There are four types of endemic human corona viruses in the world—229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1—and people across countries commonly get infected with these. According to experts, SARS-CoV-2 virus is soon becoming the fifth endemic human coronavirus. Once the supply bottlenecks of COVID-19 vaccines are overcome, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is supposed to become yet another…

The Indian states, worried as they are about COVID-19 and the fatalities, need to take a calculated risk to reopen schools. While the risk to some students of contacting COVID-19 is high, the risk to the future of all students is even higher As the world locked down last year in the face of the…

Now, with the Taliban back in at the helm in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the chief influencer and with the ISIS and Al Qaeda back in play – India is in the crosshairs of some of the worst terror organisations in the world. With more powers and groupings indicating that they will negotiate with the…

Afghanistan is a complex geopolitical playground and remains one of the world’s fiercest battlegrounds. After the recent withdrawal of US and NATO troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban immediately began claiming territory in various parts of the country. They now control more than 85 per cent of the country. The Afghan government may be overthrown in…

The US war on Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 was backed by the largest and most all-encompassing international support ever rallied behind a state going into conflict. The shocking images from New York and Washington D.C. in 2001 gave the US unprecedented access to this international support, so much so that even states such…

It is clear by now that universal access to vaccines depends upon cheap prices, and high scale and speed of production. Even if governments subsidise prices to make the vaccines cheap or ideally free of cost, at present, there are not enough vaccines to administer the critical mass of the population in poor- and middle-income…

At the all-important two sessions (lianghui) meetings last month, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials adopted a new and surprisingly unambitious Five-Year Plan, reoriented the country’s technology strategy and redoubled the crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong. All of this was documented in the English-language media. But another crucial CCP announcement flew below the media’s…

As Britain readies to host the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow in November this year, there is a concerted effort to push countries towards publicly endorsing and adopting ‘Net Zero’—a carbon neutral emission norm—as policy. This is a demand for an inflexible, near-impossible, time-bound agenda to achieve what is…

Cancel culture is not unique to the age of Twitter. After all, we cancelled the tobacco industry decades ago. As such, the treatment of the sector may hold important lessons for navigating a world of wokeness and the potential pitfalls of absolute cancellation. In his new book, Good Business: The Talk, Fight, Win Way to…

Although the Pacific and Indian Oceans have traditionally been viewed as separate bodies of water, India and the US increasingly understand them as part of a single contiguous zone. The US Maritime Strategy (2015), for example, labels the region the ‘Indo-Asia-Pacific’, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump referred to it in their…