For some time, the world of education has become aware of the exceptional success of Finland’s boldly innovative education system. The ideas that guided the Finnish government were not new or original. They have been debated, applied, experimented and validated...
India’s abstention in a recent vote at the UN Security Council over Russian threats to Ukraine raises serious questions over India being a key ally of the West in the years to come. Indian leaders failed to stand up for Ukrainian sovereignty because of India’s close relations with Russia, a major supplier of military equipment. For anyone who wants to explain away India’s conduct at the United Nations as an...
Many scholars have spilled much ink on Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. A giant has now waded into the fray and penned a masterpiece. Ishtiaq Ahmed is a professor emeritus at Stockholm University who first made his name with a pathbreaking book, “The Pakistan Garrison State: Origins, Evolution, Consequences.” He then went on to pen the award-winning “The Punjab Bloodied Partitioned and Cleansed,” a tour de force on the partition of Punjab in...
They say history repeats itself, first as a tragedy and then as a farce. At the dawn of India as a republic, several Western and Indian scholars, including Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, had reservations about its survival as a democracy. Widespread poverty, illiteracy and deep-rooted social divisions based on caste and religion were considered as serious threats to meaningful implementation of universal enfranchisement. For all his follies, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first...
"If we don't learn from the tragedies of the past, we are cursed to repeat them in the future," proclaims the home page of the website of the Himachal Pradesh State Disaster Management Authority. To ensure that the irony is not lost on either the creator or the visitor of the website, just above the quote is a ticker flashing a sequence of major disasters that have afflicted the state,...
Kabul has fallen again to the Taliban. Surprisingly, so has the Panjshir Valley where the legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud defied both the Soviets and the Taliban. Even more surprisingly, India has stayed silent so far. It was in 1996 that the Taliban took over Kabul the last time around. Following a version of extreme Islam, it unleashed a reign of terror in Afghanistan. It also exported terror to India. It...
The COVID-19 pandemic is increasing inequality globally and even advanced economies have not been spared. Before the pandemic began in 2020, inequality was on the rise. Decades of globalization, loose monetary policy and the rise of oligopolies have contributed to this phenomenon. In many ways, globalization has kept inflation down. When Walmart imports Chinese goods, Americans get more for less. China can manufacture cheaply because labor costs are low. The...
An effective communicator with a questionable past builds a successful campaign as an outsider disinterested in everyday, run-of-the-mill politics. He smartly taps into the fears and anxieties of voters and projects himself as the only person who can fix the supposedly broken system. Despite warnings from ex-associates and journalists regarding his sociopathic behavior, he decries the media and political opponents as unpatriotic. Policy wonks and veterans in his party are...
