On Afghan road, scenes of beauty and death

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A road that runs through a mountain gorge between Kabul and Jalalabad holds its own terrors. From the New York Times:

Sarobi, Afghanistan — Even in a nation beset by war and suicide bombings, you would be hard-pressed to find anything as reliably terrifying as the national highway through the Kabul Gorge.

The 40-mile stretch, a breathtaking chasm of mountains and cliffs between Kabul and Jalalabad, claims so many lives so regularly that most people stopped counting long ago. Cars flip and flatten. Trucks soar to the valley floor. Buses play chicken; buses collide.

The mayhem unfolds on one of the most bewitching stretches of scenery on all the earth. The gorge, in some places no more than a few hundred yards wide, is framed by vertical rock cliffs that soar more than 2,000 feet above the Kabul River below. Most people die, and most cars crash, while zooming around one of the impossible turns that offer impossible views of the crevasses and buttes. More:

50 reasons to marry a Bengali man

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From The Telegraph, Calcutta:

10. They expect women to serve them at the dinner table. At least she should be urging him on to the right bowls.

11. They expect the women will carry the dirty dishes to the sink, clear the table and put away the remnants in the right containers.

12. If they do put the food away, the fridge looks like a battlefield, with several things dismembered, dismantled and oozing liquids. In any case, they would never clean the refrigerator. Ditto for the cooking gas.

13. When they are drunk they invoke Robi Thakur. Then they tend to go for the cosmic, namely, Debabrata’s rendition of Akash bhora surjo tara, after which they have dinner.

14. But then when they are sober why are they still discussing Sachin Tendulkar versus Sourav Ganguly, and backing Dada to win?

15. In public, they admire Nandita Das. In secret, they want to be Salman Khan.

16. Rare is the Bengali man who looks good in a formal suit. He stops midway into it. He looks square. Or round. But proud. If you ask him why, he is likely to say that intellect is inversely proportional to height in his part of the world. He can be smug, very smug. More:

50 reasons not to marry a Bengali woman

45. She tries too hard not to look Bengali. She will never have the Punjabi oomph, or the south Indian sensuality. But she will persist in trying. What’s more, she will tell you with a big smile that so and so storewallah thought she was a Punjabi today. Contradict at your own risk!

44. Like the accomplished women of Pride and Prejudice, they all sing Rabindrasangeet and Nazrulgeeti, dance, paint and recite poetry. God help you if she takes her talent seriously.

43. She will never get along with your mother. It is a matter of principle.

42. They will pet and spoil their husbands like overgrown babies and then they’ll ask you not to be a mamma’s boy. The truth is they’d rather you be a “wifey’s pet”.

41. They hate being second to your mother but are still far too controlled by their own mothers.

40. They remove gift wrappers for hours and then preserve the paper under the mattress. If she had her way, she would keep the sellotape too.

39. She won’t leave a single mirror free of stick-on bindis. More:

To which Anvar Alikhan in Outlook adds some more:

1) She will give you a silly pet name (Oltu, Poltu, etc); 2) She will buy you a monkey cap and bed socks for winter; 3) She will feed you Hilsa, which is a unique experience, like trying to eat barbed wire through a mouthful of fish mousse:4) She will throw away your precious World War II movie collection, and replace it with her own collection of Tarkovsky films…More:

In India, designer hairstyling makes the cut

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Carla Power in Time:

It’s like a fish market,” says Jawed Habib, fondly surveying the Sunday-afternoon hubbub of his south New Delhi hair salon, one of 12 he runs in the Indian capital alone. Heaving with stylists, JAWED HABIB PRO TEAM emblazoned on their bold red-and-black shirts, the salon recalls less the chaos of a fish market than the disciplined efficiency of a well-run kitchen. His golden quiff defying gravity, the 46-year-old Habib serves as both head chef and maître d’, helping a matron into her chair, judging the angle of a junior stylist’s cut, checking the helmet of sludgy green henna drying on an elderly gentleman’s hair and moustache.

Habib’s salons aren’t India’s poshest, but that’s not the point. Over the past decade, the New Delhi native has brought branded hairstyling to a country where millions still get their hair trimmed by mummy-ji in the bathroom, or by barbers whose salons consist of a tree trunk with a mirror tacked onto it. Habib has helped convince Middle India that hair isn’t just something that grows on your head but rather a market waiting to be primped and tugged at. “People used to think hair care was a low-grade profession, with no future,” he says. “I showed them that it’s both a science and a business.” More:

Why Irrfan Khan may well be Asia’s finest actor

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Jyoti Thattam in Time:

On a dirt track under the midday sun, Irrfan Khan waits at the starting line. The 42-year-old actor is playing a poor army recruit from a village in central India who runs just to get the extra ration of food allotted to athletes. At his first race, his character doesn’t know what to do when the pistol sounds, so he prays. “You idiot! Run!” the starter screams. That spurs the soldier into action, and the naive confusion on his face turns into determination. Extras from the Bengal Sappers — actual young army recruits who live on the base in Roorkee in northern Uttarakhand state, where the movie is being filmed — crowd around the sidelines as he lowers his head and takes off.

This kind of character — the village boy who succeeds against all odds — is a staple of Bollywood, India’s film industry, the largest in the world. But Khan turns it into something more. In his hands, the true story of Paan Singh Tomar, a track-and-field champion turned mountain bandit, becomes a parable about the frustrated poor. Khan says the film, written and directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia, an old friend from drama school, appealed to him because it follows the hero once he has been forgotten. “It talks about our system,” he says. “It’s a sign for any nation, any society — how much they are prepared to care for a talent.” More:

[Image: www.irrfan.com]

Attacks on Indians in Australia: Is it racism?

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Rod McGuirk, The Associated Press, from Canberra:

Discerning the truth, amid the back and forth, has proven difficult.

The controversy comes amid explosive growth in the foreign student population in Australia. The Indians have grown the fastest, from 2,700 in 2002 to 91,400 last year. Overall, overseas students rose from 150,000 to almost 400,000 during the same period.

Australian universities expect Indian enrollment to plummet 30 percent this year, in part because of safety fears.

No doubt there is racism in Australia, as in virtually every society. Researchers have found that one in 10 adults here could be described as racist, a proportion that is not negligible, said University of Western Sydney geographer Kevin Dunn.

“It’s good that they’re a minority of people, but what’s bad is if we deny that that’s out there, and secondly, that we don’t do anything about it,” he said. “My concern is the Indians are right in saying that on those latter two points, we’ve got a problem.”

To what degree racism is behind the attacks is another question. More:

Reverse exodus of migrant workers in Persian Gulf challenges India

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Emily Wax from Kochi in the Washington Post:

When his overnight flight landed, Abdul Wahib walked out of Kochi’s palm-fringed airport and hugged his family. After 24 years of working in the United Arab Emirates, he was home. He carried a suitcase and a layoff notice: His well-paid job as a forklift operator at Dubai’s once-bustling port was terminated.

Wahib’s airplane was filled with Indian laborers, some fired by text messages, dozens owed months of back pay.

“My flight was full of shocked men, sad men. I could think only of my wife and two children back in India,” said Wahib, 48, who had saved enough to buy a three-bedroom house in a sleepy hamlet of coconut groves and banana trees in the southern state of Kerala. “I didn’t want to disappoint them. India has become a strong nation. But it’s migrants’ money that has pumped through our banks and villages. I hoped I could find good work at home.” More:

The trader of shadow fortunes

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Everyone knows about the illegal lottery business. Few know who runs it. In Tehelka, Shantanu Guha Ray uncovers Santiago Martin of Myanmar:

Every few nights, as a nation dreams, contract employees of Kolkata-based courier companies heave brown bags onto nondescript railway station platforms across Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. These jute sacks hold no prosaic cargo, but literally millions of lottery tickets worth hundreds of crores, each ticket a sultry — and illicit — promise of riches. Troops of young boys swarm onto these sacks; dividing their contents among themselves, they cycle off into the approaching dawn. That day — and every day — lottery tickets worth Rs 40 crore will be sold across India. Lotteries are legal in just 12 states and five Union territories; in the other states, tickets are clandestinely sold at nondescript tea stalls, cigarette shops and newspaper vends. Illegal lottery tickets account for a whopping 60 per cent — Rs 7,200 crore — of the Rs 13,000 crore gambled every year on lottery tickets.

Presiding over this illegal empire of eternal hope and callous numbers is Santiago Martin, 42, a Myanmarese whose interest in paper lotteries are perhaps as old as he is. The day Martin was born, his Yangon-based parents won a super lottery, getting $1,000. “He proved lucky for his parents,” says T Arumayagam, who worked with Martin in Arunachal Pradesh where lotteries are legal, before he shifted to Coimbatore. More:

Breaking away: India’s internal frictions

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India’s latest statehood movement reveals a crisis at the heart of the country’s globalising ambitions. Siddhartha Deb on the fight for Telangana. From The National:

One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2008, I found myself standing in a concrete building set amid a patchwork of agricultural fields on the outskirts of Armoor, a town in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The building had a grand title, Garden City Function Hall, but apart from its bleak rural surroundings – the vegetation blasted dull yellow by months without rain – there was little to distinguish it from countless such structures in India that are regularly rented out for weddings and celebrations. As waiters dressed in jeans, vests and shoes without socks circulated with glasses of water, a man with long hair and a thick moustache began singing, his right hand sometimes pressed to his heart and sometimes swept out in the hope of stirring people from their midday torpor. A chorus line of young boys, bare-chested and in white dhotis, danced behind the singer, occasionally breaking out in a sheepish refrain of “Jai Telangana!” – “Victory to Telangana”.

The singers were demanding the formation of a new state called Telangana, an area of some 155,400 square km to be carved out of Andhra Pradesh, India’s fifth-largest state. The hundred-odd people at the gathering, from farmers with calloused hands to lawyers with video cameras, were there to support this demand, as was R Limbadri, a professor at Osmania University in Hyderabad, who had grown up in a nearby village and had brought me to the event. Limbadri was a Dalit, a member of the lowest Hindu caste, and he was far less dramatic than the singer when he addressed the crowd. He supported statehood, he said, but only if Telangana was formed as a different kind of state, one truly committed to ending the incredible economic disparity that has troubled Andhra Pradesh in recent years. More:

Ancient tribal language becomes extinct as last speaker dies

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Boa Sr, the last member of the Bo tribe, sings.

Boa Sr, the last speaker of the Bo language of the Andaman Islands, has died. Photograph: Alok Das/Survival/

Boa Sr, the last member of a 65,000-year-old tribe, died last week aged about 85. She was the last native of the Andaman Islands who was fluent in Bo, one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic times. Jonathan Watts in The Guardian:

The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures.

Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.

Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.

Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.

Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language. More:

From The Independent: Boa Sr, known for an infectious laugh, survived the Asian tsunami of December 2004. She told linguists: “We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us ‘the Earth would part, don’t run away or move’. The elders told us, that’s how we know.” More:

The death of a language: The loss of endangered languages like Bo is more a cultural than a scientific tragedy. In The Guardian.

Also read the story in Survival

I wanna be like Osama

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From Jihad! The Musical, a satirical romp about the war on terror

Bollywood’s first gay screen kiss

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The poster of Dunno Y ... Na Jaane Kyun

From BBC:

The director of a Bollywood film featuring the first male gay kiss in mainstream Indian cinema expects censors to pass the film for release.

Sanjay Sharma made Dunno Y … Na Jaane Kyun (Don’t Know Why) after a High Court ruling overturned a law against homosexuality in India last year.

“At the moment I’m not thinking about any political or censor problems,” Sharma told BBC Asian Network.

The release of Bollywood’s answer to Brokeback Mountain is planned for May.

Aung San Suu Kyi, a leaking roof, and the brother who won’t let her fix it

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Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi lives in this house on University Avenue in Yangon, on the shores of Inya Lake. The military has blocked off University Avenue since 1999, making the house inaccessible to anyone without special permission. Yangon, Myanmar, 1995. Image: tap tap tap /cc

Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

The dispute between Ms Suu Kyi and Aung San Oo, her elder brother and only surviving sibling, dates back to 1988 when their mother, Khin Kyi, living at the white, colonial-style building located in Rangoon’s University Avenue, suffered a stroke. As the health of their mother, the wife of Burma’s independence leader Aung San and a woman who served as Burma’s ambassador to India and Nepal, worsened, Ms Suu Kyi returned to Burma from her home in Oxford to care for her.

Nine months later her mother suffered a second stroke and died in late December, by which time the country’s fledgling democracy movement had already mounted fierce challenges to the government, in which up to 6,000 democracy activists had been killed.

Ms Suu Kyi, who had first encountered the protesting students when they brought wounded comrades for treatment at the hospital where she was caring for her mother, was swept up in the struggle. She began addressing huge crowds, and was quickly acclaimed the legitimate heir to her father as the champion of Burmese freedom.

According to her lawyer, Mr San Oo said that she could continue to live in the family home for as long as she wanted, only stipulating that if she sold it, he would receive half the proceeds. Nothing more was heard of the matter until 2000 when Ms Suu Kyi’s brother, who by this time had taken US citizenship and emigrated to California with his Burmese wife, launched a legal action in the Rangoon High Court for the house to be divided. On that occasion, Ms Suu Kyi’s lawyers were successful and defeated the action but the following year, her brother, who is an an engineer, filed suit again. The matter is still pending. More:

So what if you aren’t Shah Rukh, you can still be an ass

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In Outlook, Shefalee Vasudev on fair skin fetish:

Why do Bollywood stars, who claim to be global-local ambassadors of new India, agree to become brand ambassadors of products without being absolutely sure they are hundred per cent safe? Katrina Kaif, who is naturally fair, sells Olay’s Natural White. Preity Zinta, another fair lady, was not so long back the face of Fem’s Herbal Bleach. “It is not a bleach, it is a breakthrough,” said the ad. Wow! Sonam Kapoor sells L’Oreal’s White Perfect and Deepika Padukone sells Neutrogena’s Fine Fairness range. John Abraham dimples and offers you a shade card as he tries to convince you to buy Garnier’s Men’s fairness cream.

What’s especially worrying is that terms like ayurveda, natural, herbal, and adjectives like long-lasting, healthy, nourishing and enriching are used in conjunction with fairness products. (‘Herbal bleach’ sounds like such a slap to ayurveda!) More:

We’re all Shah Rukh

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The RSS, the BJP, Mukesh Ambani and Rahul Gandhi are on the same side — against the Shiv Sena. Can Mumbai finally find its voice? Samar Halarnkar in The Hindustan Times:

On June 26, 1963, US President John F Kennedy, showing solidarity with beleaguered West Berliners, famously said (in a grammatically incorrect statement): “Ich bin ein Berliner.” I am a Berliner.

After 9/11, the French paper Le Monde declared: “We are all Americans.”

On Monday, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said: “Count me as a Bihari.”

The wise often argue that silence speaks the loudest.

Not always. Not now. Not in India.

There is a reason the world’s best car companies install powerful horns in the automobiles they sell here. Indians need to say it out loud. Injustice triumphs when the powerful are silent, when standing strong only needs a voice.

So, in a city where business tsars and Bollywood stars are infamous for grovelling whenever a politician frowns, it was a relief to first hear Mukesh Ambani and later Shah Rukh Khan stick it to parochial politics and the Shiv Sena, incongruously named after Shivaji the Great.

“You can only say what you believe in and stand by it, and hopefully I will have the strength to do so,” Khan said in New York about the Sena’s threat to ban his latest movie, My Name is Khan, and to prevent his return to Mumbai. “As an Indian I’m not ashamed, guilty or unhappy about what I said, neither am I sorry.” More:

Shootout at the Rocks

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Ibn-e-Safi was one of the great Urdu pulp fiction novelists. Detective Imran is his most famous creation and the best-selling Imran series are Urdu cult classics. The Economic Times carries an excerpt from Shootout at the Rocks, translated into English for the first time by Bilal Tanweer.

The clock struck one and Imran got out of bed. He opened the door and came out of the room. Silence reigned everywhere, but not a single light had been turned off in any of the rooms in the bungalow.

He stepped out into the verandah and waited to hear any footsteps or sounds, and then he darted into the room where the colonel’s family was assembled. Except for Sophiya, everyone had a rifle next to themselves. Anwar and Arif looked extremely bored, Sophiya’s eyes were bloodshot due to lack of sleep, and the colonel was sitting on the sofa, still as a statue. He was not even blinking his eyes. Upon seeing Imran, he twitched.

‘What is it? Why have you come here?’ he thundered.

‘Something is bothering me,’ Imran replied.

‘What?’ said the colonel. His demeanour did not soften.

‘If you are troubled by a few unknown men, why don’t you inform the police?’

‘I know that the police cannot do anything.’ more:

The case of the missing sex toy

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Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

But in what may be a new experience for the hotel, it has now become the location of a search for a missing sex toy. In a message posted on an online forum used largely by ex-pats in Delhi, a man whose name I shall withhold, claims his girlfriend “forgot her dildo in the restrooms of the Imperial hotel yesterday”.

“If anyone of you expats is planning to have some fun there very soon, please let us know, because we’re on a trip to Khajuraho (site of a series of temples featuring erotic carvings) right now,” he adds. “We don’t dare to tell the hotel workers directly. We’re new in India and we don’t know how to deal with the culture gap even if Indians are supposed to be masters in the erotic field.”

The gentleman provides further details on the missing item, saying it is the shape of a crucifix and was a gift. More:

A different side of Goa

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Upscale and untouched, a new breed of villas emerge for travelers seeking seclusion. Jemima Sissons in the Wall Street Journal:

Casa Colvale

As the speedboat turns the corner on India’s moss-green river Chapora and shoots past muddy water buffalo basking in the midday heat on the banks, Casa Colvale emerges majestically into sight. We could be forgiven for thinking that Doctor No or Odd Job are about to pop out of the chic cream and glass villa flanking the hill, and we have to remind ourselves that we aren’t on a secret James Bond mission.

Englishman James Foster, the warm, convivial property manager, greets us with a fresh lime soda as the boat glides smoothly to the pier. “Watch out for the crocodiles,” he chirps, only half-joking, as he helps us off the boat.

We have come to Goa seeking solitude and comfort. If we have gone looking for discreet luxury in India, it doesn’t come better than this.

Casa Colvale was built by clothing magnate Sheila Dhody, who used to come to Goa with her children during the holidays to escape the oppressive heat of New Delhi. “It is a simple love story,” Mrs. Dhody says. “When we were shown this place by the agent there were no footpaths and we had to hack our way through the thick undergrowth. Then, suddenly before my eyes, was the most incredible view I had ever seen in my life.”More:

King of Bollywood dreams of global hit — in Hindi

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S. Mitra Kalita in the Wall Street Journal:

Since this film is about a Muslim man married to a Hindu woman, something you might know about, can we talk about the role of religion in your life?

I’m a Muslim. I’ve been brought up by an amazing set of parents who taught me all that I know. I’m married to a Hindu girl. I’ve never tried to explain my religion to her and she’s never tried to explain her religion to me. We don’t make a big deal of it. I go celebrate Eid or might give her a gift on Diwali. Our kids know the prayers of both religions. The bottom line is that they’re thinking of God.

The modern Indian should be moving toward nonradicalism. It’s okay to be idealistic but one should be realistically idealistic. I’ve led my life that like. I am God-fearing. I am a proud Indian. I am a capitalist. More:

The end of the squashy tomato?

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Researchers at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research in New Delhi have developed tomatoes genetically modified to stay fresh for 30 days longer. From The Telegraph, Calcutta:

Plant biologists in India have discovered two previously unknown genes that are involved in fruit ripening and shut them down to create what might be the world’s longest-lasting tomatoes.

The tomatoes developed at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), New Delhi, can retain their firmness and texture for up to 45 days without refrigeration, compared with ordinary tomatoes that shrink and lose texture in about 15 days.

The researchers at the NIPGR have applied their gene-silencing technology on tomatoes, but they say it may also, in theory, be used to increase the shelf life of mangoes, papayas and bananas.

“We’re not adding new genes into tomatoes — the shelf life is increased by shutting down two genes that make the fruits go soft,” said Asis Datta, the senior scientist at the NIPGR who led this research. More:

[Graphic: The Telegraph]

The bad Sufi

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Modern Sufi leaders have become part of Pakistan’s corrupt ruling elite, favoured by the West not for their ‘moderation’ but for their compliance. Qalandar Bux Memon at Naked Punch:

I was sitting at the shrine of Shah Kamal in Lahore, with the dhol beats and whirling dervishes dancing to connect to the ‘centre of the universe in themselves’, when a friend turned and pointed to an old German fellow sitting a few meters from us. “He just delivered a lecture on Sufism. He is an expert on the subject, and talked about how it’s a religion of peace and love.”

I replied curtly: “Have you ever been in love? Have you had your heart broken? What peace is there in that state? What peace was there when Mansur had his head chopped off on the orders of the Baghdadi Emperor? What peace was there when Shah Inayat was fighting against the Mughal emperor for his life and that of his commune? What peace is there in Sassui’s peeling feet as she searches for her beloved through the desert of Sindh?”

My friend agreed and said: “But they pay me – I have to go along with them.” More:

Part two of Qalandar Bux Memon’s series on Sufism, focusing on the history of Sufism and the positive role it could play, will be published at The Samosa.

Curry bashing?

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Do the recent attacks against Southasian students in Australia constitute hate crimes or sporadic violence? And has the reaction been more harmful than the incidents themselves? Bina D’Costa, a research fellow at the Centre for International Governance and Justice at the Australian National University, in Himmal Southasian:

The story is actually far more complex than either of the two dominant narratives – on anti-Indian racism and students – would appear to let on. The problems not only appear to go well beyond the education sector, but also include class issues within Southasian communities, and racial tensions between South and West Asian communities. Shortly after the student protests, taxi drivers of Southasian origin demonstrated in Melbourne for their own security; many saying they have long felt unsafe driving at night. While those demonstrations were widely reported in the Australian media, the global media – including in India – did not pay serious attention to the pleas of the taxi drivers. But all the while, there was great focus on the plight of the Southasian students, most of them from relatively well-off families. While some Southasian taxi drivers are also students, the recent attacks, portrayed as targeting only Indian students, created a different kind of anxiety about Australia. Both the press and the middle class in India were able to mobilise critical public opinion to pressure the Australian government to respond to the violence. More:

Down Under, India’s Plunder

An Australian perspective on the recent attacks on Indian students. Jane Rankin-Reid in Tehelka:

First, let’s dump some false assumptions about the so called “lucky country”. Complacency about Australia’s tremendous success as a cohesive multi-cultural new world society is both a good sign that co-existence is second nature in our community, and potentially a bad sign of institutionalised insensitivity towards newer, more swiftly changing migration issues. Still, after decades of vigorous political correctness where official language was combed for all signs of offensiveness towards minorities of any shape or size, it is unsurprising that we Australians think of ourselves as some of the planet’s fairest, most tolerant and open minded individuals. We are, if only because by law, we have to be thoughtful and cooperative with one another. Sorry is our second name. But being sorry is not always enough, as indigenous Australians will testify. More:

Waiting for the Jaffna train

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Ahilan Kadirgamar at Himal Southasian:

When I visited Jaffna recently, like all those returning home after years away I too sensed feelings of nostalgia welling up inside. This was my first visit in six years, and almost 25 since I had last lived in Jaffna, as an 11-year-old. The opening lines are by A E Manoharan, the Tamil pop star and baila singer who took Jaffna by storm in the 1970s – a time when, in my mind, Manoharan was more popular than the youthful leaders of the militant movements who would emerge soon enough. I have vague memories of going to an open-air Manoharan concert, sitting on the bicycle bar as one of my relatives rode us to where we could hear the loudspeakers. Incidentally, Manoharan composed “Ilangai enpathu”, with its reference to the palmyra fruit, two decades before rights activist Rajani Thiranagama and her colleagues would write The Broken Palmyra, for which she would be murdered.

By chance, a few weeks after my recent visit to Jaffna, I was sitting next to Manoharan himself on a flight from Madras to Colombo. The great singer was on his way to Jaffna for his first concert in the peninsula after the war, to celebrate Pongal. Manoharan, now 65 years old, like so many others returning home spoke of his anxiety at what Jaffna might look like – who would be left, who might have died, the suffering people have endured, what people might tell him, and what memories would return. During the flight, Manoharan spoke in eloquent, poetic language on a range of issues. He remembered how his first concert at the large Veerasingham Hall in Jaffna had been a flop, as only 60 people turned up. His manager cursed him, but, three months later he had the hall packed. As the plane jerked and landed, I asked him for a message that I could write about. In a sentimental tone, he replied, “Now I am going back to my land with happiness and peace of mind.” More:

Also at Himal Southasian: The Jaffna diaries by Ben Bavinck, a retired missionary who lived in Sri Lanka for more than 30 years and now lives in his native Netherlands:

17 August 1991, Jaffna. The next morning I went cycling to Vaddukoddai, Uduvil and Maruthanarmadam. Jaffna looked quiet. Everybody was cycling as usual. The Nallur Temple festival was just beginning.

I went to talk with a friend, Daya, who looked back on the Tiger attack on the Elephant Pass army camp. At the time, he said, the community in Jaffna had been in a state of psychosis: “A struggle till the bitter end has started.” Very young boys and girls, many just 10 years old, had joined the Tigers, Daya continued, and parents were now in a state of panic because their children had disappeared. Even schools and other institutions had been persuaded to participate in propaganda meetings for the Tigers, with the result being that schoolchildren, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides had been keeping the roads to the front clear as the fighting was taking place.

Mrs Malik

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How Pakistan-born Mushaal Mullick fell in love with Kashmiri militant-turned-separatist leader Yasin Malik. From Open:

Mushaal is the kind of face the cameraman would pick up in a packed cricket stadium. She is the sort of girl who would keep as souvenirs the cinema tickets of her first-ever date. She is a girl in whose purse you’d find a mirror, a comb and, perhaps, lip salve. She likes Phil Collins and Shakira, and in poetry her taste varies from Rumi to Sylvia Plath. She is, you’d say if you ever met her, full of life. She has a teenage intensity, if there is any such thing. She writes the way she speaks, and like most youngsters, likes to be on Facebook, adding friends so frantically you would think she is on an undercover mission to make the Facebook server collapse. She writes ‘you’ as ‘u’ and makes careless mistakes such as referring to her school principal as ‘principle’ in emails. The 24-year-old Mushaal was in Delhi recently, with her husband, former militant and now Kashmir’s prominent separatist leader, 43-year-old Yasin Malik. “You could write that Yasin is an Aries and I am a Scorpio,” she told me. And, before I could react, she blurted, “Oh, forget it! It will look so childish.” More:

[Image: Mushaal Mullick website]

Nobel winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan not worthy of phone without deposit

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Amit Roy from London in The Telegraph, Calcutta:

Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan feels he has been deliberately humiliated by the mobile phone company O2 which treated him less favourably than most customers by forcing him to pay a £325 deposit and refusing to budge even after he had explained he was an established scientist with an impeccable record of paying his bills.

“I am actually slightly suspicious that there is an element of racism at play here as well, since I can’t think of a logical reason why I should be denied credit,” said Ramakrishnan, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry, worth $1.4 million, with two other scientists.

The problems began on December 2 last year when Ramakrishnan, a US citizen settled with his wife in Cambridge for the past 10 years, went to a city centre O2 store to buy the highly recommended iPhone 3GS black, 32 Mb.

Ramakrishnan had no difficulty with the young white assistant who served him but the store’s manager insisted he would have to pay a deposit if he wanted the phone. Customers considered credit-worthy are not usually asked to pay such a deposit. More:

Kashmir — the ultimate skiing destination

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Tom Robbins in The Observer:

Then suddenly we pop out, back into the sunlight on an open slope which Nick calls Snow Leopard Couloir because of the animal’s tracks he’s seen in the snow there. (We never manage to spot one, but we do encounter its more common relative, the Himalayan Leopard – two of them skinned on the walls of the Highlands Park, one alive, seen by some of our group in the lights of a taxi at night.)

The snow in the couloir is a delight, turned sugary because it has sat untouched on the hill for so long, and we whoop as we ski down it, stopping occasionally to take photos, before we eventually reach a snow-covered road in a forgotten side valley. It’s a military track off-limits to the public, used by soldiers heading for their border look-out posts. As we take off our skis to begin the hour-long walk back to town, there’s a distant rumbling and a khaki truck lumbers around the corner, the three soldiers in the cab looking bemused at the skiers standing in the road before them. It’s as if a wormhole has opened up between the frivolous slopes of Courchevel and this troubled corner of Asia, which Bill Clinton once dubbed “the most dangerous place in the world”. More:

The greatest scientific advances from the Muslim world

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Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics and of the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey, in The Guardian:

There is no such thing as Islamic science – for science is the most universal of human activities. But the means to facilitating scientific advances have always been dictated by culture, political will and economic wealth. What is only now becoming clear (to many in the west) is that during the dark ages of medieval Europe, incredible scientific advances were made in the Muslim world. Geniuses in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and Cordoba took on the scholarly works of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, India and China, developing what we would call “modern” science. New disciplines emerged – algebra, trigonometry and chemistry as well as major advances in medicine, astronomy, engineering and agriculture. Arabic texts replaced Greek as the fonts of wisdom, helping to shape the scientific revolution of the Renaissance. More:

Original Letters From India by Eliza Fay

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From The New York Times:

She was only 23, the half-educated wife of an Irish barrister, when the newlyweds set off in 1779 on a rough-and-tumble journey across Europe and the Middle East to Bengal. There, he quickly ran up debts and fathered an illegitimate child. Leaving the scoundrel, she returned to England in 1782 and supported herself by importing muslin and other goods that required her to voyage three more times to India, and once to America. Alas, no more successful at business than at marriage, she almost vanished from history. Little is known about her last 20 years except that she died penniless and intestate in Calcutta. More:

Media crackdown in Sri Lanka

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Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

In what campaigners claimed was a “settling of scores”, around half-a-dozen websites has been blocked and the offices of one of them sealed. A foreign journalist who had been ordered from the country after asking a question about the president’s brother was subsequently told she could stay after her case received international attention.

“Now that the president has been re-elected, there appears to be a settling of scores with critics of the government,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch (HRW). “Just days after the election, some officials seem to be on a campaign to abuse their power.” More:

Understanding Afghan tribes

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From The New York Times:

In India, riches breed birthday excess

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Kate Darnton, a writer and editor living in New Delhi, in the Boston Globe:

In the three months we’ve lived here, we have attended seven or eight birthdays for the children of upwardly mobile Indians. Toddler birthday party inflation has Delhi firmly in its grip. In fact, the parties of Boston and Newton can’t hold a candle to the epic extravaganzas of Vasant Vihar, New Delhi. Once you enter past the guards and the ushers, through the arcade of balloons, you are greeted by a buffet of Bar Mitzvah-like largess: dim sum, sushi, pasta, salad, Indian food, kiddy junk galore. There are cakes that rise on remote-controlled elevators, lit by rings of sparklers. There are chocolate fondue fountains, ice cream sundae stations, and endless Indian sweets. As for entertainment, the more, the better: elephant, horse, and camel rides; magic shows; face painters; temporary tattoo artists; train rides; fireworks. When you leave, you are handed not just a goodie bag, but also a wrapped present that will outshine the gift that you had brought for the birthday boy.

Each child attends with an entourage: One mother, clad in designer jeans, heels, and shades, her make-up heavy. She makes a beeline for the lounge area where she’ll air-kiss her girlfriends, then gossip for the remainder of the evening. The occasional dad shows up, still in his business suit. He heads for the opposite corner from his wife, where he’ll talk cricket scores and Sensex prices till it’s time to go. Besides the children, it’s the ayahs who constitute the largest segment of the birthday population. These nannies are usually slight young women who shadow their charges a half-step behind, spoon-feeding them. The nannies themselves are not allowed to eat from the buffet, but receive small boxed dinners to take away. More: