There are moments in the long march of international affairs when a summit, otherwise destined for the archives of routine diplomacy, acquires the resonance of a turning point. The BRICS Summit convened
“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” ~ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone “Jananam Shokam; Maranam Karunam ( from an ancient Sanskrit sloka. Birth is sorrow;
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“If you must wound someone, it is better to kill him.” I’ve encountered some version of this missive throughout the course of my career. And like any good quote, this one’s precise
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Last week, I explained what happens when the world’s most powerful geopolitical actors abdicate their leadership responsibilities. America’s war with itself continues to escalate with few guardrails. The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle
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A senior US official told Washington Post that the toned-down early morning Israeli strike Saturday on military targets in Iran was a “proportional strike,” which “was moderate enough to quiet the conflict
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A common refrain is that the race in the US presidential election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is a ‘toss-up’, that it hangs on a ‘knife’s edge’, and could ‘go either
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The forthcoming COP 29 Climate Meet, set to take place from November 9 to November 22 in Azerbaijan, has not generated much excitement. On the contrary, there is considerable skepticism about its
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It was Friday afternoon, March 2011, when I turned on my television just in time to catch Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah’s Friday speech on PressTV, broadcast live from Lebanon. With an English translation
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After I became the eighth Executive President of Sri Lanka, I handed over the Easter Sunday Attack Commission reports to the President of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Harold Anthony Fernando, at
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“We must face up to an inescapable reality: the challenges of sustainability simply overwhelm the adequacy of our responses. With some honorable exceptions, our responses are too few, too little, and too
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Since time immemorial, people have inevitably wondered where they came from and where they will go after death, when their bodies are either buried or cremated. Saints and religious scriptures from around
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All eyes should be on the salsa dancing capital of the world, Cali, Colombia, where representatives of 190 nations are joined by a broad swath of global civil society and international Indigenous
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The end of the Cold War and the dismantling of what had been a bipolar world order raised the question of what exactly constitutes a superpower. The question has been bandied about
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“ No single politician, party or country can reform this system alone. Instead, an international coalition will have to change the laws, end secretive practices and restore transparency to the international financial
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Throughout history, the line between war and politics has often been blurred, encapsulated best in Clausewitz’s famous dictum, “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” This idea, central to
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The Institute of Chartered Accountants deserves the highest praise for persuading three of Sri Lanka’s former Presidents, Chandrika Kumaratunga, Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickremesinghe, to appear on a single platform at its
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