The question is no longer whether he will win 2019; it's what he will do with the new status, says Shekhar Gupta.
There is nothing the young Purvanchali wants more desperately than to escape to a place with less hopelessness, and some opportunity, discovers Shekhar Gupta.
Much of the pre-2014 peace in our hotspots is diminished. Kashmir is on the boil and the Northeast is anarchic, observes Shekhar Gupta.
'You worry when serious people, with control of our and our children's future, begin to start obsessing over social media, seeing it as an easy, lazy, fun, low-cost substitute for boring, old-fashioned practices of politics, governance and serious, fact-based debate,' says Shekhar Gupta.
Using a sledgehammer to fix some ills can cut down a game at its peak, warns Shekhar Gupta.
That's all it takes to protect an institution -- just one person with no past and no greed for the future, says Shekhar Gupta.
'All of Indira Gandhi's bad economic ideas are being strengthened, from nationalised banks to anti-poverty, handout yojanas,' says Shekhar Gupta.
The note ban is Modi's make-or-break gambit for 2019. Opposition leaders see a vulnerability and won't gift pre-eminence to the Congress, says Shekhar Gupta.
'Openness is a great weapon in the armoury of more open societies. That's why the fight with Pakistan isn't just about India be six times bigger, but equally bitter and insecure Pakistan,' argues Shekhar Gupta.
'Nawaz Sharif knows a coup in 2016-2017 will not only complete Pakistan's isolation, but even a whiff of instability will frighten the world into imagining another Islamic State-zone, and this in a fully nuclearised subcontinent,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'Since India has to live next to Pakistan, it can't remain under permanent blackmail.' 'A predictable consequence of these fundamental shifts is the fraying of the principle of strategic restraint.' 'It hasn't been junked. But the threshold has been shifted to provide India much greater room for retaliatory action,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'This army has lost Pakistan's territory, ideology, financial and intellectual capital, ruined its institutions, democracy, the respect for its passport and, like it or not, reduced its status to a globally acknowledged university of jihad,' says Shekhar Gupta.
Abusers on social media will be rewarded if you just got intimidated or even minimally distracted. If you don't let the noise make you do either, you are winning, without even fighting the battle, says Shekhar Gupta.
GM is already in our food chain for years. The approval for indigenous GM mustard should put fake fear-mongering to rest, says Shekhar Gupta
Indians thrive in ordinariness -- from academia and science to business and military power. Sports is just an apt metaphor, says Shekhar Gupta.
Tubes gone, Irom Sharmila the brand is dead. As long as she was trying to kill herself, she had value to the cynics trying to build their careers over her fast, says Shekhar Gupta.
'No country can go from zero to hero at the Olympics.' 'A hundred Indians now feature in the world's top 25 and that's progress,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'There is a problem with the rise of a popular view that sees Kashmir through the prism of the larger, chronic Hindu-Muslim tensions.' 'By redefining the Kashmir problem simplistically in Hindu-Muslim terms could end up keeping Kashmir but losing most Kashmiris,' says Shekhar Gupta.
Zakir Naik, a gentle, rockstar televangelist, is dangerous as young Muslims may be swayed by his fundamentalist interpretations of Islam and justify victimhood and extremism, says Shekhar Gupta.
'The Congress has become two distinct parties, one of the durbar, the other of the field and if they keep drifting apart, death is a certainty,' says Shekhar Gupta.
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