Sep

3

YSR Reddy, Andhra CM, dies in helicopter crash

September 3, 2009 posted by indiatime | 8 Comments

“…Lord! It’s a miracle! Man up and vanished like a fart in the wind!
It’s a conspiracy! That’s what this is! It’s one big damn conspiracy! And everyone’s in on it! Including her!…”
- Samuel Norton (warden) - The Shawshank Redemption (by Stephen King)

The chief executive officer of one of the largest states in the nation has now gone missing for well over 24 hours. And so far, the police, the army, the airforce, the border security force, the greyhound commandos, unmanned drones, private search missions, satellites, bhuvan, have all been unsuccessful at finding YSR Reddy, the missing chief minister. The search that had originally focused on a a few thousand square kilometer area, has now been narrowed down to about 60-70 square kilometers.

What is astounding is that there hasn’t been any communication with the missing group. It’s obvious that the radio signals from the helicopter is the best pointer to the last known location, and the cellphones carried by the missing could only help in pinpointing the last location where the phones were still able to communicate with the nearby towers.

But an altogether lack of any type of communication raises some serious concerns and potentially very ominous possibilities:

1. the missing party of people might have met with a serious accident, their helicopter going down into a thick wooded area, with some fatalities or serious casualties whereby the members of the party are either unconscious if at all still living or are all dead.

2. The missing helicopter might have crashed into a lake or a water reservoir, drowning the occupants. Such a scenario has already been speculated on account of some eyewitness accounts from near the Shri Shailam project. It is considered less likelier than a crash landing or an emergency landing into the woods.

3. The missing helicopter might have crashed or force-landed into a forest, but the survivors may be in danger of attack by tigers from around the area. The area is host to the famous ‘operation tiger’ sanctuary.

4. the missing helicopter might have gone down into a wooded area, but the survivors might have been captured by local Maoist/naxalite terrorists and may have been whisked away outside the search perimeter and taken to an unknown location. Such a scenario can play out and evolve into a ransom situation where release of some prisoners would be bargained for, or the captured party may be exchanged with another group of captors - perhaps a more radical group like lashkar-e-toiba. This scenario, if true, will not play out soon, because the kidnappers will need some time to get the captured to a secret location.

Who might the terrorists ask in return for safely exchanging a missing chief minister and his officers? Well, there is no shortage of high-value exchange prisoners with Mohammad Ajmal Kasab (26/11 Mumbai attacks surviving gunman), Afzal Guru (convicted parliament terror attack mastermind), Safdar Nagori (imprisoned chief of SIMI - Students Islamic Movement of India), etc.

4. the missing party may all be okay, just minimally injured but unconscious and unable to move because of minor injuries and fractures, etc.

The picture will be a lot clearer as will be the weather by the end of today. Until then, YSR’s supporters, opponents, fans, and his bosses in Delhi will all be praying for his safety.

9 am India time update:
The helicopter wreckage has been found near Rollapenta, about 40 nautical miles east of Kurnool. Two helicopters of the Indian military are said to be hovering over the scene.

11am India time update:
Five bodies have been found at the wreckage site and YSR Reddy, the popular chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh, has been confirmed killed in the crash.

Sep

2

Andhra chief minister’s chopper goes missing

September 2, 2009 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

Y S Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR), the chief minister (CM) of Andhra Pradesh and his helicopter, both went missing for several hours earlier today, giving heart attacks to the state police, and spurring speculationss about his whereabouts.

Recent updates are confirming however, that the helicopter has landed safely in the Kurnool district, somewhere on an open playground in Bhanucharla village Atmakur area.

YSR was on a 3-district tour, traveling from Hyderabad towards Tirupati. His chopper began its journey at about 8:30 this morning, but went off the radar screens in a few minutes, about 79 nautical miles from Hyderabad’s Begumpet airport.

What is still worrying the authorities is that the helicopter and the CM were near the Nallamalla hill range, a known naxalite area, and even if the reports about the helicopter’s safe landing are to be believed, the CM still needs to be safely extricated from the area that may be a hotbed of terrorist/naxalite activity. The police are trying their best to keep the extrication part of their operation a secret, hoping to whisk YSR out of the dangerous area immediately.

Just yesterday, Tim Holding, an Australian politician traveling in his helicopter, had also gone missing somewhere close to one of Victoria’s highest mountains. Poor weather was blamed in that story, just as it is being said to be a huge factor in YSR’s helicopter story as well. But Tim Holding’s adventure had a good ending. Looks like YSR’s adventure too, may be over soon.

Update:
Earlier reports of the CM’s helicopter landing safely, have been left in doubt as there still is said to be no communication between the authorities and the missing CM. The search operations were called off a little earlier on account of severe weather

Aug

31

Dirty hands, deep ditches

August 31, 2009 posted by indiatime | 2 Comments

Times is reporting about a global hygiene survey that shows only 44% Indians have clean hands. I wonder why we need a survey to tell us that the majority of Indians have dirty hands. If you add up all the politicians, top/mid/low level bureaucrats, law enforcement, judiciary, etc, that would already amount for a large share of the dirty hands right there. With politicians, you can add their family members, wives, sons, daughters, etc. And add these people’s partners from the industry and corporate world, from small-time grocery shops to big-time corporates.

Actually, we should be celebrating that 44% Indians have clean hands. That’s almost half a billion clean hands, probably the largest population of clean hands on the planet. I was discussing this amazing piece of good news with a friend, when he enlightened me that the 44% clean hands literally meant clean hands, free of biological germs. That revelation, instead of tempering my joy, further heightened it, because that 44% clean hands figure started looking even more impressive.

But ‘clean hands’ wasn’t the only metaphor happening this morning.

In New Delhi, a top bureaucrat. who once served with a prime minister, died yesterday, when he fell into a 6-foot roadside ditch. Speak of good people’s lives driven to ditches because of the government’s callousness. 78-year old Trilok Nath Makan was a private secretary to former PM Atal Bihari Bajpayee. Walking close to a sidewalk which hadn’t remained much of a sidewalk because of roadside digging by the local municipal government, Makan fell into an open ditch. He couldn’t see the 6-foot ditch because the roadside lamps had been turned off. He lay in the ditch overnight, his family and his old wife worrying to death about his whereabouts. They found his body in the ditch in the morning, one of the topmost bureaucrats who served this country, literally disappearing into a ditch because someone failed to cover it.

Now let’s have those survey people go and talk to the officials in the Delhi municipality and the corrupt contractors. How many clean hands, you think?

Aug

27

Sports ministry toys with the meaning of sports

August 27, 2009 posted by indiatime | 5 Comments

India’s Youth Affairs and Sports ministry has now officially ruled that Formula 1 racing or F1 is not sports. The ministry’s ruling came in response to a private promoter’s request for about $36 million remittance for a license fee payment to the Formula 1 admin body. “…The proposed F1 race does not satisfy conditions which focus on human endeavour for excelling in competition with others, keeping in view the whole sports movement from Olympics downwards…”, ruled the sports ministry. A spokesman for the ministry, however, clarified the ministry’s stand, adding “….This project is absolutely beyond the realm of the common man. We expressed our inability to consider it…”.

The JPSK sports, floated by a private venture and officially and secretly backed by the Indian Olympic Association, had been closing in on the issue with their partnership with the UP chief minister Mayawati. So Mayawati, last year, created a special economic zone (SEZ) for her business partners in F1 racing, slating 2500 acres of prime land for the venture. But the differences between the ruling Congress and Mayawati’s BSP party, turned into a red flag for the F1 project. The Indian Olympic Association, has been controlled and ruled for years, by Congress party loyalist Suresh Kalmadi, whose connections to the party headquarters seem to have come up short for now.

Cricket, India’s biggest business (ahead of outsourcing), biggest religion (ahead of Hinduism) and biggest entertainment (ahead of Bollywood) and biggest sports (ahead of itself) is already beyond neck deep in politics, with the state and central bodies completely dominated and under the whim of powerful politicians. It wasn’t so all the time, however. It took Indian politicians a while to figure out the money equations involved in the sports entertainment industry. But now that they have wisened up, their eyes are on the other big prize in sports - the business of racing. The real reason Formula 1 racing isn’t getting a jump start is not about whether it is sports or entertainment. It is purely about which political players stand to make the most money out of it. So until that decision is made, the bureaucratic wordsmiths in the government will keep coming up with ways to rain on F1’s starting lineup in India.

When does a sport stop being a sport? When does it become ‘entertainment’? And at what point does the entertaining sport become a business? Looks like those questions will best be answered once all the business interests involved have been assured of their take in the matter.

Aug

24

Mumbai-Delhi air corridor was recently said to be one of the top 6 busiest in the world. India’s airports, especially Delhi’s IGI, has also shown the highest year-to-year percentage growth (28%) in the number of travelers. And with tragedies such as the newly constructed roof falling down at the capital’s IGI, it is painfully obvious that India’s air travel infrastructure, is crumbling fast.

The good news is that so far, India has been extremely lucky. That may not always be the case, however. Just yesterday, a major mishap almost did happen at the Mumbai airport, when two planes were given clearance to take off simultaneously from the same runway. Just a few weeks ago, two other planes had a similar incident when they both were cleared for simultaneous take-offs from the same runway. Although the mistakes can be attributed an overworked air control tower, there is much more to these incidents than just that.

The scenario of two passenger jets colliding in mid-air can almost certainly kill every passenger in those planes, resulting in hundreds of casualties and fatalities. A repeat of such an incident in a matter of a few weeks is a sign that no countermeasures have been put in place after the first incident. It’s possible that it may take some deaths and a few air tragedies to wake up the lazy bums in the civil aviation ministries.

Were this to happen at some rural airport, it would still be a cause for concern. But this happening at the nation’s busiest airports tells us that things have gotten completely out of control with the air travel. To this mix, add just one more tiny complication - birds taking off simultaneously from the same runway.

Folks, if you do travel this corridor, please make sure your financial paperwork such as your will, last wishes, etc are in order. Once you’re on the plane, please make sure your seat belt is on. If you are in the window seat, please keep looking outside the whole time during the take off and watch out for another plane flying or taking off from your runway. And if you’re in the emergency seat, please be ready to bail everyone out. Just know that you’re completely on your own when you travel the Mumbai-Delhi corridor, and that you cannot rely on and hope that the government has systems in place to protect you from danger. Lastly, remember your God or your deity, whichever is dearer to you. If you’re an atheist, you’re out of luck, but you can still hurl some lasting and uncivil cusswords at the civil aviation ministry.

Aug

22

Unprepared, unaware, naive and stupid

August 22, 2009 posted by indiatime | 6 Comments

Heavy downpours brought everything to a standstill as darkness engulfed India’s capital city at 4 pm. Heavens opened up without a warning and uncommon chaos erupted on usually severely chaotic city streets. Even the airport lost its roof from some of its newer construction.

Nobody saw it coming. Not anyone in meteorology departments. Not a soul in any of India’s observatories. Nobody in the government. None of India’s many satellites. Nobody working on Bhuvan earth. Nobody. We have once again demonstrated that we have no clue, no expertise and no idea how to read and interpret weather maps, how to study and extrapolate weather patterns and how to warn our public about a doom about to befall upon us.

Whether it is a tsunami, a terror attack, a destructive and disruptive downpour or an endemic health emergency of the severest kind and highest priority, India has yet not ben able to successfully implement a wider alert system that can inform, educate, alert and save lives.

Let’s stop talking about sending a man on the moon. Let’s stop bullshitting about one-upping google. Let’s not speak about drones and nuclear submarines. Let’s quit the debate on our standing in the 21st century. All that is nonsense and idiotic chatter when you see that we can’t do shit right by ourselves. Once we get past initial stage of denial, we may be able to finally do something right.

And by we, I mean you, the bloody idiots in India’s legislative assemblies and the parliament. It is you all who have led this once great nation down a ridiculous path, cheating and deceiving the masses with you fake promises, keeping fake issues burning by dividing the public on every basis imaginable.

You can bet we’re in deep mess, when the biggest issues facing us are an over-the-hill actor’s whining about waiting at the airport or an over-the-hill sportsman’s whining about a house in restricted defense space or an over-the-hill politician’s whinings about matters past. Thank God yesterday’s downpour was not a deluge and thank God Kasab didn’t land in Mumbai with a hundred other colleague sand and thank God the Chinese are not that smart either.

Aug

14

Bhuvan what?

August 14, 2009 posted by indiatime | 2 Comments

After hearing and reading about the great hoopla about Indian government’s answer to google earth, I managed to go to the Bhuvan website, register, download the software, and get a glimpse of what looks like some google earth-like app. Overall, the process took a few hours at the end of which my feeling of exasperation turned to frustration and great disappointment.

First off the bat, let me say how proud I feel that someone at the Indian Space Research Organization has figured out how to write software that shows satellite images layered on top of various information systems. And to be held in comparison to Google Earth, obviously one of the the best apps on the web, is rather distracting, intimidating and sucks a lot. That’s why, when someone in the Indian government, last year announced that India was busy making a google-earth killer app, many of us proud Indians hoped and wished for Indian agencies to wait and come out with the app only when it was ready, good enough to be presented, and with all the bandwidth resources at hand. It would be such a big disappointment, many of us thought, if after all the bragging and boasting, we turned up with something that was hardly worthy of a 21st century web user experience.

Well, folks, Bhuvan - the google earth killer is out and on display. And it is not only disappointing, but is a painful user experience from the get go all the way through. It has browser limitations - it asks you to use only IE6 and above (That’s rather strange, because the rest of the world is out to kill and stop using IE6 any minute), utilizes platform-dependent technology, gives you no instructions on what to do and how to go about using the service, and is just a very, very primitive user experience, at least for those who aren’t as web savvy.

I hate to come down harsh on ISRO’s brightest scientists, who we all know, do this only for their love of the country and not for any financial gains. They do this with most meager resources, with little guidance from the government and the universities, and given a proper environment and backing, could probably move planet earth, not just google earth. But I cannot understand how little regard ISRO’s leadership and its backers in the government seem to have for the Bhuvan team and its scientists. It is the government’s attitude and lack of support that clearly makes the Bhuvan app look like poor man’s google earth. That’s a shame, because to take Google on with such audacity and boldness, would by itself qualify these mad scientists for some well-deserved medals. But the immature and ill-timed release release of an ill-prepared app, is pure unnecessary braggadocio that is more politics than science.

Aug

13

The economics of swine flu - I

August 13, 2009 posted by indiatime | 8 Comments

The swine flu epidemic is so far purely a health crisis. And it will be so for a while. But one of the downsides of not having managed to stem the tide earlier, is slowly going to be seen on the economic front. Already, many avenues on that economic fronts are being hit hard:

1. Retail: since people will be staying home and not strolling in the malls and on the streets. With the festival and holiday season right around the corner, the impact is even worse, since many retailers make much of their annual income during these few months.

2. Entertainment: Especially, Bollywood, since so much of the business there is based on crowds showing up at the movies. Television, will however, have a bigger audience and many more eyeballs watching.

3. Transportation: Actually, transportation and civil aviation may be showing an uptick in the initial period, as people scramble to get to the place of their choice during such critical times. Most will be traveling home to be closer to families, plus since the cities are affected the most, there is a mini-exodus away from the cities to smaller towns and villages.

4. Tourism: Tourism will take a major hit, near-term as well as long-term. International tourism will drop rather drastically. Visuals of locals moving around in masks is hardly the kind of tourism commercial India would want the international tourists to see.

5. Food-related industries: e.g. a lot less eating out, and the restaurant industry will take a direct hit.

6. Pharmaceuticals: Typical flu season remedies are already in high demand, but the biggest beneficiaries are the mask-makers, especially those that make and distribute the special flu masks or respirators.

7. Medical Tourism: Takes a huge hit because of swine flu. With TV images of unclean hospitals with unhygienic conditions and discarded and infected masks lying around or thrown on the streets, it’s hard to convince the world that cheap is better.

8. Outsourcing: Although outsourcing is supposed to work remotely and via telecommutes, India is where the actual human factor of outsourcing lives, so any shift in the workforce is bound to affect that. In an industry where deadlines and timely deliveries can mean much, employees not showing up can prove quite inconvenient.

9. Sports: The world badminton tournament has already lost a few teams where players of some countries have chosen to flee home. Soon, Cricket too, may take a backseat to the epidemic flu. Thankfully, the commonwealth games are a year away.

10. Finance: Reduction in short and long-term investments is one of the adverse effects that is little discussed but is much-feared.

Scientists who study the effects of epidemics on economy, point out that the need for flexibility in resource allocation and the limitation of movement of the masses are two of the biggest challenges posed by epidemics. In a country like India, those challenges are further heightened, firstly by existing infrastructural challenges in resource allocation and distribution, and secondly by the size of the population where it’s not just limitation of people’s movement but the challenge of limitation of movement for a billion people.

Swine flu has already overwhelmed and overburdened some giant economies. For India, however, it brings economic challenges of proportions that are best best kept mum about. Unless controlled soon, we may be seeing the impact of this H1N1 flu for many years to come.

Aug

12

The sunny side of swine flu season

August 12, 2009 posted by indiatime | 3 Comments

Swine flu, the epidemic that has lately been ravaging India, is said to be a little uncomfortable with warmer climates. Yesterday, when India’s health minister was tauting India’s early efforts in successfully stemming the swine flu tide, most Indians knew that the slow early uptick in swine flu infections had little to do with governmental interventions and a lot more to do with the much hotter summer climate of a few months ago. With temperatures across India dropping down several degrees, H1N1, having survived the early shock of India’s heat, seems to have come back with a vengeance.

That also means H1N1’s days in India are limited. Sure, there will be many more victims at the rising rates being reported daily. But October is around the corner and having never lived in India, H1N1 has no idea what it’s in for. In fact, October heat in India is at times much harsher and much inhabitable for most living things. It is a lot harder to take than the hot summers that Indians have always been used to. And hiding in between a comfortable post-summer fall and the cooler breezes of November, October stands like a mean-spirited bully that won’t budge.

This year though, India can’t wait for October to be here. Watching innocents die day after day, of a flu that none of us had ever heard about, having nothing to do with pig farming, and having to suffer for some other civilization’s dietary and hygiene habits, none of it all makes any sense. But then again, nothing ever last for ever, and so won’t this deadly swine flu season. Some have recently suggested that even planet earth’s days in the universe are almost over.

But you and I may not have to wait for that to see the end of swine flu. A few more rotations of planet earth will tilt the planet just enough to drive swine flu out of its comfort zone here in India. Six more weeks. And the normally unwelcome October will find many takers this time around. And then we’ll here the health minister once again, speaking about how the government’s policies made H1N1 run away with its tail between its legs. And thus will begin yet another political season.

Aug

11

New swine in old bottle

August 11, 2009 posted by indiatime | 4 Comments

Most Indian media are today abuzz with swine flu activity in and around the government and public circles. Since yesterday, India’s health minister Azad has been seen busy, coordinating a national health disaster management. Still, it is a matter of great shame and surprise to most, how India has bungled this one up.

It was well over a few months ago that we heard of screening at India’s international airports, and quarantines for suspected swine flu patients. All that precaution, seemed to stem the tide, for a while. For just a little while that is. The government officials and the public health experts in India, imagined that this was a disaster avoided. Hardly. Swine flu seems to have come back with a vengeance and it seems to have adapted itself to the Indian climate, and now has gotten comfortable with India’s hospitality and warmth.

One would think we would have learnt the lessons after seeing a dozen deaths across the country in a matter of a few dozen hours. Ha! India’s Health minister was upto the old Indian politician trick today, telling the Indian press how India has handled it better than USA and UK. “…They’ve had so many deaths, we haven’t…”, he opined. Although statistically and numerically accurate, his statement shows his ignorance and inexperience in handling disasters of this kind, and that is a very scary fact. For the health minister and his team, may have wasted precious time during last several weeks, focusing their attention on other much less important matters than a worldwide pandemic that everyone knew would soon come to India. And whenever he was hard pressed for answers, the minister’s response was that ‘health is a state subject..”.

If health is indeed a state subject, then what is the need to have a health ministry in New Delhi? Why don’t we just shut down the central health ministry and save us some Rupees that are needlessly spent in supporting a department that has no work and no job except to make suggestions about public policies?

But that’s not going to be much comfort, either. The state level health departments are full of even stupider morons who can’t seem to produce an intelligent monosyllable. As of this moment, Maharashtra government’s health department’s website fails to make even a mention of swine flu. And even if they did decide to wake up, what would they do? The health ministry of that state, which is currently the epicenter of the swine flu, declares these to be important objectives :

6 To improve the maintenance of buildings

7 To implement various national health programmes

8 To give health education for improving knowledge, attitude and behaviour of the community.

Look who’s improving whose behavior and attitude?

Aug

9

Slowly but surely, swine flu spreads across India

August 9, 2009 posted by indiatime | 1 Comment

Swine flu is now claiming new victims, every day, in India. Pune is leading the list with 34 new cases recorded on Saturday. Two of the H1N1 victims died on Saturday, a housewife in Mumbai and a teacher from Kedgaon, near Pune.

The way the H1N1 epidemic has been spreading in India, it appears that it is becoming increasingly difficult to actually trace how and where the victims got their swine flu infection. That’s very scary, because in the initial period of the epidemic, the investigation and the attention was focused on the non-resident Indians traveling to India from the United States. In fact, Pune most probably got its own H1N1 from a couple of local students who traveled to Houston to visit NASA and came back with the H1N1 swine flu strain.

How did the Mumbai housewife got the flu? Asked if she had traveled abroad in the days preceding her infection, the doctors seemed to have no clue, and apparently they hadn’t bothered to check that.

As for the Pune teacher, the scary part is that he worked in a school 55 kilometers away from Pune. Meaning, the deadly strain of swine flu has already confirmedly made it inland. A college student from Pune, whose flu was detected in Osmanabad (a few hundred kilometers away from Pune) had actually traveled from Pune and carried the flu with him to his native place.

Far away from Pune, the state of Bihar recorded its first case of swine flu in a resident who had returned from Singapore 2 months ago.

The official number of swine flu cases has gone up by almost 50% in the last 4 days alone. Still, the doctors and the government officials seem clueless as to the exact protocol that needs to be followed. So far, the big cities have only a handful of H1N1 patients on ventilator or in the ICU. Soon, that situation is going to worsen and there is going to be issues of equipment resourcing.

One thing is for sure. Swine flu is going to claim many more victims in India, unless someone higher up wakes up and realizes that they have a bloody crisis at hand. And someone needs to tell the doctors that there is such a thing called swine flu going around. The doctors’ ignorance and casual attitude claimed the life of 14-year old Rida Sheikh in Pune and soon it might claim a 28-year old techie in Mumbai whose doctors didn’t think of swine flu in his case because he hadn’t traveled abroad.

Aug

8

North Korean ship caught in Indian waters

August 8, 2009 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

An article in today’s Global Politician discusses an emerging potential threat on India’s border on the east - Myanmar. Several factors are said to have raised alarms about Myanmar’s new and possibly close relationship with North Korea:

1. recent aborted voyage of Kang Nam I, a North Korean ship carrying a cargo of Scud-type missiles and heading towards Myanmar

2. arrests last month ,of North Koreans trying to export a magnetic measuring device to Myanmar

3. recent evidences of secret tunnels being built in Myanmar

And today comes the news about a North Korean ship, dropping anchor in the Indian waters off of Andaman and Nicobar islands. The ship told the Indian navy that it was carrying sugar to Iraq.

Aha! Why is a North Korean ship carrying sugar to Iraq, lurking so tantalizingly close the Burmese border? For now, the Indian navy and the coast guard have the ship surrounded, but the high sea drama is definitely not over yet and promises to get more colorful over next week. And this is one sugar-carrying ship that India needs to take seriously and not let go. And once that investigation is complete, India needs to seal off the Indian ocean on its eastern coast, and sink any suspected nuclear-material carrying ship to the depths of the Indian ocean.

Jul

28

A couple of years ago, Yasmeen, a 15-year old teen prostitute in Kashmir, told the police about how she was forced into prostitution by Sabeena, a local madam. Sabeena in turn, opened up her client diary, which consisted the names of VIPs, VVIPs and VVVIPs in and around the state, including the local officials, bureaucrats and principal secretaries, ordinary legislators and top politicians and cabinet-level government ministers, as well as top and mid-level police officials.

That teen prostitution sex story from 3 years ago has now come back and claimed the top pol in the J&K politics. Chief minister Omar Abdullah, the third-generation chief minister of his state (the son of former J&K chief minister Farooq Abdullah and the grandson of J&K chief minister Sheikh Abdullah), resigned a few hours ago, amidst allegations that his and his father’s name fared in the list of VVIPs from madam Sabeena’s list.

Yasmeen’s story started when while in her 8th grade, she was once invited to madam Sabeena’s house. She was drugged by a state government security guard, and then raped and blackmailed into prostitution after being filmed. Turned out that Yasmeen was not an only or one of the few victims, but was one of the many such victims who were regularly ‘fed’ to the top officials in the Jammu & Kashmir government. Not surprisingly, the police and India’s central investigating authorities initially dragged their feet, reluctant to touch or charge anyone, until the supreme court began slamming the investigation process. Added to the mix were allegations about high-level cover-ups.

Chief minister Abdullah’s resignation came about after recent allegations by People’s Democratic leader Baig who spoke about Abdullah’s famous father - Farooq, being on the sex scandal list as madam Sabeena’s client number 38.

Jul

27

Three more accused have now been convicted in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blast case. Later, the public prosecutor declared the convictions as a blow to Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Pakistan-based militant group.

Although the convicted trio faces death penalty and may indeed get it, this can hardly be called a blow to any Pakistan-based group, let alone Lashkar (That was already proved last year when Lashkar managed to walk a dozen armed people into the streets of Mumbai, wreaking a similar havoc as the one 16 years ago). In a series of slow and lame convictions over last 16 years, the Indian authorities have indeed managed to catch and convict most of the small fish. And many of those small fish may be fried as well. But the biggest ones flew away long long ago.

And that’s why none in the media bothered to follow up with the visiting secretary of state on why her country would not force Pakistan to hand over to India the man who has been the mastermind behind many of the terror attacks against us. Dawood Ibrahim does not live in the border areas and he does not hide in the caves. The extradition of Dawood Ibrahim was the one thing India should have demanded and stuck to. That the Indian prime minister cannot even bring himself to utter such a demand speaks volumes about how far India still has to go and how subservient it still is in the area of international relations. Even Sri Lanka, a much smaller nation, finally got their wish to kill their own public enemy number one. Looks like India will end up giving Kashmir up to Pakistan and giving Arunachal Pradesh up to China and giving Goa back to the Portuguese before it can qualify to demand anything from the world’s real superpowers.

Jul

24

Countering counterfeit menace

July 24, 2009 posted by indiatime | 2 Comments

Pop singer Michael Jackson’s death a few weeks ago, prompted questions about his overdosing on drugs and the extent to which he went doctor-shopping to get those drugs, often spending close to 50 thousand dollars per month. Actually, it would have been so much easier had the pop star moved to India, where he could easily have had access to whatever drugs he needed. And he would most probably still be around, because many of the drugs available on the Indian market, are spurious and fake.

Sources from India’s drug enforcement agency is saying that almost 25% percent of the pharmaceutical trade in India is counterfeit and fake. Meaning one out of four times you are out to get a medicine, you will be buying a fake one. Officially however, the Indian Drug Manufacturers Association as well India’s Asst Drug controller reject the high numbers, claiming that the actual counterfeiting may be close to only 2-3%.

On top of the counterfeit list is viagra, the fake variety of which has now overtaken caterpillar fungus as the most sought after aphrodisiac. And it may even have made it way into the antimalarial drugs. Besides Viagra, many cough and cold medicines and cancer drugs as well, have a demand in the counterfeit market. The cough medicine, for its high volume high demand business. And the caner medicines for their high profitability.

India’s health ministry seems to be aware of the huge fake drugs issue, though. It has now announced big payoffs for those who venture to whistleblow and expose the big fish in the counterfeit drug industry.

On top of India’s own spurious drug industry, Chinese-made fake drugs with ‘Made-in-India’ labels have become an additional headache for Indian officials. Looks like China is really worried about losing its status as the world’s most populous nation.

Yes, Michael Jackson could indeed have saved himself by moving to India. He could have taken all the drugs he needed to take and he would still be little affected if at all. And he would have found out about the various ways sleepless Indians do help themselves to sleep. Watching parliamentary debates on TV, overloading on spicy food, or taking alertness medicines…the list is endless.

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Why I’m happier than Mukesh Ambani
An inconvenient truth about India’s intellectual property
UFOs may be ‘idlis’ but time travels only in ‘medu-wadas’
Dr Singh is no Dr King
Lesser Known Indians
The Most ‘Nobel’ Teacher of Them All
The third Indian revered in China
A little Poland in India
The vanishing of Indian languages
The looting of Chandigarh’s treasures
Bharat, Pakistan and Hindustan, Indiana
Welcome to India, Steve!
Top 5 explanations for the president’s gesture
An IIT on every street, an IIM on every block
Pakistan, Jinnah, Wadias and the American anthem
An IAS officer’s nightmare of lustful, lascivious stares comes true