Make Sense of the world
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In March 2015, the unexpected newly elected president of Sri Lanka, Maithripala Sirisena, stated that the national anthem could be sung in Tamil at official and institutional events. For anyone alien to life on the teardrop island, this announcement may have come as a surprise since, after all,...
Last week, 53 days after his suspicious disappearance on March 10, Bangladeshi journalist Shafiqul Islam Kajol was “found” by authorities in Benapole, 150 miles from Dhaka where he was last seen. On May 3, border guards apparently discovered Kajol, the editor of the daily...
US President Donald Trump had already taken a sledgehammer to the export-led growth model. With the COVID-19 pandemic rousing primal passions, hitherto unfashionable ideas are emerging like Dracula from their grave. Protecting infant industries to improve future competitive advantage or strategic...
On April 5, India responded to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to light earthen lamps for nine minutes at 9 pm. Earlier on March 19, he appealed for a 14-hour “people’s curfew” three days later. On March 25, Modi imposed a national lockdown over 1.3 billion people, the biggest such...
In India, as the national lockdown was extended till May 3, it is incredible that the government failed to do what it should have done a month ago. Heart-rending images of stranded people in cities all over the country, desperately trying to make sense of the sudden loss of home, hearth and...
Up until April, the COVID-19 outbreak in Singapore had largely been kept under control, to the extent that it was considered one of the best examples of pandemic response in the world. By speedily rolling out measures — including contact tracing, aggressive testing and isolating potential...
The COVID-19 pandemic is dominating the news, and rightly so. This pandemic is a human rights crisis, and millions of people are at risk. However, it is crucially important that the media continue to report on what else is happening in different countries around the world. In the midst of the...
The COVID-19 pandemic is a truly global crisis, challenging even the most advanced health systems and economies in the world. But more devastation looms as the novel coronavirus has not yet reached many of the world’s most vulnerable populations. Among them are more than 900,000 Rohingya...
Amid the debate surrounding COVID-19, the rhetoric around hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) in the United States and India is the best example of the populism of our times. Earlier on in the pandemic, anecdotal evidence from France led US President Donald Trump to proclaim that all the patients should try...
In India, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government has a tendency for doing things like a “surgical strike.” In 2016, at just a few hours’ notice, Prime Minister Narendra Modi removed the 500 ($6.50) and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation. The move, known as demonetization, sent...
Nearly one year has passed since the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka, and in the midst of a lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, the anniversary was marked under somber circumstances. The trauma of these terrorist attacks — which occurred when an Islamic extremist group bombed churches...
