Monthly Archive for April, 2009

Padma Lakshmi’s jewelry strategies

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 30, 2009
in Fashion
. 0 Comments

From the Wall Street Journal:

padma1There’s an error women sometimes make when they wear jewelry, says “Top Chef” host Padma Lakshmi: “You notice the jewelry more than you notice her smile or her face. Jewelry should not upstage you.”

To avoid that, Ms. Lakshmi has a simple strategy. “I pick one hot point on my body that I’m going to highlight,” she says. “Let one area do the singing — you don’t want to hear three songs at once.”

For example, Ms. Lakshmi, who just launched a jewelry line that will start selling at Bergdorf Goodman in May, sometimes wears an eye-catching stack of bangles on her wrist with small earrings but no other jewelry. Or she’ll wear long earrings to draw attention to her neck and collarbone and slip on a pinky ring as a small, additional touch. “You want to have one main story and one back story, and that’s it,” she says.

[image from www.padmalakshmi.com]

More:

India is in peril. Obama is making it worse

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 30, 2009
in Terrorism
. 2 Comments

Brahma Chellaney says that India is indeed ‘the sponge that protects us all’ from terrorism emanating from Pakistan. The new President’s strategy is compounding the Af-Pak problem. In the Spectator:

One of the most striking things about the larger Asian strategic landscape is that India is wedged in an arc of failing or troubled states. This harsh reality is India’s most glaring weakness; its neighbourhood is so combustible as to impose a tyranny of geography. Today, Pakistan’s rapid Talebanisation tops India’s concerns. After all, the brunt of escalating terrorism from Pakistan will be borne by India, which already has become, in the words of ex-US official Ashley Tellis, ‘the sponge that protects us all’.

As Pakistan has begun to sink, top US intelligence and security officials have made a beeline to India for discussions, including the new CIA director Leon Panetta (who came to New Delhi on his first overseas visit), the FBI director Robert Mueller, the joint US chiefs of staff chairman Mike Mullen and the administration’s special envoy Richard Holbrooke. The fact that President Obama, in his first 100 days, has helped put together $15.7 billion in international aid for Islamabad shows that the United States will not allow Pakistan to become a failed state.

The real threat is of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan. Yet Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan (or ‘Af-Pak’ in Washingtonese) inspires little confidence. Throwing more money at Pakistan and keeping up the pretence that the badly splintered and weakened al-Qa’eda poses the main terrorist threat risks failure.

More:

Sri Lanka: A long, slow descent into hell

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 30, 2009
in Sri Lanka
. 0 Comments

Novelist Romesh Gunesekera mourns his island’s fate. In the Guardian:

Twenty six years ago, I was writing the earliest of the stories that would end up in my first book, in which a man called CK dreams about opening a guest house on the east coast of Sri Lanka. If one tries to pin his dream down on a map, I guess it would be just a few miles from the so-called “no-fire zone” today, a place where Tigers are said to be shooting Tamil hostages who do not want to be human shields, and the government of Sri Lanka is accused of bombing civilians; the strip of land where the BBC says the endgame of this long civil war is being played out, and from where 160,000 men, women and children have fled in the last couple of weeks. The heart-wrenching images of those refugees are superimposed for me on CK’s dream and an idyllic sepia photograph, in a family album, of the small town of Mullaitivu, where an uncle and aunt lived 60 years ago.

Between my first draft of CK’s story in the spring of 1983 and the second in the summer of that year, Sri Lanka went into freefall. Tension had been building up for some years in Sri Lankan politics. Many Tamils felt heavily discriminated against in the increasingly Sinhala-focused agenda of successive nationalist governments in Sri Lanka, whereas many in the majority Sinhala population saw the government’s changes as redressing imbalances instituted under British rule. These tensions burst into sporadic militant attacks in the north through the 1970s and an increasing government military presence in the area. More:

Karachi journal: Leather corsets and bondage wear

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 28, 2009
in Business and Pakistan
. 0 Comments

Pakistani brothers carefully conceal a business that in a conservative Muslim country is as risky as it is risqué. Adam B. Ellick in the New York Times:

corset2In Pakistan, a flogger is known only as the Taliban’s choice whip for beating those who defy their strict codes of Islam.

But deep in the nation’s commercial capital, just next door to a mosque and the offices of a radical Islamic organization, in an unmarked house two Pakistani brothers have discovered a more liberal and lucrative use for the scourge: the $3 billion fetish and bondage industry in the West.

Their mom-and-pop-style garment business, AQTH, earns more than $1 million a year manufacturing 2,000 fetish and bondage products, including the Mistress Flogger, and exporting them to the United States and Europe. More:

Latest in Indian footwear: Protest

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 28, 2009
in India and Indian elections 2009
. 0 Comments

Emily Wax in the Washington Post:

shoes“Joota: The ultimate nonviolent weapon,” a front-page headline in the Mumbai Mirror tabloid read Monday, using the Hindi word for shoe. An editorial cartoon in the paper showed shoes being handed back to hurlers on silk pillows with a new wristwatch inside, “to get around the Election Commission’s code against bribing voters,” the caption read.

The shoe-as-missile-of-discontent appears to have been inspired by Muntadar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who lobbed both his shoes at President George W. Bush in December. Zaidi became an international hero. But he also drew a year in prison.

In India, New Delhi journalist Jarnail Singh kicked off the “shoe bite,” as the gesture is known here, when he threw a shoe at the home minister during a news conference this month in the capital. He said he was frustrated by the minister’s reply to a question about riots in 1984 in which hundreds of Sikhs were killed. More:

Musharraf with Frost

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 28, 2009
in Pakistan
. 0 Comments

Ahmad Faruqui in Dawn:

musharrafWould it not be nice if Frost, who is now working for Al Jazeera, were to put a few questions to the former general in a globally televised event? Here is a ‘thought experiment’ on what that conversation may sound like.

Frost: It is said of the Emperor Augustus that he found Rome made of clay and left it made of marble. You ruled Pakistan for eight years and commanded the army for nine. Yet some people argue that the strategic culture of the nation was more toxic when you left the scene than when you had arrived on the scene. What do you say to them?

Musharraf: During my tenure, we had unprecedented economic growth. We laid the foundation of one of four mega dams that were to bring energy and water independence to Pakistan and we completed Phase I of the new port of Gwadar. We held elections and began a transition to real democracy. We stabilised relations with India and were on the verge of signing a peace accord on Kashmir. And we arrested more terrorists than any other country. These are no mean accomplishments. More:

Zardari: the man who caved in to the Taliban

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 28, 2009
in Pakistan
. 0 Comments

Brig Gen Shaukat Qadir, a retired Pakistani infantry officer, in the National:

When Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari finally inked the Swat peace deal two weeks ago, handing that region over to the Taliban, he left an indelible mark on the nation’s history; and just as two of his predecessors did, he established his legacy for the people of Pakistan.

If General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s legacy is the initiation of religious extremism in Pakistan, and General Pervez Musharraf’s is its flowering into the terrorism that the country is riddled with today, then Mr Zardari will go down in history as the one who succumbed to those terrorist threats – although that ignominy is not his alone, and has to be shared by the parliament that approved the deal, legitimised the Taliban’s activities and handed over a part of the country to them.

Already, Sufi Muhammed, the militant who brokered the deal and is the estranged father-in-law of Maulana Fazlullah, leader of the Swat Taliban, has categorically stated that none of the previous acts of the Taliban can be prosecuted under the Islamic laws being imposed in Swat: so in one sentence they have been granted amnesty for murder, rape, pillage and other crimes.

More:

The boatmen of Allahabad

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 28, 2009
in India, Indian elections 2009 and Politics
. 0 Comments

Jawid Laiq in the Hindustan Times:

It’s been exactly five years. I am back at the holy sangam, where the waters of the Ganga and the Yamuna merge, in Allahabad. I am here yet again for the fifth time as a political pilgrim during a Lok Sabha election to garner the electoral wisdom of the nishads, the boatmen who ferry yatris from every corner of the country to the sangam. On the sandy beach by the confluence, after a lot of prodding, the boatmen reveal what they have gathered from the political comments of hundreds of pilgrims from every region, clan and caste. The boatmen have proved to be more accurate election pollsters than the professional ones commissioned by TV channels and newspapers.

Among a group of nishads, sitting on a rough wooden platform embedded in the sand, there is a definite consensus: the top two contenders for the vote in Uttar Pradesh are the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Congress. As they repeatedly put it in colloquial Hindi, “Haathi aur Panjey may takkar hai”. (The contest is between the elephant and the hand – the symbols of the BSP and the Congress). Ranjan Kumar Nishad, who remembers me from my last visit, echoes the general opinion that the Congress will do much better in the state in 2009 than it did in 2004. The Samajwadi Party (SP) will fare badly this time and the BJP will be in fourth place in UP with only a handful of seats. Ranjan Kumar’s colleagues suggest that nationally the Congress may emerge again as the single largest party with significantly more than the 145 seats it got in 2004. They are unwilling to guess the precise number of seats.

More:

Stop funding my failing state

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 27, 2009
in Pakistan
. 0 Comments

When Pakisan’s president visits the White House next week, he’s sure to ask for another handout. But Fatima Bhutto, niece of the late Benazir Bhutto, says the billions of dollars the U.S. gives are merely propping up a government that’s capitulating to terror [in The Daily Beast]

In Pakistan things move at a leisurely South Asian pace. We missed our goals to eradicate polio recently because we, a nuclear nation, could not sustain electricity across the country long enough to refrigerate the vaccines. Garbage disposal is a nonexistent concept, and plush neighborhoods in Karachi boast towers of rubbish piled on street corners and alleyways. Prisons and police cells are full of prisoners awaiting trials, and our justice system, despite the reinstatement of the Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudry, leaves little to be desired in terms of meting out free and fair access to justice.

One thing moving ridiculously fast, however, is the Taliban’s stranglehold on the country. After two years of fighting off Taliban insurgents camped out in the lush Swat Valley, Pakistan’s president, Asif Zardari, threw in the towel last week and gave the militants what they wanted—Shariah law.

more

More American workers outsourcing own jobs overseas

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 27, 2009
in Economy
. 0 Comments

The Onion:


More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas

The end of something

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 27, 2009
in Art
. 0 Comments

Aditya Dev Sood at 3quarksdaily:

I have few and fading memories of my father in uniform. He was already resigning his commission by the time I was four, and the period of his gallantry in combat and the near-thing escapes from border skirmishes thankfully happened before I was born and before he even knew my mother. How much of his joke-telling-scotch-drinking-jazz-loving social personality, though, was shaped by his training as a cadet in Khadakvasla? Would it have been much different on the other side of that border? Sikandar’s quiet study of the musical culture of the Pakistani Armed Forces is immediate evidence of the common Anglo-Indian idiom that all legatees of the British Indian Army share.

I feel I should know these tunes by name, but they are blending into one another in my mind. Was there a Reveille? A Taps? One of them must surely be The Last Post, with which soldiers from the United States through Britain through Pakistan and India are laid to final rest. I smile wanly at Pakistani troops marching jauntily to Colonel Bogey March, which I remember from Hollywood’s Bridge over the River Kwai. Now a soldier sitting impassively in what appears to be a professional recording studio is belting out a folk or tribal tune that I can’t completely catch either, now dissolving into soulful and jazzy improv and fadeout: jadon ho gae gori nal pyar, ho gae kisi de nal pyar…

The alternately seated and then marching Army bands, and their fluid medley of Western and Indian musicalities puts me in mind of my own wedding day, now a lifetime ago. The invitation card was based on a painting I’d commissioned from the contemporary Indian miniature painter Mohammed Firozuddin, who traces his families legacy back to the house of Mansur, Jehangir’s court painter. Its cover was based on The Marriage Procession of Dara Shikoh, a famous Avadhi painting by Haji Madni, and showed an enormous imperial procession behind the mounted prince, including a troupe of musicians and foot-soldiers carrying their shields above their heads.

More:

Sri Lanka’s war: Dark victory

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 27, 2009
in Conflict and Sri Lanka
. 0 Comments

From the Economist:

A Dark herd creeps across a grassy plain, wades a shallow lagoon and clambers to safety. Filmed from the air on April 20th, this was a scene Sri Lanka’s government had been dreaming of: the start of a mass breakout from the Tamil Tigers’ last sanctuary by, it claims, over 100,000 refugees-perhaps two-thirds of those being held hostage there. Having inspired the exodus, by breaching a sandy embankment around this “refuge”, a few kilometres of beach in north-eastern Sri Lanka, the army has encircled the surviving Tigers.

According to its private estimate, the Tigers may be reduced to 1,000 hardened fighters, plus a few thousand recently impressed refugees. The army believes Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tiger chief, and his senior henchmen are among them-as was also claimed this week by a spokesman for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as the rebels are properly known, after the Eelam, or Tamil homeland, for which they have waged a 26-year war. To bag these men, the last prize of a brutal two-year offensive, the army claims to be using stealthy tactics, with “deep-penetration” commandos and snipers. It has a history of over-egging its battlefield triumphs. But the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa seems genuinely to believe that one of Asia’s oldest wars could be over within days.

More:

The defiant poets’ society

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 26, 2009
in Afghanistan
. 0 Comments

Christina Lamb returns to Afghanistan seven years after the fall of the Taliban and finds a country still rife with the persecution of females. In the Sunday Times:

On a stony hillside overlooking the ancient city of Herat stands the graveyard of its most illustrious citizens, where every Friday local people gather for picnics. But there is one tombstone at which many women stop and genuflect. It is that of a 25-year-old woman called Nadia Anjuman, and the flowery Persian engraving describes her as a poet who risked her life to keep writing under the Taliban. What it doesn’t say is that she was killed by her own husband.

Nadia’s death is seen by her friends and women across Afghanistan as symbolising the betrayal by the international community of all their promises to free Afghan women – given as one of the main reasons for ousting the Taliban regime 7Å years ago. “What happened to Nadia should make the world bow its head in shame,” says her friend and fellow writer Leila Razeqi. “Your prime ministers and presidents promised freedom to us Afghan women. That someone like Nadia is under the soil and her husband walks free should make you ask what is really going on here.”

I first came across Nadia Anjuman on a bitterly cold morning in November 2001, in the exuberant first few days after the fall of the Taliban, when everyone was shaving off beards, casting off burqas and flattening Coke cans with hammers to fashion satellite dishes to watch TV – for so long banned. I was walking along Cinema Street in Herat when a sign caught my eye. It said Herat Literary Society, and beyond was a path leading to a small white bungalow.

More:

Caught on camera: Taliban shoot couple dead for adultery

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 26, 2009
in Society
. 0 Comments

Click on the image to see the video at the Telegraph site. [Warning: contains distressing footage]

Click on the image to see the video at the Telegraph site. Warning: contains distressing footage

Saeed Shah in the Telegraph, UK:

Their deaths were squalid, riddled with bullets in a field near their home by Taliban gunmen as the execution was captured on a mobile telephone.

In footage which is being watched with horror by Pakistanis, the couple try to flee when they realise what is about to happen. But a gunman casually shoots the man and then the woman in the back with a burst of gunfire, leaving them bleeding in the dirt.

Moments later, when others in the execution party shout out that they are still alive, he returns to coldly finish them with a few more rounds.

Their “crime” was an alleged affair in their remote mountain village controlled by militants in an area that was only recently under the government’s sway. It was the kind of barbarity that has become increasingly familiar across Pakistan as the Taliban tide has spread. More:

A Life in the Day: The Dalai Lama

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 26, 2009
in Faith
. 0 Comments

His Holiness the Dalai Lama in the Sunday Times:

dalai_lamaBreakfast is at 5.30, a porridge called tsampa, made from roasted barley. Delicious and good protein – quite heavy, but necessary, because empty stomach since lunch the previous day. Then heavy work in the bathroom or toilet. Before my gall-bladder surgery in October, this not so certain: sometimes you have to force your way through! But now seems more regular.

I listen to the radio, mainly BBC or occasionally a Tibetan broadcast from America. Then meditation, for five hours if possible. This includes visualisation of the mandala, or deity-yoga meditation. We say that these meditations can prepare one for death and give some power of control when it happens.

Mid-morning in Dharamsala, where I live, I go to my office or to a meeting. If I’m not in a hurry, I study Tibetan scriptures, then the Indian newspapers and perhaps Time and Newsweek. More:

New Delhi goes gaga over Obamas’ puppy

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 26, 2009
in India and Trends
. 0 Comments

portuguesewaterdogs

Emily Wax in the Washington Post:

Forget India’s month-long national elections, the global financial crisis and terrorism. In recent days, the capital has gone crazy over Bo, the first dog of the United States. Even Bollywood film star Salman Khan has placed an order for a Portie, according to the Hindustan Times, which ran a headline that read “Delhi’s Doggie No.1.”

The energetic, black-haired dog — a relatively rare breed — has to be imported here from Europe, the United States or Thailand, prompting concerns that the animals might be drugged for the long flights or smuggled in illegally. Including airfare and various permits, a Portuguese water dog would cost an Indian buyer about $2,000, said Satish Chhillar, a veterinarian.

That’s as much as India’s recently released Tata Nano, said to be the cheapest car in the world.

More:

The fantasy of orientalism in Madras’s architecture

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 26, 2009
in Design and Heritage
. 0 Comments

Malavika Karlekar in The Telegraph, Calcutta:

Around the same time, the sea wall around the heavily guarded Fort St George at Madras was built. Its construction, as well as that of the sewers in the Black Town, required knowledge of local conditions and materials – an expertise that was easily available with Indians enlisted for the job. A port city till well into the 19th century, Madras consisted of the walled Black Town of “native” settlements. To its south was the Fort and beyond stood Chepauk Palace, home to the Nawabs of Carnatic. They patronized a Muslim courtly culture and had well-known Sufi scholar-mystics as guests. While there were some feeble attempts at bringing about an interface between cultures through, for instance the Cosmopolitan Club, Jayewardene-Pillai argues that it was the dynamism of the governor, Francis Napier, that led to “a peculiar and unexpected hybrid imperial architectural style”. And Robert Chisholm was the man chosen to design and implement the construction of many of these buildings. In the 1860s, the government of Madras launched a competition for the best plans for Presidency College and the Senate House of the university and 17 proposals were received; the judges decided on the designs of Robert Chisholm, an executive engineer in Bengal’s public works’ department. More:

Santha Rama Rau dies at 86

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 26, 2009
in Books
. 0 Comments

From the New York Times:

santha_rama_rauSantha Rama Rau, an Indian-born, Western-educated journalist whose work helped demystify the Indian subcontinent for American readers in the decades after World War II and India’s independence, died Tuesday in Amenia, N.Y. She was 86 and lived in Amenia, in Dutchess County, and in Manhattan.

The cause was cardiopulmonary failure, said her son, Jai Bowers.

Ms. Rama Rau wrote novels and adapted the E. M. Forster novel “A Passage to India” for the stage, but she was largely a travel writer, a chronicler of journeys in Asia, Africa and the former Soviet Union for publications like The New Yorker, Harper’s, Holiday and The New York Times Magazine. Many of her stories, written with stylish simplicity in the first person, were collected as books that read almost as autobiography. The titles included “East of Home” (1950), “View to the Southeast” (1957) and “My Russian Journey” (1959). She also wrote an autobiography, “Gifts of Passage” (1961), that reads like almost like a travelogue.

“It is a short but extraordinarily dramatic flight,” she wrote in that book, of a trip from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to Kabul, Afghanistan. “The Hindu Kush is the wildest and most forbidding part of the Himalayas, so high that the plane flies between, not over, the mountains, and from the cabin you look up to see the snow-capped, treacherous peaks. Below you is a harsh and bony map of precipitous valleys and rocky ravines – a landscape utterly without comfort, and on too immense a scale to be anything but daunting.”

More:

I want my country back

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 26, 2009
in Pakistan
. 0 Comments

Sehar Tariq in the News International [via 3quarksdaily]:

talibanEight years ago I boarded a plane to the United States to come to college. I was 17. As I left, my father hugged me and told me to never come back because he believed that soon Pakistan would not be a country fit for me to live in. I told him he was trying to save money by not having to buy me tickets to come home. We laughed it off. I hugged him goodbye and that day my father and I began our great debate about the fate of Pakistan. Abba told me to stay away. I defied him every time. I came home twice a year. I only flew PIA. I refused to do an internship in the US I worked every summer in Pakistan. I moved back when college ended. I started work in Pakistan. I worked two jobs because there was so much to do and not enough time to do it in. I was inspired and energised. I was hopeful and optimistic.

Today I am neither. And I have lost the debate with my father about the fate of Pakistan. The Parliament by endorsing the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation (NAR) has heralded the end of Pakistan as I knew and loved it. Today, the elected representatives of the people turned Pakistan into Talibanistan. Today we handed over a part of the country to them. I wonder how much longer before we surrender it all.

Today we legislated that a group of criminals would be in charge of governing and dispensing justice in a part of Pakistan according to their own obscurantist views. They have declared that the rulings of their courts will be supreme and no other court in the land can challenge them. They have also declared that their men that killed and maimed innocent civilians, waged war against the Pakistani army and blew up girls schools will be exempt from punishment under this law. A law that does not apply equally to all men and women is not worthy of being called a law. Hence today we legislated lawlessness.

More:

Inside the Taliban’s ‘grave error’

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 26, 2009
in Afghanistan and Pakistan
. 0 Comments

From MSNBC [via 3quarksdaily]:

Taliban Commander Fateh in Buner, Pakistan.

Taliban Commander Fateh in Buner, Pakistan.

“The Taliban finally made a grave error,” said Javed Siddiq, editor of the influential Urdu language daily Nawa-e-Waqt. “Once they challenged Pakistan’s constitution as un-Islamic, Islamic scholars and the Pakistani people no longer saw them as the self-styled defenders of Islam against western infidels – but infidels themselves who want to dismantle the Pakistani state.”

Siddiq said that challenging the constitution was a wrong step and believes it has backfired. Pakistan’s constitution was carefully forged by a board of Islamic scholars in 1973 – every tenet was crafted to make sure it conformed to the principals of Islam.

“Now, all the different sects of the Sunni and Shiite, the religious scholars, the army, the politicians and every Pakistani is against the Taliban,” Siddiq said. “They have lost.” More: [Photo: NBC News]

Clash of the titans

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 25, 2009
in Cricket
. 0 Comments

In Tehelka, Shantanu Guha Ray looks at the deteriorating relationship between Shah Rukh Khan and Sourav Ganguly and says this is the reason why Shah Rukh dropped the word Kolkata from his Knight Riders’ team.

souravA FORTNIGHT AGO, as he stepped onto the tarmac of Mumbai airport after his meeting with Shah Rukh Khan, Sourav Ganguly picked up his Blackberry and whispered “I do not trust anyone, really, I do not trust anyone!” The former Indian skipper, on a high barely a month before because of his involvement in the selection of the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) team and the cheer leaders, had a premonition of what would happen once the team landed in Cape Town for the trial matches before the start of the second edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL). A week before the crucial meeting at Mannat, home of KKR owner and Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, Ganguly had skirmished with coach John Buchanan over the latter’s multiple captaincy theory and had set Kolkata afire by first disagreeing with, and then agreeing to the format.

more

Amrit Singh, civil liberties crusader

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 25, 2009
in Politics
. 3 Comments

In the ongoing debate and controversy over torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan by CIA operatives sanctioned by the Bush administration, Ms Amrit Singh is leading a crusade against former President George W. Bush. Amrit Singh is a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union and has played a key role in forcing the U.S. Defense Department to release photos of American militarymen torturing prisoners. She co-authored “Administration of Torture” with Jameel Jaffer. She is also the daughter of the Prime Minister of India.

The following from the ACLU website:

Amrit Singh

Amrit Singh, the youngest daughter of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

Amrit Singh is a Staff Attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, where she has litigated cases relating to the torture and abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody abroad, the government’s use of diplomatic assurances to return individuals to countries known to employ torture, the indefinite and mandatory detention of immigrants, and post 9/11 discrimination against immigrants. She is counsel, among other cases, in ACLU v. Dep’t of Defense, litigation under the Freedom of Information Act for records concerning the treatment and detention of prisoners held by the U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo Bay and other locations abroad; and Ali v. Rumsfeld, a lawsuit brought against senior U.S. government officials on behalf of Iraqi and Afghan prisoners who were tortured in U.S. custody. Prior to joining the Immigrants’ Rights Project, Singh litigated a variety of racial justice issues as the Karpatkin Fellow at the National Legal Department of the ACLU, including post 9/11 airline discrimination against brown-skinned passengers and the failure of the state of Montana to provide adequate legal counsel to indigent criminal defendants. Prior to joining the ACLU, she served as a law clerk to the Hon. Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Singh is a graduate of Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School.

And about the book:

aot_bookAdministration of Torture is the most detailed account thus far of what took place in America’s overseas detention centers and why. Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh draw the connection between the policies adopted by senior civilian and military officials and the torture and abuse that took place on the ground. They also collect and reproduce hundreds of government documents-including interrogation directives, FBI e-mails, autopsy reports, and investigative files-obtained by the ACLU and its partners through the Freedom of Information Act. The documents show that abuse of prisoners was not limited to Abu Ghraib but was pervasive in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay. More:

Read the story in The Telegraph, Calcutta:

There is deep irony in Amrit’s decision to go after the man for whom her father professed love gratuitously on behalf of all Indians during a meeting in the White House last year.

Amrit, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) specialising in cases relating to torture and abuse of prisoners held in US detention, yesterday called for a Congressional select committee and an independent prosecutor to investigate allegations of Bush-era abuse of prisoners.

“Anything short of that would be insufficient,” she said on National Public Radio (NPR), which has a huge listenership among America’s liberals, for whom the torture issue has become more important than the economic crisis. Read the full story here. More:

Read her piece at the Huffington Post:

Most people do not even know that these photographs exist. When the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse images were first leaked to the press almost five years ago, the Bush administration painted the abuse as anomalous and pinned the blame on a few bad apples, a handful of low-ranking “rogue” soldiers. Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, “I can’t conceive of anyone looking at the [Abu Ghraib] pictures and suggesting that anyone could have recommended, condoned, permitted, encouraged, subtly, directly, in any way, that those things take place.”

The party man or the economist?

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 25, 2009
in India, Indian elections 2009, Leaders and Politics
. 1 Comment

LK Advani and Manmohan Singh

LK Advani and Manmohan Singh

One wants to be the Prime Minister of India for the next five years; the other, the incumbent, has been PM for the past five. Aakar Patel on LK Advani and Manmohan Singh in Mint-Lounge:

He opposes the Indo-US nuclear deal. Why? Because America does not treat India as “equals”. He views strategic policy through honour and emotion.

Of his autobiography’s 48 chapters, not one is on economics. Muslims, Kashmir, terrorism, Pakistan, Musharraf, Kargil, Shah Bano, Naxalism, Godhra, Assam, Ayodhya. These are his concerns. His passion is all about what other people should not do.

Under Advani, the BJP’s three policy thrusts were all negative: Muslims should not keep Babri Masjid; Muslims should not have polygamy; Kashmir should not have special status.

He offers nothing creative, even to Hindus, only resentment.

There is one brutally tough man in politics, but it is not Advani. This man is cold and emotionless when you observe him talk.

If power means the ability to influence change, he is the most powerful leader in the history of India.
His policies, 18 years old, cannot be bent, forget changed, by leaders who came after he wrote them.

More:

The Priyanka Gandhi interview

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 25, 2009
in Indian elections 2009, Leaders and Politics
. 0 Comments

Barkha Dutt speaks to Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on her grandmother, Indira Gandhi, her father’s assassination and how Vipassana meditation helped her make her mind up about politics

priyankaThe media has one persistent question for Priyanka Gandhi. Will she join politics? Her answer, so far, has remained a steadfast ‘no’. But now, for the first time, Priyanka Gandhi, the charismatic campaigner for the Congress in Amethi and Rae Bareli, reveals that for many years of her life, she was sure that politics was “absolutely what she wanted to.”

Priyanka, I know you’ve been asked whether you will join politics a million times. We know you’ve said you don’t want to be in politics, but you’ve never said why you don’t want to be in politics.

Frankly, I’m not sure I’ve figured out why myself. But I’m very clear I don’t want to be in politics, I’m very happy living my life the way I am. I think there are certain aspects of politics which I’m just not suited to.

You’re saying that from experience?

Yes, from having seen a lot of it. I mean, there was a time when I was a kid, when I was about 16-17 when I thought this is absolutely what I want to do with my life.

Really, you were excited by it?

Yes, but I think I wasn’t very clear about my own identity.

more

Indian business students snap up copies of Mein Kampf

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 24, 2009
in Books and India
. 0 Comments

From The Telegraph:

hitlerBooksellers told The Daily Telegraph that while it is regarded in most countries as a ‘Nazi Bible’, in India it is considered a management guide in the mould of Spencer Johnson’s “Who Moved My Cheese”.

Sales of the book over the last six months topped 10,000 in New Delhi alone, according to leading stores, who said it appeared to be becoming more popular with every year.

Several said the surge in sales was due to demand from students who see it as a self-improvement and management strategy guide for aspiring business leaders, and who were happy to cite it as an inspiration.

“Students are increasingly coming in asking for it and we’re happy to sell it to them,” said Sohin Lakhani, owner of Mumbai-based Embassy books who reprints Mein Kampf every quarter and shrugs off any moral issues in publishing the book. More:

Nandan Nilekani: the ‘Bill Gates of Bangalore’

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 24, 2009
in Business, India, Innovation and Leaders
. 0 Comments

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, shares his views on open markets and the failure of public systems. From the Guardian:

nilekaniThe man who inspired the slogan “the world is flat” has a small revision to make in the light of recent events. “The world has got flattened,” says Nandan Nilekani, chairman of Indian technology giant Infosys.

The “Bill Gates of Bangalore” – as he became known to star-struck American commentators – first served as inspiration to Thomas Friedman when the New York Times columnist wrote that bible of globalisation, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, way back in 2005. Then, as now, at the epicentre of the Indian IT outsourcing boom, Infosys and its charismatic co-founder seemed the embodiment of the optimistic mood. Soaring world trade, the endless march of the internet and a common language (jargon-inflected English) were ironing out political and geographical divisions around the world.

It all feels an age ago, sitting over a pot of tea in a deserted London hotel foyer. Global trade has collapsed, protectionism is on the rise and the banking crisis has national governments rushing to resurrect control over international business. But Nilekani insists the analysis still holds. “Because the world was flat, we all got flattened: the crisis moved around the world faster,” he says in that enigmatic way that visionary businessmen get away with. Whether he means we were all just flattened to the ground by the financial earthquake at the same time, or irreversibly rolled smooth by the progressive force of globalisation, is left unspoken.

More:

The criminals running the Af-Pak border

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 24, 2009
in Afghanistan
. 0 Comments

Gretchen Peters, author of the forthcoming “Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda,” at Foreign Policy:

In the last eight years, the Afghan Taliban have greatly expanded their illicit activities, morphing into a force more violent and ruthless than when they were in power from 1996 to 2001 and building up an economic empire worth almost half a billion dollars. Their activities are diverse: In some parts of the south, they collaborate with drug traffickers to dictate poppy output. They provide armed protection for opium convoys leaving Afghanistan’s farm areas and protect heroin labs along the Pakistan border. In addition, they work with kidnapping rings that have snared diplomats, journalists, U.S. contractors, and wealthy local businessmen. They cooperate with gunrunners, human traffickers, and the smuggling gangs that illegally export millions of dollars worth of Afghan antiquities.

They also extort monthly payments from legal Afghan businesses, terrorizing village shopkeepers and even nationwide cellphone providers, attacking their homes and premises if they don’t comply. District-level Taliban commanders collect fees as high as $250 per truck passing through their control zones from import-export firms and trucking companies, even “taxing” the tankers carrying jet fuel to NATO air bases in Kandahar and Bagram. More:

Cracking the Indus Valley script

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 24, 2009
in Heritage and Science
. 0 Comments

Scientists have moved closer to deciphering the Indus Valley script, believed to be one of the three oldest languages. The language was spoken at least 4,000 years ago between 2500 and 1900 BC in what is now north-west India and the eastern part of Pakistan.

Earlier studies by linguists and historians claimed that the script did not represent language but is religious or political imagery. Now, a team of Indian scientists has reported in the latest of Science that the script is indeed a language.

The team: Rajesh P.N. Rao, computer scientist from the University of Washington; Hrishikesh Joglekar, a software engineer in Oracle India, Mumbai; R. Adhikari, faculty of the physics department at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai; and I. Mahadevan, researcher at the Indus Research Centre, Chennai, Nisha Yadav from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Mayank N. Vahia from the Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences in Mumbai.

Examples of the Indus script

Examples of the Indus script

Mint newspaper’s science reporter Seema Singh has a very good story that explains the background and the significance:

Among the linguistic scripts, texts of English, Old Tamil, Rig Vedic Sanskrit and of the Sumerian language spoken in Mesopotamia, another civilization that thrived around 4,000 years ago, were used for comparison. What was compared was the permissible randomness in choosing a sequence. It is this randomness, which allows flexibility in composing words or sentences. But even within this randomness, there is always a clear pattern in a script that represents a language. In contrast, DNA sequences are completely random.

The results show that the Indus inscriptions were different from any of the non-linguistic systems, says Rao of the University of Washington. The finding of the study marks a considerable leap from a provocative 2004 paper titled The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis that claimed the short inscriptions had no linguistic content, somewhat implying that the literacy of the Harappan civilization was a myth. Its lead author offered a $10,000 (Rs5 lakh) reward to whoever produced an Indus artefact that contained more than 50 symbols. More:

The following from Science Daily:

The Rosetta Stone allowed 19th century scholars to translate symbols left by an ancient civilization and thus decipher the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

But the symbols found on many other ancient artifacts remain a mystery, including those of a people that inhabited the Indus valley on the present-day border between Pakistan and India. Some experts question whether the symbols represent a language at all, or are merely pictograms that bear no relation to the language spoken by their creators.

A University of Washington computer scientist has led a statistical study of the Indus script, comparing the pattern of symbols to various linguistic scripts and nonlinguistic systems, including DNA and a computer programming language. The results, published online April 23 by the journal Science, found the Indus script’s pattern is closer to that of spoken words, supporting the hypothesis that it codes for an as-yet-unknown language. More:

Also read Wired and New Scientist stories

Petraeus to Pakistan: Forget about India

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 23, 2009
in Pakistan
. 0 Comments

From Wired:

patraeusUS general, David Petraeus, told a Harvard forum on Tuesday that the ‘military situation in Afghanistan will probably deteriorate in the near term’. He said: ‘We do believe we can achieve progress, but it’s going to get worse before it gets better. … There will be tough months ahead.’

For more than six decades, Pakistan and India have been enemies: The two countries fought a series of wars, the most recent of which left an estimated 4,000 Pakistanis dead. And last year’s spree killings in Mumbai were traced to a Pakistani militant group with government ties.
But yesterday, at a forum here at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus had a message for the Pakistanis: Get over it. These days, your biggest enemy isn’t India. It’s home-grown extremists.

For decades, Pakistan’s powerful military and intelligence services have viewed India as enemy number one. According to Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, that strategic fixation on India persists, despite the rising power of home-grown extremists.

More:

[Photo: US Dept of Defense]

Pakistan a mortal threat to world: Hillary

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 23, 2009
in Pakistan
. 0 Comments

With the Taliban closing in on Islamabad and moving to within 70 miles of the capital, the Obama administration believes the Pakistan government is giving in to the militants. In a testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, secretary of state Hillary Clinton said the nuclear-armed Pakistan was becoming a ‘mortal threat’ to the world. ‘I think that the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists,’ she said.

She was referring to Pakistan’s deal with the Taliban giving them complete control over the Swat valley, 100 miles west of  Islamabad. On Tuesday, the Taliban also took over Buner, just 70 miles from Islamabad. Read the Washington Post story.

buner_mapBuner falls into the hands of Swat Taliban: Karachi’s Dawn newspaper said in a report that “Taliban militants from Swat took control of Buner on Tuesday and started patrolling bazaars, villages and towns in the district.” The newspaper said the Taliban “have been on a looting spree (in the region) for the past five days. They have robbed government and NGO offices of vehicles, computers, printers, generators, edible oil containers, and food and nutrition packets. Read the Dawn story.

The New York Times says “The fall of the district, Buner, did not mean that the Taliban could imminently threaten Islamabad. But it was another indication of the gathering strength of the insurgency and it raised new alarm about the ability of the government to fend off an unrelenting Taliban advance toward the heart of Pakistan.”

In a report from Islamabad, it says:

A local politician, Jamsher Khan, said that people were initially determined to resist theTaliban in Buner, but that they were discouraged by the deal the government struck with the Taliban in Swat. “We felt stronger as long we thought the government was with us,” he said by telephone, “but when the government showed weakness, we too stopped offering resistance to the Taliban.” More: