Rajeev Srinivasan works in sales and marketing in the software industry. He spends his time in the US and India. He graduated from IIT Madras and the Stanford Business School.

• September 11th, a year later   - September 11, 2002
'Whatever Americans might feel, September 11th was not the end of civilization as we know it. However painful it might have been, it is merely a wakeup call: "Welcome to the rest of the world! This is how the other half lives, vulnerable to terror and fearful of our lives".'

• Taming the predatory State of today   - August 16, 2002
'Instead of being the omniscient and omnipotent Big Brother, the government needs to redefine its role as an infrastructure provider, whose main role is law and order, defense and external affairs and the protection of national interests.'

• The predatory State   - August 16, 2002
'The Indian State is not able to, or willing to, or even interested in, protecting the interests of its citizens. The State is a dangerous entity whose primary interest is self-preservation and self-aggrandisement.'

• China: From mismanagement to collapse   - July 29, 2002
'What better way to distract people's attention from economic folly and an ideologically bankrupt polity than by going to war?'

• India vs China: Startling economic facts   - July 26, 2002
'There is also a lot of hard data that suggests China's 'miracle' looks more like a 'debacle'.'

• All the President's Men...   - June 21, 2002
'I do believe choosing A P J Abdul Kalam sends the right message to anyone who cares to observe. The message that today's India is not to be trifled with, that it has strong-willed men and women who are not afraid to stand up to world pressure and look after its interests.'

• Tools of the 'secularist' arsenal   - June 4, 2002
'In the 'secular' 'progressive' manifesto, free speech means hate speech against Hinduism, but not other religions. Hinduism is fair game for the most vile hate speech, innuendo, insinuation, and just plain invective. This is blatant discrimination.'

• After the carnage: the predatory 'intelligentsia'   - May 13, 2002
'The 'secular' 'progressives' always mouth meaningless platitudes when there is aggression against Hindus. Then why isn't it perfectly legitimate for me, in reverse, to weep for Hindus, and to downplay aggression against Muslims?'

• Europe's hypocrisy   - May 1, 2002
'Since these terrorists, aided and abetted by the overly multi-cultural British, end up attacking and harming India, I think India would be fully justified to file a complaint with the newly constituted International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice, naming Tony Blair, Jack Straw and the British queen for war crimes: they are allowing terrorists to be harboured on their territory.'

• Dealing with the Tigers: India's tightrope options   - April 15, 2002
'We who are unable to force General Musharraf to release Masood Azhar and Sheikh Omar should not even dream of getting Prabhakaran handed over to India to stand trial. Whose army is going to enforce that, I ask?'

• Two strikes: one in China, the other in Kerala   - April 4, 2002
'There is one thing India can learn from China. That is how to deal with your difficult workers: something India really needs to learn. In fact there is another thing: how to cook the books and make up brilliant macroeconomic statistics that Americans salivate over.'

• Godhra, 'secular' 'progressives' and politics   - March 25, 2002
'Can you imagine what would have happened if, say, black rioters had torched a trainload of white commuters in New York City? The entire country would have been in flames.'

• Sport as metaphor   - March 12, 2002
'Compare cricket to the way governance works in India: it is almost exactly the same. The personality cults, the dynastic succession of mediocrities, the extreme incompetence and inability to win; and the fattening of self and pals at the trough of public money.'

• Blaming the Hindu victim   - March 7, 2002
'What kind of "provocation" leads someone to randomly execute women and children in the most gruesome manner possible, by burning them alive?'

• On the art of war   - February 6, 2002
'If Pervez Musharraf does manage to hold on, he is likely to become Pakistan's Gorbachev, presiding over the dissolution of his country's empire.'

• Indians will no longer be impressed by Marxist histrionics   - January 4, 2002
'In terms of mutilating textbooks, I am impressed by the sheer chutzpah of the leftists in crying "Wolf!" now when they have unhesitatingly done nothing but large-scale bowdlerization for the last fifty-odd years.'

• Historicide: Censoring the past... and the present   - January 3, 2002
'If we inculcate in our children a false history of India we will create a society of monsters: much like our lost generation that worships America, Russia or China, but never India. This cannot be countenanced.'

• What happened in Kunduz?   - November 30, 2001
'Which team is Foggy Bottom playing for? The good guys or the bad guys? Whose benefit is the war for: America's or Al Qaeda's?'

• Other people's wars: we need to worry only about our national interests - Part II   - November 1, 2001
'India's war is against the real terrorists nurtured by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China. The Americans are shadow-boxing: they only want to make a lot of noise, declare victory and go home.'

• Other people's wars: let them fight them - Part I   - October 31, 2001
'The Americans traditionally respect the militarily strong, especially those who have hurt them. Now that the Arabs and Afghans have hurt them, the Americans will have some respect for them. We, Indians, have no place in their world view.'

• Triumph of the dispossessed: Naipaul and the enigma of exile   - October 22, 2001
'None writes better or more evocatively about the experience of exile, about being dispossessed, than V S Naipaul. The Nobel is a richly deserved tribute.'

• Pearl Harbor Redux: another day that will live in infamy   - September 17, 2001
'Americans are finally realizing what it feels like to be the targets of determined and implacable terrorists, especially those fuelled by religious ideology. Indians have coped with this for years, and the Americans have generally been unsympathetic to our plight.'

• A Plebiscite for annulling Partition   - September 4, 2001
'I think the majority of people in Pakistan will see that Partition has brought them little good. Rational economic thinking for the majority would indicate reunification.'

• You want a plebiscite? Okay, let's do a real one, then!   - September 3, 2001
'The objective is to gain a strategic understanding of the mind-sets of today's Pakistanis and other enemies of India. It is essential for Indians to understand their tactics, their objectives, and their role-models.'

• The travails of god's own country   - August 20, 2001
'I have roots only in Kerala and San Francisco, my two homes. I have worried about how San Francisco will disappear one day in the earthquake on the San Andreas Fault; now I fear for Kerala too.'

• Mala fide in Madras   - July 4, 2001
'The Centre decided to pick on the governor of Tamil Nadu as they are loath to take on the mercurial Jayalalithaa, whom they may yet feel the need to ally with at some future point.'

• Because it's their nature, their custom: why the Indo-Pak summit is doomed   - June 18, 2001
'Pakistani armymen and its surrogate terrorists brutally murder people in Kashmir every day. This is not a nice tete-a-tete between neighbours: we have barbarians at our gates.'

• Who killed the royal family of Nepal?   - June 4, 2001
'When the dust settles, I suspect we will find that poor King Birendra and most of his family were massacred not because of their son's love-life, but simply and cold-bloodedly as part of the Sino-Islamic attack on Hindu civilization.'

• The Chinese will blink   - May 30, 2001
'They cannot afford a trade war with the Americans. Nor can they afford an arms race: just as the Americans beggared and destroyed the Soviet Union, they will be able to destroy and fragment China.'

• Dancing with wolves: India and the rogue states   - May 28, 2001
'India is finally saying, ideology be damned, let us look after our own selfish interests. I hope this is the beginning of a trend. It is in India's strategic interests to contain China just as China has contained us.'

• In memoriam: Narayan, Greene, Desani and Adams   - May 21, 2001
'R K Narayan and Graham Greene were two of the best writers of English fiction who were eternal bridesmaids in the Nobel Prize sweepstakes, to mix metaphors wildly. I am not sure why Greene never quite made it. But I think I know why Narayan never got it -- it has to do with epidermal pigmentation.'

• Contenders, yes; good marketers, no   - May 16, 2001
'All of a sudden, Indians are contenders. Yet we are ignorant of the power of marketing, and the value of branding.'

• The man who knew marketing   - May 15, 2001
'There is little doubt that Dewang Mehta was a master marketeer: he understood the power of packaging and positioning. He was the evangelist par excellence.'

• Religion is like soap-powder   - April 25, 2001
'It is entirely possible that the prohibition against idol-worship in the semitic religions is really a secular marketing idea that has in course of time been transformed into an article of faith.'

• And what exactly is wrong with idol-worship?   - April 24, 2001
'When Hindus prostrate themselves before images of their gods, these are idols. When Christians prostrate themselves before images of the crucified Jesus or Mary, these are icons."

• Beware the Ides of March, George Fernandes   - March 17, 2001
'Very interestingly, it has been exactly one week since the Chinese announced their biggest-ever budget for their military: an official number of $17.2 billion (an 18 pc increase from last year in real terms); and the Economist suggests that 'actual spending is between three and five times higher'. And all of a sudden, India loses its most able defence minister ever. Curious coincidence?'

• Children of a Lesser God   - February 23, 2001
'Christians moan about "attacks"? Theirs has been a civilisational attack on the rest of the world, their religion no more than a convenient facade for European imperialism.'

• What the Thunder Said   - January 31, 2001
'Those who live abroad sometimes have a tendency to give a measly sum, say $ 50, thinking of the multiplicative factor of the exchange rate. This is nonsense. Give one day's salary, people! This is the least you can do. Let the pain be equally shared amongst all of us.'

• Comparative advantage: India vs China   - January 15, 2001
'I think India's fate is neither Japan's nor Mexico's. Her future is brighter. As for China, I think its future is more likely to be Mexico than Japan. This is why I am not quite as worried about China as a lot of Indians seem to be.'

• Goodbye, foul Millennium: millennius horribilis   - January 1, 2001
'India is coming out of its self-imposed isolation. We are coming out of a thousand years of being told we are inferior. Whereas in point of fact, our traditions are superior. We have forgotten and lost to termites more than most other civilisations ever created.'

• Brutes only understand brute force   - December 8, 2000
'It is true insanity to offer peace to someone with the instincts of a raging bull. These terrorists are today's implacable buffalo-demons; let us not do the Chamberlain thing of trying to appease them. It won't work, as it didn't work with the Nazis and the Chinese.'

• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: December 2000 edition   - December 7, 2000
'The national interest comes first. Nobody is going to remember those who stood for foolish principles (remember Non-Alignment, that which caused us to stand around like idiots mumbling slogans about Palestine and South Africa as the world raced ahead?): it is results that count.'

• Civilisation itself is under withering attacks by barbarians   - November 27, 2000
'Maybe foreign correspondents get to truly despise the countries they live in.