IT IS NOT A HEADLINE I would want to put on cover. Don’t we all want to give the Ukraine peace plan a chance? But then, if available facts and trends point to that, what else does one do?
Once, I shared here a question a child had raised—a daughter of one of THE WEEK’s senior editors. “The Ukraine war is over, right, Appa?” She was not yet in high school when the war began in earnest in February 2022. She will leave high school in about three months.
Over time, she saw the war disappear from the front pages of newspapers and even from conversations. So let us forgive her for thinking that the war is over. It is like the death of a parent or someone close, I feel. They think we will remember them every day. We would want to remember them every day. But, do we? Can we? And when that forgetfulness blankets us, what does it mean for them, and us?
Former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko spoke with our contributor Mridula Ghosh. The inside headline reflects his pain: “Ukrainians are writing the chronicles of our times with their blood; we are shaping history.” He told Mridula that he considered the first Indian ambassadors to Ukraine his brothers.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the first ambassador’s name. In August 1992, ambassador Sudhir T. Devare became the first Indian representative to Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia. Then came ambassadors R.K. Rai, V.B. Soni, S. Kipgen, Debabrata Saha… down to the incumbent, Ambassador Ravi Shankar, highlighting a long and fruitful relationship with the country.
For the cover, Mridula also interviewed Dmytro Lubinets, Ukrainian parliamentary commissioner for human rights; the former mayor of Kherson, who was released from Russian captivity, Volodymyr Mykolayenko; Ukrainian human rights activist Maria Tomak; and lawyer-turned-soldier Markiian Duleba.
Things happening at home can reflect in lands far away, as Senior Assistant Editor Pratul Sharma found out in Dagshai, Himachal Pradesh. James Joseph Daly, a young Irish private from the Connaught Rangers, was executed at the military jail here for leading a mutiny protesting the British Army’s violence in Ireland.
Mahatma Gandhi travelled to Dagshai to extend support to the Irish soldiers, and local legend has it that the barrister spent a night in solidarity, in the cell next to Daly’s. Three decades later, Nathuram Godse would spend a night in the same jail.
The politics of our times is kept sometimes in buildings and sometimes in gaming consoles. In @leisure, Special Correspondent Anjuly Mathai looks at the politics of video games, drawing on conversations from Manorama Hortus 2025. It was a revelation to many that video games are more than ‘games’—they offer perspectives and experiences, not just entertainment.
Another interesting article is ambassador R. Vishwanathan’s review of Indranil Chakravarty’s The Tree Within—The Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz’s Years in India. During his years as a diplomat, Paz married the French artist Marie-José Tramini, his second wife, under a neem tree at the Mexican ambassador’s house in Delhi.
I wonder if the tree still stands there. If so, it deserves a heritage marker, like the English Heritage blue plaques.