Rahul Jacob

2 weeks ago | livemint.com | Rahul Jacob

In 1914, John Maynard Keynes wrote an almost triumphalist ode to globalization, just before that vision was dismantled by World War I and the subsequent Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in the US.

1 month ago | livemint.com | Rahul Jacob

Less emphasis on the PLI scheme ought to create room for a new industrial policy. Let’s call it ‘NIP’ as a marker of the speed needed in rethinking our approach on several issues that bedevil the economy. These include India’s overvalued exchange rate, which should be routinely measured against a basket of our export competitors’ currencies, and concluding key bilateral trade treaties over which negotiations have dragged on for years.

1 month ago | htsyndication.com | Rahul Jacob

Posted On: 2025-03-07 Posted By: Rahul Jacob Business & Finance Health & Lifestyle Technology Cities International MINT New Delhi, March 7 -- Imagine a literary festival not as encounters with favourite authors or listening to fascinating debates but instead as embarrassing onstage debacles, serialised episodes of misadventures that metamorphose in the mind into a very public pillorying. With this season's calendar of lit fests, in locations as diverse as Jaipur and Thimphu, coming to an end,...

1 month ago | livemint.com | Rahul Jacob

The next morning, the discussion was as chaotic as anything I have witnessed. Noticing that the Life of Pi author Yann Martel was in the audience, I opened the Q-and-A early to use him as an additional panellist. He argued in favour of believing in religion, a counterpoint to Nasrin’s denunciation of organised religion as responsible for patriarchy and many of society’s ills. At the end, an American woman attendee pulled me aside.

1 month ago | livemint.com | Rahul Jacob

The contrast between the Pope’s candour and the mostly muted response from European leaders to US Vice-President J.D. Vance’s provocative 14 February speech in Munich could not have been clearer. Vance said, somewhat incredibly, that he worried more about the state of European democracies than he did about possible threats to Europe from China and Russia.