Rakesh Ahuja

For the excuse that it is about cow as a holy animal, now it is the water buffaloes - the real reason, as everyone knows, is that Hindutva goons want to target Muslim men, and can do it with full support of the cops in BJP-ruled states.

Why Did the British Come to Hate the Russians? – Jeffrey Sachs

These last two paragraphs, in particular. Bravo. nytimes.com/2026/10/26/opini…

Warm congratulations to Navi Pillay, the first woman of Indian origin to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Her extraordinary life story belongs to the many-storied, often heroic history of Indian migration: oceans traversed , hardships endured, discrimination confronted and new homelands served with honesty and distinction. Her Indian inheritance and her South African experience meet in a life devoted to human dignity. Were Gandhiji alive, I believe he would have recognised something deeply familiar in that journey: the struggle against injustice in South Africa becoming a commitment to justice everywhere. We may not have agreed with all her judgments or positions. That should not diminish our respect for her courage, independence and achievements. She is as much a daughter of India as she is of South Africa. Our national pride should be accommodating enough to embrace her independent conscience.

Look at her record in viciously targeting India on human rights during her career. She never condemned during her tenure as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008–2014) and her subsequent international work Pakistan-sponsored terrorism against India. Much worse, she did not explicitly condemn Pakistan by name for the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks during her tenure as the UNHCR. Her personal rhetoric on the attack was condemnable. Instead of pointing to external state sponsorship or naming Pakistan, she said this: "Whenever there is an act of terrorism, one points fingers at neighbouring countries, thereby absolving oneself of all responsibility... Terrorists need not be from outside; they can be home grown. When you accuse others, you fail to take steps to correct the problem at home." And here we have Indians wanting us to congratulate her!!

Why the fuck are Indians hated so much? What have they done to deserve this level of hatred? Have Indians promoted terrorism? Have they colonized your countries? Enslaved your people? Stolen your homes? Taken away your families? Kidnapped your children? What exactly have millions of ordinary Indians done to deserve this much racism and hostility? Is it because they're educated, intelligent, ambitious, hardworking, and competing for the same jobs as you? Since when did intelligence and ambition become crimes? Since when did working hard to build a better life become a reason to be hated? If your problem is job displacement, then why aren't you directing the same anger toward artificial intelligence? Why not question AI? Why not question ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Anthropic, OpenAI? AI has the potential to displace far more jobs than Indian immigrants ever could. Yet somehow, the Indian engineer, the Indian student, the Indian doctor, and the Indian worker become your enemies. Why? Because it's easier to target a human being with a different skin colour or accent than to confront the actual economic forces changing your world? And understand one thing clearly. If an Indian refuses to engage with your racism, if they ignore your insults, if they choose not to respond to your hatred, it doesn't mean they lack a spine. It means your hatred isn't worth their time. Indians don't owe you an apology for being educated, ambitious, hardworking, successful, or simply existing. Being Indian is not a crime. Being successful is not a crime. And your insecurity is not a justification for racism.

A man suddenly approaches a group of street musicians and asks, “Can I play with you? I’ve got my pan flute.” When they ask what he wants to play, he chooses Vivaldi’s Winter from "The Four Seasons"—one of the most difficult pieces there is. And then he leaves everyone around him in awe. On the pan flute, Michel Tirabosco delivers an incredibly skillful performance, with remarkable breath control and emotion. Even though this was a planned flash-mob-style setup, the real talent of the musicians and the pure joy they bring still move people deeply. A beautiful moment of music, connection, and limitless passion.

Western civilization has never had a clean record. Its history is soaked in conquest, enslavement, and slaughter. Yet it always took solace in one redeeming quality: it carried within itself the seeds of its own correction. Its unwavering support for Israel has betrayed the values and squandered the achievements cultivated over centuries of philosophical inquiry and moral struggle. But more importantly, it has dismantled the very mechanism of self-correction that once enabled it to confront and overcome its own wrongs. The West's defenders often argue that, yes, it lived under some of history's most brutal monarchies, but it gave the world constitutional democracy. It enslaved Africans on an industrial scale, they concede, yet abolished slavery and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It colonized continents, but came to recognize the right of peoples to self-determination. It waged two world wars, yet drafted the UN Charter and outlawed aggression. It perpetrated the Holocaust, yet helped establish the Genocide Convention. It committed unspeakable crimes, yet helped build the architecture of accountability, from Nuremberg and the Geneva Conventions to the International Criminal Court. It dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities and gassed soldiers in the trenches of Ypres, yet helped forge the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the ban on chemical weapons. This capacity for self-correction gave the West a normative power that served it for decades. It allowed Western capitals to speak the language of rules and rights, and to be heard even by those who remembered suffering at Western hands. Its unconditional support for Israel has squandered that capital. Worse, it has turned the West against the very mechanisms that once allowed it to redress its mistakes. This did not begin in Gaza. It has been under way for half a century. Democracy was the first casualty. When Senator Charles Percy lost his seat in 1984, the head of America's leading pro-Israel lobby publicly boasted that politicians everywhere had taken note. Four decades later, a single pro-Israel super PAC spent more than $20 million to unseat two members of Congress in one election cycle. Governments across the West have adopted definitions of antisemitism that blur into criticism of Israel. Students are arrested for protesting, foreign scholars face deportation for their op-eds, and in Britain hundreds have been detained for holding placards. Free speech is being policed on behalf of a foreign regime. The legacy of abolition has been betrayed. The West that ended slavery and ultimately turned against apartheid South Africa has made peace with racial domination. Through the 1970s and 1980s, as the world isolated Pretoria, Israel was among its most important military partners. Today the very instrument that helped bring down South African apartheid, the boycott, is penalized in dozens of American states and condemned by Germany's parliament when aimed at Israel. This comes even as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel's own B'Tselem conclude that Israel practices apartheid. The promise of decolonization has been inverted. The West that eventually conceded independence across Asia and Africa has, since 1967, armed and shielded an occupation it formally considers illegal. It shrugged off the International Court of Justice's 2004 ruling against the separation wall and watched settlements expand in defiance of Security Council Resolution 2334. When the Court declared the entire occupation unlawful in 2024, Western capitals answered with more weapons. The UN Charter has been hollowed out. The principle that territory cannot be acquired by war, enshrined in Resolution 242 and drafted by Britain, was abandoned when Washington recognized Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights. The United States has vetoed roughly 50 Security Council resolutions to shield Israel since 1972, about half of all the vetoes it has ever cast. It has paralyzed the Council as occupation hardened, ethnic cleansing continued and tens of thousands were killed. It has walked out of UNESCO and the Human Rights Council over their treatment of Israel and defunded UNRWA, the lifeline of Palestinian refugees. The Genocide Convention has been emptied. In 1982, the General Assembly declared the Sabra and Shatila massacre an act of genocide. The massacre was carried out in camps ringed by Israeli troops, and the major Western powers abstained. Four decades later, the ICJ ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza, and a UN commission of inquiry has since concluded that Israel committed genocide. Western weapons kept flowing. Germany, of all nations, found itself defending its arms exports before the Court. International criminal justice has been gutted at every level. When Belgian courts pursued Ariel Sharon over Sabra and Shatila, Belgium rewrote its universal jurisdiction law under Israeli and American pressure. When a London court issued an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, Britain changed its law so it could not happen again. In 2020, Washington sanctioned the ICC prosecutor for investigating Americans and Israelis. In 2025, after her successor sought Netanyahu's arrest, it sanctioned him, the Court's judges and even a UN special rapporteur. European governments that once championed the Court found reasons not to enforce its warrant. And the non-proliferation regime is collapsing. Since 1969, Washington has tacitly accepted Israel's undeclared arsenal behind a doctrine of "deliberate ambiguity." Israel remains outside the NPT and the Biological Weapons Convention and has never ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. Western states have repeatedly obstructed a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction, the very bargain that secured the NPT's indefinite extension in 1995. Meanwhile, they demand total transparency from Iran, an NPT member under IAEA inspection. In 1981, even Washington voted to condemn Israel's strike on Iraq's safeguarded Osirak reactor. In 2025, when safeguarded Iranian facilities were bombed, Germany's chancellor praised Israel for doing the "dirty work" for all of us. The lesson to every capital is that joining the treaty buys no protection, and staying out of it costs nothing. Netanyahu likes to portray Israel as the defender of Western civilization against Iran. The truth is the opposite. Iran never made the West abandon its own principles. Israel did. No adversary has damaged Western civilization as profoundly as the ally that persuaded it to dismantle its own conscience.

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar on whether democracy would work in India.

Australia condemns the Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia, including those on Riyadh airport which have stolen the lives of so many innocent people. Houthi attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure are unacceptable and must cease.