The Business Times

Janan Ganesh

FT COLUMNIST

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) receives the National Order of the Southern Cross from Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva following a press statement at Alvorada Palace in Brasilia on July 8, 2025. (Photo by EVARISTO SA / AFP)

The world is run by old men in a hurry

The advanced age of leaders is a destabilising force in international politics

Demonstrators hold US flags upside-down during a protest against US President Donald Trump on Apr 5 in Berlin.

The hopeless search for Trump’s cunning plan

Attempts to read grand strategy into the US president’s doings have run their course

In principle, 50 million people are no harder to serve than five million, assuming the civil service itself is commensurately bigger.

Pity the middle-sized nations of the world

Small countries have the best outcomes, while the few giants shape the globe

A skyline view of New York. US public life has been deteriorating since the end of the last century yet this appears to have had little effect on the economy

The lesson of the great American boom

Maybe politics, which for decades has been dysfunctional in the US, do not matter that much

Armed tribesmen loyal to Houthis at an anti-USA and anti-Israel rally, in Sana'a, Yemen, January 29, 2024. A world that gives way to non-state and anti-state forces has dire implications for much of humankind.
THE BOTTOM LINE

Welcome to the era of the non-state actor

It isn’t China or Russia that will dominate the post-American world

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty hosting a reception to celebrate Diwali in London on Nov 8, 2023. Compared with other nations, there is a relative absence of identity discourse in the UK.

The genius of Britain’s anti-intellectualism

The UK is cosmopolitan because it doesn’t overthink

The Joseph Drouhin Grand Cru Les Clos vineyards are shown in Burgundy, France, in this undated photo released to the press on May 14, 2010. Joseph Drouhin produces a range of Chablis at their estates in Burgundy. Source: Joseph Drouhin via Bloomberg. EDITOR'S NOTE: NO SALES. EDITORIAL USE ONLY.
LIFE & CULTURE

How Burgundy explains life

Complex and unreliable, the wine region resembles the experience of living

With the rise of mobile audio, urbanites could begin to live in a sensory bubble.
LIFE & CULTURE

How earphones freed the individual

Portable private sound is one of the most liberating inventions of the past century

Doha, the capital of Qatar, which won its bid to host the 2022 Fifa World Cup 12 years ago. Criticism of the choice of host raises questions over how Western nations should deal with such regimes.
THE BOTTOM LINE

Qatar World Cup critics are unprepared for the rest of this century

The West will have to make far worse moral compromises as the centre of global power creeps elsewhere

Tourists outside a restaurant on Khaosan Road in Bangkok..

Go to South-east Asia, young one

Courted by superpowers, the region is where Westerners should try their luck

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