The US President is not merely wreaking havoc but is seeking to shape a post-war Iran, ensuring that its economic recovery and reconstruction will be long and painful. As such, his rhetoric needs to be taken with deadly seriousness, says former Indian Foreign Service officer Gaddam Dharmendra in his Edit piece Trump wants to reshape Iran. Clearly, regime change is no longer on the US-Israel agenda, but their wish to send Iran back to the ‘Stone Age’ is playing itself out before the entire world. The danger, as always with the Iranians, is their tendency to overplay their hand, he writes.The war in West Asia is forcing India and the world to recalibrate its best-laid plans. If the Iran war continues and the supply of fertiliser ingredients is disturbed — about half of global food production depends on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser — the poor will return to the crosshairs, writes Editor-in-Chief Jyoti Malhotra in her weekly column The Great Game article Let’s reassure the migrants. The shrinkage in availability of small LPG cylinders is pushing migrant labourers back to their villages. In 2014, despite the astounding economic growth that PM Manmohan Singh had spawned, when his party lost power to Modi’s BJP — it was a time defined by harshness and cacophony and hope that the Modi government would restore some stability to the nation. Once again, that time is now, she writes.The Shia Muslim population in India came into limelight recently when thousands of miles from Iran, the Shias of Kashmir, Ladakh, Lucknow, Hyderabad and Bengaluru collected donations of every kind to send it to their community in the Middle East. However, the Sunni-Shia divide is deep-rooted in Uttar Pradesh. In spite of that, Lucknow’s Sunnis offered “quiet support” implying that they didn’t block the pro-Iran gestures. The Iranian embassy acknowledged the outpouring of help, writes senior journalist Radhika Ramaseshan in her Edit piece India’s Shia, BJP & Iran.The fifth edition of the ‘State of Working India’ report, published last month by Azim Premji University, reveals a startling statistic: 67% of all unemployed youth aged 20-29 are graduates. Why 11 million educated young Indians are squandering their most productive years, asks noted economist Ajit Ranade in his Edit piece Job crisis: Life in India’s great waiting room. A government clerk enjoys health cover, a pension, iron-clad job security and social prestige. No wonder the aspiring graduate chooses to wait, he writes.With the state of Punjab falling into an abyss of debt, drugs, unemployment, Punjab’s socio-economic and governance imperatives are now beyond the ability of any one individual or political party to surmount, writes Lok Sabha MP and former I&B Minister Manish Tewari in his Edit piece A human-made tragedy called Punjab. There is a need for a multi-stakeholder consensus to pull the state out of its endemic morass. It has remained submersed in a toxic loop of a “he said, she said” discourse for decades, with social media-driven reel culture now becoming the cherry on the proverbial cake, he writes.In a judgment delivered recently, a two-member Bench of the Supreme Court has a message for those who have converted from Hinduism and hope to continue availing the benefits of being a Scheduled Caste, especially relevant at a time when the country is getting ready for the Census, says former JNU Professor Surinder S Jodhka in his Edit article Caste bias persists after conversion. The Supreme Court verdict seems to reaffirm a sociologically flawed understanding of caste. Caste is not an attribute or identity that an individual or a group can choose on the basis of what they perceive to be good for them. Dalits who have converted to Christianity or Islam don’t figure among Scheduled Castes.