Learning to Drive on Mumbai Roads

Learning to drive on Mumbai roads is not a joke. Those narrow lanes with more people walking on the roads than on the footpaths and traffic signals not working half the times, it can only get messy. More so, if you are girl learning to drive, you will be looked upon as an “idiot” who has no potential what so ever to steer a car correctly.

To make this feat even more difficult our beloved BEST bus drivers, cabbies and auto rickshaw drivers add their bit. In the pursuit of making the driving experience for the novice drivers as challenging as possible, these MCPs (Male Chauvinist Pigs) also tend to slow their own commute. Leave alone their deafening horn blowing skills and seriously is using turn signals a sign of weakness for these smart asses?

My driving experience has helped me learn a new set of driving rules:

1. Don't be fooled by the lines on the road. If there is almost enough room for two cars--move over, it's two lanes.

2. Never put on your signal in anticipation of a turn. Signals are to be used to let other drivers know what you have just done. Always wait until you are well into the turn before signaling.

3. If you are a pedestrian, size up the traffic flow and find spots where you can dart in between cars to get across several lanes of traffic. Don't worry that you are crossing against the light. If any startled driver stops when you jump out inches from his car, be sure to give him a dirty look because now he has messed up your traffic pattern.

4. Bikers never overtake from the right. Its okay if you forget to horn before overtaking.

My conclusion: Indian’s are known to be the best drivers in the world… London, New York go anywhere you’d surely find an Indian Cabbie. Has anyone wondered why so… because Indian drivers are not afraid to die.

My take on "How I met your mother"

In one word "Awesome"
Romantic comedies depend on appealing actors, and these five are irresistible.
Humor quotient is high, characters are well-played and dialogues amazingly scripted.
What more to say I think this one's already a winner...

Panda Sneeze

To Pam & Zain

I read this poem somewhere and thought how well it suits Pam and Zain.

Standing by,
All the way.
Here to help you through your day.

Holding you up,
When you are weak,
Helping you find what it is you seek.

Catching your tears,
When you cry.
Pulling you through when the tide is high.

Just being there,
Through thick and thin,
All just to say, you are my friends.

How Far Is India From Where She Started?

According to a World Bank report, the absolute number of poor has risen along with India's population in the past 60 years. India, by any measure, is one of the poorest countries in the world. Roughly, 1 out of 3 Indians are living below the national poverty line. Further, the life expectancy of a 63-year-old person is a decade lower than many other developing countries, and the illiteracy rates for men and women are higher than average for low-income countries. The gap between men and women is among the highest in the world, one indication being the fact that a girl is one-third less likely to attend secondary school than a boy.

Solving these problems is India's greatest challenge. There is much scope for improvement even given India's current level of income.

Nothing illustrates this better than the comparison between the state of Kerala and India as a whole. Kerala's per capita income is slightly lower than that for India as a whole. However, an average Keralite can expect to live a decade longer than the average Indian man. Kerala is the only state in India that has more females than males, the "natural" outcome of equal treatment of the sexes. Literacy is virtually universal for boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 14, as compared to India as a whole where roughly three-quarters of boys can read and only one-half of girls. Finally, Kerala's death rate for children from 0-4 is one-sixth as low as India's. Today Kerala is the only state in India that is known to leave aside its religious differences, and practices common culture. For instance, “Onam” the annual harvest festival of Kerala is celebrated by every Keralite, may he or she be a Muslim, Christian, or a Hindu. Isn’t this a marvelous achievement and why cant the rest of Indian States also adopt such amalgamating practices.

For once, put your nation’s welfare before your religion and see the difference for yourself. Social development can make a big difference. The dream of a truly independent and progressing India can be achieved only through unifying practices undertaken by the people and encouraged by the government.

Demolition of Babri Masjid - Shame for India

The demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, was an event that exposed the fragile state of rule of law in our country. Our country which is the largest democracy and which advocates “equality of law” failed in its main task of protecting rights of minority citizens. The fault lies in the Indian Judiciary and Police who are not organized for impartial law enforcement.

Police is, rather, a subordinate body for enforcement of the policy of the government of the day, which is generally based on cynical calculations by players of the game of power. This could be clearly seen in Ayodhya where the majoritarian composition and attitudes of the police and security forces, whose subservience to the political executives made it function as a partisan force in the service of Kar Sevaks. Next, the judiciary, which is the only source of hope for the weak and vulnerable groups, failed miserably to come to the rescue of the victim group in 1950, when a one–sided attachment order was passed without removing the "idols of Shri Ramchandraj” secretly and in a clandestine manner put inside the Babri Masjid. Muslim worship was illegally brought to a stop 60 years back, and their dispossession was legally sanctified under the plea of apprehension of breach of the peace under Section 145 of the Criminal Procedure Code and Hindu parties were allowed limited right of worship under a subjectively defined status quo. According to me this was an act of national shame.

Given the state of Indian judiciary and the time-consuming affairs, I wonder how within three days of the Munsif Court order, the District Court passed an order directing the government of Uttar Pradesh to unlock the gate and within hours of passing of the above order, the temple was unlocked and even the Doordarshan cameramen were present to cover the occasion, which was widely telecast all over India? How did this case move at this speed? How did the government acquiesce in this case? How did the Faizabad District Court allow the appeal ordering the opening of locks in a matter of two days when the Hindus had been pleading for nearly 37 years? How did the Doordarshan cameras click the opening of the locks within an hour of the court orders? All these questions have only one answer — when the government is against a particular religion and pro another, such things can, and do, happen (then who cares if it is legal or not). It was more than clear that it was at PM Rajiv Gandhi’s behest the lock was opened for political considerations.

Such incidents fall rather neatly into the pattern of political blessing, official connivance and police partisanship and impunity. The only reason I can see for such happenings in our country is that the institutional machinery for impartial, effective and humane law enforcement for prevention and speedy control of any inter–community violent conflicts simply does not exist in our country. The fragility and malfunctioning of institutions of law and order in India, has led to a denial of equal protection by law to all poor citizens and weak and vulnerable groups. (Do we care what Article 14 of the Constitution of India say “The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India”).

It is distressing to note that during the last three decades no sustained effort has been made by the various human rights groups, the bureaucracy and the media to reform the system by setting attainable goals. At present Muslims continue to be underrepresented at all levels and ranks of the police. In spite of periodic official directions for special recruitment of minorities, no appreciable progress has been made in this regard. The issue of adequate presence of minorities, in the law–enforcement machinery has not been addressed by the human rights movement, nor by the secular political class, because of a "secular-communal" fixation. Whatever opinion one may hold about how to ensure a fair share of minorities in other sectors of public life, their presence in the police is quintessential to enable it to enforce law more impartially by neutralising its own biases, and by inspiring greater confidence in the communities that it wants to serve.

I think the only overriding solution is that the government assumes the role of the promoter of “fruitful dialogue”. Appeasement of minorities is a necessary condition for creating an atmosphere conducive to a profitable dialogue over Ayodhya and other issues. Thus, the government should promote Individuals with the courage of conviction to be able to take apparently unpopular decisions over all contentious issues in the larger interest of the communities and the country. It should also make minorities develop a greater sense of belonging by expanding avenues and opportunities for their participation in national life.

A necessary component should be the “de-stigmatization” of Muslims for imagined sins of the past and their consequent negative stereotyping and treatment as a suspect community to be replaced by their treatment as normal Indians. This would require a commitment to educate and sensitize any average Indian for inculcation of positive humanist attitudes. Thus, the need of the hour is to bestow India with a new system wherein the correctly prioritized interests of all communities would be protected lawfully and with due respect to varying religious sentiments.

Trading Daughters for Money

I stumbled upon this article on how parents in various villages in India have the heart to trade their daughters for money to families who cant find their sons a bride.. Although its an old article its surely worth a glance.. Being a Mumbai gal its hard to believe that I live in the same world. I am not sure if the NGO's and women rights organizations pay attention to such problems.

"The Price Of Being A Woman:
Slavery In Modern Iindia

By Justin Huggler

04 April 2006

The Independent

The desire for sons has created a severe shortage of marriageable young women. As their value rises, unscrupulous men are trading them around the subcontinent and beyond as if they were a mere commodity

Tripla's parents sold her for £170 to a man who had come looking for a wife. He took her away with him, hundreds of miles across India, to the villages outside Delhi. It was the last time she would see her home. For six months, she lived with him in the village, although there was never any formal marriage. Then, two weeks ago, her husband, Ajmer Singh, ordered her to sleep with his brother, who could not find a wife. When Tripla refused, he took her into the fields and beheaded her with a sickle.

When Rishi Kant, an Indian human rights campaigner, tracked down Tripla's parents in the state of Jharkhand and told them the news, her mother broke down in tears. "But what could we do?" she asked him. "We are facing so much poverty we had no choice but to sell her."

Tripla was a victim of the common practice in India of aborting baby girls because parents only want boys. Although she was born and lived into early adulthood, it was the abortions that caused her death. In the villages of Haryana, just outside Delhi, abortions of baby girls have become so common that the shortage of women is severe. Unable to find wives locally, the men have resorted to buying women from the poorer parts of India. Just 25 miles from the glitzy new shopping malls and apartment complexes of Delhi is a slave market for women.

Last week, an Indian doctor became the first to be jailed for telling a woman the sex of her unborn baby. India is trying to stamp out the practice of female foeticide. But in the villages of Haryana, the damage has already been done. Indian parents want boys because girls are seen as a heavy financial burden: the parents have to provide an expensive dowry for their weddings, while sons will bring money into the family when they marry, and have better job prospects.

But in Haryana, so many female foetuses have been aborted that there aren't enough women for the men to marry. The result is a thriving market in women, known in local slang as baros, who have been bought from poorer parts of India. Anyone in the villages can tell you the going rates. The price ranges from 3,000 rupees (£40) to 30,000 rupees for a particularly beautiful woman. Skin colour and age are important pricing criteria. So is whether the woman is a virgin.

When the police arrested Tripla's husband, he could not provide a marriage certificate. Generally, there is no real marriage. The women are sexual "brides" only. Sometimes, brothers who cannot afford more share one woman between them. Often, men who think they have got a good deal on a particularly beautiful bride will sell her at a profit.

Munnia was sold when she was only 17. Considered particularly beautiful, she was resold three times in the space of a few weeks. Like Tripla, she came from Jharkhand, but she was lucky: she escaped. Today she is in a government shelter for women. As she tells her story, she breaks down in tears several times.

"My father sold me to a man called Dharma," she says. "I don't know if he paid for me or not. I came to Delhi with my mother on the train, and then Dharma took me to his village. He used to beat me very badly. He used to hit me until I allowed him to sleep with me. Usually it went on for half an hour."

She was with Dharma just 20 days before he sold her. Her route criss-crossed northern India: Dharam took her to his home in Rajasthan, before selling her to a man in Haryana. "He told me: 'I have sold you to a man for 30,000 rupees'," she says. "But when we got there I realised that man wanted to sell me on as well. Then I ran away."

She found a social worker who helped her escape. In that she was fortunate: few of the women who run away from the villages where she was make it out alive. Government medical tests found she had been raped by two men. She was only 17 at the time, and the age of consent in India is 18.

"My father told me Dharma would marry me, but the marriage never took place," she says, blinking in the sun. She is deeply traumatised by her experiences; all the time she speaks, her hands play nervously with her shawl. When we ask if she wants to go home, she says: "I don't know anything. I have no will and no hope in this world."

She is the lucky one, all the same. In the villages she escaped from, hundreds of women are trapped in similar slave marriages. The village of Ghasera is a world away from nearby Delhi. It is still walled, like a fortress from centuries ago, and you enter through a narrow gateway. The roads are dirt and the houses ramshackle huts: It is hard to believe you're just an hour and a half's drive from the bright new India that is being courted as an ally by the US and attracting investors from across the world. More than 100 brides have been imported to this village alone, according to locals.

The people are hostile and crowd round strangers suspiciously. Even the police don't risk coming in to these villages unarmed. Villagers have attacked police who tried to rescue the brides, and set their cars on fire.

Anwari Katun was sold for £130 and brought here from Jharkhand. The house she is living in now is thick with flies, so many they make patterns in the air as they swarm. A small girl is asleep in the corner, flies crawling over her face.

Ms Katun wants to tell her story, but the villagers crowd into her house and stand by menacingly as she tries to speak. Her fear is evident as they stand by. Most prominent is an old woman who moves forward threateningly when Ms Katun says she is not happy. Cowed by the crowd she says: "I accept what happened to me. I'm not happy but I accept it. This is a woman's life. The only thing I want is that this doesn't happen to my sisters, that they never get sold like this."

With that, she sits in silence. Desperation is written on her face, but she is afraid to say any more with the villagers crowding around. Once they are here, with no family and no friends the women are helpless.

Rishi Kant has spent the past four years rescuing women like Ms Katun. A jovial man in designer sunglasses, he once spent four nights in Delhi's notorious Tihar jail when police carried out mass arrests of protesters at a human rights rally. His organisation, Shkati Vahini, has rescued more than 150 trafficked women. But he says he can do nothing for Ms Katun at the moment. The government women's shelter in Haryana state has places for only 25 women, and it is full. When there is no space, he can do nothing: there is nowhere else safe for the women to go. As soon as a place opens up, he says, he will go back for Ms Katun.

To get the women out of the villages, he has to enlist the help of the police. In villages such as Ghasera, the police only raid in heavy numbers, and only in the middle of the night, when they can take the villagers by surprise. Otherwise, the heavily armed villagers will resist by force. But the police are co-operative, and do get the women out. Then the long process of tracking down their parents, and trying to get them home, if possible, begins.

Getting the women out of the villages is often not easy. Recently, Mr Kant found a trafficked woman who convinced him that the man who had brought her to Haryana was running a business, and had several more women. He and the police waited in the hope the woman could lead them to the trafficker. But when they got back the next day, it appeared he had become suspicious. The woman had disappeared. Mr Kant believes she was probably sold to another part of India. He hasn't found any trace of her.

Many of the trafficked women in the villages are minors. Shabila came to Ghasera from Assam, a thousand miles away. She says she is 25, but she doesn't look a day over 15. One of the women in the government shelter, Havari, looks the same age. She is highly disturbed and talks at one moment of having had a baby, then denies it the next. She has hacked off all her hair. There is no psychiatric counselling for the women.

One of the women in Ghasera told us her sister had been sold to the village along with her, then kidnapped from it and exported to Oman. She was desperate for help to get her out.

Some of the trafficked women become traffickers themselves. Maryam, who was sold here from her native Maharashtra in 1985, has just arranged the sale of another woman, Roxana, to the village for 10,000 rupees. Although Ghasera is poor, it is better off than many of the remote villages the women come from. With their contacts there, the trafficked women can easily entice others to come voluntarily. But once they come, there is no way out. Some of the women become reconciled to their lives. Afsana speaks openly in front of her husband of her unhappiness over the years here: she is not afraid of him. Although there was no formal marriage, they have stayed together.

"I never thought I would come here. I never even thought about where Haryana was," she says. "There are several girls who do not want to stay, but what can they do? They are in a helpless situation."

Her husband, Dawood, could not get a wife locally because he has a damaged eye. He travelled to Bihar and saw several women before choosing Afsana. He paid £40. He complains that there aren't enough women in Haryana, but he does not see the link between aborting female foetuses and the shortage of women.

In Asouti, a village a short drive away, you can find the reason behind all the suffering of the slave brides of Haryana. Lakhmi Devi had five abortions, each because the child she was carrying was a girl. She had already given birth to four daughters.

She is still tortured by guilt over the abortions. "It is better for a mother to die than to kill her daughters," she says. "I was under immense pressure from my husband's family to provide him with a son. My mother-in-law even demanded I get another woman to sleep with my husband to give him a son." Eventually, she gave birth to a boy, Praveen, and her agony was over.

A recent study by Indian and Canadian researchers found 500,000 girls are aborted every year in India. Today Haryana has only 861 women for every 1,000 men. Strict laws have been put in place to prevent the practice. Abortion is legal in India but testing the gender of a foetus is not. Anil Singh, a Haryana doctor, was sentenced last week to two years in prison for telling a woman she was carrying a girl and offering an abortion.

But still, the abortions go on. To get round the police, doctors have started using codes to tell the people the sex of their baby: if the ultrasound report is written in blue ink, it's a boy; if it's in red ink, it's a girl. If the report is delivered on Monday, it's a boy, if it's Friday, it's a girl.

Meanwhile the trafficked women keep coming, from across India, to fill the places of the unborn women.

Tripla's parents sold her for £170 to a man who had come looking for a wife. He took her away with him, hundreds of miles across India, to the villages outside Delhi. It was the last time she would see her home. For six months, she lived with him in the village, although there was never any formal marriage. Then, two weeks ago, her husband, Ajmer Singh, ordered her to sleep with his brother, who could not find a wife. When Tripla refused, he took her into the fields and beheaded her with a sickle.

When Rishi Kant, an Indian human rights campaigner, tracked down Tripla's parents in the state of Jharkhand and told them the news, her mother broke down in tears. "But what could we do?" she asked him. "We are facing so much poverty we had no choice but to sell her."

Tripla was a victim of the common practice in India of aborting baby girls because parents only want boys. Although she was born and lived into early adulthood, it was the abortions that caused her death. In the villages of Haryana, just outside Delhi, abortions of baby girls have become so common that the shortage of women is severe. Unable to find wives locally, the men have resorted to buying women from the poorer parts of India. Just 25 miles from the glitzy new shopping malls and apartment complexes of Delhi is a slave market for women.

Last week, an Indian doctor became the first to be jailed for telling a woman the sex of her unborn baby. India is trying to stamp out the practice of female foeticide. But in the villages of Haryana, the damage has already been done. Indian parents want boys because girls are seen as a heavy financial burden: the parents have to provide an expensive dowry for their weddings, while sons will bring money into the family when they marry, and have better job prospects.

But in Haryana, so many female foetuses have been aborted that there aren't enough women for the men to marry. The result is a thriving market in women, known in local slang as baros, who have been bought from poorer parts of India. Anyone in the villages can tell you the going rates. The price ranges from 3,000 rupees (£40) to 30,000 rupees for a particularly beautiful woman. Skin colour and age are important pricing criteria. So is whether the woman is a virgin.

When the police arrested Tripla's husband, he could not provide a marriage certificate. Generally, there is no real marriage. The women are sexual "brides" only. Sometimes, brothers who cannot afford more share one woman between them. Often, men who think they have got a good deal on a particularly beautiful bride will sell her at a profit.

Munnia was sold when she was only 17. Considered particularly beautiful, she was resold three times in the space of a few weeks. Like Tripla, she came from Jharkhand, but she was lucky: she escaped. Today she is in a government shelter for women. As she tells her story, she breaks down in tears several times.

"My father sold me to a man called Dharma," she says. "I don't know if he paid for me or not. I came to Delhi with my mother on the train, and then Dharma took me to his village. He used to beat me very badly. He used to hit me until I allowed him to sleep with me. Usually it went on for half an hour."

She was with Dharma just 20 days before he sold her. Her route criss-crossed northern India: Dharam took her to his home in Rajasthan, before selling her to a man in Haryana. "He told me: 'I have sold you to a man for 30,000 rupees'," she says. "But when we got there I realised that man wanted to sell me on as well. Then I ran away."

She found a social worker who helped her escape. In that she was fortunate: few of the women who run away from the villages where she was make it out alive. Government medical tests found she had been raped by two men. She was only 17 at the time, and the age of consent in India is 18.

"My father told me Dharma would marry me, but the marriage never took place," she says, blinking in the sun. She is deeply traumatised by her experiences; all the time she speaks, her hands play nervously with her shawl. When we ask if she wants to go home, she says: "I don't know anything. I have no will and no hope in this world."

She is the lucky one, all the same. In the villages she escaped from, hundreds of women are trapped in similar slave marriages. The village of Ghasera is a world away from nearby Delhi. It is still walled, like a fortress from centuries ago, and you enter through a narrow gateway. The roads are dirt and the houses ramshackle huts: It is hard to believe you're just an hour and a half's drive from the bright new India that is being courted as an ally by the US and attracting investors from across the world. More than 100 brides have been imported to this village alone, according to locals.

The people are hostile and crowd round strangers suspiciously. Even the police don't risk coming in to these villages unarmed. Villagers have attacked police who tried to rescue the brides, and set their cars on fire.

Anwari Katun was sold for £130 and brought here from Jharkhand. The house she is living in now is thick with flies, so many they make patterns in the air as they swarm. A small girl is asleep in the corner, flies crawling over her face.

Ms Katun wants to tell her story, but the villagers crowd into her house and stand by menacingly as she tries to speak. Her fear is evident as they stand by. Most prominent is an old woman who moves forward threateningly when Ms Katun says she is not happy. Cowed by the crowd she says: "I accept what happened to me. I'm not happy but I accept it. This is a woman's life. The only thing I want is that this doesn't happen to my sisters, that they never get sold like this."
With that, she sits in silence. Desperation is written on her face, but she is afraid to say any more with the villagers crowding around. Once they are here, with no family and no friends the women are helpless.

Rishi Kant has spent the past four years rescuing women like Ms Katun. A jovial man in designer sunglasses, he once spent four nights in Delhi's notorious Tihar jail when police carried out mass arrests of protesters at a human rights rally. His organisation, Shkati Vahini, has rescued more than 150 trafficked women. But he says he can do nothing for Ms Katun at the moment. The government women's shelter in Haryana state has places for only 25 women, and it is full. When there is no space, he can do nothing: there is nowhere else safe for the women to go. As soon as a place opens up, he says, he will go back for Ms Katun.

To get the women out of the villages, he has to enlist the help of the police. In villages such as Ghasera, the police only raid in heavy numbers, and only in the middle of the night, when they can take the villagers by surprise. Otherwise, the heavily armed villagers will resist by force. But the police are co-operative, and do get the women out. Then the long process of tracking down their parents, and trying to get them home, if possible, begins.

Getting the women out of the villages is often not easy. Recently, Mr Kant found a trafficked woman who convinced him that the man who had brought her to Haryana was running a business, and had several more women. He and the police waited in the hope the woman could lead them to the trafficker. But when they got back the next day, it appeared he had become suspicious. The woman had disappeared. Mr Kant believes she was probably sold to another part of India. He hasn't found any trace of her.

Many of the trafficked women in the villages are minors. Shabila came to Ghasera from Assam, a thousand miles away. She says she is 25, but she doesn't look a day over 15. One of the women in the government shelter, Havari, looks the same age. She is highly disturbed and talks at one moment of having had a baby, then denies it the next. She has hacked off all her hair. There is no psychiatric counselling for the women.

One of the women in Ghasera told us her sister had been sold to the village along with her, then kidnapped from it and exported to Oman. She was desperate for help to get her out.

Some of the trafficked women become traffickers themselves. Maryam, who was sold here from her native Maharashtra in 1985, has just arranged the sale of another woman, Roxana, to the village for 10,000 rupees. Although Ghasera is poor, it is better off than many of the remote villages the women come from. With their contacts there, the trafficked women can easily entice others to come voluntarily. But once they come, there is no way out. Some of the women become reconciled to their lives. Afsana speaks openly in front of her husband of her unhappiness over the years here: she is not afraid of him. Although there was no formal marriage, they have stayed together.

"I never thought I would come here. I never even thought about where Haryana was," she says. "There are several girls who do not want to stay, but what can they do? They are in a helpless situation."

Her husband, Dawood, could not get a wife locally because he has a damaged eye. He travelled to Bihar and saw several women before choosing Afsana. He paid £40. He complains that there aren't enough women in Haryana, but he does not see the link between aborting female foetuses and the shortage of women.

In Asouti, a village a short drive away, you can find the reason behind all the suffering of the slave brides of Haryana. Lakhmi Devi had five abortions, each because the child she was carrying was a girl. She had already given birth to four daughters.

She is still tortured by guilt over the abortions. "It is better for a mother to die than to kill her daughters," she says. "I was under immense pressure from my husband's family to provide him with a son. My mother-in-law even demanded I get another woman to sleep with my husband to give him a son." Eventually, she gave birth to a boy, Praveen, and her agony was over.

A recent study by Indian and Canadian researchers found 500,000 girls are aborted every year in India. Today Haryana has only 861 women for every 1,000 men. Strict laws have been put in place to prevent the practice. Abortion is legal in India but testing the gender of a foetus is not. Anil Singh, a Haryana doctor, was sentenced last week to two years in prison for telling a woman she was carrying a girl and offering an abortion.

But still, the abortions go on. To get round the police, doctors have started using codes to tell the people the sex of their baby: if the ultrasound report is written in blue ink, it's a boy; if it's in red ink, it's a girl. If the report is delivered on Monday, it's a boy, if it's Friday, it's a girl.

Meanwhile the trafficked women keep coming, from across India, to fill the places of the unborn women."

This is a concern and I think we the so-called educated class need to take action against such happenings. According to me only thing that can really change this would be social ridiculing which again is possible only if there is some way in which more such stories can be exposed. Any suggestions...

Indifference Versus Incompetence

I wrote this last year never got time to finish it and publish it... but I think its worth a glance.

A lot of people are accusing our past & current governments of indifference to the plight of common man. Consider the plight of religious victims, the delay in investigations and trials thereafter which seem to never end and not even a handful of convictions to those who killed numerous and more importantly murdered India. I don't think it's entirely fair. Moreover, I don't think it's useful.

It comes back to the same old razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." And it becomes clearer with every passing day that incompetence is more than adequate to explain our government's inability to react quickly enough to circumstances across our country.

"Indifference" is a charge that defies empirical data, because we can never truly know the hearts of others. "Incompetence," however, can be quantified: So let's keep our eye on the ball. There's no benefit to anyone by getting personal, and by claiming that "the government doesn't care about poor people or is dead set against a particular religion." It's much more useful to make it crystal clear that the government has been just plain negligent, and that their negligence led directly to the deaths of thousands of people -- because a negligent government is something that, with enough support, we can change.

Incompetent journalists, criminally negligent journalists or liars who are complicit in the mass deception of the Indian people; there are no other ways whatsoever to describe the men and women who comprise the news institutions of India. From the hired face you see every day on the CNN's of India and aaj tak to the journalism interns. Every person currently employed in the corporate media today has some soul searching to do.

The members of today's news media warrant outrage from the people of the world who have fallen victim to their despicable practices. With each new day brings new crimes while a false sense of reality is passed to Indian people via our media. In olden times when street justice was the norm we would be dragging our beloved anchormen and women into the streets and having a public execution, for these people have been the empowering force behind the most despicable anddangerous Indian administration in history.

NOTE: I use this word: Lie. Not mislead, not mistake, misspoke, neglected to inform, omitted, left out, misrepresent, factually incorrect etc. Part of the definition of a lie is to leave a false impression. These people lie to us. I (we) should be angry. There has been too much writing and discussion about the state of the media. The good people who are trying to address the problems with the media have been dignified, intellectualized, soft spokened and IGNORED. IT IS TIME TO GET LOUD! It is time to get angry! It is time to stop the madness! With dignity and fairness the media critics and watchdogs tried to alert the public of the information being withheld by our news media. Dignified and standard methods of communication can not defeat the hugeness of false reality that emanates from our TVs, and news papers.

With dignity Media wrote about many events. They did their own investigations, held hearings and they exposed the complicity of our ruling government and its administration in those events. They wrote with dignity until their fingers hurt. They spoke with dignity until their voices gave out. They filmed documentaries until they ran out of film. They were ignored, suppressed, murdered in the literal sense. The Congress administration has devastated this nation and the world. Everything that is Indian is being destroyed while the media continue to sell catch phrases and concepts to public like "democracy" and "security"; empty words that in most cases have described the opposite of what is actually taking place. This is the stuff that ignites revolutions! Where are all the revolutionaries? Where is the outrage? Where is the anger? From the environmental terrorism and no way that our government is sensitive to this topic and failure of the dignified commissions to bring about any major changes this in itself will kill more people than all terrorist combined have issues like these go unmentioned by the media. The fact is that the not many Indian public can believe there is a reality other than the one presented on their television, news papers and radios. This, in essence, gives the broadcast media the power to control perceived reality. They abuse this power.

In response to this article the Government supporters are going to talk about the liberal media and they will sarcastically start to bring up menacing entities that control the media. I don't care who controls the media. It is a secondary issue. As long as you know that the deception is taking place you can counter it. As long as you know that there is a pickpocket in the crowd you can protect yourself. It is a bonus if you can identify him/her. It is a double bonus if you canarrest and convict him/her. Suffice to know you are being lied to. Protect yourself Get angry.One thing that we do know is who is lying to us. They splash their names all over your life. They lied about virtually every aspect of the Mau Attacks (just for your information Mau is a very small town some where in UP where over 100s of Hindus literally got butchered by Muslim fanatics who entered the trains and killed almost all the passengers) and I am sure lots of people would try to justify this as an act done by media to avert greater harm or probably mediawas ordered to do so by our very prestigious government . But what about our right to know, whatabout solace to the victims and their families and what about their unanswered sense of vengeance or the most required pressure on judiciary and our lethargic police system to wake up and find these gruesome murderers who are roaming free in our society, our government which promises us safety and media which can ensure this, are betraying us on our face, isn't this outrageous.

Enough is enough!

I am asking you to get angry. Get furious. When you turn on your TV and find that the top storyis one that you used to have to read about in a supermarket tabloid, ask yourself what news is NOT being reported. Then try to figure out how the on screen pretend journalist keeps a straight face as they try to pretend that a domestic crime is national news and worth deep thoughtful journalistic discussion.

We have to educate the public about the people who lie to them every day. You should be furious. You should feel rage. You should do something. At least spread the word!

Exploitation in Indian BPO’s:

The Indian media and business elite never tire of enthusing over India’s growing role as an IT and Business-Processing Outsourcer (BPO) to the world. Yet not much attention is paid to the working conditions in the Indian BPO sector. Little inspection would show the high levels of labour exploitation in the industry—including constant surveillance, long hours, health problems and burnouts. Any mention of exploitation in BPO’s provokes a hostile reaction from Indian business community, highlighting the economic and political reliance of India’s ruling elite on the success of the BPO sector.

Question is WHY? Is the wellbeing of Indian youth not important enough?

The comments by Pramod Bhasin, the CEO of the outsourcing provider Genpact was outrageous. He told the Financial Express: “The world is praising the Indian IT Industry... But we are bent on killing the golden goose. I am aghast any findings of workplace exploitation.”
Studies reveal that BPO employees are under constant stress because of their workload, competitive pressures and surveillance. Workers are monitored for every single breath they take in office. Closed circuit cameras and electronic timers monitor the time staff are away from their desk, including in the loo. The high targets set by the management not only unrealistic but unattainable without “burn out”. Even worse the hours are regimented. Adding to the stress, management creates an environment of competition by assessing staff performance against the figures of the “good performers”.

Further, studies reveal that the BPO industry seeks a “productively docile” workforce that has no job security or rights. The majority of its staff is considered “non-core” and dispensable. In some BPO’s, Codes of Conduct discourage employees from discussing their salaries with peers and they are subject to disciplinary actions for breaching the code. A number of states in India have exempted outsourcing companies from the Industrial Disputes Act, which provides, amongst other things, for unfair dismissal rights.

The role of human resource staff in the BPO’s is that of “camouflaging work as fun” through the use of things such as popcorn booths and ping-pong tables. Management gives their BPO staff titles such as Associate, Call Centre Executive and Customer Care Executive in an attempt to portray the positions as being high level and privileged. However, the pay and hype surrounding the jobs mask the fact that there is almost no career development in the industry. Thus, most of these youngsters are in fact burning out their formative years as ‘cyber coolies’.

Other than reports on health problems such as nervousness, chronic fatigue, body ache, insomnia, nausea, anxiety, restlessness, irritability and depression due to odd working hours and stress, a study also showed that BPO’s, especially shift work, seriously impinged social life. It said “90 per cent of the respondents did not balance work and family life. The respondents had no social life or interaction with people in the family.”

The various studies conducted on these aspects are severely backlashed:

The Financial Express editorialised against such study. It once accused the authors of being “divorced from reality”. With barely a mention of the contents of the study, it denounced it as “another ‘bleeding heart’ report that only those living in privileged institutes can afford to indulge in.” It went on to say that some “minimal creature comforts” are acceptable but any “misguided attempt to push up costs” by improving working conditions would lead to the loss of BPO jobs.

Likewise, the ruling elite fear any information emerging about the industry which could cause workers to organise against exploitation in the industry. Far from workers in the BPO sector being free to organise and join unions as stated by Nasscom, several states, including the West Bengal government, have declared the IT and IT-enabled services (ITES) sector as “public utilities”, making it much more difficult for workers to gain the legal right to strike and easier for the government to declare industrial action illegal. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the chief minister of West Bengal and a Communist Party of India (Marxist) Politbureau member has promised to crack down on any strikes in the IT and ITES sector. More importantly, the hype surrounding the growth of the outsourcing sector is seen as politically important for winning support from a section of the Indian population for the program of privatisation and the integration of India into the global economy.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) 2004 election campaign slogan of “India Shining”, particularly hailed the successes of the outsourcing sector, and featured the smiling faces of contented middle class Indians. In a shock result for the Indian ruling class, however, the electorate rejected the BJP and its claim that India was prospering. This partially explains the nervousness of the political and media establishment about a discussion of the exploitation of labour in the BPO sector. The majority of the population is already hostile to the program of privatisation and opening up India as a cheap labour platform for transnational capital. The fear is that even those who are employed in the BPO sector—the alleged beneficiaries of the agenda implemented by all ruling parties—are becoming disillusioned.

Conclusion:

Although the IT and BPO sector brought the Indian people a better standard of living, it has resulted in public-sector job cuts, destruction of whole industries, and cuts to food and fuel subsidies, which have been devastating to rural areas, the poor and large sections of the working class. Young employees need to grow beyond their “American dream”. They need to unite for the future of the country… for their own wellbeing. As someone rightly said “Suppress the young and the young will always rebel. History has seen it and proven it.” This is a wake up call for all those BPO’s which indulge in any kind of workplace exploitations. It’s an either-or situation… Either stop the exploitation or lose the “golden goose”.

Government

There are four ways in which you can spend money.

1. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money.

2. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost.

3. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch!

4. Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government.

Jessica Accused Manu Sharma Can Walk Free

You read it right. All Manu Sharma needs to do is organize some street protests in Chandigarh or Punjab through his politician father claiming that any punishment to him in Jessica case would lead to law and order problems in Punjab or even better it would result in return of militancy in Punjab. Some minister can be requested in Punjab to take up his case with congress president or President of India to show mercy in the name of larger good of people of Punjab.

What - You do not agree? Then what is your take on the protests in Kashmir on death sentence to Parliament attack accused Mohammad Afzal Guru? While it is perfectly understandable for his family to request the President for mercy, it is beyond my comprehension how can people take to streets to protect a convict of an attack on highest democratic symbol of the country - Parliament. Is there a rule of law in India or not? What most surprises me is the action of the Chief Minister of the state to take up his cause. If this is how punishment for crimes is to be decided in India, then all cases should first be referred to Chief Ministers of concerned state before taking them to court. And in case of crimes by foreigners the same should be referred to Prime Minister or President of that country. After all, the foreigner may belong to a nuclear country. Why take the risk of nuclear attack by punishing a foreigner.

CRAZY INDIANS awaken; with the fear of what has yet not happened don’t impede justice. Try to help the path of justice rather than destroying it. Think about the victims, sympathize with the right people or even better don’t sympathize with the wrong ones. Support what is right because you can grow only if India as a whole will grow and India will grow only if justice remains “JUSTICE”

Veil Philosophy

Is “the Veil” just a piece of clothing for women? A woman of any culture of any century knows that she will be wrapped in veils of all sorts, some literal and some not so obvious. Veils are prevalent in almost all cultures throughout the centuries. It was pity when I saw a woman wearing very tattered, therefore, revealing clothes, carrying a load of bricks on her head, but still amazingly very conscious of her veil down to her shoulders. Then again it was religious awe, which struck me, looking at veiled women pouring into church. Wondering about it, I decided to take a deeper look at what drove women to hide their faces and along with it, their aspirations & sentiments.

I am a Zoroastrian woman and in my religion, women have to cover their heads during prayers. This is a latest trend, and in actual Zoroastrian Literature the rule is to cover the head all the time. The stringency of this rule in those times was so much so that even a strand of hair falling out of the covering would be considered as shameful and there are stories of women being denied cohabitation with their husbands or denied the right to rear their children for such a mistake. Wow!! I am thankful that such tortures do not exist anymore, at least not, where I live.

In the 1917 Code of Canon Law, it was clearly stated that women must cover their heads. Therefore, when St. Paul decreed that man was created for God and woman was created for man and, umm, somehow the veil comes into the picture. I did not quite get the connection, but it was long time back, 2000 odd years to be precise. So, women have been wearing the veil to show submission to authority, to God and men!

Sanskrit literature is replete with instances where women have to wear veils. It is not surprising to me that under the laws of Manu the status of women is completely dependent on the man. The various religious texts have got a bewildering array of proscriptions and rules for behaviour of women, all for modesty and chastity's sake. Scholars have mentioned how women have to dress, behave and generally conduct themselves in public, which was generally under a veil, figuratively and literally.

With the British rule and then following on with independence, many atrocious practices were eradicated from the “rule book” which slowly died away in real life as well. Although if one walks around in certain parts of the country it still looks like the dark ages to me as far as the status of women goes anyway. The Hindu woman, reasonably emancipated but still a long way to go yet compared to her western counterparts.

What about the Muslim woman? Growing up in Mumbai, I will remiss, if I do not mention the other great religion, Islam. Well, needless to say that is making most of the waves these days. Stories are circulating in the media about photographs of faces not being allowed to be taken for driving licenses in various states. Turkey, which is an Islamic country, has made it compulsory for girls to wear veils in schools. Imagine women getting acid thrown on their faces and threatened in ghastly fashions if they aren't veiled in Pakistan and Bangladesh. What do the scripture say about this?

Sura 24:31 in the Koran is the key to this entire debate.

The literal translation goes as follows: "And say to the believing women that they cast down their looks and guard their private parts and do not display their ornaments except what appears thereof, and let them wear their head-coverings over their bosoms, and not display their ornaments except to their husbands or their fathers... and let them not strike their feet so that what they hide of their ornaments may be known; and turn to Allah all of you, O believers! So that you may be successful."

This is the crux of the matter and reading this translation, its pretty clear that veiling is compulsory and the woman is not to show herself except to her husband or close relatives.

For a non-Muslim like me, the question that comes up is - Why is there such a huge hue and cry about veils when it comes to Muslim women? Lets see.. isn’t modesty and not the veil a requirement for all women. Reading the stories of the women who have freely and voluntarily taken the veil, it seems like their motivations range from a desire to be seen separate from the mass of other women, to portray their faith, to affirm it in a visible manner and in certain cases, to fulfill cultural traditions.

Needless to say, the veil for a Muslim woman is far more prevalent than the others. I am sure somebody will ask and has asked why this is so? Male supremacy? Religious statutes? Cultural traditions? Modesty? Chastity? Better people than me have tried to explain this. Pushing people to wear the “VEIL” is forcing one's religious beliefs down somebody's throat and may well give rise to oppression. This goes for all religions, your relationship with your god (s) is your own, you define it the way you want according to the degree of faith in your heart, but using the name of God to oppress women is cowardly and should be shunned, may your conscience be pricked.

Should the discussion end here on what women wear? Is this the only field where women are covered in veils? How about analyzing other aspects of life where a woman wears veils which are invisible to those who don’t have to wear them? In our society, whether women belong to the majority or the minority group, what is apparent is that there exists a great disparity in the matter of economic resourcefulness between a man and a woman. Our society is “male dominated” both economically and socially and women are assigned, invariably, a dependant role, irrespective of the class of society to which she belongs. A woman on her marriage often gives up her other avocations and entirely devotes herself to the welfare of the family, in particular she shares with her husband, her emotions, sentiments, mind and body. Her investment in the marriage is her entire life, a sacramental sacrifice of her individual self and is far too enormous to be measured in terms of money. This is perfect but this in no sense gives “men” the right to oppress women merely based on their earning capacity.

The history of humanity has been witness to the fact that the religion has been used as a facade to perpetuate violence against women from time perpetual. In my eyes, a nation that does not respect its women cannot be described as a civilised nation at all. Such a nation cannot grow and develop and will ultimately perish due to its own rudimentary and tyrannical dogma. Thus, the national consensus should concentrate on betterment of women by suitably empowering them.

Need of the hour:

This situation of gender discrimination requires an immediate attention of the society since the problem is societal in nature. The mindset of the society needs to be changed by both voluntary and involuntary measures. The law regulates the social interests, arbitrates conflicting claims, demands security of persons and property of the people, and is an essential function of the state.

Law as a corner stone of the edifice of "order" should meet the challenges confronting the society. The social impact of the crime, e.g. where it relates to offences against women involving moral turpitude or moral delinquency which have great impact on social order and public interest, cannot be lost sight of and per se require exemplary treatment. The government should refuse to extend the benefit of the remission to the convicts who have committed hideous crimes against women even while extending it to other convicts. Further, safety of women victims must also be provided so that they can effectively bring before the law the offenders. Thus, in holding trial of child sex abuse or rape, a screen or some arrangements may be made where the victim or witness do not see the body or face of the accused. Recording of evidence by way of video conferencing vis-a-vis Sec. 273 of the Indian Criminal Procedure Code is permissible under the law. These measures must be supplemented with suitable "empowerment measures" like reservations in jobs and educational institutions, financial assistances, etc.

The plight of the women, however, cannot be improved until they are duly represented in the "power structure" of the nation. In a democratic country like ours, the voice of women can be heard only to the extent they are sharing the power structure in the supreme governance of the country.

So may it be a veil of cloth or may it be the veil of precincts, boundaries & restrictions, I don’t date to despise those women who take it up voluntarily. However, I am concerned about a large chunk of women who are taking it up merely on basis of parental or societal pressures without an ounce of credence in their own beliefs and doubting whether they’d ever be lucky enough to liberate themselves of these Veils.

Bush Vs Democracy

When US President George Bush vowed in his second inauguration speech to break the traditional US policy of backing authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world, he may have heralded a new era.

Bush promised to support genuine democratic movements in the Middle East and elsewhere even if it meant dumping America's traditional friends and allies.

Democracy may indeed be the cure for most problems confronting the Muslim world. But the question is can the United States take the bold steps that are needed to give concrete shape to its promises?

Can it allow democracy to take its natural course in the Muslim world, given that across the region, from Lebanon to Egypt, Islamists are emerging as a political force that the West can no longer ignore?

Promotion of democracy in Muslim countries is likely to see the empowerment of those predominant political players who turn to Islam for inspiration and guidance in public life.

If Bush was serious in his commitment to democracy, he would tell his "friends" in the Middle East to allow truly free and fair polls, even if that means Islamists coming to power.

As Islamists move to center stage in many parts of the Arab world, it's time that the United States and the rest of the Western world accepted the idea of dealing with them as legitimate representatives of the people.

In the past century, the West has sided with dictators & tyrants as they victimized the Islamists. In Egypt, grave human rights abuses by successive regimes have been ignored by the West. In Algeria, the military prevented the Islamic Salvation Front from taking office after it swept the 1991 parliamentary elections - with the blessing of the West, which saw the rise of Islamists as a threat to its interests. The consequence was a decade-long civil war.

Democracy is a must:
As democracy has been mocked elsewhere in the Islamic world, the West has consistently looked the other way. No wonder many Muslims blame the West for the suffering inflicted by their dictators. Yet Western leaders appear surprised when Al Qaeda extremists attack Western targets.

If Bush wants to usher in a new era of democracy and peace in the Muslim world, he should be prepared to deal with Muslims' genuine and legitimate representatives. He would do well to recognize the fact that Islamists are emerging as the leading political players in the Middle East and engage them as such.

Thats Me

Brown Is Beautiful

The spectacle on the night of 18th May'05, of all these Congress leaders, many of them intelligent men and women, debating themselves in front of Sonia Gandhi, pleading with her to lead the country, made me feel sick. If Sonia had any dignity, she would have stopped it, but she just listened, with a slightly bored expression, right till the last Congressman and woman had wallowed in dirt before her.

And again I asked myself the question which has baffled me for long: why do Indians have such an attraction towards the white skin? After reading the newspapers on Wednesday morning and seeing how newspapers such as The Times of India still root for Sonia Gandhi, with columnists such as Dileep Padgaonkar saying that her becoming prime minister would be in tune 'with the highest Vedantic ideals,' I wonder: does India, one of the most ancient civilizations on the planet, need a white woman to govern her?

I am sure Sonia has great qualities, but are Indians so dumb, stupid and backward, that they cannot find among themselves someone intelligent enough, non-corrupt enough, to lead them? And what about this craze for Mother Teresa? She may have been a saint, but nobody has harmed India's image in the 20th century so much: when you say India in the West, their eyes light up and they answer: 'Mother Teresa/ Kolkata/ poor people/ dumb people/ starving people/ who do not know how to care after their own underprivileged/ who need a white woman to show them how to pick up the dying from the streets/ to look after orphans'!

Is this the image Indians want today? An image that is harming them, which is stopping Western investors from investing in India? Yet, Mother Teresa is worshiped here, from Kolkata to Chennai, from Delhi to Bangalore, and when she will be made a saint by the Vatican, perpetuating this colonial, superior-minded, Christian symbol of white superiority over the brown/black man, all the Indian media will rejoice in its own mental slavery and the Indian government will probably declare a national holiday!

Why don't Indians understand that brown is beautiful? White people spend hours on the beach and put on a hundred creams to get tanned. And in winter they even artificially lie under infrared lamps in beauty parlors to get brown! Why this obsession for the Indian woman to have white skin?

How come the two most popular actors in India have fair skin and nearly blue eyes? Why this craze for 'fair' brides? If you find the answers to these, you will understand why the fatal attraction for Sonia Gandhi and Mother Teresa.

Obviously, colonisation has frozen the Indian mind in certain patterns and the British made sure, by leaving behind an enduring inferiority complex among Indians, by constantly harping on the flaws of Indian culture and inflating them. That is why today Indian intellectuals repeat like parrots what their masters had said before them: 'Hindus are fundamentalists/Brahmins are exploiters/Gowalkar was a Nazi/Indians are corrupt and no good.'

But that does not explain everything: most colonised countries have aped their masters after having hated them. No, in my mind the greatest factor behind India's love for the white is the absurd theory of Aryan invasion

According to this theory, which was actually devised in the 18th and 19th centuries by British linguists and archaeologists, the first inhabitants of India were good-natured, peaceful, dark-skinned shepherds called the Dravidians, who had founded what is called the Harappan or the Indus Valley civilisation. They were supposedly remarkable builders, witness the city of Mohenjo Daro in Pakistani Sind, but had no culture to speak of, no literature, no proper script even. Then, around 1500 BC, India is said to have been invaded by tribes called the Aryans: white-skinned, nomadic people, who originated somewhere in western Russia and imposed upon the Dravidians the hateful caste system. To Aryans is attributed Sanskrit, the Vedic or Hindu religion, India's greatest spiritual texts, the Vedas, as well as a host of subsequent writings, the Upanishads, the Mahabharat, the Ramayan, etc.

This was indeed a masterstroke on the part of the British: thanks to the Aryan theory, they showed on the one hand that Indian civilisation was not that ancient and that it was posterior to the cultures which influenced the Western world -- Mesopotamia, Sumeria, and Babylon -- and that whatever good things India had developed -- Sanskrit, literature, or even its architecture -- had been influenced by the West.

Thus, Sanskrit, instead of being the mother of all Indo-European languages, became just a branch of their huge family; thus, the religion of Zarathustra is said to have influenced Hinduism, and not vice versa. On the other hand, it divided India and pitted against each other the low caste, dark-skinned Dravidians and the high caste, light-skinned Aryans, a rift which is still enduring. Yet, most recent archaeological and linguistic discoveries point out that there never was an Aryan invasion and many historians, including the malevolent Romila Thapar, are distancing themselves from it. Yet, most Indians still believe in this absurd theory.

Wake up Oh Indians: you are as great, if not greater than the white man. You can do as well, if not better than the white man. Not only did your forefathers devise some of the basic principles of mathematics, astrology, and surgical medicine, not only are your people among the most brilliant in the world today -- half of Silicon Valley is of Indian origin, 30 percent of the United Kingdom's doctors are Indians -- but you still hold within yourselves a unique spiritual knowledge, which once roamed the world but which has now disappeared, replaced by the intolerant creed of the two major monotheistic religions which say: 'if you don't believe in my true God, I will either kill you or convert you'.

Wake up India, brown is beautiful, smart and it is the future. Dr Manmohan Singh, whatever has to be said about the Congress, you have partly redeemed India's pride, and our good wishes are with you.

This Is About The Friend Who is Leaving Me

When people talked about me,
You did not know what to think.
But you saw my tears that day,
You understood my dismay.

You lent a shoulder to me,
When everyone else walked away.
You lent a shoulder to me today,
When no one else was here to stay.

You held me close; no words were said,
You knew I had to cry, and advice could wait.
I told you things and you listened dear,
No phony sympathy, no crocodile tears.

I could not tell you everything about me though,
I wanted to preserve some dignity, so the real me does not show.
Because even though I may have found a friend in you,
My insecurities deep down would make you stumble.

For I am a person broken beyond hope,
And nowadays I am finding that harder to cope.
I want to believe and I want to dream,
But everyone around cannot stop being mean.

Thus began our beautiful friendship that day,
My days were dark but now they are only grey.
I am slowly but beginning to live,
Because you came along and showed me your gift.

I did not dare question where I stood in your heart,
Whether I was special, or was I just mud.
But now I do not have to ask for I know,
You are my friend, pure as gold.

And so our friendship carried on that way,
Even though we both knew you could never stay.
For you had your own roots elsewhere over the hope,
And I was too poor to do anything except to brood.

But we carried on thus,
And did not let that bother us.
For we had so many other things to do together,
And Time was not helping us.

Diversity Kills

India's a stunningly diverse country — a currency note has its value printed on it in 17 different languages. In other multicultural states (Singapore, US) there is nevertheless one language commonly recognised by their institutions — that of merit. In India, however, merit is taken to be an elitist affectation, to be trumped by considerations of caste, kin, community and regional affiliation.

Two things held India together till recently: That it was uniformly poor and lacked connection with the outside world, and that Congress dominated politics across the country. But both of these are changing. One of the effects of liberalisation has been that India's forward states (Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, southern states) have been growing at rates much faster than backward states (UP, Bihar, MP).

But even within forward states, growth is remarkably uneven. If this pattern of development continues, 20 years down the line Delhi will have more in common with London than with Meerut, and Chennai with Singapore than with Patna. This will inevitably lead to demands that, say, revenue generated within Tamil Nadu be invested in Tamil Nadu rather than redistributed to Assam, while Delhi and Mumbai close their doors to migrants coming from UP and Bihar.

In 2004, Punjab unilaterally annulled all the agreements it had for sharing river water with Rajasthan, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. In this case, chief minister Amarinder Singh acted as head of a sovereign state. This is the wrong sort of diversity that unfortunately will be increasingly emulated in the future — making India's present problems in Kashmir look like a picnic.

On modernisation of airports, for example, a small group of airport workers held the entire country to ransom, for no discernible reason other than elections coming up in Kerala and Bengal, and the Left needing to shore up its identity. This is possible because in fragile governing coalitions it is usually the tail that wags the dog. Mustering enough political will to do what is in the country's long-term interest is a Herculean job.

The "idea of India", much feted in 2006, could die a natural death by 2026. Unless Bollywood, or the English language, comes to the rescue.

Attacking Islam

You do not have to be particularly a Muslim to feel deeply hurt or offended by cartoons of Prophet Mohammad that have inflamed the Islamic world. The contention that any depiction of the Prophet is per se unacceptable in Islam is debatable. But some of the controversial 12 cartoons originally published by a Danish paper several months ago, and now being published all over in a rare gesture of media solidarity, are undoubtedly grating on religious sensibilities.

One of them shows the Prophet with a bomb tucked in his headgear. Another shows him entreating his followers, "Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins"! Yet another goes with the legend, "Prophet, deaf and dumb, keeping women under thumb". And another shows him on the go, blinkered, sword in hand, leading two burqa-clad women; all you can see of the women is terror in their eyes. Taken together, what do these cartoons add up to except an image of the Prophet as a bloodthirsty, misogynist tyrant? An original Osama bin Laden, if you please, whose followers today are bent on forcing all Muslim women behind the veil and who show not the least qualm in blowing-up infidel men, women and children to bits, all in pursuit of virgins in the promised paradise.

Enraged Muslims across the globe protesting against such insults to the Prophet fail to recognize that what they are dealing with here is not blasphemy but demonizing. It's in the same league as proclamation of a prominent Bajrang Dal leader some years ago that there can be no peace as long as the Qur'an was around. The same sentiment continues to be reiterated by other prominent members of sangh parivar every now and then. Here as with the Danish cartoons the issue is not blasphemy per se but insidious demonizing of an entire community.

Were the Danish cartoons a depiction of Osama or his ilk, no one could or should have complained. But when terror and enslavement of women are projected as synonymous with Islam, all Muslims stand demonized as a dangerous multitude of bloodthirsty vermin. Faced with such hate propaganda, Muslims have every right to, and they must, protest. But the forms of protest that many Muslims and even governments have chosen — mindless economic boycott of Danish products, snapping diplomatic ties, torching embassies, issuing death sentences against all Danish and Norwegian citizens, raging mobs taking to streets with banners and placards calling for butchery of enemies of Islam — are enormously self-damaging.

Through such misguided deeds, Muslims end up affirming the very image of their community that they are ostensibly outraged about. What do the agitating Muslims want? In an open letter addressed to "Honourable Fellow Citizens of the Muslims World", dated January 30, Carsten Juste, editor-in-chief of the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, has explained that "we are strong proponents of the freedom of religion and because we respect the right of any human being to practice his or her religion, offending anybody on the grounds of their religious beliefs is unthinkable to us. That this happened was, consequently, unintentional". This obviously is not enough for the agitators. Ideally, they would like to see cartoonists, editors and proprietors of the newspaper hanged in public.

At the very least they want an exemplary government crackdown on Jyllands-Posten. Some have reportedly also called for new international legislation making the death sentence obligatory for all blasphemers, blissfully unaware that many western democracies have done away with capital punishment altogether even for the worst crimes imaginable. Fortunately, unlike Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria or Egypt, Denmark is a functioning democracy. Like other democracies, it too does not hold the right to freedom of expression as absolute.

Last August, for example, Danish authorities withdrew the broadcasting license of a Copenhagen radio station for three months because it called for the extermination of Muslims. That, according to the authorities, was clear incitement to violence (against Muslims) and therefore actionable. They may argue with the Danish on where the Lakshman rekha be drawn between freedom of expression and its abuse for incitement to violence But they must also ask themselves why they remain silent when any number of mullahs and assorted jehadis (Fadi Abdullatif, spokesman for Danish branch of the militant Hizb-ul-Tahrir, is one of them), shamefully misuse the hospitality and freedom of western democracies to openly incite Muslims to violence against fellow citizens. And they must be thankful that countries like Denmark don't have laws like Pakistan's notorious blasphemy law that is a curse for religious minorities and the press. Addressing a gathering of faithful during Friday prayers, Qatar-based Shaikh Yusuf Alqarzadi, a highly respected religious leader, condemned the burning down of Danish and Norwegian embassies. Exhorting Muslims to eschew extremism, he appealed to them to express their unhappiness over the offensive cartoons in a "decent" and "civilized" manner. "I cannot condone destruction and arson because they are against basic human decency and the teachings of Islam", he said. May Allah add power to Alqarzadi's voice against targeted groups.

Me