Trump’s win similar to Modi’s in 2014
NEW DELHI: US president-elect Donald Trump could be more pragmatic once he assumes office and set aside some of the controversial pledges he made about trade deals and security alliances during his campaign, American experts Alyssa Ayres and Daniel Twining said at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on Saturday.
Ayres, senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Trump’s foreign policy stand was a “mystery at the moment”, but noted the real estate mogul had already rolled back campaign promises about bringing back waterboarding for terror suspects and prosecuting his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Twining, the director of the Asia Program at The German Marshall Fund of US, described Trump as a “rational man who can be persuaded” and an “American nationalist, not an isolationist”.
Speaking at the session on “The new US president and South Asia”, he said, “Watch what he does, not what he says.”
In some ways, Trump’s election win could be compared to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s victory in 2014 because both men wanted to shake up the existing “ossified” set-up, said Twining, who has worked with previous Republican administrations.
Trump’s outreach to Indian-Americans — including a campaign advertisement in Hindi that spoke of “Aab ki baar Trump sarkar” — was an indication that India could be a key element in his policy for the region, said Ayres, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia.
Twining noted that there had been a marked shift in the US military’s policy towards Pakistan as American soldiers had seen their colleagues killed in “Pakistan-sponsored” incidents of terrorism in Afghanistan.
“Trump is probably going to be harder on Pakistan as he doubles down on India,” Twining said.
Also, Trump could take a hard stand on China, and a planned build-up of the US Navy could allow Washington to move from a position of “speaking loudly and carrying a small stick” to a situation of wielding a “big stick”, he said.
Ayres expressed concern that the US could lose its place as a key player in climate change negotiations if Trump walked out of the Paris Accord. NEW DELHI: Deepak Chopra, known the world over as the mind and body healer who counts Oprah Winfrey, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian as friends, is trying to make medicines obsolete through technologies such as virtual reality (VR).
Progresses in this field give him hope that doctors’ prescriptions will change drastically.
“In a few years, this will replace traditional pharmaceuticals. You go to a doctor, he will tell you to go for a VR session,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on Saturday. “VR rewires the neural network, it influences the gene network. We are pioneering this in a big way.”
In that he is living up to the role of someone who switched tracks from practising traditional medicine to transcendental medication.
A trained physician specialising in endocrinology, Chopra migrated to the US in the 1970s. In 1985, he met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, known for having The Beatles among his disciples, in Washington, DC. At the time, Chopra was doing research in brain chemistry.
Yogi told Chopra he should look at Vedanta for more insights. That made the doctor switch tracks.
Things went smoothly until 1993, when Chopra exploded on the big American stage, thanks to an hour-long appearance on The Oprah Show. “It was the first time the mass audience in the US heard a diluted version of Vedanta,” he recalled.
Chopra, who has always used modern technology, is using VR to treat the trickiest of conditions, including phobia.
“VR is a good way to treat phobias, such as the fear of flying, by simulating conditions.” The same goes for eating disorders. “Give a person a feeling of fullness and you can teach them to eat right. If someone does not want to eat, you can make them feel hungry.”