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...

Gopal Raju: An Appreciation By Pranay Gupte I never believed that Herman Gopal Raju – that was indeed his full name – would ever age. The last time we met in New York, about a year ago, we dined at an Indian restaurant near Columbus Circle. Allen E. Kaye, the well-known immigration lawyer, had joined us. I had introduced Allen to Gopal nearly four decades ago, when all of us were very much younger. Allen subsequently became a columnist for India Abroad, the newspaper that G...

Davos 2008 (Published in TIME Magazine, January 31, 2008) By Michael Elliott High winds on the last day of this year's annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos prevented me from taking my usual run from the top of the Weissfluhjoch to Klosters, thinking on the way of what I'd learned during the week. I wasn't too upset. Deprived of my usual partner on the pistes — Martin Lukes, ex-CEO of a-b Glöbâl, who was unavoidably absent from this year's meeting — the long trail down int...

COLUMN-Bush, Rice and irrational optimism By Bernd Debusmann Wed Jan 23, 2008 10:00am EST (Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own) WASHINGTON, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Condoleezza Rice said it so often that it could have been the motto of last November's Annapolis conference on the Middle East: "Failure is not an option." Catchy and upbeat, the words would fit nicely on a bumper sticker. George W. Bush opened his last year in office with his first visit...

The single most significant aspect of this book is that it's under the byline of Kamal Nath, arguably India's most talented and resourceful politician since Independence. In fact, he's 61 years old -- just a year older than Modern India, which was carved out of the British Raj in 1947. There are those who predict that he will some day be the country's prime minister, and, indeed, some of his friends are already canvassing in his behalf. Mr. Nath's intrinsic decency and good nature make hi...

When more than 3,000 world leaders and journalists start their, well, deliberations on the snowy – and often snow-bound – ski resort of Davos on Wednesday at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum January 23-26, they may well run into inclement weather, not unusual for this Alpine village in eastern Switzerland. Indeed, several mandarins of the global business and political communities have suggested over the years – the late Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and Steve Forbes amo...

The Man at the Summit: Profile of Klaus Schwab (Longer Version on an Article Published in Portfolio.Com, January 18, 2008) By Pranay Gupte Not many people know that Klaus Schwab started the World Economic Forum in 1971 as a nice way to get together some of his fellow European academics, along with a sprinkling of management types, for some serious skiing in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos. Schwab, the Harvard-trained management specialist who then taught at the University of Gen...

(The following is a longer version of an article I wrote for YaleGlobal, the online magazine of the Yale University Center for the Study of Globalization.) In the perception of Arab leaders of the Persian Gulf countries, George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad mirror each other: they are both widely disliked in this region, their shrill rhetoric is not appreciated around here, and their visits – the Iranian president came to a summit of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council in Doha last m...

Professor Arvind Panagriya, who holds the Bhagwati Chair at Columbia University, is one of the most astute observers of the Indian scene. Besides being a stellar economist, he's a writer and speaker of great felicity. I strongly recommend his new book, "India: The Emerging Giant," published this month by Oxford University Press. Professor Panagriya offers a solid study of how India is being transformed from a giant country handicapped by long years of socialist policies to one of the world's ...

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...

(Note: This ditty was composed in honor of three remarkable women who complain bitterly about the shortage of smart, sensitive and single men.) "Coffee in Da Lobby" So there were these three babes in Dubai Who caused a certain gentleman to sigh; When he asked them out for coffee They said to meet them in da lobby. When he trekked to find them, The doorman said, "Ahem," The babes had just dashed out with a cabby. So the gentleman returned to the party Where there was dancing do...

(Note: This ditty was composed in honor of three remarkable women who complain bitterly about the shortage of smart, sensitive and single men.) "Coffee in Da Lobby" So there were these three babes in Dubai Who caused a certain gentleman to sigh; When he asked them out for coffee They said to meet them in da lobby. When he trekked to find them, The doorman said, "Ahem," The babes had just dashed out with a cabby. So the gentleman returned to the party Where there was dancing do...

By Vinita Bharadwaj Special to Gulf News It is perfectly easy to fall in love with Cuba. There is something in the air. Sometimes, it is driven by the seduction of revolution that still breezes past. At other times, it is the distant strains of the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack carried on a zephyr from Habana Vieja (Old Havana). By resisting might and money, Cuba, charming as it is, has also become a near antithesis of the modern, developed and capitalistic world. "This is an i...

December 16, 2007 The New York Times: OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR You Can Almost Hear It Pop By STEPHEN S. ROACH THE American economy is slipping into its second post-bubble recession in seven years. Just as the bursting of the dot-com bubble led to a downturn in 2001 and ’02, the simultaneous popping of the housing and credit bubbles is doing the same right now. This recession will be deeper than the shallow contraction earlier in this decade. The dot-com-led downturn was set off by a c...