India, Oct. 24 -- It's not often that one gets to read a book by a sitting diplomat, leave alone a sitting cabinet minister. So when a sitting External Affairs Minister decides to put pen to paper, it is big news. S Jaishankar's The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World is a meditation on the evolution of Indian foreign policy at a time of unprecedented changes in the global order. With a distinguished career in the Indian Foreign Service, which saw him handling the US and China portfolios before becoming Foreign Secretary, and then being appointed as India's External Affairs Minister by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year, his credentials are impeccable when it comes to dissecting India's options in an increasingly turbulent world. And he does so with a scholar's sincerity and a practitioner's panache in this book. The eight essays here are derived from talks he delivered over the last two years and cover topics as wide ranging as the shifting priorities of the US, the rise of China, the Indo-Pacific dynamic, nationalism and its discontents, the Mahabharata as a prism to evaluate Indian strategy, and post Covid-19 international realities. A few themes that are salient across sections are an important indicator of changing Indian foreign policy priorities....