Hello and welcome to the intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

There's a mystique to mercenaries, hired guns with serious grit and flexible ethics.

The UN has formally outlawed them, but these days the shadowy business is becoming more accepted,

and in Africa there may be more of them than ever.

And history is littered with artists who died as paupers, their genius undiscovered.

It's happening less and less.

Artists are planning for their legacies early on,

and galleries are spending quite a lot of their time and effort on the dead.

First up, though, high in the Himalayas is a mostly barren 2100-mile frontier between India and China.

The border has long been the site of scattered disputes, but on Monday things took a deadly turn for the first time in 45 years.

At least 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese troops were killed in the region of Ladakh.

The world's most populous countries and Asia's largest nuclear powers are now seeking a way out of the situation while saving face.

This particular crisis erupted about a month ago, but the border dispute itself goes back a half century.

Shashong Joshi is our defense editor.

India and China fought a border war in 1962, in which China defeated India. And the most important

thing to understand is there isn't really a border at all. There are two competing lines that's

called the line of actual control. Each side disagrees where it is. And so over time,

you repeatedly have patrols bumping into each other, facing off,

and that will continue to happen as long as neither side agrees where in the mountains their actual frontier lies.

So how did things get so out of hand on Monday if these kinds of tensions are always there?

What happened is back in the spring, India delayed one of its own military exercises because of COVID-19.

China continued with its own drill on its side of the border, but the People's Liberation

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