Sometimes, you come across two unrelated topics at different times. You would never think of any relationship to the first topic when you encounter the second topic. Why would you be among a multitude of topics you come across in your life? Thus, when I encountered the phrase ‘Golden Horde’…

In an environment dominated by government-sponsored nationalistic jingoism, writing about the following two Indian cultural phenomena of world domination is rather strange for me. But it’s worth writing about them because of their unique commonly nature and to some degree of their discrediting of the government-sponsored nationalistic cultural advocacies. The…

I must admit that I was a bit confused about what Turkistan meant when I first encountered this name in my travels in Central Asia. My confusion partly stemmed from my rudimentary knowledge of the region as that encompassing five countries with the suffix -stan and largely populated by various…

Every country has its icons. They appear everywhere, in 2D and 3D images, on currency notes, on flags, in museums, on wall decorations and billboards, and on marketing brochures for tourists and visitors. The US has the Statue of Liberty, the Washington monument, the Golden Gate Bridge, etc. …

The first time I heard about the Taliban destroying the Budha sculptures in Bamiyan Afghanistan in 2001, I must say that I was somewhat…

Halford Mackinder was an English geographer, well regarded as one of the founders of geopolitics and geostrategy. According to a recent article in The Economist magazine, he first put forward the idea of the Eurasian Heartland in 1904. He claimed that whoever controls the Eurasian Heartland, i.e. …

Every museum has a theme of some sort and after viewing a few exhibits sections, I begin to better grasp the overall structure and orient myself based on the curator’s thinking. The Kunaev living apartment museum was a bit of a challenge for me. Kunaev was the President of Kazakhstan…