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.
Can any of us be falsely accused of cyber crime ?
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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The NRI and India’s rural economy
The total amount of FDI investments in India is estimated for 2007 is $ 15 billion. And we tout that fiigure proudly – and our stock market fluctuates on any variance from that figure too. Guess what NRI”s will remitt to India in the same period ? A mind boggling $ 30 billion ! 60% of which goes into goes into Rural India. Most consisting of small amounts for the maintanence of families left behind, or small investments. If the world bank is correct, every dollar remitted contributes 3 dollars to the GDP growth – which means that NRI’s are contributing to growth of almost a $ 60 billon to India’s rural economy.
(25 million people of Indian origin live outside India. On the other hand 45 million people of Chinese origin live outside China – but they remitt just $ 25 billion into China.) ……..
The Tata Nano
It’s caused a sensation all over the world, where car manufacturers looked forward to inundating the Indian consumer with their more expensive brands, only to see that an Indian co has completely stolen a march on them. Bravo Mr Tata ! But I really resent all the people that go on about the envoirnmental cost of the car. So it’s ok to allow people who can afford it. to import gas guzzling big and expensive brands. But the moment we have a real people’s car, that is energy efficient and serves those that the lower end of the pyramid, everyone is conscious of clogged roads….
White skin, dark skin, Barak Obama
Never quite understood why the white skin has been considered superior. Or why historically white skinned people have considered themselves superior. When I was exploring a film on Nelson Mandela, I was horrified at the open statements made by the politicians of that time. They called the “darkies’ , not quite human, or like children that deserved to whipped. The British colonists called the Arabs ‘Fuzzy Wuzzies’, us ‘those damn natives’. It’s not that far ago in History that the white Americans were regularly indulging in ‘mob hangings’ or ‘stringings’ of innocent black people as they called them – almost as a sport. But what about us ? North Indians used to look down upon the South Indians because the colour of their skin. Still do……
Bhaji bashing and the politics of cricket
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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Inventor of the ‘Jaipur foot’ has passed away
In our Bollywood and Cricket obsessed media, the passing of one of the greatest Indians of our time has almost gone un-noticed. Dr P K Sethi confounded the scientific community of the world by developing a simple, affordable answer to people that had lost limbs. While the scientific community all over the world invested billions of dollars to create expensive artificial legs, Dr Sethi was already giving a new life to thousands of people all over the world. People who otherwise would have lived lesser lives with their handicap. Not content with idea just raking in millions of dollars by patenting his invention (which he could have) – Dr Sethi saw his purpose as a much larger one of “serving the people’. His hospital in Jaipur welcomed the poor, and treated them free. He stands as example to the international medical and the Scientific community – who seem to be obsessed with the fortunes they can make through their inventions and discoveries. Please visit the following web sites and thousands others and mark our respect for a great human being
http://www.jaipurfoot.org/
http://www.time.com/time/reports/heroes/foot.html
Bush expands his ‘war on terror’ to inlude all of Pakistan
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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Kumble : Were the Australians really unsporting ?
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.
Akira Kurosawa on film critics
Here is what one of the greatest film directors of all time said about film critics :
“There is a famous haiku by Bashio :
An old pond
A frog jumps in –
the sound of the water.
People who read it and say “Well, of course if a frog jumps into the water, there’s going to be a noise” simply have no feeling for haiku. There are sometimes such human beings among film critics – the things they say they see are so far off the beam that you would think they were possessed by some kind of demon. I suppose nothing can be done about critics, but we can’t have such people among film directors.’” A quote by Akira Kurosawa.
Film is poetry. But more and more film critics look for prose. Even critics now are too impatient to look beyond. Like the rest of our society now, they too suffer from information overload. We are are becoming increasingly a ‘reactive’ society’ propelled by unrelenting external stimuli.