The monsoon is about to arrive, and people are anxiously scanning the skies. Two of the last three years have seen poor rains, and the drought last year was the worst for decades. How bad is the hunger caused by […]
How hungry are Indians? Read More »
A visit to Afghanistan is a sobering one. Like most Indians, I celebrated the Taliban’s overthrow. Eighteen months later, the celebration looks premature. In theory, democracy has been restored and reconstruction has begun after two decades of civil war. In
Karzai takes on the warlords Read More »
I write this column from Afghanistan, about an ancient form of banking that has a sordid reputation in India but a splendid one in Kabul. In India, we regard hawala as criminal money-laundering. We think it uses crooked currency traders
The virtues of hawala Read More »
We have always regarded our businessmen as crooks, and foreign companies as more trustworthy, warts and all. The stock markets have always given foreign companies higher valuations than comparable Indian ones, believing that foreign companies are less likely to cheat.
Can crooks improve governance? Read More »
Computer software is India’s fastest-growing and most competitive industry. The global recession of 2001 sent most technology companies the world over into a tailspin. Yet the Indian software industry kept growing by 25 % annually. This was slower than the
Should software stocks be so soft? Read More »
One of the many conspiracy theories about the Iraq war is that the US could not tolerate Saddam Hussein’s decision to designate his oil sales in euros, not dollars. To prevent other OPEC countries from also selling oil in euros,
Why OPEC prefers dollars to euros Read More »
Back in 1990, when Doordarshan had a TV monopoly, I wrote an article titled ‘Let a thousand TV channels bloom\’. That was considered pure fantasy at the time. Leftist colleagues like Praful Bidwai protested that private channels would be vehicles
How television actually works Read More »
Journalists tend to remind readers about their most brilliant, penetrating forecasts which came true. They rarely write about times when their predictions were dismally wrong. Well, here is an entire column about how badly wrong journalists went in Iraq. Let
Getting lost in the fog of war Read More »
When the Iraq war began, some drew parallels with the Vietnam war, some with the Afghanistan war of 2001, some with the Gulf War of 1991. In fact the best parallel is with the 1971 Indo-Pak war. That in turn
Lessons from 1971 for 2003 Read More »
Many people interpret the Iraq war as part of a US plot to dominate the world through multinational corporations, some of whom are getting huge contracts to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure. The military industrial complex, it is said, has benefited enormously
Where are the imperialist profits? Read More »
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