Nirupama Rao

Here’s my updated writing portfolio, friends :

NIRUPAMA RAO - Writing Portfolio Nirupama Rao is a former Indian Foreign Service officer. She retired as Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, the senior most position in the Fo...

Zohran and Indian soft power.

“I contain multitudes,” wrote Walt Whitman, and Zohran Mamdani seems to live that truth. The son of Mira Nair, whose films carried India’s textures to the world, and Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar who traced Africa’s intellectual cartographies, Zohran stands at the confluence, a sangam, of worlds. Hindu and Muslim, Indian and Ugandan, New Yorker and Delhi-ite in equal measure, he carries within him the contradictions that define both his lineage and his politics.

There is something unmistakably Indian about the way he moves through New York boroughs— eating biryani and aloo dum with his hands, speaking Hindi with a fluency that surprises even the jaded cosmopolitan, quoting Nehru on democracy, and imbibing Bollywood beats on his victory lap. Yet there is nothing performative or with artifice, about it. He does not wear his Indianness draped across his shoulders like a flag; it is woven quietly into his being. In that unforced way , he embodies a kind of living soft power — not the state-sponsored kind, but the gentler persuasion that comes from his youthful exuberance .

Mamdani’s presence in American politics to me is an act of synthesis. From India, he carries the conviction that pluralism is a civilizational inheritance — that faiths, languages, and histories can overlap without erasing one another. From America, he absorbs the restless belief that democracy is an unfinished experiment, renewed each time someone insists on belonging. Between these two traditions, he stands as a bridge — a reminder that both nations, in their most generous moments, have imagined freedom not as uniformity but as coexistence.

His lineage is an evocative expression of all this . Mira Nair projected India’s emotional landscape through cinema; her son now projects its plural spirit through civic life. ; both do it by being unmistakably themselves. In them, India’s soft power is less a strategy than an inheritance — the quiet confidence that culture, when lived fully, persuades naturally.

Zohran Mamdani’s is a new chapter in the long conversation, that monsoon wedding between India and America, two democracies still discovering how to contain their multitudes.

Dhoom Machale.

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The United Nations Security Council was built for a different era. Its foundations reflect 1945, not the realities of today’s fractured and fast-changing world. With protracted conflicts and overstretched peacekeeping, and with political solutions often arriving too late, it is time to rethink how global peace is sustained.

In a lead editorial piece today for The Hindu , I explore why the world needs a Board of Peace and Sustainable Security (BPSS) — a new UN body under the General Assembly that complements, rather than competes with, the Security Council. The BPSS would connect peacekeeping with long-term political engagement, strengthen coordination across UN institutions, and help ensure stability endures after war.

This is not a call to tear down the existing system, but about updating it for our times. We need a structure that brings unity of purpose to peacebuilding, works with regional organisations, and ensures that peace is sustained, long after the headlines fade.

The Security Council was built by those who survived the last war. Any new architecture for peace should reflect the determination to prevent the next.

🕊️ Read and reflect — how must the UN evolve to meet the demands of the 21st century?

The case for a board of peace and sustainable security A ‘Board of Peace and Sustainable Security’ would fill the institutional void that now undermines conflict resolution