Navtej Sarna

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...

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

The recent presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was a sorry spectacle that ended with two old men being childish about...

A tour d’horizon—a global survey of hotspots—is standard ambassadorial practice. Conducted usually over lunch with a counterpart in some...

In March 1971, I spent several hours in a dentist’s waiting room, dreading the impending torture of the drill. The only compensation were...

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...

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...

In 2016, just before the Brexit referendum, a South Asian immigrant in the British Midlands was asked for his views. He was fervently in...

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...

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...

The most dramatic and immediate denunciation of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre came from Rabindranath Tagore. He wrote to the viceroy,...

Coupling is a word usually associated with intimate relations or railway wagons and not with international relations: countries don’t...