Viswanathan K's Thoughts

“When you stop looking at India through the prism of China, the authors argue, the picture looks very different.” -          Book review in Wall Street Journal George Gilboy and Eric Heginbotham wrote this book titled “ Chinese and Indian Strategic Behavior ” where they question whether America is blindly assuming that India is an ally, a country with similar interests simply because of the fear of a rising China. The book suggests a hard look at each country independently instead of looking at the two as a yin-yang pair where if one is your enemy, then the other must be your friend by definition. The authors’ conclusion? India and China spell double trouble for the US. Now for their reasons. They point at India’s stance on issues like Iran, Syria and Libya where it never aligns with the West. Both India and China, they argue, repeatedly vote against any foreign intervention anywhere, including Myanmar and Sudan. As for the argument that demo...

During the good old days of the cold war, the West could call a spade a spade, an enemy an enemy. Not so with the fight against terrorism where they have to call the very people who murder them their friends. So the Saudis are “friends” as are the Pakistanis. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and the Pakistanis hosted Osama bin Laden in a military town. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Well ok, you could term those as the compulsions of oil and geography (also known as the ‘supply routes to Afghanistan’). But it’s not just the American politicians who practice this charade: even Hollywood does the same. Cold war era movies often revolved around rogue Russian generals, but today, they don’t make any movie on rogue ISI or Pakistani army generals. And while Iran and North Korea are the “axis of evil”, there's deafening silence on Egypt (the other supplier of the 9/11 perpetrators). And while there is an increasing effort to build US alliances against China ...

We’ve heard the famous Tom Sawyer and his fence story. Of how Tom presented a punishment (painting the fence) as something attractive, so much so that his friends begged to paint the fence…and in some cases, even paid for a piece of the punishment, er, action. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, did something similar in 2007. When he was still at Harvard, he was spending so much time with his company that he hardly attended any classes. So when this art test was due, Zuckerberg had no idea of the course contents (Yeah, I know: most of us had no idea of our course contents at college even without forming companies, so does that make us smarter than Zuckerberg?!). Anyways, dropping out of college is not that uncommon, but to flunk out doesn’t sound so good, does it? So he posted all the images he should have studied on a web page and sent a mail to his classmates offering a “study guide”. Bingo! They posted the information about each image. Plus, they even filtered the most import...