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859: BOOK REVIEW: BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF CYBER SECURITY V 2.0 BY BISWAJIT SAHU

 

By Air Marshal Anil Khosla

 

Cybersecurity has become essential to modern life as individuals, businesses, governments, and institutions increasingly depend on digital technologies. A key part of cybersecurity education is the human element. Technical security controls alone cannot eliminate cyber risk. Weak passwords, phishing, social engineering, unsafe browsing practices, poor access management, and inadequate awareness can all contribute to security incidents. A broad treatment of cybersecurity can help readers appreciate the relationship between technology, people, processes, and organisational policies.

The book “Bird’s-Eye View of Cyber Security v2.0,” written by Biswajit Sahu, addresses this important topic by offering a broad, accessible account of cybersecurity. The title suggests the author aims to offer readers a comprehensive survey of the cybersecurity field rather than focus on a single technical aspect.

Biswajit Sahu is a Sr. Cybersecurity Consultant at Starlight Data Solutions (Bengaluru), with prior roles as a security engineer, presales engineer, and security analyst in Indian cybersecurity firms.  The 134-page book (V2.0 edition, published March 2025, with paperback editions appearing in 2026) reflects his half-decade-plus industry experience and his work related to educating the cybersecurity community.

The book bridges the gap between foundational security concepts and the rapidly evolving technological frontiers reshaping domain defence. It is a concise, high-level map of the digital security landscape. The book systematically covers basic cyber hygiene, attack surface mapping, network security fundamentals, and Security Operations Centre (SOC) dynamics. 

The 2.0 version goes beyond conventional IT security to include key operational areas such as Industry 4.0/OT systems, the security of critical national infrastructure, and the integration of autonomous or AI-powered threat detection. Because Sahu focuses on this subject, the text stresses the need for organisations to prepare for the coming post-quantum cryptography (PQC) era, explaining that they must adapt before existing encryption standards become vulnerable to quantum attacks.

True to its title, the text offers a thorough macro-level survey without getting into detailed code or vendor-specific settings. It draws on practical experience in real-world situations across critical infrastructure, defence and intelligence sectors, and law enforcement systems. A major advantage of a wide-ranging cybersecurity reference is that it helps readers understand the overall security ecosystem. The book’s concise structure makes it easy for decision-makers, cross-domain managers, and technical generalists who need a quick introduction to current cyber resilience requirements.

The main potential limitation of a high-level cybersecurity book is that breadth can sometimes come at the expense of technical depth. Readers with substantial experience in penetration testing, digital forensics, security engineering, malware analysis, or incident response may need more specialised resources for practical and advanced study. Thus, the book is particularly valuable as an overview and foundation, while specialised texts and hands-on laboratories remain important for developing advanced skills.

The topic is particularly relevant because cyber threats keep evolving as technology advances. Nowadays, organisations place greater trust in cloud services, connected devices, digital payments, remote working arrangements, and online platforms. As a result, cybersecurity needs to include not only technological protections but also user awareness. An effective introductory book on this subject should prompt readers to view security as an ongoing process which involves prevention, detection, response, and recovery.

Bird’s-Eye View of Cyber Security v2.0 can be viewed as a work aimed at developing a wider understanding of cybersecurity and its importance in the digital era. Its broad perspective is potentially useful for readers who want to understand how different aspects of cyber protection fit together. For students and newcomers to cybersecurity, such an approach can provide a foundation for further exploration of specialised areas. The book is a practical, quick-read executive briefing. It is particularly well-suited for military/defence leaders transitioning into multi-domain digital security, corporate executives seeking high-level risk literacy, or practitioners needing a broad framework to align emerging tech with threat readiness.

 

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858: BOOK REVIEW: WALKING WITH NANAK BY HAROON KHALID

 

By Air Marshal Anil Khosla

 

Haroon Khalid’s Walking with Nanak is an unusual blend of travelogue, history, biography, folklore, and historical fiction. First published in 2016, it follows Khalid as he retraces places associated with Guru Nanak in present-day Pakistan, accompanied by his mentor Iqbal Qaiser. Its central achievement is presenting Nanak not only as a saint, but also as a son, husband, father, poet, traveller, philosopher, and friend.

Khalid, a Lahore-based anthropologist and journalist known for his work on Pakistan’s vanishing minority heritage, was drawn back to Nanak after encountering the Baburbani verses and realising how much of the Guru’s life unfolded on Pakistani soil. The author travels across Pakistan, visiting gurdwaras, shrines and other places associated with Nanak’s life. These locations include spaces of pilgrimage, abandonment and contested memory. The journey is therefore geographical only on the surface; more deeply, it explores how history survives or disappears in landscapes transformed by Partition, nationalism and religious majoritarianism.

The book’s most distinctive feature is its blending of fact, oral history, travel writing and fiction. Khalid deliberately fictionalises parts of Guru Nanak’s journey with Bhai Mardana, his Muslim companion and rubab player. He has described this as a conscious effort to understand “Nanak the man.”

Khalid’s approach is particularly effective because he does not try to reduce Nanak to a collection of miracles. Instead, he draws upon Nanak’s poetry, the Janamsakhis, oral traditions and the physical remains of his travels. The result is a portrait of a thinker whose spiritual message emerged through engagement with society rather than withdrawal from it.

This method is both the book’s strength and its principal vulnerability. Fiction allows Khalid to imagine Nanak’s conversations, doubts, relationships and responses to the world around him. It makes the historical figure accessible and emotionally immediate. At the same time, readers must remain conscious that the reconstructed scenes are interpretive rather than verifiable biography.

A particularly strong feature is Khalid’s attention to Punjab’s syncretic religious culture. Stories of Hindus visiting Muslim shrines, Muslims preserving memories of Sikh sites, and interactions between different religious traditions allow him to present Nanak within the broader cultural world of medieval Punjab, rather than treating Sikhism as something that appeared in isolation. The book therefore becomes as much a meditation on the history of the Punjab as it is a biography of Nanak.

The book’s slight weakness is its structure. The narrative moves between Nanak’s time, Khalid’s contemporary journey, and the history of the later Sikh Gurus. Some readers may find these shifts illuminating; others may find them cumbersome.

Khalid writes with patience, curiosity and empathy. His anthropological background helps him look beyond formal doctrine toward lived religion, local memory and the political uses of heritage. He is also attentive to the meaning of Sikh sites within a Muslim-majority Pakistan. This aspect is often neglected in purely architectural or devotional accounts.

The book is especially valuable for readers interested in Sikh history, Pakistan’s neglected heritage, Partition memory and South Asian religious pluralism. It demonstrates how travel writing can recover historical meaning from abandoned sites and how poetry can sometimes reveal a historical personality more vividly than conventional biography.

Khalid’s book is thoughtful, courageous and culturally significant. Its occasional structural looseness and reliance on imaginative reconstruction prevent it from being a fully authoritative historical study, but these same qualities give it warmth and accessibility. Walking with Nanak ultimately invites readers to move beyond inherited boundaries (between faiths, nations, history, and memory) and encounter Guru Nanak as a human being whose message remains relevant in an age of sharpened identities.

 

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857: Veer Guardian 2026 Brings Air Exercises in the Limelight

 

Discussion with Shivan Chanana on the “DefencePulse” program of WION TV  

Talked about  “Beyond Exercise Veer Guardian”:  Japanese fighter operates from Indian soil for the first time. Fighters fly together: India & Japan build greater air force interoperability. India and Japan are moving from air exercises to deeper synergy.

 

Link to the WION post:-

 

 

Inputs to the questionnaire from a journalist on exercise.

 

  1. What’s driving the jump in India’s exercise tempo in the last 12–18 months?

I don’t think there’s really a “jump” in the strict sense. India has been steadily engaging in bilateral and multilateral exercises with a wide range of countries as part of its defence cooperation and military diplomacy for years now. What has changed is media attention. These exercises are, in fact, a continuation of an established trajectory. India’s participation has also evolved and expanded in scope over time, a logical progression as its defence relationships and operational engagements grow.

 

  1. Given today’s volatile geopolitics, China’s assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and persistent border/maritime tensions—is India’s surge in joint exercises about deterrence, asserting power, or both?

In my view, it would be difficult to characterise these exercises primarily as being about either deterrence or power projection. At its core, India’s participation is an evolving, natural progression, increasing in scope and complexity as our forces mature and our partnerships deepen.

That said, these exercises do carry strategic and political signalling value. Globally, partners and adversaries alike read into who exercises with whom, and how often.  Highly complex, multi-domain drills (such as Malabar, Tarang Shakti, or Yudh Abhyas) signal that India has both high-end capability and coalition interoperability. Expanding exercise zones into the Western Pacific, the South China Sea, and deep into the Southern IOR asserts India’s status as a power capable of out-of-area contingency responses.

The exercises should therefore be seen in the broader context of India’s growing engagement with different countries and armed forces, rather than being attributed to a single strategic objective.

 

  1. Apart from geopolitical benefits, what are the military benefits for a country conducting these many exercises?

Beyond diplomacy and geopolitics, these exercises yield critical military-technical advantages. Exercises provide several direct military benefits:

    • They increase interoperability between participating forces, including communications, procedures, command relationships and tactical coordination.
    • They allow each force to learn from the other’s operational practices, training methods, logistics systems and tactical experience.
    • They build military-to-military familiarity and trust, which are particularly valuable during a crisis.
    • They expose personnel to unfamiliar operating environments, doctrines and equipment.
    • They improve the ability to conduct coordinated humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, maritime-security and evacuation operations.
    • They strengthen military solidarity and professional relationships among participating forces.

 

  1. How do these exercises fit into India’s broader alliance calculus balancing Quad engagements, SCO ties with Russia/China, and deeper drills with France/UK without slipping into a NATO-style bloc?

India engages in joint bilateral and multilateral exercises across a wide spectrum of partners, but that participation does not signal a drift toward any military alliance. Strategic autonomy remains a cornerstone of Indian policy, and historically India has never been part of a formal military alliance. Exercising with multiple, even competing, blocs simultaneously is entirely consistent with that autonomy; it is not a contradiction.  India’s model is closer to strategic autonomy with selective interoperability rather than a collective security model.

 

  1. What’s one clear sign this high tempo of exercises will last, not just a short spike? For example, more back-to-back drills, new first-time exercises with partners, or procurement/MRO deals linked to the platforms used in these drills.

These exercises are not ad hoc events. The proposals are drawn up for three-to five-year horizons and put up for in-principle approval, followed by detailed annual planning. Naturally, execution of the planned calendar depends on several factors. The mix of exercise partners (old and new) changes with the geopolitical landscape. These exercises are not intended to secure defence procurement deals. Dedicated platforms like DefExpo or Aero India serve that function. However, they do advertise and showcase exportable equipment.

 

  1. Where do you see the clearest line from exercise outcomes to procurement/co-production in the next 12–24 months?

Exercises primarily have an operational and training purpose. They can improve understanding of each other’s capabilities and operating procedures, but that does not mean that participation will automatically lead to a procurement or co-production agreement. Those decisions are driven by separate strategic, operational, technological and commercial considerations. The two tracks, operational exercises and acquisition, are largely separate and run through different processes and forums.

 

  1. Is it smarter for India to keep connections and allies across groups—Quad, SCO, France/UK rather than locking into one bloc like NATO, and does this exercise-heavy approach fit India’s non-aligned strategy better?

India engages with countries across different blocs based on mutual interest and benefit, not bloc allegiance. This approach is consistent with India’s long-standing emphasis on strategic autonomy. Maintaining defence relationships across different groupings gives India greater flexibility to cooperate with individual countries on areas of common interest without necessarily joining a formal military bloc.

 

  1. With drills stretching from the Bay of Bengal to the Western Pacific and new activities with Japan, Mongolia, the Philippines and others, is India subtly pushing back on China’s “String of Pearls,” and how does this change the South Asian geopolitical game?

I would not characterise India’s exercise engagements as being directed at any particular adversary. They are part of India’s broader defence cooperation with partner countries.

That said, the interoperability and logistical familiarity built through these exercises do enable operations across diverse geographies.

Clearly, a common strategic concern or adversary can incentivise closer defence cooperation, including joint exercises, between two or more countries. But that does not mean that every exercise should be viewed through that lens.

 

  1. India is deepening economic and diplomatic ties with both the US and China, while simultaneously building military power through these exercises, does this “engage all, prepare for all” approach work, or does it risk overstretch and mixed signals?

The sound policy is to engage everyone, including potential adversaries. International relations have no permanent friends or enemies; national interests and the geopolitical environment are dynamic and can change over time. India therefore has an interest in maintaining relationships across different groupings while building the capabilities necessary to protect its own interests. The challenge is to maintain that flexibility while ensuring that defence engagements remain aligned with India’s broader strategic priorities.

 

  1. With India-Japan air drills and other IAF exercises, which air-domain capabilities and platforms are being stress-tested, and what does that mean for spares, engines, and MRO in India?

These exercises have significant training and learning value, particularly in terms of operational procedures, interoperability and exposure to different methods of conducting air operations.

However, I would not describe them as placing extraordinary additional stress on the aircraft or leading to exceptional spare consumption. The flying and maintenance requirements associated with exercises are generally factored into the annual spare and maintenance support planning.

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Disclaimer:

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