THE GREAT INDIAN CHESS HOPE!
Sixteen year old Praggnanandhaa is one of India’s fastest rising chess grandmasters, a country that has no grandmasters till Vishwanathan Anand became its first grandmaster in January 1988.
Since then 72 others have grasped this honor. Pragg belongs to a generation of young Indians who embody the country's growing influence in chess, a sport that has its origins in a two-player Indian board game from the sixth century.
It's no mean feat in a country of 1.3 billion people feverishly obsessed with cricket.
The educational value of the game is why many Indian parents are encouraging their children to play the game.
Indians place a huge emphasis on their children's learning, and chess is seen as a welcome addition.
These students were in Ukraine because they wanted to become doctors and could not afford the corrupt system in India which wanted 3 to 5 Crores as fees. They went to Ukraine.
The Government of India, also known as Modi Sarkar, failed to advise them in time.
That is because Government of India, read that as Modi Sarkar, was busy doing election rallies in UP.
There is a clutch of Gujarati Students too who are stuck there. They were told to go to Poland border and they walked.
#UkraineInvasion@RavikanthS_
PUTIN'S OPTIONS NOW?
With NATO forward troops activated and Russian forces getting closer to NATO borders in the European heartland like Poland and Romania, at what will stage could that lead to pre-emptive defensive moves?
Putin wants a non-aligned Ukraine as a buffer, but occupying all of Ukraine takes that out. Does it serve Russia better to occupy and integrate just the ethnic Russian majority areas and leave the rest of Ukraine as a neutralised buffer?
A long occupation of Ukraine will lead to a guerilla war that will inevitably entail support from across the NATO borders. Putin has to make quick decisions and not get bogged down in Ukraine.
PUTIN’S CHESS. CLEARLY HE IS NO GRANDMASTER!
Russia might have good reason for it or even just cause. In this Oped piece in The Hindu Rakesh Sood, a former diplomat and a well regarded one at that, analyses what led to the present situation.
He lays the cards out neatly. But could Putin have handled it better? He didn’t state his objective and grievance clearly and loudly enough. This he made it appear like a bolt out of the blue attack.
Could there have been another way of forcing NATO to halt, and to tell the West that it’s unilateral days and ways are over? No more Iraq or Libya or Syria.
RUSSIANS MIGHT BE POOR COMPARED TO EUROPEANS, BUT RUSSIA IS RICH.
Russia’s GDP is smaller than India’s . It’s military budget too.
But it is a very rich country with cash, natural resources, mineral wealth and scientific and technologically advanced capabilities.
Russia’s central bank and private sector have almost $1 trillion of liquid wealth, with a much larger share of this held in U.S. dollars than most people realize, even after the country sold all its Treasuries holdings in 2018, Pozsar wrote.
WHERE NEXT RUSSIA?’
Today, Putin seeks at the very least a two-tier NATO, in which no allied forces are deployed on former Warsaw Pact territory.
The inevitable negotiations over this and other elements of a new European security “architecture” would be conducted with Russian forces poised all along NATO’s eastern borders and therefore amid real uncertainty about NATO’s ability to resist Putin’s demands.
This takes place, moreover, as China threatens to upend the strategic balance in East Asia, perhaps with an attack of some kind against Taiwan.
John Mearsheimer, a professor of international relations and security at the University of Chicago has for years been cautioning American diplomats to stop pressing for Ukraine in NATO.
He argued that it would be akin to Russia setting up military bases in Canada. Would the USA accept it? We saw how the USA was ready to go to war when the Russians placed missiles in Cuba in 1962.
The mistake the West made was to assume that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia had no great power security concerns. Big mistake!