The eminent Indian historian, who travelled from the neighbouring country still often cast as Pakistan's oldest and most intractable of rivals, spoke of history as "a dialogue between the present and the assumed past".
When seemingly intractable conflicts arise, rival parties convene councils, or jirgas, of elders and third parties to seek solutions through consensus.
Less than three weeks later, the poll has had the opposite effect, stripping away the extra 40% of land – up to 36,000 sq km (14,000 sq miles) – its leaders had claimed and showcasing an intractable divide between the region's two rival power bases.
Finally, some of the seemingly most intractable cooperation problems in the world today are the conflicts between rival nations and different political, religious or ethnic groups.
The charges come at a time of a deep economic downturn and political discord in Ukraine, with a seemingly intractable power struggle between President Yushchenko and his main pro-Western rival, Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko.
From the 1860s to the 1890s, the rival Hatfield and McCoy clans waged America's most infamous and intractable family feud there.
Alfred von Tirpitz, Germany's Naval chief who realized at his first meeting with the Kaiser that he did "not live in the real world"—consciously exploited Wilhelm's envy and rage in order to extract the astronomical sums required to build a German Navy to rival Britain's, a project that created an arms race and became an intractable block to peace negotiations.
Indeed, in the search for innovative models to address seemingly intractable problems like climate change, we would do well to consider Bell Labs' example — an effort that rivals the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project in size, scope and expense.
Though administration officials said significant progress was made, especially on the economic front, the session also underscored the intractable nature of a long list of grievances between the world's richest country and its fastest rising rival.
Mathematically precocious since his school days at Winchester College and then Cambridge, he earned his office at the Princeton institute in 1953, aged 30, after proving that three rival formulations of nascent quantum theory were, in fact, one and the same and expanding them to tackle other intractable problems.
