The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on every aspect of life, including education, in an unexpected and long-lasting way. To keep our economies from coming to a halt, governments are maximizing online employment practices and improving e-health and e-learning capabilities. Academic institutions all over the globe have embraced online education as a way to make up for the significant drop in training hours. Professional and skilled workers in the economy have easily and effectively moved to online work mode.

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Around 200 PRC ‘fishing boats’ have entered Philippines waters and despite love calls from Duterte to his counterpart in Beijing, refuse to leave.

Owing to a longstanding territorial dispute over the Kuril Islands (also known as northern territories) Russia and Japan, haven't established a peace treaty 75 years after WWII. The return of the islands had been historically important to Japanese leaders. The new Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga acknowledged the dispute in his first speech in the Parliament.

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Almost a decade ago, on 10 June 2011, a Tier One United States’ Naval Special Warfare Development Group, namely DEVGRU or Seal Team Six assassinated Osama Bin Laden in the heart of Pakistan. At the time, counter terrorism apparatus around the world had geared up for what most analysts had prophesised would be Islamist reprisals for the Abbotabad incident.

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In November 2014, this author was a member of the Indian delegation for a Track II Dialogue with Myanmar. The delegation had among others, a very senior former diplomat who had headed a particular prime minister’s Policy Planning Committee in 1984 and a former Army Commander. The author had earlier represented India in Track II Dialogues with Bangladesh and China, but a curious sense of atavism had gripped his innards when he was asked to be part of the Indian delegation to Yangon.

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Nehru believed that he was neither ambivalent nor ambiguous, but on the side of ‘non-alignment’, whatever that was intended by him to be in practice.

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The issue of China’s bizarre visa policy towards a section of India’s citizenry had come to the fore almost a decade ago when two sportsmen from Arunachal Pradesh were prevented by Indian immigration authorities from boarding a flight from New Delhi to Beijing in order to attend the Weightlifting Grand Prix that was to be held in China’s Fujian province on 15-17 January 2011. The reason for the prevention—in consonance with the considered Indian stand—was that the sportsmen had stapled Chinese visas on their passports.

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Even as Bangladesh completed thirty glorious years of independence on 26 March this year, the issue of the erstwhile East Pakistan’s relationship with its biggest neighbour remains complex. To that end, the single most pertinent question pertaining to Indo-Bangla relations that continues to be raised is as to how a country whose liberation was ably aided by India, and in the military campaign for which many Indian lives were lost, acquired a “turn around” and had become a hostile nation within a matter of years.

Advancing Blue Economy (BE) goals is a resonant theme among of the Bay of Bengal littoral states. The regional integration to enhance blue growth serves as a catalyst for regional growth and development. Despite multiple government efforts to promote blue growth, there is yet no comprehensive agenda for marine governance of the littoral states.

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Attempting to provide an illustration about the non-homogenous character and artificiality of the North East construct, the author had written in the introduction to one of his edited collections [Frontier in Flames: North East India in Turmoil (Penguin, 2008)] that,