BRIG BYTES

  Cockroaches are in news, they are gloating in their celebrity status, after all no less than the Chief Justice of India has compared them to the youth of our country, later clarified as fake degree holder unemployed ones. As though ‘rose by any other name wouldn’t smell as sweet’, so cockroach by any distinction will cease to be what the species is. Youth of our great nation are our hope for the future, they are the ‘dividend’ portion of the demographic equity that we the people have so painstakingly accumulated, generated and reproduced over the last nearly eight odd decades. Now comparison with cockroaches can be perceived as a compliment as we all are aware, their main characteristic is ‘survival’. They predate even dinosaurs, and will survive the nuclear holocaust too, God forbid but should that ever be perpetuated on us by some maniacs. Cockroaches have another very useful trait, the feminine gender of homo sapiens is by and large mighty scared of them. Males of the homo sap...

So a newspaper in Norway has published a cartoon with Modi as a snake charmer playing the harp   to entice the oil suppliers, which has naturally irked   many of us Indians. For the Westerners, the image of a snake charmer is synonymous with poor, backward, primitive, superstitious Indians. The colonialists had a field day in lampooning the uncivilised barbarians, who have no business to aspire to the higher table, which is traditionally reserved for the ‘gora saab’. What’s new about this stereotyping of Indians, Peter Sellers’s depiction of an Indian in Hollywood movies, Mind Your Language, the British sitcom, Churchill have all been guilty of the same crime against the one of the oldest civilisations of the world. Some years ago, when India’s Mars mission was hugely successful, the NewYork Times published this highly distasteful cartoon. Obviously this kind of denigration is a sign of envy. Onida TV which some of us old timers would recall had an advertisement going with ...

  “Thucydide’s trap” was bandied about during the recent summit between Xi and Trump. The mere mention of a trap sent the advisors scurrying for cover, as none of them had ever heard of such a term. They were only aware of the ‘honeytrap’ especially of the Epstein variety. Google or may be even Chatgpt would have come to their rescue and they would have realised this was a lesson from ancient Greek history and related to the contest between  the challenger to the throne and the incumbent power in the world order. I read about this sometime in the last decade while studying US-China relations and how and when would this phenomenon be applicable in the emerging global geopolitical scenario. The trap essentially describes that a conflict is bound to ensue with the rise of a new power, as was witnessed between Athens and Sparta about two millennia ago, after their victory over Persia. Be that as it may, Xi Jin Ping trumped hapless Trump with such unpronounceable tongue twisters wi...