Jaswant Singh At Brookings

We caught C-Span's coverage of Jaswant Singh's speech at Brookings yesterday. Fascinating stuff.

He spoke at length about mutual mis-perceptions between US & India, and the consequent problems this creates for notions like strategic partnership or natural alliance.

Of course, it doesn't help when our most intelligent diplomats, like Mr. Singh, are also the most unintelligible. For all the knowledge of foreign policy issues this blogger has, he had to strain to understand what Mr. Singh was really implying by his complex and oblique idea construction. We can only wonder what the Americans in the audience thought.

Why do Indian diplomats speak in riddles and not in plain English?