In the course of my travels and interactions with people at all levels, the questions that I have been asked most frequently is - have you really managed to make an impact on policy decisions? How do you know that your research reaches the decision makers and is taken seriously by them? Are the right people reading your reports? A look at the response that the SFG series on cost of conflict has evoked answers questions very cogently.

A couple of years ago, I was attending an academic conference on global governance in Canada . The immigration officer asked one of the speakers to explain the purpose of his visit. The speaker said that he was there to address a conference on global governance. The immigration officer retorted: "Global what?"

A car priced at 2000 Euros is about to appear on India's roads very soon. India has about 40 million households in its bike economy people who can afford to ride a motorbike. Most of them can afford to purchase a small car at 2000 Euro, albeit some of them with loan from a bank. Even if one fourth of them decide to purchase the new car, there will be 10 million new cars in the market. This is 10 times the number of cars that come on the roads every year at present.

The decision by General Musharrf to force the Martial Law on Pakistan poses two serious questions. Is it the beginning of the end of the Musharraf regime? Or is it the beginning of the end of Pakistan? These two questions offer stark alternatives. If General Musharraf survives in power, he will dissolve Pakistan. If, on the other hand, he is removed from the scene, there is a good prospect for Pakistan to rejuvenate itself as a nation. The choice is crystal clear either the axis between the military and extremists will survive or the Pakistani nation will survive. It will not be possible for the two to co-exist for more than a few years.

The brutal crackdown of the Burmese military regime on protesting civilians and monks in September 2007 has at last brought international attention to a country which has been ruled and brought to the verge of collapse by the longest-serving military dictatorship in the world.

Three disparate things that I read recently made me sit up and take another look at the threat that biotechnology poses to the future of humankind. The first was an announcement made by scientists of the J Craig Venter Institute on their work on genome transplantation that enabled them to transform one kind of bacteria to another type....