The Indian National Security Advisor, Shiv Shankar Menon, made a few brief remarks about India’s nuclear weapons programme at the Indian Council for World Affairs on 21 August. Read more

India could still win one more medal in wrestling, but its present four medal tally still only puts the country at 47th place in the medal rally. Read more

The United States and Pakistan are in a death spiral of invective and abuse, a good thing for India one would presume. Largely yes but with a little smidgeon of no. Read more

I have been a long-standing critic of the Indian penchant for buying and hoarding gold. Read more

Several days ago I was a guest of the Institute of International Strategic Studies at its 2012 geoeconomics conference. Geoeconomics, as its name implies, is the study of political economy that has strategic consequences. And there could not be a more apt place for this than Bahrain, the home of the IISS’s outpost in the Middle East. Read more

Global Health Strategies, an NGO that works with the Gates Foundation and other groups, recently released a report on the so-called BRICS countries and global public health. Their main point was that the BRICS countries had an increasingly and largely invisible role in world health, especially among the poorest of the poor. Read more

Pakistan’s economic situation is deceptively sounder than it actually is. It’s public debt is about 50 per cent of GDP. Its external debt is about a quarter of GDP. And it basically told the IMF that it doesn’t need the last $ 3.7 billion tranche of an emergency loan that it had negotiated with the multilateral financial body. Read more

I recently gave the Jean Monnet lecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University on Europe and Asia. That’s a topic only slightly smaller than the Eurasian land mass so I largely focused on the European Union and its policies toward China, India and Asian regionalism. Read more

Another day, another foreign policy statement. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent oped piece in Foreign Policy magazine titled “America’s Pacific Century” helps place some perspective on where India fits into the US’s larger strategic view. Read more

The Barack Obama administration spent its first two years bashing Wall Street and America Inc. This led to some harsh words between the White House and the US Chamber of Commerce. Read more