Category: Current Events

Was speaking at the India Today Enclave with Amir Khan. But then attended a panel where Yasin Malik was speaking. For those that do not remember, Yasin was at one time the leader of the most feared terrorist group in Kashmir. Now he is a political leader looking for peace and reconciliation with India and Pakistan, because he believes that the future of the youth of Kashmir depends upon the two nations coming to terms. But he still supports the right of the Kashmiri’s to decide on their own future, even if it meant an independent Kashmir. A few years ago if he was seen in Delhi he would been shot in sight by the armed forces. So full marks to India Today for having the courage to bring such disparate views on the same platform as Finance Minister Chidambaram, and even on the same dias as a member of India’s Parliament…

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Like pigs bred for slaughter, minor girls in Mumbai brothels are being bred for prostitution by being injected with growth hormones and fed testosterone pills in the guise of vitamin pills. So that they develop larger breasts and hips early. Customers apparently like under age girls with slightly mature bodies. Not only that, in the event of a police raid, the brothel owners can claim the girls to be older. According to DNA a 14 year old girl complained ” i hate looking at my body. My hips and chest have swelled in the last year and suddenly I have hair on my chin”.
Just around the corner of course, the stock exchange is making people into billionaires everyday. And land deals are being also struck for billions of dollars in the backyard of these brothels.

Farheed claims that Parvez Musharraf, whom he so admired, is now just holding on to power and should let go. He suggests that the once admired president would create a great legacy that brought Pakistan’s economy under control, and stopped the country from breaking into civil strife. I think Farheed Zakaria is being naive. He has forgotten the maxim ‘He that rides the Tiger’. The day Musharraf aligned himself with the American troops against his own people in the tribal hills bordering Afghanistan, he was a marked man. He knows that the day he gives up power, and no longer has the security that a president has, he either has to leave the country to a safe haven in the US, or will become an easier target for the fundamentalists – and rather like Benazir herself – with minimum security.

How difficult is it for someone to pirate your cyber identity ? Your IP address ? This case makes all of us completely vulnerable, given the complete break down of the judicial system in India, the lack of application of our police force that is anxious just to fix the blame as soon as possible to take the heat off them selves, the frightening lack of respect for the rights of the individual, Add to that lack of technical expertice of both, the Police and the Judicial system. A Bangalore based young software engineer Lakshmana Kailash k spent 50 horrendous days in Yerwada jail for a cyber crime he did not commit….

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Pull out of the tour ? What nonsense ! Hey guys – cricket is just a game which we lost ! It happens all the time, bad umpiring or not. Australia is a damn good team and really hard to beat. But we are turning out to be such a nation of cry babies ! Now all the politicians in India have got into the ‘ cricketing’ act. “Get our team back”. ‘We will fight this insult”. Soon I guess the Indian parliament will be in uproar, forgetting deeper more important issues like ‘law and order ‘ in India, where lives of the under privileged are constantly treated with indifference. Where abuse is the order of the day. The answer to all this is to beat the hell out of the Aussie’s the next match ….. if u can !

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Pakistan stands now on the brink of being the next Afghanistan. The killing of Benazir Bhutto is now being seen as an opportunity by President Bush to include all of Pakistan in ‘covert operations’. Not just the Western Tribal areas. The CIA is already considering covert operations. The excuse will be that an ‘unstable nation that has nuclear capabilities, is under threat from Islamic fundamentalism’. It will take a lot of will and hard thinking from the Pakistani people to stop this and not allow their nation to become the next battle ground between terrorism and the US. And neither can India now stand by and watch. Nothing will be worse for us than an ‘Afghanistan or and Iraq like’ situation at our borders. It is time for us to change our strategy towards Pakistan ….

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OK, some really bad umpiring cost us the 2nd test match in Sydney. Or did it ? It’s only a guess that the match would have been drawn if the decisions had not gone the way they did. I actually do not think that Kumble should have been so down beat in his press conference. Why blame the Aussie’s for being unsporting ? They always play with aggressive intentions as must India. Would an Indian player actually have claimed a player ‘not out’ if the umpire was in doubt ? Just look at the way bowlers always howl for dismissals all the time – hoping to unsettle the umpire into giving a decisions against the batsmen. It’s the way the game is all over the world.

All Mumbaiites should feel very very concerned of the behaviour of drunken young men that molested the young girls outside J W Marriott on New Years eve. While there are individual incidents of rape etc reported all the time, what is frightening about this incident was the mob mentality that took over without a single thought or compassion for the hapless girls. Almost like hunting pack animals, the girls were attacked by a mob of 70/80 men that were ripping off their clothes. Which means that this has become a socially acceptable behaviour pattern. Why does this happen …… ?

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Who killed Benazir ? Suicide bombings were unheard of in Pakistan before 9/11. And before the US ordered Musharraf to send his army against his own people in Pakistan’s western regions to flush out the Taliban. Why ? The supposed reason was to look for Osama Bin Laden. But that was EIGHT years ago, and Osama could be dead of natural causes by now. No one talks about him anymore in any case, and the Keyword has become Al Quaeda, about whom no one knows very much. Because Al Quaeda has now becomea ‘philosophy of terrorism ‘ as an acceptable tool of warfare, rather than a cohesive organization anymore. It is the usual construct of the Western World looking for simple answers to vastly complex problems of cultural divide, religious divide and harsh economic disparities……

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Benazir Bhutto in her younger days. She was president of the Oxford University Students Union. A face so full of optmism, joy and hope. Can only the young be so optimistic ? Is youth unafraid of consequences, or merely unaware of them ?