Or how to make Kolkata (Calcutta) the centre of Asia again. An AI-modified version of a painting by Sheikh Muhammad Amir; India; ca. 1840; Opaque watercolor on burnished paper. Soon after independence in 1965, Singapore's founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew used Calcutta (Kolkata) as a benchmark, aiming for Singapore to eventually exceed the standard of the bustling, established city. While he admired its historic role, his later, often-quoted sentiment was that he intended to make Singapore...

A new age of competition demands new rules.(AI generated image.) US Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau’s recent statement at the Raisina Dialogue in Delhi —“We won’t repeat the China mistake with India”—signals that Washington views its past openness to China as a strategic error, one it intends to avoid with New Delhi by imposing stricter reciprocity, technology safeguards, and market protections in any deepening partnership. This shifts the terms under which India can leverage US...

Under President Donald Trump, the US is determined to reverse the growing global opinion about its decline. In the span of nine weeks between January and February 2026, the United States seized a foreign head of state from his own capital, escalated a bombing campaign against one of the world's most militarized states, and watched its president declare America was "reasserting power." The word choice was telling. You do not reassert what you securely possess. The flurry of military action, in...