Your ticket to India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the rest of South Asia
Novelist Sir Salman Rushdie, Emory professor Dr. Deepika Bahri, filmmaker Deepa Mehta and writer Christopher Hitchens discuss love, sex, writing, stories and friendship. The conversation was inspired by Rushdie’s assertion in his 1999 essay on the anniversary of the fatwa that “love feels more and more like the only subject.” Emory University.
Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta and Dr. Matthew Bernstein, Emory Professor of Film Studies, discuss Mehta’s friendship with Salman Rushdie, her beautiful Elements film trilogy, issues of censorship in India and Mehta’s forthcoming adaptation of Rushdie’s novel “Midnight’s Children.” Emory University
From The Guardian:
Have you got six months off? Do you fancy a long walk? If so, World Expeditions may have just the holiday for you. They have become the only trekking outfit to offer a guided trip along the first completed section of the Great Himalayan Trail (GHT).
Stretching for 1,700km along the length of Nepal, the GHT will take you a mere 157 days to complete. You’ll see eight of the world’s 14 peaks over 8,000m, including Everest, and cross passes reaching up to 6,000m, climbing a total of 150,000m. That’s a Snowdon every day for half a year. Oh, and it will set you back £20,500.
The GHT isn’t the world’s longest long-distance footpath. The Continental Divide Trail in the US is 5,000km and the Trans Canada will be three times that. But this steroidal version of the Pennine Way looks like being the most coveted of all. Eventually, the trail’s originators hope it will stretch from the mighty 8,000m peak Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, considered the westernmost outlier of the Himalaya, to Namche Barwa in Tibet. It will connect five Asian countries – Bhutan, China, India, Nepal and Pakistan. More:
‘Kavi’, American director Gregg Helvey’s short film (19 minutes) in Hindi about an Indian slave boy, has lost out the Oscar in the Best Short Film (Live Action) category to the Danish entry ‘The New Tenants.’
Read more at kavithemovie.com and here and here
A life-sized reconstruction of the moment just before the dinosaur hatching and snake were preserved. The scales and patterning of the snake's skin is based on its modern relatives. The coloration of the hatchling is the artist's interpretation. / Sculpture by Tyler Keillor/Photo by Ximena Erickson/Image modified by Bonnie Miljour
Christpher Joyce at National Public Radio:
Scientists have discovered a macabre death scene that took place 67 million years ago. The setting was a nest, in which a baby dinosaur had just hatched from an egg, only to face an 11-foot-long snake waiting to devour it.
The moment was frozen forever when, apparently, the nest was buried in a sudden avalanche of mud or sand and everything was fossilized.
The discovery was made by Jeffrey Wilson, a professor at the University of Michigan. He had heard about the amazing fields of dinosaur eggs discovered in India.
Wilson visited a scientist in India who showed him a broken, fossilized egg encased in a briefcase-sized block of stone. He leaned in to take a closer look and saw something else.
“I was stunned when I saw it,” Wilson says, “because, sort of leaping out at me, were the peculiar articulations between the vertebrae of a snake, and so I had no idea that there would be a snake there but there it was sitting in front of me.” More:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
In The Indian Express, Georgina Maddox reviews “Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writings.”
Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writings (Two Volumes); Edited by Vivan Sundaram (Tulika Books, Rs 5,750)
From the black-and-white Marg magazine that he brought out in 1972 to two superbly packaged mega volumes in 2010 — artist Vivan Sundaram has single-mindedly orchestrated the making of the Amrita Sher-Gil myth. Connoisseurs will argue that an artist as feisty and outspoken as Sher-Gil does not deserve less. While many publications on the half-Indian, half-Hungarian artist have been greeted with plaudits, one wonders if the bottomless interiors of the Sher-Gil archive have been finally plumbed with this exhaustive volume that reproduces her diary entries, letters, photographs, sketches and paintings.
This latest offering from Sundaram — who is also Sher-Gil’s nephew — surpasses anything that may have been printed till date on her. Priced at Rs 5,750, the collector’s item is glossy but lacks the frivolity of earlier coffee-table books on Sher-Gil. It also moves ahead of heavy-handed academic writing that some of the earlier books have displayed. The novelty of this avatar lies in its format: it spans her short life of 28 years (1913-1941) in refreshing epistolary style. It is a story told through the artist’s letters and diary entries that begin in 1920 when Amrita was barely seven years old. More:
Dharavi, Mumbai, where population density reaches 1m people per square mile
From Prospect:
The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.
Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” There’s even a book on the subject: The World’s Scavengers (2007) by Martin Medina. Lagos, Nigeria, widely considered the world’s most chaotic city, has an environment day on the last Saturday of every month. From 7am to 10am nobody drives, and the city tidies itself up. More:
Sarah Jacob in The Economic Times:
Swami Pranavananda Brahmendra Avadhuta is not exactly a name that you would expect on the attendance rolls of a fashion trade show. But then swamiji—as he is known—hates predictable patterns in life as much as in his fabrics.
Christian Fabre became Swami Pranavananda after the ups and downs of his business life landed him in the lap of vedanta. But instead of withdrawing to himself, the French man decided to apply the new wisdom of share-and-care in his business, spotting the potential of organised retail in India as early as 2006.
Today, his Christian Fabre Textiles Pvt Ltd caters to around 20 global brands, including Lee Cooper to Oxbow, and stands out in India’s fabric firmament with 25-30% annual growth. The Chennai-based garment buying house acts as a facilitator between these brands and local manufacturers, with a finger across the value chain, from design to manufacturing. More:
From The Times:
Liverpool emerged as a takeover target for the seventh-richest man in the world last night as the pressure mounted on Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr to cut a deal to sell Anfield.
Mukesh Ambani, the wealthiest man in India, is one of two tycoons from the sub-continent competing to buy a stake in the Merseyside club.
The Sahara Group’s chairman, Subrata Roy, and Ambani’s Reliance Industries have each tendered similar bids to pay off Liverpool’s £237 million debt in return for a 51 per cent stake in the club.
Last night Christian Purslow, the Liverpool chief executive, denied any knowledge of either bid, but The Times understands that approaches began as early as November and that some preliminary talks have taken place.More:
Update: Liverpool have denied that there has been any contact with either of the two Indian businessmen linked with buying a 51% stake in the club.
Boa Sr, the last member of the Bo tribe, sings.
Boa Sr, the last speaker of the Bo language of the Andaman Islands, has died. Photograph: Alok Das/Survival/
Boa Sr, the last member of a 65,000-year-old tribe, died last week aged about 85. She was the last native of the Andaman Islands who was fluent in Bo, one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic times. Jonathan Watts in The Guardian:
The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures.
Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.
Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.
Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.
Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language. More:
From The Independent: Boa Sr, known for an infectious laugh, survived the Asian tsunami of December 2004. She told linguists: “We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us ‘the Earth would part, don’t run away or move’. The elders told us, that’s how we know.” More:
The death of a language: The loss of endangered languages like Bo is more a cultural than a scientific tragedy. In The Guardian.
Also read the story in Survival
From The New York Times:
She was only 23, the half-educated wife of an Irish barrister, when the newlyweds set off in 1779 on a rough-and-tumble journey across Europe and the Middle East to Bengal. There, he quickly ran up debts and fathered an illegitimate child. Leaving the scoundrel, she returned to England in 1782 and supported herself by importing muslin and other goods that required her to voyage three more times to India, and once to America. Alas, no more successful at business than at marriage, she almost vanished from history. Little is known about her last 20 years except that she died penniless and intestate in Calcutta. More:
Salil Tripathi in the Wall Street Journal:
Call it the curious incident of the forgotten cricketers. After nearly two hours of a keenly watched auction on Jan. 19, the Indian Premier League’s eight cricket teams bought 11 of the 66 players from 11 countries on offer. But not one Pakistani player was picked.
India and Pakistan have long been enemies on the pitch, but such a public rejection of some of Pakistan’s best players (who are also some of the region’s best players) represents a dangerous new low. The auction process is an important part of the Premier League’s “Twenty20 cricket,” an entertaining, made-for-television, abbreviated form of the sport played in 16 countries.
Twenty20 cricket is not the traditional, seemingly endless version where men in white take a break for tea. Here a match lasts around three hours, with each team playing only 20 overs, trying to amass as many runs as possible and using unconventional techniques. Busty cheerleaders encourage them. And international players are traded just like they are in Major League Baseball or the English Premier League. The changes have drawn new, younger crowds and attracted millions of dollars of television advertising and a recent deal with YouTube. More:
With the row on glaciers, the heat is on R.K. Pachauri, TERI chief and IPCC chairman. Pachauri speaks of Copenhagen and answers questions on whether the controversy has dented IPCC’s image. From the Indian Express:
You are one of the most visible of climate change activists. Does that open you up for a lot of personal attacks, the kind of what we saw recently in The Daily Telegraph? Is that a problem?
Somebody gave me a piece of advice which I believe in firmly: if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. The fact is, I am visible, I am vocal and I am going to be even more so. If that attracts the kind of nonsense, the kind of underhand lies that people pitch against me, I am prepared to take it. I have no hesitation in continuing with what I am doing. I believe society is enlightened and intelligent enough to be able to separate the truth from falsehood. When it comes to pursuing what I believe in, I am a fighter to the end. I will not stop. More
Ayaz Memon in Mint-Lounge on India-Pakistan cricketing relations:
My late friend Omar Kureishi (whose crusty voice on radio brought Pakistan cricket alive for millions of followers from the 1950s till his death in 2005) had a simple solution for the subcontinent’s most vexing issue. “Keep the ruddy politicians out, and cricket will keep the people of India and Pakistan together.”
This came shortly after the Karachi one-day match had been disrupted by young men who had run on to the field and assaulted India captain Krishnamachari Srikkanth, ostensibly to advocate the “Kashmir cause”. Like a quintessential cricket romantic, Omar, despite his privileged education and understanding of realpolitik, could be reduced to utter dismay at the volatility of Indo-Pak relations, in which cricket would often become the first casualty.
“In 1961-62,” he related to me, after the Karachi incident, “Hanif Mohammad had his hand slashed by a ruffian’s blade. Why would anybody want to deprive millions of people from watching a master like Hanif, or a young prodigy like Tendulkar (who was making his international debut then) play unless they have been weaned on prejudice?” More
The editorial in Dawn, Karachi: The IPL uproar
It may well be true that reasons of politics sealed the fate of Pakistan’s T20 celebrities. Even so, there is no cause whatsoever for the Pakistani government to question the workings of a private venture in India that is first and foremost a moneymaking enterprise. And even if New Delhi is being duplicitous, as some allege, Islamabad should show more grace and refuse to mix politics and sports. Pakistani fans and players have every right to be outraged. Not so the Government of Pakistan. More:
Also from Dawn: News and comments from the Indian press in the aftermath of the exclusion of Pakistani cricketers from the Indian Premier League.
The story is getting curiouser and curiouser. Someone called it “Wateragate 2.”
First there was a story in The Telegraph,London, questioning the business interests of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, head of the New Delhi-based The Energy Research Institute, chairman of the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
It accused him of “making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies.” Click here to read the story: Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
Dr Pachauri described the report as “a pack of lies”.
A few days later The Telegraph ran another story: The questions Dr Pachauri still has to answer:
At the least it seems that Dr Pachauri’s position as the world’s “top climate official” has been earning a very substantial income for the institute of which he is director-general; and the only way to avoid further questioning must now be for both Dr Pachauri and Teri to come out into the open over all those issues that remain obscure.
Then The Sunday Times ran a story: World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown:
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
A followup story in Bloomberg quotes Dr Pachauri as saying that research by IPCC suggesting Himalayan glaciers may disappear by 2035 “needs to be investigated anew…”
An award-winning United Nations panel is re-examining its research about how fast Himalaya’s glaciers are melting, the top UN climate-change scientist said.
Research by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggesting Himalayan glaciers may disappear by 2035 needs to be investigated anew following a report in the London-based Times newspaper that flawed data may have been used, said Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of the Nobel prize-winning group.
“We are looking at the issue and will be able to comment on the report after examining the facts. The science doesn’t change: Glaciers are melting across the globe and those in the Himalayas are no different,” he said in a telephone interview. “We’re not changing anything till we make an assessment.”
Below, from Richard North’s (co-author of the first story in The Telegraph) post titled “Pachauri: there’s money in them glaciers,” at EUReferendum:
With the case for more research thus established, Pachauri’s institute, TERI, approached the wealthy Carnegie Corporation of New York through a consortium led by the Global Centre for funding to carry out precisely the work to which his own “independent” report had drawn attention.
In November 2008, they were successful, being awarded a $500,000 grant for “research, analysis and training on water-related security and humanitarian challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalaya glaciers.” This helped Dr Pachauri set up the TERI Glaciology team, putting at its head now professor Syed Iqbal Hasnain.
A regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan could blot out the sun, starving much of the human race. Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon in Scientific American:
India and Pakistan, which together have more than 100 nuclear weapons, may be the most worrisome adversaries capable of a regional nuclear conflict today. But other countries besides the U.S. and Russia (which have thousands) are well endowed: China, France and the U.K. have hundreds of nuclear warheads; Israel has more than 80, North Korea has about 10 and Iran may well be trying to make its own. In 2004 this situation prompted one of us (Toon) and later Rich Turco of the University of California, Los Angeles, both veterans of the 1980s investigations, to begin evaluating what the global environmental effects of a regional nuclear war would be and to take as our test case an engagement between India and Pakistan.
The latest estimates by David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security and by Robert S. Norris of the Natural Resources Defense Council are that India has 50 to 60 assembled weapons (with enough plutonium for 100) and that Pakistan has 60 weapons. Both countries continue to increase their arsenals. Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons tests indicate that the yield of the warheads would be similar to the 15-kiloton explosive yield (equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT) of the bomb the U.S. used on Hiroshima.
Toon and Turco, along with Charles Bardeen, now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, modeled what would happen if 50 Hiroshima-size bombs were dropped across the highest population-density targets in Pakistan and if 50 similar bombs were also dropped across India. Some people maintain that nuclear weapons would be used in only a measured way. But in the wake of chaos, fear and broken communications that would occur once a nuclear war began, we doubt leaders would limit attacks in any rational manner. This likelihood is particularly true for Pakistan, which is small and could be quickly overrun in a conventional conflict. More:
Hassan Abbas interviews US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:
Do you think there might be some possibility in future that E.U., China, and United States altogether can take an initiative to bring Pakistan and India together and help them resolve their differences. We continuously hear that peace in the Af-Pak region is considered the most critical issue for the global security concerns. A global approach hence can be relevant. Do you think such an international effort can work?
Secretary Clinton: I think it could be a guarantor or it could be a positive force for implementation. But I think that the impetus must come from the two countries themselves. And at some point, both countries might say we’ve gotten as far as we can get; therefore we need some support, we need some new energy. But we have to start with the two countries and with their commitment to pursuing this dialogue first. More:
Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times:
But there was something else, an anti-Americanism whose depth and intensity I could not fully grasp. So to find out where Pakistan’s head was, I sought help from one of the country’s top psychiatrists.
What I got was not so much an explanation as an illustration, in all its anger, of the embittered language in which a great many Pakistanis discuss their relationship with America — living proof of just how different America’s understanding of Pakistan is from its own view of itself.
“The real terrorists are not the men in turbans we see on Al Jazeera,” said the psychiatrist, Dr. Malik H. Mubbashar, vice chancellor of the University of Health Sciences in Lahore. “They are wearing Gucci suits and Brit hats. It’s your great country, Madam.”
I asked him to spell it out. “It’s coming from Americans, Jews and Indians,” he said. “It’s an axis of evil that’s being supervised by you people.” More:
"Israel probably has about four nuclear sites, whereas the nuclear storage facilities in India and Pakistan are – despite many rumors – largely undetermined."
Hans M. Kristensen in Federation of American Scientists Strategic Security Blog: [via 3quarksdaily]:
The world’s approximately 23,300 nuclear weapons are stored at an estimated 111 locations in 14 countries, according to an overview produced by FAS and NRDC.
Nearly half of the weapons are operationally deployed with delivery systems capable of launching on short notice.
The overview is published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and includes the July 2009 START memorandum of understanding data. A previous version was included in the annual report from the International Panel of Fissile Materials published last month. More:
They are the two biggest icons of the country; they are also unabashed admirers of each other. Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan speaks about the genius of Sachin Tendulkar, who completes 20 momentous years in international cricket. From the Times of India:
You are a legend yourself and have been in the limelight for so many years now. Do you appreciate the way Tendulkar has handled pressure, both on and off the field?
AB: I am no legend, but Sachin is a consummate artist and all such artists are gifted in handling pressure under all circumstances. Indeed, I believe if there were to be no pressure in an artist’s life, his best would never emerge.
Have you ever delayed a shoot, or postponed an appointment, just because Tendulkar was going great guns during a match?
AB: Yes, innumerable times! More:
India had a tremendous influence on the Beatles and their music. Many a song came about just hanging around the Maharishi’s ashram at Rishikesh. So the Beatles’ double album is really a hymn to India. Bill Harry, the founder of Mersey Beats, the magazine that made the Beatles famous and introduced the band to manager Brian Epstein, in the OPEN magazine. Above, The making of Sgt. Pepper (circa 1992)
In 1966, George began studying the instrument under Ravi Shankar and continued to be inspired by Indian music, recording several numbers incorporating Indian instruments or using Indian musicians to accompany him. Another example is Love You To where he played the sitar like a guitar and featured instruments such as tabla and tambura.
George also recorded the track The Inner Light at EMI Studios in Mumbai while one of his contributions to the Sgt Pepper album was Within You, Without You. John’s Across The Universe featured George on sitar and tambura. The Sanskrit phrase, ‘Jai guru deva, om’ features in the chorus, which roughly translates to ‘victory to God divine’.
The Beatles were to be inspired by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and transcendental meditation and set off for the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, a journey which became one of their most fulfilling creative adventures during which they composed 32 songs. More:
Actor and model Lisa Ray chronicles her journey through cancer and its lessons in a blog. From Mint Lounge:
In June, model and actor Lisa Ray was diagnosed with multiple myeloma — an incurable cancer of the white blood cells. In between getting blood transfusions, trying to retain a normal life and attending press conferences for her new film, Ray decided to write a blog: The Yellow Diaries. Partly sardonic, partly heartbreaking, it’s a glimpse into her personal journey and the journey of those who are battling cancer. Edited excerpts:
From the marrow
7 September 2009
A few months ago my bone marrow started sending me messages.
The signals: I was always exhausted, pale, drained, and completely depleted of red blood cells. The lack of oxygen made me a serial yawner and spacier than a displaced Czarina. Little did I know, but my haemoglobin had fallen to levels where even a dedicated bloodsucker would turn their thoughts to revival. In between work and travel in India this year, I got a routine blood test and the results sent me to the hospital for a blood transfusion.
But not a reason to stop and, like, change my life?
The attempt to communicate probably started earlier. Time when I was ‘busy’. Building a career and impersonating myself. Travelling a lot and stock-piling impressions and drama and super-hyped destinations and a life in ‘art’. So I couldn’t hear my marrow gently carbonating. Trying to get my attention. Instead of tuning in to my body, I tuned out like a landlocked pirate tuning out the sounds of the sea.
And then I stopped travelling and returned to Canada. Got myself tested by Dr Susy Lin, landed in emergency and eventually got full membership into the Cancer Club.
That’s how I found out I have multiple myeloma.
To read Lisa Ray’s blog, visit www.lisaraniray.wordpress.com
S. Mitra Kalita on how the Galleon insider-trading scandal reflects how far a community has come. In the Wall Street Journal:
It seems like a courtroom drama made for Bollywood: The Sri Lankan hedge-fund kingpin being prosecuted by a fellow immigrant, the Indian-born U.S. attorney for Manhattan.
But the case against Raj Rajaratnam is very much an American story. Mr. Rajaratnam, the billionaire founder of the Galleon Group, and Preet Bharara — the Indian-born, Ivy League prosecutor – are both South Asian, a term that actually gained popularity (and possibility) overseas to refer to the collective people from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, among others. The relatively small immigrant group has formed a power elite in the U.S., from positions in corporate boardrooms to the governor’s mansion.
An estimated 2.5 million Indians live in the U.S., less than 1% of the total population. Yet their median income is a whopping 80% higher than the average American’s.
And in recent years, South Asians have found disproportionate success in technology and financial services, businesses at the core of the insider-trading allegations unveiled last week. More:
Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic, is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. From the Washington Post:
We learned that these workers returned in their prime: the average age of the Indian returnees was 30 and the Chinese was 33. They were really well educated: 51% of the Chinese held masters degrees and 41% had PhDs. Among Indians, 66% held a masters and 12% had PhDs. These degrees were mostly in management, technology, and science. Clearly these returnees are in the U.S. population’s educational top tier?precisely the kind of people who can make the greatest contribution to an economy’s innovation and growth. And it isn’t just new immigrants who are returning home, we learned. Some 27% of the Indians and 34% of the Chinese had permanent resident status or were U.S. citizens. That’s right?it’s not just about green cards.
What propelled them to return home? Some 84% of the Chinese and 69% of the Indians cited professional opportunities. And while they make less money in absolute terms at home, most said their salaries brought a “better quality of life” than what they had in the U.S. (There was also some reverse culture shock?complaints about congestion in India, say, and pollution in China.) When it came to social factors, 67% of the Chinese and 80% of the Indians cited better “family values” at home. Ability to care for aging parents was also cited, and this may be a hidden visa factor: it’s much harder to bring parents and other family members over to the U.S. than in the past. For the vast majority of returnees, a longing for family and friends was also a crucial element. More:
