Monthly Archive for February, 2008

U.S. embrace of Musharraf irks Pakistanis

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on February 29, 2008
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The Bush administration’s continued backing of the Pakistani president is perceived as American meddling. David Rhode reports from Islamabad in The New York Times:

The Bush administration’s continued backing of President Pervez Musharraf, despite the overwhelming rejection of his party by voters this month, is fueling a new level of frustration in Pakistan with the United States.

That support has rankled the public, politicians and journalists here, inciting deep anger at what is perceived as American meddling and the refusal of Washington to embrace the new, democratically elected government. John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, said Thursday during a Senate panel hearing that the United States would maintain its close ties to Mr. Musharraf.

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The making of Budget 2008

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on February 29, 2008
in Economy
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In the run-up to the general elections scheduled for 2009, the Indian government puts rising prices and the flagging farm economy at the forefront of P. Chidambaram’s fifth and last full Budget, reports Reuters. Loan waivers to farmers and enhanced spending on education and health are some features. For a detailed Budget 2008 report by Reuters click hereBusiness Standard on what goes into the making of the Budget:

Every year in mid-February, a motley group comprising top officials of the finance ministry, experts, printing press technicians and stenographers pack their bags and head off to North Block, the British building designed by architect Herbert Baker.

Over the next 10 to 15 days, they are confined inside the walls of this imposing building that adjoins Rashtrapati Bhavan, the presidential residence and former viceregal palace, penning and printing India’s Annual Financial Statement, which the layman calls the Budget. This is the penultimate stage of a process that starts nearly six months before with the issue of the Budget circular by the Department of Economic Affairs in September.

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Rupert Murdoch’s adventures in China

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on February 29, 2008
in Books and China
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He might run a slew of tabloids but Rupert Murdoch’s own private life has been pretty much off-limits. With the publication of a kiss-and-tell book (Rupert’s Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife, Penguin Books, 2008), former Australian journalist Bruce Dover goes where few men have gone before. Eric Elis reviews the book in The Asia Sentinel.

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Few of Rupert Murdoch’s former employees are eager to write about him. Likewise, few of his publications are eager to review a book about him. This review was turned down by the Far Eastern Economic Review, which is part of Murdoch-owned Dow Jones, after it was initially accepted. Nor has it been reviewed by the Murdoch-owned Australian or the Australian Literary Review.

Such is the real or imagined damage that Rupert Murdoch could inflict on a media career that few of his minions have been so bold as to write a kiss-and-tell account of their time at his elbow.

I can think of only one; Harold Evans, the ex-editor of London’s Sunday Times who Murdoch tapped to be editor of London’s Times after buying it in 1981. Evans lasted a year, resigning in high dudgeon over the editorial independence the man Britons call “The Dirty Digger” — pace his Australian antecedents — supposedly guaranteed to secure the purchase.

Evans’ splenetic book Good Times, Bad Times became a best seller and his joust with Murdoch did his career no harm — he later ran Random House, edited some worthy U.S magazines and penned magisterial histories. Like Murdoch, he became a naturalized American. Unlike Murdoch, he was knighted by the British establishment in 2004 for “services to journalism.” There are other tomes posing as Murdoch insiders like ex-Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil’s Full Disclosure and the hugely funny Stick It Up Your Punter: The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper but they are better assessed as snapshot newspaper biographies.

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Masjid Mahabat Khan, Peshawar

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on February 29, 2008
in Pakistan and Travel
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In Pakistaniat.com, Owais Mughal on the 17th Century mosque of Mahabat Khan in Peshawar


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The old city of Peshawar is called the ‘andar shehr’ (the inner city). The mosque of Mahabat Khan is located in andar shehr. The mosque was built in the seventeenth century and it is named after Mahabat Khan Mirza Lerharsib who twice governed Peshawar under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. Its exact date of completion is unknown, as there is no surviving epigraphical or literacy evidence to indicate the fact. Doing a quick web search I found three years marked as its completion (1627, 1630 & 1670 AD) years. More sources cite 1670 as the completion year than the other two.

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The return of Kureishi-man

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on February 29, 2008
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In The Spectator, D.J. Taylor reviews Hanif Kureishi’s latest novel, Something to Tell You

Anthony Powell always maintained that readers who disliked his early books did so on essentially non-literary grounds. Conservative reviewers of the 1930s, irked by the party-going degenerates of a novel like Afternoon Men (1931) did not believe that such people existed. If, on the other hand, they did exist then novels ought not to be written about them. The same danger has always lain in wait for Hanif Kureishi, whose fiction — whatever one might think of his prose style — has always been weighed down by the almost supernatural dreariness of the characters who wander about in it.

We first met Kureishi-man as long ago as The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Older, by no means wiser and yet more inwardly distressed, he turned up again in Intimacy (1998), a novella whose subject was supposedly Kureishi’s own failed marriage, and the short stories collected in The Body (2002). Here in Something to Tell You, some even more extreme versions of him slouch over the clotted West London pavements: the wrong side of 50, but still clinging, barnacle-like, to the hull of SS Metropolitan Media, still obsessed with the sexual act and that lost Seventies past of drugs, women and radical politicking that no Kureishi-man has ever managed to subdue. If the current outing has a symbolic highpoint it comes when several members of the cast get to meet Mick Jagger in the aftermath of a Rolling Stones concert.

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Live from Bombay — teaching students in California

Published
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on February 28, 2008
in Education and Technology
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An American student takes a class in web-based technology at University of California San Diego from his desktop in Mumbai. From a UCSD news release:

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Although the course is very interactive, Derek Lomas teaches it using various forms of web-based technologies, including wiki sites, video streams and e-mail. Lomas’ course, “Design for Development: Developing Technologies for Developing Economies,” aims to connect UCSD students to the problems of the developing world. It is a practicum class with a diverse set of undergraduate and graduate students whose varied majors include engineering, computer science, economics, biotechnology and art.

Lomas received his undergraduate degree in cognitive science at Yale University and currently is in the Master of Fine Arts program at UCSD, studying social design and art and science integration. He first traveled to India in July 2007 to work for QUALCOMM Inc., but stayed because he was inspired to teach the course from an international perspective.

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[via SAJAforum]

Only in China

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on February 28, 2008
in Design
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Bangalore will have a new international airport in March. Delhi will have one in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Till then, take a look at Beijing Airport’s Terminal 3, designed by British Architect Lord Foster. The new terminal, said to be a modern representation of both the Chinese dragon and the Forbidden City, is 2.9 km (1.8 miles) from end to end and took just four years to build. It’s bigger than all Heathrow’s five terminals put together.

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The changing face of Bhutan

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on February 28, 2008
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As the last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom cautiously opens itself to the world, traditionalists fear for its unique culture. Arthur Lubow in the Smithsonian Magazine.

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On rural highways in Bhutan, trucks hauling huge pine logs rush past women bowed beneath bundles of firewood strapped to their backs. In the capital of Thimphu, teenagers in jeans and hooded sweat shirts hang out smoking cigarettes in a downtown square, while less than a mile away, other adolescents perform a sacred Buddhist act of devotion. Archery, the national sport, remains a fervent pursuit, but American fiberglass bows have increasingly replaced those made of traditional bamboo. While it seems that every fast-flowing stream has been harnessed to turn a prayer drum inside a shrine, on large rivers, hydroelectric projects generate electricity for sale to India, accounting for almost half the country’s gross national product.

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In love with voting, hopelessly

Published
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on February 27, 2008
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In Tehelka, author and columnist Kamila Shamsie on the long and tortured road to being able to vote in Pakistan, finally  

ONE OF my earliest memories dates back to Election Day, 1977, when I was four years old, and my father showed me a mark on his thumb in indelible ink and explained it was there to identify voters and prevent them from returning to vote a second time. A little over thirty years later, I’m typing this and hitting the space bar with a thumb that is — for the first time in my life — similarly marked in indelible ink.

I was too young to vote in 1988 when Pakistan had its first elections since those 1977 elections of my childhood memory (I don’t count the bogus elections that happened under General Zia’s watch.) Too young to vote, but — at 15 — perhaps exactly the right age to fall in love with the idea of voting. Today I remember it as a kind of dream, the exultation in Karachi’s air as those elections drew near. Even though there were plenty of voices, even then, saying the military would still be the real power in the land it did little to temper that exultation. I remember one party at which scores of adolescents were dancing to the election song of the PPP: Jeeay Jeeay Jeeay Bhutto Benazir! rang the chorus; a young Angrez at the party watched, shaking his head in disbelief and said, ‘I’m trying to imagine school kids in London dancing to a ‘Go Maggie’ song.’ The next song was the MQM’s campaign song and everyone danced to that with as much fervour. It wasn’t just on the dance-floors of private parties — everywhere you went in Karachi there were rallies conducted with a frenzied air of joy, and people singing on the street.

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Subdued but unbowed

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on February 27, 2008
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Monks who were at the forefront of September’s demonstrations against the Junta in Burma have been under constant surveillance by authorities, writes Kyi Wai in The Irrawaddy

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A 35-year-old, slender, dark man with a long face wearing a white shirt and longyi is sitting in a teashop opposite a A-Nauk Taik, a famous monastery in western Pakokku.

Many people, including the teashop owner, notice him. They know he is an undercover police officer assigned to watch the monks’ activities in A-Nauk Taik, also known as Mandalay Monastery.

Pakokku residents said that since the September monk-led protests, the authorities have assigned various officers in plain clothes to areas surrounding Buddhist monasteries, many of which are also monastic schools that train monks in the higher Buddhist scriptures.

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Reading around Calcutta

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on February 27, 2008
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The cancellation of its legendary book fair was a blow, but this most literary of cities still has plenty to excite readers, says Hirsh Sawhney in The Guardian.

The road from the airport into Kolkata, West Bengal, a hub of the Communist Party of India, is burdened with billboards that scream the names of telecom brands. A sign for a housing development entices citizens to “live in the centre of tomorrow’s Calcutta”; a campaign for a once-rickety Indian bank claims that “we all change for the ones we love”. This advertising speaks of a Kolkata that’s struggling to overcome its reputation as a socialist dinosaur and assimilate into the world of free-market prosperity. But it’s another kind of repute that draws me here.

I’ve reached the city in time for the 33rd Annual Kolkata Book Fair, the largest book fair in Asia and the best attended in the world. Although Delhi is considered the present-day capital of Indian publishing, this eastern Indian metropolis and its book fair remain a mecca for book lovers.

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A nest of potential assassins eye each other in Pakistan

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on February 27, 2008
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Eric Ellis, Southeast Asia correspondent for Fortune Magazine, on Asia Sentinel. Ellis was an official monitor of Pakistan election:

Although the western powers are breathing a sigh of relief over what appears to have been a relatively free and clean election in Pakistan last week, which delivered a decisive drubbing for the strongman Pervez Musharraf, it didn’t take long for the men of violence to re-appear. With the victors still to decide who’ll formally run the country, Pakistan’s military top medic, General Mushtaq Baig, was killed along with eight others by a suicide attack in the garrison town of Rawalpindi.

The warm inner glow of the post-election is quickly fading to the realization that the election probably has created a mess that will have to be cleaned up in any time between a year and 18 months from now. Keep an eye on the military, which has run this country for 34 of its 60 years of existence.

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Bolly-good Barack!

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on February 27, 2008
in Leaders
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We spotted this on 3quarksdaily:

The girl who grew up as a boy

Published
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on February 27, 2008
in Afghanistan
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Arti Pandey in International Herald Tribune:

I was greeted by a high school graduate dressed in men’s salwar-kameez and vest when I arrived at the school in Afghanistan’s Northern province of Faryab last July.

“You thought I was boy, didn’t you? Because I dress like boy and walk like boy – yes?” The short hair and men’s clothing contradicted a girlish voice. “I always dress like boy. People think I am boy, but I am girl. But I don’t like to be girl.”

This was my introduction to Azaada Khan, the girl who grew up as a boy under the omniscient eye of the Taliban.

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A severe bend in the river

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on February 27, 2008
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Does the greatly esteemed and cherished Nobel Prize provide the kiss of death for writers, VS Naipaul in particular? Ramachandra Guha, historian and author of India After Gandhi, in The Hindustan Times:

Like some other writers of my generation, I have a deeply ambivalent attitude towards the work of VS Naipaul. I was moved and charmed by his early stories of social life in the Caribbean. I admired the understated style of his non-fiction. I marvelled at his readiness to challenge the pieties of political correctness, as in his book, Among the Believers, a prescient analysis of the pathologies of Islamic fundamentalism. On the other hand, I was irritated by his ill-judged comments on Indian politics (as in his seeming endorsement of Hindu fundamentalism). And I was seriously put off by his vanity and pettiness, as in his disparaging remarks about his contemporaries and the simultaneous suggestion that he was the only living writer worth considering.

In the middle of last year I was asked to review Naipaul’s new book, A Writer’s People. I found it a disappointing and at times even obnoxious book. He could not, it seems, mention another writer without putting him down (thus Philip Larkin was dismissed as a “minor poet”, and Derek Walcott accused of insinuating himself into the good books of the Americans). The subliminal and at times open message of this silly little book was: Once there was Mahatma Gandhi, who transcended the boundaries of caste, religion, and nation to become a Universal Being. After him came VS Naipaul, who did likewise. In between lay a barren desert of under-achievement.

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How he was sentenced to die

Published
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on February 26, 2008
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Kim Sengupta of The Independent, UK, interviews Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student journalist sentenced to death, in a prison in Mazar-I-Sharif, Afghanistan:

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‘What they call my trial lasted just four minutes in a closed court. I was told that I was guilty and the decision was that I was going to die’ 

Clutching the bars at his prison, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh recalls how his life unravelled. “There was no question of me getting a lawyer to represent me in the case; in fact I was not even able to speak on my own defence.”

The 23-year-old student, whose death sentence for downloading a report on women’s rights from the internet has become an international cause célèbre, was speaking to The Independent at his jail in Mazar-i-Sharif – the first time the outside world has heard his own account of his shattering experience. In a voice soft, somewhat hesitant, he said: “The judges had made up their mind about the case without me. The way they talked to me, looked at me, was the way they look at a condemned man. I wanted to say ‘this is wrong, please listen to me’, but I was given no chance to explain.”

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A day in the life

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on February 26, 2008
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A commuter moves from one train to another in Mumbai, India. Reuters photo in The Telegraph, UK:

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A bloody stalemate in Afghanistan

Published
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on February 26, 2008
in Afghanistan
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Elizabeth Rubin in The New York Times Magazine.

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We tumbled out of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside. It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks. Through night-vision goggles the soldiers and landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static. Just across the valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River valley in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar. Yaka China was just a few villages south and around a bend in the river from the Americans’ small mountain outposts, but the area’s reputation among the soldiers was mythic. It was a known safe haven for insurgents. American troops have tended to avoid the place since a nasty fight a year or so earlier. And as Halloween approached, the soldiers I was with, under the command of 26-year-old Capt. Dan Kearney, were predicting their own Yaka China doom. [Photo: Specialist Carl Vandenberge, right, and Staff Sgt. Kevin Rice, left, are assisted as they walk to a medevac helicopter after being shot by insurgents in the ambush.]

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How Pakistan blocked YouTube to the rest of the world

Published
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on February 26, 2008
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From The Washington Post:

If you happened to be searching for a video at YouTube.com Sunday afternoon, there’s a good chance your browser told you it was unable to locate the entire Web site. Turns out, much of the world was blocked from getting to YouTube for part of the weekend due to a censorship order passed by the government of Pakistan, which was apparently upset that YouTube refused to remove digital images many consider blasphemous to Islam.

According to wire reports, Pakistan ordered all in-country Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to YouTube.com, complaining that the site contained controversial sketches of the Prophet Mohammed which were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month. The people running the country’s ISPs obliged, but evidently someone at Pakistan Telecom – the primary upstream provider for most of the ISPs in Pakistan – forgot to flip the switch that prevented those blocking instructions from propagating out to the rest of the Internet.

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India’s Muslim scholars decry terrorism

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on February 26, 2008
in Faith and India
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An influential group of Muslim theologians in India have denounced terrorism as “un-Islamic.” From The Hindustan Times:

One of the most influential Muslim seminaries, with followers across the world, on Monday issued a kind of fatwa, declaring terror activities as anti-Islam. The Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband also involved top clerics at a conclave in defining terrorism in the light of the Quran and Shariah.

Reading out the declaration on behalf of an aging Darul Uloom rector, Maulana Marghoobur Rahman, a member of Darul’s governing body said: “Killing of innocents is not compatible with Islam. It is anti-Islamic.”

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Cold warriors do a flip

Published
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on February 26, 2008
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Nuclear terrorism threatens all states alike and they should be mobilised to confront it collectively. Shyam Saran, India’s former foreign secretary, in The Times of India:

George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn have little in their distinguished careers that would point to a strong advocacy of nuclear disarmament. On the contrary, their preoccupation as public servants was to maintain US nuclear deterrence against its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union. They dismissed the goal of nuclear disarmament as fantasy.

And yet today, these same veterans of the Cold War are arguing forcefully for putting nuclear disarmament back on the inter-national agenda. In two important articles they wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year and in January this year, they call for a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, prevent their spread into potentially dangerous hands by strengthening non-proliferation and technology denial regimes and eventually end their threat to the world through their total elimination.

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India sends seeds to ‘Noah’s Food Ark’ deep in the Arctic

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on February 26, 2008
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Sonu Jain in The Indian Express:

Halfway between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole in an archipelago called Svalbard, three enormous caverns have been blasted 130 m into the permafrost. Called the doomsday vault, it will be a Noah’s Ark of food in the event of a global catastrophe. Among the world’s 45,000 most important seeds stored in this Svalbard Global Seed Vault, there will be quite a bit of India too.

Seeds of sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea, pigeonpea, groundnut and six small millets will be transferred by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) from its headquarters in Patencheru, near Hyderabad to this location, 1000 km from the Arctic.

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The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opens Tuesday 26 February. Watch the opening ceremony:

Kosovo: Consequences for Asia

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on February 25, 2008
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Kosovo’s independence  is a reminder of divisive issues best left alone, says  Philip Bowring on Asia Sentinel:

With its encouragement and then acceptance of Kosovo’s independence, the major western countries have opened a huge can of worms, setting themselves at odds not only with Russia and Serbia but much of the rest of the world, Asia in particular. With many countries in Asia having significant sectarian issues, most will either come out openly against recognizing Kosovo, or just quietly fail to do so.

The US and the major European powers, Germany, Britain and France, appear to have barely thought about the wider consequences of giving birth to a mini-state (population 2 million) with an aggrieved Serb minority supported by Serbia backed by Russia. In their myopia, the western nations seem to have believed that this was just an issue about the organization of European borders, forgetting about broader global implications. They also seem to have forgotten their history of this corner of the world where western Christendom meets both eastern Christendom and Islam.

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Cultural parallels: Fiddler on the Roof in Hindi

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on February 25, 2008
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Ben Frumin, an American journalist in India, has a piece in the current issue of New York’s Jewish Daily Forward about a Hindi version of “Fiddler on the Roof.”

fiddlerontheroof.jpgDespite the fact that almost all her knowledge of Jews and Jewish culture comes from a couple of books and the film “Schindler’s List,” Renu Chopra, a slight Hindu woman raised in the north Indian state of Punjab, plays a surprisingly convincing Yente, the nosy shtetl matchmaker in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

“I’ve never met a Jew, never,” Chopra said while wrapping a black shawl around a sparkling gold-and-red kurta during a recent rehearsal. “People [in India] don’t know about Jews. They have no idea about Jews.”

That’s not surprising, considering that there are only about 5,000 Jews in this country of 1.1 billion people, and only about 40 Jews in the capital city of New Delhi. But that didn’t stop an amateur theater company here from staging a Hindi “Fiddler” that’s played five times since this past December, with four more shows scheduled for April.

[Photo: Indian actor Rakesh Gupta, a 48-year-old civil servant, plays Tevye in the Hindi production of 'Fiddler on the Roof.']

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US moves to expand its role in Pakistan

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on February 25, 2008
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Farah Stockman reports from Washington in the Boston Globe:

US officials are quietly planning to expand their presence in and around the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan by creating special coordination centers on the Afghan side of the border where US, Afghan, and Pakistani officials can share intelligence about Al Qaeda and Taliban militants, according to State Department and Pentagon officials.

The Bush administration is also seeking to expand its influence in the tribal areas through a new economic support initiative that would initially focus on school and road construction projects. Officials recently asked Congress for $453 million to launch the effort – a higher request for economic support funds than for any country except Afghanistan.

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A kingdom in the mountains shares its secrets

Published
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on February 25, 2008
in Art, Bhutan and Travel
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Susan Emerling in The New York Times:

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When American curators arrived one spring morning at Norbugang Yu Lhakang, a Buddhist temple in a remote village in western Bhutan, they found a group of monks sitting on the floor in bright robes, chanting. They had been there since 6 a.m., intent on creating the right ambience for a divination ceremony.

The question before them was whether a small 18th-century gilt bronze sculpture – a female personification of supreme Buddhist wisdom – could make its way to the United States for a traveling exhibition of Bhutanese art.

It fell to the sculpture’s owner, a Bhutanese businessman whose family had had the piece for generations, to roll the divination dice. Tremulously, he rolled a two, a six and a nine.

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The guide to Bhutan

Bhutan has always been beautiful, but now it is beautiful and luxurious. Tom Fordyce in The Times, UK:

monastry.jpgIt was a disturbing scene. Three half-naked men, all wearing hideous carved masks, were running towards me, brandishing wooden phalluses the size of monkey wrenches. On my right, a shaven-headed monk mumbled a monotone mantra while striking a pair of discordant cymbals.

Overhead circled a large flock of ravens, getting closer with every lap. From the ancient monastery to my left came another man, wearing what appeared to be a welder’s mask, a sheen of oil and not much else.

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In thriving India, wedding sleuths find their niche

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on February 25, 2008
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Emily Wax in The Washington Post:

paliwal.jpgLike a lot of young Indian couples, they met on a matrimonial Web site and within a matter of weeks were picking out the wedding invitations, reserving the horse-drawn carriages and having the bride fitted for a pearl- and gold-encrusted sari.

Judging by his online profile, the groom was suitable and eager to be a good spouse: a quiet, stay-at-home kind of guy who never drank and worked as a successful software engineer. Perfect, thought the bride, a shy 27-year-old computer engineer. Too perfect, according to Bhavna Paliwal, one of India’s wedding detectives, who are being hired here in growing numbers to ferret out the truth about prospective mates.

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Pakistan’s billboard art

Published
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on February 24, 2008
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from pakistaniat.com:

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In Peshawar, a dream of a peaceful life

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on February 24, 2008
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Music and dancing are back as a poll landslide for secular parties brings a vibrant change to Pakistan’s North-West Frontier. Jason Burke in The Observer.

Sinking back in his armchair, Maulana Shuja ul-Mulk strokes his thick beard with one hand and the fluffy tail of a small toy dalmatian with the other. ‘We were surprised by the results,’ he admits from a supporter’s home in the small rural western Pakistani town of Mardan, ‘but we believe in democracy.’

Whether the claim is true or not, the hard political reality is that Mulk and his hardline religious party are now out of power. In the 2002 election, he and scores of other ultra-conservative clerics swept into government in Pakistan’s turbulent North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) on a tide of anti-Americanism and resurgent religious enthusiasm, vowing to impose Islamic law. But in last week’s national and provincial polls, voters backed secular and liberal candidates and evicted the ruling alliance of religious parties.

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Running on hope

Employment, security and freedom are what the common man in Pakistan dreams of. Travelling through Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Karachi — first after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and then for the election — Subhajit Roy of Indian Express pieces together Pakistan’s story of despair and dreams.

It’s the night of Sunday, February 17, the night before Pakistan goes for the “mother of all elections”, and in posh seaside Clifton area in Karachi, a group of about 150 young men in 15 cars and tempos and a dozen bikes are dancing to the tune of a Benazir Bhutto song in full volume. Waving the Pakistan People’s Party banners and flags, these young men are dancing, clapping, shouting, laughing.

That is the first sight of pure relief and happiness in Pakistan that I see in the past two months of my fly-in-fly-out visits to the country, after what can be described as a ‘stressful’ period in the country’s history. After eight years of military rule, people don’t know whether it’s over yet. And after months of collective depression, it is as if these young men-most of them studying or unemployed-have sniffed victory in Karachi’s cool sea-breeze nine hours before the country goes to the polls.

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Online education takes off in India

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on February 24, 2008
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The business of distance learning on the subcontinent is becoming so big that foreign universities and venture capitalists are taking note. Nandini Lakshman in BusinessWeek:

It’s a Sunday afternoon and class time for 39-year-old IT worker Seema Shetty. Her feet curled under her in a swivel chair, she sits in front of a computer monitor, adjusts a set of headphones, and scribbles in a notebook. Shetty, who works for consulting firm Mastek in Mumbai, is in a virtual classroom in the Vile Parle suburb, where a dozen computers link students to some of India’s elite management institutions. Today’s class is a three-hour general management lecture, part of the online education course conducted by the Xavier Labor Relations Institute in Jamshedpur, in the remote northern Indian state of Jharkhand.

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