Sunday Posts

Despite all our claims of being at the pinnacle of civilisational progress, we have a Global Learning Crisis at hand. We have 57 million primary school-age children are out of school, half of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. 31 million of them are girls, and half of them have never ever set foot in a school. A further 250 million children can not read or write, despite being in school: Out of these, 130 million can not read or write even after spending more than 4 years at school. 90% of the children in Honduras, more than 50% in Uganda and 33% in Mali can not read a single word of connected text at the end of grade two. Among the children who manage to attend Primary School, 25% of them drop out before reaching the Secondary School. 69 million school-age adolescents are not attending secondary school. UNESCO reports that these numbers have hardly decreased in the last three years and the progress has stalled or reversed in a number of countries. Finally, add to that 774 milli...

Palestinians want to be recognized as a State, what's wrong with that? Israel was curved out of Palestine in one of the first acts of the rubber-stamp imperialism era. That was a different age. That was a time when the retreating British empire wanted to leave small pockets of direct influence and weaken the incumbent states. So, we had Pakistan, which was meant to be a client state of the Empire overlooking its oil interests in Persia; So was Israel, another protege, another victim, tasked with the job of holding Middle East on balance. But, Israel was being curved out of Palestine, a state which existed then, which the Palestinians objected to. They ended up being gobbled up, exactly as they would have feared, in the end. For someone watching the drama, this would have been amusing if not for all the bloodshed. Palestinians objected to Israel then not because they were nationally minded, but it made no sense curving out some land to a nation of immigrants. It ...