Will Indians face a backlash in the United States?   By Pranay Gupte (Published in The Hindu, India, July 2, 2010)   There’s been increasing angst and teeth-gnashing among Indians in the United States this week over a tongue-in-cheek essay by columnist Joel Stein in the international newsweekly, TIME. Mr. Stein ruefully talks about how his native Edison, a New Jersey community just across the Hudson River from New York City, has been transformed into a “Littl...

Suharto Without Tears By Pranay Gupte In the cascade of condemnations and condolences that followed the death of former Indonesian strongman Suharto on January 27, one voice was conspicuously missing. That voice was of Dr. Haryono Suyono, the Chicago-trained sociologist who served for almost two decades as Suharto’s minister of population and family welfare. Those two decades represented the most benign of Suharto’s authoritarian rule, not the least because of Dr. Haryono&rs...

Timeless Journey: The Maktoum Tradition and the Making of Modern Dubai By His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum (Note to Editor: This article was published in The Wall Street Journal on January 4, 2008. His Highness Sheikh Mohammed completed two years as ruler of the Emirate of Dubai, and Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates earlier this week. He is writing his memoir, due to be published later this year.) When President George W. Bush of the United...

Here's an uplifting quote from Barack Obama in New Hampshire today: “If you believe that we don’t have to settle for what the cynics tell us we have to settle for, but instead we can reach for what we know is possible,” Mr. Obama told an overflowing audience at the Lebanon Opera House Monday morning. “I am convinced that we will not just win the nomination, we will not just win a general election, but you and I together, we can start repairing this country and repairing the world and we wi...

The Spy Who Wants Israel to Talk By David Ignatius Sunday, November 11, 2007; B07 The Washington Post JERUSALEM -- Efraim Halevy, the former head of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, titled his memoirs "Man in the Shadows." But now that he's out in the sunlight, the 72-year-old retired spy chief has some surprisingly contrarian things to say about Iran and Syria. The gist of his message is that rather than constantly ratcheting up the rhetoric of confrontation, the United States ...

Hmmmm, let’s see. Maybe Professor Fish should now also start predicting the monsoons in South Asia. This is August 2007; the elections are in November 2008. Those who, like Professor Fish, gaze so deeply into the crystal ball run the risk of needing sun glasses after a while. Blinded by Hillary, is it? Let’s see: What about those sleazeball Indian entrepreneurs around her who “raise” money? What about those many trips taken to India by her spouse where, shall we say, Bollywood beauties, ahem,...

My good friend Anwer Sher in Dubai makes a trenchant point that, as literature goes, Sir Salman Rushdie's work, "The Satanic verses," is unlikely to rank terribly high in the pantheon of enduring books. There are readers who buy books to read them, and there are buyers who acquire books by the yard so they look good on their shelves. To put it another way, Sir Salman's books are often talked about more than they are understood. As Mr. Sher puts it, anyone reading his books would scarcely take...

I have been a longtime fan of the writings of James Traub, so my view of his books is obviously somewhat biased. Nevertheless, I was astonished by the depth of his reporting about the United Nations and Kofi Annan. In view of the immense access that the U.N.'s outgoing secretary general gave him, Traub would have been surely tempted to write a hagiography. But he shows himself to be the consummate professional. This book is as much about Annan's setbacks and mistakes as it is about his triump...