un, not the Kardashian. For one, his smiling visage. I do not recall a single picture of him where...
Oct 1, 20233 min read


Some knights are forever
The most dramatic and immediate denunciation of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre came from Rabindranath Tagore. He wrote to the viceroy,...
Sep 3, 20233 min read


Why west wants to de-risk China ties, not de-couple from it
Coupling is a word usually associated with intimate relations or railway wagons and not with international relations: countries don’t...
Aug 13, 20233 min read
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