No One’s Going to Budapest

 Something about Vladimir Putin might seem epically familiar to Indians. He resembles Duryodhana in his obsti­nacy, increasingly. He won’t be content with stopping the fighting—a war of territorial aggression he alone started and escalated—along the current frontlines. Russia wants defending Ukrai­nian troops out of the entire Donbas region so as to annex it. US President Donald Trump, days after imple­menting the Gaza peace deal and disappointing Ukrai­nian President Volodymyr Zelensky, came around to think the meeting with Putin in Budapest would be a waste of time since the Russian is not sincere about peace.

“Every time I speak to Vladimir, I have good conversations and then they don’t go anywhere. They just don’t go anywhere.” Alas, that’s true. So Russia’s largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, have been sanc­tioned. Rosneft, owned by the state, produces half of Russia’s oil and 6 per cent of the global output. Logically, the sanctions would raise international oil prices and also hurt Putin’s war machine, but it seems the Russian economy can stop but not the Kremlin’s war. Perhaps Zelensky is right: only the Tomahawks in his hands, capable of hitting Moscow and St Petersburg, will convince Putin of the error of his ways.

 Harper Lee’s Battle with the Truth

For more than 50 years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, Harper Lee was literary America’s biggest one-book wonder despite the fact that Mockingbird had become a school textbook and its hero Atticus Finch (portrayed by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film) a household name. In 2015, about a year before her death, Lee published Go Set a Watchman which killed the legend of Atticus. Lee showed the morally upright lawyer in the segregation­ist South as a bigot, with prejudices that shock his now-adult daughter. Watch­man, presented as a sequel, was actually the first draft of Mockingbird and a more honest book. This was the real Atticus, not the idealised version. Lee, with her roots in Monroeville, Alabama (Maycomb in the books), was a New Yorker most of her life. A new collection, The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays, shows again that her singular insight, or preoccupation, is how to love and hate but also live with people close to us despite their serious flaws, such as their (Southern) racism. The non-fiction in this collection is mostly forgetta­ble but Lee is at her sharpest when dealing with detail, as in her stories.

 New York Minutes

The final debate among the three mayoral contenders— Democrat Zohran Mamdani, Republican Curtis Sliwa, and independent Andrew Cuomo—turned nasty and personal. But the takeaway remains how conveniently undecided Mamdani still is on affordable housing, also on the ballot for November 4. Nor is he unwilling to work with President Trump on the cost of living while pledging to be mayor of New York’s Jews too. It should have shocked that a candidate had to be asked if he was anti-Se­mitic, but such is Mamdani’s double-digit lead. Noticeably, he is already climbing down from the socialist high horse. Else, he should prepare the city for bankruptcy.