An Indecisive Indian

    India and China, the two nuclear powers, have come head to head in recent days. It has generated a flood of discourses and emotions at a scale not seen in recent years, not even when the two had squared off at Doklam and remained deadlocked for 72 days. Let us go back to June 2017 near the trijunction point of border between China, Bhutan and India. Bhutan declared that the Doklam territory on which China was building a road was a Bhutanese territory although it was being claimed by China and it was a part of the ongoing border negotiations. India, which is committed to looking after the defence of Bhutan through a treaty, sent troops to the construction site and challenged the road work being done by China. After some face off, negotiations were held, India pulled back its troops and China stopped the construction at least in the immediate part of the disputed territory. Bhutan maintained that it did not want India and China to go to war and generally avoi...

Friends, I invited comments, as also more thoughts, in my news analysis programme aired on thepublic.india YouTube channel on last Saturday, 13 th June, and the part one of this blog, on the subject of self-reliant Atmanirbhar Bharat . I got many responses. So, in the spirit of Polonius in Hamlet to give every man thy ear, and also not to have this half-empty vessel make its own noise, I draw upon mainly on this treasure of wisdom and these flights of thoughts, rephrase and rethink and present your descant back to you. Let me take up what Mr. Shaji John says. According to him, at a time when all the other sectors are in doldrums, the only sector standing tall is Agriculture. A significant component of Atmanirbhar Bharat, therefore, has to be built upon self-reliant villages. But we have to rise beyond the sloganeering or the entire concept is likely to fail. Interesting. Ms Subbulakshmi Sundarrajan also says that for our country to concentrate on creating competitive a...

I had last talked about Train 18 in the blogs on blogspot.com at http://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2020/05/chapter-22-sisters-of-train-18-and-rdso.html And on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sisters-train-18-rdso-s-mani/ I had digressed to other issues of late. Today, I restart the journey even as the book has now gone for publishing . Our shop floor meetings had become a routine and it was now do or die with some companies who were lagging behind. The meetings had, quite disconcertingly, become like more of the same , with an occasional key manager from the lagging firms continuing their assurances and of course, sudden disappearance from the factory and the phone network. A déjà vous everyday, been there done that frequently. The news had spread all around that the Transformers were not coming in time and we were told by many suppliers as to how their equipment/shop work would align itself pretty well with the delayed time frame. The only thi...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his now-famous speech on 12 th May, made an impassioned pitch for Atmanirbhar Bharat , a self-reliant India within an intertwined global platform in the spirit of ‘Vishwa Kalyan’ (world welfare) and ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ (the world is a family). He tried to fashion our movement towards self-reliance as something that would altruistically accommodate the aspirations of the whole world. He evoked our recent export of medicines and world-wide acceptance of Yoga as examples of a trustworthy India in her quest to be a vanguard in the global path to help the mankind, a display of his masterly phraseology. The speech was delivered with the usual flair, knowing that pride and passion work well with people, most of who would never bother to make a reality check. He knew that his vast populace of admirers would find great meaning and direction in the speech, not because of the content but because he was the deliverer. At the same time, he was well aware...