Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

A version of this essay is published by swarajya.com at https://swarajyamag.com/world/chinas-clampdown-on-national-technology-champions-xis-new-industrial-statism-triumphalist-hubris-and-art-of-ju-jitsu The world has been baffled by China’s sudden clampdown on its very successful, and giant, companies such as e-payments company Ant Financial, ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing, food-delivery firm Meit...

A version of this essay was published by swarajaya.com at https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/a-tale-of-two-hacks-pegasus-and-chinas-microsoft-exchange-penetration In the recent past, we have seen a lot of news stories. Massive riots in South Africa and Cuba. The uncertainty in Afghanistan. Floods in Germany and China. Surging Wuhan virus cases in hitherto relatively unscathed Southeast Asia. A ‘border...

Please listen to the podcast (click the ‘play’ button above). A version of this essay will be published by Chintan of the India Foundation. The terrifying riots there have died down a bit, but not before causing significant damage. Not only the deaths, but the damage to the economy and to investor confidence must be substantial. A major oil refinery was shut down, highways were blocked, telecom to...

A version of this essay was published by swarajyamag.com at https://swarajyamag.com/world/lessons-for-india-from-south-africa-beware-of-those-bearing-gifts . Please listen to the podcast (click the ‘play’ button above), and give me feedback. It takes a lot of work to put the podcast together, and I would like to hear what you guys think of it, and your suggestions on how it can be improved. As I w...

A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-pakistan-will-soon-control-all-of-afghanistan/20210714.htm Indian geo-strategists are rightly worrying about the fallout on India from the Afghan situation and America’s comprehensive defeat there. The specter of Saigon 1975, with the last helicopter leaving from the Embassy, and desperate p...

A version of this article was published by Chintan on 7/7/2021: please read it at https://chintan.indiafoundation.in/articles/bidens-america/ I heard this, almost exactly in those words, from two different Indian-Americans: one, a spiritually-inclined female cousin, and two, an apolitical old friend.  I was startled, and reminded of the old rock ballad from Crosby, Still, Nash and Young ( Our Hous...

A version of this article has been published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/india-blundered-along-like-others-did/20210623.htm There is a loud chorus of voices blaming India for somehow messing up its response to the massive wave of Wuhan virus (Covid-19) infections that have devastated the country. Many articles and editorials have come out in both the Indian media and wester...

[PLEASE NOTE: THE FIRST 30 SECONDS OF THE AUDIO ARE MESSED UP. PLEASE BEAR WITH ME AND IGNORE THAT, THE REST OF THE AUDIO IS FINE. I DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO AUDACITY TO FIX IT UP AS MY PC IS BROKEN RIGHT NOW.] There was an outstanding Doonesbury cartoon from 1980 lampooning then-POTUS candidate Ted Kennedy for making high-flown statements with nothing actionable: the punch-line was, “A Verb, Senator,...

https://chintan.indiafoundation.in/articles/biden-afghanistan-and-relations-with-india/ It is up to every nation to pursue its interests; as has been said famously, there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests. India must accept this reality. The US will pursue its own interests, as defined by the current administration, although the question remains whether its short-term tactics will...

Note: Sorry for the silence for a couple of weeks, as I was busy. And computer problems: my Windows PC, where I normally use Audacity to record, has been messed up with boot problems. So this is recorded on a simple audio program on my Chromebook, and no chance of any post-processing editing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus epis...

I think western media has been less than honest in its ‘data analysis’ of Wuhan virus cases and deaths in India. One newspaper said the numbers were an undercount by 30x. Several others have confidently assumed similar large undercounts. After all, India must be hiding the true numbers — for what exactly, they didn’t say. I tried to understand how they concluded this, just as they confidently said...

There are three plausible reasons for the Biden Administration’s tone-deaf reaction to India’s humanitarian crisis in the #Wuhanvirus vaccine imbroglio: * malign neglect * a woke agenda * a monstrous conspiracy. As someone who lived half his adult life in the US, I have fond memories of the people and the country, and I have long been an advocate of closer India-US ties. The two are Estranged Demo...

From the transcript: Today for Episode 28, I’m delighted to have with me Dr Naras Eechambadi, who’s an expert in the use of data science and analytics to drive marketing. This is relevant because the majority of startups fail not because of poor or inappropriate technology but lack of innovative and creative marketing. But Naras’ personal journey through management consulting and the two startups...

Dr K V Bapa Rao from Los Angeles and I discuss the current situation in India-US relations. Excerpt from the transcript: We have had a little time to explore what the Biden presidency means in practice for India and more broadly for Asia, in the last few weeks. I don’t know about you, but I am severely underwhelmed, because I see the US blowing hot and cold towards India, while it is being sandbag...

The late Christopher Hitchens once wrote a book titled “The Ghoul of Calcutta”: it was about those profiting from deaths in that city. I looked up the term, and it means a monstrous being associated with graveyards and consuming human flesh. I was struck by how appropriate that term was when I saw the following tweet. Note the use of the term ‘stunning’. It implies that the pain of hundreds of fam...

For the last few years, the idea that “Smart Cities” were the inevitable next stage in the evolution of urban spaces has been the consensus among policy buffs. It stands to reason: city-based clusters are where creativity and innovation have always flourished, because of the collision and co-operation between diverse viewpoints and diverse backgrounds of densely-packed residents.  In fact, chance...

A wide-ranging chat with Dr Uday Balakrishnan (retired from the Indian Postal Service as a Member of its Board), currently teaching governance at IISc Bangalore, who has seen the beast from the inside, warts and all. We discuss: Can the bureaucracy be reformed? What are its biggest problems and sins? Is it attitude, perhaps unchanged from James Mill’s time, ie 1817? Is it the way they are recruite...

podcast above a version is published at https://chintan.indiafoundation.in/articles/artificial-intelligence-2-0-the-language-wars-are-coming/ There have been major technological breakthroughs recently, such as CRISPR-cas9 in gene-editing, AlphaFold2 in protein-folding, and the spread of blockchains and cryptocurrency. But it’s a fair bet that natural language processing via AI and Deep Learning wi...

It hit 41.5 degrees Celsius in Palakkad this week. In the blistering heat, there is an 89-year old man campaigning for the post of MLA from this storied town that sits in a gap in the Western Ghats between Tamil Nadu and Kerala. He is the legendary Dr Elattuvalappil Sreedharan, India’s most accomplished engineer. At his age, he has no need to prove anything to anybody. He has been awarded India’s...

The most vivid analogy for the latest crisis in global supply chains, the Suez Canal blocking by a grounded super-container ship, is that of a heart attack. Just as a block in an artery can lead to disastrous consequences for a human, the blockage of an arterial waterway can disrupt global trade. The Suez accounts for 12% of the world’s total cargo movement because it is a key transit route betwee...

Due to widespread Anglophilia, there is a benign image of Britain with memes like “the sceptr’d isle”, “home of Shakespeare, the Knights of the Round Table”, “Oh, to be in England now that spring is in the air!”, the Battle of Britain” and so on. But is the reality a little different? The experiences of three women there recently suggest that something is not right. Racism, bigotry, and vicious in...

Did Pratap Bhanu Mehta jump from Ashoka University? Or was he pushed? This seems to be the Hamlet-esque “to-be-or-not-to-be” question of the day in the Indian media. The simple answer is that it is very good if he was pushed. And it’s even better if he jumped. That of course needs an explanation. The push option is if the Government of India made an offer to the trustees of Ashoka that they couldn...

Vaccine diplomacy has brought out the best and the worst. There are the usual small-minded intellectual property battles, which really do not show #BigPharma in a good light. See my piece on Chintan here: https://chintan.indiafoundation.in/articles/why-india-should-rely-on-its-domestically-produced-vaccines/ and its podcast version is above. The US is reputedly hoarding 30 million doses of AstraZe...

There is a vicious, long-term Plan for us. Every day we see instances of this in action. Here’s what they did to use before when they had power. Now things are no better. We have to heed the lessons of the past. https://www.indiafacts.org.in/commentary/the-withering-attack-on-us-they-have-good-reasons-why-they-wish-us-harm/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscri...

Social media was once viewed as a breath of fresh air, with independent citizen-journalists providing unbiased content. Alas, those days are over. Today, social media is a powerful #BigTech force for thought control, and as such, it needs to be reined in. The GoI’s proposals in this regard are modest, and entirely reasonable. See a version of this podcast in print at https://chintan.indiafoundatio...