Vijay Vikram

I have never liked Ranbir Kapoor or Katrina Kaif. So, it was with some trepidation that I decided to watch Raajneeti.

As I had mentioned in yesterday’s post, I was eagerly awaiting this evening’s live broadcast of the Intelligence Squared debate on Pakistan. You would be forgiven if you’re not especially enamoured of such events because they have become something of a dreary staple of Western policy circles. People who had never heard of Pakistan before [...]

I have always maintained that Swapan Dasgupta represents one of the teen murtis of intellectual India’s right wing revolt – the other two being Ashok Malik and Arun Shourie. In my view, it is these three gentlemen, in their role as public intellectuals that provide the most coherent voice to the concerns of conservative middle [...]

I’ve been reading two very interesting documents that provide an insight into the worldview of the American intelligence community – the CIA’s Strategic Intent (2007) and the National Intelligence Strategy of the United States (2009) that is published by the Directorate of National Intelligence. The latter, charged with coordinating the vast intelligence apparatus of the [...]

The Sunday Pioneer seems to have outdone itself today. It features op-eds by two of the finest observers of Indian political and social trends. First, we have Swapan Dasgupta on the anniversary of the November attacks on Bombay. My favourite sentence from the piece is – If initial trends are any indication, it is likely [...]

I just spent the last two hours listening to a recording of Arun Shourie’s interaction with Harvard students instead of reading about Karl Mannheim’s views on Conservatism. It was worth listening to the entire thing even with the moderator’s unsettling diction. The most stimulating part of the discussion came right at the end when a [...]

I have just recieved a startling piece of news. Barack Obama of Illinois has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – that holy grail of liberal statecraft – for his incomparable services to the cause of humanity. Absurdly, I find myself in direct agreement with Pakistan’s Jammat-e-Islami on this matter: It is an embarrasing joke. [...]

Analysing Indian Foreign Policy is not a worthwhile intellectual endeavour. To be fair, my intellectual engagement with the world began with an interest in India’s geopolitics. This is probably because I have a Schmittian conception of all that is political. Because of this adversarial, Machtpolitik-esque understanding of politics, international politics naturally elicited my intellectual curiosity [...]

I can’t say that I ever fully understood Mr Kulkarni. I have always found his columns and other public utterances abstruse and rather dense, thereby finding it difficult to get a handle on his political philosophy. A rare exception to this general rule was Kulkarni’s open letter to Advani that argued for a recasting of [...]

It is no secret that the BJP high-command has avoided any attempt at genuine reflection on the reasons for defeat in the 2009 General Elections. In fact, the emerging consensus within India’s miniscule right-wing intelligentsia is that the BJP never quite recovered from the defeat in 2004 and continued on with the 2009 campaign on [...]