The feed of updates to Nitin, you can't be serious!
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. Counting is always political. Who gets counted, what gets counted, and how the counting is done are not just technical choices but acts of power. So when the International Monetary Fund’s index places India 71st on AI preparedness while Stanford’s index puts it among the top five, the gap is more than a measurement…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. India’s social capital deficit registers as a factor in its current account deficit through the demand for gold. Our appetite for gold is not a irrational cultural quirk. It is, in part, a revealed preference, a tangible symptom of our collective distrust in each other, in our society and in our civic institutions. More…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. Pakistan has stepped up to play a useful role in mediating between the United States and Iran in attempting to bring the latest West Asian war to an end. It should not surprise us that the Pakistani establishment, which has a culture of geopolitical risk-taking, has turned adversity into an opportunity. Not only does the…
This is an unedited draft of a special The Intersection column, that usually appears every other Monday in Mint. New Delhi must act urgently to gather a coalition of like-minded and like-affected countries to conduct diplomacy with the warring parties in West Asia. The goal is not so much to get them to stop fighting but to prevent their war from throwing the Indian and world economy into a severe…
Welcome to Nitin Pai’s cyberspace . You are in the structured section of my domain where I have my blog posts, newspaper columns, updates on my teaching and research, and other things you had always been warned about. My response to the question on Pakistan’s mediation and implications for India: Pakistan’s role as a mediator is a welcome development and any ceasefire brokered by any country is in…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. On 31 March, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ( IRGC ) threatened that it would target 18, mostly American, technology companies in retaliation to US-Israeli attacks on Iran. It declared that “ since the main element in designing and tracking terror targets are American [Information and Communications Technology]…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. It is impossible to tell how and when the current war in West Asia will end because we do not know what the United States—specifically President Donald Trump—wants out of it. Israel wants to expand through military domination of the region. Iran wishes the same but at this point is likely to be content with regime…
Welcome to Nitin Pai’s cyberspace . You are in the structured section of my domain where I have my blog posts, newspaper columns, updates on my teaching and research, and other things you had always been warned about. “ India has been trying to balance its ties both with the US and Iran,” said Nitin Pai, founder of Takshashila Institution, a think tank based in Bengaluru. “ Passage of ships from…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. I propose that India adopt the SAKA doctrine for the next three years As conflicts increase in a world of disorder, the path that best serves India’s interests is one of non-involvement. The causes over which countries are fighting are complex but do not concern us. New Delhi does not have the leverage necessary to…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. While the transatlantic relationship made the headlines at this month’s Munich Security Conference, many of the European analysts I hung out with were more concerned about whether, how and how quickly Europe could build adequate military capacity in order to achieve meaningful strategic autonomy. The twin fears a…
Welcome to Nitin Pai’s cyberspace . You are in the structured section of my domain where I have my blog posts, newspaper columns, updates on my teaching and research, and other things you had always been warned about. This (pre-publication draft) editorial refers to some of the essays that appear in the February 2026 issue of India’s World magazine on India’s AI Ambition. Politics of the current…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. This one appeared on a Tuesday. There are two ways to produce a line of Shakespeare. The first and obvious is for old William to write it. The second is to give a monkey a typewriter and an infinite amount of time. The infinite monkey theorem argues that a monkey independently and randomly punching keys on a typewriter…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. The public debate over gig economy over the past week has centred around the tough working conditions and sharp management practices of the delivery platform industry. Anecdotes, personal experiences and newspaper reports have highlighted how despite working hard and long to satisfy performance algorithms, gig workers…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. While the White House insists that the US might use military force to annex Greenland, serious people in Denmark believe that the actual takeover might be more prosaic. As Shane Harris and his colleagues report in The Atlantic , President Donald Trump could simply announce on social media that the territory is now a part…
Welcome to Nitin Pai’s cyberspace . You are in the structured section of my domain where I have my blog posts, newspaper columns, updates on my teaching and research, and other things you had always been warned about. This is my list of fiction for 2025. I have rated them into categories, but within a category they are in no particular order. They are in two categories: completely read or re-read,…
This is an unedited draft of my The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. Commenting on the politics of a Western democracy where he resides, my old friend Sanjay Krishnan remarked that the liberal party there is caught struggling in quicksand. The more vigorously it tries to save itself, the deeper it sinks in the muck. It needed a different strategy. The scene is somewhat…
Welcome to Nitin Pai’s cyberspace . You are in the structured section of my domain where I have my blog posts, newspaper columns, updates on my teaching and research, and other things you had always been warned about. I’m thinking aloud. Here are some tentative, non-exhaustive assessments of one of the big changes of our time.. This post first appeared on the Takshashila Institution blog The Trump…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. David Michael Malone , my friend and mentor, elected to die with dignity on the 24th of November at the age of 71. The veteran scholar-diplomat — a former Canadian high commissioner to India — had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a couple of years ago and Alzheimer’s disease more recently. He was spared the pain but…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. After this year’s shocking turn in India-US relations, quite a number of people argued that India must tilt towards China to counterbalance the United States. It is true that we have ended up becoming geopolitically more dependent on Washington than the United States is on us. However, there are at least three problems…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. A few months ago, the Karnataka government amended the state’s cinema regulation rules to cap ticket prices at ₹200 . The multiplex industry association challenged this in the high court and secured a stay order. The state government appealed, upon which a division bench of the high court maintained the stay, but…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. In a recent online conversation on the dismal state of urban infrastructure a senior political leader all but admitted that government officials are incapable of delivering public works. When he suggested willing private companies or industrialists take up the task of supervising the construction of roads, he was not…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. My previous column was a reflection of how the United States, like the triumphant Yadus after the Kurukshetra war, might be defeating itself from within. Today I want to discuss a remarkable grand diagnosis of where the West in general went wrong and why it finds itself wrapped in anxiety and steeped in insecurity. I…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. Most people believe that the Mahabharata concludes with the defeat of the Kauravas in the Kurukshetra war and the coronation of Yudhishtira as the righteous Pandava ruler of Indraprastha & Hastinapura. The story, however, does not finish at that point. It ends with the destruction of the Yadus, the submergence of…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. A revolution is almost always an emergent phenomenon. The ingredients for one might exist for a long time but they do not always come together in a politically explosive form. This explains why mass protests, leave alone revolutions, are relatively rare in history and current affairs. If the existence of poverty,…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. Pratap Bhanu Mehta offered a searing indictment of Indian capitalism in the Indian Express a few days ago. At a time when tectonic shifts in world politics requires Indian capital to step up, he finds that it “ shows little appetite for risk, no courage, little ambition for leadership, and little confidence in its own…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. The past six months have shown that India is not a swing power. We could not deter China from providing active assistance to Pakistan during a military conflict. Our weight proved insufficient to dissuade the United States from singling us out with atrocious tariffs. We have been shown the limitations of India’s national…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. I concluded my previous column arguing that the current geopolitical moment is similar to 1991 and that India would do well to do now what it did then: economic reform and Look East. Even if it were not for the problems with the United States, there has long been a case for a second round of economic liberalisation and…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. The Indian economy is resilient. It will absorb the shock of Donald Trump’s tariffs and plough on. Like a river that eventually flows into the sea, the economy will respond to the sudden obstacle by changing course and springing new distributaries. As I have written in these pages before, India’s size, diversity,…
This is an unedited version of The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. China is moving ahead with its plans to build a hydroelectric project on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet. India should be concerned. But appropriately. Worries that Beijing will use water is a tool of coercion or weapon of war are likely overblown. What ought to concern us more are the…
This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. I want to sound a warning: a caste census not only risks diverting India away from development but could also undermine our foundational constitutional values. Instead of reducing the salience of caste in Indian society, it will reinforce it. In so doing, it goes against B.R. Ambedkar’s warning on day-zero of the Indian…
This is a pre-publication draft of The Intersection column that usually appears every other Monday in Mint. Now that the United States has entered Israel’s war against Iran by bombing its nuclear installations, its future will hinge on their ability and willingness to put boots on the ground. There is little doubt that Iran’s ruling ayatollahs have not only been defeated but also shown up to be…