Today's Times of India has this headline on the front page:
Some of you may sympathise with this viewpoint - why should India be buying from (and indirectly supporting) an aggressor nation like Russia, especially when innocent Ukrainians are losing lives?
Should we not listen to the moral entreaties made by the "good guys" - the US and other western powers?
Time for a history lesson folks.
In this hard-hitting piece titled 'What’s behind India’s Ukraine policy, Western hypocrisy & how nations act in self-interest', leading journalist Shekhar Gupta lays down the case for national interest (interestingly, also the name of this weekly column).
In it, Gupta makes one key point:
The article then shares example after example of this principle... making it a great case study for a pattern-finding insight:
Powerful stuff.
Also, Gupta can be cheeky in his writing. He starts the column with a quiz-based reference to Operation Searchlight, the brutal repression that the Pakistani Army carried out in 1971, to curb the Bangladeshi nationalist movement (which resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian lives lost) and several million refugees who fled to India.
His point: No western power came to the aid of innocent Bangladeshi civilians then.
In the end, Gupta crafts this line to conclude the piece (emphasis mine):
Ouch.
That is known as a callback, a very cool technique used in writing and humour.
#SOTD 35
Ravi
A Storytelling Coach More details here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravishankar-iyer/
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