The Indian budget every year has always been an eagerly awaited event. For many decades, the best minds in economics, finance, tax, business and industry throng the media house to analyze the provisions shared by the Financial Minister.
Sometimes major events completely disconnected may be data points for the plans of the different powers around the world. The challenge is to discern what purpose they serve? More critically, what are we moving towards?
When the US Ambassador threatened India's "Strategic Autonomy" policy over India's friendship with Russia - much more than meets the eye was at stake. Let us unpack how the Ukraine war has fundamentally changed the US and the world. And why are we here anyway?
Alcatraz, the legendary prison in California, remains etched in every person’s mind who has seen it once. Only 3 people ever escaped that place. No one knows if they ever made it to the other side of the bay.. on the shore. The guards believed that they drowned, while the rest of the prisoners wanted to believe that they had reached the shore. There was a certain romanticism in it. Here is an interesting NPR program with interviews with two different people who had spent time in that prison – one an inmate and other a guard.
Inmate is Robert Schibline, who was caught robbing banks while on shore leave from the Navy — and used the aircraft carrier on which he was stationed as a getaway vehicle. The guard is Jim Albright, who escorted the last inmate out of the prison on March 21, 1963.
“Well, the reputation of Alcatraz went far and wide, even to us convicts,” Schibline says. “I had a bit of a trepidation when I got off the bus, and seeing that thing sitting on the island, out in the bay, shrouded by fog, I thought, ‘Oh boy, here I go again, into the world unknown!'”
Albright was also nervous on his first day on “The Rock.”
“I remember I was only 24 when I started there, and I had no previous experience,” he says. “So it was kinda fearful, and you’d be apprehensive and it was exciting and everything, especially when you walked through the door for the first time and they slammed the door behind you. Because you didn’t know what to expect.”
Here is the discussion with the two from NPR’s All Things Considered:
When the US Ambassador threatened India's "Strategic Autonomy" policy over India's friendship with Russia - much more than meets the eye was at stake. Let us unpack how the Ukraine war has fundamentally changed the US and the world. And why are we here anyway?
The story of Jeffrey Epstein is making waves after the case documents have been opened up. Its sleazy content is entertaining. But is that the real story? Power, sex trafficking and espionage - its all there.
The Department of Justice indictment on Pannun, the high-profile US officials' visits, and strange geopolitical realignments paints an intriguing picture. We will analyze all the events and actions to make sense.
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