'China is likely to help Pakistan in keeping the fire burning in J&K to bleed India for its own interests.' A fascinating excerpt from Lieutenant General K Himalay Singh's Making of a General: A Himalayan Echo.
An Indian Air Force plane with 120 people on-board, including Indian envoy Rudrendra Tandon, landed on Tuesday at the Jamnagar airbase in Gujarat from Kabul in Afghanistan.
The question 'Who was/were behind Aditha Karikalan's killing?' will continue to remain a historic mystery despite Mani Ratnam setting out to unravel it in his own way, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
Biden's authorisation of 5,000 troops in his statement on Saturday included 1,000 who are already on the ground in Afghanistan, according to a defence official. A battalion of 1,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division were redirected to Kabul, instead of their original standby position in Kuwait.
Images from the World Athletics Championships in Budapest on Saturday.
'Given the present force levels, India cannot fight and win.' 'India can't hope to terminate the conflict on India's terms and impose the nation's will upon the adversaries,' says Brigadier Gurmeet Kanwal (retd).
The enormous structured global advertising machinery that surrounds every football game on the planet today? Pele was perhaps single-handedly responsible for all of it. By just being brilliant, captivating crowds, and behaving like a being from the future, doing things that STILL provoke oohs and aahs from watchers. Vaibhav Raghunandan salutes the Incomparable Pele.
It is for the investigating agencies to probe all aspects of the assassination, including a possible Chinese hand, or if the killer was just a disgruntled element who acted on his own and wanted to earn some dark space in history like Nathuram Godse or Lee Harvey Oswald, notes Japan expert Rajaram Panda.
'As Indians, we should be claiming and celebrating 'Bhartiyata' rather than seeking commitment to beliefs which are divisive and exclusionary.'
Kashmir zone inspector general of police Vijay Kumar also urged the protesters to be patient and 'not get carried away by political parties.'
Like Nitish, Mamata and KCR have prime ministerial ambitions, but, unlike Nitish who has established a rapport with Sonia, both Mamata and KCR are cold towards the Congress president, points out Virendra Kapoor.
Asia's richest man Gautam Adani, besides looking at opportunities to expand his vast empire, is hooked on ChatGPT - the programme that trawls vast amount of information to generate natural-sounding text on virtually anything - from crafting jokes to writing ad copy, debugging computer code, to even generating poems and essays. Adani, whose conglomerate has in recent years diversified from mines, ports and power plants into airports, data centres and defence, penned musing from his visit to Davos to attend the World Economic Forum meeting. "From a meetings perspective, this was perhaps my busiest WEF as I met over a dozen heads of states and several business leaders," he wrote on LinkedIn, talking of new geopolitical couplings, climate change and tight-lipped evangelists and AI.
US Congressman Joe Crowley, who spearheaded the campaign for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to create a new separate hate crimes category in the agency's uniform crime reporting programme to track bigoted attacks against Sikh Americans, has now set his sights on fully integrating Sikh Americans in the US Armed Forces
Over the past few days, the Biden administration has been reaching out to its friends and allies to support it against Russian aggression in Ukraine.
'The government must provide more funds to enable the armed forces to fight and win tomorrow's wars,' states Brigadier Gurmeet Kanwal (retd).
Human Rights Watch said support for such "lawless action" will lead to future lawlessness by security forces and protesters.
With an epic battle of billionaires for supremacy in one of the world's most prolific markets and a pandemic-propelled surge in online shopping in the background, India's nearly trillion-dollar retail market is hoping to touch 85 per cent of the pre-COVID business in the first half of the New Year. In a year when the COVID-19 carnage ripped apart the retail business, circa 2020 will best go down for the unravelling of the war between Jeff Bezos, the world's wealthiest man, and richest Indian Mukesh Ambani for pre-eminence in the booming market that is estimated to reach $1.3 trillion by 2025. It all started with Ambani's Reliance Industries agreeing in August to buy assets of the nation's second-largest retailer for Rs 24,713 crore, just a year after Bezos' Amazon purchased an indirect stake in the indebted Future Retail.
During her nearly 17-minute speech, she did not mention Pakistan.
The US is not in a forgiving mood for being humiliated in such a manner by an insurgent force and made to look 'loser' internationally, predicts Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
Addressing a press conference, Gen Naravane said the focus of training will be on preparing the army for future wars which will be network-centric and complex.
China's Ambassador to Afghanistan Wang Yu and Acting Minister of Refugee Affairs of the Afghan caretaker government Khalil-ur-Rehman Haqqani attended the handover ceremony at the airport.
Former Indian diplomats on Monday termed the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan as a "setback" for India strategically, and asserted that the priority for New Delhi right now should be to evacuate its citizens from the war-torn nation.
'The Indian response in confining our action to our side of the LoC set a dangerous precedent,' argues Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
'The challenge is to put in place a strategy for future courses of action beyond April 14 when the lockdown comes to an end,' notes Brigadier Narender Kumar (retd).
'India was in no position to wage another war in 1965, having suffered a morale-shattering defeat in 1962. The three services were in the middle of a modernisation and expansion phase and therefore not fully trained or battle-ready.'
'I like to see myself as a troll-slayer and I have realised the best way to do that is to ignore them. Nothing bothers them more,' Barkha Dutt tells Rashme Sehgal.
Once the tanks roll back, a zero-based assessment of future equations with China is necessary. Given the conflict situations that China is imposing on India time and again, the red, amber and green lines of interactions with China need to be laid down and communicated in no uncertain terms, asserts Srikanth Kondapalli, the leading China expert.
"We want to establish a government that includes all sides," Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah said, adding that they want an end to the war.
President Kovind, who arrived in Dhaka earlier in the day on his maiden State visit at the invitation of his counterpart M Abdul Hamid to attend the golden jubilee celebrations of Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971, held delegation-level talks with him which was followed by a banquet.
'If we play our cards right, we may even benefit from the competition between the US and China as seen from increased investment from each of these countries into India.' 'The size of our market gives us an important lever of power which we shall have to play adroitly and intelligently,' points out Ambassador Gautam Bambawale -- who served as India's envoy to China -- in the Professor V M Dandekar Memorial Lecture 2019, delivered on March 8, 2019 in Pune.
While a full-fledged war between the two nuclear and rising powers in Asia is highly unlikely due to the costs of war, yet a scenario of a quick land grab by China to humiliate India again cannot be rule out in future, says Srikanth Kondapalli.
The new law, effective from January 1, weakens the role of the State Council, China's Cabinet headed by Premier Li Keqiang, in formulating military policy, handing decision-making powers to the Central Military Commission (CMC), the overall high-command of the two million-strong People's Liberation Army (PLA) headed by Xi, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Sunday.
'It is ironic that General Rawat, an infantry officer who the government chose because of his expertise in counter-insurgency, has made his first bold statement in the realm of warfighting and mechanised operations,' points out Colonel Ajai Shukla (retd).
'The Indian Navy has sufficient combat power in areas of interest to India that can quickly scale up operations if the need arises.' 'This includes all the choke points leading into the Indian Ocean as also areas within.'
'India has to understand that the permanent state of war that exists between India and Pakistan has to be expected,,' says Colonel Anil A Athale (retd). 'The only way to ensure peace or absence of war is to maintain a militarily-dominant position over Pakistan.'
'He is psychologically preparing the PLA and the Chinese public to avoid a loss of face.'
'There will be positive growth, but if you ask me whether we are going to have the original growth rate of 8%, the answer will be, no.'
In this weekly self-help series, mental health and life coach Anu Krishna tells you how to take control of your life.
We can make a beginning by openly acknowledging the Russian help in 1971 victory when President Putin visits India on 6 December 2021. Showing gratitude to a friend is part of our DNA, notes Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
'A one-party State is not possible in a diverse country like India.'