In early April 2019, the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) released a Farmers Manifesto for Freedom. It was a progressive document, and said, “Seven decades after India won independence from British colonial rule, the largest section of our population, the farmers, have remained bound by the chain of laws and regulations”.

The only beauty about the Asian geopolitics is that it is born in Asia. In other geographies, geopolitics is generally regulated from other power centres. Critical geopolitics strives to understand the narratives of inclusion/exclusion and otherness of the ideological spaces within a region

All those fiction movies which talked about contagion, or the one that was about the single ship that takes on a virus with a primordial strain from the Arctic, felt over the top and pretty much made up. And yet today billions of people across the world are under lockdown and the possibility of hundreds and thousands dying before a cure is found seems real. That a vaccine is created sooner than later is a distant thought.

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

How dreadful the idea could be if it is proved that the novel Coronavirus that has spelt a world-wide disaster is not a natural virus but a manufactured one !

Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has halted our movement and left us alone to ponder over what for and why. Regardless of the individual’s nationality, religious belief, political position, social status, creative accomplishment, beauty for that matter all have bowed down to the might of the virus. Is it nature’s revenge on ruthless and callous profiteering and conspicuous consumption?

Notwithstanding the worldwide reputation of being humble servants and courageous combatants, the Sikhs in Kabul area of Afghanistan received bullets, when they were worshipping inside the Gurudwara, leaving at least 27 dead and many wounded. The Islamic State (IS), with all impunity, took the responsibility of the attack.