Singh is King There has been much song and dance about the visit of Obama and Michelle to India. Both endeared the youth and the nation alike in India and back home in US dancing their way through the storm of the showdown in the mid term elections. The US got to sign $10 Billion worth of deals with the MMCRA deal also in the pipeline, restored 50,000 US jobs and...

Editorial Comments The readers would have noted the resource management philosophy of the South Asian Idea reportage and analysis change to cover daily events aroud the world impacting South Asia. The aim is to provide a cogent and multidimensional analysis in a readable format. The month end summary enables readers to gather the threads cohesively to form their opinions...

In Papua New Guinea the Umeda village that Alfred Gell studied was a complexly patterned community, really a complex of hamlets in a larger area, that had evolved culture to fit the circumstances. The people themselves were physically evolved to survive, sturdy sun-darkened folks who probably had a lot of inner physiological molecular mutations that allowed them to live...

The mid term elections in US have ominous portents for Obama ranging from the domestic to foreign policy issues. This post attempts at unraveling some of the the thoughts being proposed and debated by think tanks across the globe. The domestic issues are for US to take a call on. With less than a month left, it’s beginning to look as this midterm election will have...

The situation in Afghanistan, despite increased Kinetic activity by US, Karzai‘s initiatives for talks with Taliban and an intransigent Pakistan fighting as the “frienemy” in the Af Pak war, is sending mixed signals to India. Imperatives for USA For the US  the war seems to have intensified from Afghanistan to a public diplomacy initiative in a West vs Islamdebate....

Musharraf turned the Pakistani world upside down with the revelation that Pakistan had trained terrorists to fight against India as all else had failed to evoke international response to Kashmir. Why did he do this soon after announcing his decision to return to active politics in Pakistan  ”to galvanise Pakistanis and fight a “jihad against poverty, hunger, illiteracy...

A recent article in the “Opinionator” by philosophy professor Jeff McMahan attracted a good deal of attention on my listservs, which include environmentalists, hunters, and animal studies people — a broad assortment easily set at each other throats. Some took this article as absolutely received word and others said it was obviously provocation and still others...

The discussion on Bellagio papers some time back by a group chaired by Stephen P Cohen argued out the future viability of Pakistan. Amongst a range of view points some interesting aspects have been argued out in this post. Some owe allegiance to the papers while others are author’s assessments and observations. What however needs emphasis is that drastic measures are...

In an effort to decipher our own social and planetary trajectories as they intertwine — possibly to bring us down — we’ve become very interested in things like dinosaurs and Roman empires. I’ve been fascinated to watch the dialogue about what the discovery of agriculture (and then walled cities which led to organized armies) have done to our humanness,...

With the French president Nicolas Sarkozy at the head, the French government passed a bill that ‘banned’ veil-wearing or simply the wearing of the niqab and burqa in public. Some in the government including the Council of State, a major judicial body, advised against such “morally-ambiguous” bills on the religious attire of Muslim women. The bill...