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MENASA ?
The Acronym dictionary defines MENASA as – Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. When you google it, MENSA throws up. Not a very smart acronym, this one. But try harder, and you will find the definition for it. A new acronym. A fad. A smart ( and pretentious) way to club together groups of […]
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Dalai Lama: Achieving world peace through inner peace
On the west lawn of the US Capitol Hill, this Saturday, people celebrated something very unique: Peace. With the spiritual leader Dalai Lama leading the dialogue, it turned out to be one of the most inspiring talks that I have heard in a long time. His key message was this: We can achieve world peace […]
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The challenge of writing about India
An impossibly hard task – how do people do it ? I will start with a confession : This blog post is one of the hardest that I have written so far. Not because I don’t know much about my country of origin, but precisely because of it. India is such a complex, vast, diverse […]
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Is this really a social media revolution ?
Is this really a social media revolution ? “Egypt is on the lower end of face book penetration in the Arab world at 7.66 per cent, whereas the UAE, at the highest, is at 50 per cent” says a recent report on social media usage by the Dubai School of Government ( DSG). Having managed […]
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A heady week ahead for Middle East peace – time for the US to act ?
With President’s speeches out of the way, there seems to be much to look forward to this coming week in the realm of Middle East peace. The first speech on thursday, which failed to live up to the expectations of Cairo speech, is seen by most analysts as damp, weak and ineffectual. The second speech […]
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Q and A with Riz Khan, Anchor at Al –Jazeera English
It is not everyday that you get to meet your childhood hero. To me, Riz Khan has always been a role-model and continues to do the kind of work that I would love to do, though in a different format. Even though I am a bit star-struck by him, I managed an interview about an […]
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Today, I became an Indian – yet again.
2 April 2011 is a historic day in my life. India has won the Cricket world cup today and I am a new revert. A revert to being completely and truly Indian. There are few things that can define an Indian identity. To be an Indian in the year 2011, it would seem reasonable to […]
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To plan or not to plan – that is the question.
“Long term planning” is a dreary word in my dictionary. I have always loathed thinking about what my life / the world will look like in 5 yrs time. The very idea of a “five year plan” conjures up images of India’s socialist misadventures, which led to a country trapped in a time-warp; to be […]
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Non-hierarchical news gathering the new wave sweeping journalism ?
In an interesting discussion, which brought together the stalwarts of journalism in Washington DC, as well as some member of other new media, several issues were discussed – including, but not limited to the Arab “social media revolutions”, the democratisation of news across the Middle East and also questions of access. The keynote speaker at […]
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Battle of intelligence vs intellect
While investigating the role of spoilers in the Middle East peace process, I started off with the rather objective and fair assumption that the lobbies in Washington DC are skewed positively in one direction. That is to say, the Israeli lobbies are so powerful and influential that they dominate the discourse on the issue and […]
