Feb

29

Change? What change?

February 29, 2008 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

For last several months, the United States has been having a fascinating dialog about change. Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, both the hopefuls who seek the democratic party’s ticket, have made a claim to that mantle of change. Obama by virtue of his race and Hillary by virtue of her gender. An idea of an African-American president or a woman president is rather unfamiliar and very, very novel for the world’s richest democracy.

For Indians however, the idea of a woman leading the country is nothing new. India has had a woman prime minister who ruled India for almost 15 years. India currently has a woman who though not officially ruling India, is very much the leader of the party that rules India. India has also had several women as governors of various states, right from day one of independence when Sarojini Naidu became the governor of Uttar Pradesh. India currently has 3 women serving as chief ministers of their states, and the last woman governor of India went on to become the first woman president of India - the current president - Mrs. Pratibha Patil.

So, as several Americans debate the idea of change with the possibility of a woman president, I wonder what change India has experienced so far by getting a woman president. In India’s case, there really wasn’t much expectation of any winds of change since India’s presidential chair is more or less ceremonial and symbolic. But symbols mean a lot. And during her inaugural speech, India’s first woman president did mention that women’s empowerment was a particularly important to her.

But I wonder how that whole empowerment scenario works in practice.

What does a victim of domestic abuse say to the husband who beats her?

You can’t raise your hand on a woman since a woman is now president of India….

What does an unborn female fetus say to her parents?

Don’t kill me because the president of this country is a woman…

What does a rape victim say to the gangsters who are about to destroy her life?

No,no..you can’t do that..because a woman is a president of this country….

What does an elderly widow say to a son who treats her like a burden?

You can’t do that son…you know an elderly woman is a president of this country…

What does a weeping bride say to her future family?

Please don’t ask for dowry and please don’t burn me to death….or the woman president will come and get you!

How does that work my friends? How does the change thing work? Because if it doesn’t, then what is the point of electing a woman as a president? Just so we can tell the rest of the world that we elect a woman president? The argument that a woman president means a good change for women is pure rhetoric. Balderdash. Baloney. Bunkum.

Feb

28

In what will definitely go down as one Kolkata’s most hotly debated criminal cases of the century, India’s CBI has now given its final verdict and judgement on the death of Rizwanur Rehman, the young graphics teacher found dead on the railway tracks, days after marrying a Hindu industrialist’s daughter. CBI has now ruled that Rizwanur Rehman was stressed out while dealing with a new inter-religion marriage and its consequences, and committed suicide by jumping in front of a train.

This will surely be the first case in world history where a young man finds love, marries his sweetheart albeit from a different religion, they both start a life together, and within a month the young man kills himself out of frustration, anger and stress brought upon by his wife’s family who are not able to accept the reality that their daughter has married of her own volition and to someone outside of their religion. And how does this young man kill himself? Not by taking sleeping pills, not by drinking poison. If the CBI is to be believed, he was so stressed out that he was practically out of his mind..and he chose quite a violent way to end his life..a professional who spent his working hours in the tender world of graphic design must really have been a sicko who secretly desired a very brutal, violent and an excruciating death. Ha!

The problem with CBI’s case is that right from the beginning, CBI officers had been making leading and concluding remarks that hinted where the agency was eventually going with this whole issue. The CBI’s hinting at Rizwanur’s melancholy is based on a purported phone call between him and his wife where his wife is supposed to have told him that she wanted to split. Surely, a man who had the courage to plunge into an inter-religion marriage wasn’t a faint-hearted trembling teenager who would just stiffen to death over a death threat or an argument with his wife.

Here is the real reason why the CBI ruled the way it did. First of all, it has been known from the very beginning that the very top brass of Kolkata police was intimately involved in the case on behalf of the super-wealthy industrialist family that sits on various boards and funds various political operations and donates heavily to political campaigns in that city. For CBI to have ruled otherwise, it would have taken an uprooting of the entire police department, at least the very top layer of it, in the city of Kolkata. By forcing false arguments in the case, by discrediting witnesses over the last few months, and by cajoling the Rehman family into taking a softer line, the CBI eventually made a suicide case of what was essentially a murder investigation to begin with.

That wasn’t entirely unforeseeable though, knowing that the victim’s family was up against an industrial empire worth several hundred million dollars with everything at stake. The take-home lesson is how powerful a force money is. When you have hundreds of millions of dollars, you can practically wish a death upon somebody and they will be so stressed out and distraught, that they will lose their mind, become zombies and jump in front of speeding trains. Ha! What power it must be to rattle somebody into jumping in front of a train? And what must be going through the victim’s mind? Oh My God, I must jump in front of this train or else those powerful people will come and hack me to pieces!

Feb

27

Forgotten Indians at Oscars

February 27, 2008 posted by indiatime | 1 Comment

The Times seems to think that India made its presence felt at this year’s Oscars. I don’t know what the TNN writer was smoking as he watched the Oscars, but did you see or hear anything that said ‘India’ at the Oscars?

Ok, to be fair…there were a few mentions of Indian names. Shekhar Kapoor-directed film Elizabeth - The Golden Age won an award for costume design and Alexandra Byrne the costume designer did say ‘Shekhar’ as she thanked a few people. Actually, costume design is the only category where an Indian has previously won an Oscar (Bhanu Athaiiya for Gandhi).

The film ‘Golden Compass’ won the best special effects award. It is a film based on Philips Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy. The film went through some growing pains as it was produced with its director Weitz leaving and temporarily replaced by Anand Tucker, the director of ‘Shopgirl’ who is of Indo-German descent. But Weitz came back to complete the film, which got mixed reviews because of its anti-Chritstian overtones. The Rhythm & Hues studio won an Oscar for the film’s special effects and a bulk of its production team is based out of its Mumbai office. So about 150 anonymous Indians in the Mumbai office do get credit for their hard work and late nights. Funny thing is the studio’s website does not seem to mention its Indian office anywhere.

Lastly, a special mention for Apurva Shah, the animation artist and the visual effects supervisor for the incredibly well-animated award winner Ratatouille. He has previously worked on such beauties as Antz, and Finding Nemo. Apurva, however, is not the first Indian to have achieved such a distinction. Previously, Umesh Shukla, the talented character integration supervisor for Titanic, had broken through the ceiling to give Indians a footing in the fantastic animation land of Hollywood.

Feb

27

India tests underwater missile

February 27, 2008 posted by indiatime | 1 Comment

Only hours ago, Indian navy test-fired a nuclear-capable missile (SLBM) from an underwater platform in the Bay of Bengal. The missile is designed to be launched from a submarine and gives India a fallback capability to launch nuclear missiles in case the land-based or air-based launches are incapacitated for any reason. The test was carried out by the DRDO, India’s defence research and development arm. The range of the missile, codenamed K-15, has officially been described at 435 miles but that number could in reality be somewhat higher.

Last year, India’s DRDO had indicated that it would probably test-fire a submarine-based nuclear-capable cruise missile sometime in 2008. India has been developing submarine-based cruise missiles in separate projects with Israel and Russia, projects that will make India only the fifth country with that kind of naval power.

India has previously successfully tested underwater-launched missiles, but most of those were shorter-range missiles. Today’s test, if successful, adds yet another weapon to India’s naval arsenal, a weapon capable of striking deeper in China (India already has more than sufficient capability to hit each and every inch in Pakistan with its mobile missile launchers).

Feb

26

What should India put in the doomsday vault

February 26, 2008 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

The doomsday vault opened today in a remote area of Norway, a giant container that will house seeds to protect world crops in case there is a biological, nuclear or climatic disaster that destroys the food crop on the planet. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built by Norway and is owned by Norway, but any country can store their own crop seeds without any charge and is allowed to retrieve those seeds whenever it wants.

Besides storing the obvious wheat and basmati rice and things like that, I want to begin creating a list of seeds that I think India should store in case there is a big disaster:

1. guava (my personal favorite)
2. mango
3. tea
4. spices (turmeric, cumin, red pepper etc)
5. amla (Indian gooseberry)

Send your suggestions quickly or else Laloo and his friends in the parliament wil start filling the wagons with betel seeds (to chew paan once the big disaster strikes).

Feb

26

Music in North Korea

February 26, 2008 posted by indiatime | 4 Comments

In the same week that Pakistan banned the popular Youtube.com website, North Koreans have now had an unforgettable evening that featured New York Philharmonic orchestra. A few hours ago, the concert hall in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital city, filled with back to back renditions of the North Korean and the American national anthems. That was followed by a rendition of Gershwin’s American in Paris, a colourful creative mix portraying life in a foreign city.

Almost 50 years ago, the Soviet Union, then a nation hiding behind the iron curtain, opened its doors to outside music when it invited the same New York Philharmonic orchestra, then conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Long before the Berlin wall fell down, it was music and sports that made great overtures which became preludes to eventual diplomatic thawing of relations between longtime enemies.

In southeast Asia, India and Pakistan have had that musical diplomacy going for a long time, with maestros like Mehdi Hassan and Ghulam Ali from Pakistan, and maestros like Zakir Hussain, Alla Rakha, Bismillah Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Shivkumar Sharma from India. Bollywood and its music have single-handedly done more diplomacy than any politician on either side of the border. The sports of Cricket and Hockey have played their part with fans from both sides getting worked up with patriotism while still admiring the skills of the opposition.

However, the biggest contrast between what is happening in North Korea this evening and what has been happening on the Indo-Pak border, comes from an entity that is, not surprisingly, far too potent and far more powerful than music. Religion, as an ideological issue outshines and outshadows every other standard no matter how attractive or how beautiful.

Feb

26

Pakistan causes major youtube outage

February 26, 2008 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

Pakistan’s telecommunications agencies caused global Youtube outage when they erroneously posed as the fastest route to Youtube, after having blocked Youtube access within Pakistan to ban any so-called blasphemous content.

Two days ago, Pakistan started blocking Youtube access to its internet netizens. The telecom agencies in Pakistan redirected any internal request for Youtube videos to an internet ‘black hole’, a dead-end where the requests just died and the internet users were thus denied access to Youtube content. But Pakistan Telecom published that route to its international carrier in Hong Kong which compounded the Pakistan Telecom’s error by directing any Youtube requests that it received, to a bunch of blocked internet addresses in Pakistan. The Hong Kong carrier’s error got propagated to other major carriers and for a while, most of Asia was blocked from accessing Youtube.

As of Monday evening, Youtube site was up in most places except Pakistan and there were no apparent changes in the content for which Pakistan had originally banned Youtube. Also running normally were Wikipedia and Google, the other major information hubs that still displayed the content banned in Pakistan.

Feb

25

Where can Musharraf go?

February 25, 2008 posted by indiatime | 1 Comment

Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf is said to have been thinking about an exit strategy for several days now. There were runmors a few days ago that he might want to leave soon, but today’s reports show that Musharraf isn’t going anywhere yet. Part of Musharraf’s problem is that he can’t decide where to go. Having done nothing else but dictating for last several years, it will be a big change for him to be in a position wher he has to take dictation from others. So to help him sort through all the options, here is my list of suggestions for Musharraf’s post-dictatorial careers:

1. Join the Indian Cricket League:
ICL is hiring and the money isn’t bad either. And there are so many similarities between Cricket and dicatorships. There’s not much to do, no real responsibilities. One can badmouth others at will, and the ego trips are free.

2. Become a real estate developer in Mumbai:
People from other professions have been making this jump in recent days, and with his military connections, Musharraf already has the guns and ammunition that a real estate developer in Mumbai needs. Plus he is used those life-threatening phone calls that a Mumbai real estate developer has to attend to.

3. Replace Shah Rukh Khan as the host of Who’s smarter than your fifth-grader:
It would be a good idea to make the distinction and show everyone who definitely isn’t.

4. Join Kashmir independence movement:
Over last several years, Musharraf has invested a lot in the Kashmir area. All the money and arms and support that he supplied to his Kashmir separatist buddies…they can definitely oblige him with a house in the valley. What are good friends for, anyways?

5. Become a don in Dubai:
Musharraf has all the experience, financing, ammunition, arms, stooges, all the paraphernalia that a Dubai don needs to start business. The infrastructure is in place, the money is good, and there isn’t much of a learning curve, at least not for him.

6. Become the CEO of Micro-Hoo:
Musharraf has been showing a lot of interest in online and internet market, especially with his ban on Youtube. Having declared his apathy for Google’s Youtube, Musharraf may be positioning himself to become the chief of rival giant Micro-Hoo since they need some dictatorial genius to take them past Google’s young guns.

7. Enter the US presidential race:
With consumer advocate Ralph Nader entering the US presidential race, the race is suddenly wide open. This may be Musharraf’s big chance to quickly set a meeting up with ‘Meet the Press’ anchor Tim Russert and announce his candidacy. Plus he has more supporters in the US than in Pakistan. As for an outsider not being able to become a US president, Musharraf is too well versed in the art of changing constitution. He has years of experience in that field.

8. Get a job at Beijing Olympics:
China owes this to Musharraf. China has always shown a willingness to support Pakistan’s dictators and they can oblige him with some odd job at one of the Olympic arenas. Maybe the shooting range or something. The pay is good and Musharraf can take home as many lead toys for his grandkids as he can.

9. Join old bordertown friends, chill and hang out:
As much as Musharraf wants to do this, he is never gonna. Because that would tip everyone off as to the whereabouts of some old friends. Plus he won’t get to use all those nice suits if he becomes a cave-man spending nights playing cards with friends in the border mountains.

10. Become a Bollywood bad guy:
Bollywood hasn’t had a real bad guy in years. Plus with the new wave of historic movies, it would be refreshing to see Musharraf play say someone like crazy Mahmood of Ghazni or Aurangzeb or somebody like that. The pay is really good. If the movie gig doesn’t work out, Musharraf can be a judge on the Indian Idol. And then he might also contemplate becoming a TV news anchor in India. It would be a good thing for Musharraf’s tortured soul to get a few pointers on democracy 101.

Feb

24

The government of Andhra Pradesh will pay up Rs. 5 lakhs to the wife of a murder victim in Kuwait, part of the settlement deal that will win a pardon for the murderer, a Kerala state native who is in a Kuwaiti prison awaiting execution.

Suresh, the murder victim, a native of Andhra Pradesh, was killed last November, when he was attacked by his friend Simil, in what was essentially a scuffle over a cricket match.

According to Kuwait’s Shariyat laws, the wife of a murder victim can pardon the murderer and can make a deal with the murderer’s representatives to win a reprieve or leniency. So a village council member from Simil’s village in Kerala traveled to Cudappah in Andhra Pradesh to make a deal with victim Suresh’s wife. Mediating through the local physician, murderer Simil’s family friends managed to persuade Suresh’s wife to accept Rs. 6 lakhs as compensation. Recently Suresh’s wife upped the demand to Rs 15 lakhs, so the townspeople started a fundraising drive which will now get some help from the Andhra Pradesh chief minister.

The financial compensation also known as blood money or Diyah in Kuwait, is a practice that is applicable to murders that are not pre-meditated. When the relatives of the victims agree to the diyah deal, a letter of forgiveness called tanazul is executed, death sentence is commuted and subsequent punishment is reduced to half. At this time, the convict can apply for a presidential (Ameeri) pardon to get out of the remaining half of the punishment.

So coming back to the point, an NRI in Kuwait who is originally from Kerala stabs and kills another NRI originally from Andhra, and the Andhra government is now paying the victim’s wife Rs. 5 lakhs of the taxpayer money (surely the money isn’t coming from the Chief minister’s pocket) because the murderer from Kerala comes from a poor family. So people’s sweat money is being paid off as blood money for a murderer who stabbed someone else due to a Cricket dispute. Why doesn’t the BCCI, the richest cricketing body in the world, pay the blood money for one of their fans? Since it is because of idiots like him that we still have idiots like them killing every other sport but Cricket?

Feb

23

Hillary, Obama and Gandhi

February 23, 2008 posted by indiatime | 2 Comments

Barak Obama, the American presidential hopeful has an article that will soon be published in India Abroad, explaining in detail his lifelong admiration for Mahatma Gandhi.

“…In my life, I have always looked to Mahatma Gandhi as an inspiration, because he embodies the kind of transformational change that can be made when ordinary people come together to do extraordinary things…..That is why his portrait hangs in my Senate office…”

Hillary Clinton, Obama’s rival in the presidential primaries, is also inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and has said before,

“…I have admired the work and life of Mahatma Gandhi and have spoken publicly about that many times….”

Those remarks from Hillary came after she had made a lame attempt at a humor when she brought up Mahatma Gandhi’s name in one of her speeches (January 2004), saying,

I want to end (my speech) with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi…he (Mahatma Gandhi) ran a gas station in St. Louis for a couple of years…Mr. Gandhi, do you still go to the gas station…lot of wisdom comes out of that gas station…

Here’s the video clip from years ago:

So, sixty years after Gandhi’s death, his name still matters in the political machinations of a country he never visited but always admired. I wonder whether that has to do with the fact that Gandhi never sought political office in his life!

Feb

22

Road to perdition

February 22, 2008 posted by indiatime | 2 Comments

Deepa Kurup writes in the The Hindu on how mother toungues thrive in our multi-cultural society. She points out that the director of India’s Central Lanuguage Research Institute in Mysore is not too pessimistic about Indian languages dwindling or dying down. His fear, however is that a lot of traditional knowledge hiden in books or scriptures or folks songs can disappear if the future generations don’t continue to speak those languages.

Last evening, the democratic party in the US hosted a debate between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, the two candidates trying to become the nominee for their party. Speaking in the state of Texas which has America’s largest Spanish-speaking electorate, each of them pointed to the importance of knowing a second language. It is estimated that by 2050, the US will have about 150 million with Spanish as their first language. And Americans of generations thereafter, will not be able to get away with being able to speak just their mothertongue.

Although most Indians speak at least 2 languages, and many speak more than 3 or 4 fairly fluently, India has still managed to lose its most precious language, the language that was the origin of most of the Indian languages, and the language that Hinduism’s famous scriptures were written in. The way in which India has discarded Sanskrit, the very medium of our heritage, is an indication that even the rest of India’s languages will one day take the same route.

Much of the blame with Sanskrit’s departure lies with India’s educationists who have managed to turn our education system and the school years into a series of rote memory tests that focus on totally useless examinations catering to a select group of vocations.

There was this kid in my highschool class who was really fluent in Sanskrit. His father was a Hindu priest and took his son along with him for various religious ceremonies where my friend accompanied his father in chanting Sanskrit chants and Vedic mantras. Unfortunately for this kid, Science and Mathematics were his weakest subjects and he barely managed the Social Studies class. But he was fluent in Sanskrit, way more fluent than any Sanskrit teacher we ever had. During our lunch breaks, we asked him to sing some rather racy love poems in Sanskrit and he obliged us with recitations from Kalidasa’s incredible treasure.

I recently found out that his son had chosen not to continue with the family tradition and had become a call center employee and was making real good money. So I gave him a call, congratulated his son and broached the good old memories of our schoolyard lunch breaks. “Does you son know that you are fluent in Sanskrit? You used to speak Sanskrit as if you came right out of Mahabharata or something”, I said. “Oh forget that”, he said, sounding excited, “you should hear my son speak English..he speaks in such a perfect American accent, you will not be able to tell him apart from an American…”!

So my friend’s family has lost an age-old tradition but has gained a walletful of dollars. And I have a sense that something similar has happened on a much larger scale as well. I don’t know how some of our good tradition treasures could be saved or salvaged, but I do believe that losing them somehow equates to losing a part of us and a part of our identity. And losing them for the lure and greed of financial treasure is a misstep that we as a nation may come to regret in the coming years. Because without an identity of our own, the road to perdition would not be far away.

Feb

21

Definitely not saved by the bell

February 21, 2008 posted by indiatime | 1 Comment

Here is what happened in India’s schools last week:

1. In New Delhi, a teacher stripped a 6-year old kindergarten girl down to her undergarments, and made the young girl stand on the writing desk, and tied her hands. Then, the teacher ordered the rest of the students to shout ’shame, shame’. The 6-year old’s family has told the police that the teacher regularly beat their daughter, and sometime slapped her very hard.

2. Also in New Delhi, Rinky Kaushik, a 15-year old girl has been in coma for last month or so because of injuries she suffered when her teacher beat her on the head with a stick. Rinky’s parents have told the police her teacher repeatedly beat her on the head because she refused to attend his tuition classes.

3. In Ahmedabad, a class-XI student died of exhaustion when his teacher punished him for tardiness by making him run around the school.

4. In Kolkata, a Physics teacher lured a female student into the Physics lab and molested her. The teacher got the girl alone with him on the pretext of giving her special tutoring in math.

Feb

20

Anyone watching the Indian TV channels today would be watching the great Cricket auction in India, where the Cricket players from India and all around are being auctioned off to various teams for India’s new cricket league. The huge money numbers associated with the players might make one feel that these players are super heroes from a distant planet who can do anything. In reality, the players are being bought real cheap, if you see that nearly most of the players have been bought for much less than a million dollars each.

So I have two money advices to those of you who like to look at future trends and start making a buck before others come and spoil the fun. Two trends, two investment advices for you all out there.

First one is cricket cards. Yes, just like baseball and football cards, some of which can fetch a price of more than a million bucks. For Indian fans, the day is not far when a cricket card from 2008 would be sold for several million dollars (which I think will be the Indian currency in 2050) in another 50 years. America has had the card fever for more than a hundred years. And in the days when there was no television and there were no video games, most American kids thought baseball cards were an enjoyable hobby. In a hundred years, an original Sachin Tendulkar (card) will go for several million dollars, an original Dhoni (card) for a few bucks more, and an original Sehwag might still fetch several hundred thousand dollars.

Second one is pharmaceutical companies that produce growth hormones. As the new Cricket league fever grips the nation, players will be vying to be traded to various teams for higher prices. There will be bidding wars and a whole new world of sports agents demanding billions for their clients - batters (I think batsmen will soon be called batters - I bet the word batsman is going away) with averages of 20 and 30 and bowlers (as a kid, I always thought the word was baller, but my father corrected me when I was 5) with average stats. To be competitive, batters and bowlers will need to be in top physical shape and strong with six-packs rivaling the famous Shah Rukh Khan. Soon, cricketers all around will be frantically buying steroids, the magical substance that makes American baseball and football players stronger.

For those out there who have little kids, there is a better way to make a fast buck (provided your kids are a little sports-oriented). Yank your kids out of those primary schools and kindergartens and put them in Cricket academies instead. In another 10 years, you will be cashing those fat checks given put by Ambani et al as your kid becomes a part of the great Indian Cricket league.

What? Your kid isn’t into sports? Oh, I’m so sorry. But no worries and no reason to despair. Having taken your kid out of his or her school, you are wondering if you have screwed things up for them. No, not at all. Let me send you the address and contact details for Suresh Wadkar music academy. That way, you can rest assured, that if not the Cricket League, then some reality singing show will be the salvation for your family.

One more thing. Stop feeling so sad about all those years you worked hard and all that time you wasted in schools and colleges. There will soon be so many opportunities for the likes of us who can’t sing, can’t dance and can’t even hit a ball. McDonald’s will soon to taking applications for official vendors at Cricket stadiums all over India, to sell boiled peanuts and hot dogs and samosas and vadapav and burgers at these league games!

Feb

19

Elephants go ballistic in India

February 19, 2008 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

Not canniballistic, but ballistic. Just plain crazy. It is a measure of how desperate India’s wildlife has become. Just a month ago, an Indian elephant, member of an otherwise peaceful and herbivorous species, killed and ate a fellow Indian in the northeastern state of Meghalaya.

In a state where deforestation and human encroachment have threatened the existence of the native wild life, the balance of nature hangs thin and things have already taken a turn for the worse. There have bee incidences of elephant herds coming into villages, attacking illegal liquor dens and helping themselves to a drink or two. Sometime after that, almost 10 drunk elephants died of electrocution after they failed to notice an electric fence.

More than a hundred years ago, in 1903, New York’s famous Coney Island Park had a baby elephant named Topsy, who turned wild, and killed 3 spectators. The park officials tried to kill her by feeding her cyanide-laced carrots. But she survived those. Then the park officials decided they would strangle her with a noose, but the Society for Prevention of Cruelty (ASPCA) opposed that. So the park officials decided to summ,on Thomas Alva Edison, the famous scientist who lived only a few miles away, in New Jersey. Edison and his staff fastened copper plates to the baby elephant’s feet and gave a 6600 jarring volts of electricity. The baby elephant fell down to the ground, as the copper plates went up in smokes.

Like Topsy, the baby elephant, India’s wild life conservation strategy has turned topsy-turvy. Not because the forest officials aren’t doing their job. But because there is a widespread lack of awareness about the environment, permeating from the top of the government all the way down to the local populations neighboring wildlife reserves. The elephants would not be eating humans if they could just speak our language and tell us to stop destroying the forests. All their erratic behavior really means is that they are trying to tell us humans somehting.

Feb

19

A surprise in Pakistan?

February 19, 2008 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

The opposition parties in Pakistan have managed to pull of that country’s first coup of the new century, by defeating President Musharraf’s party in the elections held yesterday. IN results so far, the opposition seemed to have come close to winning the majority, but counting still went on for almost a 100 seats out of the total of 342.

Musharraf’s party, having won 37 seats so far, was trailing two other parties, with Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) winning 80 seats so far, and former PM Sharig’s party winning 64 seats so far. But here is the catch. Those two parties have so far not given any clear indication that they will sit together in the parliament. Which meant that in spite of having won the fewest seats so far, Musharraf could still upstage his rivals, forge a few alliances, and keep the opposition divided enough that his party can still hold the reins of power.

For Pakistan, this next week will be the most critical week in the coming 100 years as it will determine which way Pakistan chooses to go. If the people’s will prevails and Musharraf is ousted, democracy has a chance to take a root. For Pakistan’s sane moderates, however, there is a bigger challenge after checkmating the king though. Their next target has got to be the perpetrators of extremism who hate with the sounds of democracy just as much Mr. Musharrf does.

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