Finding Soho

US Secretary of State John Kerry visited the western Indian state of Gujarat on 11 January for a business summit and Islamabad on 12 January to lead a strategic dialogue with the Pakistani government and military. Kerry’s visit comes ahead of President Obama’s visit to India scheduled for 24 January. Ahead of these summits, Kerry announced that Pakistan had curtailed and “[taken] action against” terror groups Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). This certification is necessary for the disbursement of civilian aid under the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, more often referred to as the Kerry-Lugar Bill, and came just before Kerry’s departure for the subcontinent. However, recent events and their aftermath in Pakistan indicate that state support for terror organisations has not ceased. On the contrary, the specific groups mentioned by Kerry appear to have become more active in recent weeks. In response to concerns from the Indian government, the US has tempor...

The movies that Richard Linklater-Ethan Hawke have done together have a special place in my heart. I absolutely love the Before series - Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight. Each of them has left me awestruck and breathless. They are so intensely realistic and so intensely simple that, in my view, they have a magical and ethereal quality. There's something truly, ineffably momentous about those movies. Momentous because they seem to capture really significant moments in time - moments that appear insignificant, mundane and prosaic but are teeming with joie de vivre and the joy of small things. My response to them, even though they are very 'intellectual' with dialogue taking precedence over action, is always very physical. (Besides, this caveat doesn't entirely apply here as I do actually like movies where dialogue is privileged over action.) The words, stories and destinies that these movies weave together always evoke a physical reaction. Immersion is t...

The Charlie Hebdo massacre was not an accident, not a stray act of horror and not an unanticipated calamity. It was the culmination and result of a noxious coming together of ever-increasing radicalisation and political paralysis in the face of radicalisation and violence. It was the outcome of a series of ‘provocative’ challenges to reigning orthodoxies and the violent backlash these challenges invited. But this is not to suggest that the challenges themselves caused the ‘retribution’, a deeply disturbing and pernicious argument that has been put forward in relation to Charlie Hebdo for some years in some quarters until now (and perhaps even now); in this case, retribution, a term that evokes such guttural revulsion, was fuelled by a politics of ‘la haine’ and vitriol and enabled by the reticence of the rational, secular public.  Political leaders and the news media of liberal democracies have played a significant role in this. As Michael Weiss argues in Foreign Policy and Emm...