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Former Pakistani officer embodies a policy puzzle

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on March 5, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Terrorism
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Carlotta Gall from Rawalpindi in The New York Times:

With his white turban, untrimmed beard and worn army jacket, the man known uniformly here by his nom de guerre, Col. Imam, is a particular Pakistani enigma.

A United States-trained former colonel in Pakistan’s spy agency, he spent 20 years running insurgents in and out of Afghanistan, first to fight the Soviet Army, and later to support the Taliban, as Pakistani allies, in their push to conquer Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Today those Taliban forces are battling his onetime mentor, the United States, and Western officials say Colonel Imam has continued to train, recruit and finance the insurgents. Along with a number of other retired Pakistani intelligence officials, they say, he has helped the Taliban stage a remarkable comeback since 2006.

In two recent interviews with The New York Times, Colonel Imam denied that. But he remains a vocal advocate of the Taliban, and his views reveal the sympathies that have long run deep in the ranks of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. More:

The terror of Bollywood

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on March 5, 2010
in Movies
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While American blockbusters shy away from Islamist villains, Indian films give them a showing. Arun Venugopal in the Wall Street Journal:

In Indian movies, the terrorist isn’t some veiled abstraction: He’s your brother (“Fiza,” 2000) or house guest (“Black and White,” 2008) or the woman you couldn’t live without (“Dil Se,” 1998). Their torment—over Kashmir, or U.S. foreign policy, or killings at the hands of Hindus in Gujarat—is writ large. When it cannot be expressed through dialogue, it’s expressed through song.

Over the top? Yes, some of these films definitely are. They’re movies with big, bold emotions, featuring characters who care openly about their cause, whether they’re extremists trying to destroy the country or vigilantes trying to save it (“A Wednesday!” 2008). Indian films tackle the big questions: What motivates someone to commit mass murder? Can a terrorist be reformed? And can even a suicide bomber love, or be loved? By contrast, even Hollywood’s most engaging efforts on the subject, like the TV show “24,” are more about plot and pacing and getting to the bomb in time.

Bollywood has the enormous advantage of cultural proximity. India contains a large Muslim community, people who are not just watching movies but quite often scripting them, composing their soundtracks and starring in them as well. Some stereotyping aside, to a far greater extent than Western filmmakers, Indian filmmakers know how to capture the Muslim experience and critique it. More:

In light of Nalanda

Published
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on March 4, 2010
in Culture, Education and Heritage
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Modern-day Nalanda / Photo: Namit Arora

The ruins of one of Asia’s great centres of learning still inspire travellers. Namit Arora in Himal Southasian:

Nalanda University arose in the early fifth century, during the reign of Kumara Gupta, though references to precursor sites associated with teaching and learning go back another thousand years, to the time of the Buddha and Mahavira. Between Xuanzang and Yi Jing, we have a compelling portrait of the university’s curriculum, the life of the monks, the buildings and the general features of the community.

Nalanda was more like a school of higher learning than an undergraduate college. Prospective students had to be at least 20 years old, and submit to an oral exam for university entrance. They had to demonstrate deep familiarity with a host of subjects, and with old and new works in many fields. Only around a quarter of prospective students were admitted, and even they were promptly humbled by the calibre of their teachers and co-students. When Xuanzang visited Nalanda, there were 8500 students and 1500 teachers in 108 residential monasteries, which often had two or more floors. Excavations have revealed exquisitely carved temples and a row of ten monasteries of oblong red bricks directly across from a row of stupas in brick and plaster. Rooms typically had chairs, wood blocks, small mats and utensils stored in wall niches. Yi Jing approvingly wrote that each year before the monsoon, the best rooms were awarded to the eldest members in the community.

Some of the best teachers not only taught but also composed treatises and commentaries, much as Xuanzang himself did later in life. Many acquired great fame, and a Nalanda education held serious cachet among the public. Teachers lived among the students in the monasteries, common features of which included a podium for lectures, a communal brick oven, bathrooms and a water well (often in octagonal cross-section, supposedly inspired by the Eightfold Path, one of the Buddha’s central teachings). Water clocks guided daily routines, and gongs were used to signal the start and end of events, services and ceremonies. “There are more than ten great pools near the Nalanda monastery,” wrote Yi Jing. “Every morning a ghanti is sounded to remind the monks of the bathing-hour.” For their daily exercise, the monks went for walks in mid-mornings or late afternoons. Their dinner typically included bean soup with butter, rice and vegetables, perhaps also ghee, honey, sugar or a seasonal fruit such as mango. More:

God and the gospel of globalisation

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on March 4, 2010
in Culture, Economy, India and Society
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Against all hope, secularism remains a myth. Meera Nanda in Himal Southasian. Meera Nanda’s most recent book is “The God Market: How globalization is making India more Hindu (2010)”.

Asha Dangol / Himal Southasian

The defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s general elections last year was greeted with relief by secularists and democrats everywhere. Not entirely unreasonably: they read the fact that the BJP lost a solid 3.4 percent of its previous poll share as evidence that Indian voters had rejected the majoritarian politics of Hindu pride and prejudice, peddled by the BJP and the rest of the Sangh Parivar. The general consensus is that the ideology of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, has lost its appeal among the urban youth and middle classes – that secularism has won and “God has left politics,” to borrow the elegant title of a recent essay by Delhi journalist Hartosh Singh Bal. Market reforms and globalisation emerge as the stars of this saga. Both the friends and critics of the BJP agree that it is the fervour for making money in India’s roaring economy that doused the flames of Hindu nationalism from the hearts of the middle classes. But that is not all. The ‘free’ market, we are told by a section of influential Dalit intellectuals, will not only free India from the menace of communal violence, but will also lift the curse of caste oppression. It is fair to say that the gospel of globalisation is gaining ground in India.

The story about how the markets defeated the BJP goes as follows. Hindutva appealed to the middle classes and youth back in the bad-old-days of the 1980s and 1990s, when these groups were feeling beleaguered and angry due to the failures of Nehruvian socialism and ‘pseudo-secularism’, which, in their view, gave undue preference to Muslim and Christian minorities. But in the nearly two decades of economic liberalisation and foreign investments that began in the early 1990s, India has witnessed a great burst of economic growth. As a result, the Hindu middle classes are angry no more. Far from feeling beleaguered and discriminated against, they have become more cosmopolitan, more self-confident, and more willing to take on global challenges and seek out global opportunities. Indeed, so confident is the Great Indian Middle Class that it has claimed the 21st century as India’s Century. And so the critics ask: What use can such forward-looking people possibly have for the past glories of Hinduism, about which the stodgy old men in khaki shorts keep harping? This story has found great favour among the self-proclaimed Friends of the BJP, who want the party to drop Hindutva altogether, or at least to make it sound less communal, and emerge as a ‘normal’ pro-market, pro-defence, anti-‘minority-appeasement’, right-of-centre party. More:

Bad, better, greatest

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on March 3, 2010
in Cricket and Sport
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Pradeep Magazine in the Hindustan Times:

A nation led more by frenzy than reason had anointed Sachin Tendulkar as the greatest cricketer ever a long time ago. No matter that Donald Bradman’s batting average, at 99.94 runs per innings, is almost double that of Tendulkar. So how do we decide who was the ‘greatest’?

Tendulkar is the front-runner if volume of runs scored, the number of hundreds notched up, the sheer amount of matches played across all formats of the game, and the years spent on the field all go into the making of a yardstick. His double century against South Africa last month, the first ever in the one-day game, has once again triggered that old debate of ‘Who’s better, who’s best?’ This time round, even the conservative international media are willing to acknowledge that the Mumbaikar could well be on par — if not better than — the man who till now was considered ‘untouchable’ as a cricketing icon, Sir Don. More:

Taking on the Taliban

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on March 3, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Books, Pakistan and Terrorism
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Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

The Taliban’s jihad, like rock and roll, has passed from youthful vigor into a maturity marked by the appearance of nostalgic memoirs. Back in the day, Abdul Salam Zaeef belonged to the search committee that recruited Mullah Omar as the movement’s commander; after the rebels took power in Kabul, he served as ambassador to Pakistan. “My Life with the Taliban,” published this winter, announces Zaeef’s début in militant letters. The volume contains many sources of fascination, but none are more timely than the author’s account of his high-level relations with Pakistani intelligence.

While in office, Zaeef found that he “couldn’t entirely avoid” the influence of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Its officers volunteered money and political support. Late in 2001, as the United States prepared to attack Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the I.S.I.’s then commanding general, Mahmud Ahmad, visited Zaeef’s home in Islamabad, wept in solidarity, and promised, “We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.” And yet Zaeef never trusted his I.S.I. patrons. He sought to protect the Taliban’s independence: “I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.” More:

The blight of Hindustan

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on March 3, 2010
in Culture, India, Religion and Society
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Namit Arora at Shunya’s Notes:

How the institution of caste took root and spread is still a hotly debated question among scholars, but its story begins c. 1500 BCE with the arrival of the Indo-Aryans into what is now Pakistan. Data from disciplines like linguistics, philology, and archaeology strongly suggests that these bands of nomadic pastoralists came from further west. Upon arrival, they encountered long settled rural communities, which were perhaps divided into subgroups based on occupation, much like guilds—in the sense that the subgroups were not hierarchical, hereditary, or endogamous. The Indo-Aryans, whose culture became dominant, introduced into the region their social pyramid with three classes, or varnas: the Brahmins (priests and teachers), the Kshtriyas (warriors and rulers), and the Vaishyas (traders and merchants). They added a fourth varna after their arrival: the Shudras (laborers and artisans). All four varnas appear in the earliest known Indo-Aryan text, the Rig Veda, and were no doubt a feature of the emerging Vedic society.

As the settled indigenous communities became part of the early Vedic society, they also adopted its principle of hierarchy, turning their own occupational subgroups into castes, or jatis. The principle of hierarchy, proposed Dumont, had to do with ritual ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ that members of each occupational subgroup were assigned at birth. The highest ‘purity’ points went to those with religious, intellectual, and administrative pursuits, the lowest to workers associated with dead bodies, human waste, tanneries, butchery, street cleaning, and such—most of these were in fact deemed too low to be part of the varna system at all, i.e., they were considered outcastes. Stated differently, ‘purity’ became a means of codifying social power relations using Brahminical ‘knowledge’. More:

Sri Lanka’s diaspora won’t give up

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on March 3, 2010
in Sri Lanka
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A new report finds that overseas Sri Lankans are determined to seek a separate homeland. From Asia Sentinel:

With the grim civil war that wracked Sri Lanka finally over after 26 years, and with the Tamil minority seeking to pick up their lives after their rebellion was crushed mercilessly, only one group appears determined to continue the fight, and that is a large portion of the hundreds of thousands of Tamils overseas.

As many as 100,000 people were killed in the civil war, out of a nation of 20.1 million. The Brussels-based International Crisis Group, an independent non-governmental organization, in a new 29-page report, “The Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora After the LTTE” issued on Feb.23, has strongly urged the diaspora to give it up and instead seek to create a sustainable piece in a united country.

Whether that is possible is in serious doubt. The triumphalist government of President Mahindra Rajapaksa, despite statements urging reconciliation, is showing little signs on the ground of actually bringing the Tamils back to full partnership in the government. Nonetheless, the report says, any initiatives to carry on the struggle for an independent state may go forward in the diaspora, “but they must repudiate the LTTE’s violent methods,” said Robert Templer, the ICG’S Asia Program Director in a prepared release. “And they must also recognize that the LTTE’s separatist agenda is out of step with the wishes and needs of Tamils in Sri Lanka.” More:

Taslima fury hits India again

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on March 3, 2010
in Faith, India and Women
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An article apparently written by exiled author Taslima Nasreen has sparked  attacks on newspaper offices and protests in the Shimoga and Hassan districts of Karnataka. Two people have died as a result. 

In an article written in 2007, Nasreen has apparently criticised the burqa. This article was translated to Kannada and published in a local newspaper, the Kannada Prabha.

In the wake of violence caused by the reproduction of her article, Nasreen has issued a statement saying her article had been ‘misused’.

The article appears on the author’s website. The Quran does prescribe purdah, sh writes. But that doesn’t mean that women should obey it.

Read Taslima Nasrin’s article, Let’s Think Again About the Burqa here

Pamella Bordes traced to Goa

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on March 2, 2010
in People
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From the Daily Mail:

She once caused scandal with her links to a minister and a Libyan official. Now, 21 years on, Miss Bordes has a new name and is living in Goa…

As she travels around the Indian resort, she attracts barely a second glance from the British tourists.

And the woman who was once famously pictured stepping out of a limousine in the company of then Tory minister Colin Moynihan, is today travelling alone in a small white Suzuki runaround.

But that is exactly how Pamela Singh likes it. More:

From The Telegraph, Calcutta:

Pamela became “Pamella” when the beauty queen travelled west, first to America and then to Britain, where she arrived having married a Frenchman with the surname “Bordes”.

In 1988 and 1989, when she worked as a “researcher” at the House of Commons, she got the newspapers hot and bothered after she was photographed one evening in the company of Colin Moynihan (now Lord Moynihan), the Tory sports minister. She was what westerners consider “exotic”.

She was certainly a pretty girl who was for a while the girlfriend of Andrew Neil, then editor of The Sunday Times. Donald Trelford, the editor of the rival Observer, a newspaper with a much bigger size than it boasts now, also sought her attention, it was said at the time. More:

Planet Pakistan

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on March 2, 2010
in Pakistan and Terrorism
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Robert M. Hathaway in The Wilson Quarterly. Robert M. Hathaway is the director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program. His most recent book is Powering Pakistan: Meeting Pakistan’s Energy Needs in the 21st Century (2009). [via 3quarksdaily]

An American visitor in Pakistan can’t help thinking at times that he has arrived in a parallel universe. Asked about the presence of Al Qaeda on their country’s soil, Pakistanis deny that there is any evidence of it. They lionize A. Q. Khan, who created the country’s nuclear weapons program and sold essential nuclear technology and knowledge to Iran, North Korea, and Libya, and they are incensed by American worries about the security of their country’s nuclear assets. Suicide bombings and political assassinations are near-daily occurrences, yet many Pakistanis are astonishingly complacent about the murderous groups behind them. They rail instead against the government that is powerless to prevent these attacks and an America that would like nothing better than to see an end to ­them.

Last October, when I visited, Pakistanis were fuming over the U.S. aid package recently approved by Congress. The $7.5 billion Kerry-­Lugar bill tripled American support for Pakistan over a ­five-­year period and reversed the overwhelmingly ­pro­military slant of previous U.S. aid. Instead of going almost entirely to the armed forces, American dollars will flow to schools and clinics, economic development, and efforts to promote the rule of law and democratic governance. Pakistan’s friends in Washington were jubilant. Yet most Pakistanis I spoke with insisted that because the aid came with ­conditions—­the U.S. secretary of state must certify that Pakistan is working to end government support for extremist and terrorist groups, for ­example—­it was an affront and a threat to their country’s sovereignty. One legislator complained that what Pakistan was being asked to accept was less an aid package than a treaty of ­surrender.

Denial is a national habit in Pakistan. With a long history of failed governance and political leaders who put their personal interests first, Pakistanis point their fingers at the United States, their arch-enemy India, or the ­all-­purpose malefactor often described in the local news media as the “hidden hand”—anyone but themselves to explain their nation’s past failings and precarious ­present. More:

All is colour today

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on March 1, 2010
in India
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Aditya Dev Sood at 3quarksdaily

You know, we all have our favorite seasons, our special days in the year. For me that has to be Holi. Today is all color and madness, the world is turned upside down, nothing is wrong, all is forgiven, everything is laughter.

These tents in pink and white are looking taut, expectant. What is it, ten, ten-thirty? Gaurang is over there setting up the DJ, Abhinav the bar, along with Kishan Chand, who is nailing down the table-cloths to the tent-house tables. I have to set up the chat-wallah-s, all along this back wall of the garden, far enough from the Holi playing action, but also away from the bar — we don’t want to have to monitor the liquor too hard today.

Hari kulfi khaenge, sahib? The kulfi guy’s brought the regular kesari kulfi, but also the one spiked with the green stuff. You should try one. Down the row we’ve got aloo-tikki-s on that enormous frying pan, and then the gol-gappa guy and then the fruit-chat guy, all from my Dad’s contact in Chandni Chowk. More:

Frustrated strivers in Pakistan turn to Jihad

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on March 1, 2010
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A new generation has made militant networks more sophisticated. From The New York Times:

Lahore: Umar Kundi was his parents’ pride, an ambitious young man from a small town who made it to medical school in the big city. It seemed like a story of working-class success, living proof in this unequal society that a telephone operator’s son could become a doctor.

But things went wrong along the way. On campus Mr. Kundi fell in with a hard-line Islamic group. His degree did not get him a job, and he drifted in the urban crush of young people looking for work. His early radicalization helped channel his ambitions in a grander, more sinister way.

Instead of healing the sick, Mr. Kundi went on to become one of Pakistan’s most accomplished militants. Working under a handler from Al Qaeda, he was part of a network that carried out some of the boldest attacks against the Pakistani state and its people last year, the police here say. Months of hunting him ended on Feb. 19, when he was killed in a shootout with the police at the age of 29. More:

Love and death in Pakistan

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on March 1, 2010
in Terrorism
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From The Guardian:

The story began with a chance meeting on a train between a British care worker and a young Pakistani chef. It ended in tragedy this week when Belinda Khan was among eight people killed by a suicide bomber in a marketplace in troubled northern Pakistan.

Yesterday relatives and friends told the tragic story of how Khan, a 44-year-old woman from Cardiff, came to be in one of the world’s most dangerous places. They described how her relationship with pizza chef Yahya Khan ended when he was shot dead in Pakistan by the Taliban two years ago, and how she married Yahya’s younger brother, Saeed, just a fortnight before she was caught up in the suicide bomber’s attack.

Saeed, 25, also spoke of the horror of the moment when he and his new wife were caught in the terrorist bombing as they paused for a snack at a market in the Swat valley in the country’s North-West Frontier province.

He said he wished he could have died with his bride. “Me and my family are missing her very much,” he said. “She was a brave woman and gave a lot of love to me and my family members.”

Belinda’s journey to the Swat Valley began some five years ago when she stepped on to a train in the UK and met Yahya Khan. Their backgrounds were very different. More:

Get a womb: Gay couples outsource Indian mothers

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on March 1, 2010
in Health, Science and Society
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Saritha Rai from Bangalore at GlobalPost:

In a building smack in the middle of chaotic Hyderabad, an hour’s flight from Bangalore, 29-year-old American Brad Fister recently got acquainted with the delirious joy of first-time parenthood.

Fister and his partner Michael Griebe, who own a computer business in Kentucky, contracted a womb from an Indian surrogate mother thousands of miles away in Hyderabad. Their daughter Ashton, conceived in a laboratory out of Fister’s sperm and an anonymous donor’s egg, was born in mid-February.

India has long been the go-to destination for a diversity of outsourced tasks such as answering customer service calls, online tech support and high-end technology services.

Now Americans — and increasingly gay American couples — are follwing American corporations into the world of oursourcing. More:

Amit Chaudhuri: ties that bind

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on March 1, 2010
in Books and India
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Amit Chaudhuri has earned acclaim for his novels about family and belonging. Helena Frith Powell visits him in his home base of Kolkata, the focus of his next work. From The National:

Amit Chaudhuri does not much like travelling. He finds the day before he is set to leave particularly difficult.

“I feel I am neither here nor there,” he says in an interview at the Kolkata home he shares with his wife, 11-year-old daughter and his octogenarian parents. “I am a soul in transit. You would think after 20 or 30 years of travelling it would get better, but it doesn’t.”

Chaudhuri, a youthful-looking 47-year-old with a charming, boyish smile, is the author of five novels, all of which have won literary prizes, a musician in the Indian classical tradition and an academic.

He has been based in Kolkata since 1999 after a childhood spent in Bombay (he refuses to call Indian cities by their new names, “Why should I call it Mumbai just because someone says it is called Mumbai? They might change it again next year”) and student years in London. More:

Love Asana: India embraces Mills & Boon

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Mills & Boon has come to India, and its romantic novels featuring Indian love interests are being embraced by the middle class. Jerry Pinto looks at the genre that it is finally taking root in a country that has been modest about amorous entanglements. From The National.

He’s tall, dark and handsome. She’s beautiful, doe-eyed and chaste. His eyes flame when he sees her. She wonders if it is wrong to feel “this way”. For decades, Indian middle-class women grew up reading about men with hard thighs and women who didn’t even know how beautiful they were. Of course, they were all white people, although a Latin lover might sometimes be permitted, so long as he owned a castle in Spain.

The good news is: Mills & Boon has come to India. Last year, the world’s largest publisher of romantic fiction ran a contest to discover new talent, and Milan Vohra won it with a short story called Love Asana, in which Shioli Dewan, a yoga instructor (height: 5ft 1in; eyes: delicious warm honey-brown; hair: a rich, dark auburn mane that tumbles to her shoulders in careless abandon) finds love with one of her students, Sujay (height: 6ft; legs: long, lithe; hair: charming jet-black hair that flip-flops any old way). The catch is that he’s 28; she’s 30 and a battle-scarred veteran of the love wars. More:

A new bend in the river

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on March 1, 2010
in Books
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Having moved beyond postcolonialism and a welter of sari-and-mango novels, Indian literature has struck out into darker, messier terrain, Rana Dasgupta writes. Is this the new lore of an agonised nation? From The National:

Novels and nations are linked by an intimate kind of analogy. If nations are the stage on which modern life and feeling unfold, novels are the form in which these things are recounted, understood and turned, finally, into lore. Such is the apparent scale and ambition of modern life that no smaller treatment than the novel will finally match up – not even cinema, which, for all its protean vitality, has never quite displaced the novel from the pinnacle of modern cultural achievement.

This is why emerging nations strive to beget great novels. During the years of America’s rise, for instance, the project of the “great American novel” was conscious and determined. Industry alone would not make the United States great: to grow beyond Europe it needed to match Flaubert and Tolstoy. In 1897, the novelist Frank Norris wrote that American writers should be focused on the task of creating the novel “which is the most thoroughly American in its tone and most aptly interprets the phases of American life”. More:

Irom and the iron in India’s soul

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on February 28, 2010
in human rights
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Irom Sharmila Chanu is a civil rights activist in the Indian state of Manipur. Since November 4, 2000, she’s been on a fast demanding that the Government of India should withdraw the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, from Manipur and other areas of India’s north east.

Her story, says Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka, should be part of universal folklore:

For young Irom Sharmila, things came to a head on November 2, 2000. A day earlier, an insurgent group had bombed an Assam Rifles column. The enraged battalion retaliated by gunning down 10 innocent civilians at a bus-stand in Malom. The local papers published brutal pictures of the bodies the next day, including one of a 62-year old woman, Leisangbam Ibetomi, and 18-year old Sinam Chandramani, a 1988 National Child Bravery Award winner. Extraordinarily stirred, on November 4, Sharmila, then only 28, began her fast.

Sprawled in an icy white hospital corridor that cold November evening in Delhi three years ago, Singhajit, Sharmila’s 48-year-old elder brother, had said half-laughing, “How we reach here?” In the echo chamber of that plangent question had lain the incredible story of Sharmila and her journey. Much of that story needed to be intuited. Its tensile strength, its intense, almost preternatural act of imagination were not on easy display. The faraway hut in Imphal where it began. The capital city now and the might of the State ranged against them. The sister jailed inside her tiny hospital room, the brother outside with nothing but the clothes on his back, neither versed in English or Hindi. The posse of policemen at the door. More:

Jhunjhunwala’s real bull run

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on February 28, 2010
in Business, India and People
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It took 17 years for India’s most famous investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala to become a father, and it beat anything that all his thousands of crores could buy. Manju Sara Rajan in Open:

Most women accept discomfort as an essential part of the pregnancy ritual, but it takes altogether something else to survive what Rekha Jhunjhunwala went through. In 2003, 39-year-old Rekha, wife of India’s most famous investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, finally became pregnant for the first time. But by the final trimester in early 2004, her baby was in serious trouble: it was sliding down the birth canal far too fast. Too late to surgically keep the baby in, too early to bring it out, Rekha’s doctor gave her a single prescription: be confined to bed till delivery date. “I didn’t bathe for three months,” she says. “It was difficult to do anything, my legs were elevated all the time, and because I was always lying down, after some time I did everything on my side, even eating. But I was determined.” Nishtha was born on 30 June 2004. Her brothers, twins Aryaman and Aryavir, were born at 12.29 am and 12.30 am on 2 March 2009. It took the millionaire couple 22 years of marriage to complete their family.

The latest Forbes India rich list counts 49-year-old Jhunjhunwala as the 58th richest man in the country, with a fortune of $915 million (Rs 4,209 crore). “I have far less than people think, far more than I need. My wealth fluctuates by 5 per cent every week,” he says. But even an amateur guesstimate of listed and unlisted investments, private equity interests and cash holdings safely puts the former chartered accountant’s net worth at over a billion dollars. “Whatever is known publicly is underestimated,” says a source close to him. More:

Who killed Gautama Buddha?

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on February 28, 2010
in Books, Faith and Religion
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New research reveals the dark truths on the life and times of Buddha. Sheela Reddy in Outlook:

Seven years ago, when Buddhist scholar and former monk Stephen Batchelor embarked on a search for the real Siddhartha Gautama, rooting through over 6,000 pages of the Pali Canon — the oldest set of texts on his teachings, which provide glimpses into his social and political world — perhaps he didn’t even dream of the Buddha that would emerge from his research. Far from the picture we have of Siddhartha as a prince who grew up in a palace, who renounced it all and became the Buddha, attracting the rich and powerful as well as hundreds of monks and nuns by his teachings, until one day he just lay down and died, Batchelor’s portrait of the Buddha “is not that simple”.

In his new book, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, to be out in the US early March, this author of eight other books on Buddhism claims the Buddha was a man whose teachings were regarded by his contemporaries as not only radical, but “queer” enough for him to be denounced by one of his own former disciples as a “fake”, who not only managed to win the patronage of the three most powerful political figures of his time, but was worldly enough to survive in the midst of court intrigues, murders and betrayals, effectively quelling a rebellion within his own flock before he was done in by the ambitions of his own family.

But it is Batchelor’s findings on the Buddha’s last days that are the most startling: in the last 10 months of his life, Batchelor says, the Buddha, old and ailing, saw his two main disciples die, one of them brutally murdered, and was forced to flee with a handful of loyalists from all the three political bases he had spent a lifetime building up, until he was possibly poisoned to death by one of his many rivals, leaving a pretender to take over the community after an intense power struggle. More:

Plane-spotting

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on February 28, 2010
in Crime
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Two British plane-spotters — Stephen Hampston, 46, and Steven Martin, 55, — were held last Monday at a hotel near the New Delhi international airport after staff raised concerns about their suspicious behaviour. They have been charged with illegally intercepting communications between pilots and airport authorities.”This planespotting that they were doing is illegal in India. They should have applied for permission before doing this,” Delhi police said.

Below, Bhairav Acharya, a Bangalore-based plane-spotter, on his hobby. From The Indian Express:

A few decades ago, when airlines and pilots and stewardesses epitomised glamour, plane-spotting was an understandable hobby. Each country’s national airline did more than ferry people overseas; they represented that country abroad. In the late ’80s, for instance, when Ethiopia was in the midst of famine and conflict, their national airline was remarkably successful. In major airports around the world, Ethiopian Airlines aircraft jostled for space with the big European and American carriers. I remember a group of Ethiopian women break into proud applause in a waiting room in Dubai when their airline touched down in front of them.

I often used to travel to Tanzania, and from the windows of African airports I watched planes from little known cities land and depart, each one a colourful embodiment of their countries. I was fairly young when I learned to identify aircraft. There is something unforgettable about sitting in the rear of a Boeing 727, with the third engine screeching overhead, as the pilot makes the last broad turn over the Red Sea before landing in Aden. Or the steady whine of the Boeing 757’s two engines barely 30 feet above the water, where Entebbe airport’s runway juts out like a promontory into Lake Victoria. More:

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see

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From TED:

At Pawan Sinha’s MIT lab, he and his team spend their days trying to understand how the brain learns to recognize and use the patterns and scenes we see around us. To do this, they often use computers to model the processes of the human brain, but they also study human subjects, some of whom are seeing the world for the very first time and can tell them about the experience as it happens. They find these unusual subjects through the humanitarian branch of their research, Project Prakash.

In this talk, Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain’s visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.

Evidence of tolerance: Clashes are rare

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Akash Kapur in The New York Times:

I maintain my faith in India as a highly tolerant — if imperfectly so — country. I believe that the nation’s sporadic episodes of communal violence represent aberrations rather than the norm, inevitable clashes that are remarkable for the extent to which they are, indeed, sporadic.

When I consider the nation’s major outbreaks of communal violence since independence, I am struck by the fact that nearly each one was instigated by an act of political demagoguery. Politicians seeking votes have regularly fanned hatred and chauvinism. And as the Indian scholar Asghar Ali Engineer has pointed out, religious concerns are frequently a front for material interests. Riots between Hindus and Muslims are often thinly veiled property disputes or clashes over commercial interests.

Yet for all the effort by political and business leaders to spread hatred, violent clashes remain rare, unusual in a country where Hindus and Muslims (and followers of other religions) live side by side, in crowded cities and villages, doing business and practicing their faiths in full view of one another. More:

And here’s the link to his previous column, Upholding a tradition of tolerance:

Indian tolerance has deep roots. The Vedas, a body of texts believed to be around 3,000 years old, proclaim that “truth is one; the wise call it by many names.” The Rig Veda, considered the oldest, similarly teaches that “good thoughts come to us from all sides.”

Indian tolerance has also manifested in the country’s society and polity. The Edicts of Emperor Asoka, who ruled much of north and central India in the third century B.C., are notable for their accommodation of other faiths — proclaiming, for instance, that “all religions should reside everywhere” and that “there should be growth in the essentials of all religions.”

Lunch with Shah Rukh Khan

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From The Financial Times:

I wait to meet Khan in the coffee shop at the Courthouse Hotel, off Regent Street in central London. A former magistrates’ court, its grey façade and quiet lobby feel too restrained for a Bollywood superstar.

I had been warned earlier in the day that the star was feeling unwell and that lunch would be delayed. Eventually, after a three-hour wait, I am ushered up to the star’s suite on an upper floor, where Khan, looking tired, greets me warmly.

He is wearing a slim-fitting black suit, a sky-blue shirt with open-necked white collar and shiny black shoes. He plays with his glasses as we talk.

We go into the sitting room of Khan’s suite, a wood-floored, wood-panelled room with armchairs grouped around a coffee table and windows overlooking the street below. The hotel has set up a small buffet table, and a waiter puts rice and chicken curry on a plate for Khan, who normally spurns carbs to maintain his six-pack. He has made an exception for this lunch.

I ask the waiter for chicken and rice with extra lentils and salad on the side. We eat with our plates in our laps, until Khan breaks off to light a cigarette. More:

Pakistan’s secret weapon: A diplomat who can read facess

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From The New York Times news blog, The Lede:

In advance of talks in New Delhi on Thursday between Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart, Salman Bashir — which touched on a number of sensitive issues — a Pakistani newspaper suggested that Mr. Bashir’s delegation included a secret weapon: a diplomat “who can read the faces of people and predict what they are actually thinking and feeling — an art known as physiognomy.” More:

Below, the report in The News, a Pakistani newspaper:

When Pakistani negotiators start their dialogue with the Indians in New Delhi on Wednesday, they will be informally helped by one of their team members who can read the faces of people and predict what they are actually thinking and feeling — an art known as physiognomy.

Director-General for South Asia, Afrasiab Hashmi, may turn out to be a treasured guide for the country’s delegation by reading the faces of the Indian negotiators.Few people know about the God-gifted quality of Hashmi. He is an expert in judging a person’s character or personality from that mans facial characteristics and structure. Physiognomy and its practice dates back to the ancient Greece but was abandoned later.

Hashmi is said to have harboured this skill by birth, not learning through any special courses. It becomes very difficult to hide one’s inner-self in front of Hashmi, people close to him say, though he gives his frank opinions only to frank friends. More:

Mystical form of Islam suits Sufis in Pakistan

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Sabrina Tavernise from Lahore in The New York Times:

It is Sufism, a mystical form of Islam brought into South Asia by wandering thinkers who spread the religion east from the Arabian Peninsula. They carried a message of equality that was deeply appealing to indigenous societies riven by caste and poverty. To this day, Sufi shrines stand out in Islam for allowing women free access.

In modern times, Pakistan’s Sufis have been challenged by a stricter form of Islam that dominates in Saudi Arabia. That orthodox, often political Islam was encouraged in Pakistan in the 1980s by the American-supported dictator, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Since then, the fundamentalists’ aggressive stance has tended to eclipse that of their moderate kin, whose shrines and processions have become targets in the war here.

But if last week’s stomping, twirling, singing, drumming kaleidoscope of a crowd is any indication, Sufism still has a powerful appeal. More:

A history of India, as told by the Budget

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From The Wall Street Journal:

Below are excerpts from major national budget speeches in the 63 years of India’s nationhood.

1. 1947-1948

“The long-term effects of the division of the country still remain to be assessed and we are too near the events to take a dispassionate view. When the ashes of controversy have died down, it will be for the future historian to judge the wisdom of the step and its consequences on the destiny of one fifth of the human race.”

–R.K. Shanmukham Chetty, finance minister, Nov.26, 1947

2. 1949-1950

“Although this is the fourth year since the cessation of hostilities, the return of normal conditions, without which it is impossible to expand production and develop trade, seems still as far off as ever. Over large parts of the world, conditions remain disturbed and the progress of recovery from the ravages of the war is painfully slow. In Europe the impasse in Berlin, the civil war in Greece and the emergence of two rival camps among the countries that fought the war as allies are symptomatic of the abnormal conditions which still prevail.”

–John Mathai, finance minister, Feb.28, 1949

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Reinvigorating the BJP

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Swapan Dasgupta in The Wall Street Journal:

Barely 10 months ago, India’s elites agonized over the possibility that the general election would produce an unstable and fractious coalition government that would jeopardize the country’s economic growth. Today, with a stable government in place and the Congress Party having clearly established its political primacy, Lutyens’ Delhi resonates with whispered concern over the absence of a purposeful opposition.

The concern is based on a string of misgivings. The Manmohan Singh government is perceived to have grown utterly complacent. With inflation having crossed 8% and the price of food having registered a sharper increase, there is a feeling that the government is letting matters slide because it doesn’t fear political opposition and social unrest. There are fears that political considerations are preventing a robust response to the Maoist threat. Finally, in the aftermath of the Copenhagen summit and the resumption of dialogue with Pakistan, there are concerns that the prime minister is obliging the Obama administration excessively.

Since it lost power in 2004, the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s principal opposition party, has lost its earlier appeal among the middle classes and the youth. This erosion of support was a consequence of a tired leadership, internal feuding, the pursuit of a policy of blind obstruction to all government initiatives and a failure to check sectarian hotheads identified with its Hindu nationalist ideology. From being a party of conservative Middle India, the BJP ceded its centrist space to the Congress Party. In recent months, it has been paralysed by a failure to counter the appeal of Rahul Gandhi, the Congress heir-apparent. More:

The tallest short man

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In The Hindustan Times, Sumit Mitra profiles veteran politician Pranab Mukherjee:

Pranab Mukherjee

But, more importantly, PKM, as he is called by his colleagues in affection and awe, is a consummate politician. It is a badge that unfortunately very few contemporary politicians can wear. (A.B. Vajpayee is an exception, but he is no longer a contemporary.) It is Mukherjee’s razor-sharp political judgement that overshadows the minor question marks — such as his being a closet dirigiste, not to speak of his mercurial temper or his home-grown English, which the smart set of his party has named ‘Pranabese’. But it is a pleasure to hear the argument that rings out of his misplaced sibilants, subtly structured, brilliantly argued, and delivered with a rich cadence.

It was left to another master politician, Indira Gandhi, to discover this little master when, in 1969, Mukherjee, as a member of the Bangla Congress, a breakaway Congress group, delivered in the Rajya Sabha a speech that foreshadowed the vivisection of Pakistan — still two years ahead. Maybe Indira thought how could this five foot wonder, son of a freedom fighter from faraway Birbhum, peep into her innermost thoughts. Within a year Mukherjee and his faction was in the Congress. As a junior minister with independent charge of revenue and banking departments, he was quickly making headlines with a crackdown on the then Bombay smuggling underworld don who had become a law unto himself. Haji Mastan, whom he got arrested, was the inspiration behind emerging superstar Amitabh Bachchan’s cult movie of the time, Deewar.

Indira hit it off so well with her favourite find that, after her return to power in 1980 from the post-Emergency oblivion,

she promptly dispatched the grave and stodgy R. Venkataraman from the Ministry of Finance to Defence and, in January 1982, led Mukherjee to the room in North Block that he’d love most through the rest of his career. More: