SINGAPORE: The results of the 2023 GCE A-Level examinations will be released at 2.30 pm on Feb 23, with students receiving their results from their schools. Details on the collection will be shared by the respective schools, the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board (SEAB)Continue Reading
Sliced offers a twist on traditional fish soup. Instead of the usual Teochew or Cantonese-style fish soups, the guys developed a fish broth made by brewing sea bass bones, anchovies, vegetables and garlic for more than six hours. No seasoning or milk is added. They also offer a Japanese-inspired dashi made with bonito flakes and more.
“Everyone has their favourite fish soup stall or traditional flavour that they like. But here we want to build a broth based on what we like and what we feel people will like,” shared Wong.
To “break from the norm”, they also decided to shine the spotlight on the fish farm’s poster fish – sea bass – which isn’t commonly used for fish soup.
“Many people say sea bass is not nice or has a muddy taste, but not if it is farmed well. We love it and we want you to try it. If it is good enough for Michelin-starred restaurants, why not for fish soup?” said Wong.
Sliced uses sea bass that are around 3kg as the meat is most ideal for fish soup. The bigger ones will be tougher, said Goh.
Sliced also offers the usual batang fish soup, as well as seafood soup using la la and prawns. There are plans to introduce specials such as wild-caught local fishes like seabream and orange spotted grouper in future.
BUSINESS HAS BEEN SLOW
Since Sliced opened late December, business has been rather slow due in part to their “ulu”, or remote, location (Wong has a penchant for opening F&B establishments in areas with low footfall). It doesn’t help that the coffeeshop they are in is closed on Sundays.
“We need the weekend crowd. We are speaking to the landlord to see if we can open on Sundays,” said Wong.
They’ve also had to offer more affordable options to cater to the working crowd following feedback that their sea bass soup, previously priced from S$8, was a tad steep.
“There are a lot of foreign workers in this area and to them, price point is very important. So now we have a small portion that starts from S$6. We also added batang fish soup, which starts from S$4, to our menu,” shared Wong.
“We’re a local fish farm, so we don’t have batang (which is wild-caught). But no choice, I have to offer batang to feed the crowd.”
THE MENU
SEOUL: About 20 per cent of South Korea’s trainee doctors said on Friday (Feb 16) they would resign effective on Tuesday to protest a government plan to admit more students to medical schools, saying this would hurt the national health insurance scheme. Representatives of the trainees, who work at theContinue Reading
Before she had her head covered in liquid mould, Chantalle thought the experience was going to be “relaxing”.
“I really thought I was going to enjoy the process. When the mould mixture was applied on my neck, in my ears, and then over my eyes, it began to feel very scary and I started to freak out a little. I didn’t expect to react that way. It feels like you’re in a coma,” recalled Chantalle.
The removal of the hardened mould was another challenge.
“While removing the mould, the (area around the nostrils) shifted, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. The mould was also very tight, and it was like being trapped inside. That was another level of fear,” she said.
Chantalle broke down in tears the moment the mould was removed and the crew members were heard calming her down.
“I think I would do better if I have the chance to try this again,” said Chantalle at the end of the video.
At least the traumatic experience paid off. Here’s the final product in Kill Sera Sera’s first episode:
Singapore-based studio Fntastic announced its closure on Dec 12, just five days after the launch of its highly-anticipated game The Day Before flopped.
Like Skull and Bones, the game was an open-world massively multiplayer online (MMO) game and reportedly was among digital distribution service Steam’s most wishlisted games. It is now one of the 10 worst-reviewed games of all time on the platform.
Skull and Bones could, however, help Singapore’s gaming industry chart new waters.
According to data by market research company YouGov, three-quarters of the country’s population play video or mobile games, and among those aged 18 to 24, this jumps to 90 per cent.
Last year, Singapore claimed its first SEA Games e-sports gold medal and also hosted the first Olympic Esports Week.
The government has several initiatives in place to spur the development of games in Singapore, like the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA)’s INVIGORATE and Games Solution Centre (GSC).
“Singapore’s gaming industry has enormous growth potential with 45 per cent of the world’s gamers based in Asia,” Mr Chong Yang Chan, managing director at data integration and analytics company Qlik, told CNA last year.
Mr Chong then pointed out that for a “nation of gamers”, there are a limited number of homegrown games.
“For Singapore game developers, scaling up highly playable games for an international audience remains the primary challenge,” he explained, adding that local talents should be nurtured and supported.
Skull and Bones might be a step in the right direction, according to Mr Wong.
“It’s definitely a step-up because we’ve never had a triple-A game come out of Singapore before,” he said. “Even if it had a troubled development cycle, it is still something worth celebrating.”
Mr Wong hopes the game will succeed, as it could pave the way for future blockbuster games to be made locally.
“We do have the talent and the skill set to make games like that. We just often don’t have the budget or the resources to do so,” he added.
“Whether the game does well … it’s not relevant to the fact that it’s definitely the first of its kind and hopefully, it will pave the way for more to come in the future.”
Never believe what bipartisan foreign policy establishment hacks say about China and Russia. They don’t believe what they say, either. The Blob (as Obama aide Ben Rhodes called it) learned through generations of strategic blunders that if everyone closes ranks and sticks to the same story, its members will survive a strategic disaster of any magnitude with their careers intact.
The same principle explains why not a single American banker went to jail after the subprime collapse of 2008, the biggest fraud in all financial history. The Blob’s logic is simple: If you go after one of us, then you have to go after all of us, and who will be left to put things back together?
Whether or not it was right for America to go abroad seeking monsters to destroy in Moscow and Beijing, the way we went about it was abominably stupid.
“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared,” Machiavelli advised.
Washington has wounded Russia and China but not disabled them, setting in motion a tragic sequence of responses that in the worst case will lead to war, but more likely will leave the United States with vastly diminished strategic standing.
The rise of China and the resilience of Russia have persisted through serried waves of tech restrictions, $125 billion of NATO support for Ukraine and an unprecedented sanctions regime against Russia, including the seizure of $300 billion in reserves, among other measures.
The Black Legend propounded by the Blob states that China is on the verge of invading Taiwan because its Communist leaders hate democracy, and because it wants to distract its citizens from their economic misery. It claims that Vladimir Putin wants to revive the Russian Empire and invaded Ukraine because it “is a country that for decades has enjoyed freedom and democracy and the right to choose its own destiny.”
In fact China has bracing economic challenges, but no crisis, and no widespread popular discontent. It wants to preserve the status quo, barring a Taiwanese move toward sovereignty, which is all but ruled out by the results of Taiwan’s national elections this January.
China is a formidable strategic competitor, but its global plan centers on dominating key industries and export markets rather than military deployments – and that plan is proceeding at a rapid clip, despite American efforts to hobble it.
Russia made clear for a decade that it would not tolerate the extension of NATO’s boundaries to its border with Ukraine, as the late Henry Kissinger, former Ambassador to Moscow and now CIA Director William Burns, and others repeatedly warned.
Vladimir Putin declared on the eve of his invasion of Ukraine, February 23, 2022: “If deployed in Ukraine, [NATO weapons] will be able to hit targets in Russia’s entire European part. The flying time of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Moscow will be less than 35 minutes; ballistic missiles from Kharkov will take seven to eight minutes; and hypersonic assault weapons, four to five minutes. It is like a knife to the throat.”
The Biden Administration believed the Russian economy would collapse under US sanctions. In March 2022 President Biden declared, “The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half.”
Russia’s economy is not only larger today than it was two years ago, but has increased production of weapons up to tenfold, producing seven times more artillery shells than the combined West, by Estonian Intelligence estimates. Some 70 percent of casualties are inflicted by artillery, and Russia has an overwhelming advantage, as well as superior tactical air support and offensive missiles and drones.
Russia also produces 100 main battle tanks a month, while Germany produces 50 per year. With five times Ukraine’s population, Russia will win a war of attrition barring some catastrophic blunder.
How did Russia do this? China, India, Turkey, and other countries transformed their trade and financing profiles to support the Russian market. China’s exports to Russia nearly tripled from prewar levels. India became Russia’s top customer for oil and doubled its exports of machinery to Russia during 2023. Turkey and the former Soviet republics became conduits for unreported exports to Russia.
Ukraine is short of artillery ammunition and air defense systems. Russia’s cheap, Iranian-designed Shaheed drones are now penetrating Ukraine’s air defenses and hitting military installations and critical infrastructure. The United States doesn’t have enough inventory to keep Ukraine supplied.
Russia is gradually achieving its stated objective, namely to de-militarize Ukraine. Ukraine’s manpower resources are thin, and the military is putting 50-year-old soldiers into the front lines. Last October, a Zelensky aide told Time that even if the West provided more weapons, “We don’t have the men to use them.”
None of these facts is contested, but the Blob’s enthusiasm for the Ukraine War increases in inverse proportion to its prospects for success. It is considered downright dangerous to question the wisdom of the war: Bill Kristol proposed to bar Tucker Carlson from returning to the United States after his projected interview with Putin.
Having called out the bear and gotten mauled, the Blob knows what consequences it may face. Germany is in recession after the cutoff of cheap Russian gas supplies pushed up the cost of energy, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz has an approval rating of 17 percent. France’s President Macron polls at 23 percent.
Having exacted Nibelungentreue (absolute, unquestioning loyalty) from reluctant NATO allies to pursue the war, Washington faces a populist revolt led by Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and the National Rally in France.
Heads should roll, or at least careers should abort. But the greater its blunders, the stronger the Blob’s solidarity. They have a story, and they will stick to it.
Ukraine, to be sure, is a warm-up act for the main strategic event of the next decade, namely America’s contention with China. China now buys more oil from Russia than from Saudi Arabia, and has nearly tripled exports to Russia by official count (and probably much more through third parties), but it has stayed on the sidelines, allowing Russia to do the bleeding.
With three times more manufacturing capacity than the United States, and a significant lead in automated manufacturing, China has made itself a fortress bristling with thousands of satellite-guided anti-ship missiles, perhaps a thousand modern aircraft, formidable electronic warfare capabilities, and other means of dominating its home theater. Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute wrote on January 4:
While select munitions stockpiles do exist, the war in Ukraine has shown that past munitions requirements based on rosy war assumptions have vastly underestimated the need for volume in modern warfare. According to RTX, the prime contractor for the SM-6, the existing SM-6 stockpile sits somewhere north of 500 missiles. This is not nearly enough for a drawn-out conflict with any peer adversary and potentially any sub-par one, too.
Beijing is well aware of our shortfalls as is evidenced by China’s rapid expansion and investment in its missile forces. China’s ground-based missile forces have nearly doubled in the last decade, and the Pentagon estimates that the PRC has stockpiles of thousands of missiles in reserve, all as part of a strategy to mass fire and overwhelm US warships in a potential conflict.
The ongoing skirmish between Houthi guerrillas and the US Navy in the Red Sea was a spectacle that allowed Beijing to watch and assess U.S. anti-missile capabilities. The outcome is alarming. The destroyer USS Gravely resorted to its Phalanx Gatling guns to destroy an incoming cruise missile only four seconds from hitting the ship, implying that its missiles failed to intercept the attacker.
An American destroyer carries about 100 anti-ship missiles. China claims to have an automated factory that can produce 1,000 cruise missiles per day. That’s unverified, but China has plants that assemble more than 1,000 electric vehicles a day; I visited a Chinese facility that produced 2,400 5G base stations a day with just 45 workers.
The US Navy is massively outgunned in the South China Sea. American strategists spin scenarios of Taiwanese resistance against a D-Day-style landing across the 70 miles of the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese are not stupid enough to send a slow-moving flotilla against Taiwan, not when they have the capacity to sink anything that floats on the surface within 1,000 miles of the island.
Fortunately, a confrontation over Taiwan is unlikely after the January elections, which returned the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party to the presidency, but with a 40 percent rather than a 57 percent majority as in the last election. The new People’s Party holds the balance of power, and its leader holds the presidency of Taiwan’s parliament. Beijing appears satisfied with the resulting political gridlock.
The prevailing narrative in the Blob is that China is likely to attack Taiwan because of Xi Jinping’s obsession with personal prestige, and because it would distract from China’s internal economic problems. On February 6, Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins University and Michael Beckley of the American Enterprise Institute wrote of China that “many of the conditions that once enabled a peaceful rise may now be encouraging a violent descent.”
China has economic problems, to be sure. But they are high-class problems to have. When Deng Xiaoping began the reforms in 1979 that increased the size of China’s economy 16-fold in real terms (according to the World Bank estimate), only 3 percent of Chinese had tertiary education. Today’s number is 63 percent, on par with Germany.
China graduates about 1.2 million engineers and computer scientists each year, compared with slightly over 200,000 for the United States. Chinese universities by most international surveys are at or close to par with the United States.
Only 16 percent of China’s population was urban in 1979, compared with 64 percent today. China moved 700 million people from the countryside to the city and turned subsistence farmers into industrial workers, propelling a 40-year boom in urban property prices.
Chinese households have 70 percent of their wealth in property, and the cost of housing in Tier 1 cities has become prohibitive. Shifting investment away from property to industry is a wrenching and disruptive business, and the Chinese authorities went about the transition with characteristic heavy-handedness. China’s housing sector is in distress, but that is the least interesting part of the story.
With a declining workforce, China needs to raise productivity through automation, and export its labor-intensive industries to countries with younger populations. It has to shift the focus of investment from property (required to absorb the mass migration from the countryside) to industry, and it has to upgrade its industry.
One might say that China is in crisis, but China has always been in crisis. Uniquely among the world’s nations, its economy, built on a flood plain of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, has always required enormous investment in water management for irrigation, flood control, and transport.
Today China has marshaled its resources in a massive effort to overcome Washington’s efforts to limit its access to advanced technology. The cost of achieving semiconductor independence in the face of US sanctions is substantial. China is building 22 chip fabrication plants and expanding others, at a cost of perhaps $50 billion, roughly equivalent to the annual CapEx of the CSI 300 Index (roughly comparable to America’s S&P 500 Index).
Although Beijing subsidizes chip production heavily, the cost of duplicating large parts of the semiconductor industry in China will challenge the bottom lines of the companies involved.
China stunned American policymakers in September when Huawei released a smartphone powered by a home-produced 7-nanometer chip capable of 5G operation, an event that Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo called “incredibly disturbing.” According to news reports, China is on the cusp of producing 5-nanometer chips, only one generation behind the best that Taiwan and South Korea can make.
American experts didn’t think this was possible, because it isn’t economical to use older lithography equipment to make high-end chips. China doesn’t care about the economics, because the externalities of high-end chip production (in the application of artificial intelligence to manufacturing, logistics, and services) more than outweigh the costs.
America’s tech war with China has succeeded in imposing significant costs on China’s economy, cutting off in my guesstimate somewhere between 0.5 percent and 1 percent of its annual GDP growth. But this has only slowed China’s juggernaut, not stopped it.
Despite the costs, China leapfrogged Japan and Germany to become the world’s largest exporter of autos. It dominates the production of telecommunications infrastructure and solar panels, as well as steel and other industries. Its enormous investment in semiconductor fabrication will likely give China a dominant position in so-called legacy chips, which comprise 95 percent of the world market.
Meanwhile, China has doubled its exports to the Global South since 2017 and now exports more to developing countries than it does to all developed markets combined. Its export drive is supported by about $1.5 trillion of credits and investment through the Belt and Road Initiative. It is building digital broadband through the whole of the developing world, with transformative effects that lock many countries into China’s sphere of economic influence.
America’s efforts to “de-risk” import dependence on China have only diverted trade flows to the US by way of middleman countries that depend in turn on China. As International Monetary Fund economists wrote last November, “Countries replacing China tend to be deeply integrated into China’s supply chains and are experiencing faster import growth from China, especially in strategic industries.
Put differently, to displace China on the export side, countries must embrace China’s supply chains.”
Tariffs on Chinese goods and related measures to reduce America’s import dependency on China have made the rest of Asia (and to some extent Latin America as well) all the more dependent on Chinese supply chains.
The view of the United States from Beijing is grim. CPC leaders know that China must transform itself or suffer the deleterious consequences of an aging population. In China’s view America’s attempts to restrict Chinese access to high-end semiconductors, the building blocks of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, constitute an effort to destroy China, not to restrict its access to military technology.
By injuring China without disabling it, Washington has given China an incentive to undermine American interests wherever convenient. This is obvious in the Middle East, where China sees an opportunity to “exhaust” the United States, as Prof. Lui Zhongmin said in a February 6 interview.
The Blob’s blunders are so comprehensive, so thorough and so damaging that there is no short-term fix to the damage that the United States will suffer as a consequence. That does not necessarily portend the end of American primacy on the world stage. The loss of Vietnam entailed a devastating blow to American prestige, to the point that much of the US and the European elite believed that the Soviet Union would win the Cold War.
That didn’t happen, because America responded to its strategic setbacks by reinventing warfare. In order to do so we invented the Digital Age. In 1973 Russian military technology, especially in the decisive field of air defense, was the best in the world. By 1982 American avionics and smart weaponry had turned the tables. America’s capacity to innovate remains our greatest asset.
We need to take stock soberly of our position and correct the policy errors that left us without the capacity to produce enough 155mm shells to supply our allies, let alone make hypersonic missiles. We need a defense driver for high-tech R&D and manufacturing on the scale of the Kennedy Moonshot and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.
I proposed a plan for accomplishing this in a 2023 monograph for the Claremont Institute, “Restoring American Manufacturing: A Practical Guide.” I am confident that this is the right policy, because we have done it three times before: During World War II, during the 1960s, and during the 1980s.
What we have done before, we can do again. We cannot stop the rise of China. But we can rise faster.
David P. Goldman is deputy editor of Asia Times and a Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute. This article was first published by The American Mind and is republished with permission.
“Quite frankly, I wasn’t looking at the world when we set out to make this movie,” Yamazaki said in a recent interview. “A lot of our team members said, ‘Oh, it’s Godzilla, The whole world is going to see this. You have to treat it differently.’ I told them all: ‘This is a small budget film made for a certain audience.’ They’ve proved me wrong and I’m very happy that they did.”
Much has been made of the pairing of Oppenheimer and Barbie, but the better double feature for Christopher Nolan’s film might be Godzilla Minus One. Across seven decades of movies, Godzilla has been deployed in a variety of ways. But Godzilla Minus One returns to the essential nature of Godzilla as a sober symbol of nuclear holocaust and atomic trauma.
In the 1954 original, Godzilla is woken by hydrogen-bomb testing. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka once said: “The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the bomb. Mankind has created the bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind.”
Ironically, that Godzilla didn’t reach American audiences at the time. The version released in the US was heavily edited and stripped of much of political themes. Raymond Burr, a Canadian actor, was inserted in new footage.
For some Western moviegoers, Godzilla Minus One is a truer introduction of Godzilla, one of the movies’ greatest and grandest metaphors, than ever before.
“One of the many interpretations of Godzilla, through the evolution of the series of films over the years, has been forgotten – which is the original interpretation,” says Yamazaki. “Given the current state of affairs, what the world is going through right now, I thought it was very important that message not be forgotten. My intent was to put a spotlight on what Godzilla represented.”
In Godzilla Minus One, just as WWII is ending, Godzilla is growing. He begins appearing off the coast of Tokyo. For a kamikaze pilot Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), who didn’t kill himself in battle, confronting Godzilla offers a chance for redemption. When Koichi returns to Japan, he finds his parents dead and the city in ruins. Meanwhile, American bomb tests on Bikini Atoll are fuelling Godzilla’s power.
Recent Hollywood versions of Godzilla have put the kaiju into less Japan-centric contexts. The last was 2021’s Godzilla Vs Kong. Legendary Pictures, which licenses the character from Toho, will on Mar 29 release with Warner Bros Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. If not for its coming debut, Godzilla Minus One might still be playing in theatres. It bowed out of cinemas in late January after the one-week run of a black-and-white version.
But unlike more broadly blockbuster-styled Godzilla films, Godzilla Minus One is rigorously rooted in a Japanese perspective. Some have lamented that Oppenheimer, in staying close to J Robert Oppenheimer’s story, leaves out any Japanese experience of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But what’s absent of Oppenheimer is everywhere in Godzilla Minus One.
Yamazaki has only seen an English version of Oppenheimer; the film hasn’t yet been released in Japan. But he believes it’s telling that both he and Nolan were separately drawn back to the dawn of the nuclear era.
Juggernaut BooksOn an autumn day in 1576, a Mughal princess led a cohort of royal women on an unprecedented voyage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
It was the first time in Mughal India that a woman had gone on the sacred pilgrimage called the Hajj that is considered to be one of the five pillars of Islam.
At the age of 53, Gulbadan Begum – daughter of Babur, founder of the Mughal empire – and 11 women from the royal household – left the confines of a harem in Fatehpur Sikri to set off on a journey that would stretch across six years.
But details of this remarkable journey are missing from the records, possibly due to acts of omission by male court historians eager to preserve the “modesty and sanctity” of the women travellers and their pilgrimage, say historians.
Gulbadan’s pilgrimage to Mecca was marked by acts of bravery and kindness, but also rebellion, as author and historian Ruby Lal notes in her book, Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan, due to be released later this month.
Even though Gulbadan is regarded as the first and only female historian of the Mughal empire, having chronicled her life experiences in the Humayun-nama, the book curiously lacks details about her journey. In fact, her book is incomplete, with several pages missing.
“Gulbadan was writing at a time when it was common for chroniclers to make copies of works written by royals. But not a single complete copy of Gulbadan’s book exists,” says Lal, who has pieced together the elusive details of the Mughal princess’s trip through her own dedicated research by delving into Ottoman history, Persian and Mughal manuscripts and various other sources.
“The silence around such a powerful woman’s one-of-a-kind voyage speaks volumes,” says Lal.
Gulbadan – which roughly translates to rose-hued skin – was born in Kabul in 1523 to Dildar Begum, emperor Babur’s third-oldest wife. At the time of her birth, her father was miles away, planning his conquest of Hindustan, as the Indian subcontinent was then known.
The princess would soon get used to seeing her father during the brief visits he made in between the many wars he fought and this separation would mark almost all of her relationships with the powerful men in her family – her father, her half-brother Humayun, and later on, her nephew Akbar.
While the men were away fighting bloody battles for dominance over lands far and wide, Gulbadan grew up in the company of strong women – the emperor’s mother, aunts and sisters, his wives and their daughters. They played important roles in courtly affairs, acting as confidantes and advisers to kings and princes.
The little princess’s childhood was also marked by movement – at the age of six, she became the first Mughal girl to travel from Kabul to Agra after her father captured the territory. She would make the journey back to Kabul, the land of her childhood, as a married woman after her family was driven out of Hindustan by the Afghan king Sher Shah Suri.
These journeys stretched on for months, and Gulbadan and other royal women would camp in tents, travel in palanquins and on horseback across deserted mountainous terrain, braving enemies, thieves and the elements.
“Mughal women were used to a peripatetic lifestyle,” says Lal. “They were constantly migrating to new places or living in temporary camps as they travelled with their men to wars.”
This itinerant itch is probably what led the Mughal princess to ask her nephew, Akbar, for permission to go on the Hajj in the late 1500s, says Lal.
Akbar’s greatest ambition was to establish the supremacy of the Mughal dynasty and as he made inroads towards this goal in Hindustan, he “began casting himself as a sacred figure, an infallible spiritual authority,” Lal writes in the book.
He also became the first Mughal ruler to order the seclusion of all Mughal women in a walled harem.
“The inviolability of the royal harem, penetrable only by the emperor – housing glorious and untouchable women… was meant to be proof of his near divinity,” Lal writes.
But this stasis made Gulbadan restless and so in October 1576, she and other royal women set off on the pilgrimage to Mecca, having told Akbar that it was a vow she had made to the divine.
Akbar enlisted the first two grand Mughal ships built by him – Salimi and Ilahi – for their voyage. The royal cohort also carried with them gold-lined chests filled with silver and gold pieces to distribute as alms, cash worth thousands of rupees and 12,000 “dresses of honour”.
“Ordinary men and women, old and young, and children lined the streets of the red sandstone Mughal capital, Fatehpur Sikri” to watch the departing cortege, Lal writes in her book.
But the trip was fraught with danger from the outset. The sea route to Mecca was under the control of the Portuguese, who were infamous for burning and plundering Muslim ships. The land route through Persia was equally unsafe – known to harbour militant groups who attacked travellers.
Gulbadan and her companions were stranded at the port of Surat for almost a year before they could secure safe passage from the Portuguese. They sailed for four weeks across the Arabian Sea to reach Jeddah and travelled on camels across hot desert sands for days to reach Mecca.
But the most interesting leg of Gulbadan’s journey came after she visited Mecca, as she and her cohort chose to stay back in Arabia for the next four years.
“Unanimous in their decision to leave the harem, they were likewise united in their choice to be vagabonds, mujawirs (spiritual sojourners) in the desert lands,” Lal writes in her book.
Here, Gulbadan and her companions dolled out alms, coins and other items, becoming the talk of the town. The Mughal princess’s benevolence incensed the ruling Ottoman Sultan, Murad, who saw these acts as being a testament to Akbar’s political might.
And so the Sultan sent out a series of three decrees to his men, ordering the eviction of Gulbadan and the Mughal ladies from Arabia.
Each time, Gulbadan refused to leave.
“It’s an unprecedented act of rebellion by a Mughal woman,” says Lal. “It shows how committed Gulbadan was to her desire for freedom.”
Finally, the Sultan, aghast at her stubbornness, used the castigatory term in Ottoman Turkish – na-meshru (an inappropriate or erroneous act) against the women, a term considered so severe that it invited the displeasure of Akbar.
It was after this decree that in 1580, Gulbadan and her cohort left Arabia and their convoy reached Khanwa, 60km (37 miles) west of Fatehpur Sikri, in 1582.
On her return, Gulbadan was hailed as a “nawab” (a ruler) and was even invited by Akbar to be the only female contributor in the Akbarnama – a chronicle of the grandeur of Akbar’s dynasty commissioned by the emperor himself.
But despite an entire section of the Akbarnama being dedicated to Gulbadan’s trip to Mecca, her time in Arabia and censure by Sultan Murad find no mention in the book, or anywhere else.
Getty ImagesThe Lunar New Year is traditionally a time for gathering with family and friends to eat and drink.
And for hundreds of years the drink of choice in China for these celebrations has been baijiu – a clear spirit made with fermented grains which packs a potent punch.
Baiju is also often drunk straight and at social events such as weddings and birthdays.
Its Alcohol-By-Volume (ABV) can top 60% – in comparison spirits like scotch whisky and tequila typically have an ABV of around 40%.
“Baijiu certainly still has its place in Chinese liquor consumption, even among young consumers,” says Allison Malmsten, public research director at Daxue Consulting.
It accounts for well over 90% of China’s spirits sales, with annual sales of around $160bn (£127bn).
However, in recent times drinks from abroad have been growing in popularity in what is the world’s biggest spirits market.
In 2022, sales of whisky in China were valued at $2.3bn, according to market research firm Euromonitor International.
That figure is expected to almost triple by 2027 as the whisky market there is expected to grow at around five times the rate seen globally.
Those sales are being driven by young, middle class, urban, educated and increasingly female drinkers.
Many of them are shunning baijiu in favour of less alcoholic spirits from outside China, according to Ms Malmsten.
The growth in demand for whisky in particular, has helped encourage international brands to open distilleries across China.
Amongst them is French drinks giant Pernod-Ricard, which owns the Jameson Irish whiskey brand as well as Beefeater Gin and Absolut Vodka. It is investing $140m in a production base near Emei Mountain in Sichuan Province, Southwest China.
UK-based rival Diageo also opened a plant in the Yunnan Province in December and is currently trialling production with plans to be fully up and running later this year. The company is also opening an Asia-Pacific Innovation hub in Shanghai.
“We are here for a long-term play,” Managing Director for Diageo in China Atul Chhaparwal told the BBC.
He is bullish about the market, saying the demand is so strong that is space for everyone.
“Given the vibrancy of the overall whiskey category in China, there will be enough space for single malts, for blended whiskies, for local players, for imported whiskey, to grow,” he says.
“Whiskey currently makes up less than 2% of the total spirits consumed in China, which indicates that how much room headroom everyone has to play in here,” he adds.
That includes homegrown distilleries which have sprung up across the country. Pernod estimates there are between 30 and 50, with many still being built.
The whisky market is also expanding in other parts of Asia.
“The growth is immense”, spirits retailer Maison du Whisky’s Jamie Li told the BBC in the French company’s store in Singapore.
Mr Li, who heads sales to South Korea, Japan and China expects to see a boost during the Lunar New Year as Chinese tourists visit Singapore.
“Chinese New Year is kind of like Christmas in Europe – it’s festive, people want to spend money, buy nice gifts and have something memorable. So whisky is part of their memory,” he says.
There is also a growing number of collectors who “buy and hold” bottles of whisky which are expected to rise in value.
But it’s not all smooth sailing for China’s whisky market warns Ms Malmsten.
“The local distilleries are still in the early stages. 80% of the whisky has only been aged for two years or less. There’s a lack of barrels and a lack of professionals to help with production,” she says.
Still, if the success of China’s wine industry is anything to go by, ‘watch this space’ when it comes to whisky.
“What we saw with China’s wine industry is that once it started to mature, the demand for Chinese wines skyrocketed. In our recent survey, we found that after French wines, Chinese wines are the second most preferred,” Ms Malmsten says.
“As China’s whisky production matures, we might see a similar rise in demand for domestically produced whisky as well.”
Last month, Hamas ambushers fired a rocket-propelled grenade into a Gaza Strip residential building where Israeli soldiers were laying explosives to blow up the place later. The RPG round detonated the explosives prematurely, brought the building down and killed 21 Israeli troops.
It was the largest one-day loss of life among Israeli troops so far in the four-month war. Beyond that, it highlighted the reality that rival forces are fighting hard even while American diplomats are busily trying to arrange a ceasefire and organize post-war peace talks.
Israel is dedicated to maintaining control of Gaza for the foreseeable future. Its forces are clearing a buffer zone inside the Gaza Strip border to put as much distance as possible between them and Hamas, which triggered the current combat by breaching the border fence between Israel and the territory.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also plans to station soldiers in the enclave after war’s end while setting up a cooperative government of Palestinians, aided by some sort of new international agency to supply food, fuel and other day-to-day necessities to civilians.
Hamas, while still fighting, is focusing on a more distant and perhaps limited scenario: to remain a player in a post-war period when United States-sponsored peace talks might take place. With its military control reduced in the face of Israel’s military onslaught, Hamas decided to respond to a US call for ways to ease the conflict in the short run and end it forever in the long run.
Hamas leaders provided mediators with a proposal for a ceasefire to last more than four months – time to facilitate an exchange of captives with Israel. It also demanded that Israel withdraw its forces from Gaza. In addition, Hamas has approached the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, to form a unified Palestinian government as their side’s participant in proposed long-range peace talks.
US President Joe Biden, eager for some kind of breakthrough, rejected the Israeli plan to effectively occupy Gaza. He termed the Hamas response “over the top.” However, he did not criticize Hamas’s alliance with the Palestinian Authority – in effect, did not reject the idea that Hamas might somehow survive the war as a partner in peace. That alone represented a policy reversal for Biden. At the war’s start, Biden fulsomely endorsed Israel’s effort to destroy Hamas altogether.
The incompatible goals of the warring contestants help explain why American-led negotiations to end the war are foundering. For Hamas, the issue is not only salvaging political influence but ensuring the physical survival of its leadership, which Israel has pledged to capture or kill.
For Netanyahu, political survival is also at stake. He is already being faulted for having underestimated Hamas’ military abilities. Agreeing to accept Hamas’s post-war survival would certainly end his time in power.
Biden has his own political needs, and trying to please both sides, Israeli and the Palestinian, gets in the way. At home, he is under fire from pro-Palestinian groups for backing Israel and from pro-Israeli constituents for trying to restrain Israel’s war tactics and influence post-war strategy. He would like to woo voters from each side to supports his reelection to the presidency this November.
In the meantime, it is being left to Arab countries, notably Egypt and Qatar, to corral the Palestinians into peace efforts.
The Americans are left to exercise influence on Israel, but Netanyahu seems unfazed by the prospect of resisting US pressure.
Rather than entertain Biden’s concerns over the deaths of thousands of civilians in Gaza, Netanyahu has simply pocketed Washington’s verbal support and aid without softening his hardline policies. At one point, he informed Biden that Israel was a “sovereign country” that no one could order around.
Last weekend, Biden requested that Netanyahu not invade Rafah, a city at the Egyptian border that is hosting displaced Palestinians, without first producing “a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the more than one million people sheltering there.”
Netanyahu responded by asking military officials to come up with a plan and by stepping up aerial bombing of Rafah.
Rather than taking Netanyahu to task publicly, Biden had anonymous White House surrogates express his frustration to a television network. The unnamed officials told the NBC-TV news that the President has been “venting his frustration” about his inability to influence Netanyahu, whom he referred to in insulting and vulgar language.
Netanyahu responded Tuesday by pulling out of US-mediated ceasefire negotiations in Cairo. “Israel did not receive in Cairo any new proposal from Hamas on the release of our hostages,” Netanyahu’s office announced. “A change in Hamas’s positions will allow the negotiations to advance,” it said, adding that the prime minister “will not give in to Hamas’s delusional demands.”
Netanyahu has long rejected Biden’s preferred option for future Israeli-Palestinian peace. Known as the two-state solution, it proposes to provide for Palestinian sovereignty in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Early in the war, Biden prolaimed that, “when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. In our view, it has to be a two-state solution.”
The two-state solution refers to a formula pushed by the US in the early 1990s. It was meant to create a Palestinian state. The plan disintegrated over time in the face of periodic Palestinian revolts that included terror attacks and the gradual entry of some 450,000 Israeli settlers into the West Bank. The process was especially encouraged by Netanyahu during his off-and-on terms as prime minister spanning fourteen years.
Israel dismantled its 21 settlements in Gaza in 2005, but maintained control of air and sea access as well as sharing with Egypt control of land routes into the territory.
Unable to persuade Netanyahu to agree to immediate and long-term Gaza solutions, Biden has started to signal his displeasure by applying indirect, related pressure on Netanyahu. He recently ordered the State Department to investigate whether Israel’s bombing of Gaza had used American-supplied weapons on civilian targets. Biden also placed economic sanctions on a small group of violent West Bank settlers.
Critics of Biden’s diplomacy regard such discrete moves as insufficient. Biden’s “harsh words for Netanyahu, if he even really said them, are nothing more than words,” Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a research fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, said in a television interview.
“At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is policy, and Biden’s policy has been unconditional support of Israel every step of the way,” Kenney-Shawa told the Al Jazeera TV news network.
“It’s all well and good for the president to say he’s concerned and wants things to happent,” remarked Matt Duss, executive vice president for the Center for International Policy, a research group in Washington, DC. “The actual policy is still unconditional support, and we’ve seen the results of that.”
The Netanyahu government seems unfazed by Biden’s subtle messaging or any other criticism. Michael Herzog, its ambassador to the US, told the Kan, an Israeli public broadcaster, that disputes with Washington has not reached an “historic level of tensions or some sort of crisis.”
He said Biden “maintains a critical dialogue with us that has quite a few questions about how we are conducting the war and the direction in which we are taking it. I do not foresee an end of aid. I don’t expect the US to try to force a ceasefire on us in Gaza.”
