Explain It Clearly

  The Sunday Perspective™ · Explain It Clearly TRUMP LOST THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE AGAIN. WHO GETS BOMBED NEXT? EVERYONE, TAKE COVER. A Participation Trophy, a Cabinet of Nodding Dogs, and the World's Most Expensive Ego THE SUNDAY PERSPECTIVE™   |   EXPLAIN IT CLEARLY Some men lose a prize and move on. Some men lose a prize and complain. Donald Trump lost the Nobel Peace Prize twice, acquired somebody else's medal, and still seems convinced that the real scandal is the committee's failure to recognise his genius. At this rate, the Nobel Committee may need a new category: Peace Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Demanding the Peace Prize. In 2025, the award went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. In 2026, it went to South African jurist Navi Pillay. Trump received neither honour. On October 9, after Pillay won, he called the decision an “indelible stain” on Norway, dismissed the laureate as someone he had never heard of, and claimed that he deserved eight...

  The recurring Modi-Putin car rides look like diplomatic theatre. They may actually reveal something much more important about how India is navigating a world where every great power wants a relationship on its own terms. By: Manish Kumar, Founder & Editor, Explain It Clearly First Tianjin. Then Delhi. Now Bishkek. Somehow, whenever Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin finish talking, they keep ending up in the same car. The latest episode came on August 31 in Bishkek, after the two leaders met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit. Instead of separating into their respective motorcades, Modi and Putin climbed into Putin's Russian-made Aurus and travelled together to the opening ceremony of the World Nomad Games. It was almost a replay of Tianjin a year earlier, when they had shared a car before their bilateral meeting. Putin later did something similar during his December 2025 visit to India. The internet can have its fun with the image. “Mo...

  An uncomfortable examination of India's child-protection system, adolescent relationships and what happens when a child speaks. There is something deeply uncomfortable happening inside India's child-protection system. The country has one of the strongest laws in the world for protecting children from sexual offences. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, or POCSO, was created with a simple and necessary premise: when a child is sexually abused, the law must not wait for adults to decide whether the allegation is convenient, credible enough, embarrassing enough or damaging enough to someone else's reputation. Yet India is increasingly confronting a paradox. The machinery of POCSO can become extraordinarily powerful when adults invoke it against an adolescent relationship. But when a child actually says, “Someone abused me,” the same system can encounter hesitation, institutional defensiveness, private inquiries, demands for proof and, in the worst ca...

  India's SCO Stand May Be the Warning Shot of a World No Longer Willing to Accept American Hegemony There are moments in geopolitics when a sentence in a diplomatic declaration matters less for what it says than for what it reveals. The Bishkek Declaration of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation may be one of those moments. The ten-member organisation condemned military strikes on Iranian territory, described the attacks as violations of international law and the UN Charter, reaffirmed Iran's sovereignty and territorial integrity, backed its right to peaceful nuclear activity and called for the conflict to be resolved through political and diplomatic means. India joined that consensus. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking at the summit, made the broader principle unmistakable: wars cannot become the default mechanism for resolving disputes; dialogue and diplomacy must prevail. The declaration was careful. It did not name Washington o...

  The old energy economy buys the new one. For years, the story seemed almost settled. The future belonged to software. Then cloud computing. Then artificial intelligence. The companies that mattered would be the ones building models, chips, platforms and applications. Oil belonged to another age—a vast industrial inheritance from the twentieth century, increasingly challenged by electrification, renewables and the transition away from fossil fuels. Then the machines got hungry. Not metaphorically. Literally. Artificial intelligence needs enormous quantities of electricity, and as the machines become more powerful, the AI revolution starts looking less like a software story and more like the biggest industrial construction project in decades. Data centres need land. They need substations, transformers, cables, cooling systems, water, construction capacity and, increasingly, dedicated generation. The digital economy has discovered that it still has to live inside the physica...

  *We have spent years celebrating India's demographic dividend. But a young population is not a dividend. It becomes one only when an economy can give its people productive work, rising incomes and a reason to believe that tomorrow will be better than today. If GDP keeps racing ahead while good jobs do not, India may discover that its greatest demographic advantage was never an advantage at all. * There is something almost obscene about the way we talk about India's economic success. GDP is rising, growth forecasts are healthy, foreign investors are watching, factories are being announced, expressways are being built, digital payments are exploding, India is becoming a geopolitical power, and the stock market has learned to speak the language of a future superpower. And somewhere in the middle of all this celebration sits a young Indian asking a remarkably unfashionable question: Where is my job? Not any job. Not work invented for the purpose of making an employment stati...