Broken Bangles: The Soul of Humanity is Broken

Understanding War Is war an inevitable part of human nature, or can we envision a future where conflicts are resolved peacefully? It is difficult to understand the logic of any war from a civilisational point of view . Whenever a war erupts, the existential doubt arises and haunts us with greater intensity: is war not a self-defeating trait of human civilization? The answer is yes, and no. Many scholars have studied the connection between war, peace, and basic human nature with varying degrees of success . All of them beat their brains out trying to figure out the root causes of war and where its dateline begins in human history. The resulting theories cast light on many nuanced aspects of war, peace, and human nature. The scientific approaches of evolution, psychological theories, game theory, and much more have been used to expound the meaning of war. Kinship, hostility, group bonding, identity, altruism, cooperation, and many more similar and contrasting concepts went into this chu...

Researchers view Ukraine as a political state and an ethnolinguistic region that expands beyond the country’s political boundaries. 603700 square kilometres is the size of this country, which is larger than any other country in Europe except Russia. One irony of the ongoing attack by Russia on Ukraine is that the two largest countries in Europe have become parties to an unnecessary war, not to mention the cost of innocent human lives. 750800 is the area of Europe where Ukrainians live, and this territory extends outside the country of Ukraine. Ukrainian communities live in Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Moldova, and Russia. Geographically, most of this ethnolinguistic group of people live either in the plains of rivers or sea coasts. Paul Robert Magocsi, in his book, ‘A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its People’, quotes a geographer from Ukraine, Stepan Rudnytskyi, saying, “Nine-tenths of Ukrainians have certainly never seen a mountain and do not even know what one looks like.” ...

  The World and Its Arms Trading Nations The United States has the largest defence budget in the world. Each year, it allocates huge amounts to developing new weapons and weapon technologies. In each conflict in which it intervenes, America has two interests: pursuing its strategic goals and boosting its defence industry by enabling weapons sales.  The facts and views about America’s economic interests in any war have been exhaustively discussed in the public domain. During the Afghan and Iraq wars, the problematic premise of US interests in global conflicts were put under scrutiny like never before. Less known is how these interests evolved in the succeeding decades. A glimpse of this change can be seen in the words of Alexander C Karp in his recent book, ‘The Technological Republic’ in which he observes that the key US industries have moved away from serving the nation and its strategic and secuirty interests and found a new boss to serve- the consumer, the king of the mark...

  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...