Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

A version of this essay was published by the Deccan Herald at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/adani-s-under-fire-we-ve-seen-this-before-3783432The repeated, withering attacks on the Adani group are getting to be tiresome, partly because they usually have no merit per se; and partly because the Western habit of weaponizing the narrative is now so evident. It is basically propaganda, with the pliant media manufacturing consent to support foreign policy.In a recent column in the Financial Times, Janan Ganesh wrote: “Politics, not tech, makes the world go around”. He may have a point, but at the moment, it is the opposite: the breakneck generativeAI race, and China’s near-monopoly in rare earths, are fueling both trade wars and capitulation: for example, Trump said before meeting Xi that “the G2 will be convening shortly”. TACO, anyone?I said during Biden’s days in “A US-China condominium dividing up the world between themselves”, that for the Deep State, a G2 would be a convenient (short-term) thing to do. Trump apparently has accepted that a) Chinese leverage is insurmountable, b) a division into spheres of influence would work best. Sadly, it would be disastrous for the US (and the Quad) in the medium term to make China Asia’s hegemon.But it is happening. As BNP Paribas puts it in a research note quoted by the Financial Times, “[Washington]... is now dealing with a peer rival capable of imposing material economic harm on it — a relatively new position for the US and a development which, at least to us, confirms China’s ascendancy to global economic superpower status.”It would be entirely rational for a G2 to prevent a third great power from rising, and India is the only candidate: Brazil, Russia, South Africa, the EU are handicapped in one way or the other, e.g. geography, resources, demographics, politics. Therefore the G2 are imposing a Thucydides Trap on India: wage economic (if not kinetic) war, and balkanize it.Everybody has learned lessons from the recent past (“Confessions of an economic hit-man”, anyone?): how Japan was ruined via the Plaza Accord, how Britain lost its pre-eminence by debasing its currency, and how the US allowed itself to be systematically de-industrialized by China over the last 30 years. They are not going to let India grow, certainly not easily.Thus Adani is a proxy for India. Mark Mobius, a legendary investor, said, “Investing in Adani is like investing in India”. That is not an exaggeration, because Adani has demonstrated the capability to deliver in more than one domain, especially in ports and airports (Disclaimer: I have a small position in Adani Ports). They have operations in Colombo, Haifa (Israel) and Abbot Point (Australia), which makes them a potentially major player in global shipping, not to mention their container ports at Mundhra and Vizhinjam (Trivandrum).There have been several waves of attacks on the Adani group, the first in June 2021 alleging improprieties in investments by Mauritius-based funds; the second in January 2023 with the ‘bombshell’ Hindenburg (a short-seller) report alleging stock manipulation and accounting fraud; the third in November 2024, a US Dept of Justice allegation about bribery; the fourth in October 2025 by the Washington Post alleging the Indian government induced LIC to invest $3.9 billion in Adani firms.When the Hindenburg report was publicized as the “largest con in corporate history” by pliant media like Reuters, FT and WSJ, I wrote that “The Adani Group may not be derailed by Hindenburg”. I also did a video conversation with Professor Narayanan Komerath on the topic.In fact, in a “dog it was that died” outcome, it was Hindenburg that closed shop; Adani has recovered even after a second Hindenburg report accusing the SEBI chief as well.Adani has been successful in their ports and energy businesses; they are doing well in airports; their efforts in green energy and in data centers (the new Google AI data center in Vishakhapatnam) may yet prove to be winners. Thus Adani has shown it can compete well in difficult infrastructure sectors. It is true that these need to align with government policies.Which brings whispers of ‘crony capitalism’, which is rich coming from the US, where ‘robber barons’ like John D Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J P Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt created enormous fortunes primarily through cronyism. Have you heard the dictum “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”? Boeing, the Koch Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Big Tech are current beneficiaries of State munificence.India has had its share of crony capitalists who provided citizens with shoddy goods at high prices. I don’t dare name them, but you know who they are. Every country supports its national champions: Japan’s zaibatsu, Korea’s chaebol, China’s State Owned Companies.And recently J P Morgan Chase announced it is investing $1.5 trillion in US industries such as critical minerals, pharma, semiconductors, energy, drones, cybersecurity, AI and so on. Surely this is after consultations with and a go-ahead from the US Government. Similarly, it is neither sinful nor unusual for the Indian State to support dominant, effective players. More power to Adani!800 words, 31 October 2025 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

The third episode in the IITM Alumni Association Trivandrum’s live monthly Fireside Chats. Host Rajeev Srinivasan speaks with senior executive and academic Dr. Rajasree, the CEO of Trest Research Park, earlier VC of APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University and an IIT Madras alumna speaks on India’s semiconductor and electronics ecosystem, particularly addressing the India Semiconductor Mission and its goal of achieving self-reliance in the sector, spanning everything from design to manufacturing. Key topics explored include the nation’s strategy to focus on mature nodes (like 28nm chips) rather than cutting-edge technology, the Design Linked Incentive (DLI) program to support startups, and the potential for the growing electronics industry to offset job losses in the IT services sector due to factors like H1B visa fees and generative AI. Dr. Rajasree also shares insights into major investments by groups like the Tatas and projected timelines for the initial domestic chip production and packaging in India, expected around late 2025 to 2026.AI-generated podcast on this fireside chat from notebookLM.google.com: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/hindu-americans-political-vulnerability-violence-h1b-bias-13936122.htmlChandra Mouli Nagamalliah, a 50-year old motel manager in Dallas, Texas, was brutally hacked to death and beheaded by a Cuban criminal illegal alien, in front of his wife and son. The murderer kicked Chandra’s head around in the parking lot, before picking it up and dropping it in a garbage bin. All this because of an argument about a washing machine.This extraordinary incident got no airplay in the US, partly because it coincided with the murder of a conservative broadcaster, Charlie Kirk. There have been other acts of extreme brutality in the US: Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was stabbed to death by a psychotic killer in a train. In December, Debrina Kawam was burned alive in a New York subway.Violence is not unusual, but it hits home when a ‘model minority’ Hindu is killed in such a dramatic manner. There was also the unexplained death of Suchir Balaji, a whistleblower who used to work for OpenAI, who may have been silenced. 633 Indian students have died abroad in 5 years, including 172 in Canada and 108 in the US, according to India Today.I worry about what all this means for the 2-3 million Hindu-Americans. I specifically speak of Hindu-Americans for good reason. Non-Hindus from India have other networks: Muslims and Christians join existing mosque and church groups; some Sikhs project Khalistani memes, falsely alleging religious discrimination in India, seek asylum, and shun Indian connections. Zohran Mamdani, a PIO, has strong Islamist support in his run for NYC Mayor.Second, anti-Hindu noise in the US has gone up substantially, especially the allegation that Hindus practise caste-based discrimination. There was the California Bill SB 403, sponsored by Afghan-American State Senator Aisha Wahab, which the Governor vetoed. Now there is a new Bill SB 509 that also targets Hindus, and which has also passed the California Senate and Assembly. It was co-authored by State Assembly Member Jasmeet Bains.Then there are the lawsuits. There was the infamous suit against Cisco Systems alleging caste bias by two Hindu ‘upper-caste’ managers against a ‘lower-caste’ employee. After years of acrimonious hearings, the Federal Court penalized the California Civil Rights Department for faulty prosecution; CRD withdrew the case against the two managers; the case against Cisco continues in arbitration. But this has led to copy-cat suits and a malign narrative against Hindus.Another major lawsuit was against the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Temple in Robbinsville, NJ, the largest Hindu temple in the Western Hemisphere, again with accusations of caste-based discrimination. After years of wrangling, and accusations that an immigration lawyer had coerced some complainants, the DOJ and the US Attorney’s Office for New Jersey closed the criminal case on September 19th, finding no violations of federal law or worker exploitation. The civil case continues; the narrative against Hindus has been strengthened.There are leftists with Hindu names aplenty who are actively campaigning against Hindus and supporting people like the academic Audrey Truschke, a known anti-Hindu activist. This is true even among some people in India: for instance, Annapurna Roy won Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, and dedicated her win to women and “the children of Gaza”, never mind the Hindu women, children and men being severely oppressed in Bangladesh right next door.There has been a massive spike in the anti-Hindu narrative online in the recent past; paradoxically because of their ‘model-minority’ nature: they work hard, obey the law, pay taxes, and get ahead in life. Hindu-Americans likely have the highest per-capita income of any ethno-religious group in the US (Indian-Americans at large do). This leads to envy, especially as the economy struggles and you need scapegoats.That is reflected in attacks on the H1-B visa program, of which Indians are the biggest beneficiaries. There is the sudden imposition of a $100,000 “tax” on H1-B visas by President Trump. The net result of this is going to be an exodus to India and third countries, an echo of Idi Amin expelling Indians from Uganda.On the one hand, a good bit of America’s competency in technology is supported by Indian engineers on H1-B visas (of course, there are Indian doctors and nurses and so on also on H1-B). On the other hand, US engineers don’t have much bargaining power (compared to, say, US doctors), so they have been complaining about foreign-born engineers for decades.In addition to being part of the Trump Administration’s pressure tactics on trade, the H1-B noise harks back to early 20th century anti-Hindu and anti-Indian prejudice, when racism and religious bigotry combined to oppress immigrants. A century later, same wine, different bottle. I wrote in January about the compelling cases of Bhagat Singh Thind and Vaishno Das Bagai. They were, like Chandra Nagamalliah, real human beings, not just some statistics. The murdered Charlie Kirk himself had explicitly called for reducing visas for “people from India”.But there is a bigger, more general problem: Hindus generally seek wealth, not political power, ie the old Guns vs. Butter debate. The problem is that if you don’t have guns, the folks with the guns will take your butter. Hindus focused historically on wealth creation, and then were left flabbergasted when wave after wave of invaders came over the Khyber Pass or across the oceans, and just took the wealth.It is the same in the US now: Hindus seek material advancement, not political power. Even the Hindu elected representatives said very little about Chandra’s tragic death. Vivek Ramaswamy, who had earlier emphasized his Hindu roots, was silent until prodded by online critics. Other prominent politicians were also quiet.But other immigrant groups have made substantial progress in capturing political power. As an example, the entire city council in Hamtramck, Michigan, is Muslim. In the UK, Pakistani-origin people are in positions of power. In Dearborn, Michigan, the Muslim mayor, on September 9th, told a Christian priest that he was an Islamophobe and effectively urged him to leave the city.Without political power, Hindus will be vulnerable. There will be sorry exoduses from various countries, and India should become the “nation of last resort” for PIOs. India should treat this as a version of the ‘1000 Talents’ program that China used to attract its diaspora, and create ways to utilize their skills to support economic growth. That needs a lot of planning and can be a win for the country, however traumatic it is for individuals.Here is the AI-generated Malayalam version of this podcast, from notebookLM.google.com:1000 words, 20 Sept 2025, updated 23 Sept 2025 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-us-farm-distress-real-reason-for-trumps-tariff-tantrums/20250916.htmThere is breaking news that the trade talks between the US and India are on again. This means I was probably right that the harrumphing by President Trump and company was an opening gambit meant to soften India up for a deal that was beneficial to the US.The whole “India is funding Russia’s war effort by buying oil” meme sounded like a red herring right from the beginning, because of the very many reasons why it is not true. Now the real underlying reason behind the full-court press by Trump aides Navarro et al seems to have surfaced: it is to strong-arm India into rescuing the American farmer.It was an off-hand comment by an aide that gave away the farm (so to speak): US Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s assertion that India does not buy any corn from the US, in a September 14th interview to a US TV channel called Axios. Now this puts a whole new spin on things, because there is a crisis in US farming. No nation can afford to hurt its farmers, for both commercial, and perhaps more importantly, social and cultural reasons. We have seen how Japan subsidizes its uncompetitive rice farmers because rice is so central to its traditional culture. We have seen (at least in the days when I still used to read the magazine) the Economist commenting on “wine lakes” and “butter mountains”, that is, excessive production of agricultural products in Europe. Much the same in the US.If you over-produce, you need to find a buyer. That is the crux of the matter right now: the US used to sell 24 million metric tons of soyabeans, for example, to China every year, but after the tariff threats against it, China entirely switched its purchases to Brazil. So there’s a “soy mountain” in the US, and bankruptcies are mounting. This is serious. On the one hand, the US has lost its pre-eminence in industry to China through foolishly allowing the slipping away of its entire productive capacity to that country in the pursuit of the elusive “China price”. Now, it is on the brink of losing its pre-eminence in agriculture as well, and that can lead to the loss of food security, and a host of other, surprisingly large, side-effects. I summarized the whole problem in a tweet:It is indeed a systemic problem with many unintended consequences. On farm distress, there are several indicators: increased bankruptcies and farm liquidations/auctions, reduced farm loan repayment rates, and lower values for farmland, although farm profits have gone up temporarily because of US Department of Agriculture ad-hoc aid, not higher prices.There are several reasons for this collapse: but the biggest is buyer power. Because of over-production and global surpluses, prices have fallen for many crops; and as mentioned above, the wholesale move of Chinese demand away from the US has left overflowing silos with no prospect of sales in sight. Result: prices fall sharply.I have often felt that buyer power (one of Michael Porter’s famed “Five Forces”) is underestimated by many. Here it is in action. India seems to not understand that it is a big buyer of many commodities, and that gives it market power; so exercise it. On the contrary, India seems to view itself as a supplicant to big sellers. Not quite.What the US appears to be doing is to force India to be “the buyer of last resort”, on whom their products can be dumped: after all, I suspect the idea is, 1.4 billion people have to eat something, so why not eat American corn? There’s a certain perverse logic to this, especially if you remember the PL-480 days when American corn was indeed an emergency food supply to food-deficit India: cornflour is to this day called “American mav” in Kerala. But I am pretty sure Lutnick has no idea of all this.What is exercising the Trump lot is the fact that most of the farms are in solidly-Republican midwestern states (Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin). I remember driving through many of them on a 4,000-mile Boston-San Francisco road trip: there’s nothing but cornfields for miles and miles. And they could be a disaster for Trump in the mid-term elections in 2026.Conversely, it does not occur to Trump aides that no Indian politician can afford to alienate his small farmers by bringing in American farm products, not to mention the cultural sensitivity to dairy products from er… non-veg cows. In an India that is largely self-sufficient in foodgrains these days, there is very little benefit in buying large quantities of foreign products. As an example, imports of oilseeds from ASEAN has decimated coconut farmers in Kerala.The Iowa governor has been in India twice, once in late 2024, and once just last weekend, trying to induce Indians to buy corn. Similarly, the governor of Nebraska was in Japan this month trying to sell them ethanol from corn. This is interesting: I wonder if the sudden enthusiasm in India for E20 ethanol blended petrol has something to do with US pressure.I am not a fan of ethanol blended petrol, because I think hybrid electric-petrol vehicles are a safer, better-tested alternative. But if the GoI is intent on E20, it may be better to buy corn ethanol from the US than to over-exploit water resources in India to grow sugarcane for the same. And maybe, just maybe, it will get Trump to back off from the shrill tariff cacophony.But to go back to my tweet above, there are a lot of other reasons for India to be wary of American farm products. The gigantic subsidies in the US Farm Bill (of the order of $20 billion a year) encourages farmers to over-produce (corn mountains for example). This ends up being converted to High-Fructose Corn Syrup, which is then added to virtually every food product: just read the labels in US supermarkets.I personally have seen the obesity epidemic in the US from the 1970s: people have become grossly fat, and diabetes levels, especially in inner-city ghettos of black and brown people, have gone through the roof as a result of all this sugar. #BigFood, that is all the packaged-food companies and fast-food companies, have engendered this transition, partly because of grossly manipulated "scientific" studies that blamed saturated fat and cholesterol.The culprit, it turns out, was always excessive sugar in the diet. But in the meantime #BigMedicine and #BigPharma took full advantage by selling statins as cholesterol-lowering drugs, and now the new panacea is Ozempic-class weight-loss drugs. However, objective studies show that despite the US spending enormous amounts on healthcare (about 20% of GDP), the health outcomes are mediocre, and often worse than other high-income countries.None of this makes it a good idea to import US farm products wholesale. What is worse, though, is the agricultural ecosystem which includes Genetically Modified Organisms. It depends on large-scale use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The Terminator Seed is terrifying: a Monsanto can turn off next year’s crop by refusing to sell new seeds, which is literally the “kill switch”. What you harvested this year will not germinate! Fiendishly clever, indeed!Given all this, and despite the critical importance of agri-products in both US politics and economics, it is a bad idea for India to be bullied into taking the stuff on board. India would be buying new problems, and its native intellectual property is what needs to be husbanded.There has already been tremendous erosion or digestion without recompense of these valuable IPs. A lot of traditional Indian rice variants have been spirited away to the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines; similarly A2 zebu, humped Indian cattle, have been decimated in India by Amul and others importing A1 Jersey-type cattle. Ironically zebu breeds like Bramah are thriving in Texas, Brazil etc. No need to let IP loss happen again.It remains my belief that agricultural and dairy products are a red line for India that no Indian politician can cross. Sorry, Secretary Lutnick.Here is the AI-generated Malayalam podcast from notebookLM.google.com:1375 words, 15 Sept 2025 updated 16 Sept 2025 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/what-fuels-anti-india-hate-in-the-west-13932053.htmlI am personally very pro-America, yet I too have been baffled by the noises emanating from the Trump administration regarding India, particularly from one aide. Peter Navarro, apparently some trade muckity-muck, has had a field day accusing India of various sins. Apart from the entertainment value, this leads to a serious question: Why? And why now?There is reason to believe, by connecting the dots, that there is indeed a method behind this madness. It is not a pure random walk: there is a plan, and there are good reasons why the vicious attack on India has been launched at this time and in this manner. Of course, this is based on open source and circumstantial evidence: I have no inside information whatsoever.In this context, consider what is arguably the greatest political thriller of all time: "Z" (1969) by Costa-Gavras. It is based on a real-life political murder in Greece, where a popular left-leaning candidate for President was covertly assassinated by the ruling military junta.The way the plot unravels is when the investigating magistrate, masterfully played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, notices a curious phenomenon: the use of a single phrase "lithe and fierce like a tiger", used verbatim by several eye-witnesses. He realizes that there was a criminal conspiracy to get rid of the inconvenient candidate, with plausible deniability. Words and phrases have subtle meanings, and they reveal a great deal.Thus, let me bring to your notice the following tweets:* “India could end the Ukraine war tomorrow: Modi needs to pick a side” (August 5)* “Europeans love to whinge about Trump and to claim he is soft on Russia. But after 3 years it is Donald J Trump who has finally made India pay a price for enabling Putin’s butchery.” (August 6)* Speaker: “[the American taxpayer] gotta fund Modi’s war”. TV Anchor (confused): “You mean Putin’s war?”. Speaker: “No, I mean Modi’s war”. (August 28)Do you, gentle reader, notice a pattern?Now let me tell you who the authors of these posts are. The first quoted an article by an officer in the British Special Forces, which means their covert, cloak-and-dagger military people.The second was by Boris Johnson, former British Prime Minister. Johnson, incidentally, has been accused of single-handedly spiking ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, when there was a possibility that the whole sorry spectacle of the war could have been settled/brought to a close.The third is by the aforementioned Peter Navarro on an American TV channel, Bloomberg Television.I don't know about you, but it seems to me that these three statements are lineal descendants of each other, one leading seamlessly to the next.This is how narratives are built, one brick in the wall after another. In reality, India has not contravened any sanctions in buying oil from Russia, and in fact has helped maintain a cap on oil prices, which were rising because of the Ukraine-Russia war. But then who needs truth if narrative will suffice?My hypothesis is that the anti-India narrative – as seen above – has been created by the British Deep State, otherwise known as Whitehall. First from the spooks, then from the former Prime Minister, and then virally transmitted to the American Deep State. It is my general belief that the British are behind much mischief (sort of the last gasp of Empire) and have been leading the Americans by the nose, master-blaster style.Britain has never tasted defeat at the hands of Russia; while France (Napoleon) and Germany (Hitler) have. Plus the US Military Industrial Complex makes a lot of money from war.A malignant British meme, intended to hurt Russia, is now turned on to India, which is, for all intents and purposes, an innocent bystander. Britain has had a thing about both Russia (“The Great Game”) and now India, and it was precisely why it created ‘imperial fortress’ Pakistan, with which to trouble, and if possible, hurt both.Then there was the second set of tweets that took things one step further. Navarro, all warmed up, blamed “Brahmins” for “profiteering by buying Russian oil at the cost of the Indian people” in a broadcast on September 1. Why he would be bothered about the “Indian people” is a good question. But what was far more interesting, indeed hilarious, was the near-simultaneous, and absurdly wrong, set of tweets by a whole group of INDI Alliance mavens.They ‘explained’, in almost identical words, that what Navarro meant was not “Brahmins”, but “Boston Brahmins”, a term coined in 1860 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a doctor/essayist, to refer to traditional US East Coast elites, generally WASPs (White Anglo Saxon Protestants) who dominate the corridors of power in the US. Many claim to be descended from the original Pilgrims, Puritan extremists from Britain, who arrived in Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620.They go to private (‘prep’) schools like Philips Exeter Academy, then Harvard or Yale, then Goldman Sachs, then Harvard Business School, and generally end up running the country as a hereditary, endogamous caste. It is very difficult for outsiders to marry into or enter this circle, although money helps. For example the Irish Catholic Kennedy clan is part of this caste because they made big bucks (partly by smuggling liquor during the Prohibition era), even though the Irish are generally looked down upon.I have long claimed that America is full of castes like this, which include the investment-banker caste, the lawyer caste, the doctor caste: all go to the same schools, the same colleges, marry each other, etc. In fact they do form the kind of exclusionary group that the western narrative imputes to India jati-varna. Anyway that’s a long story, and that’s not the point: it is the tweets by, for example, Karti Chidambaram, Sagarika Ghose, Saket Gokhale, et al.They were so ‘spontaneous’, so near-identical, and so outright idiotic that it is impossible that they came from anything other than a ‘toolkit’ supplied by the usual suspects: the regime-change specialists. And their claim was not even accurate: Navarro was indeed targeting Hindus and Brahmins, as is evident from the following tweet. There is no earthly reason for him to choose this image of Modi, other than that he was coached into doing so.So we go back to the original question: why? Who hates Hindus so much?There are a number of other incidents where Indians (in particular Hindus) have been targeted in various countries: Ireland recently; Australia some time ago and again now, see below an anti-immigration (particularly anti-Indian) rally on August 31st; Canada with its Khalistanis running amok (lest we forget, 40 years ago, they downed Air India Kanishka).Let us note the curious coincidence that these are all countries where the British have influence: Canada and Australia are in effect their vassals. Ireland is not, and I suspect the British are hated there, but somehow in the last few weeks, this British prejudice has spilled over with “Irish teenagers” physically attacking Indians (including women and children). I wonder if the “Irish teenagers” are really British agents provocateurs.So let’s put two and two together: who hates Indians, Hindus and Brahmins? Why, Pakistanis, of course. And they have been burned a little by Operation Sindoor. Pahalgam didn’t quite turn out the way they thought it would, considering it was scheduled during the India visit of J D Vance accompanied by his Indian/Hindu-origin wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance. That might explain why there’s a sudden explosion of social-media hatred by ISI and CCP bots against Indians.Pahalgam was Phase 2 of the regime-change operation. By so visibly targeting and murdering Hindus in Pahalgam, the Pakistanis calculated they could induce massive rioting by Hindus against Muslims, which would be an excuse for “the rules-based liberal international order” to step in, exile Modi, and um… restore order, as in Bangladesh. The usual playbook.Alas, “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”, and Pakistan got a whipping instead, and some of their (US or China-supplied?) nuclear assets apparently went up in smoke. But make no mistake, the regime-change gang will redouble its efforts.Phase 1 had been the 2024 elections where there were surprising losses by the BJP. Phase 3 is the ‘vote-chori’ wailing by the INDI Alliance: odd, considering nobody knows which passport(s) Rahul Gandhi holds. Phase 4 is the ongoing ‘Project 37’ in which renegade BJP MPs are supposed to bring down the central government.Pakistan, and its various arms, including the Khalistan project, participate with great enthusiasm in these various phases. And for all intents and purposes, the UK has now become a Pakistani colony. Recursive master-blaster, as I conjectured: Pakistani-Britons control Whitehall, Whitehall controls the US Deep State. Here’s Britain’s new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, in the words of a suddenly-awake Briton on September 6th.An Emirati strategist, Amjad Taha, asked a valid question: why is there more terrorism in the UK than in the Middle East?Wait, there’s more. Here’s a loudmouth Austrian who wants to dismantle India, long a Pakistani dream. And the map is by some Jafri, which sounds like a Pakistani surname. The Austrian also wants Rahul Gandhi to be the next Prime Minister.Pakistan is itself unraveling, as can be seen in Balochistan which is in open rebellion. Their Khalistani dream is new, but Kerala and the Northeast as Islamist entities were standard memes even from Chaudhury Rehmat Ali who dreamt up Pakistan in the first place in the 1930s.Pakistan just got a boost, however, with OSINT identifying a US C-17 (a giant military cargo plane) arriving to resupply Nur Khan Airbase. This raises the question again: were US personnel and assets decimated there by Indian missiles during Operation Sindoor? Is that why the US got

The second episode in the IITM Alumni Association Trivandrum's live monthly Fireside Chats. Senior executive Sri CMA, formerly VP at Alstom T&D France and Board Member, Alstom India and Areva India, has been in charge of setting up factories in several countries, and has first-hand knowledge of geo-economics and manufacturing. He is also actively involved in analyzing international relations and geo-politics. In this live conversation, he provides insights into the (unintended) consequences of President Trump's tariffs, and answers specific questions from the audience. He considers the repercussions on India both tactically and strategically, and how the nation might respond, with diversification of markets, case-by-case analysis of sectors, and creating leverage with its own core competencies.Here is the AI-generated podcast about this live chat: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

An edited version of this essay was published by Deccan Herald at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/decoding-trump-s-tariff-tantrums-3694626, as the editor downplayed the ‘vote chori’ INDI alliance story and the atrocities by Tipu on Hindu Kerala. Last month, I wrote here about India’s splendid diplomatic isolation, but my prediction became fact sooner than I expected, with President Trump’s withering attacks on India. Biden drove Russia into China’s arms over Ukraine; Trump seems intent on driving India into China’s arms; and Ukraine isn’t even Asia’s problem, but a likely Chinese invasion of Taiwan would beThere are at least four different ways in which one could rationalize the Trump position:* A negotiating opening gambit to soften up India* Frustration from the lack of leverage against Presidents Putin and Xi* Part of a regime-change operation planned by the Deep State* A desire to force manufacturing and investment to move back to the USI hope it is a combination of 1 and 2, and that better sense will prevail before a mutually-beneficial Indo-US relationship is damaged beyond repair. However, there is a non-trivial chance that, with prompting by Britain’s Whitehall (which created Pakistan in the first place to keep India in check), the US Deep State has decided to target India.I wrote a couple of years ago that the Deep State, intimidated by China’s rise, might accept a condominium with it, giving each a sphere of influence. China gets Asia and the Indian Ocean; the US gets the Americas, Europe and the Atlantic; and they share the Pacific. India, Japan, Australia (i.e. the Quad), and ASEAN become Chinese vassals. So like the Vatican-brokered Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 that divided the world between Spain and Portugal!There is also the anti-Thucydides Trap, wherein the incumbent power (the US), instead of resisting the rise of the challenger (China), helped it grow, deluding themselves that China would be benign. However, both are now employing all possible means against new challenger India’s rise, including trying to balkanize the latter.That is Scenario 3, the Deep State playbook of ‘color revolutions’ against governments they don’t like for whatever reason. The continuous INDI Alliance efforts to stir up linguistic or caste-based divisions in India, along with the recent ‘Vote Chori’ fuss to delegitimize India’s democracy, are part of the toolkit: declare a regime undesirable, then topple it. In 2024 they almost succeeded, but not quite. They will keep trying.Scenario 4 makes a strange sort of sense. Trump realizes the US erred badly in relinquishing manufacturing to China, and wants to pull it back; also he has no interest in India becoming a new manufacturing power. Similarly, the ‘deals’ forcing Japan, the EU, Korea et al to invest billions of dollars in the US (and Ukraine, which lives on charity, has promised to spend $100 billion in the US!) are extortionate: a sort of neo-imperialism.The effort to browbeat India into buying more US weapons is part of this: Trump aide Peter Navarro grumbled that India buys 36% of its armaments from Russia. He omitted to mention that this is down from 70+% a decade ago. Sadly, US armaments and aerospace products (e.g. the F-35 and Boeing 787s) are now seen as not so reliable.The moral posturing about India’s purchases of Russian oil leading to deaths of Ukrainians is downright bizarre. It’s just business, Trump aide Scott Bessent, why repeat INDI’s Ambani-Adani mantra? Remember your own ‘robber barons’ and “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”? There are many examples of profit above morals.One is the 1973 oil price crisis, when OPEC suddenly quadrupled crude oil prices, forcing a massive transfer of wealth from developing countries, quite likely causing starvation deaths. The US could have persuaded (or bullied) OPEC into preventing the price rise. But it didn’t. Why? Because those petro-dollars were recycled into buying American weapons. The Military Industrial Complex prospered. No morality there.There is an earlier parallel. Tipu Sultan invaded Kerala in the 1780s with a reign of terror, massacres, loot of Hindu temples, pillage, forced conversions and so on. The British did nothing, despite a treaty with Travancore. After Tipu had amassed all the looted treasure in one place, the British killed him, and stole all of it themselves. The British came out smelling of roses because they killed a tyrant, and they had the loot. Two birds, one stone. No morality there, either.Given all this, there’s one thing India needs to do urgently: gain leverage, a bargaining chip. China has rare earths, OPEC has oil. India should use the 100,000 H1-B folks who are likely to be forced out from the US to gain leverage through first-class software products.760 words, 20 Aug 2025, updated 21 Aug 2025 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-from-crisis-to-advantage-how-india-can-outplay-the-trump-tariff-gambit-13923031.htmlA simple summary of the recent brouhaha about President Trump’s imposition of 25% tariffs on India as well as his comment on India’s ‘dead economy’ is the following from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Trump further imposed punitive tariffs totalling 50% on August 6th allegedly for India funding Russia’s war machine via buying oil.As any negotiator knows, a good opening gambit is intended to set the stage for further parleys, so that you could arrive at a negotiated settlement that is acceptable to both parties. The opening gambit could well be a maximalist statement, or one’s ‘dream outcome’, the opposite of which is ‘the walkway point’ beyond which you are simply not willing to make concessions. The usual outcome is somewhere in between these two positions or postures.Trump is both a tough negotiator, and prone to making broad statements from which he has no problem retreating later. It’s down-and-dirty boardroom tactics that he’s bringing to international trade. Therefore I think Indians don’t need to get rattled. It’s not the end of the world, and there will be climbdowns and adjustments. Think hard about the long term.I was on a panel discussion on this topic on TV just hours after Trump made his initial 25% announcement, and I mentioned an interplay between geo-politics and geo-economics. Trump is annoyed that his Ukraine-Russia play is not making much headway, and also that BRICS is making progress towards de-dollarization. India is caught in this crossfire (‘collateral damage’) but the geo-economic facts on the ground are not favorable to Trump.I am in general agreement with Trump on his objectives of bringing manufacturing and investment back to the US, but I am not sure that he will succeed, and anyway his strong-arm tactics may backfire. I consider below what India should be prepared to do to turn adversity into opportunity.The anti-Thucydides Trap and the baleful influence of Whitehall on Deep StateWhat is remarkable, though, is that Trump 2.0 seems to be indistinguishable from the Deep State: I wondered last month if the Deep State had ‘turned’ Trump. The main reason many people supported Trump in the first place was the damage the Deep State was wreaking on the US under the Obama-Biden regime. But it appears that the resourceful Deep State has now co-opted Trump for its agenda, and I can only speculate how.The net result is that there is the anti-Thucydides Trap: here is the incumbent power, the US, actively supporting the insurgent power, China, instead of suppressing it, as Graham Allison suggested as the historical pattern. It, in all fairness, did not start with Trump, but with Nixon in China in 1971. In 1985, the US trade deficit with China was $6 million. In 1986, $1.78 billion. In 1995, $35 billion.But it ballooned after China entered the WTO in 2001. $202 billion in 2005; $386 billion in 2022.In 2025, after threatening China with 150% tariffs, Trump retreated by postponing them; besides he has caved in to Chinese demands for Nvidia chips and for exemptions from Iran oil sanctions if I am not mistaken.All this can be explained by one word: leverage. China lured the US with the siren-song of the cost-leader ‘China price’, tempting CEOs and Wall Street, who sleepwalked into surrender to the heft of the Chinese supply chain.Now China has cornered Trump via its monopoly over various things, the most obvious of which is rare earths. Trump really has no option but to give in to Chinese blackmail. That must make him furious: in addition to his inability to get Putin to listen to him, Xi is also ignoring him. Therefore, he will take out his frustrations on others, such as India, the EU, Japan, etc. Never mind that he’s burning bridges with them.There’s a Malayalam proverb that’s relevant here: “angadiyil thottathinu ammayodu”. Meaning, you were humiliated in the marketplace, so you come home and take it out on your mother. This is quite likely what Trump is doing, because he believes India et al will not retaliate. In fact Japan and the EU did not retaliate, but gave in, also promising to invest large sums in the US. India could consider a different path: not active conflict, but not giving in either, because its equations with the US are different from those of the EU or Japan.Even the normally docile Japanese are beginning to notice.Beyond that, I suggested a couple of years ago that Deep State has a plan to enter into a condominium agreement with China, so that China gets Asia, and the US gets the Americas and the Pacific/Atlantic. This is exactly like the Vatican-brokered medieval division of the world between Spain and Portugal, and it probably will be equally bad for everyone else. And incidentally it makes the Quad infructuous, and deepens distrust of American motives.The Chinese are sure that they have achieved the condominium, or rather forced the Americans into it. Here is a headline from the Financial Express about their reaction to the tariffs: they are delighted that the principal obstacle in their quest for hegemony, a US-India military and economic alliance, is being blown up by Trump, and they lose no opportunity to deride India as not quite up to the mark, whereas they and the US have achieved a G2 detente.Two birds with one stone: gloat about the breakdown in the US-India relationship, and exhibit their racist disdain for India yet again.They laugh, but I bet India can do an end-run around them. As noted above, the G2 is a lot like the division of the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in 1494. Well, that didn’t end too well for either of them. They had their empires, which they looted for gold and slaves, but it made them fat, dumb and happy. The Dutch, English, and French capitalized on more dynamic economies, flexible colonial systems, and aggressive competition, overtaking the Iberian powers in global influence by the 17th century. This is a salutary historical parallel.I have long suspected that the US Deep State is being led by the nose by the malign Whitehall (the British Deep State): I call it the ‘master-blaster’ syndrome. On August 6th, there was indirect confirmation of this in ex-British PM Boris Johnson’s tweet about India. Let us remember he single-handedly ruined the chances of a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine War in 2022. Whitehall’s mischief and meddling all over, if you read between the lines.Did I mention the British Special Force’s views? Ah, Whitehall is getting a bit sloppy in its propaganda.Wait, so is India important (according to Whitehall) or unimportant (according to Trump)?Since I am very pro-American, I have a word of warning to Trump: you trust perfidious Albion at your peril. Their country is ruined, and they will not rest until they ruin yours too.I also wonder if there are British paw-prints in a recent and sudden spate of racist attacks on Indians in Ireland. A 6-year old girl was assaulted and kicked in the private parts. A nurse was gang-raped by a bunch of teenagers. Ireland has never been so racist against Indians (yes, I do remember the sad case of Savita Halappanavar, but that was religious bigotry more than racism). And I remember sudden spikes in anti-Indian attacks in Australia and Canada, both British vassals.There is no point in Indians whining about how the EU and America itself are buying more oil, palladium, rare earths, uranium etc. from Russia than India is. I am sorry to say this, but Western nations are known for hypocrisy. For example, exactly 80 years ago they dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, but not on Germany or Italy. Why? The answer is uncomfortable. Lovely post-facto rationalization, isn’t it?Remember the late lamented British East India Company that raped and pillaged India?Applying the three winning strategies to geo-economicsAs a professor of business strategy and innovation, I emphasize to my students that there are three broad ways of gaining an advantage over others: 1. Be the cost leader, 2. Be the most customer-intimate player, 3. Innovate. The US as a nation is patently not playing the cost leader; it does have some customer intimacy, but it is shrinking; its strength is in innovation.If you look at comparative advantage, the US at one time had strengths in all three of the above. Because it had the scale of a large market (and its most obvious competitors in Europe were decimated by world wars) America did enjoy an ability to be cost-competitive, especially as the dollar is the global default reserve currency. It demonstrated this by pushing through the Plaza Accords, forcing the Japanese yen to appreciate, destroying their cost advantage.In terms of customer intimacy, the US is losing its edge. Take cars for example: Americans practically invented them, and dominated the business, but they are in headlong retreat now because they simply don’t make cars that people want outside the US: Japanese, Koreans, Germans and now Chinese do. Why were Ford and GM forced to leave the India market? Their “world cars” are no good in value-conscious India and other emerging markets.Innovation, yes, has been an American strength. Iconic Americans like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs led the way in product and process innovation. US universities have produced idea after idea, and startups have ignited Silicon Valley. In fact Big Tech and aerospace/armaments are the biggest areas where the US leads these days.The armaments and aerospace tradeThat is pertinent because of two reasons: one is Trump’s peevishness at India’s purchase of weapons from Russia (even though that has come down from 70+% of imports to 36% according to SIPRI); two is the fact that there are significant services and intangible imports by India from the US, of for instance B

A version of this essay was published by Deccan Herald at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/the-abhimanyu-syndrome-india-and-its-isolation-3650402Recent events have made it increasingly clear that India is utterly alone. I call this the Abhimanyu Syndrome, in honor of the teenaged Abhimanyu, who only knew how to enter the impregnable Chakravyuha, and who was then murdered, alone, against all Dharmic principles, by several powerful Maharathis.India's possible rise as an economic and military power is being resisted tooth and nail by the incumbent major powers. This is natural: all 'insurgent' powers face this problem. India's rise will need some paradigm shifts, which may or may not happen.China's rise was helped by two things: an industrial policy and inadvertent help by the US's managers and Wall Street who were seduced by the short-term appeal of the lower-cost 'China price'.The ruthless industrial policy is a result of China's civil services being full of engineers who understand the near term. In the long run, it may or may not succeed because of second-order effects such as population implosion, environmental ruin and skewed investment decisions.The US is now facing decline (and the EU has already begun a steep decline) for a variety of reasons, including natural cycles and the loss of comparative advantage in weaponry.In this context, I wish I knew what paradigm shift, if any, will propel India to a G3 slot, but the general global churn, new technologies, etc might create an opportunity. In the meantime, India has to struggle alone, against a mass of hostile powers.I read an article in a Sri Lankan newspaper that painted India as a tyrant, but China as a benevolent friend dispensing largesse. Yes, the same China that has grabbed Hambantota! And it called for a new SAARC, one minus India. This is the kind of propaganda that China and Pakistan are rolling out in the Indian subcontinent.China has every reason to want to kneecap India, the only Asian power that can (and hopefully will) challenge its hegemonistic pretensions. Even the US doesn't: Obama anointed China as the guardian/manager, if not owner, of 'South Asia'. Spheres of influence, you see.The US, in general, has been a disappointment. Many Indians expected, after Biden's antics with Yunus in Bangladesh, that Trump would be more in tune with Indian interests, partly because the US and India both need to keep China in check, and Trump wants to move more manufacturing out of China.But that has clearly not happened. Instead, India has been in Trump's gunsights over trade (although India's surplus is small, and agricultural items that the US wants to sell are a serious no-no for India). Their embrace of Pakistan during and after Operation Sindoor has been inexplicable unless Trump has adopted pure Deepstate policy.India cannot be a Chinese vassal (although it is in BRICS) and it doesn't want to be an American vassal though it’s in the Quad (its ties with Russia and strategic autonomy are too important). Thus India is squeezed; for instance, the recent threat by some NATO muckity-muck to impose Russia-related sanctions was sinister.This could be both good and bad. Let’s face it, nobody likes a rising power (see Thucydides Trap). While the Sri Lankan paper glorifies China, let us remember that China has territorial disputes with literally every one of its neighbors, and most of ASEAN is deathly scared of them. That comes from hard power. If SAARC or G20 or somebody is worried about India, that is a good sign that home-grown military power is noticeable.Everyone complains that India is not loyal to them. BRICS boosters grumble that India is a Western ‘mole’ that is preventing them from toppling the dollar and making the US irrelevant. Conversely, the Anglosphere complains that India is not sufficiently committed to them, as in not toeing their Ukraine line. This is as it should be: multi-alignment means India is not beholden to anybody, but will pursue its selfish interests first and foremost.This is qualitatively different from the late lamented ‘non-alignment’ of Nehruvian days, which meant everybody disliked India for its moral posturing. Multi-alignment means India will engage with everybody, on its own terms. With the US, for technology and trade. With Russia, for weapons and oil. Even with China, despite China being India’s staunchest enemy, for electronic components. And even with perfidious Britain, as in the just-concluded FTA, which I personally consider pointless.Thus the splendid isolation is a back-handed compliment: the rest of the world is anticipating the rise of India as a superpower; and superpowers have no friends, only interests. And remember, Abhimanyu died, yes, but his side won overwhelmingly.780 words, 22 Jul 2025 updated 25 Jul 2025 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-air-india-crash-how-to-spin-doctor-and-peddle-narratives-the-western-way-13912025.html There has been a virtual masterclass lately in the creation and dissemination of biased narratives. Not only in the case of the ill-fated Air India 171 (Boeing 787, June 12, 2025) that crashed, but also in some other, unrelated instances. The age-old practices of "truth by repeated assertion" and "dubious circular references" as well as "strategic silence" have all been deployed in full force.The bottom line with the Air India flight: there is reasonable doubt about whether there was mechanical/software failure and/or sabotage or possible pilot error. Any or all these caused both engines to turn off in flight. But the way the spin-doctors have spun it, it is now "official" that the commanding pilot was suicidal and turned off the fuel switch. Boeing, the plane maker, and General Electric, the engine maker, are blameless.This is, alas, not surprising. It is in the interests of western MNCs to limit reputational damage and monetary loss related to their products. They do massive marketing by unleashing their PR agencies. We also saw how they protect themselves in other instances. A leaked Pfizer contract for their Covid vaccine insisted that if anything happened, it was the user's problem, not Pfizer's: there was no indemnity.Incidentally, a report on July 19th said that the Pfizer COVID vaccine can lead to severe vision problems. Oh, sorry, no indemnity.What is deplorable in the Air India case is that the AAIB, the Indian entity investigating the disaster, chose to release a half-baked preliminary report with enough ambiguity that a case could be (and definitely was) built up against the poor dead pilots. Any marketing person could have read the report and told them that it would be used to blame the pilots and absolve the manufacturers.Besides, the AAIB report was released late night on a Friday India time, which meant that the western media had all of one working day to do the spin-doctoring, which they did with remarkable gusto. Meanwhile the Indian media slept. Whose decision was this? Clearly, Indian babus need a remedial course in public relations if this was mere incompetence. Of course, if it was intentional, that would be even worse.There is a pattern. In earlier air accidents, such as the Jeju Air crash involving a Boeing 737-800 in South Korea in December, the pilots were blamed. In accidents involving Lion Air (Boeing 737 Max 8, 2018), China Airlines (737 200, 1989), Flydubai (737 800, 2016), ditto. I am beginning to believe that a lot of Asian pilots are poorly trained and/or suicidal. Ditto with the F-35 that fell into the ocean off Japan.Truth by repeated assertion is a powerful force for gaslighting the gullibleI wonder what excuses we’ll hear about the Delta Airlines Boeing 767 whose engine caught fire in the air after take-off from LAX on July 20th. The pilots didn't die so they will speak up. Besides, they were westerners. I am eagerly awaiting the spin on this.I also noticed with grim amusement how the BBC, WSJ, Bloomberg and Reuters and so on were busy quoting each other to validate their assertions. This is a standard tactic that India's distorians (see Utpal Kumar's powerful book 'Eminent Distorians') have perfected: B will quote third-hand hearsay from A, then C will quote B, D will quote C, and before you know it, the hearsay has become The TRUTH. But if you wind it back from D to C to B to A it becomes, "I hear someone told someone that xyz happened". Out of thin air, then.There is also the lovely tactic of strategic silence. It has been used to un-person people who ask inconvenient questions. It has also been used to defenestrate inconvenient news. Just days ago, under the Deepstate-installed new regime in Syria, hundreds of minority Druze were brutally massacred. There was video on X of armed men in uniform forcing Druze men to jump off tall buildings, and desecrating their shrines.Similary, there is a brutal reign of terror, rape, murder and thuggery against Hindus, Buddhists and others under the Deepstate-blessed regime of Mohammed Yunus in Bangladesh: a clear genocide. Neither Syria nor Bangladesh gets any headlines. There are no loud human-rights protests as in the case of Gaza. This is not news. It is un-news."Manufacturing Consent" all the way.India is particularly vulnerable to this gaslighting because Indians consume a lot of English-language 'news'. Scholars have long noted how the US public has been maintained in a state of ignorance so they could be easily manipulated. The same is true of the Indian middle class. So there is yet another reason to do less in English. Fooling, say, the Chinese or Japanese public is a lot more difficult.The fact is that even though Indians may be literate in English, they do not understand the context and the subtext of what is fed to them by the likes of The Economist, NPR, The Financial Times, the New York Times, etc. The best way I can explain this is the 100+5 analogy in the Mahabharata: they may fight with each other on domestic matters, but Anglosphere and Deepstate are in cahoots when it comes to international matters.Things are both getting better and getting worse. On the one hand, social media and its imprint on generative AI mean that it is ever easier to propagate fake news (in addition to deepfake audio and video, of course). On the other hand, despite the problem of charlatans and paid agents provocateurs getting lots of eyeballs, the large number of Indians on social media may push back against the worst kinds of blood libel against India and Indians, of which there's plenty these days often created by bots from 'friendly' neighbors.This is a serious matter indeed. One solution is to do a version of the Great Chinese Firewall and ban wholesale the worst offenders. Indeed, a few of the vilest handles have been ejected from X. However, the pusillanimity with which notorious Pakistani handles were unbanned, then re-banned after outrage, shows there's something rotten in the Information Ministry. Almost exactly the same as the unbanning of Pakistani cricketers, then rebanning after outrage. Is there anybody in charge?Information warfare is insidious. Going back to the Air India case, I think the families of the maligned pilots should sue for gigantic sums for libel and defamation. The sad state of the Indian judiciary may mean that, unfortunately, this will not go far. However, there is precedent: Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore used to terrorize villainous western media by suing them in his courts. They learned to toe the line.If this tactic does not work, India should eject the hostile media. The Indian market is increasingly important to western media (not vice versa) because soon there will be more English-reading consumers in India than in the Five Eyes Anglosphere. I should say that in quotes because as I said above, most Indians are blissfully unaware of the hidden agendas, and naively believe them. But "Judeo-Christian" culture is very different from Dharmic.I keep getting emails from the New York Times with tempting offers to subscribe to them for something really cheap like Rs. 25 a month. They need Indian readers. I have been shouting from the rooftops for years that one of these charlatan media houses needs to be kicked out, harshly, with 24 hours notice to wind up and leave. As in the Asian proverb, "kill the chicken to scare the monkeys". The monkeys will notice, and behave. Otherwise the information warfare is just going to get worse.1290 words, Jul 22, 2025 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-zohran-mamdani-and-the-coming-crisis-for-hindus-in-america-13908482.htmlI have long felt the Deep State works on a single playbook in its foreign policy: regime-change, or what is colloquially called ‘Color Revolutions’. It is a simple routine: in some remote country, declare the ruling dispensation to be mad dogs, and shoot them, metaphorically if not in reality. Anoint a ‘friend’ as the new chief. All hail to him/her! The pliant media goes along.There have been innumerable such plays all over the world, and most of the time, the results have been bad to disastrous for the country in question. Just look at Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, and Syria for recent examples. Iran, too, when Mossadegh was toppled because of, what else, oil: BP was annoyed at him for nationalizing Iranian oil.As an aside, I have wondered why Deep State did not orchestrate a color revolution against the Nehru Dynasty. On the face of it, there were plenty of reasons to do so: Jawaharlal’s embrace of the Soviet Union, Indira’s defiance regarding East Pakistan, and so on. So why didn’t they topple the Dynasty and install a puppet, as they did with Mohammed Yunus in Bangladesh?Maybe India was just too unimportant. Or maybe, just maybe, the Nehru Dynasty was in fact the Deep State puppet already in place. Was Jawaharlal hand-picked, and didn’t even know?So is Zohran Mamdani’s rise the first Color Revolution in the US? A friend claimed that it wasn’t, and that Barack Obama was the first. That is a debatable point, but one could argue that Obama 1 & 2, and Obama 3 (Biden’s term) were the worst presidencies in US history.While there have been many good opinion pieces written about Mamdani’s rise and rise, for instance by Jaggi and Avatans Kumar, I would like to focus on the broader implications of what Deep State might achieve by rolling out a Color Revolution in its own backyard. It’s one thing to mess up a far-off country, and entirely a different thing to screw up your own premier city. This is a high-risk (and presumably high-return) strategy for Deep State.Of course, the UK Deep State (aka Whitehall) may well be leading the US Deep State by the nose. I called it a “master-blaster” relationship, hat tip to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. This color revolution possibility is not something I invented out of thin air, I give due credit to, among others, San for noting this possibility, along with many other unusual things about the Mamdani campaign, including its connection to Soros, as well as the uncompromising religious bigotry and use of dog-whistles against, for instance, Jews and Hindus. So Zohran Mamdani is worth watching, and so is his father, Columbia Professor Mamdani, who wrote something alarming in his 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror: see an excerpt below that seems to justify suicide bombing as a tactic. Of course, he may just have been doing an academic analysis, and surely, what the father said cannot be attributed to the son, but we can wonder about early influences on Zohran.Beyond the personal proclivities of the man and family, there is a mixture of Islamist radicalism and extreme-left radicalism in Zohran Mamdani’s background. Some have called his rise a victory for the Red-Green Alliance, which is of significance to India, because here too we have often seen such a combination in play. Besides, it’s notable that Mamdani has never said a word about atrocities committed on Hindus in Pakistan/Bangladesh or even in India, though he’s quick to make up atrocity literature alleging “Gujarati Muslims have been wiped out” in India. About 10 million Gujarati Muslims may like to differ. Amazingly, the very people whom Mamdani is supposed to be emancipating, the underclass blacks and other low-income residents of NYC, did not vote for him. His victory in the Democratic primary came from young, well-off whites and “Asians” (the same Asians as in the UK?), and unions. That itself is telling. The bigger question, though, is how this relates to the eclipse of the West. I take the UK as Exhibit A. There was a recent article in the Economist magazine about how Britain is now a cheap country. In other words, the per capita income has fallen, and British assets are valued low, because there is a general perception of malaise, partly because manufacturing has collapsed.The headline is precious. It reminds me of the subtitle to Stanley Kubrik’s “Dr Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”. Right on, cheers, tally-ho!It was hugely entertaining to also listen to an Economist podcast which suggested that a “services-led economy” would be the UK’s savior. Raghuram Rajan, take a bow. Necessity being the mother of invention, I suppose. There is not a single product of British manufacturing that anybody wants (with the possible exception of Rolls-Royce aircraft engines). They were able to dump their inferior goods on defenseless colonies (read: India) but those days are over.They are now apparently depending on services (e.g., their journalism, which, with its clipped accents, impresses Americans, but is available to the highest bidder. The word “Presstitutes” leaps to mind). In addition, IT services, it seems, given their convenient time zone. And cheap IT labor. Yes, direct threat to India. Wipro, Infosys, TCS, I am sure are paralyzed with fear. The UK is, in many ways, the canary in the coalmine. Its precipitous decline is related to the fact that it is a small island off northwest Asia, whereas of course the US is a continent-sized country with massive resources. But the other factors: the previous holder of the global reserve currency, the previous dominant superpower, etc., are relevant to the US.To be honest, I have no idea what the UK’s elites are thinking, because their current trajectory is going to end in disaster. As I have said before, they have fancied themselves as dealmakers extraordinaire, with Whitehall leading the world in mischief. But they were too clever by half: their homeland is collapsing. I don’t mind, it’s schadenfreude time, but I wonder what 3-d chess they are playing. I wonder if the US Deep State has a clue that the US could end up like the UK. The one thing that has sustained the UK in the last few decades is their financial services. But with the LIBOR scandal and Brexit, that game is also moving on: to Frankfurt, Singapore, Dubai (and eventually I guess GIFT City, India). The City of London, the name of the financial district, has been decimated. This is a warning to Wall Street in New York City.Another warning comes from California in general, and San Francisco in particular. Once the most appealing of American cities, it has been turned into a fetid, dangerous place full of yes, “street-shitters” and fentanyl addicts. The main culprit has been rule by left-wing extremists who put in place the ingredients for terminal decline: for instance, a moratorium on prosecuting any property crimes worth less than $950, which led to the hollowing out of retail downtown.I am not saying New York City is a pleasant place especially compared to what San Francisco was (I lived for a long time in the suburbs of both, so I have personal experience) but there is surely a lot that can go wrong with socialism of the Mamdani variety. Exhibits A, B, C: Venezuela, Cuba, etc. What is of more immediate concern to Hindus is that the US will become more dangerous for them. As it is, the amount of racial hatred and animosity towards brown Hindus has grown perceptibly, aided by social media ‘influencers’ who are likely paid by ISI/CCP/Deep State. There is also the element of envy, as Hindus have risen to high positions, mostly by way of hard work and smarts. In analogy with Jews, this envy can turn into poisonous bigotry. We have seen how Kristallnachts develop. And then Final Solutions. The UK has seen, along with the growth of its Muslim population (“demography is destiny”) a concomitant level of animosity and violence against Hindus: see Leicester; and the British establishment is so afraid of Muslims that they will not take any steps to curb their acts. This is leading to clear and present danger for Hindus. We have seen this movie before.In addition to the increasing animosity towards H1-B holding Indians, who are predominantly Hindus, a victory for Zohran Mamdani will basically make it clear to US Hindus that their days are numbered, and that the US may rapidly follow the UK into societal and economic collapse. It’s a sobering thought. Do we have a Plan B?1330 words, 15 Jul 2025 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

A version of this essay was published by first post on Jul 14 at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-whats-driving-trumps-u-turns-13906527.htmlThere were two good reasons to support Donald Trump for President of the US: one, that he did not go to war in his first term, and two, that he was the very antithesis of the Deep State-controlled former President Biden.Alas, just less than six months into his re-incarnation as the 47th President, there is reason to wonder if the first claim is no longer accurate: the Ukraine war is dragging on, and so is the Gaza war; Trump’s role in the India-Pak skirmish was murky; and he got the US into the Iran-Israel war as a belligerent; so it’s hard to portray him as anti-war any more.On the other hand, almost all the initiatives Trump came up with (although in characteristic bull-in-the-china-shop fashion) that could have potentially damaged the Deep State are now being rolled back. It appears the Deep State is back in charge. Consider the much-ballyhooed trade war with China. Personally, I thought the goal of bringing manufacturing back to the US was laudable, although difficult. We saw a whole lot of saber-rattling. But after all the smoke settled, it appears that China, the purported target of the tariff wars, is now sitting pretty with a trade deal that sets 55% tariffs (including a universal 10%, 20% because of fentanyl, and 25% left over from Trump’s first term, according to grok).In other words, Trump folded because the Chinese were holding his feet to the fire over rare-earths etc, where they have a quasi-monopoly. The rude meme TACO (I will not spell it out here, but you can look it up) was current for a while.There has been a series of little things that together show that Trump, despite all the bluster, is not that much in control. It is likely that the Deep State has co-opted him, on what grounds we will have to wait and see. The Deep State is nothing if not resourceful. It may be blackmailing him, or it may be dangling crypto profits, or a Nobel Peace Prize in front of Trump. Who knows what other carrots and sticks it wields.The abrupt departure of Elon Musk, and the equally abrupt demise of DOGE was a clue that something was going on. What started with a lot of public support has been quietly trashed. It is obvious to anyone that the Deep State has entrenched itself through sweetheart deals and indirection (eg. USAID as a mechanism for distributing goodies to pals) to the extent that official US foreign policy is merely an inconvenience for the Deep State’s actual policies.So now the Deep State is rampaging again, and it has defeated Musk. We saw disturbing signs over the last few weeks, pretty much ever since Musk was defenestrated. There was the tilt towards Pakistan during the 4-day skirmish, followed by the embrace of Field Marshall Munir. Yes, it is true that this can be explained away with the idea that American nuclear material is being held by US troops on Pakistani soil.Those who are worried about India’s long-term interests were naturally shocked by this volte-face, but it just goes to show that everybody pursues their national interest, friendships be damned. India is beginning to learn that truism, and not getting involved in everybody’s problems, as it were clutching its pearls, clucking and lecturing as in the old Nehruvian days. This is definite progress. India no longer looks like a laughing stock (despite the “pajeet” “smelly” type propaganda unleashed against it, presumably by the CCP and Deep State.)Then came the humiliation of Tulsi Gabbard, the handpicked Director of National Intelligence, whom Trump contradicted directly in regards to intelligence about the Iranian nukes. After that, there was the Iran-Israel 12-day war; India consoled itself that the Trump embrace of Munir was because the US needed to have Pakistan available for US sorties into Iran.After the Iran Israel war, there has been the curious spectacle of the Epstein Files that disappeared. Attorney General Pam Bondi who had earlier said she had the files on her desk is now forced to eat her words. FBI Director Kash Patel is made to look silly. Exactly why would that be? There are dark rumors about who’s on the Epstein list, but, ok, they’re just rumors.This reminds me of the incredible circus over Hunter Biden’s laptop. Everybody knew it was highly compromised, but the FBI stonewalled all investigations. Instead, it peddled the prurient fiction of the Steele dossier. Diversionary tactics, I suppose.And oh, by the way, how come the FBI has not breathed a word about Thomas Matthew Crooks who shot Trump on the campaign trail exactly a year ago on July 13th, and whose assassin bullet missed Trump’s cranium by millimeters? It’s hard to believe that he was an innocent lone wolf. Who was funding him? I contend it was the Deep State. John Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby all come to mind. So do Robert Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan. The sad fact of the matter is that, despite a promising start, Trump now appears to be bogged down in distractions like the Nobel Peace Prize (dear Norwegians, just give it to him and let’s just move on. After all, you gave it to warmongers Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, Theodore Roosevelt, Barack Obama. Trump is almost in the same illustrious club.)The U-turns on tariffs and trade show that Trump is beginning to see the reality that he cannot wish away de-industrialization, as King Canute memorably learned when he ordered the waves to cease and desist. His goal of bringing back manufacturing to the US is laudable, but it is not clear if that will happen in more than a token manner. The reality of being held hostage by China’s supply chain is also dawning on him. 30 years of fecklessness in allowing China to run riot are now coming home to roost.Dedollarization is happening as well. While I don’t believe certain doomsday scenarios about precipitate American decline, recession and collapse, it is possible the US will become less of a solitary colossus throwing its weight around. It is this prospect of multi polarity, and the determined pursuit of national interests that India should focus on. The Deep State is inscrutable, and it apparently now has Donald Trump in thrall to itself.1050 words, 8 Jul 2025 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-west-asia-hostilities-will-resume-again-only-question-is-when-13903341.html West Asia is again on the boil. Well, to be precise, it has been on the boil for a very long time, but we have the additional spectacle of the Iran-Israel war. Despite the ceasefire, which I hope does hold, there is a lot here that should concern all of us based on the geopolitical and geo-economic fallout.There are at least three issues of interest: the geopolitics, the war tactics, and the impact on the rest of the world. GeopoliticsIt would be fair to say that much of the turmoil in the region dates back to British (and to a lesser extent French) meddling in the 20th century, for instance the Sykes-Picot Act, or the antics of TE Lawrence. Britain’s broader actions—contradictory promises (Balfour), repressive mandates, oil-driven interference, and botched withdrawals—sowed division, resentment, and conflict that shaped the region’s 20th-century chaos. Many of these issues, like sectarianism in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, persist today.The nations Britain created with arbitrary lines marked on a map made no sense because they ignored ethnic, tribal, and religious realities, sowing seeds for future conflicts. Indians know all about this: the same sort of random map-making in the Indian subcontinent led to extraordinary misery (the Radcliffe Line, created in just five weeks, created East and West Pakistan with little attention paid to ground realities, using outdated maps and census data).The British Deep State (let us call it Whitehall for short) has lost much of its clout, but it has been leading the American Deep State by the nose in what I referred to as a “master-blaster” relationship. And the latter has a rather clear SoP: there needs to be constant wars to feed the Military Industrial Complex, and so they will arrange for wars, which will lead to a complex money-laundering operation, with petrodollars being whitewashed through the IMF etc and ending up in the coffers of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, and friends. It is notable that one of President Trump’s main claims to fame in his first Presidency was that he scrupulously avoided going to war, in sharp contrast with his predecessors over the last several decades, all of whom had started or indulged in one war or the other. It appears that this time, though, the US Deep State has managed to co-opt Trump into its warmaking agenda, which, incidentally does not disqualify him for a Nobel Peace Prize: see Kissinger or Obama.What has happened in this 12-day war is that it became a stalemate, for all practical purposes. Neither Israel nor Iran can fully defeat the other, as neither has the resources to continue. A good metaphor is a boxing match, where evenly matched pugilists are both exhausted, covered and blinded with blood, and can hardly stand on their feet. The referee calling a halt is a blessing for both of them.Iran has, for years, shouted hair-raising slogans about obliterating Israel, although it is not clear how much of this was rhetoric, considering Uncle Sam’s support for the latter makes the latter quite powerful. This sloganeering was supplemented by proxy allies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, all of whom have been capable of mischief. Plus there is the nuclear bomb.Israel set out to tame Iran on all these fronts. Their goals were to deprecate, if not destroy, Iran’s nuclear capability, defang the proxies, and impose a regime-change on the country. Let us remember the Stuxnet incident of 2010 when a computer virus was introduced into the Iranian centrifuges that are used for uranium enrichment, causing many of them to disintegrate. The assaults on Nataz, Fordow and Ispahan (much like Israel’s raid on Iraq’s Osiraq reactor long ago) were intended to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program altogether.With the US’ help, it appears as though there has been serious damage to Iran’s weapons capabilities, although there are rumors that 400 kg of highly enriched uranium was smuggled out just before the bunker-buster strikes via B-2 bombers on the fortified, underground sites. Among Iranian proxies or force-multipliers, its so-called Axis of Resistance, Hamas has been severely degraded, with top commanders eliminated (notably Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh) and its tunnel network in Gaza largely inoperable. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nazrallah and several key aides have been targeted and killed. The Houthis have escaped relatively unscathed, although the Americans were bombing them.On the other hand, it may not be possible to effect regime change in Iran. There seems to be a standard playbook of so-called ‘Color Revolutions’, wherein a ruler is replaced by someone close to the West through what is portrayed as a “popular uprising”. The Ukraine Maidan Revolution that placed Zelenksy in power, the Bangladeshi coup that brought Yunus to power, and the “Velvet Revolution” are examples.But one of the earliest examples was the CIA/MI6 coup in Iran that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and brought Shah Reza Pahlavi back to monarchical power. And the reason: Mossadegh had nationalized the Iranian oil industry, and freed it from the clutches of British Petroleum. The 1979 coup by the mullahs succeeded because the Shah was unpopular by then. Iranians, despite widespread opposition to Khameini, probably don’t want the Shah dynasty back, or for that matter someone else chosen to rule them by outsiders.There was also a fairly strange set of events: just as it is said the Iranians were allowed to spirit their uranium away, the Iranians seem to have given notice of their attacks on US bases in Qatar etc. (allowing the US to move their aircraft and personnel), and, strangest of all, a social media post by Trump that appeared to approve sanctions-free Iranian supply of oil to China!Thus there are some pantomime/shadow-boxing elements to the war as well, and some choreography that is baffling to the impartial observer. Geopolitics is a complex dance.War tacticsThe Israeli assault on Iran started with shock and awe. In the first phase, There was a massive aerial bombing campaign, including on Natanz. But more interestingly, there was a Mossad operation that had smuggled kamikaze drones into a covert base near Teheran, and they, as well as anti-tank missiles degraded Iranian air defenses. Mossad also enabled successful decapitation strikes, with several top commanders and nuclear scientists assassinated.This phase was a big win for Israel, and reminded one of the continuing importance of human intelligence in a technological age. Patiently locating and mapping enemy commanders’ movements, managing supply chains and using psychological tactics were reminiscent of how Mossad was able to introduce the Stuxnet worm, and use pagers as remote explosive devices. In the second phase, the two were more evenly matched. Israel’s Iron Dome was unable to deal with sustained barrages of Iranian missiles, as no anti-missile system can be more than 90% effective. Both began to suffer from depleted stocks of arms and ammunition. Thus the metaphor of two grievously wounded boxers struggling to stay on their feet in the ring. It took the bunker-busting US B-2 bombers in the third phase to penetrate deep underground to the centrifuges, but there is still the possibility that Iran managed to ship out its fissile material.We are now in a fourth phase: both parties are preparing for the next round of kinetic warfare.The lessons here were once again the remarkable rise of UCAVs or drones as weapons of war, and the continued usage of high-quality human intelligence. It is rumored that Israeli agents had penetrated to high levels in the Iranian military hierarchy, and there was allegedly a high-level mole who was spirited away safely out of Iran.Both of these are important takeaways for India. The success of India’s decoy drones in the suppression of Pakistani air defenses will be hard to repeat; the Ukrainian drone strike against Russia’s strategic TU-44 and other strategic bombers, which were sitting ducks on the ground, shows us what drones can do: India has to substantially advance its drone capability. India’s counterintelligence and human intelligence suffered grievous blows when various personalities, including a Prime Minister, a Vice President, and the head of RA&W all turned hostile, with the result that India’s covert presence in Pakistan will have to painfully recreated again. Perhaps India also does not have a policy of decapitation strikes. Should it?Impact on the rest of the world, especially IndiaIn general terms, it’s hard to declare an outright non-loser in this war, except possibly China, because it is the one player that seems to be quite unaffected: its saber-rattling on Taiwan continues unabated. Russia lost, because it had been viewed as being an ally of Iran; it was unable to do much, enmeshed as it is in the Ukraine mess. Israel and Iran both came out, in the end, looking weakened, as neither could deliver a fatal blow.The US got kudos for the B-2 bombers and the bunker-busters, but it is not entirely clear if there was some kind of ‘understanding’ which meant that Iran is still not that far away from being able to build its nuclear bomb. Indians will remember how President Reagan winked at Pakistan’s efforts to nuclearize with Chinese help, and issued certificates of innocence.Pakistan in particular, and the Islamic Ummah in general, took a beating. Instead of expressing Islamic solidarity with Iran, it turns out Pakistan was quite likely opening up its air bases for possible US strikes on Iran. That would explain why Indian strikes on Pakistan’s Nur Khan air base alarmed the Americans, who may have been bulking up their presence there partly as a way of opening a new front against Iran.None of the other Islamic powers, with the possible exception of Turkey, paid more t

A version of this essay was published by Deccan Herald at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/let-s-make-our-own-planes-3607351June 23rd was a very sad anniversary: it was exactly 40 years ago that Air India Kanishka, Flight AI 182 (Montreal-London-Delhi), a Boeing 747, was blown up in the sky off Ireland, killing all 329 on board. There has never been closure, because the Canadian government stonewalled the investigation into how alleged Khalistani terrorists on their soil perpetrated one of the worst airline disasters in history.The black box and cockpit voice recorder were recovered, and confirmed a loud explosion and sudden loss of communications and an explosive decompression, consistent with a bomb in baggage. Separately, two baggage handlers at Narita were killed when another bomb linked to the same terror group exploded on the ground on flight AI 301 on the Toronto-Tokyo-Bangkok-Delhi route.On June 12th, 2025, the as-yet unsolved crash-landing of AI 171 (Ahmedabad-London) killed all but one of 242 on board, and at least 35 people on the ground, as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner failed just after take-off. The black box has been recovered, and India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau was able to decode it. The detailed results will take another couple of weeks. Fortunately, the black box didn’t have to be sent to the US because they would have an incentive to exonerate Boeing.Indeed there is already a media narrative of a) incompetence of the Indian pilots, b) poor maintenance by Air India. While there have been previous complaints about broken seats and entertainment systems, there was a clear objective to limit reputational damage to already beleaguered Boeing. Whistleblower reports have long suggested shoddy manufacturing practices especially on jets earmarked for delivery overseas.Boeing appears to be an engineering-driven company that was ruined as the focus shifted to bean-counting and finance, ever since they took over McDonnell Douglas in 1997, but paradoxically allowed the latter’s cost-cutting managers to dominate. Instead of innovating, they now tend to recycle old designs. A 2022 Netflix documentary, “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing”, is scathing in its accusations.India is building the infrastructure for significant growth in air travel, to the extent that the hostile Financial Times mocked it with a story titled “Air India crash tests Narendra Modi’s ambition to get his country flying”, blaming Air India and the airline regulator (but not Boeing). All this has implications for India, considering that Air India ordered 220 Boeing aircraft and another 350 from Airbus, while Indigo ordered 500 Airbus planes. That’s many billions of dollars. The obvious question is: why isn’t India making these commercial aircraft? Surely aerospace is a growth sector for India? Yes, there will be offset-based sub-assembly manufacturing, and maintenance operations, but why not India’s own passenger aircraft?Brazil’s Embraer, Russia’s UAC and China’s COMAC are eyeing the cosy Airbus-Boeing duopoly. Strategic autonomy suggests India should also strive for its own design.There are military reasons too. Warfare is changing, and drones and missiles are becoming more important, though fighter aircraft remain critical. India is developing the Tejas and the newly-approved AMCA, but there is the salutary tale of the indigenous HF-24 Marut, phased out because of underpowered engines, inadequate infrastructure, and poor coordination between HAL, the IAF, and the government; also no private sector involvement and the lure of imports.India has to build its own fighter jets, and especially jet engines like Kaveri: India is last in line for foreign engine-makers, and anyway, they keep the kill switches. India may be able to sell fighter jets to many countries, along with the battle-tested BrahMos, Lakshya and Akashteer, so spending on them is an investment with likely returns.There is still the siren-song of the US F-35, the Russian Su-57, and so on. There is, ironically, a British-owned F-35B sitting, forlorn, in the rain, on the tarmac at Trivandrum airport since June 15th. It has a) fuel issues, b) hydraulic problems with STOL, c) other problems. This $100+-million jet may end up having to be hauled back in a big transport plane, unable to take off on its own. Local trolls advertised it on OLX for a mere $4 million for scrap.British specialists were flown in, but couldn’t fix it. They await Americans now. Obviously, even the closest allies do not get full technology transfer.Let us also remember that the first F-35 built under license by Mitsubishi in Japan ended up in the Pacific Ocean. The pilot, who died, was blamed for ‘spatial disorientation’, not Lockheed Martin. The black box was damaged, so the story ends there.Suffice to say that in both civil and military aircraft it is time for India to get its act together.775 words, 29 June 2025The AI-generated podcast based on this essay is here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

The massive attack by Ukrainian forces on very far off Russian airbases using lots of stealth and amazing subterfuge is destined to be a classic military operation. There are good reasons to believe this was not done by Ukraine on its own, and possibly not even by major European powers such as France (via Napoleon) and Germany (via Hitler), both of which have been humbled by Russia in the past, or even Sweden. The needle of suspicion falls on Britain, as well as the US Deep State (as distinct from President Trump, who has been trying to get this war over and done with). Cui bono? It’s only NATO and the MIC that need war and permanent war.A wounded Russia will react and harshly. What might they use? Surely their hypersonic Oreshnik missiles that basically cannot be defended against. And given this is a Pearl Harbor moment for Russia, they could well argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki set a precedent. We might be in for World War III, just like the previous two were both European wars as well, which entangled the rest of the worldAs for India, it is double jeopardy, as World War III is not in India’s interests, nor is the chance that China is the entity that might benefit from an American focus shifting from the Indo-Pacific to the European theater. Besides, it is deeply worrying that an operation of this scale was pulled off in Russia, which has its own internal fifth columns. India has this is spades: those who are in India, and who have a declared attitude of animosity towards the Indian nation. Human intelligence needs to be tightened (remember the large number of spies, honey-trapped soldiers, social media influencers etc. that came out of the woodwork in the wake of Pahalgam and Operation Sindoor).These are scary questions. Among them is how one can deal with drone swarms, possibly using Electro Magnetic Pulses (though that has secondary problems). Overall, these are frightening times. 4 June 2025AI-generated podcast based on this podcast, from notebookLM.google.com: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

A version of this essay was published by the Deccan Herald at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/op-sindoor-how-we-won-and-lost-3566189There are no clear wins in wars these days, especially when terrorizing populations, or nuclear blackmail, is the goal. Pakistan’s war manual may well be The Quranic Concept of War (1979) by Brigadier S K Malik, with its pithy statement: “Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end itself… Terror is not a means of imposing a decision on the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose on him.” Notably, this book has a forward from General Zia-ul-Haq, their then President.In War From the Ground Up (2012), Emile Simpson, a former British Army officer, argues that modern wars often lack binary outcomes due to their political and informational complexity. Thus you could both win and lose a war, and that’s what Operation Sindoor’s outcome is.On the plus side, India won a clear military victory. India leveraged its integrated air defense, long-range missiles, global positioning satellites and drone decoy technology to achieve aerial dominance. This enabled India to make pinpoint strikes, unchallenged, first on terrorist enclaves, and then on Pakistani military sites, including, it is said, nuclear storage silos.India surprised most observers, because it was not only through expensive imported fighter jets that it deprecated Pakistan’s offensive capabilities, but also indigenous drones, loitering munitions and cruise missiles. India needs strategic autonomy, because foreign suppliers, and supply chains, are not dependable. They keep the kill switches, and can turn off the spigot.India may well have ushered in a step-change in modern warfare itself, an age where drones and missiles tilt the balance rather than fighter jets, although the latter continue to remain key. Maybe it is sufficient to have slightly less advanced jets like the Tejas and the upcoming AMCA rather than procuring top-end F-35s, Su-57s etc. But there is a caveat: fighter jet engines. India must get its Kaveri engine working, for self-reliance.India also established strategic red lines: terrorist attacks will henceforth invite disproportionate and military retaliation because there is a military-terrorist nexus, with Pakistani soldiers cosplaying as terrorists, exchanging uniforms for long shirts, loose pants and beards, as a way of sub-critical harassment with plausible deniability.Furthermore, Pakistan’s nuclear threat has been defanged. India’s ability to hit their nuclear command center and two of the entrances to their storage facility in the Kirana Hills, suggest that their nuclear assets, if any, are disabled. Besides, there are rumors that warheads are not in Pakistani hands, but American or Chinese. That stands to reason, because otherwise Pakistan would likely have proliferated them to Iran, Turkey and non-state actors such as Hamas.So what are the negatives? The biggest is that this skirmish has not put even a dent in Pakistan’s use of terrorism as state policy. Indeed, the next encounter with terrorists has already taken place in Kishtwar on May 22nd, exactly one month after Pahalgam, with one Indian soldier killed. Terrorism and war with India continue to be the raison d’etre of the Pakistani state.India comprehensively lost the narrative war. Operation Sindoor is portrayed in the Western media on Pakistan’s terms (including the usual bogey of ‘nuclear war’), and their claims of shooting down 5-6 Indian jets are accepted as the truth. Many Pakistanis are embedded in Western media outlets, and that is not accidental. As they say, you can wake up a sleeping person, but not someone who is pretending to be asleep.In that sense, the all-party delegation visiting various capitals is an exercise in futility, because the West is not interested in India becoming a peer-level competitor: the G2 with China is bad enough, who wants a G3 with India as well? Also, just as the EAM told Europe that their (Ukraine) problem is a European problem, the West sees India’s problems as not theirs.Pakistan’s ability to internationalize the issue is a failure for India’s stance that Kashmir is a bilateral issue. Fortunately, nobody actually cares, including the UN or its Security Council.A major failure for India was that it could have, but did not, capture any territory, which would have been a devastating blow to Pakistan’s amour propre, and would have made “Field Marshal” Munir a laughing stock. India errs on the side of caution, and a large-scale intrusion does have problems with hostile civilians and stretched supply lines.But surely the Haji Pir Pass could have been recaptured: it was needlessly given away in Tashkent in 1966. It is a major route of infiltration for terrorists, its commanding heights dominate Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and it cuts the Uri-Poonch distance from 282km to 56km.Alas, a resounding military victory has been morphed into a stalemate.795 words, May 27, 2025AI-generated podcast from notebookLM.google.com: Now AI-generated podcast in Malayalam from the same: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-india-fights-alone-narrative-wars-western-gaslighting-and-a-missed-opportunity-13891339.htmlFrom the 1st of May until the 20th I was traveling in the US, and thus had to depend on western media (mostly Twitter/X) for news about Operation Sindoor and the aftermath. It was self-evident that there was no point in reading things like the NYTimes, Wapo, the Economist, etc. because one look at their headlines confirmed that they were “manufacturing consent”.Soft PowerGiven the difference in X posts that I read in the US and those in India, I think the algorithms were deprecating posts for me in ways that are hard to detect. In other words, there is a narrative war where India has no say, but lots at stake. India’s soft power is seriously wanting. Joseph Nye, the academic who popularized that phrase, passed away this week: following in his footsteps, it behooves India to make a concerted attempt to improve its story-telling.It faces an uphill battle, because Western, especially American, media has shown an ability to gaslight at scale in three major stories in the recent past: the COVID panic, the “Trump-is-a-Russian-stooge” meme, and the “Biden is mentally sharp as a tack” story. They are good at it, have no love lost for India, and so India needs a long-term plan to get its own propaganda story out, for instance developing an Al-Jazeera-style global footprint or an X-style social medium.The entire Western narrative, for self-serving purposes, continues to be against India, for good reason: they do not wish to see India grow into a peer-level competitor at the G3 level. In this, both China and the West are of one mind, and it shows. Besides, the West has every incentive to try to block India from becoming a major arms exporter: they would prefer India to continue to be one of the biggest importers, preferably from them.Narrative warfare is a Western specialty, as I said in Information Warfare, Narrative-Building: That Kind of Warfare. In addition to kinetic warfare, India needs to up its game here too. Narratives have real-life consequences.The Pakistanis have been quite successful in their own narratives, riding on Western media: here is an example from the Nikkei (which owns the Financial Times) from a Pakistani journalist. This is typical of the stories created by Pakistanis and amplified by western media: basically that India took a major hit, with five or six high-end aircraft downed by Pakistani/Chinese weaponry. The story was repeated so many times that it essentially became the Truth.A step change in aerial warfareMy personal belief is that India won a victory on the ground and in the air, humiliating Pakistan, attacking it at will and exposing its Chinese armaments as below-par. Some thoughtful neutral experts support this view: See Calibrated Force and the Future of Indian Deterrence. India also demonstrated surprising competence in the new age of electronics-based warfare. It may no longer be expensive fighter jets (and by extension, aircraft carriers) that tilt the balance, but missiles, drones and integrated air defense.This must be emphasized. There are periodic step-functions in warfare that render earlier, victorious technologies/processes less valuable: this is similar to disruptive innovation, where the ‘insurgent’ firm nullifies the apparent advantages of the ‘incumbent’ firm. Often that means a point of inflection. An example is the arrival of the longbow in medieval times that made hitherto unstoppable heavy cavalry stumble. Another is the arrival of air power itself.Today there may be another point of inflection. Experts have suggested that warfare going forward will be software-driven, including drone swarms that can autonomously reshape their formations (reminiscent of the murmurations of flocks of starlings). Presumably, there will be plenty of predictive AI built in as well. Given India’s poor track record in software products, it was generally assumed that India would not do so well in such a new environment.In reality, there appears to have been a clever integration of indigenous and imported technology to create an “iron dome” of sorts against Pakistan’s Chinese missiles, of which an advanced variant, PL-15, was apparently shot down intact.More interestingly, it appears that Lakshya and Banshee drones were programmed to masquerade as Rafales, Sukhois, etc. by emitting their radar signals, thus attracting enemy fire towards themselves. This might explain the claims of five or six Indian aircraft shot down by Pakistan, whereas in reality they may have simply shot down the phantom, mimic dronesThe implications are large: in effect, India was able to attack Pakistan at will: video evidence shows significant damage to terrorist sites in the first round, and to military sites in the second round, including to key Pakistani air bases, as well as, it is said, the entrance tunnel to the nuclear storage facilities in the Kirana Hills. Indian air dominance appears to have forced the Pakistanis to beg for US support to suggest a cessation of hostilities.This skirmish was proof in the heat of battle for India’s indigenous weapons, especially the BrahMos (although of course that is a joint venture with Russia). It may result in a number of serious queries from prospective customers especially in Southeast Asia, who will be interested in battlefield performance against Chinese missiles and aircraft. This would be a win for India’s arms industry.Conversely, there is a singular sore spot: fighter jets. For a variety of reasons, most especially the fact that the Kaveri engine has not been allowed to complete its testing and development phase, India is still dependent on others for advanced fighters. And this is just fine as far as they are concerned, because the Americans want to sell F-35s, the French want to sell more Rafales, and the Russians want to sell Su-57s.Here’s a twitter comment by a military historian who suggests that India’s fighter jets are inadequate. He deleted his further comment that indigenization is fine as industrial policy, but it doesn’t work for advanced weaponry. This is a typically sniffy attitude towards India, which is grist to the mill for the Chandigarh Lobby’s successful efforts to trash local weapons and gain lucrative middleman deals for foreign weapons.Strategic Dilemma: To push on or notThere is also a strategic dilemma. India has an unfortunate habit of wasting its soldiers’ hard-won victories at the negotiating table due to bad political calculations. The epitome of this is of course, Indira Gandhi’s 1971 give-away of 93,000 Pakistani PoWs in exchange for essentially… nothing. There is some reason to wonder if something similar happened in 2025 as well. A tactical victory was possibly converted into a stalemate, and the old era of hyphenation and the nuclear bogey has returned.What we saw in 2025 was that the Pakistanis were taken by surprise, and India had a massive advantage. But now that cat is out of the bag, Pakistanis and Chinese will regroup and figure out corrective tactics. Thus India has, to use an American expression, “shot its wad”, and the element of surprise is gone forever.The end game for India is the dissolution of Pakistan into four or five statelets, which, one hopes, will then concentrate on Pakistani Punjab as the root of all their troubles. In that case, they will keep each other occupied, and India can live in peace without regular terrorist attacks. Of course, that may be a pipe-dream, given the Ghazwa-e-Hind formula many entertain, but the collapse of the Pakistani state is anyway desirable for India.Should India have continued its offensive? Forget the murky issue of the nuclear assets in Sargodha. Should India have moved the Line of Control forward into some areas, perhaps into Gilgit-Baltistan (with Sharda Peeth and the Kishenganga) and up to the Jhelum River in Pak-occupied Jammu and Kashmir? The problem though, is that once you start moving past the border posts, you have hostile civilians to contend with, and your supply lines start getting stretched.Even though it is tragic to let go of an opportunity to thrash an enemy that’s on the back foot, and Pakistan will inevitably use the truce to rearm itself and come back ever stronger (the Treaty of Hudaybiyah is not a meme in the Islamic world for nothing), it is not clear to me what India could have done to militarily make the LOC irrelevant and make Pakistan implode, especially in the context of American pushback.The role of the USWhy was there pressure from President Trump? One of the things I observed during my US stay is the total absence of DOGE and Elon Musk from the headlines after Trump’s 100 days, very contrary to their ubiquity early on. Similarly, the security implications of Trump’s recent embrace of Syria’s President Al-Sharaa contradicts Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s views on Syria as evidenced by her tweets. Further, there are U-turns on tariffs.This means Trump is being mercurial as ever. Furthermore, there might be something to the idea that his family’s embrace of crypto may have endeared Pakistan – which is making noises about supporting crypto at scale – to him. All this is red-pilling many about Trump. Indeed, he may be allowing short-term, commercial considerations to drive policy, which may return to haunt the US: that is exactly what Clinton, Bush, Obama et al did with respect to China.On the other hand, there are longer-term considerations, too. Pakistan is essentially a Potemkin nation, which has no particular reason to exist, other than it is being propped up. Initially, it was a British project for the Russian Great Game; then it was taken over by the US Deep State in order to fend off the Soviet Union. Pakistan was a “major non-NATO ally” (MNNA) according to Obama if I remember right, and earlier it was a member of CENTO and SEATO

Please note: I wrote this on April 28th, and then was traveling abroad for the last few weeks, so I had no opportunity to post this until now, sorry about that: but nothing I have said here has been rendered wrong by Operation Sindoor and the near-war that happened after I wrote this. Deccan Herald ran a slightly edited version as my regular column on May 4th at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/on-pahalgam-imperial-fortresses-and-kashmir-s-settler-colonialism-3523731 With good reason, India has focused on Pakistan as the culprit behind the Pahalgam atrocity. It is telling that their army chief declared to Pakistanis that Hindus and Muslims are two different nations and that Kashmir is Pakistan’s jugular vein. He implied that Pakistan is the ideal Islamic state as in Venkat Dhulipala’s “Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India”. This could have been a signal to the terrorists to create maximum offence while massacring Hindus.Given Kargil, IC 814, Bombay 26/11, Uri, Pulwama, and now Pahalgam, India is justified in cutting ties to Pakistan, including trade, sports, the cringe Attari circus, even diplomatic relations. India did once mass its forces at the Line of Control in Operation Parakram, but honoring the Shimla Agreement, did not cross. Now that Pakistan has canceled the Agreement, there is no legal reason for restraint, especially since the nuclear bogey is no longer credible.But there is more. The Pakistani defense minister said that his country had been doing the dirty work for the US and the West for decades. Maybe he meant the Afghan war against the Soviets and post-9/11 somersaults by Pakistan. But that’s only scratching the surface.Britain explicitly created Pakistan as a Great Game weapon against Russia/Soviet Union, and when that collapsed, against india. Britain has been using Pakistan as an “imperial fortress”, as I pointed out in “Britain’s outsized, malign role in global chaos”. Whitehall tilts strongly towards Pakistani interests, even in the case of widespread gang-rapes of minor white girls, not to mention their antics against Hindus in Leicester.Official mouthpiece BBC never speaks of Pakistani terrorists, only ‘gunmen’; it’s always “Indian-controlled Kashmir”; and an extraordinary headline recently said: “Pakistan suspends visas for Indians after deadly Kashmir attack on tourists”. These are not accidents.Britain and the US Deep State (eg. Madeleine Albright and other Atlanticists) worry about the waning influence of Europe (or “northwest Asia” as I wrote in “The End of the European Century”). Naturally, incumbent powers go to war with a rising power (Thucydides Trap: Graham Allison's thesis). This has been the rationale for containing Russia, now it is being turned to Asia. China is rather inscrutable and impregnable, so they attack India, which is easier prey.Then there is the Otherization of Hindus and thus Indians. Even as staunch an atheist as Richard Dawkins (“The Blind Watchmaker”) admits Judeo-Christian cultural biases. Only Christopher Hitchens among modern atheists was self-reflective enough to avoid this. Abrahamics would like to make us disappear, and so engendered great famines in India (“Late Victorian Holocausts”). Now this is reprising through climatism (at an Alexandra Ocasio Cortez rally there was a woman earnestly saying “we have to eat babies” to reduce emissions). Covid was possibly another attempt at depopulating ‘deplorables’, that is black and brown people.Let’s not forget China, also unhappy about India’s possible economic rise; so it dutifully regurgitated “all-weather” support for Pakistan. They have used Pakistan to keep India down, as a force multiplier for violence and trouble. Then China can market itself as a safe investment destination compared to a dangerous India where FDI may be risky. I suspect this is part of their siren-song to big firms (eg. Apple) now.Finally, and most importantly, there is the settler-colonial complex of Muslim Kashmiris. They trot out South Africa, other European conquests and Gaza as examples of colonialists violating natives’ rights and imply the same in Kashmir. The bitter irony of course is that it is the Muslims who are the colonialists wiping out Kashmir’s indigenous Hindus who have a 5000 year history there. They have turned the logic on its head: see the Harvard Law Review paper “From Domicile to Dominion, India’s Settler Colonial Agenda in Kashmir”.There have been seven tragic exoduses of Hindus from Kashmir: 1. 1389–1413 (Sultan Sikandar Shah), 2. 1505–1514 (Fateh Shah II), 3. 16th–17th Century (Timurid Period), 4. 1752–1819 (Durrani Rule), 5. 1931 (Anti-Dogra Riots), 6. 1986 (Anantnag Riots), 7. 1989–1990 (Militancy-Driven Exodus). Most Hindu Kashmiris now rot in refugee camps.I wrote long ago in “India, the Kashmiri colony” about Muslim Kashmiris extracting tribute from the Indian/Hindu taxpayer. Worse, there is evidence emerging that local overground workers (eg. mule handlers) arranged the logistics for the Pahalgam massacre. Acts of terror need local support, possibly including from local politicians (a former CM referred to terrorists as “the boys with guns from the mountains”).Yes, it’s good to punish Pakistan (eg. Indus Water Treaty), but terror will persist until Muslim Kashmiris realize their future lies with rising, multi-religious India, not jihadi failed-state Pakistan; and the Deep State desists from further mischief.798 words, Apr 28, 2025 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/movies/column/what-made-shaji-n-karun-a-master-film-maker/20250429.htmJust last week, I read in the local Trivandrum papers about Shaji N Karun receiving an award in the name of J C Daniel, an early pioneer in Malayalam films. That’s when I realized that the master film-maker had named his house ‘Piravi’ in memory of his extraordinary directorial debut in 1988. It brought back a flood of memories of that film, whose title means ‘birth’, but whose theme was death and loss.Now comes the news of his own death, aged 73, from cancer. Om shanti, Godspeed, Shaji, as you join the Great White Whirligig in the Sky!I met the director twice: once, about fifty years ago, when we both were volunteers for a local science fair, and he was a student at the Film and Television Institute in Pune; and then in 1988 or 1989, when he spoke at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where ‘Piravi’ was featured. The film had won the Cannes Camera d’Or-Mention d’Honneur, among many other prizes, including at Locarno, Edinburgh and so on: possibly more than any other Indian film.What impressed me about his talk was his humility and reticence: even though he was an acclaimed cinematographer and ‘Piravi’ was received very well, he was quiet, even shy. He explained his use of the blue tints in the film: it is the color of apasmaram, he said, using the Malayalam/Sanskrit word for madness, which the father of the ‘disappeared’ youth in the film falls into.Even though he made several other films, and he was the cinematographer who shot most of the works of legendary Malayalam film-maker G Aravindan, it is ‘Piravi’ that marked the zenith of his career. I can say without hesitation that it is stunningly powerful; as an art-film fan, I have seen hundreds of superb, even outstanding films, but this one, alone, spoke to me. I wept seeing it, tears streaming down my cheeks. No other film has ever affected me so much.For a Malayalam speaker and one who had seen the Emergency, it was a viscerally powerful experience, especially because it was based on the real-life story of Rajan, a ‘disappeared’ engineering student. As I wrote some years ago in https://www.rediff.com/news/column/emergency-why-rajans-story-resonates-with-me/20150625.htm I could easily have been another Rajan, another number.Rajan’s character is never seen in the film, except as a child; his father, played by octogenarian Premji, fills the screen with his presence, his anguish, at the loss of his only son born late in his life. And in real life, the father, Professor Eachara Warrier, who was one of my heroes, https://www.rediff.com/news/2006/apr/24rajeev.htm spent the rest of his life demanding justice from the uncaring State.The film’s minimalist dialogue and focus on human despair, grief, and the struggle against systemic injustice resonate universally, transcending cultural boundaries. Its subtle yet poignant exploration of loss makes it relatable to global audiences.Apart from the universal message of grief, there is also the story of the father-son relationship. I was strongly affected by passages from the film where you realize how much the predatory State took from the father, as per the Hindu tradition. I remembered my father 10,000 miles away in India, who too had no son to help him.The film begins with an invocation from the Kaushitaki Upanishad; a dying man bequeaths his life to his son. The son accepts each of his gifts."My speech in you I would place". "Your speech in me I take.""My sight in you I would place." "Your sight in me I take.""My mind in you I would place." "Your mind in me I take.""My deeds in you I would place." "Your deeds in me I take.""My vital breath in you I would place". "Your vital breath in me I take.""May glory, luster and fame delight in you." "Heaven and desires may you obtain."And from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, "Whatever wrong has been done by him, his son frees him from it all... By his son, a father stands firm in this world."Personally for me, I think the film was a catalyst in my decision to return to India, specifically back to Kerala. Another Indian friend (I think he was a Telugu) who saw it with me in San Francisco said, “I’m so tempted to chuck it all and go live in a Kerala village”.Apart from the overwhelming sense of loss, the film is remarkable from two points of view: visual storytelling and innovative techniques.The muted lighting, traditional architecture, and atmospheric elements like rain mirror the characters’ emotional turmoil. The film’s stillness and sparse dialogue amplifies the actors’ expressive performances, particularly their eyes, conveying deep emotion. The monsoon rain is a palpable presence with the sense of anticipation as we wait for its arrival, as the father waits for his son every day at the bus-stop till the last bus; heart-breakingly, we in the audience know he will never return. And then later, when the father falls in the rain, the ferryman’s dilemma: if he helps him up, his boat will drift away. The ferryman’s compassion prevails and he rushes to help.The film’s use of weather, sound (e.g., the bubbling of water evoking anxiety), the simple everyday beauty of Kerala village life, and deliberate pacing created a meditative yet intense atmosphere. The use of color to invoke emotion (as in traditional ragas) is another technical innovation.With ‘Piravi’, Shaji N Karun joined the select group of great masters of film: film as witness, sakshi, film as literature. Malayalam once upon a time used to produce such films. Today it is only mindless violence, politics, and grotesque humor: the films have no soul, although they are technically quite good. With Shaji’s passing, and earlier with his mentor Aravindan’s untimely death, an era is coming to an end.976 words, Apr 29, 2025 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

* Sectors negatively affected. Pharma with $12.72 billion will be affected, textiles $4.3 billion, agri products $2.58 billion, jewelry $11.88 billion, autocomponents $2 billon may face 26%+auto specific 25%, chemicals $5.7 billion. Steel $475 million, with 26%+steel specific 25%, footwear $456 million* Sectors positively affected (supply chain attraction): electronics and telecom $14.39 billion will benefit for 54% on china, engineering goods like turbines $7.1 billion because of china and vietnam, petroleum and minerals $3.33 billion, already negative tariffs* Pharma has a specific carve out, and both apparel and footwear companies are struggling.Here’s the notebookLM.google.com AI-generated podcast based on this audio. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe