THE SUNDAY blackout on Aug 4 in Greater Jakarta and parts of West Java was said to be the worst in many years.

AND so we have come to the end of the End of History. Remember Francis Fukuyama? He was the American professor who declared in a book of that title, that the ferocious competition of political “isms” – capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism – which so plagued the world and ravaged societies for much of the 20th Century was over, with the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.

To the uninitiated observer, the recent announcement of India’s civil aviation regulator that domestic airlines had registered growth of 2.62% in the first five months of 2019 in comparison to 2018 may suggest cloudless skies. The reality though is that India’s aviation sector is a bird flying with at least one damaged wing. The causes are many and include bad policy, slipshod regulation and slippery entrepreneurs. Sadly now, many of these ills are coming home to roost.