Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳

Army daughter|Diplomat|Cartophile|Author:The Fractured Himalaya; Rain Rising| Founder The South Asian Symphony Orchestra |

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

Sisters: 1957, Pune. Nirmala left, Nirupama on the right. In the second photo, Asha the youngest of the trio, still a baby, is seen.

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

“Even a single lamp dispels the deepest darkness.”
– Mahatma Gandhi.

Happy Diwali/Deepavali.

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

Wishing you both the very best in the years ahead. @Nidhi

[Omar Abdullah @OmarAbdullah]

A new journey began yesterday 💍@Nidhi

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

Warm congratulations to Navi Pillay, the first woman of Indian origin to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Her extraordinary life story belongs to the many-storied, often heroic history of Indian migration: oceans traversed , hardships endured, discrimination confronted and new homelands served with honesty and distinction.

Her Indian inheritance and her South African experience meet in a life devoted to human dignity. Were Gandhiji alive, I believe he would have recognised something deeply familiar in that journey: the struggle against injustice in South Africa becoming a commitment to justice everywhere.

We may not have agreed with all her judgments or positions. That should not diminish our respect for her courage, independence and achievements. She is as much a daughter of India as she is of South Africa. Our national pride should be accommodating enough to embrace her independent conscience.

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

@ruchirakamboj Congratulations, dear Ruchira!

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

Poster. East Village. New York. Today.

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

Please do use quotes, Shiv. My generation I guess is raging against the dying of the light. No hard feelings. I regard you as a friend.

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

Ma'am, of the over half-million impressions/engagements on that tweet, you've quoted a tiny handful. There will be those on any tweet you choose. What I'm surprised by is that a veteran diplomat didn't get the reference. Shall use quotes next time!

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

Shiv am respectfully attaching just a few of the negative comments on your post. These are just a few. How can you say mine was the only one. That is NOT TRUE.

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

Respectfully, ma'am, the only negative reaction was yours. Literally everyone else that follows me understood the reference, because JD Vance's use of "indentured servants" was a top headline all day. It wasn't an obscure reference.

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

But you never put it in quotes, did you? Normally what is spoken by others is quoted and properly referenced. I had not seen the Vance statement. Your sarcasm went over my head, am afraid. That is also why you have had so many negative reactions to your witticism.

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

My tweet was a swipe at VP Vance's words, ma'am not Navi Pillay. Surprised you didn't get the reference/sarcasm.

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

To term Navi Pillay an ‘indentured servant’ is historically false and profoundly demeaning. Her forebears endured indenture. Their suffering is neither an insult nor a hereditary status to pin on a descendant.

You may disagree with her judgments if you wish, but do engage with them. Reducing a distinguished jurist to the colonial subjugation suffered by her ancestors betrays contempt for the dignity of labour and for a painful chapter of our own history. A seasoned Indian journalist should know better.

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

An indentured servant just won the Nobel Peace Prize. https://t.co/D3rBogD9Zt

[US-India Strategic Partnership Forum @USISPForum]

USISPF Statement

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

Nations do not acquire compassion with wealth. It is hardly a luxury acquired with better living standards. It is intrinsic to you as a person, rich or poor. Why wear an expression of patronising surprise when a relatively poorer country than yours, effectively conserves and preserves its precious wildlife? The measure of moral imagination is not per capita income. #WildlifeProtection @TheEconomist

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

It is extraordinary that India, still a relatively poor country, can achieve something as selfless as protecting other creatures. We explain how it became remarkably good at animal conservation https://t.co/TP0ik9s4AT

[New India Foundation @newindiafndtion]

150+ Nominations. Ten books Longlist. One prize. INR 15 lakhs.

Announcing the Longlist for the 9th Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, honouring the finest non-fiction on Independent India’s history.

From the making of the Constitution to the partition of a subcontinent, from the story of India’s development to the rise of its scam economy, from the life of a diplomat who shaped the Republic’s foreign policy to a diaspora's resistance to the Emergency, from the lives of migrant workers in a Delhi factory to a hidden maestro of Hindustani music, from questions of justice in the Republic to a personal history of the nation, these books reckon with the India we live in today.

[Kanwal Sibal @KanwalSibal]

For someone who started a war with Iran with destructive international consequences, who calls the Iranians scum and a cancer and wants to bomb them back to the Stone Age, supported Israel in its destruction of Gaza, still participates in a proxy war on Russia, kidnapped the serving head of state of a sovereign country and grabbed its oil, wants Greenland, the territory of an ally etc, to claim he is the most eligible candidate ever for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize is a parody.

He implicitly endorses Pakistan’s threat to use nuclear weapons against India by repeating Shehbaz Sharif’s claim Trump saved 30 to 50 million lives in Pakistan’s conflict with India.

This means Pakistan was ready to use nuclear weapons, had worked out targets in India and estimated the casualties.

Sharif has now officially in a message to Trump on the 250th anniversary of the US applauded him for saving hundreds of millions of lives. The figure has ballooned.

India has a No First Use doctrine which Pakistan rejects despite India proposing an agreement on this. India would not have used nuclear weapons first.

Instead of deploring Pakistan’s nuclear threat inherent in Sharif’s statements, Trump is legitimising it politically.

No concern about millions of Indian lives lost because of Pakistan’s nuclear madness.

Instead, Trump capitalises on Sharif’s pandering to his vanity to lay claim to the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

@KanwalSibal Thank you so much.

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

India matters to the U.S. Yet, pressure over Russian oil, warmth towards Pakistan and Trump’s courtship of Xi raise a harder question: can Washington accept an India whose judgment it cannot control? Strategic autonomy needs capability; partnership needs respect.

My essay: https://t.co/oMrgumNMeq

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

@hvgoenka I have the most wonderful memories of Lima and the two and a half years I spent there. The food, the music, the history and the friendships forged. Sheer magic.

[Suhasini Haidar @suhasinih]

Strange that this even needs to be said....