Sunday Posts

I have now finished reading Pankaj Mishra's From The Ruins of the Empire, a fascinating tale of the idea of Asia in the time of European conquests. This is a colonial history in the reverse, a sensitive, balanced tale of interactions, tensions and ideas around the lives of men who made it. The story is structured around the lives of two central figures, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838 - 97) and Liang Qichao (1873 - 1929), and their many contemporaries who debated and developed the idea of the new Asia in the face of the advances and adventures of the newly industrialised Europe. Other prominent Asians, men like Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi, Rashid Rida, Sun Yet Sen, Lu Xun, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, leading men of Japan leading the Meiji restoration and imperial Japan, the young Ottomans and European Socialists all make an appearance, all in stark contrast with the old world colonialists such Lord Elgin, the Czar, David Lloyd George etc alongside a rhetoric-obsessed, duplicitous Woodr...

The news from Iran is getting grim by the moment. The deep division in the Iranian Regime is now in the open. I am optimistic that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the Iranian Regime, and its power will prove to be fictitious like that of other dictatorial regimes of the past. An iconic figure - Neda - has emerged in her death, an young lady shot by the hired assassins of the state, and hopefully the amateur images of her dying moments will stir an otherwise indifferent world into action. The lesson that the world's dictators don't seem to get is that technology has moved forward and the usual methods of gagging - banning the journalists, stopping the newscasts - are no longer good enough. As Iran continues to dominate Twitter and the blogs, and as the street videos shot on mobile phone keep leaking out on the Internet, the evil men of Myanmar will surely call the Iranian Elite to offer an word of advise - we told you to keep Internet out! We have seen this before,...

Iran shows all the signs of - well, senility. Like an old man who had his best days, it is stuck in the middle of the road, without the strength to move on or the willingness to move back. The key to democratic election is that the opposing parties come together to agree on the basis of the number of people they get to support them. It becomes not a debate who is right, or better, but who has the maximum number. It is an incredibly simple system, indeed a stupid system that is so easy to manipulate. This is really how all the dictators around the world get elected at a regular interval - they obviously always win by a resounding margin - and depending on who is protecting them, gets away. The Iranian regime, by no means, is friendless. It has the support of China, which is the anti-democracy in chief of the world, and of Russia, despite the not-so-friendly history of these two countries in the past. But, this time, it has staged an election too far, not unlike the other inefficient and...