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There is always a temptation to respond to whatever Sarah Palin says or does with tongue firmly in cheek. It is not only the statements she makes and the issues she raises, but the manner in which she does it. Responses to her latest move – to visit India to give a well-paid keynote address on “My Vision of America” – are not only vulnerable to tongues in cheeks, but chuckles and chokes (sari Sarah, he, he, he).

Watching Watson, the IBM-built supercomputer that handily beat the human competitors on “Jeopardy!,” I couldn’t help feeling smug about how smart we are. After all, hundreds of researchers and programmers fed Watson with millions of bits of information and electronically equipped it with the power to process all that data.

It is comical, if not cynical, the way American television anchors descended on Cairo recently and have taken upon themselves the task of fostering democracy there, even though they themselves are guilty of passively acquiescing to censorship back home. I’m talking about the virtual broadcasting ban on Al Jazeera English in the United States.

It is rightly said that great things have small beginnings. And the small beginning to end the estrangement between the world’s largest democracies began with a tryst on the terrace of a hotel room in a Mexican resort town in 1981.

With his intellectual prowess, unbending personality and personal integrity, this quintessential outsider who died last week was able to conceptualize and pave India’s path to a great power status

Here’s an entirely unnecessary piece of advice for young Indian men, particularly those who are in the cocky age when any advice from a 50 something is dispensed with as if it were a bubblegum wrapper: Please do not sport a three-day stubble that is so in among white American youth. It doesn’t go with your skin color or other physical attributes. All it does is to make you look shabby and unkempt.