What attracts women?
INI’s resident military affairs expert (no, no pun intended) sends in an article with the following bit highlighted:
Young women who don’t join the army have another important role to play. They may opt to marry army officers and encourage their female friends to follow suit. If pretty young women in large numbers come [...]
The rational school operators of Uttar Pradesh
Just like over nine out of ten families in Karnataka, many school operators in Uttar Pradesh demonstrated that they are rational actors. If the Indian government has announced that it will give Rs 325 crores over the five years to madrassas (which, among others, means "an honorarium of Rs [...]
NATO’s supply route through Pakistan is a gravy train for the military establishment…and the Taliban
Western troops fighting in Afghanistan depend on the Karachi-Khyber-Kabul supply route for 70 to 80 percent of their needs. While its importance to US and NATO forces has received considerable coverage in recent months, there has been less attention given to [...]
Four immediate steps
The Pakistani military-jihadi complex has, as expected, gone on a war footing. General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani has pledged a “matching response” to Indian surgical strikes, “in no time”. The Pakistan Air Force was scrambled to fly sorties over major cities, scaring ordinary people. And the Jamaat-ud-Dawa organised a major pow-wow of religious parties—which [...]
And your daily dose of unconventional wisdom
Pakistan’s negotiations with the IMF for a bailout package might have been held up due to bitterness of the pill even as the spectre of sovereign default looms. So when Pakistan’s policymakers are trying to stave off the default, Mosharraf Zaidi stands in front of the oncoming traffic with [...]
It looks like Pakistan will have to go in for an IMF rescue package to stave off a sovereign default. The countries who used to historically come to its aid—the United States, Saudi Arabia, China and the UAE—might even prefer it this way. In fact, according to one (rather inspired) news report, the United States [...]
Whose wealth was kept out of the financial system?
Al-Qaeda’s. (Sunday Levity. Yes, this joke is on the rest of us)
The Associated Press reports that
Al-Qaida, which gets its money from the drug trade in Afghanistan and sympathizers in the oil-rich Gulf states, is likely to escape the effects of the global financial crisis.
One reason is that [...]
On the virtues of making haste slowly
V Anantha Nageswaran would smile when he sees the Economist Intelligence Unit concede that:
Ironically, the current global situation is also making India’s measured pace of economic reform look wiser than before. At a time when Western countries are frantically nationalising banking assets, the Indian government’s reluctance to sell more [...]
And on the kindness of friends
Pakistan’s effective foreign exchange resources are down to US$3 billion—sufficient to cover about a month’s worth of essential imports. And other than a tranche of US$500m from the Asian Development Bank, it has received few firm promises. After Standard & Poor’s cut the country’s sovereign long-term foreign-currency rating to [...]
A few notches down
Commenting on his piece in Mint, V Anantha Nageswaran says (in an email) that at the time he wrote it, he had expected the US Congress to approve Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion bailout plan. In the event, the lower house voted it down, but he expects Mr Paulson to come [...]
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