Pallavi Aiyar

6 days ago | escapeartist.com | Pallavi Aiyar

To arrive in the Japanese capital, Tokyo, can be a sensorially confounding experience. It is a city of some 30 million people, with troops of skyscrapers stampeding across it, often draped in hyper-realistic digital screens that shine like constellations of capitalism come down to earth. But there is also a hush at the heart of the city’s great shrines and temples, where swirls of incense spiral in dreamlike shapes.

1 week ago | pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar

Dear Global Jigsaw,A pause this week from the ongoing Mao Keji interview on India-China relations to focus on Spain’s Easter—my favorite time of year. While in many parts of the world it may be a festival associated with bunnies and chocolate covered eggs, in Spain, Semana Santa, or Holy Week, as the seven days between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday are referred to, is something more elemental all together.

2 weeks ago | pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar

Dear Gobal Jigsaw,Given the backdrop of a potential rapprochement between China and India at a time of what will surely be tectonic shifts in global alliances I am publishing a serialized interview with one of China’s leading India-focused scholars, Mao Keji. Today’s newsletter, the third in this series, will look at Mao’s answer to the question of whether he sees India’s democracy as having played a positive roe in the country’s development.

3 weeks ago | pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar

Dear Global Jigsaw,Two thousand and twenty five will be critical for India-China relations. It marks the 75th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties and is a year that will unfold amidst a shifting global order, the attendant uncertainties of which appear to be helping a thaw in the ties between the Himalayan neighbors. This relationship has been in a deep freeze since military clashes along the nations’ disputed border in the Galwan Valley resulted in the deaths of soldiers on both sides.

1 month ago | pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar

Dear Global Jigsaw,Some significant news on my end:In August, our family will be moving to China. For me, it will be a return to the country that I lived in between 2002-2009. I began my career as a foreign correspondent in Beijing, spending years following the Sino-Indian relationship through a series of peaks and troughs. The time I spent there was definitively the most formative.