A FEW YEARS AGO, Commander Abhilash Tomy, the circumnavigator, was a speaker at THE WEEK’s annual conference, and I asked him what his advice would be to someone who is planning a challenging project. “Prepare, prepare, prepare, and execute,” came the crisp answer.
In the cover interview with Senior Assistant Editor Sanjib Kr Baruah, the outgoing Chief of Defence Staff Anil Chauhan said that the most memorable moments of his tenure were the operational bits.
“The defence forces are a profession you do not practise in the true sense—you only train for it,” the general said. “A surgeon practises surgery every day; a lawyer is at the bar every day. Most of us in uniform spend our entire careers training for a contingency that may never come. I was fortunate. Everything I had worked towards… came into practice during Operation Sindoor and was successfully demonstrated.”
The comprehensive interview covers all the main events of the general’s tenure as CDS, and includes his views on why the idea of a two-front war could be obsolete, and whether India was anywhere close to deploying nuclear assets during Operation Sindoor. I am sure that you will enjoy reading the interview and Sanjib’s accompanying article.
As always, the issue is much more than the cover article. In a poignant piece of reportage from Malegaon, Chief of Bureau (Mumbai) Dnyanesh Jathar spoke to victims of the 2006 blasts. On April 22, the second set of accused was acquitted by the Bombay High Court. This leaves victims and their families with no closure. If the police, investigating agencies and courts cannot provide an answer, where should the common man look for closure?
In business coverage, Senior Assistant News Editor Maijo Abraham interviewed A.V. Anoop, chairman of AVA Group, makers of the popular Medimix soap and other products. It was news to me that Medimix pioneered the 18gm soap bar in hotels. Anoop said that the group is constantly reinventing its products and their placement to meet market changes.
I understand his point fully. For example, soap bars have been replaced by liquid soap dispensers in hotel rooms, and loofahs have become a staple in most washbags. I think liquid soap brings with it a market for a resealable, lightweight, waterproof pouch for loofahs.
In @leisure, Special Correspondent Anjuly Mathai captures the journey of Dr Mitra Satheesh, an ayurveda doctor who travels the world alone, mostly to places unheard of.
Until recently, the joke in THE WEEK’s office was that we knew of only two people who had been to Burkina Faso—former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao in 1995 and our News Editor Mathew T. George in 2010. Now, we have added Mitra to that list. Growing up, I knew the country as Upper Volta, before it changed its name to mean ‘The Land of Upright People’. The West African nation’s capital is a bit of a tongue-twister, too—Ouagadougou.
The country has been in the recent news for Ibrahim Traoré, 38, a Burkinabé military officer and politician who has been its interim president since his predecessor was overthrown in 2022. He was supposed to hold elections in July 2024, but the junta extended its rule by five more years.
This April, he told state media: “People need to forget about the issue of democracy. Democracy is not for us. Look at Libya, this is an example close to us.”
That statement should make us all grateful for the professional defence forces that we have, should it not?
