Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

I still remember all the praises that veteran development professionals showered on Paul Kagame. It was 2015, and I was landing in Tanzania for my work at the One Acre Fund, an American microfinance NGO. The Rwandan president was the darling of Western donors, creating a country of political stability, clean streets, and a transparent welcome for foreign investors in a neighborhood often characterized by opaque shakedown, hidden costs of doing business, and unpredictable, sudden changes in policymaking that risk leaving people, assets, and money stranded.

When people envision a "revolution," they often conjure images of sudden bouts of violence and radical change. People coordinate large-scale gatherings where they clash with the police and military to voice their suffering and demand change. From the protests emerge charismatic leaders whose speeches move crowds and whose ideologies are projected into the public consciousness. When the authorities refuse to budge in the face of popular discontent, protests turn into mob violence, then organized armed opposition that overcomes the defenders of the regime. 

The Japanese often attribute the country's high-quality manufactured products to  Shokunin Damashii (職人魂) in action. A historical culture of craftsmen focusing on doing one thing and just one thing well in his or her life has led to a slew of artisanal success stories, from fabled swords from centuries ago to the aged sake rice wine taking over the world's palate. Despite modern manufacturing's reliance on automation and assembly lines, the country's electronics giants and carmakers continue to suggest that this culture of perfectionism over individual lifetimes is the secret ingredient to made in Japan's fine reputation.

Last week, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the country's main governmental agency for international development, announced that it was scrapping what it called the Africa Hometown Initiative. The initiative was originally intended as a city-to-city economic development partnership, with four Japanese regional governments being respectively paired with an African counterpart, so that Japanese resources and know-how can be shared at the grassroots level more efficiently and directly. The more bottom-up approach to international development promised an alternative to JICA's usual ways. It did not take long for the country's right-wingers to spread false information about how the initiative would be a beachhead for millions of Africans to swamp Japan. By focusing on the use of the word "hometown," these individuals easily played into the growing fear among the Japanese public about the country becoming less Japanese over time through a surge of non...

After years of popular films that portray Chinese patriotism in contemporary settings, China's film-makers finally turned back to the past, namely World War II, for more inspiration. Two recent films,  Dead to Rights (南京照相馆) and 731 , respectively depicting the plight of Chinese civilians during the Nanjing Massacre and the biological weapons experiments in Northeastern China, hit theaters. It is a rather opportune time for the pivot. The Chinese government had just concluded a massive military parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, reminding people to not forget a painful past.

A few days ago, my neighborhood in Malta was hit by a series of power outages, blanketing the area in darkness just as everyone was about to head to bed. With the late-summer heat still unbearably strong, it was not exactly the easiest night to get through. Waking up in a sweat at 3am, I found myself unable to keep lying on the soaked-through bed in a windless room, so I headed up the balcony, just a catch whatever breeze it could offer. I expected that, devoid of the usual orange-ish streetlights, the top-down view of the streets, lined with stone buildings on both sides, would be ghastly, but far from it.

The microcosm of contemporary global politics played out on the official Facebook page of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His meticulously documented trip across saw him first touring Japanese factories, calling on the two countries to cooperate on semiconductor development. Then he found himself in Tianjin, China, openly handshaking and calling Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin his friends and partners. All this despite the US publicly denouncing their summit as a congregation of anti-Americanism, while the Japanese government called on world leaders to avoid China ahead of its end-of-WWII celebrations.

I do not normally comment on Japanese politics. It is not because I am not interested in politics or the country. But it is much more because, for much of the past decades, it has not been a source of change or inspiration. As the country struggled with deflation, economic stagnancy, and depopulation, politicians had little to say about solutions, preferring to muddle on with a combination of quantitative easing and pensioning off the growing cohort of old people, buying political capital in a land where the youth are largely characterized by political apathy .

When the Russo-Ukrainian War first broke out, the battlefield success of Ukrainian drones in blowing up Russian armored vehicles made me wonder whether columns of armored vehicles still have their place in modern warfare. Three years since then, the power of the drone has proven to be far more potent and game-changing in the blood-soaked fields of Donbas. Ukrainians have managed to smuggle them into Siberia, launching them against Russian strategic bombers located thousands of miles from the frontlines. And in exchange, Russians have pummeled Ukrainian cities, even without established air superiority.

Israel's latest attack on Iran was entirely unprovoked. Even as American and Iranian diplomats prepared for the next round of nuclear weapons negotiations in Oman, Israeli airstrikes lit up the night sky across the country, hitting not just suspected nuclear weapons facilities, but also government and residential compounds, in a bid to simultaneously damage military hardware but also take out its military, political, and scientific leadership in one fell swoop. The surprise attack was followed by Israeli government announcements that, confusingly, also called on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the regime.

The young Chinese woman in the photo is certainly a beautiful one. In a recent social media post I came across, the poster spoke of how the woman, the girlfriend of a fellow American engaged in cutting-edge technological research in Japan, may be a front for Chinese state-sponsored spying. His evidence? That the attractive woman is just way out of his friend's league, and that her being enamored with him cannot realistically be possible without some sort of ulterior motives. Through the story, the poster cautioned others to stay far away from overly enthusiastic Chinese women in their midst.

The schedule of an educational consultant unaffiliated with a regular school can be an odd one. With students occupied with their classes until late afternoon on weekdays, the consultant is not in a position to speak to the same kids until their evening hours and weekends. The result is that the consultant's work becomes not so different from a barman: busy from the dinner hours late into the night, with no possibility of a free weekend. For someone like me who has always worked in corporate jobs where weekends and holidays are almost sacred for otherwise busy employees, the service industry work schedule is new.

While the world worries about the repercussions of the reciprocal tariffs that Trump has thrown at the world, he is quietly making his next move. Yesterday, in response to the South Sudanese government's refusal to take back its citizens deported from America, the Trump administration unilaterally revoked the US entry visas of all South Sudanese citizens, irrespective of their personal stance on their home country's government. With the attention of governments and investors the world over fixated on his Liberation Day, he is opening a new front on his determination to bend the world to his will.

If there is anything consistent about the inconsistent Trump administration so far, it has been a belief in self-importance. Amidst the endless threats and flip-flops of tariffs on other countries, the vague words around peace deals in Ukraine and Gaza, and the winding road of the domestic war against left-wing wokery, the administration has never stopped believing in one underlying principle: that the other countries fundamentally need the US more than the US will ever need them, and that in the face of the administration's agreessions, its enemies cannot credibly muster effective counterattacks.

"You know, all the countries in the Gulf...they are very different!" Almost as soon as the taxi driver heard that I had just flown into Bahrain from Kuwait he began listing out the subtle nuances that distinguish his Arab petrostate from the neighboring ones. "In Kuwait, they have so much money...but the roads are no good," he pointed out as we drove on the smooth highway into the city. I had to agree, even though I had been in the island country for less than an hour. The spiffy international airport and roads in Bahrain were a far cry from the not-so-well-maintained counterparts in Kuwait.

Spare a thought for American election pollsters. After predicting massive victories for the Democrats in the two previous presidential elections, they again forecasted a tight election with a lead for the Democrats led by Harris. As the votes are counted, they are again proven wrong. Rather than waiting for days for ballots to be counted and then recounted to ensure that slim margins of errors are minimized in tight races, a picture emerged of the Republicans taking a massive lead in places they should not be, most notably in Florida where Trump won by 13%.

By the standards of often blank-faced  Japanese politicians, the incoming prime minister Shigeru Ishiba is certainly charismatic. Years of going on TV shows and giving media interviews, not to mention running around rural Japan to shake hands with voters have given him a folksy, joke-filled talking style more reminiscent of George W. Bush than a Japanese bureaucrat in a suit. It is no wonder that he has earned the likes of the grassroots, while attracting skepticism among his fellow politicians, even within the same party. Being different does not help in the subdued one-party democracy that is Japan.

The much-awaited Joker sequel starts with the titular protagonist in prison, pending trial for his murders committed two years ago. The man, frail and emaciated, chooses to remain quiet in the face of constant taunts from the guards, too happy to jump on any perceived infringements to beat up inmates. Gone is the confidence of the clown defending his actions, and inspiring millions who saw him as the symbol of fighting back against the authorities that seem to exist to protect Gotham's powerful bullies. As Arthur, the man simply retreats into an inner world of fantasy, shriveling as he heads to an inevitable death penalty.

The 1960s and 1970s were the height of the decolonization movement. Centuries of European presence across the globe, particularly in Africa, disappeared in years. Sometimes it was the result of sheer violence, such as how the Algerian independence fighters took down an increasingly exasperated colonial French army and drove out millions of white residents fleeing in fear. But others, like Malta, simply saw the breakup of colonial empires as inevitable for the overstretched colonial powers, feigning allegiance to symbols of continued colonial rule in exchange for concrete progress toward self-governance.

The Middle East is grabbing the world's attention once more for all the wrong reasons. Months after a war that plunged Gaza into unprecedented destruction and threatened Israel's international standings , the conflict threatens to spill beyond a small part of the Levant. Israel has gone on the offensive to preempt others from reinforcing the embattled Hamas, wantonly bombing Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, and Yeman, seeking to erode the military capabilities of its enemies through assassinating military and political leaders while destroying military hardware and critical infrastructure that could be used to support war efforts.