Fighting the next war on May 20, 2018Wars are not ending any time soon. In 2014, there were 40 wars, the highest number since 1999. Plato’s aphorism, “Only the dead have seen the last of war,” still rings true. The next war will be different from its predecessor. 21st century wars are turning out to be very different than those in the […]
A visit to the hot springs of Arenal, Costa Rica on May 14, 2018Costa Rica lies in Central America between Nicaragua and Panama. The Pacific Ocean is on the west and the Atlantic on the east.It is well known for its natural beauty. And so off we went to see it one December, during the year-end holidays. Besides beaches and rain forests, it has volcanoes. One of them […]
Mountbatten’s ‘Shameful flight’ on May 13, 2018Churchill had used the expression ‘shameful flight’ to describe the hurried British exit from India. UCLA’s Stanley Wolpert, the biographer of Jinnah, Nehru and Gandhi, made that phrase the title of his book about Partition. In a BBC interview given shortly after the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965, Mountbatten resorted to vulgar language to confess that […]
Ulysses S Grant: the magnanimous victor on May 7, 2018The war memoirs of General Grant are considered second in importance, only to those of Julius Caesar. Not only do they provide a detailed account of the American Civil War, they are also ‘a great, unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece,’ to quote Mark Twain. Grant’s claim to fame is that he led the Union forces […]
The waterfalls and islands of Iguacu, Brazil on May 4, 2018While touring Sao Paolo in Brazil, I came to know that on seeing the waterfalls at Iguacu, Eleanor Roosevelt (the wife of President Franklin D Roosevelt), had exclaimed: “Poor Niagara.” We had seen Niagara Falls up close in a boat. They were incredible. So, for the US first lady to have made that comment about […]
Touring the Emerald Isle on April 29, 2018During the two years I spent at St Patrick’s High School in Karachi, I wore the bluish-grey shirts with a green three-leaf icon on the pocket proudly. It was only decades later that I discovered that St Patrick was the patron saint of Ireland and what we wore on our shirt pocket was the shamrock, […]
Demystifying partition on April 28, 2018“The Great Partition”, as Oxford’s Yasmin Khan calls it, was designed to end communal warfare between Muslims and Hindus that had engulfed India during the closing years of the British Raj. Instead, it reinforced “the estrangement of the two nation states.” What followed was a far cry from the “hopes and dreams of Swaraj and […]
Talking with India on April 20, 2018The army chief, General Bajwa, used the passing out parade at the Pakistan Military Academy to make a surprising foreign policy initiative. He called for talks with India. The Indians should take him up on the offer. Like Prime Minister Vajpayee, Modi knows that the real power in Pakistan resides in the army. It might […]
Rediscovering Scotland the brave on April 19, 2018As a scout, I would march to a rhythm with a deep beat and resonance in it. I would assume that it was a Pakistani tune. Years later, I was surprised to discover that it was the tune of ‘Scotland the Brave.’ It was pervasive in the British Commonwealth. The Economist had once noted that […]
Lord Wavell and the partition of India on April 16, 2018Mountbatten has gone down in history as the man who partitioned India. But the idea was conceived by his predecessor. Wavell served as the penultimate viceroy under two prime ministers, Churchill and Attlee. He came to India as the successor to Lord Linlithgow. Neither Linlithgow nor Wavell wanted to divide India. Before Wavell arrived, it […]