Broken Bangles: Putting Together Life and the World

  Is Iran a Full-fledged Nuclear State? Iran is a nuclear threshold state. It has in its possession enough enriched uranium to make several atomic bombs. The US intelligence has warned that if Iran wants to build a nuclear bomb, it can do it at some point in the future. Iran has always maintained that its nuclear programme was aimed at peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The world, especially the US-led western countries, however, generally disagrees and tends to portend all kinds of worst-case scenarios about Iran becoming a full-fledged nuclear power.    According to a 2024 US Congressional Research Service report, Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons programme and did not have all the technologies necessary to develop nuclear weapons. Iran’s uranium enrichment programme has been running since 2000. These facilities, in theory, could generate highly enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons. In nuclear reactors used for generating energy, low-enriched uranium is used, and I...

  A Case For Refugees We have been witnessing a right-wing surge against accepting refugees. The latest in a series of refugee-related decisions, and the gravest of all rather, Donald Trump and his team have begun random deportations of "illegal" migrants in the name of his 'America first' policy. Yet, the reality constantly signals that all countries must revise their refugee policies generously and prepare to take in as many refugees as possible if we still claim our share of humanity. Understandably, people are afraid of their country taking in refugees in hundreds and thousands. The fear that a huge influx of people outside their cultures into a country might destroy its financial security, reduce their job opportunities, and change the familiar social fabric is real.  This fear fails to consider our long cultural history of accepting people from outside cultures.  Our ancestors, wherever their homeland was, shifted from one place and settled in another for many r...

  Record! I am an Arab And my identity card is fifty thousand I have eight children And the ninth is coming after a summer Will you be angry? -From the poem, Identity Card, by Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine We are a civilisation camouflaged in modernity and democratic virtues, yet ancient emotions reign underneath. The Israel-Gaza war offers a sinister peek into them. The violence of this war is such that both sides kill indiscriminately, even civilians, in huge numbers. There is an unfathomable absurdity to this and every conflict.  The lives of young Gazan and Israeli soldiers are cut short in acts of intergenerational hostilities over disputes about stretches of fertile and barren lands and cultural memories. We begin to see a pattern emerging, signifying ancient fears and hopes. This article is about one such fear and the hope originating from it.   The news from Israel indicates that many parents and widows of the young Israeli soldiers killed i...