To get to President Asif Ali Zardari’s presidential palace in the heart of Islamabad for dinner is like running an obstacle course. Pakistan’s once sleepy capital, full of restaurant-going bureaucrats and diplomats, is now littered with concrete barriers, blast walls, checkpoints, armed police, and soldiers; as a result of recent suicide bombings the city now resembles Baghdad or Kabul. At the first checkpoint, two miles from the palace, they have my name and my car’s license number. There are seven more checkpoints to negotiate along the way.
Apart from traveling to the airport by helicopter to take trips abroad, the President stays inside the palace; he fears threats to his life by the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda, who in December 2007 killed his wife, the charismatic Benazir Bhutto, then perhaps the country’s only genuine national leader. Zardari’s isolation has only added to his growing unpopularity, his indecisiveness, and the public feeling that he is out of touch. Even as most Pakistanis have concluded that the Taliban now pose the greatest threat to the Pakistani state since its cre- ation, the president, the prime minister, and the army chief have, until recently, been in a state of denial of reality.
“We are not a failed state yet but we may become one in ten years if we don’t receive international support to combat the Taliban threat,” Zardari indignantly says, pointing out that in contrast to the more than $11 billion former president Pervez Musharraf received from the US in the years after the September 11 attacks, his own administration has received only between “$10 and $15 million,” despite all the new American promises of aid. More:
Propaganda films obtained by The Sunday Telegraph in Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, show boys of 14 or 15 recording farewell messages before climbing into vehicles filled with explosives.
Suicide bombings were extremely rare in Pakistan but have increased dramatically since the Taliban took control of Swat in the aftermath of a bungled government crackdown on extremists launched in 2007.
One film which Pakistanis have been watching with horrified fascination shows a boy of about 15, named in the video as Arshad Ali from Swat, who attacked a polling station after the Taliban banned voting last year.
Sitting with an AK-47 cradled in his lap and fiddling with prayer beads, he stares into the camera. Speaking calmly, he said that the people of Swat were living in evil times and that sacrifice was called for. More:
The language was already biblical; now the scale of what is happening matches it. The exodus of people forced from their homes in Pakistan’s Swat Valley and elsewhere in the country’s north-west may be as high as 2.4 million, aid officials say. Around the world, only a handful of war-spoiled countries – Sudan, Iraq, Colombia – have larger numbers of internal refugees. The speed of the displacement at its height – up to 85,000 people a day – was matched only during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. This is now one of the biggest sudden refugee crises the world has ever seen.
Until now, the worst of the problem has been kept largely out of sight. Of the total displaced by the military’s operations against the Taliban – the army yesterday claimed a crucial breakthrough, taking control of the Swat Valley’s main town, Mingora – just 200,000 people have been forced to live in the makeshift tent camps dotted around the southern fringe of the conflict zone. The vast majority were taken in by relatives, extended family members and local people wanting to help. More:
THE first thing Sadaffe Abid did when she heard Wednesday’s massive bomb rattling the windows in her office four miles away was, like most residents of Lahore, to telephone to check on family and friends. However, what she did next was more surprising.
“I told them we should come out on to the streets to protest against these militants,” she said. “This bomb was meant to turn public opinion against the army operation to clear the Taliban from Swat, and we shouldn’t give in.”
The stylishly dressed Abid, 35, is chief executive of a foundation providing microfinance for rural women, and says until recently she never thought the Taliban were anything to do with her.
Yet twice in the past two months she and many of her friends have gathered for rallies in the Mall in central Lahore, holding placards declaring “No to terrorism”, after spreading the word through Facebook and text messages. More:
Imran Khan, Al Jazeera’s reporter in Pakistan, is filing regular dispatches from the country as the army battles Taliban fighters in the North West Frontier Province:
The Taliban are still fighting back on the outskirts of Mingora. They are still in control, so local sources tell us, of key towns and villages surrounding Swat valley city.
There are still pockets of resistance in the neighbouring area of Buner, where Taliban fighters recently beheaded three men they suspected of spying.
Also, the type of tactics the Taliban are now using are much more in line with classic insurgency warfare.
They are using hit and run tactics, spraying machine gunfire at army troops and then retreating.
The army are treating this type of tactic more as a nuisance then a threat, but it shows just how fraught the battle is.
Also if the battle is over within the next three days, then is the war over?
There are now, according to the Pakistani government, 3.4 million people displaced by the fighting. More:
A young girl was denied admission into a Sikh-run college in Amritsar because she plucked her eyebrows. She challenged it in a court and, in a verdict running into 152 pages, the judges have endorsed the stand taken by the supreme temporal body of the Sikhs, the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) and said the college was justified in refusing to admit her.
The SGPC manages all Sikh minority institutions. It said a believer could not be a true Sikh – even if born in a Sikh family — if he or she trimmed hair.
According a report in the Times of India, “Saturday’s order, replete with references to Sikh history and Sikh model code of conduct, also noted that the Guru Granth Sahib is for guidance of Sikhs in their pursuit towards spiritual salvation. It does not deal with the code of conduct prescribed for Sikhs. It was the Sikh rehat-maryada (code of conduct) that dealt with issues like importance of unshorn hair.”
Sikhs are forbidden by their holy book to cut their hair. Hair is one of the five symbols (known as the five Ks) of Sikh faith: Kesh (uncut hair), Kara (a steel bracelet), Kanga (a wooden comb), Kaccha – also spelt Kachh (cotton underwear) and Kirpan (steel sword). Sikh women are just as forbidden to cut any body hair or even trim their eyebrows. More about the faith here.
Calcutta in 1977 when the Communists came to power (32 years later, they are still in power) and Kolkata now. Shamik Bag, a U2-loving, bourgeois Kolkatan, born the same year Jyoti Basu was elected chief minister at the head of a Left Front government, looks back at the confusing, decadent years. From Mint-Lounge:
Five years after a stretch of it was renamed, Kolkata’s Park Street is yet to get used to being Mother Teresa Sarani. It’s early into Saturday evening and Park Street is playing true to form: Ladies in miniskirts, long-haired musicians, encyclopaedia sellers, drug pushers, well-fed happy families hand-held by paan-chewing patriarchs, pimps and prostitutes-all ready to mingle seamlessly into the night of food, alcohol, dance, music, money, sex. Park Street doesn’t seem to be in any urgent need of missionary charity yet.
As we turn the corner into Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road, the Park Street cool metamorphoses-volubly and visibly-into chaos. Vehicles piled up behind a tram car that has stopped dead in its wrecked, wretched track; crowds on the road while hawkers rule the pavements, honking, shouting, screaming, jostling-urban paralysis. Luke Kenny, well known as a video jockey till he became better known with Rock On!!, is sitting next to me, I’m at the wheel, there’s Steely Dan playing and air conditioning too-comforts carried over from Park Street. Kenny is back in the city of his birth-we had got together incidentally-and sitting immobile amid the anarchy of the street, he opportunely lets one slip in: “You think the Communists have been good for Calcutta?” More:
There are three kinds of tourists to Goa: Those looking for a “trip”, who head straight to the northern hippie haven of Arambol; those looking for fun, who camp on the sands of Baga and Calangute; and those who come looking for themselves, and head to the southern idyll of Palolem.
Palolem’s story, like that of all tourist magnets, is one of hype and deflation. Long promoted by Western guidebooks as the secret tropical paradise, the fortunes of this quaint Goan fishing village were changed irrevocably by the influx of thousands of sun-starved, winter-weary Europeans. In the late 1980s, it had just coconuts and fishermen. By the end of the millennium, fishermen were letting out a few rooms to visitors. Now, there are restaurants with near-identical menus and clubs and Internet cafés and laundrywallahs and “Hello-friend-I-give-you-cheap-price” vendors and masseurs (“shakes” and spicy massages also available) and yoga packages and Silent Noise parties and, of course, fishermen accosting tourists for a dolphin-sighting ride. More:
What makes men like Binayak Sen pose such a threat to the state that he has to be jailed for over two years until the Supreme Court is forced to intervene? In Tehelka, Shoma Chaudhury travels to Raigad and Dantewada in Chhatisgarh where the state is waging war against it own people, to find out.
ONE YEAR ago, before the campaign on his behalf had gained m o m e n t u m , TEHELKA did a cover story on Binayak Sen – doctor and human rights activist, jailed on false charges under the draconian Chhattisgarh (People’s) Public Security Act (See TEHELKA: No Country for Good Men). On May 25, when Supreme Court judges Markandeya Katju and Deepak Verma took just sixty seconds to undo an injustice that had been wilfully perpetuated by the State for two long years, it should have been an occasion for another cover story, more celebratory, documenting among other things, Binayak’s wife, Ilina’s Herculean legal struggle for his release. But Binayak and Ilina’s story is merely symbolic of a much bigger, on-going and faceless struggle. And so, even as the human rights community exploded in joy with the May 25 victory, 400 kilometers from Raipur, another big battlefront was being opened.
It is two days after 59-year-old Binayak Sen got to go home. May 28, scalding, red dust everywhere, a hot loo blowing. A man in a white lungi and kurta sits under a leafy tree, listening to ten Gond tribals tell their story of how two nights earlier their village was looted. Every ration burnt. Every goat taken, every hen kidnapped. Not even a little chick left behind. The tribals have trekked from faraway Kamanar village in the hope that this man in white will help them access the ear of the State. It is a difficult proposition because it is the State that has looted the village: How do you lodge an FIR with the police when it is the police that have stolen your chickens?
One day this month, Faridun Karimdad, a 36-year-old farm worker, was lying on a cot in a gloomy hospital ward in Mardan, a town in Pakistan’s northwest. He inched onto his right side to show me the splatter of dried blood above his left hip. The day before, as Karimdad and his family prepared to flee the village of Khot in the Swat Valley, a mortar exploded outside his home, shattering his hip and killing his son and two daughters. He could live with his loss, he told me, if he believed the Pakistani military’s offensive would bring peace — if only the brief peace his village enjoyed after the Pakistani government negotiated a cease-fire with Taliban fighters last February.
Karimdad, like many of the refugees fleeing the fighting in Swat, blames both sides for violating the terms of the deal. The government had agreed to recognize sharia, Islamic law, in the region if the militants agreed to lay down their arms. But peace did not hold for long. The Taliban continued pushing into mountains toward the capital, Islamabad, and claimed territory in the neighboring district of Buner.
Then, in early May, facing harsh criticism from the United States for ceding territory to the militants, the government launched a heavy-handed military offensive against the Taliban in Swat — a mission that Karimdad, like many in his situation, believes is destined to fail. The Pakistani military claims to have killed more than 1,200 Taliban fighters and is now waging street battles and searching houses for militants in Swat’s main town of Mingora. More:
Over the decades, the residents of Mysore got used to the sight of westerners dolled up in saris wandering through the streets. Blonde girls in Indian dress were among the thousands of students who flocked to the south Indian city to study Ashtanga yoga with Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois, the man credited for doing much to bring the discipline to the west.
Jois died on May 18, just short of his 94th birthday, in the city where he arrived, aged 14, to beg on its streets and study Sanskrit. Today, Mysore is the site of one of the world’s biggest IT training centres run by computer group Infosys.
India’s transformation over the past century did little to alter Jois’s daily routine. For more than 70 years, he could be found teaching yoga from four in the morning until midday to scores of eager students from across the world. More:
Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in the Wall Street Journal. A former CIA officer, Riedel chaired President Obama’s strategic review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Pakistan is a unique nuclear weapons state. It has been both the recipient of technology transfers from other states and a supplier of technology to still other states. It has been a state sponsor of proliferation and has tolerated private sector proliferation as well. Pakistan has engaged in highly provocative behavior against India, even initiating a limited war, and sponsored terrorist groups that have engaged in mass casualty terrorism inside India’s cities, most recently last November in Mumbai. No other nuclear weapons state has done all of these provocative actions.
The origins of the Pakistani nuclear program lie in the deep national humiliation of the 1971 war with India that led to the partition of the country, the independence of Bangladesh and the destruction of the dream of a single Muslim state for all of south Asia’s Muslim population. The military dictator at the time, Yaqub Khan, presided over the loss of half the nation and the surrender of 90,000 Pakistani soldiers in Dacca. The Pakistani establishment determined it must develop a nuclear weapon to counter India’s conventional superiority. more:
The Philippines and other smaller countries are gaining on what used to be the sole superpower in the global call-center business, India.
The Philippines’ share of the industry — the business of helping people rectify computer problems, pitching magazine subscriptions and other time-consuming tasks — has risen from virtually zero a decade ago to 15% today, the No. 2 spot, according to Dallas-based Everest Research Institute.
Meanwhile, India’s share of the global business-processing market, while growing in value, has fallen to 40% from about 80% in 2004 as the industry spreads to other parts of the world.
This shift isn’t because of a sudden aversion to India. India-based call centers still lead the industry. more:
More than 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the final throes of the Sri Lankan civil war, most as a result of government shelling, an investigation by The Times has revealed.
The number of casualties is three times the official figure.
The Sri Lankan authorities have insisted that their forces stopped using heavy weapons on April 27 and observed the no-fire zone where 100,000 Tamil men, women and children were sheltering. They have blamed all civilian casualties on Tamil Tiger rebels concealed among the civilians. More:
[Visit the Times page for the photographs.]
Also read Emily Wax report in the Washington Post:
The strip of beach where tens of thousands of civilians huddled during the Sri Lankan military’s decisive assault against the Tamil Tiger rebels this month shows clear signs of heavy artillery shelling, according to a helicopter inspection of the site by independent journalists, interviews with eyewitnesses, and specialists who have studied high-resolution satellite imagery from the war zone.
That evidence contradicts government assertions that areas of heavy civilian populations were no-fire zones that were deliberately spared during the final weeks of military assault that ended this island nation’s quarter-century of civil war.
“We see a lot of images of destroyed structures and what look like circular shell craters and also, frankly, very large holes in the ground. If it was a shell, it must be a very large one to make 24-feet-wide craters,” said Lars Bromley, director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights project, which was asked by human rights groups to study the satellite images. More:
On Wednesday evening the Sri Lankan delegation at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva was celebrating after its victory in fending off an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by its army.
Sri Lanka’s Government has consistently denied killing civilians in the battle to wipe out the Tamil Tigers and blamed the rebels for any deaths. It hailed the vote by the council as a vindication of its action.
An investigation by The Times into Sri Lanka’s civilian casualties, however -- which was conducted in a week-long visit to Sri Lanka -- has found evidence of a civilian death toll of 20,000, almost three times that cited previously. The majority perished under government guns. More:
A reporter’s story
Catherine Philp in the Times:
It was four years since I had been to Sri Lanka and everything had changed. The shaky ceasefire, which was collapsing even then, had imploded with an all-out military offensive to drive out the Tamil Tigers.
At a distance I was not necessarily opposed. In five years of covering South Asia I had travelled several times to “Tigerland” and was in no doubt of the rebels’ capacity for brutality. More:
The English newspaper’s estimate, which it said was based on an analysis of “aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony,” relied in part on an anonymous United Nations source and what the paper called “confidential United Nations documents.” But Sri Lankan officials heaped scorn on the report and U.N. officials told The New York Times, The Guardian and The BBC that they have no good estimate of the number of civilians killed in the final weeks of fighting and questioned the methodology.
On The Times of London Web site, the newspaper’s foreign editor, Richard Beeston, narrates a video analysis of aerial photographs of the beach where Tamil Tiger separatists made their last stand, surrounded by thousands of civilians. The photographs appear to have been taken after the fighting ceased, and The Times says that they show evidence of shelling and of a large number of graves for both militants and civilians. More:
Some had imagined that nuclear weapons would make Pakistan an object of awe and respect internationally. They had hoped that Pakistan would acquire the mantle of leadership of the Islamic world. Indeed, in the aftermath of the 1998 tests, Pakistan’s stock had shot up in some Muslim countries before it crashed. But today, with a large swathe of its territory lost to insurgents, one has to defend Pakistan against allegations of being a failed state. In terms of governance, economy, education or any reasonable quality of life indicators, Pakistan is not a successful state that is envied by anyone.
Contrary to claims made in 1998, the bomb did not transform Pakistan into a technologically and scientifically advanced country. Again, the facts are stark. Apart from relatively minor exports of computer software and light armaments, science and technology remain irrelevant in the process of production. Pakistan’s current exports are principally textiles, cotton, leather, footballs, fish and fruit. This is just as it was before Pakistan embarked on its quest for the bomb. The value-added component of Pakistani manufacturing somewhat exceeds that of Bangladesh and Sudan, but is far below that of India, Turkey and Indonesia. Nor is the quality of science taught in our educational institutions even remotely satisfactory. But then, given that making a bomb these days requires only narrow technical skills rather than scientific ones, this is scarcely surprising. More:
Kavya Shivashankar from Olathe, Kansas is the eighth Indian kid to win the Spelling Bee.
She’s 13 years old, in 8th grade, enjoys practicing her violin, bicycling, swimming, and learning Indian classical dance. She looks forward to becoming a neurosurgeon.
Kavya spelt the word “laodicean” — which means indifferent or lukewarm especially in matters of religion — to claim the title after her only remaining American opponent Tim Ruiter flubbed “Maecenas,” which means a generous benefactor.
According to a report in the Times of India, some eleven million American schoolkids participated in the US National Spelling Bee championships this year, and when the final 293 made the cut, there were 32 kids of Indian origin. Read the full story here:
The BJP has lost its appeal amongst its traditional bastion, the middle class. In the Hindustan TimesRajdeep Sardesai tries to come to terms with why.
As a news anchor who lives in a television studio, and whose reporting days are rapidly becoming a fading memory, my one connection with the ‘real’ world is a morning walkers’ group in the neighbourhood park. The gathering includes senior citizens, service sector professionals and independent businessmen. Their viewpoints on most issues — be it POTA, uniform civil code, black money in Swiss banks, or even the Ram Mandir — are similar to a BJP manifesto. Yet, a majority of them voted for Sheila Dikshit in last year’s Delhi Assembly elections and Dr Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister this year. In their voting preferences lies the key to explaining perhaps the only nationwide trend of election 2009: The dominance of the Congress/UPA over the BJP/NDA across urban India.
As the comprehensive National Election Study done by Yogendra Yadav and his team has shown, the UPA has gained in votes and seats in urban constituencies. With the exception of Bangalore and Ahmedabad, the Congress and its allies have swept metropolitan India. The UPA won 34 of the 57 major urban constituencies, the NDA just 19. The UPA won an impressive 81 of the 144 semi-urban constituencies, the NDA only won 39. It’s not just the urban poor, the study shows that the UPA was 15 per cent points ahead of the NDA among urban middle class voters.
A surge at the box office has made this spring a surprisingly happy one for the movie business. And as the big summer films arrive, Americans are expected to pile into theaters in even greater numbers.
Yet at one little cinema in Jackson Heights, Queens, the plot line is not so happy. The Eagle Theater is shut tight, its steel burglar gate pulled down and its marquee blank, battered and dark.
The cause of the theater’s untimely closing – like many things that happen in this bustling immigrant neighborhood – lies not in New York but clear on the other side of the planet.
In Mumbai, India, a seven-week-old strike by film producers has brought Bollywood, that country’s multibillion-dollar film industry, to a halt. The Eagle specializes in first-run Bollywood movies, and without a supply of new films, theaters like it around the world have had to screen old ones, dip into the pricier Hollywood and European film catalogs – or shut down. More:
It took just nine correct letters for Kavya Shivashankar, 13, to be crowned the new US spelling champion.
Stefan Fatsis on the National Spelling Bee contest. From the Daily Beast:
[Akshay Buddiga faints at the 2004 Bee]
Kids stammer, tug at their hair, and display preadolescent tics that are hard enough to manage in front of malicious middle-school classmates let alone a nation of living-room critics, sportswriters, and live bloggers. In 2004, a 13-year-old named Akshay Buddiga famously fainted during a turn. The YouTube video is shocking-not because Akshay gets up and spells “alopecoid” correctly but because not a single person rushes to his side. “Stop the clock,” one judge says in an unalarmed, schoolmarmy voice. When Akshay rises, the judge says-without any way of possibly knowing- “He’s all right.” As if.
If you’ve seen the documentary Spellbound, you know the lengths to which some kids-and, more to the point, some parents-go to prepare for the Bee. The finalists will have spent hundreds of hours-possibly thousands in the case of veteran spellers-memorizing arcane words. They will have been tested via printed word lists and interactive software. They will have been drilled ceaselessly by demanding moms, dads, teachers and coaches. For the top competitors, the pressure is profound. (As the Bee has evolved, it’s grown more difficult. The winning word in 1981 was “sarcophagus.” Not to brag, but my first-grade daughter can spell that.) More:
Also: Fourteen Indian American kids have made it to the semi finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee contest. At Sify News.
A man in Mazar-e Sharif (northern Afghanistan) who walks into the wind with his son, suddenly a powerful wind tugged him and fell down on the ground, then stood and started to spit blood on his son when he was suffering from pain. I took this picture when they were walking farther down the street. He is one of those warriors who lost one of his legs in war against Soviet Invasion, today he is begging on the streets alongside of hundreds of others who are effected by war. More:
Scientists have uncovered what they say is the oldest case of leprosy yet found. They have discovered traces of the disease in a 4,000-year-old skeleton they found near Udaipur in Rajasthan, India. The skeleton was buried about 2000 BC.
A report in Science Daily says a team of biological anthropologists from Appalachian State University and archaeologists from Deccan College in Pune, India, recently reported analysis of a 4000-year-old skeleton from India bearing evidence of leprosy. “This skeleton represents both the earliest archaeological evidence for human infection with Mycobacterium leprae in the world and the first evidence for the disease in prehistoric India.”
The authors say their find confirms that a passage in the Atharva Veda, a set of Sanskrit hymns written around 1550 B.C., indeed refers to leprosy, a reading that had been doubted because until now the oldest accepted written accounts of the disease were from the sixth century B.C.
The bacterium that causes leprosy seemed to have spread worldwide from a single clone, biologists reported three years ago. But for lack of sufficient samples, they could not tell whether the bacterium was disseminated when modern humans first left Africa about 50,000 years ago, or spread from India in more recent times.
In the Guardian, Ed Douglas takes a tour of the compound that witnessed a royal bloodbath and the death of the monarchy in Nepal:
The two banknotes I handed over to get inside Kathmandu’s newest museum told the story. On one were the mild features of King Birendra, whose reign ended in June 2001 when Birendra’s son, the Eton-educated Crown Prince Dipendra, killed dad, mum, his brother and sister, and five others before turning the gun on himself. Allegedly. On the other, newer banknote, there is a picture of Mount Everest – and no king at all.
That’s because Nepal’s monarchy is now history. After years of grim authoritarianism and mismanagement by King Gyanendra, who succeeded his brother, Nepal’s people finally got the chance to boot him out last year, via the ballot box. Gyanendra quite literally handed his crown to the new government and after 240 years, Nepal’s ill-starred Shah royal dynasty was gone.
So what to do with their digs? Even before Gyanendra quit the throne, plans were laid to turn the Narayanhiti palace into a national museum. This opened in February to intense public interest. Nepal’s then prime minister, Maoist and former rebel leader Prachanda, cut the ribbon. Ordinary citizens queued round the block to see where Birendra died and how their recent monarchs lived. More:
Last year, as a New Delhi mom desperate to get my daughter into an elite private school, I chose my interview outfits carefully: Boots and blazers for the schools known among the business class. Colorful salwar kameezes for the more cultural and political set. Taking no chances, we brought her artwork, copies of my first book, reviews of my husband’s art shows. We were shameless, stopping only short of outright bribery and jockeying connections–both traits as entrenched in Delhi as sequins and seekh kebabs.
Last week, we completed a whirlwind tour of some of New York City’s best public schools. We gave no thought to our appearance before each of the six tours. Who we were didn’t matter at all, and not so much our daughter either. What got us in the door was her performance on a Saturday morning earlier this year, shortly after we returned to the U.S. In what any parent will recognize as a fluke (what if she had been moody, hated the proctor, wanted eggs for breakfast instead of pancakes?), she scored high enough to qualify for a magnet school. More:
This is Delhi in its glory. Hotter, even, than when I knew it as a child, the temperatures these days scratching past the 45 degrees Celsius that were their absolute threshold then. Every day the earth baking, every night the atmosphere billowing in response, plumes of invisible heat unsettling the skies, a sudden imbalance and extreme of the natural order, corrected by crazy dust storms in the late afternoon, whose special, threatening light, one knows, will never break to rain. The dust is everywhere. On window sills and on the floors of my home, on doorknobs and banisters, and even hidden atop curtain rods and high shelves. The body is always tormented by the heat, always seeking respite, coolness, moisture, a wet towel, ginger-lemonade, the direct draft of an air-conditioner.
Last summer, when I was remodeling this house, I had six air-conditioners installed, one for each room, most of them split units, their umbilical tubing buried within the masonry. When we moved in, at the end of September, they seemed excessive, perhaps even a bit of a waste. This month, they seem barely adequate, and my family’s warnings prescient — don’t skimp on the aircon or you’ll regret it in the summer, when you most need it. The units loom over each room, promising Singaporean efficacy, but delivering Patna levels of cooling.
In the center of the two-storied house is a kind of small atrium, or large shaft, which stretches from plinth to roof. My neighbor has one just like it — it is mandated by local zoning. The idea was, in those pre-aircon-days of the Raj and early Indian post-coloniality, that air would circulate through the house, gathering heat from the groins and armpits of its wilting inhabitants, before entering the atrium and rising up as hot air must, but also following Bernoulli’s principle, that fluids will accelerate as they pass through a narrower channel. The logic of air-conditioning, sadly, runs so directly counter to this ecological understanding of architecture, as a coordination of air flows from outside the building, in through its interiors, all the way out its top. More:
Riots erupted across the Punjab region of India on Monday after a Sikh preacher from an Indian sect was killed by a rival Sikh group in Austria. Within hours of the incident in Vienna, thousands of Sikhs took to the streets, setting fire to buildings, vehicles and a train. Curfew was imposed in four towns and the army fanned out to quell the violence.
The dead man belonged to Dera Guru Ravidass Sachkhand Balan, a Sikh sect of dalits, or untouchables. Sikhism rejects caste divisions; one of its main tenets is the equality of all believers. But caste inequality is entrenched in rural Punjab, resulting in the spread of caste-based sects within Sikhism.
“In fact, all major villages in Punjab today have two gurdwaras – one frequented by the so-called ‘upper castes’ or Jat Sikhs, another by Dalits or ‘lower castes,’” writes Vipin Pubby in the Indian Express. Click here to read the full story.
The Indian Express has an excellent FAQ on the history of deras (Sikh sects) in Punjab:
What are deras and why are they in the news? A dera is technically the headquarters of a group of devotees who follow the teachings of a particular spiritual guru and generally have a living representative of the guru who is equally revered. The representatives of the gurus, who hold the gaddi, are normally anointed by their predecessors.
How many deras are there in Punjab? Estimates vary but it is generally believed that there are about 300 major deras across the state and the neighbouring state of Haryana. Out of these, about a dozen have substantial following – over one lakh devotees each. There are hundreds of others which are restricted to a few villages each. More:
The National spoke to the wives of ambassadors in Abu Dhabi. Among them, Sunita Mainee Ahmad, wife of India’s ambassador to UAE, Talmiz Ahmed:
“We have been here since August 2007, but this is not my first posting as an ambassador’s wife. My husband Talmiz has been ambassador in Oman and Saudi Arabia. I was brought up mainly in England where I practised as a maritime lawyer. I still work as a consultant here in Abu Dhabi for Clyde & Co. I have twin daughters who are both trainee lawyers in London.
My husband’s priority is to encourage investment into India, to develop trade, business and foreign relationships. I support him in all the promotional activities he does, but my role is also to promote India with the women here. So it is a two-pronged approach. I am not one of those women who play bridge and have endless lunches. I use my time to promote professional and cultural events such as a recent event showcasing dances and traditional costumes of India.
I am personally involved in all the events, from the lighting to the rehearsals. I get women involved from the Indian community and I encourage them all to voice an opinion. I am known as an “approachable” ambassador’s wife.
I do my own cooking for many of the events. In an Indian home you watch your mother and learn from her. When my husband and I got married he was posted to South Africa so I started experimenting there because I no longer worked full-time as a lawyer. Now, whenever I have diplomatic dinners of up to about 50 people, I cook. I plan the menus and start organising the shopping three days before. I might cook about 10 dishes for a dinner. I have loads of recipe books, but my favourite is still Delia Smith. More:
Eminent Karachi-based columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee shares his memories about his chidlhood and school days: From Dawn:
Our old school, the Bai Virbaiji Soparivala Parsi High School (BVS), housed in a proud building that stands on Abdullah Haroon Road in our now plagued city of Karachi celebrated the 150th anniversary of its founding – not a bad record in these days of constant change and turmoil.
An old saying goes that one’s school days are the happiest days of one’s life – well mine may not have been the happiest days of my life, but they were undoubtedly happy and carefree days, of fun, joy and of course of learning -the last being the greatest gift that can be given to a child. My school days started in 1931, when I followed in the footsteps of my parents, Rustom Fakirjee Cowasjee and Mucca Rustomjee H J Rustomjee and all my various uncles and aunts. I was later joined by my two brothers, Cowasjee (better known as John) and Cyrus, and a large handful of cousins and friends.
Our principal in those far-off days was a skilled educationist, Dr Maneck Pithawalla, DSc, FRGS, FGS, who took on the job in 1920 and stayed until his retirement in 1946. The finest tribute to him was possibly that paid in 1955 on his 70th birthday when Old Virbaijeeites gathered to honour him. My cousin, Dr Roeinton Khambatta, spoke on the occasion: ‘ … We have built no monuments for you and have erected no pillars. Great empires have built these and they have been razed to the ground, forgotten for ever. We give you something more – the promise of a thousand and more Old Virbaijeeites to tread the paths you hacked out so well, to pass on your teachings by word of mouth to the generations that come to seek that goal you set for us – Towards the Best Light [the school motto].’ More
He’s one of the best-selling authors in the Hindi language, with some 300 titles to his name and more than 25 million books sold. But he’s no literary lion. Instead, Pathak writes pulp fiction novels that are sold at drugstores and seedy railway stations.
His tales feature an array of sordid characters and dirty dealing, but up until now, you couldn’t read them unless you could read Hindi. That changed in March, when Blaft, an upstart boutique publisher in Chennai released the first-ever English translation of a Pathak book – one his most famous, called “Painsath Lakh Ki Dakaiti.”
It first came out in 1977 and has since sold 300,000 copies over 15 reprintings. The English version is called “The Rs 65 Lakh Heist” (that would be “The $6.5 million Heist” in American money). More:
Defying all the conventional wisdom about Indian television viewers – notorious for dogged allegiance to campy soap operas that pitted idealized brides against scheming mothers-in-law – the hottest show on TV today is a progressive, heartwarming drama about a plucky little girl caught up in an illegal child marriage.
Called Balika Vadhu, or “Child Bride,” and set in rural Rajasthan, where marrying off daughters before they hit puberty is still a common practice, the show has caught the imagination of urban viewers across the board and throughout India, ushering in a revolution of sorts in cable television programming.
It has helped Colors, an upstart channel launched by Viacom and Network18 in July last year, supplant Rupert Murdoch’s Star Plus as the most-watched Indian television network – a title Star Plus held for nine years running. And it has unleashed a new wave of progressive programming devoted to issues facing India’s “distressed daughters.” More:
