SumanSpeaks: Current Affairs:

2012-01-29T11:11:00.000-08:00

100,000 conversions and counting, meet the ex-Hindu who herds souls to the Hereafter

~~Saba Imtiaz

Deen Mohammad converted to Islam in 1989. He said when he read the Holy Quran he realised that 360 gods were useless.

MATLI, 23 January, 2012: Such are Deen Mohammad Shaikh’s powers of persuasion that he has converted 108,000 people to Islam since 1989, the year he left his birth religion Hinduism behind.
His multi-coloured business card describes the Matli dweller as the president of the Jamia Masjid Allah Wali and Madrassa Aisha Taleem-ul Quran – an institute for conversions to Islam.
The reedy 70-year-old brandishes an embellished cane. A red-and-white keffeiyah perched on his shoulder offers people a hint to his theological leanings.
As he speaks to The Express Tribune, his arm slices an invisible arc through the air. He is gesturing to a vast expanse of nine acres of donated land where converts are invited to pitch a tent and stay. “My heartfelt wish is that the entire world becomes Muslim,” comes his response, when asked about the en masse conversions. His piety is matched only by its ambition.
But contrary to the grandiose proclamation, this preacher isn’t a repository of rehearsed sound bites. It is only after he settles down on a charpoy that he deigns to embark on the journey of a Hindu named Jhangli who became an expert in evangelism.
“I always loved Islam,” he begins. “I read the Holy Quran and realised that 360 gods were not of any use to me.”
At first he had to study the Holy Quran in secret. There was the risk of being misunderstood if a Muslim caught him with the holy book. He started fasting and in fact he would begin a day before Ramazan started.
Shaikh’s mother grew alarmed at her son’s forays into another faith. She thought that if she married him off, he would not ‘leave’. Thus, he was barely 15 when his wedding took place, followed by a quick overtaking by nature – four girls and eight boys.
But despite this, he was drawn back to his curiosity and managed to find a teacher, Sain Mohammad Jagsi, who instructed him in the Holy Quran and Hadiths or sayings of the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh).
Fortunately, Shaikh’s uncle was of the same mind and the two men agreed that they would give each other the strength. Shaikh held off until his daughter was married to a Hindu as planned, since he had already “given his word”. Then there was no turning back.
After his conversion, Deen Mohammad Shaikh made it his mission to woo others. He began in his own backyard, preaching to family, before venturing beyond this comfort zone. Encounters with the rich and powerful helped pave the way. Retired Pakistan Army general Sikandar Hayat, who owns a sugar mill in Matli, offered Shaikh money, which he turned down. Instead, he urged Hayat to give jobs to some of the new converts. Hayat and his daughter proved extremely helpful in providing assistance.
Now, Shaikh says, his fame has spread and people come to him from as far as Balochistan, members of all religions and sects, who would like to convert. A small mosque has sprung up in his residential compound along with a number of rooms where children – mostly girls – are taught how to say their prayers and recite the Holy Quran.
One of the teachers is 14-year-old Sakina, who is just 15 days into the job. “Only a few students are difficult to teach,” she says while commenting on their ability to recite a text in an unknown language.
Shaikh is aware of the difficulties converts face while taking on what appear to be the initially daunting rigours of a brand new system. He makes life easy for the first 40 days. “They only have to pray farz!” he says while referring to the mandatory parts. This relaxed schedule ensures that they can ‘confirm their faith’. He understands that if he demanded they start out with praying five times a day to offer even the optional and ‘bonus’ parts, “They would run away!” as he puts it with a look of mock horror on his face.
Other than this, he is reluctant to actually explain how he influences the people. All he offers is a nugget of fire and brimstone: “I tell them that I was a Hindu too and that they would burn in Hell if they are not Muslim.”
More than saving a soul:
There are other practical considerations that accompany conversions. In order to ‘save’ the converts from influential Hindus in other districts, Shaikh packs them off to Hub Chowk while the Kalima is still moist on their lips. “Their families would beat them up (for converting) otherwise,” he explains.
This trick of the ‘trade’ he learnt from personal experience. He alleges that he was kidnapped along with his daughter-in-law by influential Hindus who threatened him so that he would stop converting people. “They don’t want these poor Hindus to stand up to them when they become Muslims,” Shaikh maintains.
Despite 108,000 conversions, for which a record is kept, Shaikh still doesn’t feel his work is done. He wants everyone to be a Muslim and learn from his example. He also attends the Tablighi Jamaat’s annual congregation in Raiwind, although he doesn’t believe in sectarian divisions. “All groups are like brothers to me,” he declares.

Courtesy: The Express Tribune, January 23rd, 2012.

2012-01-28T03:20:00.000-08:00

Politics in Bangladesh: Turbulent House
The army claims to have thwarted a coup

Jan 28th 2012: Delhi: from the print edition: IT WAS, says Gowher Rizvi, a close adviser to Bangladesh’s prime minister, “very quickly nipped in the bud”. He was talking of a coup plot foiled by the army. The schemers—16 were involved, and some are on the run—included disgruntled mid-ranking officers, retired officers, and others abroad. He claims investigators found a list of prominent people to be assassinated, and another list of generals expected to be “potential partners”.
Bangladesh has faced dozens of coups, failed or not, in its 40 years. But for an army spokesman to give details of one, on January 19th, was unusual. He named the plotters and blamed them for inducing others to revolt (by passing on provocative e-mails and posting on Facebook). The conspirators, he said, shared extreme religious beliefs.
The official view is that dogged opponents of Sheikh Hasina Wajed’s elected regime must now be rooted out, especially from the army. These include Islamists—many supposedly recruited to the army in the early 2000s—and those who oppose ongoing war-crimes trials (over killings during the secession war of 1971).
Mr Rizvi says the government’s legitimacy is assured and reports “absolute calm” in Dhaka, the capital. The army’s discipline looks admirable, he says, encouraged by a popular desire (in contrast to a few years ago) for men in uniform not to meddle in politics.
The equanimity is not shared by all. Many normally garrulous Bangladeshi commentators this week shunned requests to talk. A wide presumption exists that phones are bugged. Speak to one of the men accused of leading the plot, who is in hiding abroad, and a murky picture emerges. Ishraq Ahmed concedes that the arrested men are his friends, but denies religious extremism (indeed, he complains that the authorities have eyed up his painstakingly collected cellar of wines, Armagnacs and malt whiskies). He says the government “can show no troop movements, no guns, anything” to prove the plot.
Mr Ahmed is a former high-ranking officer from a liberal family. He says he fought “with great responsibility” for Bangladesh’s independence. Now he and other nationalists are merely trying to oppose what they see as a coup-by-stealth by Sheikh Hasina, who is letting Bangladesh be “turned into a Bantustan” run by India.
He makes many claims. Among the more plausible and specific is that spies from India’s Research Analysis Wing (RAW) operate in the country. He claims, too, that for two years RAW has had an office within the headquarters of Bangladeshi Intelligence in Dhaka and a “direct submarine cable for communications” back to India. He claims that Indians conduct electronic surveillance in the country and kidnap suspects from Bangladeshi cities. Indian prodding, he adds, encourages the government to crack down on “anyone with beards. Any practising Muslim is vilified and portrayed as Taliban.”
Mr Rizvi denies all this, saying he is “totally unaware of any Indian presence in Bangladesh”. Yet he accepts that many are uneasy about Bangladesh’s rapprochement with India under Sheikh Hasina. Bangladesh has also met Indian demands to root out Islamists’ training camps, and he concedes that some individuals—though not Bangladeshis—are taken over the border for prosecution in India.
Fractiousness will grow ahead of a general election in 2013. Returned to power three years ago, Sheikh Hasina has seen her popularity slump from 81% to 39%, according to an opinion poll published by the Daily Star on January 8th. More telling, 74% say they oppose her constitutional meddling last year, which changed how elections are organised. That may bode ill for stability. Mughal kings struggled to rule the territory over four centuries ago, lamenting that Bengal was “a house of turbulence”. Little has changed.
Correction: This article originally stated that the contents of Ishraq Ahmed's cellar had been confiscated. The bottles are still there, for the moment. Cheers.

Courtesy: The Economist

2012-01-21T11:12:00.000-08:00

The Great Nastik Revolt

~~ by Prabhakar Kamath

Intellectual Ferment: By 600 B.C.E. a great intellectual ferment was brewing across the Indo-Gangetic plain the likes of which India has not seen since. Countless different Kshatriya-inspired philosophies sprang up from the agitated intellect of the Indo-Gangetic Civilization. During this period (900-500 B.C.E), thousands of wandering sophists, known as Parivrajaka, crisscrossed the country questioning anything and everything, including the doctrines of the Gunas and Karma, the Vedas, Vedic sacrificial rites, animal sacrifices, Varna Dharma, and supremacy of Brahmins. They engaged each other in robust public debates on every topic on earth. They challenged their adversaries to either win them over in debate or to follow them. These ‘argumentative Indians‘ came to be known as ‘ ‘Hair splitters’ or ‘Eel wigglers.’ The public halls all over Aryavarta were packed with curious people eager to learn and experiment with new ideas to cope with life’s vicissitudes. New Age Philosophies thrived everywhere. They were all sick and tired of Brahmanism’s remedy for every problem in the world: Perform sacrifices!

The Rise Of Heterodox Dharmas:

This was the period in India’s history when massive winds of change were blowing through the land resulting in the overthrow of the decaying old social, political, and religious orders. Disgusted and disenchanted by Brahmanism, the opposition gradually coalesced into a number of reactionary groups over the centuries following the Vedic period. These reactionaries could be broadly classified into two groups: The Upanishadic sages, who attempted to reform Brahmanism from within (as we studied in the previous article), and Nastiks, nonbelievers, who rejected the essential elements of Brahmanic Dharma, and abandoned it altogether. Those days the epithet Nastik did not mean Atheism since the concept of God was still very nebulous. The Upanishadic entity Brahman, being free from any positive attributes, did not qualify to be a true God. Kshatriya nobles led the heterodox groups just as they did the Upanishadic effort to reform Brahmanism.

Two Nastik Groups:

Within the Nastik movement itself there were two distinct groups: Sramanas (monks) who renounced worldly pleasures, and Lokayatas (worldly) who embraced them. A detailed discussion of the principles of these groups is beyond the scope of this article. The main purpose of this article is to show how they arose in reaction to the decadence of Brahmanism and what their legacies are and what lessons we could learn from them.

1. Sramanas: This group resorted to Sanyasa- literally, “throwing down”- and renounced not only all material comforts but also all socially obligated duties (Karma). Within this group, four distinct sub-sects emerged:

Shri Nakoda Jain Temple

A. Jainism: The first subgroup, following the philosophy of Mahaveera, later on formed Jainism. The hallmark of this religion was absolute nonviolence toward all living things. This religion was clearly reacting to the horrors of animal sacrifices emblematic of Brahmanism. Some of these monks walked around naked as an expression of their complete renunciation of material things and accidental violence against living creatures. Jainism gained many adherents, mostly in the business class. It got a huge boost when Chandragupta Maurya abandoned his throne and joined it in 298 B.C.E. He retired to a Jain hermitage at Shravana (Sramana) Belagola in what is today Karnataka State, and starved himself to death in the manner of Jain saints.

B. Ajivika: The second of these Nastik groups was Ajivika, founded by Gosala, a contemporary of both Mahaveera and the Buddha. This sect believed that everything in this world was predetermined (Niyati). Destiny, not man’s actions, determined the outcome of one’s soul. Their philosophy can be summed in one line: Go with the flow. Chandragupta’s son Bindusara (ruled 298-272 B. C. E), who boasted the title of Amitraghatha, meaning Slayer of Foes, abandoned Brāhmanism and embraced Ajivika sect. He detested Brahmanism and yet he did not care for Buddhism and Jainism as they were too nonviolent to suite his title or temperament. He believed in his destiny as the emperor of the largest empire ever in India. In fact, his empire was larger than present day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh combined!

Mauryan Empire during Ashoka's rule

C. Buddhism: The third subgroup, following the teachings of Gautama Buddha, later developed into Buddhism. This was essentially a rational Dharma that emphasized right thinking and conduct. Buddhists rejected all aspects of Brahmanism except for the doctrine of Karma. Right conduct, not birth-class, should decide one’s status on life, they said.Morality, not class system and rituals, defines a true Dharma. As we will study in our future articles, Upanishadism and Buddhism had many things in common. The Buddhist monks were known as Bhikkus as they made their living by begging. Beggars became holy and begging became fashionable in India. Buddhism’s Three Fundamental Laws, Four Noble Truths, and Eight Noble Paths arose in reaction to the decadence of Brahmanism. From the Buddhist point of view, man created God to meet deep psychological needs such as to fulfill desires and protection from evil. Buddhism gained royal patronage for nearly 1000 years. Ashoka the Great (ruled 272-232 B.C.E.) abandoned Brahmanism and embraced rationalist Buddhism, which he referred to as the true Dharma (Dhamma). He was singlehandedly responsible for making Buddhism the predominant Dharma of India till the 8^th century A.D., and into a World Religion.

D. Asceticism: The fourth subgroup of Sramanas consisted of individual Ascetics (Munis, the Silent Ones), who renounced everything and wandered in search of the Ultimate Reality. These people often practiced severe austerities (Tapas) in the form of self-denial and self-torture as the means of mastering their senses to achieve personal liberation from Samsara. Half-naked Sadhus and Sanyasis, who stick long needles into their tongue and cheeks; who hang from trees by means of hooks, and who stand on one leg for years, belong to this subgroup (BG: 17:5-6). We can find true as well as false Ascetics, Swamis and Gurus such as these all over India and abroad to this day.

Dharma of Brahmanism versus Dharma of Buddhism:

Both Brahmanas and Buddhists used the term Dharma to promote their own agendas. To Brahmins, Dharma meant people of each class (Varna) faithfully and helplessly performing their class-designated duties as per their specific Guna (Sattva, Rajas, etc.). For example, a Kshatriya’s Dharma was to invade his enemy’s territory, steal his cows, burn his buildings, kill him and acquire his wealth. This was exactly what Ashoka did when he invaded Kalinga. To emphasize this, prince Krishna often addresses Arjuna as Dhananjaya (Conqueror of Wealth, BG: 1:15) and Paranthapa (Scorcher of Foes, BG: 2:3), and Arjuna addresses Krishna as Madhusoodana (Slayer of Madhu) and Arisoodana (Slayer of Foes, BG: 2:4). If a Kshatriya refused to fight for a ‘righteous cause’, whatever that phrase meant, then he was considered as one who had abandoned his Kshatriya duty, as did Arjuna in the Original Gita, before he was brought to his senses by prince Krishna. Such a Kshatriya was described as unmanly, impotent, cowardly, dishonorable, and the like (BG: 2-3). He would suffer dishonor in the society here on earth and hell hereafter (BG: 2:33). There was no room for compassion, mercy, kindness, etc. when a Kshatriya performed his Dharma. And it did not matter who the identified enemy was -Guru, uncle, great uncle, grandfather, cousins- one must give up his Ahamkara (I, me and mine) and perform his Dharma as defined by his Varna. No guilt or sin would arise from such actions (BG: 18:17). Likewise, a Brahmin’s Dharma was to chant the Vedic hymns, perform Yajnas, kill animals and sacrifice them in the fire to please the gods. Their logic was that all Dharmas are attended with some evil like smoke enveloping fire; that is no reason to abandon them (BG: 18:48). It is better to perform one’s own Dharma imperfectly than to perform another’s perfectly because in the former case one goes to heaven and in the latter case one goes to hell (3:35). The ultimate goal of all classes was to gain perfection here on earth by performing faithfully and helplessly his class-designated Dharma (BG: 18:45). Therein lay the stability of the society -and supremacy of Brahmins in the Varna system.

To Buddhists, on the contrary, Dharma meant ethical principles such as nonviolence, truthfulness, generosity, kindness, tolerance, equality, goodness and mercy, which people of all classes should practice. The Dhamma (ethics) of a Brahmin should not be different from that of a Sudra. In fact, such class distinction should not exist at all. Furthermore, one must respect sanctity of life and not kill animals for the sake of sacrifice. Even burning rice kernel with chaff was not good. To them Vedic rituals were useless as compared to the practice of ethics. Ashoka says:

Rock Edict # 9: Other ceremonies (rituals of Brahmanism) are of doubtful fruit, for they may achieve their purpose, or they may not, and even if they do, it is only in this world. But the ceremony (practice) of Dhamma is timeless. Even if it does not achieve its purpose in this world, it produces great merit in the next, whereas if it does achieve its purpose in this world, one gets great merit (here on earth) and there (in heaven) through the ceremony (proper practice) of the Dhamma.

2. Lokayata: The second major Nastik reactionary group, known as the Lokayatas, also known as Charvakas or Materialists, went in the opposite direction. The most prominent Lokayata philosopher was Brihaspati who lived around 600 B. C. E. We can get glimpses of this great man’s thinking from a quote in Madhvacharya’s Sarva Darshana Samgraha (early 14^th century):

“There is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world, nor do the actions of four castes, orders, etc. produce any real effect. The Agnihotra, the three Vedas, the ascetic’s three staves, and smearing one’s self with ashes, were made by nature as the livelihood of those destitute of knowledge and manliness. If a beast slain in the Jyotisthoma rite will itself go to heaven, why then does not the sacrificer forthwith offer his own father? If the Shraddha produces gratification to beings who are dead, then here, too, in the case of travelers when they start, it is needless to give provisions for the journey… While life remains let man live happily, let him feed on ghee even though he runs in debt; when once the body becomes ashes, how can it ever return again? If he who departs from the body goes to another world, how is it that he comes not back again, restless for love of his kindred? Hence it is only as a means of livelihood that Brahmins have established here all these ceremonies for the dead, -there is no other fruit anywhere…”

The amazing thing about the above statement is that this man, who lived 2600 years ago, appears to be so modern and rational in his thinking! If we met this man in the street today, we might have a conversation with him like we would with an enlightened man of 21^st century. As regards living on borrowed money, which I think was a rhetorical statement, I am sure there are a lot of followers of this particular aspect of Lokayata philosophy all over the world.

Legacy Of, And Lessons From, Sramana Sects:

Jainism: Jainism has lingered on as a minor religion in India to this day, patronized over the centuries by minor royal houses and rich merchant class in the western and southern India. Jainism did not have a great royal patron like Buddhism did in Ashoka the Great. Jainism did not pose a significant threat to Brahmanism and so it has survived in India to this day. Even though a minor religion, the influence of Jainism on Brahmanism and the rest of the world was as profound as Buddhism, if not more. It was Jain philosophy of Ahimsa (nonviolence), which led to Brahmanism finally giving up animal sacrifices and embracing vegetarianism. Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement during India’s independence struggle was rooted in the Jain philosophy of nonviolence. Dr. Martin Luther King’s successful struggle to emancipate African-Americans in America was patterned after Gandhi’s nonviolent method in India.

Ajivika: Ajivika sect lingered on till 13^th century and met its Destiny in the dustbin of history thereafter. However, its theory of Destiny (Niyati), which is often interpreted as fatalism, occupies the intellect of many Indians to this day. We can frequently get glimpses of Ajivika philosophy in conversations with Indians: “No one can change one’s Destiny.” “Whatever is destined to happen, will happen.” “All this is a play of Fate!” “Whatever is written on your forehead cannot be changed!” Complete acceptance of Destiny gives one complete peace of mind as well as absolute passivity!

Young Monks

Buddhism: For 1000 years after the Buddha’s death, Buddhism spread in leaps and bounds under the patronage of great royal houses: Maurya, Greco-Bactrian, Kushana, Gupta, Maukhari, Pala and the like. Resurgence of Brahmanism began in the early centuries of Christian era, probably under the patronage of the Guptas. By the time of Harshavardhana of the Maukhari house (590-647 A. D.), its lobby was strong enough to attempt his assassination for patronizing Buddhism. Another development that enhanced decline of Buddhism was revival of Brahmanism led by Shankaracharya (788-820 A. D.). He singlehandedly revived Brahmanism from ts deathbed by means of his great intellect, and even greater gift of the gab, and perhaps the greatest duplicity of all the Acharyas in interpreting anti-Brahmanic literature such as the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. In the course of our quest for truth, we will study some examples of his deliberate misinterpretations and nonsensical commentaries on the anti-Brahmanic shlokas of the Bhagavad Gita. By doing so, he converted the Bhagavad Gita, ‘The Manifesto of the Revolution to Overthrow Brahmanism’, into ‘The Standard Handbook of Brahmanism’. After the arrival and spread of Islam (10^th -12^th A. D.), Buddhism disappeared from India altogether. Brahmanism absorbed what little was left of it and half-heartedly declared the Buddha as the ninth avatara of Vishnu. A section of Brahmanism continued to vilify him as one born to mislead Nastiks to hell. Regardless, Buddhism became the World Religion, thanks to two great Chinese pilgrims to India and innumerable Bhikkus who spread the message of the Buddha all over Far East and Middle East. I will not be surprised if some day some open-minded Christian scholar will trace the origin of Jesus’ ‘show him the other cheek’ philosophy to that of the Buddha, exported to Middle East by Ashoka’s emissaries in the 3^rd century B. C. E. In fact, Jesus’ revolt against Orthodox Judaism, and subsequent birth of Christianity, followed the blueprint laid by the Buddha.

Legacy And Lessons From Sramanas:

The lesson to be learned from all the above Sramana sects is that any attempt to bring sanity into Brahmanic Dharma should be characterized by purity of purpose, speech, thought and action. The rationalist activist must be perceived by his target population as a person who is rational, reasonable, good, honest, nonviolent and free from common human weaknesses such as anger, hatred, greed, selfishness, arrogance, and deceitfulness. Nothing hurts a reform movement like the perception by the target population that the activist himself is not of exemplary behavior. In other words, all reformation movements are nothing but exercise in self-improvement. Without trust in the reformer’s bona fides, his attempts will not bear any fruits. A rationalist’s approach should be one in which he comes across as genuinely interested in helping the religionists in overcoming their irrational fears and insecurities, which are the basis of their irrational beliefs and behaviors. This reminds me of the anecdote in which a psychotic patient tells his psychiatrist that he lives on the moon. The psychiatrist empathically plays along and even accepts the patient’s invitation to visit him on the moon on a certain date. On the designated day of the visit to moon, the psychiatrist says, “All right, I am ready. Let us go.” The patient surprises the psychiatrist by asking him, “You mean you really believe that I live on moon?”

Lesson From Lokayatas:

Lokayata philosophy was largely misunderstood, ridiculed and hooted off the Indian stage of philosophy by Brahmins as it struck at their very livelihood. Most of what we know of its fundamental beliefs comes to us from its staunch Brahmanic critics, and therefore is of dubious value. Many of their tenets were deliberately or out of ignorance misinterpreted by Brahmanic commentators. Its literature was available to scholars at least till 17^th century. It disappeared entirely over the past few centuries. Either Brahmanic loyalists destroyed it, or the palm leaves rotted away or were eaten by termites. Prakriti has a way of destroying everything, especially in India!

As the reader can discern, the Lokayata philosophers did not mince words. They indulged in frontal attacks against what they considered as Brahmanic fraud. However, frontal attacks, such as those launched by the Lokayatas against essentially irrational beliefs of Brahmanism rarely, if ever, get desired results. Logic, facts, and reasoning are no match to deep-rooted beliefs of delusional proportion, which majority of Hindus have. When Mahmud of Ghazni stormed the temple of Somanatha in 1025 A. D., he found 50,000 deluded Brahmins and devotees crying with their hands wrapped around their necks and repeatedly pleading with the stone lingam (phallus) of Shiva to save them as well as their rich temple from the sword of Mahmud. Mahmud, though no less deluded by his own religion, had more faith in his own sword. He gladly obliged the Brahmins and devotees to chop their bobbing heads off. Till the last man the devotees refused to believe that the stone lingam had no power to protect them. It didn’t occur to their deluded intellect that if the Shiva lingam did not save them from Mahmud’s sword after one pleading, repeat pleadings would not make any difference. Such is the deluding effect of religion on one’s reasoning powers.

Changing Beliefs And Behaviors Is A Mighty Task:

Man is essentially a creature of well-established beliefs, habits and behavioral patterns and it is mighty hard to change these. For example, people, who are always late for parties, as is the case with the vast majority of Indians I know in America, rarely change their behavior no matter how well one reasons with them. When confronted, they give one or more totally irrational explanations for their tardiness. They might need a combination of insight into their unconscious belief system (such as “I have to keep my ‘dignity’ by showing up late”, or, “If I show up on time my host might think I am dying to eat his food”) and incentive to change (such as “Sorry, all freshly made Jelebis were gone an hour ago! You are too late!” or a note on the door, “Sorry, the party ended an hour ago. We have gone for a walk.”). It takes a lot of mental energy for people to adopt a new belief system (such as “It is a sign of utter disrespect for the host if I don’t show up on time”) and conform their behavior to their new beliefs (such as “I must show up for the party on time”).

Most People Are On Autopilot:

It takes a highly “aware” person to transcend the power of childhood indoctrination and resort to reasoning. Most Hindu religionists I know do not fall in this category. Even a confirmed Atheist might reflexively exclaim “Oh, my God!” when he witnesses a tragedy or when he has an extremely pleasurable experience. That does not make him a believer in God. It simply proves that deep-rooted behaviors are often on autopilot and are very difficult to remove. Very high level of self-awareness and reasoning power are needed for one to change one’s irrational behavior. As a psychiatrist, I can attest to the fact that majority of my highly educated patients are unable to change their well-established behavioral patterns in spite of many attempts and reminders even in the context of a trusting relationship.

Note: Dr. Prabhakar Kamath, is a psychiatrist currently practicing in the U.S. He is the author of Servants, Not Masters: A Guide for Consumer Activists in India(1987) and Is Your Balloon About Pop?: Owner’s Manual for the Stressed Mind.

Courtesy: Nirmukta

2012-01-21T03:46:00.000-08:00

Paid News: How corruption in the Indian media undermines democracy

Sections of the media in India have willy-nilly become participants and players in practices that contribute to the growing use of money power in politics, which undermines democratic processes and norms— while hypocritically pretending to occupy a high moral ground, says the report released by Press Council of India
The Press Council of India’s once suppressed report on paid news, which indicted many publishers and broadcasters of taking money for reporting on state assembly elections in 2004 and 2009; praising one candidate while maligning others; which had a significant effect on the voting results is finally out.
The recommendation of the Press Council report were withheld from the public until an right to information (RTI) application from journalist Manu Moudgil forced to Press Council to come out with all the relevant details by 10 October 2011 after an order from the Chief Information Commissioner (CIC).
The report says, "It is widely believed that many media companies, irrespective of the volume of their businesses and their profitability, were 'selling' news space after arriving at an 'understanding' with politicians and representatives of corporate entities that were advertisers. Space in publications and airtime were occupied by advertisements that were disguised as 'news'."
After the ‘paid news' scandal surfaced, the Press Council, on 3 June 2009, under Justice GN Ray set up a subcommittee to inquire into the racket. The committee comprising Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, senior journalist, and Sreenivas Reddy, produced an explosive 71-page report which clearly mentioned the names (and details) of the personalities who were involved in this racket.

Courtesy: Moneylife Digital team

2012-01-01T12:12:00.000-08:00

Osho Teachings on Celebration

Osho - That's my whole teaching, celebration; not worship but celebration. When you worship, you start making a hierarchy; the lower and the higher. When you worship you put something on top of other things. When you worship, something becomes sacred and something becomes profane. When you worship you divide, you split existence. Then something is praised but in the wake of it, something is condemned too. So worship is not religious.
The god of the worshipper is not the true god, because to exist it needs a devil. Without a devil the god will not be possible. The more you praise the god, the more you have to condemn the devil. Then the world is torn apart into two enemy forces, and when you divide the world, you are also divided in it, you become split and schizophrenic. A part of you becomes evil and a part of you becomes holy, and then there is constant conflict, repression, and all joy is lost. A worshipper is basically ill-at-ease; he is dis-eased.
Celebration is a totally different dimension. When you celebrate, you celebrate all, you don't divide. For a celebrator, prayer is as beautiful as drinking tea. The tea is not profane and prayer is not separate; all is one. The church, the temple, the mosque and the pub are all one. Making love to a woman or a man or praying to a god is the same.
Celebration does not divide. It unites, it brings things together; it creates a togetherness in the world. The duality disappears and there is unity, and with unity there is joy because there cannot be any conflict. There is no struggle, nothing has to be overcome. All is overcome in the celebration itself. The worshipper has a goal; he has to attain it. The celebrator has no goal; he has attained it already. Worship is always future-oriented; celebration is present-oriented. You celebrate this moment, you worship some other moment.
You worship Christ; now two thousand years have passed. You worship the past -- Krishna, Mohammed, Rama -- or you worship the future -- heaven, god -- which is going to happen. But the celebrator worships this moment, he lives this moment. That is his worship; he lives it totally.
It happened once: a Christian theologian went to see a Zen master who was a painter too. Celebrators are always creators; worshippers are non-creative. The master was painting. He was just going to do something, he was in that moment of waiting when something descends, when something takes possession. The Christian said, 'I would be very happy if you can paint Jesus Christ for me. ' The master said, 'Okay, I will paint Jesus Christ.' And he painted a bamboo!
When the bamboo started coming up, the Christian was a little puzzled; had he forgotten what he had said When the painting was completed it was one of the most alive bamboos ever done. The Christian asked, 'I am sorry; the painting is beautiful, but you had promised to paint christ.'
But the master said, 'This is Christ! Can't you see Christ in it? The fragileness of it is exactly the fragileness of Christ. The wind is moving it; can't you see it? It goes with the wind: thy will be done. It is exactly Christ. And it is so alive and so beautiful; it belongs to god! What more can you expect? This is Christ...this moment this is Christ; Christ has taken the shape of a bamboo. And Christ was a bamboo, a hollow bamboo. He was not there, that is his beauty. He allowed god to exist in him, he allowed god to come through him, he allowed god to have a contact with the world; he became the connection.' But the Christian could not understand. He can only understand a jesus on the cross; how can he understand a bamboo as christ?
Christians have been very much puzzled by the Zen attitude towards life, because it has no worship in it; it has celebration.
A Zen master was asked, 'What is the essential secret of Buddhism? And the master said, 'The cypress tree in the courtyard,' because in that moment that was the only reality for the master.
I have heard another story. A man came, a monk, not belonging to the Zen people. He wanted to be initiated by the master, a Zen master. He was asked, 'From where are you coming?' He said, 'I come from a monastery which is called "the monastery of spiritual light".' The master said, 'Spiritual light? Never heard about anything like that. Strange! I am ninety and I have never heard anything about spiritual light; what do you mean? In the day there is sunlight, in the night there is the lamplight. From where comes this spiritual light, what is this spiritual light?'
The man was at a loss, he couldn't answer. Then the master answered for him. He said, 'Don't be worried. In the day, sunlight; in the night, lamplight. This is what spiritual light is; there is no other spiritual light.'
This is a different vision of life -- as it is, in its suchness, and enjoying each and every moment of it. So don't just remain contented with the name celebration; become celebration!
That's what sannyas is all about: it is a celebration of god, not a worship. And celebrate in your own way, because celebration cannot have any form. Worship becomes petrified into forms; celebration remains alive. And all is divine; there is nothing profane.

Source: from Osho Book "The Sun Behind the Sun Behind the Sun".

Additional note: Osho (11 December 1931 – 19 January 1990), born Chandra Mohan Jain, and also known as Acharya Rajneesh from the 1960s onwards, as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh during the 1970s and 1980s and as Osho from 1989, was an Indian mystic, guru, and spiritual teacher who garnered an international following. [Wikipdia].

2011-12-31T08:23:00.000-08:00

Makaravilakku season begins in Sabarimala Temple

Makara Vilakku Festival

Sabarimala: The 'Makaravilakku' season began with much fanfare and devotion at the hill shrine of Lord Ayyappa on Friday evening. The festival will continue for 21 days.
According to reports, the sanctum sanctorum of the temple was opened at 5.30 pm however in accordance to tradition no ritual was conducted in the temple.
On January 12 the annual petta thullal at the Erumeli Sree Dharma Sastha Temple would be held. Two teams have been formed to conduct the special ritual known as the petta thullal. One team would take out the ritual procession from Erumeli Kochambalam to Erumeli Sree Dharma Sastha Temple at 12 noon. This will be done after seeing the 'krishnaparunthu' in the sky. The other would do the same from the Kochambalam to Erumeli Sree Dharma Sastha Temple at 2 pm soon after seeing the star in the sky.
The 'Thiruvabharanam' procession would be take out from Pandalam Valiyakoickal Sree Dharma Sastha Temple at 1 pm on January 13.
The Thiruvabharanam is an attire in gold to be adorned on the idol of Lord Ayyappa on the Makaravilakku day on January 15.
The auspicious 'Makarasamkrama Pooja' would be held at Lord Ayyappa Temple at 12.58 am on January 15.
Other important dates:
January 15: After the Thiruvabharanam ceremony, the deeparadhana would be held at 6.30 pm.
January 15 to 19: Carrying the 'thidambu' of Malikappuram Devi on a finely dressed elephant.
January 20: Guruthi ritual at Malikappuram at 11 pm.
January 21: Temple closed at 7 am.

Courtesy: Parda Phash

2011-12-31T07:51:00.000-08:00

Drugs, Item girls, New Year

Mumbai: People getting busy with New Year celebrations beware - the drug peddlers are on the prowl. According to reports, item girls are the preferred way of transporting the narcotics inside the party arenas.
Since item girls are the star attraction at these dos, the drug peddlers are reportedly offering huge amounts in the name of 'performance'. It has been reported that the item girls are being instructed to carry a travel bag which, they are told, contains cash but actually has drugs.
Reports say that a model-turned-item girl revealed the plans to the police in her complaint filed in Mumbai.
Rozlyn Khan told the police that she was approached by a caller who posed as an organiser offering her an amount three times of what she charges. On further prodding she came to know that she will have to carry a bag full of drugs to the New Year bash for which she has a VIP entry meaning that she won’t have to go through the security checks.
Rozlyn informed that a lot of item girls were being approached by these drug dealers and many of them agreed to the deal without knowing what was inside the bag.
The police have registered the complaint against the anonymous caller under section 507 IPC, criminal intimidation by anonymous communication.
Reports say that the police teams are also keeping an eye on the New Year bashes across the city.

Courtesy: Parda Phash

2011-12-30T15:50:00.000-08:00

Adult Film Condom Proposal Qualifies for June Ballot
The city attorney calls it "needless and wasteful," but supporters argue the measure is needed to prevent and reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS
By Jonathan Lloy

A proposal that would require adult film actors to use condoms has qualified for the June ballot after proponents gathered enough signatures to put the issue before Los Angeles voters.
Proponents gathered more than 70,000 signatures, exceeding the 41,000 required to place the issue on the ballot, according to AIDS Heathcare Foundation spokesman Ged Kenslea. The signatures were certified last week by the LA City Clerk.
The Adult Film Workplace Condom Initiative would condition adult film permits on the production company's agreement to use condoms on the film set. Under the proposal, fees may be charged to "provide for inspectors to ensure compliance with conditions on film permits."
"We have other conditions on film permits," said Michael Weinstein, of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a backer of the proposal. "If you're going to blow things up, you have to have the fire department involved."
The ballot measure is the subject of a legal challenge by City Attorney Carmen Trutanich. His office filed a lawsuit earlier this month, calling the measure a "needless and wasteful expenditure of public resources made in connection with a measure which the voters have no power to adopt."
State laws already mandate use of condoms when workers are exposed to blood-borne pathogens, the lawsuit states.
But in a letter sent to the LA City Council after Trutanich issued his opinion on the matter earlier this year, Cal/OSHA officials said local authorities can require condom use on adult film sets.
"State law does not preempt such action by the City because the City does not seek to enact an occupational health and safety standard but rather a public health standard applicable to any film activity (regardless of employment relationship) within the City boundaries," officials said in the letter.
The ballot proposal has come under fire from the Free Speech Coalition, a Canoga Park-based industry trade group. The group issued a statement in support of the lawsuit, calling the measure "political grandstanding" and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Courtesy: NBC Southern California

2011-12-30T15:21:00.000-08:00

3 (three) women in Zimbabwe Charged in Series of Sex Attacks on Men

By Columbus S. Mavhunga

Harare, Zimbabwe (CNN) -- Police in Zimbabwe on Friday charged three women found in possession of 33 condoms containing semen with 17 counts of aggravated indecent assault in a case that may be a break in a string of sex attacks over the past two years by women targeting male hitchhikers.

Prosecutor Michael Reza told a court in Harare that the counts were for each of the 17 men who had positively identified the women as having sexually assaulted them in 2010 or 2011.

The women, all of them in their mid-20s, were arrested Sunday in Gweru, about 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Harare, when their car was involved in an accident. Police found the condoms in the women's car. Police appealed to any other victims to inform police.

The three were taken Wednesday by police to Harare.

"Since Monday, 17 men came and positively identified the women as having raped them," said a police official in Harare who refused to be identified. "Most of the men said the women would offer a drink either laced with something to tranquilize them or were forced at gunpoint."

Watch Ruparanganda, a professor of sociology at the University of Zimbabwe said : "Some sections of the society use these sperm for ritual purposes. The thinking is that it can be used for regeneration of life since they are source of life (biologically). Some people think that they can have their bad luck gone by using semen. I am sure that explains all this we have been witnessing (men being forced)."

The prosecution identified the suspects as Rosemary Chakwizira, 24, Sophie Nhokwara, 26, and her sister, Netsai Nhokwara, 24.

They were to be held in custody until their next appearance, set for October 28, when more charges may be filed.

"We might have had more victims come identify these women," said the police source.

Source: CNN.com
Photo Courtesy: Nutty News

2011-12-29T09:44:00.000-08:00

~:The Indian Jews:~

To be against "Brahminism" is part and parcel of the political correctness of progressive scholars in twenty-first-century India, much like being against Muslims is part of the message of their Hindutva colleagues.

~~By Jakob De Roover

Social science debate in India has been hijacked by the struggle between secularism and Hindutva for decades now. Usually the Sangh Parivar is blamed for this turn of events. However, it could well be argued that the Hindutva ideologues simply adopted the stance of the secularists. Perhaps the best illustration is the case of anti-Brahminism.
To be against "Brahminism" is part and parcel of the political correctness of progressive scholars in twenty-first-century India, much like being against Muslims is part of the message of their Hindutva colleagues. This indicates that something is very wrong with the Indian academic debate. Promotion of animosity towards a religious tradition or its followers is not acceptable today, but it becomes truly perverse when the intelligentsia endorses it.
In Europe, it took horrendous events to put an end to the propaganda of anti-Semitism, which had penetrated the media and intelligentsia. It required decades of incessant campaigning before anti-Semitism was relegated to the realm of intellectual and political bankruptcy. In India, anti-Brahminism is still the proud slogan of many political parties and the credential of the radical intellectual.
Some may find this parallel between anti-Brahminism and anti-Semitism ill-advised. Nevertheless, it has strong grounds.
First, there are striking similarities between the stereotypes about Brahmins in India and those about Jews in the West. Jews have been described as devious connivers, who would do anything for personal gain. They were said to be secretive and untrustworthy, manipulating politics and the economy. In India, Brahmins are all too often characterised in the same way.
Second, the stereotypes about the Jews were part of a larger story about a historical conspiracy in which they had supposedly exploited European societies. To this day, the stories about a Jewish conspiracy against humanity prevail. The anti-Brahminical stories sound much the same, but have the Brahmins plotting against the oppressed classes in Indian society.
In both cases, historians have claimed to produce "evidence" that cannot be considered so by any standard. Typical of the ideologues of anti-Brahminism is the addition of ad hoc ploys whenever their stories are challenged by facts. When it is pointed out that the Brahmins have not been all that powerful in most parts of the country, or that they were poor in many regions, one reverts to the image of the Brahmin manipulating kings and politicians behind the scene. We cannot find empirical evidence, it is said, because of the secretive way in which Brahminism works.
Third, both in anti-Semitic Europe and anti-Brahminical India, this goes together with the interpretation of contemporary events in terms of these stories. One does not really analyse social tragedies and injustices, but approaches them as confirmations of the ideological stories. All that goes wrong in society is blamed on the minority in question. Violence against Muslims? It must be the "Brahmins" of the Sangh Parivar. Opposition against Christian missionaries and the approval of anti-conversion laws? "Ah, the Brahmins fear that Christianity will empower the lower castes." Members of a scheduled caste are killed? "The Brahmin wants to show the Dalit his true place in the caste hierarchy." An OBC member loses his job; a lower caste girl is raped? "The upper castes must be behind it." So the story goes.
This leads to a fourth parallel: in both cases, resentment against the minority in question is systematically created and reinforced among the majority. The Jews were accused of sucking all riches out of European societies. In the decades before the second World War, more and more people began to believe that it was time "to take back what was rightfully theirs." In India also, movements have come into being that want to set right "the historical injustices of Brahminical oppression." Some have even begun to call upon their followers to "exterminate the Brahmins."
In Europe, state policies were implemented that expressed the discrimination against Jews. For a very long time, they could not hold certain jobs and participate in many social and economic activities. In India, one seems to be going this way with policies that claim to correct "the historical exploitation by the upper castes." It is becoming increasingly difficult for Brahmins to get access to certain jobs. In both cases, these policies have been justified in terms of a flawed ideological story that passes for social science.
The fifth parallel is that both anti-Semitism and anti-Brahminism have deep roots in Christian theology. In the case of Judaism, its continuing vitality as a tradition was a threat to Christianity's claim to be the fulfilment of the Jewish prophecies about the Messiah. The refusal of Jews to join the religion of Christ (the true Messiah, according to Christians) was seen as an unacceptable denial of the truth of Christianity. Saint Augustine even wrote that the Jews had to continue to exist, but only to show that Christians had not fabricated the prophesies about Christ and to confirm that some would not follow Christ and be damned for it.
The contemporary stereotypes about Brahmins and the story about Brahminism also originate in Christian theology. They reproduce Protestant images of the priests of false religion. When European missionaries and merchants began to travel to India in great numbers, they held two certainties that came from Christian theology: false religion would exist in India; and false religion revolved around evil priests who had fabricated all kinds of laws, doctrines and rites in order to bully the innocent believers into submission. In this way, the priests of the devil abused religion for worldly goals. The European story about Brahminism and the caste system simply reproduced this Protestant image of false religion. The colonials identified the Brahmins as the priests and Brahminism as the foundation of false religion in India. This is how the dominant image of "the Hindu religion" came into being.
The sixth parallel lies in the fact that Christian theology penetrated and shaped the "secular" discourse about Judaism and Brahminism. The theological criticism became part of common sense and was reproduced as scientific truth. In India, this continues unto this day. Social scientists still talk about "Brahminism" as the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.
Perhaps the most tragic similarity is that some members of the minority community have internalised these stories about themselves. Some Jews began to believe that they were to blame for what happened during the Holocaust; many educated Brahmins now feel that they are guilty of historical atrocities against other groups. In some cases, this has led to a kind of identity crisis in which they vilify "Brahminism" in English-language academic debate, but continue their traditions. In other cases, the desire to "defend" these same traditions has inspired Brahmins to aggressively support Hindutva.
In twentieth-century Europe, we have seen how dangerous anti-Semitism was and what consequences it could have in society. Tragically, unimaginable suffering was needed before it was relegated to the realm of unacceptable positions. In India, anti-Brahminism was adopted from Protestant missionaries by colonial scholars who then passed it on to the secularists and Dalit intellectuals. They created the climate which allowed the Sangh Parivar to continue hijacking the social sciences for petty political purposes.
The question that India has to raise in the twenty-first century is this: Do we need bloodshed, before we will realise that the reproduction of anti-Brahminism is as harmful as anti-Muslim propaganda? What is needed to realise that the Hindutva movement has simply taken its cue from the secularists? Do we need a new victory of fascism, before we will admit that pernicious ideologies should not be sold as social science?

Note: Jakob De Roover is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO) Flanders at the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium.

2011-12-29T08:14:00.000-08:00

~:এক সপ্তাহে সিরাজগঞ্জ জেলার বেলকুচি উপজেলা ও এনায়েতপুর থানার ৭ টি মন্দির ভাঙচুর:~

গত এক সপ্তাহে সিরাজগঞ্জ জেলার বেলকুচি উপজেলা ও এনায়েতপুর থানার বিভিন্ন মন্দিরে প্রতিমা ভাঙচুর করেছে দুষ্কৃতিকারীরা ৷ বেলকুচি উপজেলার মহাশ্মশান ঘাট কালীমন্দিরের কালী মূর্তি, এনায়েতপুর কালীমন্দিরের কালীদেবীর মূর্তি, বটতলা কালীমন্দির, হালদার পাড়ার দুর্গামন্দিরের লক্ষ্মীদেবীর প্রতিমা, খামারগ্রাম কালীমন্দিরের কালী দেবীর প্রতিমা সহ মোট সাতটি মন্দিরের দেবীমূর্তি ভাঙচুর করা হয়েছে।
বেলকুচি থানা পুলিশ প্রতিমা ভাঙচুর ঘটনায় ৫ জনকে আটক করেছে বলে থানা সূত্রে জানা যায় ৷ কিন্তু ধারাবাহিকভাবে প্রতিমা ভাঙচুরের ঘটনায় স্থানীয় হিন্দুদের মধ্যে আতংকের সৃষ্টি হয়েছে ৷ জেলা পূজা উদযাপন কমিটি, শাহজাদপুর উপজেলা পূজা উদযাপন কমিটি, বেলকুচি উপজেলা পূজা উদযাপন কমিটি প্রতিমা ভাঙচুরের ঘটনায় নিন্দা জানিয়ে বিবৃতি দিয়েছে এবং অবিলম্বে দুষ্কৃতিকারীদের গ্রেফতারসহ ক্ষতিগ্রস্তদের ক্ষতিপূরণ দেওয়ার দাবি জানিয়েছে।
এদিকে উক্ত ঘটনার প্রতিবাদে বাংলাদেশ জাতীয় হিন্দু ছাত্র মহাজোট ঢাকা বিশ্ববিদ্যালয় ক্যাম্পাসে একটি বিক্ষোভ মিছিল বের করে। ওই মিছিলে ছাত্ররা মূর্তি ভাঙার ঘটনায় তীব্র প্রতিক্রিয়া ব্যক্ত করেন ও মন্দিরগুলোতে প্রশাসন কর্তৃক ক্ষতিপূরণ দাবি করেন। সংখ্যালঘুদের মানবাধিকার ও ধর্মীয় স্বাধীনতায় অপশক্তিদের হস্তক্ষেপের নিন্দা জানিয়ে প্রশাসনকে এ বিষয়ে আরও সতর্ক হওয়ার জন্য দাবি করেন তারা।

হিন্দু বার্তা হতে

Translation:

~:In Belkuchi subdivision and under Enayetpur Police Station, in the Shirajganj district, 7 Hindu Temples were desecrated/damaged by the miscreants:~

In the last one week, in one of the most bizarre incidents, in Belkuchi sub-division and under Enayetpur police station, in the Shirajganj district, Bangladesh, several Hindu temples were vandalized and idols desecrated/destroyed by some miscreants. The following list includes some of prominent names, among the seven such incidents in the last one week:
(i) "Mahashamshan Ghat Kali" Idol in Belkuchi sub-division.

(ii) The idol of goddess Kali in Enayetpur, Kali Temple

(iii) Bat-tola Kali Temple

(iv) The Lakshmi idol of "Durga" Temple in "Haldarpara"

(v) The idol of goddess "Kali" of Khamargram Kali Temple and few more.

In the connection the Belkuchi Police Station has rounded up 5 mischief mongers. But, this unwarranted breaking of the idols of Hindu Gods, in chronological order in so many places, has created a lot of furor among the local Hindus. The office bearers of District Pooja Celebration Committe, Shahjadpur subdivision Pooja Celebration Committe, Belkuchi subdivision Pooja celebration Committe, have vehemently criticized such motivated communal strikes by vested interest individual/groups on soft Hindu Targets and have asked for an immediate action against those responsible for perpetrating such heinous crimes against the Hindus. They had also, demanded compensation for the damaged party.

In another crucial development related to this shameless incident, National Students Federation of Bangladesh had organized a protest march within Dhaka University Campus. In that rally, the student leaders strongly condemned such motivated attacks on Hindu Symbols of reverence. They have also demanded an immediate compensation package, for those damaged temples, from the current Bangladeshi Government. The participating students in that rally, had also urged upon, the government of Bangladesh, to take stringent measures, against the culprits; so that the Human Rights and Right to religion, of the minorities of Bangladesh are not trampled upon by vested groups.

Courtesy: Shonaton.com

2011-12-29T06:34:00.000-08:00

Who Says Politics is the Last Resort of a Scoundrel ?

~~by Florine Roche

The oft-repeated maxim ‘politics is the last resort of a scoundrel’ may sound harsh and derogatory in the simple sense of the term. The blanket application of this maxim to the worldwide political scenario may not be justifiable. But if the political happenings in India in the last few decades are anything to go by, it makes sense to alter the maxim - ‘politics is the last resort of businessmen who are scoundrels’ or to change the definition completely based on individual percipience . Because for many in our country politics is also a business, to grab huge mass of land, buildings, shopping malls, apartments and prime properties in major cities of India and to amass wealth.   Considering the way this clan of scoundrels swindle our country left, right and centre, they deserve a much more ruthless term to describe them rather than stick on to the age old term of a mere scoundrel.   Because words like scoundrel are too mild and have lost their meaning in today’s changed circumstances. May be one can call them avaricious rogues, parasites, maniacs or a kind of bacteria, virus or political cancer, who are bent upon inflicting such a deep wound from which our country cannot survive leave alone recover.
One can only say politics in India stinks badly, to an inexplicable degree as it is unable to come out from the morass of filth, corruption, dishonesty, rank opportunism, expediency, maneuverings and manipulation of all kinds and above all, greed and criminalization that has come to afflict it. Elections after elections we keep generating more filth adding on to the existing one. With many politicians with criminal background getting elected to the parliament both at the centre and in states, one can only expect the political situation to become worst than what it is today. Just wait and watch! The stabbing to death of a sitting BJP MLA in Bihar by an exploited school principal, is just a small price paid by the politician for his misdemeanor and brazen behavior. And lo, there will be enhanced security cover to these ‘netaas’ , for which taxpayer’s money will be spent.
You may wonder what warranted this kind of outburst to direct my angst against politicians at this stage, now that 2G scam is losing the initial euphoria it had generated.   What triggered my pent up anger against the degeneration of the political scenario is the Citizens Report on Governance and Development, 2010, released by the National Social Watch recently showing that 128 out of 543 (25%) of the Lok Sabha members in India are either industrialists, traders, businessmen or builders. Though it is nothing to gloat about, Rajya MPs from these groups account for only 10 % (25 out of 245) in the parliament. Not that it is something that was not known to a majority of Indians. The trend of businessmen becoming politicians has been on the rise especially in the last two decades.   But for the first time there was a clear idea of the number of businessmen netaas who have succeeded in spreading their tentacles to the precincts of parliament, albeit as elected representatives.
The report also says that this trend is a flagrant departure from the past when both the houses of parliament had the right balance of educationists, intellectuals, industrialists, sportspersons, social workers or people who excelled in art, culture, literature & music. The report says “it was rarely that one found an industrialist or businessmen or others from allied communities in the Lok Sabha right until the 1990. But the recent years have witnessed an astonishing growth of crorepatis in both the houses of parliament”.
Again, it is not just the question of these businessmen spreading their wings in parliament, but using their clout for their personal gains. Ever since getting elected to the parliament, the financial fortunes of many MPS have also undergone a sea-change - of course only for the better. This is, at a time when common people are struggling to live in the big bad world with spiraling inflation and many small time businessmen struggling to survive following the onslaught from MNC’s, luxury malls and big business houses and the global economic meltdown resulting in the closure of many businesses.
Leaving aside common man, where else but in politics in India, can one expect his income to rise by a stupendous 3,024 per cent during a period of five years from 2004 to 2009? This record is created by 46 year old Vijayawada parliamentarian Lagadapati Rajagopal, an industrialists who unabashedly calls himself as a political social worker. During this five year period his fortunes witnessed an exponential growth from Rs. 9.25 crore to 289 crore, something that no ordinary mortal can even think of in his dreams. And behold!   The change in the political fortunes of these elected netaas is not confined to a single individual or any single party. It spreads across politicians of all hues and political parties.
Among those parliamentarians whose affluence has witnessed a big leap include BJP MP Maneka Gandhi. Her assets rose from 6.32 crores ibn 2004 to reach Rs. 17.6 crores in 2009. The assets of another BJP MP Uday Singh, who hails from Bihar,   rose from 3.06 crores in 2004 to 43.86 crores in 2009.
The assets of our own ‘Mannina Maga’s Maga” H D Kumaraswamy saw a sharp rise from 3.06 crores in 2004 to 49.85 crores within a short period of 5 years. Milind Deora, young businessmen-parliamentarian, son of union minister Murli Deora, also is a crorepathi whose assets saw a big jump from 4.98 crores to 25.86 crores. Industrialist-Congress parliamentarian Navin Jindal also witnessed a meteoric rise in his fortunes from 12.12 crores to 131 crores in five years. Another Trinamol Congress MP Ambika Bannerjee also considerably enhanced her wealth from 23.18 lakhs in 2000 to 17.6 crores in 2009.   This is just the tip of the iceberg, based on the declaration of assets required to be submitted by these parliamentarians. One can just imagine the black money staked in foreign banks, benami properties, assets and cash and gold by these unscrupulous and shameless beasts!
Union minister and veteran parliamentarian S. Jaipal Reddy, who released the report, painted a rather grim picture of what lies ahead saying the proportion of rich parliamentarians will keep rising in the days to come mainly because contesting elections has become a costly affair.   The report also reveals that except in Kerala more money is spent during elections in the southern states.
One would not have grudged these businessmen becoming mere parliamentarians. But, many members of parliament belonging to various political parties are in the centre stage of the conflict of interest. This is because many parliamentarians are part of the various standing committees connected to their specific professions, despite being industrialists. It is well known in the parliament circles that finance and industry-related committees are the most sought after and many MP’s often solidly lobby to be a part of such committees. A cursory glance at the list of members of these all important committees including standing committees on finance and industry and the public accounts committee, reaffirm these facts.
For example at least 3 members on the Standing Committee on Health, run their own medical and education institutions. The 31 member Standing Committee on finance has everyone connected with industry, cutting across party lines and 8 of them are from Andhra Pradesh, all leading captains of industry. Can these members allow to formulate policies which are detrimental to their business interests?
Nearly 1/3 members of the Committee on Industry are those from the business and industry. Businessmen Navin Jindal, Tamilnadu educationist M Thambi Durai and Andhra-based contractor Kamba Siva Rao are members of the Public Accounts Committee. Public Undertaking Committee has three Andhra-based businessmen as members – T Subbirami Reddy, Nama Nageshwara Rao and Rajagopal Lagadapati. An MP who has a defense equipment business is allowed to be on a defense committee that formulates policies pertaining to defense.
These members of various standing committees have the power to summon officers, including those from the income tax and revenue departments and one can imagine the outcome. It is said these members wield enormous clout and even their personal assistants often browbeat bureaucrats and officials. Being members of the powerful standing committees, one cannot rule out abuse of public office for personal gains by these MPs. It is not without reason therefore, that the personal wealth of many of our MP’s rose by leaps and bounds.
While our MP’s are bent upon getting a handsome increase in their salaries or even ask to be paid salaries equivalent to that of salary paid to the highest bureaucrat - may be taking a cue from Japan and France, they fail to emulate politicians of other countries in other matters. In Switzerland, parliamentarians are not paid salary or allowance. They just get paid leave from their employers on the days of the session. In Mexico, MP’s are paid handsomely but are allowed to do business or practice any profession. In USA, members of Congress cannot earn more than 15% from outside of their Congressional salary. But when it comes to Indian MP’s there is no bar. They only add up to the existing bars or remove all the bars/obstacles that come in the way of their business interests.
Though becoming a MP is a sure fire way of making more money in this country, decent people shy away from joining politics. It is not easy also for an ordinary mortal to get into politics where dynastic succession is in vogue both at the centre and in many states. Even though some politicians are naïve at the time of joining politics, with the passage of time and on joining bunch of unscrupulous rogues, they become one like them. May be it is difficult to survive amidst a bunch of crooks who are driven by the sole objective of swindling this country in all possible ways.
Now you know why our businessmen sweat it out during election time doing padyatras and even coming to the doorstep of voters with folded hands? It is a kind of investment to them, as one months of hard work is sure to earn him or her in crores in the days to come. So the next time a businessman enters into politics and eulogizes about serving the public, you know what he/she means. So take full liberty in altering the existing maxim. Let your creative mind work overtime.

Courtesy: Daijiworld.com

2011-12-24T04:19:00.000-08:00

"Girls undergo systematic rape and torture in brothels"

KOLKATA: One doesn't expect socialites to spend a languid rainy afternoon listening to horror stories. Especially when it's a diminutive 62-year-old narrating the tales. But when it is one Anuradha Koirala doing the talk, the glamour quotient doesn't matter. The grit that fuels this character does. It jolts listeners out of stupor and lands them in a stark world with sleaze and grime.
A packed audience, mostly members of the FICCI ladies organization, listened with rapt attention as the chairperson of Maiti Nepal (an NGO that has rescued over 18,000 women from sexual slavery and exploitation) recounted stories that touch a nadir in human depravation.
Radhika, a 16-year-old from a well-to-do high caste Nepali family, fell in love with a boy from a low caste and eloped to get married. But with the boy unable to find a job and the girl's family unwilling to support them, the husband convinced her to sell one of her kidneys at Chennai for Rs 65,000. By then, they had already had a girl. After the money was spent, the husband sold her along with the daughter to a brothel in Mumbai. There she was first gang raped and then forced into sex trade. Her daughter's tongue was burned to prevent her from crying for her mother when she was entertaining clients. They lived like this for six years till a client learnt about her tale and informed Maiti.
"We managed to rescue Radhika and her daughter. There are many instances when tip-offs from clients have led to rescue of Nepali girls forced into prostitution. But for every such fairytale ending, there are hundreds of cases in which a girl lives and dies a sex slave," said Koirala.
Sarita, another Nepali girl trafficked to Mumbai and working in a brothel, broke both her legs after jumping off the three-storied building when she attempted to escape from forced oral sex. She survived. But for many girls, it is too late when rescued. "Several of them are infected with AIDS. Others become drug addicts. All that Maiti can then provide them is dignified death. At its hospice, there are 17-year-olds who look like 70, waiting for death to deliver them from a short, yet horribly cruel life. While women rescued from India are usually infected with diseases, those rescued from the Gulf are worse off with 57% psychotic cases from not just sexual but physical and mental abuse as well. Depravation reaches new levels when girls are trafficked to the Gulf. They are like zombies when rescued," she said.
While most girls trafficked from Nepal land up in brothels in Nagpur, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Surat, Delhi, Bangalore, Siliguri, Gorakhpur and Meerut, girls are increasingly being re-routed to the Gulf, China and South-East Asia as well. "While traffickers in India prefer girls with mongoloid features as prevalent in people from lower castes in Nepal, those in China prefer girls from high caste who have prominent nose and high cheek bone," Maiti Nepal director Bishwo Ram Khadka said.
Of the 600,000-800,000 people trafficked every year globally, 70% are women and children. Of this, 150,000 cases are in South Asia with Nepal accounting for a lion's share. Maiti estimates there are 150,000-400,000 Nepali girls and women in Indian brothels. A big chunk of them are aged 7-24 years.
"The girls undergo systematic rape and torture. They are starved and scalded by smoldering cigarettes and sometimes even murdered. Those who are young are given hormone injections so that they appear big and then gang raped as an initiation into the trade. Thereafter, they are made to entertain 5-50 clients a day," said Koirala.
While extreme poverty in west Nepal is considered the primary reason for Nepali girls being trafficked in large numbers, Koirala says gender discrimination is the root cause, citing social practices like Chaupadi, Deuki and Badi where girls are driven into flesh trade by families.
Koirala took up the cause of rescuing and rehabilitating women in 1993 after suffering domestic violence. "At the time, everyone in Nepal was speaking about trafficking but no one was doing anything. So I took a plunge and have been swimming against the tide since," said Koirala, who was awarded CNN Hero of the Year 2010.

Courtesy: The Times of India

2011-12-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

~:Social media code: Congress cautious, BJP opposes Sibal's way:~

The Congress Wednesday reacted cautiously to government moves for a code of conduct for social media, calling for larger debate, while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was supportive but said Communications Minister Kapil Sibal's way of approaching the issue is not right
Congress spokesman Manish Tewari hoped the government would hold threadbare consultations with all stakeholders before taking a decision.
"The issue is very sensitive and it needs larger debate. We hope that the government will take any step after this issue is discussed threadbare with all stakeholders," Tewari said answering a query over the controversy involving content on social media such as Facebook and Google.
BJP leader S.S. Ahluwalia supported the government's view on objectionable content on the social networking sites but said Sibal's way of approaching the issue is not right.
"We condemn if some distortion has taken place on such sites. No political party would approve distortion of images of public figures on the social network sites," Ahluwalia said.
But he said that "Sibal's way of regulating them is not okay".
Ahluwalia compared the government's move to ask the social networking sites to block objectionable content with the way it treated yoga guru Baba Ramdev when he protested the black money issue in Delhi earlier in the year and was asked to give a declaration on ending the agitation.
The BJP leader said the government should instead bring the regulation that it planned for these social network sites to parliament for discussion. "We will give our views then," he said.
Stating that the constitution granted complete freedom of speech, Ahluwalia said the social networking sites should not promote pervert pictures or hurt religious sentiments of people.
Sibal had said that global internet companies should block some content from their sites in view of senstivities and cultural ethos of people of the country.

Courtesy: Mid-day

2011-12-08T16:35:00.000-08:00

'Why censor FB when you allow Sunny Leone on TV?

Sunny Leone

BJP leader wonders why the government wants to repress social media, when it is not censoring the Indo-Canadian porn star who is now a rage on national television; Kapil Sibal states our society is 'not as mature as in the West'.
Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) young leader Anurag Singh Thakur wonders why the government wants to censor social media like Facebook when it is not 'censoring Sunny Leone', an Indo-Canadian porn star who is a rage on the popular television show Bigg Boss.
"Why do they want to censor Facebook, when they don't censor Sunny Leone," Thakur asked a day after Communications Minister Kapil Sibal advocated screening of inflammatory or offensive content on social networking sites.
Sunny trend:
"Thousands of children are searching for her on internet and getting connected to porn sites," said Thakur on the sidelines of a conference on effective legislatures organised by PRS Legislative Research.
Congress leader and Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor, who had 'rejected' censorship for social media, however, said that after an expostulation from his colleague Kapil Sibal he felt some restriction was needed, as Indian politics and society was not as mature as in the West.
Are we immature?
"I talked to Kapil Sibal, he told me that there were inflammatory images of gods, goddesses, prophets. When I saw those, I felt there is a problem. Free speech in India is not the same as in the West," Tharoor said at the conference.
"If certain people see these images, it can cause violence, we don't have a democracy so mature that we can ignore such things. So certain amount of restraint is necessary," he said.
"Inflammatory communal incitement is like a match at a petrol pump, why should we do that?" Tharoor argued, adding in good measure, however, that he was against censorship.
Contradicting him, Thakur said social media was a platform for common expression and should be allowed to grow and become mature.
"Social media should be given time to get mature," said Thakur, adding that it should be left to the social media to create ways of removing objectionable content. "There are options like watermarking," he suggested.
Sibal, however, said the government will not allow social networking sites to host 'objectionable' content and will take steps to screen and remove these.

Courtesy: Mid-day

2011-12-07T14:01:00.000-08:00

Nikaah in Shiv Sena 'first family'

Mumbai, December 5: Bal Thackeray's eldest son late Bindumadhav's daughter Neha and her husband Mohammad Nabi got married on Thursday and the wedding reception held at Hotel Taj Lands End on Sunday in Mumbai.
Raj Thackeray, who was present with wife Sharmila and children Amit and Urvashi, did the kanyadaan.
Uddhav Thackeray and wife Rashmi were also present for the occasion, as was Smita Thackeray and her sons Rahul and Aishwary.
Neha's mother Madhavi Thackeray welcomed guests like Manohar Joshi, Ram Kadam, Ashish Shelar, Gopal Shetty, Nitin Sardesai and wife Swati, Mangesh Sangle, Shirish Parkar, Shishir Shinde and others.
The wedding was kept a secret from his famous mama by Vilas Gupte,Bal Thackeray's nephew.
"I haven't had the courage to tell him yet, but I'm sure Bal mama will bless the couple," said Gupte, an anxious but proud father, at the reception.
By all available reports, the bride converted to Islam and had a nikaah three months ago at Bandra (West), a posh Mumbai suburb.
Thackeray lives close by, in Bandra (East), recently declared Mumbai's dirtiest area by the municipal corporation.
"They had the nikaah three months ago in Bandra, which was attended by Neha's friends," confirmed Mohammed Qayoom, the groom's brother.
The bride and her father are denying the conversion. Asked if she changed her religion for the nikaah as is mandatory, Neha smiled and said: "I don't need to convert, I have a very adjusting husband."
Haji Afzal Hussain Khan, the bridegroom's father, said: "They did have a nikaah. Frankly, it depends on the girl's family when they want to tell him (Thackeray)."
Neha and Mohammed Nabi, both physiotherapists, met a year and a half ago at a private clinic in Kurla. They fell in love and decided to tie the knot. "But the family took some time to come around," admitted the couple.
Gupte does not think there could be a permanent falling out between his family and the Thackerays over Neha's marriage. "I'm sure when I do tell him, Bal mama will accept it like the rest of us have."
Neha and Nabi had a registered marriage on Sunday followed by a reception at Wadala, central Mumbai. The bride looked radiant in her red-and-gold zari sari beside her handsome groom in a beige suit.
Gupte's mother and the Sena boss are first cousins. "One of the reasons I kept the news of the wedding from Bal mama was that we did not want to trouble them during the election campaign."
The Sena lost both bypolls held on Saturday, with its Malwan candidate losing his deposit to ex-Sainik Narayan Rane.
The marriage is significant because of Thackeray's past. A saffron supporter, he would denounce Muslims as "Pakade" (Pakistan-backers). In 1999, the Supreme Court barred him from voting in or contesting elections for inciting Hindu-Muslim riots.

Courtesy: Coataldigest.com

2011-12-07T13:33:00.000-08:00

~:Bal Thackeray’s granddaughter weds Gujarati guy:~

Mumbai: Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray's granddaughter Neha married a Gujarati guy in Mumbai on December 4, sources said.
Neha is the daughter of Bal Thackeray's eldest son late Bindumadhav. Neha has married Manan, son of an old friend of Bindumadhav and Raj Thackeray. The marriage has further cemented the family’s bond with the MNS leader.
The entire family, excluding Bal Thackeray, attended the wedding at Hotel Taj Lands End. Neha's mother Madhavi Thackeray welcomed guests like Manohar Joshi, Ram Kadam, Ashish Shelar, Gopal Shetty, Nitin Sardesai and wife Swati, Mangesh Sangle, Shirish Parkar, Shishir Shinde and others.

Raj Thackeray, too, attended the reception, along with his wife and sons, reports said.

Meanwhile, there is a speculation in media circles that the Thackeray's son-in-law converted to Hinduism sometime back, but the family has denied the reports.

Courtesy:Daily Bhaskar
Photo Courtesy: Pakistan Defence

2011-12-07T13:20:00.000-08:00

~:Underage girl forces classmates into prostitution in China:~

A 13-year-old-girl in China pushed her three underage friends into prostitution after suspecting them of disclosing her secret that she was working as a prostitute at a massage parlour.
The incident occurred in Henan province.
Honghong (name changed) was herself lured into the sex trade to earn pocket money after she quit the school two years ago, the Shanghai Daily quoted a media report as saying.
But when her boyfriend broke up with her after learning about her job, Honghong was convinced that her classmates had disclosed her secret and vowed to take revenge, the report added.
The underage Honghong and a fellow 17-year-old prostitute threatened to beat the three classmates, aged between 13 to 14, to death if they didn't join prostitution.
Fourteen-year-old Xiaoshan (name changed) was coerced into having sex with two men at the massage parlour. The other two 13-year-old girls looked so young that the parlour owner refused to keep them.
Honghong was immune from the legal punishment while her helper, Dandan, has been charged with forcing others into prostitution, according to Zhongyuan District People's Procuratorate, a law supervision organ, in the provincial capital Zhengzhou.

All the four girls lived in low-rent communities with their migrant worker parents who struggled to make ends meet in Zhengzhou, the report said.

Courtesy: Mid Day

2011-12-07T13:04:00.000-08:00

"Banana, cucumber bring sexual thoughts; women must avoid them"

Cairo: Women should be kept away from fruits like banana or cucumbers as they could arouse them and make them think of sex, feels an Islamic cleric. The unnamed sheikh who is based in Europe was quoted saying to an Egyptian website that if women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male should serve them.
According to him, these fruits and vegetables “resemble the male penis” and hence could bring sexual thoughts to a woman’s mind.
He also added carrots and zucchini to the list of forbidden foods for women.
The sheikh once featured in an article on el-Senousa news.
One being asked how to “control” women when they are out shopping for groceries, the cleric answered saying this matter is between them and God.
Answering another question about what to do if women in the family like these foods, the sheikh advised the interviewer to take the food and cut it for them in a hidden place so they cannot see it.
The opinion has stirred a storm of irony and denouncement among Muslims online, with hundreds of comments mocking the cleric.
One reader said that these religious “leaders” give Islam “a bad name” and another commented said that he is a “retarded” person and he must quite his post immediately.
Others called him a seeker of fame, but no official responses from renowned Islamic scholars have been published on the statements.

Courtesy: Daily Bhaskar

2011-11-27T11:32:00.000-08:00

Hawking Poison: Desperate US prisons look for lethal drugs from India. Should we market death?

Anjali Puri

Sodium Thiopental:

What Short-acting barbiturate used as an anaesthetic. First of a standard three-drug protocol used in the United States to execute prisoners sentenced to death. Lethal dose (up to 5 grams) used to render prisoner unconscious, after which a paralytic and a toxic agent injected in sequence.
Why Shortage of sodium thiopental in the US after sole domestic supplier, shut production in 2009, citing lack of raw materials. Demand low, outside of prisons in the US.
How Initially, US prisons able to import it from Britain, but ban imposed by Britain, other European countries, after human rights groups protest. Mainstream drug companies reluctant to supply. Therefore, some prisons are turning to India.

***

It all started with a mundane phonecall in August, received by the Noida office of a Swiss-Indian drug company called Naari. The caller, a Calcutta-based Indian businessman called Chris Harris, wanted samples of a drug called sodium thiopental to dispatch, he explained, to Zambia for registration by the country’s drug authorities. It was a perfectly plausible request. The drug, though largely replaced by better anaesthetics in the West, is still used widely in the developing world. Accordingly, Naari dipped into its stocks and sent vials containing 485 grams of sodium thiopental to Harris in Calcutta in end-September; and waited for the large order that he said would follow.
A few weeks later, the firm’s Indian officials were stunned when an investigator with the London-based charity, Reprieve, which campaigns against the death penalty, called to tell them where those samples had really gone. Not to Zambia, but the American state of Nebraska; not for medicinal use, but to execute convicts by the chosen American method, lethal injection (see infographic).
Surprise turned to outrage when they learnt from the investigator, Maya Foa, that Naari had even been named as the supplier of the drug in a press release issued by Nebraska’s Department of Correctional Services (NCDs) on November 3. “We’re not in the business of helping to execute people, we were lied to and cheated,” says a spokesman for the company. The prison paid $5,411 for the chemicals—over 15 times what Naari would have ordinarily charged Harris for them. But Harris hadn’t paid at all. By selling Naari’s free samples to Nebraska’s execution machinery, apparently desperate for drugs, the small-time middleman had made—yes—a killing.
Foa, who’s working with Naari on strategies to prevent the exported drugs being used in executions, says the episode, though shocking, is typical. “It is often the case that manufacturers and suppliers are drawn into this trade unwittingly and have no idea their drugs are going to execution chambers,” she says. That knowledge belongs to perfidious middlemen, key players in a macabre niche of global commerce ominously seeking to widen its footprint in India.
High US standards for foreign drugs drop dramatically when it involves import of drugs for lethal injections.
Harris, for instance, has been in assiduous contact with American prison departments, as shown by documents obtained by campaigners through Freedom of Information Act applications. It was he who brokered transactions in which Nebraska and South Dakota bought sodium thiopental in December 2010 and February 2011 respectively from Kayem Pharmaceuticals Pvt Ltd, which turned out to be a two-room outfit in a Mumbai suburb. (Eventually, US enforcement officials did not permit the use of those drugs, due to procedural violations in the import process.) Dipak Shangvi of Ganpati Exim, a Calcutta wholesaler and exporter of drugs, says he was in discussions with Harris a few months ago over supplying the drug to the US, but pulled out quickly when he realised—thanks to a Google search that led him to ask Harris some probing questions—that it was going to a prison. “We are Jains,” he said, by way of explanation.
The intriguing larger question is: why are state institutions in the mighty United States shopping at the murky end of the pharma trade? The answer is, they don’t have much choice. Drug companies, increasingly reluctant to be branded as suppliers of drugs for lethal injections, are distancing themselves from US prisons, which is no small achievement for hyperactive anti-capital punishment groups. When Hospira, the sole producer of sodium thiopental within the US, shut shop in 2009, for a variety of reasons, some US prisons initially managed to source the drug from Britain. (By now, it will not surprise readers to know it came from a company that operated out of the back of a driving school.) However, campaigners put an end to that trade by persuading several European governments to ban it. Many US prisons switched to a single drug called pentobarbital, commonly used to put down dogs, but campaigners won that round, too. In July this year, a Danish company, Lundbeck, the only licensed maker of the drug in the US, bowed to pressure (especially when it took the form of a major investor, a Danish pension fund, selling off a hefty € 5.4 million worth of its shares) and agreed to deny the drug to American execution chambers.
What has made the campaign against lethal injection popular is not just European aversion to the death penalty, but the campaigners’ unrelenting focus on American double standards. The US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) zealously protects its citizens from the perceived shortcomings of foreign drugs (ask big Indian pharmaceutical firms, which have to jump through many hoops for usfda approval, before their products can enter the US market) but those standards drop dramatically, clearly for political reasons, when it comes to the import of drugs for lethal injections. That’s why consignments arranged by Indian middlemen are able to make it to US prisons.
The tacit rationale seems to be that standards don’t matter for people who will die anyway. But lawyers and campaigners are contesting that cynical argument, both in and outside the courts. They argue that murky supply chains can result in chemicals becoming degraded and lead to torturous and painful deaths. The chilling, oft-cited recent case is of Brandon Rhode, 31, whose eyes remained open until he died, leading a doctor to testify that the imported (from Britain) sodium thiopental injected into him may have “lacked efficiency”.
While campaigners are all set to fight the use of the latest imports for executions, the Indian route is a worry, admits Foa. “We have been very successful; some US states are now in a de facto state of moratorium on the death penalty. This could take us backwards.”
Should Indians care? Opinions are divided, even among those who usually care, reflecting cleavages on the larger question of capital punishment. (There is also a certain exasperation with the blinkered, single-issue vision of western groups.) C.M. Gulhati, usually a trenchant critic of drug companies, sees no case to answer here. “If we execute our prisoners, we really can’t object to Americans executing theirs. There are no legal, clinical or ethical grounds on which we can say, don’t export the drug to American prisons,” he says. Amar Jesani, an expert on ethics, rights and health systems, disagrees: “What is lawful is not necessarily ethical. Section 377 was not ethical, the death penalty is not.” Pointing out that doctors in America do not, by consensus, administer lethal injections, he says: “If they don’t participate in killing, pharmaceutical companies shouldn’t either. They should be named and shamed when they do.”
Interestingly, Dilip G. Shah, secretary general of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, takes much the same tack. Dismissively, he says, “This is a niche segment, dominated by unscrupulous small operators looking for easy money. None of the large pharmaceutical companies would touch it. They wouldn’t want to be associated with killing people.” And why, he asks, should the industry compromise on its reputation for relatively small gains: “The volume is nothing—are there that many people on death row?” For campaigners, that last argument might work best, in persuading India to turn its back on this sordid trade. Self-interest usually gets more done than ethics.

Courtesy: Outlook (5th December, 2011)

2011-11-27T04:47:00.000-08:00

~:Selected pieces from the Booker Prize (2006) winning Novel: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai:~

This lady seems to have a fascination to use slangs and highly sensual texts at random, especially the four letter word. Let us have a look at some of the sentences from the "Award Winning" book:

He covered his timidity with manufactured disgust: "How can you? Those, those women are dirty," he said primly. "Stinking bitches," sounding awkward. "Fucking bitches, fucking cheap women you’ll get some disease . . . smell bad . . . hubshi. . . all black and ugly . . . they make me sick. . [Chapter: 3].
Chile—in the Zona Rosa duty-free of Tierra del Fuego, Indians, whiskey, electronics. Bitterness at the thought of Pakistanis up in the Areca used-car business. "Ah . . . forget it. . . let those bhenchoots make their quarter percent. [Chapter: 5].
In his cabin bunk at night, the sea made indecent licking sounds about the ship’s edge. He thought of how he had half undressed and hurriedly re-dressed his wife, of how he had only glimpsed her expression, just bits and pieces of it in the slipping of the pallu over her head. However in memory of the closeness of female flesh, his penis reached up in the dark and waved about, a simple blind sea creature but refusing to be refused. He found his own organ odd: insistent but cowardly; pleading but pompous. [Chapter: 8].
Their washing line sagged under a load of Marks and Spencer panties, and through large leg portholes, they were favored with views of Kanchenjunga collared by cloud. At the entrance to the house hung a thangkha of a demon—with hungry fangs and skull necklaces, brandishing an angry penis—to dissuade the missionaries. In the drawing room was a trove of knickknacks. [Chapter: 9].
She sometimes thought herself pretty, but as she began to make a proper investigation, she found it was a changeable thing, beauty. No sooner did she locate it than it slipped from her grasp; instead of disciplining it, she was unable to refrain from exploiting its flexibility. She stuck her tongue out at herself and rolled her eyes, then smiled beguilingly. She transformed her expression from demon to queen. When she brushed her teeth, she noticed her breasts jiggle like two jellies being rushed to the table. She lowered her mouth to taste the flesh and found it both firm and yielding. This plumpness jiggliness firmness softness, all coupled together in an unlikely manner, must surely give her a certain amount of bartering power? [Chapter: 13].
Now he walked through the greasy bus station with its choking smell of exhaust and past the dark cubbyhole where, behind a soiled red curtain, you could pay to watch on a shaking screen such films as Rape of Erotic Virgin and SHE: The Secrets of Married Life.[Chapter: 15].
"Fucking Russians! Crazy borscht and shit!" shouted Mr. Bocher in anger, but to no avail, and abruptly, it was all over again. "Fuck you, you fuckers," he yelled at the men who had worked for him.[Chapter: 17].
The reasoning, they all knew from having heard this before, formed a central pillar of Hindu belief and it went like this: so strict was the Koran that its teachings were beyond human capability. Therefore Muslims were forced to pretend one thing, do another; they drank, smoked, ate pork, visited prostitutes, and then denied it. Unlike Hindus, who needn’t deny. [Chapter: 21]
Jemubhai was glad he could disguise his inexpertness, his crudity, with hatred and fury—this was a trick that would serve him well throughout his life in a variety of areas—but, my God, the grotesqueness of it all shocked him: the meeting of reaching, suckering organs in an awful attack and consumption; maimed, bruise-colored kicking, cringing forms of life; sour, hair-fringed gullet; agitating snake muscled malevo-lency; the stench of urine and shit mixed up with the smell of sex; the squelch, the marine squirt, that uncontrollable run—it turned his civilized stomach.[Chapter: 28]
The container broke apart, the powder lurched up filtered down. Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment, he clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor, and as more of that perfect rose complexion, blasted into a million motes, came filtering down, in a dense frustration of lust and fury—penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of—he stuffed his way ungracefully into her. [Chapter: 28]
She didn’t know much about the English, and whatever she did know was based on a few snatches of talk that had reached them in the seclusion of the women’s quarters, such as the fact that Englishwomen at the club played tennis dressed only in their underwear.
"Shorts!" said a young uncle.
"Underwear," the ladies insisted.
Among underwear-clad ladies wielding tennis rackets, how would she manage?
She picked up the judge’s powder puff, unbuttoned her blouse, and powdered her breasts. She hooked up her blouse again and that puff, so foreign, so silken, she stuffed inside; she was too grown-up for childish thieving, she knew, but she was filled with greed. [Chapter: 29]
As he left he could hear Sai beginning to sob. "You dirty bastard," she shouted through her weeping, "you get back here. Behave so badly and then run away??" [Chapter: 29]
"You bastard," she said to the emptiness. "My dignity is worth a thousand of you." [Chapter: 29]
"Shut the fuck up, motherfucker," men shouted from up above. "Shithead. What the fuck. For fuck’s sake. Asshole. Fuck you." A rain of beer bottles crashed around them. [Chapter: 30]
His papers, his papers. The green card, green card, the machoot sala oloo ka patha chaar sau bees green card that was not even green. It roosted heavily, clumsily, pinkishly on his brain day and night; he could think of nothing else, and he threw up sometimes, embracing the toilet, emptying his gullet into its gullet, lying over it like a drunk. The post brought more letters from his father, and as he picked them up, he cried. Then he read them and he grew violently angry. [Chapter: 30]
Before the butcher slit the goat’s throat, Biju could hear him working up his disdain, yelling "Bitch, whore, cunt, sali," at her, dragging her forward then, and killing her. [Chapter: 30]
But Bose swung rapidly to another position—satisfaction either way—but depth, resolution. Still a question for Bose: should he damn the past or find some sense in it? Drunk, eyes aswim with tears, "Bastards!" he said with such bitterness. "What bastards they were!" raising his voice as if attempting to grant himself conviction. "Goras—get away with everything don’t they? Bloody white people. They’re responsible for all the crimes of the century!" [Chapter: 31]
One of the boy’s attackers had unzipped his pants and was pissing on him, surrounded by a crowd of jeering red-faced men. [Chapter: 32].
The call was over, and the emptiness Biju hoped to dispel was reinforced. He could not talk to his father; there was nothing left between them but emergency sentences, clipped telegram lines shouted out as if in the midst of a war. They were no longer relevant to each other’s lives except for the hope that they would be relevant. He stood with his head still in the phone booth studded with bits of stiff chewing gum and the usual Fuck-ShitCockDickPussyLoveWar, swastikas, and hearts shot with arrows mingling in a dense graffiti garden, too sugary too angry too perverse—the sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart. [Chapter: 36].
There was the joy of the chase and the joy of the fleeing, and when he set off on practical research trips, he had found pure love in the most sordid of spots, the wrong sides of town where the police didn’t venture; medieval, tunneling streets so narrow you had to pass crabwise past the drug dealers and the whores; where, at night, men he never saw ladled their tongues into his mouth. [Chapter: 39]
He looked up the word in the card catalog and brought back armfuls of books; he smoked cheroots, drank port and Madeira, read everything he could from psychology to science to pornography to poetry, Egyptian love letters, ninth century Tamilian erotica. [Chapter: 39]
They looked pretty in the sun, these little homes, babies crawling about with bottoms red through pants with the behinds cut out so they could do their susu and potty; fuschia and roses—for everyone in Kalimpong loved flowers and even amid botanical profusion added to it. [Chapter: 40]
Chickens, chickens, chickens bought to supplement a tiny income. The birds had never revealed themselves to her so clearly; a grotesque bunch, rape and violence being enacted, hens being hammered and pecked as they screamed and flapped, attempting escape from the rapist rooster. [Chapter: 40]
"Look at that. It’s getting fucking Biblical," said someone next to him at the rails. "Fucking Job. Why? Why?" [Chapter: 41]
The gale took his words and whipped them away; they reached Biju’s ears strangely clipped, on their way to somewhere else. The man turned his face in toward Biju to save the wind from thus slicing their conversation. "Muhheakunnuk, Muh-heakunnuk—the river that flows both ways," he added with significant eyebrows, "both ways. That is the real fucking name." Sentences spilled out of the face along with juicy saliva. He was smiling and slavering over his information, gobbling and dispelling at the same time.But what was the false name then? Biju possessed no name at all for this black water. It was not his history. And then came fucking Moby Dick. The river full of dead fucking whales. The fucking carcasses were hauled up the river, fucking pulverised in the factories. "Oil, you know," he said with intense internal frustration. "It’s always been fucking oil. And underwear." Eyebrows and saliva spray. "Corsets!!" he said suddenly. [Chapter: 41].
All over India the crops had been rotting in the fields, the nation’s prostitutes complaining about lack of business because every male in the country had his eyes glued to the screen. [Chapter: 41].
He received blank faces, some angry laughter. "Saala Machoot. . . what does he think? We’re going to look for his dog?" People were insulted. "At a time like this. We can’t even eat!" [Chapter: 46]
"How am I supposed to travel to Jalpaiguri in my dirty underwear? As it is I am smelling so badly, I am ashamed even to go near anyone," the same lady said, holding her own nose with an anguished expression to show how she was ashamed even to be near herself. [Chapter: 48]
"Stupid bitch, dirty bitch!" The more he swore, the harder he found he could hit. [Chapter: 49]

2011-11-04T17:32:00.000-07:00

Strauss-Kahn's sex scandal to be turned into porn film
By ANI, Thursday, Nov 3, 2011

[See how Media distorts the News: The "alleged molestation" (which already is crumbling due to lack of evidence in the court of law) becomes "Alleged Rape"...and this time it is not the Indian Rotten Press, it is from the reputed house like ANI.... The basic character of world-wide media has deteriorated to nadir in the last two--three decades or so...in an efforts to grab the eye-balls, in the midst of fierce competition.!! Now if you say, you are a journalists, many people might try to shun you on the fear of getting involved in unnecessary troubles. Some of these unscrupulous media-men are responsible for this and have degraded this noble profession]

Paris, Nov 3 (ANI): The internationally publicized allegation of rape by a New York hotel maid against former International Monitory Fund head Dominique Strauss Kahn will now turned into a porn movie.
The film tilted "DXK", will be produced by the company My Porn Production that has urged public to help fund the film's 200,000 Euros production.
The film will star Roberto Malone as the lead character "David Sex King." Porn star Sandra Romain will play his wife and actress Katia De Lys will portray the hotel maid.
According to the producers, the film will be a "parody" of the scandal that saw Strauss-Kahn accused of sexually assaulting Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean hotel maid, The Local reports.
The scandal dashed Strauss-Kahn's hopes of becoming the Socialist Party's challenger to President Nicolas Sarkozy in upcoming election.
The French politician is still facing a US civil suit brought against him by Diallo. (ANI)

2011-10-30T05:54:00.000-07:00

~:VEDIC PERSPECTIVE ON CREATION:~

The Vedas state that creation is ongoing: what has been in the past is being repeated in the new cycle: Advaita Vedanta upholds the notion of the pulsating or oscillating universe:

Creation is interpreted in the Vedas as a developmental course rather than as bringing into being something not hitherto existent. It was considered as an ongoing-process and not an event.
The Purusha Sukta of Rig Veda paints a picture of the ideal Primeval Being existing before any phenomenal existence. He is conceived as a cosmic person with a thousand heads, eyes and feet, who filled the whole universe and extended beyond it.
The world form is only a fragment of this divine reality. The first principle which is called Purusha manifested as the whole world by his Tapas.
This view gets crystallized into the later Upanishadic doctrine that the spirit or Atman in man (at microcosm) is the same as the spirit which is the cause of the world which goes by the name Brahman or Paramatman (at macrocosm). These theories are discussed in elaborate details in the following Upanishads Viz., Prasna, Aitareya, Mundaka, Taittiriya, Katha, Chandogya, Svetasvatara, Brhadaranyaka, Maitri, Paingala Upanishads besides the Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Vasishtha. Among the latter Acharyas the contributions made by Gaudapada, and Adi Sankara to these thoughts are colossal.
A brief quotation from the article “Cosmology in Vedanta” by Swami Tathagatananda published by Vedanta Society of New York given below brings out lucidly the perspectives of both Vedanta and Modern science on this subject.
“A perceptive reader will find many striking similarities between the latest findings of Astrophysics and ancient Indian cosmological ideas, of which Swamiji (Vivekananda) says: " . . . you will find how wonderfully they are in accordance with the latest discoveries of modern science; and where there is disharmony, you will find that it is modern science which lacks and not they."
Einstein writes that "cosmic expansion may be simply a temporary condition which will be followed at some future epoch of cosmic time by a period of contraction. The universe in this picture is a pulsating balloon in which cycles of expansion and contraction succeed each other through eternity."
The modern astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking, writes: "At the big bang itself, the universe is thought to have had zero size, and so to have been infinitely hot . . . The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired."
The Vedas also state that creation is ongoing: what has been in the past is being repeated in the new cycle.
Stephen Hawking writes, "Thus, when we see the universe, we are seeing it as it was in the past." He further writes, "But how did he [God] choose the initial state or configuration of the universe? One possible answer is to say that God chose the initial configuration of the universe for reasons that we cannot hope to know."
It is perhaps enough for the modern mind to know how great is the similarity.
Vedanta does not support the "Big-bang Theory" and its mechanistic materialism. We have merely cited certain common ideas to be found in both.
Brahman is the ultimate Reality. Brahman is impersonal-personal God. Impersonal God may be called the static aspect and personal God may be called the dynamic aspect of Brahman.
The static aspect Anid Avatam - as Rg-Veda puts it, "It existed without any movement."
Brahman is truth, Consciousness and Infinitude. Knowledge, will and action are inherent in Brahman. God projects the universe by animating His prakriti (maya).
Astrophysics and Advaita Vedanta agree on certain points. Advaita Vedanta upholds the notion of the pulsating or oscillating universe. Creation is followed by dissolution and this process will continue ad infinitum. Science used the term "big bang" for the starting point of creation and "big crunch" for the dissolution of the universe.
The "cosmic egg” of Vedanta, which is like a point, is called singularity in astrophysics.
The background material of the scientist cannot be accepted as the source of creation. That is the biggest difference between the two systems. Science is still exploring and remains inconclusive but Vedanta has given the final verdict, which is unassailable. Unless there is one changeless Reality, change cannot be perceived at all”~~From the collective works of Mr.T.N.Sethumadhavan (tnsethumadhavan@gmail.com). Edited by Suman Mukhopadhyay.

Note: Purusha sukta/sookta (puruṣa sūkta) is hymn 10.90 of the Rigveda, dedicated to the Purusha, the "Cosmic Being". One version of the Suktam has 16 verses, 15 in the anuṣṭubh meter, and the final one in the triṣṭubh meter. While, another version of the Suktam consists of 24 verses with the first 18 mantras designated as the Purva-narayana, and the later portion termed as the Uttara-narayana [Wikipedia].

2011-10-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

WINNING STROKES: THINK DIFFERENT:

Country Club India Ltd

Leisure and infrastructure firm Country Club India Ltd moved to Rs.8.95 before cooling at Rs.8.91. The stock today gave a clear break out Rs.8.7. It has earmarked over Rs.300 crore for expansion activities in next five years and is eying one million membership in 10 years. In its June, 2011 press releasem Country Club Vice-Chairman and CEO Mr Y Siddharth Reddy told PTI, “We are spending Rs.100 crore this FY12 for developing 18 properties, which will be operational by FY 13. After finishing them, we will plan on further expansion both in the country as well as overseas for which we have earmarked over Rs.200 crore till FY16. Country Club currently has 2.5 lakh members and it is targeting to touch 1 million membership in 10 years time". Presently, Country Club India has 50 own properties, out of which 36 are directly-owned and 14 by promoter group. It has 175 franchised establishments and over 4,000 affiliations all over the world through RCI. The company, which has good presence in Tier-I cities through its clubs, is focusing on developing properties in Tier-II cities. Presently, Country Club has overall 600 rooms which will be increased to 1,000 rooms in next five years, including India as well as overseas. The company has two properties abroad, one in Dubai at a cost of Rs 185 crore and another in Kandy in Sri Lanka. The revenue for FY11 went up by 7.23 per cent to Rs 321.92 crore from Rs 300.21 crore in FY10. The company is looking at increasing its overseas expansion, especially in the Middle East and the South Asian nations on priority basis.

Tips Industries Ltd

Tips Industries Ltd moved to Rs.33.25 before closing at Rs.32.40. The company came out with superb set of numbers for the Q2FY12.

Outlook:
• The Company intends to launch a big-budget film Race 2, starring Saif Ali Khan, John Abraham, Anil Kapoor, Deepika Padukone and Sonakshi Sinha(directed by Abbas-Mastan, music by Pritam) in 2011-12.
• The Company intends to produce a mid-budget film with Shahid Kapoor (directed by Siddhartha Anand, music by Pritam) in 2011-12.
• The Company intends to release a Punjabi film, Jihne Mera Dil Luteya in 2011-12.
• The Company intends to enter into a tie-up with a leading studio to invest, fund and distribute films made by the Company.
• The Company’s repertoire of films of last 25 years is expected to continue generating royalty revenue.
• The Company plans to release around five films by March 2013. These initiatives will enhance film production revenues in an attractive way over the foreseeable future.

Allied Digital Services

Allied Digital Services Ltd moved to Rs.30.50 (almost near the upper circuits at Rs.30.55) before cooling at Rs.20.80. The 52-week high/low for the scrip is Rs.232.65/Rs.23.50. Have a look at the Pattern formation on the daily Candle Stick Chart Pattern. Allied Digital is well renowned as a leading Global IT Transformation Architect, with an impeccable track record for designing, developing, deploying and delivering end-to-end IT Infrastructure services.
With over two decades of proven experience Allied Digital responsibly delivers cutting-edge IT services and solutions to a wide range of industries spanning 35 countries across 5 continents.The company has ventured into new line of business. Allied Digital has developed a powerful network of alliances (Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, IMB, Oracle, HP, etc) with a core objective of helping its clients accelerate their success by making better IT decisions. For more on the company you can visit: www.allieddigital.net.

2011-10-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

~:Poor Form:~

Chetan Bhagat, loathed and loved in equal measure, has now picked a fight with Narayana Murthy. Why his defence of poor English is spurious and self-serving.

-By Lakshmi Chaudhry,

Example of Bad English

Chetan Bhagat is at it again. This time he’s picked a fight with former Infosys chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy for saying “the quality of students entering IITs has gone lower and lower.” Bhagat, the self-appointed champion of all things IIT/IIM, immediately jumped in the fray and got very personal: “It is ironic when someone who runs a body shopping company and calls it hi-tech, makes sweeping comments on the quality of IIT students.”
But I suspect what really pissed him off was NRN’s less publicised comments about the average IIT-ian’s declining grasp of the English language.
The Infosys mentor also lamented the poor English speaking and social skills of a majority of IIT students, saying with Indian politicians “rooting against English”, the task of getting students who speak the language well, gets more difficult. “An IITian has to be a global citizen and must understand where the globe is going,” he added
Let’s stipulate at the very outset that requiring high-level English language skills from, say, poor Bihari kids who make it to IIT is unfair. And let’s also grant NRN his underlying point: unfair or not, it is a requisite for achievement in the global economy.
But none of this applies to Mr. Bhagat who has made a bestselling virtue of bad English. Earlier this year, Bhagat tweeted [and then deleted] this little piece of literary wisdom: “Good grammar doesn’t make you a good writer. A good heart does. Else English teachers would be writing bestsellers.” It’s just the latest example of his elaborate disdain for anything that constitutes good English, which he is quick to underline given half a chance.
A column offering tips on how to learn English—in an English-language newspaper!—opens with this little gem: “Many Indians associate good English with a good vocabulary or eloquent language. This might be a result of our colonial roots, where the higher you were in societal stature, the more formal your language.”
And that, in essence, sums up Chetan Bhagat’s signature sleight of hand: anyone who preaches the virtues of good English—i.e. criticises mine—is an elitist little shit with a colonial hangover. Or as he put it plainly in yet another of his infamous tweets: “Many writers claiming to write for india sneer at indians who have poor english. Well 98% of indians have poor english.”
The “defender of the masses” schtick would be convincing except he isn’t part of that 98 percent. He’s received the best English-medium education this country has to offer: Army Public School, Delhi; IIT Delhi; and IIM Ahmedabad. And yet the man can’t string a decent sentence together. Either he had terrible English teachers or was just a lousy student. And neither is reason for pride.
To be fair, Bhagat is hardly the worst offender in failing upward as an author. That title surely belongs to his fellow IIM alum Rashmi Bansal whose Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish includes such giggle-inducing haiku: “Deep Kalra is your average Delhi Dude. Deep grew up in a typical private sector home; very comfortable.” She makes Bhagat look like Tolstoy.
But say one word against their English—or bemoan the fact that their readers are willing to lap it up without complaint—and you’re severely chastised as an upper-class twit who, in Bhagat’s words, “move(s) in circles where the common people and their tastes are looked down upon”. Yet just a generation ago, middle-class Indians could read, write and speak all their languages fluently, English included. The “class” argument hardly holds when your own parents are more literate than you. It’s not just that their kids are doing worse, but that they can’t even be bothered to try and do better.
More to the point, would this I’m-just-a-plebe defence work as well if Bhagat were writing in any other Indian language? Not quite. Poor grammar would instead be viewed as contemptuous toward both the language and the readers. Bhagat’s Hindi columns for the Dainik Bhaskar display all the characteristics he disdains in “good English”: good vocabulary, eloquent language, and yes, even a formal tone. So why the different standards for English? Because it isn’t “our” language? If so, why write in it at all?
Push Bhagat on his literary skills and he’ll say: “My English is not that great—actually, nothing about me is great. So, if you are looking for something posh and highbrow, then I’d suggest you read another book which has some big many-syllable words.” Like a Michael Crichton or Helen Fielding, perhaps. Why is bad English the proud marker of popular fiction in India when the rest of the world can churn out mass-market novels in decent prose?
NRN is right: there is a real problem when students of our nation’s top institutions have poor English language skills. But more so when this swarm of IIM/IIT alum authors are celebrated precisely for their linguistic shortcomings, which are touted as a badge of their aam aadmi credentials (never mind that the aam aadmi is rarely an IIT/IIM alum). Earlier this year, an Outlook magazine cover story titled “The Lo-Cal Literati” put it so:
It also helps that this new breed of “authors by chance,” as one of them describes himself, are “not burdened by the purity of language” or the literary style mainstream publishers demand of their writers. In fact, nearly all of them dismiss literary writers as either too Western, too long-winded, too disconnected with Real India, writing books that nobody wants to read any more, in a style that “stresses you out”, requiring a dictionary by your side as you read. By contrast, theirs is an Indian version of an English everyone is comfortable with, a dil ki bhasha (language of the heart) in contrast to a pet ki bhasha (language of commerce).
Sounds wonderfully idealistic except the scourge of bad English writing is all about the so-called pet ki bhasha, as Bhagat made clear to Tavleen Singh when she asked, “What if I said to you, ‘You write terrible books.’” His response: “That’s great! Please do, I’ll sell another 50,000 copies!” As Hartosh Singh Bal once said of Bhagat, “he matters precisely because he sells”.
Bhagat can make a virtue of his limitations only as long as they make a whole lot of money. Those lofty sales figures allow him to peddle his bog-standard English as a staunch commitment to anti-elitism. If his aam janta readers don’t demand better of him, no reason for him to do so either. No wonder he doesn’t have a problem with falling standards, be it in institutions or books. That’s his ideal India: mediocre, middlebrow and always mahaan.

Source: First Post
Photo Courtesy: Journey With Myself

2011-10-17T14:02:00.000-07:00

~:Not writing what he preaches to Narayana Murthy: Chetan Bhagat’s Revolution 2020:~

By Nayantara Kilachand

Chetan Bhagat with his wife

Like a Michael Bay blockbuster, a Chetan Bhagat novel is defiant of structural norms (be it plot- or grammar-wise), implausibly stupid (watch the latest Transformers to know what we mean), and guaranteed to make boatloads of money despite what the crabby naysayers may think about it. Wade in, then, at your own caution, because if you’re a fan of Rushdie, Roy, Mistry or Ghosh, you’ll emerge 296 pages later, undoubtedly depressed at the ways of the world that have allowed Bhagat to be the country’s best-selling literary star.
In Bhagat’s latest, Revolution 2020—about (of course) the current topic du jour, corruption,- language, plot, character development and just about anything that vaguely defines what makes a good book (but only to elitist prigs, of course) take a back seat to the notion that the author is a weather-vane for current youth sentiment. That sentiment is the pervasive feeling that our education system is corrupt. Add to this a prologue and epilogue of incredible conceit and you have another best-seller in the making.
The novel begins with Bhagat visiting GangaTech college in Varanasi to deliver a speech. There, he meets Gopal, the 26-year-old protagonist, whose sole purpose, it soon becomes clear, is to try and ply Bhagat with drinks so he can deliver this line: “Chetan sir, one drink? I can tell people I had a drink with ‘the’ Chetan Bhagat.” Somehow, Bhagat ends up accompanying the self-indulgent, sniveling Gopal to hospital after he over-binges, on Glenfiddich of all things. Gopal survives of course, so he can recount to Bhagat his life story. The life story, predictably, is a love story, or rather a love triangle involving Gopal, and childhood friends Raghav and Aarti. Gopal is poor, Raghav is middle class and Aarti well-off, each meant to neatly represent the background to which they belong. As is wont to happen with a trio of friends, one (Gopal) falls in love with another (Aarti), who professes her love for the third (Raghav). So far, so average.
AFPSoon, however, Gopal, in his vengeful quest to show Aarti that he’s a better man than Raghav (spoiler alert: he’s not), becomes embroiled in a shady nexus of MLAs and educators, who want Gopal to start a university (that would be GangaTech) to whitewash their black money. Cue moral story about the unethical nature of coaching classes that prep students for the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) and the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE); doing the right thing; and the cost of sacrifice and familial duty. Bhagat may have lashed out at Narayana Murthy for saying that coaching classes have led to the deterioration of the quality of IIT- and IIM-produced students, but his book perplexingly suggests exactly the same thing. So either Bhagat doesn’t believe what he espouses, or quite possibly, forgot what he wrote in the first place. After all, he started writing it almost two years ago.
The language, incidentally, functional and capable of getting across its point, is not the worst part of the book (though bon mots like “‘Fine’ means somewhere between ‘whatever’ and ‘go to hell’ in Girlese” and “Girls are contradictory” border on the nonsensical). Its weakest link is that all three protagonists are inherently unlikable. It’s not quite clear what Aarti has going for her except her looks; Gopal is weaselly, stupid and self-obsessed; and Raghav, is an incredibly naïve journalist who writes worse copy than Bhagat himself. But bad reviews will do little to affect the sales figures of Revolution 2020. At the end of the novel, Bhagat tells Gopal that he’s a good person, presumably for (whoops! second spoiler alert!) sacrificing love, and the implication is that it’s okay to be mediocre as long as you make money. Bhagat may well have been talking about himself.

Source: Mumbai Boss.

2011-10-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

CNN VIDEO: “Is Islamic Extremism Tied to Poverty?”

2011-10-09T13:32:00.000-07:00

~:Iran Pastor’s Execution Verdict Expected Monday; Ruling Delayed:~

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani
and his wife before his
detention on published
charges of apostasy

[According to BosNewsLife, Pastor Youcef's may learn early next week whether or not he will live or he will die.

(i) "We have been informed that the verdict is to be delivered on Monday, October 10," said Jason DeMars, director of advocacy group Present Truth Ministries (PTM), which assists the pastor.

(ii) "There is speculation that the delay is a sign that the judges have decided to consult with key religious and political leaders," including Iran's "Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," he told BosNewsLife]

TEHRAN, IRAN-- Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani learns early next week whether he will be executed for refusing to recant his faith in Jesus Christ and return to Islam, as the court needs more time to consult with the country's leadership, trial observers told BosNewsLife Thursday, October 6.
"We have been informed that the verdict is to be delivered on Monday, October 10," said Jason DeMars, director of advocacy group Present Truth Ministries (PTM), which assists the pastor.
"There is speculation that the delay is a sign that the judges have decided to consult with key religious and political leaders," including Iran's "Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," he told BosNewsLife.
On Wednesday, October 5, unidentified Iranian officials from Tehran reportedly interviewed the pastor in prison about the behavior of judges and charges against him.
"While it seems like a positive development, some observers are concerned that they could manipulate his words in an attempt to prove their false charges against him," DeMars explained.
IRAN DENIES APOSTASY:
Iran denies that Nadarkhani faces a death sentence for "apostasy", or abandoning Islam, despite a written court decision monitored by BosNewsLife.
On Saturday, October 1, Deputy Governor of Iran's Gilan Province, Ali Rezvani, said Nadarhhani is guilty of "security charges" and "running a brothel" but added "his verdict has not been finalized," Iran's state-run Press TV network reported.
“This individual is guilty and his crime is not attempting to convert others to Christianity, rather his crimes are of a security nature,” he was quoted as saying.
However Iran's Supreme Court did not mention security crimes in its recent written verdict seen by BosNewsLife.
In the document, dated June 12, 2011, judges wrote that the pastor "must repent his Christian faith" if proved that he was a practicing Muslim shortly before he converted to Christianity at age 19.
COURT URGES "REPENTANCE":
"If it can be proven that he was a practicing Muslim as an adult and has not repented, the execution will be carried out," the Supreme Court added.
It also cited observations that "Mr. Nadarkhani has confessed that in his heart and in his actions he has denied being Muslim and converted to Christianity and has advertised and encouraged other Muslims to convert to Christianity."
The court said "because of advertising" and "pastoring a church" he "repeatedly professed his Christian faith and denied the prophet Mohammad and the 12th Imam and denied the entire Koran and [the] truth of the Koran," deemed a holy book by Muslims.
Judges asked a lower court in Gilan Province, that earlier sentenced him to death, to re-examine the case, but Press TV reported that no decision has yet been made about the death sentence.
“There has been no execution order. No conviction at all has been issued yet and it is up to the court to finally decide the verdict after studying his case,” it quoted Gilan Province Judiciary Chief Mohammad-Javad Heshmati as saying Wednesday, October 5.
ARREST WARRENT ISSUED:
Nadarkhani "has been charged with a crime and is in a prison based on an arrest warrant issued against him,” he added.
Trial observers have suggested that Iranian officials are trying to add new charges to execute the pastor following an international outcry about the apostasy charges.
De Mars said Deputy Governor Ali Rezvani has described the pastor as a "Zionist". The governor, he said, "is a hardliner and has shown that he is an enemy of Christians. According to some, Mr. Rezvani is the individual who pressured the judiciary to bring these charges against brother Youcef."
There is mounting worldwide pressure on Iran to release Pastor Nadarkhani, who leads a 400-person Church of Iran congregation.
IRAN "REFUTES" ALLEGATIONS:
Press TV, viewed as a mouthpiece of the government, said Iran "has firmly refuted Western allegations of violating human rights" insisting that "Nadarkhani has a history of committing violent crimes and that he has never received a death penalty for his religious preference."
The network condemned what it called "Western media" who "manipulated the case of Nadarkhani, a convicted rapist and extortionist in Gilan Province."
Press TV said Western media are "waging an anti-Iran publicity campaign by falsely claiming that his criminal conviction is his conversion to Christianity and acting as a 'priest.'"
The Church of Iran, a major evangelical house church network, has no priests but pastors and elders supervising the congregations.
Iranian Christians and rights activists view Nadarkhani as a symbol of a wider government-crackdown on especially Christian converts in the strict Islamic nation.
Several Christians have been detained and churches raided by security forces in recent months.

Source: BosNewsLife

2011-10-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

NIGERIA: Attacks in Plateau State

September 27, 2011: Muslim extremists carried out new attacks on villages in Nigeria’s Plateau state in September, killing more than 100 Christians, including entire families, according to Compass Direct News.
On Sept. 10, 2011, Muslim extremists stormed Vwang Fwil village at 3 a.m., killing 13 Christians. Attackers killed 14 more Christians, including one pregnant woman, when they attacked the Christian community of Vwang Kogot on Sept. 9. And on Sept. 8, 10 Christians from one family were killed in an attack on Tsohom Foron village.
Compass Direct reports that some of the attackers were wearing Nigerian Army military uniforms. “What is the government doing about the soldiers?” asked Dachung Dagai, a pastor of a Nigerian church. “In some places, enough evidence has been found against these Muslim soldiers and nothing has been done. The government officials have always said they will look into the problems, but nothing has been done.”
In another attack, on Aug. 21, Muslim extremists entered Fadiya Bakut village and attacked Andre Allahmagani’s home. They killed his 10-year-old son and injured his 70-year-old mother. Allahmagani told Compass Direct News that the assailants were armed with guns, cutlasses and other dangerous weapons.
“This is becoming too much to bear,” said Emmanuel Dachollom Loman, chairman of the Barkin Ladi Local Government Council. “The government should help us before Muslims come and wipe out all of us one day.”
According to Release International, the recent violence broke out after a number of Muslims moved into the largely Christian area to celebrate the Islamic religious festival Eid, which marks the end of Ramadan.
Please pray for Christians in Nigeria’s Plateau state as they continue to face daily dangers.

Sources: Compass Direct News, Release International

2011-10-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

Saudi Arabia executes 8 Bangladeshis

Saturday, 08/10/2011 - by priyodesk

The Saudi authorities executed eight Bangladeshi workers on Friday (7th October, 2011) in the country’s capital Riyadh for their involvement in killing an Egyptian man. The men were convicted of robbing a warehouse and killing the Egyptian security guard, Hussein Saeed Mohammed Abdulkhaleq. “Yes, eight Bangladesh nationals were executed on Friday. They have been beheaded in public,” Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, second secretary (labour) of the Bangladesh Embassy in Riyadh, told The Independent over telephone on Saturday. “The Saudi authorities buried them after the Asr prayer on Friday. This is the largest figure to be executed at one go in Saudi Arabia. The earlier largest number was three,” said the official.

The migrant workers, who were beheaded in public, were sentenced to death for the murder of the man in April 2007, according to the Amnesty International.

The executed are: Ma'mun Abdul Mannan, Faruq Jamal, Sumon Miah, Mohammed Sumon, Shafiq al-Islam, Mas'ud Shamsul Haque, Abu al-Hussain Ahmed and Mutir al-Rahman.
Details of those executed are: Sumon Mia, S/o Milon Mia, Village-Kamarpur, Upazila-Pakundia, District-Kishoreganj, Sumon, S/o Abdul Hye, Village-Purboshuva, Upazila-Kalihati, District-Tangail, Mamun, S/o Abdul Mannan Sarker, Village-Abdullah Para, Post-Choibari, Upazila and District- Tangail, Shafiqul Islam, S/o Khoajuddin, Village-Bhatkurar Chala, Post-Hoteya Rajbari, Upazila-Sakhipur, District-Tangail, Faruque, S/o Jamal Uddin, Village and Post-Poiyakandhi, Upazila-Daudkandi, District-Comoilla, Abu Hussain, S/o Ahmed Biswas, District-Faridpur, Motiar Rahman, S/o Shahid Khan, Village-Krishnonagor, PS-Kotoali, District-Faridpur and Masud, S/o Mr. Shamsul Hoque, Village-Purboshubha, Post-Kosturi Para, Upazilla-Kalihati, District-Tangail.

The Saudi authorities, as per the usual practice, had not informed the Embassy in advance, and in such cases bodies are not handed over to relatives. The embassy came to know of it after contacting the jail authorities, he said.
“The eight were told in the morning to get ready and they were executed after the Asr prayer. No permission is needed to bury the executed,” he (Mohammed Mizanur Rahman) added. This is the largest figure to be executed at one go in Saudi Arabia. The earlier largest number was three,” said the official. The Bangladesh Embassy in Riyadh was preparing formal letters to be sent to the foreign ministry and the expatriates' welfare and overseas employment ministry, who in turn would inform the relatives of the executed men.
Replying to a question, Mizanur said that after being convicted by the lower court, the accused, with the support of the embassy, had appealed before the higher court, but their appeal was dismissed. Even an appeal was lodged on behalf of the Bangladesh President seeking clemency, but that appeal was not taken into cognisance.
“The last hope was to earn the forgiveness of the murdered man's relatives in exchange for blood money. But they said they will not forgive the accused,” he added.
To another question, Mizanur said: “The families of the convicted are aware of the executions.”
Saudi Arabia, where religious police patrol shopping centers and cinemas are prohibited, enforces Islamic law. The kingdom usually beheads or sentences people to lashings for murder, rape and drug-smuggling. The Sunni Muslim-majority country and member of the Group of 20 nations has been criticized by international human rights groups. Two other Saudi nationals were executed in the northern city of Tabuk yesterday, bringing the total number of executions to 10, London-based Amnesty International said in a statement on its website yesterday.

According to a news posted on the AI website, the Egyptian man was killed during a clash between the Bangladeshi workers and a group of men who allegedly were stealing electric cable from a building complex where the Bangladeshis used to work.

Three other Bangladeshis were sentenced to prison terms and flogging for the murder.

Executions have resumed in Saudi Arabia at an alarming rate since the end of the Holy month of Ramadan, said the AI.

“Court proceedings in Saudi Arabia fall far short of international standards for fair trial and news of these recent multiple executions are deeply disturbing,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for Middle East and North Africa.

“The Saudi authorities appear to have increased the number of executions in recent months, a move that puts the country at odds with the worldwide trend against the death penalty.”

“The government must establish an immediate moratorium on executions in the Kingdom and commute all death sentences, with a view to abolishing the death penalty completely,” she added.

Friday's beheading of the Bangladeshi nationals brings the number of executions in Saudi Arabia this year to at least 58, more than double than the 2010 figures. Twenty of those executed in 2011 were foreign nationals, the AI report said.

Many of those executed in Saudi Arabia in recent years have been foreign nationals, mostly migrant workers from poor and developing countries.

Defendants often have no defence lawyer and are unable to follow court proceedings in Arabic.

They are also rarely allowed formal representation by a lawyer, and in many cases are not informed of the progress of legal proceedings against them.

They, and many of the Saudi Arabians who are executed, also have no access to influential figures such as government authorities or heads of tribes, nor to money, both crucial factors in paying blood money or securing a pardon in murder cases.

Saudi Arabia applies the death penalty for a wide range of offences.

They may be convicted solely on the basis of confessions obtained under duress or deception.

At least 158 people, including 76 foreign nationals, were executed by the Saudi Arabian authorities in 2007. In 2008 some 102 people, including almost 40 foreign nationals, were executed.

In 2009, at least 69 people are known to have been executed, including 19 foreign nationals and in 2010, at least 27 people were executed including six foreign nationals.

Sources:

(i) The Independent
(ii) Priyo Internet Life
(iii) Bloomberg.com

2011-10-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

~: Making of, Steve Jobs: a Zen Buddhist, a computer era's Prodigal Son and his biological parents, Mr.Abdulfattah John Jandali, a Syrian Muslim & Ms.Joanne Simpson, a graduate student at the time and later a speech pathologist:~

His personal life was as rich and
compelling as his professional one

For all of his years in the spotlight at the helm of Apple, Steve Jobs in many ways remains an inscrutable figure — even in his death. Fiercely private, Jobs concealed most specifics about his personal life, from his curious family life to the details of his battle with pancreatic cancer — a disease that ultimately claimed him on Wednesday, at the age of 56.
While the CEO and co-founder of Apple steered most interviews away from the public fascination with his private life, there's plenty we know about Jobs the person, beyond the Mac and the iPhone. If anything, the obscure details of his interior life paint a subtler, more nuanced portrait of how one of the finest technology minds of our time grew into the dynamo that we remember him as today.
1. Early life and childhood:
Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955. He was adopted shortly after his birth and reared near Mountain View, California by a couple named Clara and Paul Jobs. His adoptive father — a term that Jobs openly objected to — was a machinist for a laser company and his mother worked as an accountant.
Later in life, Jobs discovered the identities of his estranged parents. His birth mother, Joanne Simpson, was a graduate student at the time and later a speech pathologist; his biological father, Abdulfattah John Jandali, was a Syrian Muslim who left the country at age 18 and reportedly now serves as the vice president of a Reno, Nevada casino. While Jobs reconnected with Simpson in later years, he and his biological father remained estranged.His biological father is an 80-year old workaholic who is trying to avoid retirement at all costs (sounds familiar). The Syrian immigrant says he is overcome with guilt for his treatment of Jobs and only learned recently that the child he gave up for adoption was the famous CEO.
“This might sound strange, though, but I am not prepared, even if either of us was on our deathbeds, to pick up the phone to call him,” Jandali said. “Steve will have to do that, as the Syrian pride in me does not want him ever to think I am after his fortune,” he said. "Now I just live in hope that, before it is too late, he will reach out to me, because even to have just one coffee with him just once would make me a very happy man,” he said. Jandali says although he was in love with his now ex-wife Joanne, her father was a tyrant and would not allow her to marry him since he was from Syria. Joanne then upped and moved to San Francisco to give birth to Jobs without her family or Jandali knowing. “She did not want to bring shame onto the family and thought this was the best for everyone.”
2. College dropout:
The lead mind behind the most successful company on the planet never graduated from college, in fact, he didn't even get close. After graduating from high school in Cupertino, California — a town now synonymous with 1 Infinite Loop, Apple's headquarters — Jobs enrolled in Reed College in 1972. Jobs stayed at Reed (a liberal arts university in Portland, Oregon) for only one semester, dropping out quickly due to the financial burden the private school's steep tuition placed on his parents.
In his famous 2005 commencement speech to Stanford University, Jobs said of his time at Reed: "It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple."
3. Fibbed to his Apple co-founder about a job at Atari:
Jobs is well known for his innovations in personal computing, mobile tech, and software, but he also helped create one of the best known video games of all-time. In 1975, Jobs was tapped by Atari to work on the Pong-like game Breakout.
He was reportedly offered $750 for his development work, with the possibility of an extra $100 for each chip eliminated from the game's final design. Jobs recruited Steve Wozniak (later one of Apple's other founders) to help him with the challenge. Wozniak managed to whittle the prototype's design down so much that Atari paid out a $5,000 bonus — but Jobs kept the bonus for himself, and paid his unsuspecting friend only $375, according to Wozniak's own autobiography.
4. The wife he leaves behind:

Mr.Abdulfattah John Jandali
–Steve Jobs’ Biological Father

Like the rest of his family life, Jobs kept his marriage out of the public eye. Thinking back on his legacy conjures images of him commanding the stage in his trademark black turtleneck and jeans, and those solo moments are his most iconic. But at home in Palo Alto, Jobs was raising a family with his wife, Laurene, an entrepreneur who attended the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton business school and later received her MBA at Stanford, where she first met her future husband.
For all of his single-minded dedication to the company he built from the ground up, Jobs actually skipped a meeting to take Laurene on their first date: "I was in the parking lot with the key in the car, and I thought to myself, 'If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman?' I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we've been together ever since."
In 1991, Jobs and Powell were married in the Ahwahnee Hotel at Yosemite National Park, and the marriage was officiated by Kobin Chino, a Zen Buddhist monk.
5. His sister is a famous author:
Later in his life, Jobs crossed paths with his biological sister while seeking the identity of his birth parents. His sister, Mona Simpson (born Mona Jandali), is the well-known author of Anywhere But Here — a story about a mother and daughter that was later adapted into a film starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon.
After reuniting, Jobs and Simpson developed a close relationship. Of his sister, he told a New York Times interviewer: "We're family. She's one of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her every couple of days.'' Anywhere But Here is dedicated to "my brother Steve."
6. Celebrity romances;
In The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, an unauthorized biography, a friend from Reed reveals that Jobs had a brief fling with folk singer Joan Baez. Baez confirmed the the two were close "briefly," though her romantic connection with Bob Dylan is much better known (Dylan was the Apple icon's favorite musician). The biography also notes that Jobs went out with actress Diane Keaton briefly.
7. His first daughter:
When he was 23, Jobs and his high school girlfriend Chris Ann Brennan conceived a daughter, Lisa Brennan Jobs. She was born in 1978, just as Apple began picking up steam in the tech world. He and Brennan never married, and Jobs reportedly denied paternity for some time, going as far as stating that he was sterile in court documents. He went on to father three more children with Laurene Powell. After later mending their relationship, Jobs paid for his first daughter's education at Harvard. She graduated in 2000 and now works as a magazine writer.
8. Alternative lifestyle:
In a few interviews, Jobs hinted at his early experience with the psychedelic drug LSD. Of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Jobs said: "I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."
The connection has enough weight that Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who first synthesized (and took) LSD, appealed to Jobs for funding for research about the drug's therapeutic use.
In a book interview, Jobs called his experience with the drug "one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." As Jobs himself has suggested, LSD may have contributed to the "think different" approach that still puts Apple's designs a head above the competition.
Jobs will forever be a visionary, and his personal life also reflects the forward-thinking, alternative approach that vaulted Apple to success. During a trip to India, Jobs visited a well-known ashram and returned to the U.S. as a Zen Buddhist.
Jobs was also a pescetarian who didn't consume most animal products, and didn't eat meat other than fish. A strong believer in Eastern medicine, he sought to treat his own cancer through alternative approaches and specialized diets before reluctantly seeking his first surgery for a cancerous tumor in 2004.
9. His fortune;
As the CEO of the world's most valuable brand, Jobs pulled in a comically low annual salary of just $1. While the gesture isn't unheard of in the corporate world — Google's Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt all pocketed the same 100 penny salary annually — Jobs has kept his salary at $1 since 1997, the year he became Apple's lead executive. Of his salary, Jobs joked in 2007: "I get 50 cents a year for showing up, and the other 50 cents is based on my performance."
In early 2011, Jobs owned 5.5 million shares of Apple. After his death, Apple shares were valued at $377.64 — a roughly 43-fold growth in valuation over the last 10 years that shows no signs of slowing down.
He may only have taken in a single dollar per year, but Jobs leaves behind a vast fortune. The largest chunk of that wealth is the roughly $7 billion from the sale of Pixar to Disney in 2006. In 2011, with an estimated net worth of $8.3 billion, he was the 110th richest person in the world, according to Forbes. If Jobs hadn't sold his shares upon leaving Apple in 1985 (before returning to the company in 1996), he would be the world's fifth richest individual.
While there's no word yet on plans for his estate, Jobs leaves behind three children from his marriage to Laurene Jobs (Reed, Erin, and Eve), as well as his first daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs.

--Edited version of originally penned by Ms.Taylor Hatmaker.

References:
(i) Tecca,.com

(ii) Yahoo.com
(iii) 9to5toys.com

2011-10-02T08:15:00.000-07:00

~:Navadurga:The Nine Forms of Goddess Durga:~

The festival of Durga Puja is celebrated with deep religious fervor in the Indian states. Hindu Goddess Durga is portrayed as having ten arms and believed to have nine different forms or Goddess Durga is worshipped in different forms. In other words, Navadurga, which literally means nine Goddess Durgas, constitute, according to Hindu mythology, the manifestation of Durga in nine different forms. Each form symbolizes a religious significance. On one hand, where we get to see her in the form of a gracious woman, who symbolizes the female dynamism, then on the other hand, she is given a terrifying look of a destroyer that is apt to frighten the demons. Navadurga Maa are believed to be the most sacred aspects of Goddess Durga.

She is a form of "Shakti". According to a Hindu tradition, it is believed that there are three major forms in which Goddess Durga manifested herself, namely, Mahasaraswati, Mahalakshmi and Mahakali who are the active energies (Shakti) of Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra respectively (without these goddesses the gods will lose all their powers and would not have the energy to lift a finger). In other words, the evolution of Shri Maha Saraswati, Shri Maha Laxmi and Shri Mahakali (the 3 main forms of "Shakti") took place from Shri Brahma, Shri Vishnu and Shri Mahesh or Rudra, respectively. Each of these 3 (three) deities gave rise to 3 more forms and hence in all, these 9 forms together are known as Nav-Durga or Nine Durgas.

Nava – that also means 'new' – denotes 'nine' the number to which sages attach special significance. Hence, we have Nava-ratri (9 nights), Nava-patrika (9 leaves / herbs / plants), Nava-graha (9 planets), and Nava-Durga (9 appellations). Here let us take a look at the the 9 (nine) manifestations of Goddess Durga. Each goddess has a different form and a special significance.

Nava Durga, if worshipped with religious fervor during Navaratri, is believed to lift the divine spirit in us and fill us with renewed happiness. All the nine names of goddess are narrated in ‘Devi Kavacha’ of the ‘Chandipatha’ scripture.
Science and concept of colors or Gunas in Nav Durga: Actually each Form in Nav Durga represents her special characteristic as per her guna which is in reference with color of their vestments i.e. red, yellow, blue, violet, green, orange, indigo, Grey and pink. Parvati represents white color vestments as white is combination of all colors that is why she is known as trigunatmika, combination of all gunas. Science says when white light goes from rarer (upper lokas like heaven) to denser medium (lower lokas like earth) it transforms to different colors. If density variation is less, then three colors are formed i.e. Red, Yellow and Blue, now the three primary colors represents Mahalakshmi or Mahismardini(Red), Mahasarswati or Shumbh-Nishumbh Vinashni(Yellow) and Mahakali or Madhukaitabh Vibhanjani(Blue), the Goddesses are none other than the powers of trinity. Further these splits to nine colors as their wavelength exceeds and forms above mentioned nine colors of Nav Durga i.e. now Shailputri or Hemavati who is Goddess as Nature represents green color, Brahmacharini represents devotion i.e. indigo color, Chandraghanta reperesents beauty i.e. pink, Kushmanda represents beginning i.e. voilet, Skandmata represents hard worker i.e. yellow, Katyani represents courage i.e. orange, Kaalraatri represents illusion i.e. blue, Mahagauri represents purity i.e. Red, Sidhidhaatri represents granter i.e. grey.

Here is the 9 (nine) different forms of Godess Durga:

Shailaputri:

(i) Shailaputri: The first form of Goddess Durga is known as "Shailaputri", which literally means, the daughter (putri) of the mountains (shaila). She is also variously known as Sati Bhavani, Parvati (Goddess Parvati, the consort of Lord Shiva) or Hemavati, the daughter of Hemavana - the king of the Himalayas. Her worship takes place on the first day of Navaratri – the nine divine nights. The embodiment of the power of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, she rides a bull and carries a trident and a lotus in her two hands. Shailaputri is the absolute form of Mother Nature. In her previous life she took birth from Daksa, the Prajapati as his daughter. According to one of the Upanishads she in her Haimavati aspect defeated all prominent gods. Like her previous birth in this life also Sailaputri got married with Lord Shiva.

Brahmacharini

(ii) Brahmacharini: Brahmacharini is the second form of Durga who is worshippied on the second day of Navratri. Bharmacharini means one who practices devout austerity. She enlightens us in the magnificent embodiment of Durga with great powers and divine grace. As Brahmacharini, she is portrayed as having rosary in her right hand and a water utensil (Kamandal) in her left hand. Here word 'Brahm' refers to 'Tapa'. So Brahmcharini means Tapa Charini, the one who perform Tapa. It is said that the 'Vedas', 'Tatva' and 'Tapa' are synonyms of word 'Brahm'. She is blissful and endows happiness, peace, prosperity and grace upon all devotees who worship her. Filled with bliss and happiness, she is the way to emancipation - Moksha (Sachchidanandamaya Brahmaswarupa the Existence-Knowledge-Bliss absolute). She personifies love and loyalty. Bhramcharini is the store house of knowledge and wisdom. Rudraksha beads are Her most adored ornaments! This is the phase, of Maa Parvati before marriage as a Devi Yogni and Devi Tapsvini.

(iii) Chandraghanta: The third facet of Goddess Durga is ‘Chandraghanta’, who is worshipped on the third day of Navaratri, for peace, tranquility and prosperity in life. In the form of Chandraghanta, she is portrayed as having a half moon or "Chandra" on her forehead in the shape of a "ghanta" or bell. That is why she is called ‘Chandraghanta’. Some scholars however, say, Chandra + Ghanta, means supreme bliss and knowledge, showering peace and serenity, like cool breeze in a moonlit night. She is charming, has a golden bright complexion and rides a tiger. She is shown as a beautiful woman with golden hair. She has ten hands, three eyes and holding different kinds of weapons in each. Eight of her hands display weapons while the remaining two are respectively in the mudras of gestures of boon giving and stopping harm. She is the apostle of bravery and possesses great strength to fight in the battle against demons. Therefore, this image of Durga is meant to frighten people having evil minds. She is mainly worshipped in Tamil Nadu.

Kushmanda:

(iv) Kushmanda: Kushmanda is the fourth form of the mother goddess and is worshipped on the fourth day of Navaratri. In the form of Kushmanda, she is shown as a charming woman riding a lion. The meaning of the name ‘Ku-shm-anda’ is as follows: ‘Ku’ = a little; ‘ushma’ = ‘warmth’; ‘anda’ = ‘the cosmic egg’. She resides in solar systems and she she shines brightly in all the ten directions like Sun. So she is considered the creator of the universe. The universe was no more than a void full of darkness, until her light spreads in all directions like rays from the sun. Often she is depicted as having eight or ten hands. She holds weapons, glitter, rosary, etc., in her hands, and she rides a lion.

Skanda Mata

(v) Skanda Mata: The fifth aspect of the Mother Durga is known as 'Skanda Mata', the mother of Skanda or Lord Kartikeya, who was chosen by gods as their commander-in-chief in the war against the demons. She is worshiped on the fifth day of Navaratri. She is accompanied by the Lord Skanda in his infant form. Skanda Mata has four arms and three eyes, holds the infant Skanda in her right upper arm and a lotus in her right hand which is slightly raised upwards. The left arm is in pose to grant boons with grace and in left lower hand which is raised also holds a lotus. She has a bright complexion and is often depicted as seated on a lotus.

Katyayani

(vi) Katyayani: The sixth form of Mother Durga is known as ‘Katyayani’, who is worshipped on the six day of Navaratri. People believe that, when Durga was born to Rishi Katyayan in the form of Paramba, she was given the name "Kat yayani". The legend behind her name goes thus: Once upon a time, there was a great sage called Kata, who had a son named Katya. Kata was very famous and renowned in the lineage of saints. He underwent long austerities and penance in order to receive the grace of the Mother Goddess. He wished to have a daughter in the form of a goddess. According to his wish and desire the Mother Goddess granted his request. Katyayani was born to Kata as an avatar of Durga. She has three eyes and eight hands. These are eight types of weapons in her seven hands and her vehicle is Lion.

Kalratri

(vii) Kalratri: Kalratri is the seventh form of Goddess Durga and is worshiped on the seventh day of Navaratri. As Kalratri, she is portrayed as dark as night or dark complexioned, disheveled hair and a fearlessness posture. A necklace flashing lightning adorns her neck. She has three eyes that shine bright and terrible flames emanate from her breath (flames of fire are shown coming out of her nose). Her vehicle is the donkey. She takes a ride on the Shava, as in dead body. Her raised right hand always seems to grant boons to all worshipers and all her right lower hand is in the pose of allaying fears. Her left upper hand holds a thorn-like weapon, made of iron and there is a dagger in the lower left hand. She is black like Goddess Kali and holds a sparkling sword in her right hand to battle all evil. By her scary look, she frightens the demons. Her gesture of protection assures us of freedom from fear and troubles. So she is also known as ‘Shubhamkari’ – one who does good.

Maha Gauri

(viii) Maha Gauri: Maha Gauri is the eight form portrayed as an eight year old girl, who is wearing clean white clothes. She is worshipped on the eighth day of Navaratri. She is shown as taking a ride on the bull. She has got three eyes and four hands. Her power is unfailing and instantly fruitful. It is believed that as a result of her worship, all sins of past, present and future get washed away and devotees get purified in all aspects of life. Maha Gauri is intelligent, peaceful and calm. Due to her long austerities in the deep forests of the Himalayas, she developed a dark complexion. When Lord Shiva cleaned her with the water of the Ganges, her body regained its beauty and she came to be known as Maha Gauri, which mean extremely white. Her right hand is in the pose of allaying fear and her right lower hand holds a trident. The left upper hand holds a ‘damaru’ (a small rattle drum) and the lower one is in the pose of granting boons to her devotees.

Siddhidatri:

(ix) Siddhidatri: The ninth and the last form of Goddess Durga is Siddhidatri. She is worshipped on the ninth day of Navaratri. Siddhidatri has supernatural healing powers. In totality, there are eight siddhis, namely Mahima, Prapti, Prakamya, Garima, Anima, Laghi ma, Iishitva and Vashitva. The Goddess rides on the lion as her vehicle. . She has four arms and she is always in a blissful happy enchanting pose. This form of Durga is worshiped by all Gods, Rishis-Munis, Siddhas, Yogis, Sadhakas and devotees for attaining the best religious asset. She blesses all Gods, saints, yogis, tantrics and all devotees as a manifestation of the Mother Goddess. In ‘Devi Bhagvata Purana’ it is mentioned that Lord Shiva worshiped her and was blessed with all Siddhis (supernatural powers). By her blessings his half body became female and other half body male in the avatar of Ardhnarishvara.

References:

(i) www.sify.com
(ii) First Photo of Devi Durga, courtsey: Shuma.rani
(iii) Wikipedia

(iv) Hinduism: About.com

(v) Indif.com devotional

2011-09-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

Arundhati Roy and Anna Hazare

Arundhati Roy was born to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother (Mary Roy, an women's rights activist) and a Bengali Hindu (tea planter) father on 24th November 1961, Shillong, Meghalaya, India.

She left Kerala at the age of 16 to move to Delhi. Here, she had to take-up the life of a homeless, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi's Feroz Shah Kotla. She made a living of selling empty bottles. From here she then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture (where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha). Roy met her second husband, filmmaker Pradip Krishen, in 1984, and played a village girl in his award-winning movie Massey Sahib. Until made financially stable by the success of her novel The God of Small Things, she worked various jobs, including running aerobics classes at five-star hotels in New Delhi. Roy is a cousin of prominent media personality Prannoy Roy, the head of the leading Indian TV media group NDTV,.She lives in New Delhi.

"The God of Small Things" is the only novel written by her. Here she conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things is written in an English that's completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language. As a novelist, Arundhati Roy is known for her lush language and intricate structure.

She started writing about the Narmada Dam project, India's Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron's activities in India. She has now become a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism--all the eye-popping theories. Her writings on various social, environmental and political issues have been a subject of major controversy in India.
Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence. She was also awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice' in January 2006, however she declined to accept it.
Apart from a book and political writing, Roy has also written movie scripts. She wrote and starred in "In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones", and wrote the script for Pradip Kishen's Electric Moon. She drew media attention when she spoke out in support of Phoolan Devi who she felt had been exploited by Shekhar Kapur's film Bandit Queen. She also criticizes India's nuclear weapons policies and the approach to industrialization and rapid development as currently being practiced in India, including the Narmada Dam project and the power company Enron's activities in India.
Roy is the first non-expatriate Indian author and also the first Indian woman to have won the Booker prize.

Support for Kashmiri separatism: In an interview with Times of India published in August 2008, Arundhati Roy expressed her support for the independence of Kashmir from India after massive demonstrations in favor of independence took place—some 500,000 separatists rallied in Srinagar in the Kashmir part of Jammu and Kashmir state of India for independence on 18 August 2008, following the Amarnath land transfer controversy.[18] According to her, the rallies were a sign that Kashmiris desire secession from India, and not union with India.[19] She was criticized by Indian National Congress (INC) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for her remarks.

Views on the Naxals: Roy has criticized Government's armed actions against the Naxalite-Maoist insurgents in India, calling it "war on the poorest people in the country". According to her, the Government has "abdicated its responsibility to the people"and launched the offensive against Naxals to aid the corporations with whom it has signed Memorandums of Understanding. While she has received support from various quarters for her views, Roy's description of the Maoists as "Gandhians" raised a controversy. In other statements, she has described Naxalites as "patriot of a kind" who are "fighting to implement the Constitution, (while) the government is vandalising it". Many commentators have noted that Roy does not hold sympathy for the victims of Maoist terrorism and have called her a "Maoist sympathiser." Last year the leader of the Maoist insurgency, Koteswar Rao, or Kishenji, invited Arundhati Roy to mediate in peace talks with the government. Soon after, India’s Home Secretary, G.K. Pillai, criticized Roy and others who have publicly called state violence against Maoists, quote, "genocidal."

2001 Indian Parliament attack: Roy has raised questions about the investigation into the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the trial of the accused. She has called for the death sentence of Mohammad Afzal to be stayed while a parliamentary enquiry into these questions are conducted and denounced press coverage of the trial. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has criticized Roy for what it alleges is defence of a terrorist going against the national interest.

Criticism of Israel: In August 2006, Roy, along with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and others, signed a letter in The Guardian called the 2006 Lebanon War a "war crime" and accused Israel of "state terror." In 2007, Roy was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter initiated by Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism and the South West Asian, North African Bay Area Queers and calling on the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival "to honor calls for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions, by discontinuing Israeli consulate sponsorship of the LGBT film festival and not cosponsoring events with the Israeli consulate."

I'd rather not be Anna

Arundhati Roy

21st August, 2011

If what we're watching on TV is indeed a revolution, then it has to be one of the more embarrassing and unintelligible ones of recent times. For now, whatever questions you may have about the Jan Lokpal Bill, here are the answers you're likely to get: tick the box — (a) Vande Mataram (b) Bharat Mata ki Jai (c) India is Anna, Anna is India (d) Jai Hind.

For completely different reasons, and in completely different ways, you could say that the Maoists and the Jan Lokpal Bill have one thing in common — they both seek the overthrow of the Indian State. One working from the bottom up, by means of an armed struggle, waged by a largely adivasi army, made up of the poorest of the poor. The other, from the top down, by means of a bloodless Gandhian coup, led by a freshly minted saint, and an army of largely urban, and certainly better off people. (In this one, the Government collaborates by doing everything it possibly can to overthrow itself.)

In April 2011, a few days into Anna Hazare's first “fast unto death,” searching for some way of distracting attention from the massive corruption scams which had battered its credibility, the Government invited Team Anna, the brand name chosen by this “civil society” group, to be part of a joint drafting committee for a new anti-corruption law. A few months down the line it abandoned that effort and tabled its own bill in Parliament, a bill so flawed that it was impossible to take seriously.

Then, on August 16th, the morning of his second “fast unto death,” before he had begun his fast or committed any legal offence, Anna Hazare was arrested and jailed. The struggle for the implementation of the Jan Lokpal Bill now coalesced into a struggle for the right to protest, the struggle for democracy itself. Within hours of this ‘Second Freedom Struggle,' Anna was released. Cannily, he refused to leave prison, but remained in Tihar jail as an honoured guest, where he began a fast, demanding the right to fast in a public place. For three days, while crowds and television vans gathered outside, members of Team Anna whizzed in and out of the high security prison, carrying out his video messages, to be broadcast on national TV on all channels. (Which other person would be granted this luxury?) Meanwhile 250 employees of the Municipal Commission of Delhi, 15 trucks, and six earth movers worked around the clock to ready the slushy Ramlila grounds for the grand weekend spectacle. Now, waited upon hand and foot, watched over by chanting crowds and crane-mounted cameras, attended to by India's most expensive doctors, the third phase of Anna's fast to the death has begun. “From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, India is One,” the TV anchors tell us.

While his means may be Gandhian, Anna Hazare's demands are certainly not. Contrary to Gandhiji's ideas about the decentralisation of power, the Jan Lokpal Bill is a draconian, anti-corruption law, in which a panel of carefully chosen people will administer a giant bureaucracy, with thousands of employees, with the power to police everybody from the Prime Minister, the judiciary, members of Parliament, and all of the bureaucracy, down to the lowest government official. The Lokpal will have the powers of investigation, surveillance, and prosecution. Except for the fact that it won't have its own prisons, it will function as an independent administration, meant to counter the bloated, unaccountable, corrupt one that we already have. Two oligarchies, instead of just one.

Whether it works or not depends on how we view corruption. Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality, or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?

Meanwhile the props and the choreography, the aggressive nationalism and flag waving of Anna's Revolution are all borrowed, from the anti-reservation protests, the world-cup victory parade, and the celebration of the nuclear tests. They signal to us that if we do not support The Fast, we are not ‘true Indians.' The 24-hour channels have decided that there is no other news in the country worth reporting.

‘The Fast' of course doesn't mean Irom Sharmila's fast that has lasted for more than ten years (she's being force fed now) against the AFSPA, which allows soldiers in Manipur to kill merely on suspicion. It does not mean the relay hunger fast that is going on right now by ten thousand villagers in Koodankulam protesting against the nuclear power plant. ‘The People' does not mean the Manipuris who support Irom Sharmila's fast. Nor does it mean the thousands who are facing down armed policemen and mining mafias in Jagatsinghpur, or Kalinganagar, or Niyamgiri, or Bastar, or Jaitapur. Nor do we mean the victims of the Bhopal gas leak, or the people displaced by dams in the Narmada Valley. Nor do we mean the farmers in NOIDA, or Pune or Haryana or elsewhere in the country, resisting the takeover of the land.

‘The People' only means the audience that has gathered to watch the spectacle of a 74-year-old man threatening to starve himself to death if his Jan Lokpal Bill is not tabled and passed by Parliament. ‘The People' are the tens of thousands who have been miraculously multiplied into millions by our TV channels, like Christ multiplied the fishes and loaves to feed the hungry. “A billion voices have spoken,” we're told. “India is Anna.”

Who is he really, this new saint, this Voice of the People? Oddly enough we've heard him say nothing about things of urgent concern. Nothing about the farmer's suicides in his neighbourhood, or about Operation Green Hunt further away. Nothing about Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, nothing about Posco, about farmer's agitations or the blight of SEZs. He doesn't seem to have a view about the Government's plans to deploy the Indian Army in the forests of Central India.

He does however support Raj Thackeray's Marathi Manoos xenophobia and has praised the ‘development model' of Gujarat's Chief Minister who oversaw the 2002 pogrom against Muslims. (Anna withdrew that statement after a public outcry, but presumably not his admiration.)

Despite the din, sober journalists have gone about doing what journalists do. We now have the back-story about Anna's old relationship with the RSS. We have heard from Mukul Sharma who has studied Anna's village community in Ralegan Siddhi, where there have been no Gram Panchayat or Co-operative society elections in the last 25 years. We know about Anna's attitude to ‘harijans': “It was Mahatma Gandhi's vision that every village should have one chamar, one sunar, one kumhar and so on. They should all do their work according to their role and occupation, and in this way, a village will be self-dependant. This is what we are practicing in Ralegan Siddhi.” Is it surprising that members of Team Anna have also been associated with Youth for Equality, the anti-reservation (pro-“merit”) movement? The campaign is being handled by people who run a clutch of generously funded NGOs whose donors include Coca-Cola and the Lehman Brothers. Kabir, run by Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, key figures in Team Anna, has received $400,000 from the Ford Foundation in the last three years. Among contributors to the India Against Corruption campaign there are Indian companies and foundations that own aluminum plants, build ports and SEZs, and run Real Estate businesses and are closely connected to politicians who run financial empires that run into thousands of crores of rupees. Some of them are currently being investigated for corruption and other crimes. Why are they all so enthusiastic?

Remember the campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill gathered steam around the same time as embarrassing revelations by Wikileaks and a series of scams, including the 2G spectrum scam, broke, in which major corporations, senior journalists, and government ministers and politicians from the Congress as well as the BJP seem to have colluded in various ways as hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees were being siphoned off from the public exchequer. For the first time in years, journalist-lobbyists were disgraced and it seemed as if some major Captains of Corporate India could actually end up in prison. Perfect timing for a people's anti-corruption agitation. Or was it?

At a time when the State is withdrawing from its traditional duties and Corporations and NGOs are taking over government functions (water supply, electricity, transport, telecommunication, mining, health, education); at a time when the terrifying power and reach of the corporate owned media is trying to control the public imagination, one would think that these institutions — the corporations, the media, and NGOs — would be included in the jurisdiction of a Lokpal bill. Instead, the proposed bill leaves them out completely.

Now, by shouting louder than everyone else, by pushing a campaign that is hammering away at the theme of evil politicians and government corruption, they have very cleverly let themselves off the hook. Worse, by demonising only the Government they have built themselves a pulpit from which to call for the further withdrawal of the State from the public sphere and for a second round of reforms — more privatisation, more access to public infrastructure and India's natural resources. It may not be long before Corporate Corruption is made legal and renamed a Lobbying Fee.

Will the 830 million people living on Rs.20 a day really benefit from the strengthening of a set of policies that is impoverishing them and driving this country to civil war?

This awful crisis has been forged out of the utter failure of India's representative democracy, in which the legislatures are made up of criminals and millionaire politicians who have ceased to represent its people. In which not a single democratic institution is accessible to ordinary people. Do not be fooled by the flag waving. We're watching India being carved up in war for suzerainty that is as deadly as any battle being waged by the warlords of Afghanistan, only with much, much more at stake.

References:

(i) www.msn.com

(ii) Wikipedia

(iii) The Hindu
(iv) Alternet

2011-09-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

~:Awami League leader held for "hurting the sentiments" of some of the Bangladeshi Muslims:~

Tue, Sep 20th, 2011

Goddess Durga

Gazipur, Sept 19 – A local leader of ruling Awami League (AL) has been arrested in Gazipur district on charges of hurting religious sentiment of Muslims by publishing images of holy Ka'aba, a Hindu goddess and a temple in a same poster.

Police held Babu Ranjan Nandi from Kashimpur area Sunday night following allegations from local people.
He published pictures of the holy Ka'aba, goddess Durga and a temple in the poster on the eve of Durga Puja of the Hindu community to depict his notion of religious friendship.
Mohammad Rafiqul Islam, sub-inspector of the Chakrabarti Police Outpost under Joydevpur Police Station, said the AL leader greeted the people through the poster, on the occasion of the Puja festival.

Great Khana Kaba

The poster contains the pictures of the Ka'aba on the right, goddess Durga in the middle and a temple in the left, he said.
"The poster angered Muslims of the locality."
Amid demand of the local people, police arrested him under the section 54 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
The court sent him to jail on Monday afternoon when police produced him before it.
Nandi, Awami League president of ward-7 under Kashimpur union council, has a pharmaceutical dispensary in Kashimpur Bazar.

Shri Shantadurga Temple, Goa

Maulana Abdul Mannan, imam of the Kashimpur BDS Mosque, said the sentiment of the Muslims was hurt through the poster.
"It's an offence. Those who campaigned for him (Nandi) should also be brought to justice," he added.
Freedom fighter Abdul Aziz, whose name was used below the poster, claimed that it was used without his permission.
Nandi admitted to his wrongdoing. He said: "I've sought pardon from the people in the area and asked my people to take out the posters."

P.S: Shri Shanti Durga Temple Goa: Among the other temples, the most architecturally interesting is the Shri Shantadurga Temple in Goa. The Shantadurga Temple is located in a picturesque forest clearing and was erected by one of the Maratha rulers of the Western Deccan. Dedicated to Shanta Durga, the goddess of peace, this temple has an unusual, almost pagoda-like structure with a roof made from long slabs of stone. The original temple was over 400 years old. In the temple complex there is a tank and a five storeyed bell or lamp tower. These pagoda like structures are peculiar to Goa and suggest the influence of Western Church ideas concerning the place of worship. The domed temple is Neo-Classical in design.

Courtesy:
(i) www.bdnews24.com
(ii) http://www.goa-holidays.info
(iii) http://photos-universe.blogspot.com
(iv) Flickr

2011-09-18T03:32:00.000-07:00

Islam Is NOT a Religion...!!

Linda Heywood

The dictionary defines the word religion means "belief in a divine or superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshiped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe and the expression of such a belief in conduct and ritual"
But Islam is not a religion, it is a complete way of life. Unlike other religions, which only teach beliefs and prayer rituals, Islam is a complete code of conduct that addresses every facet of a believer's life, from his attire to his business and personal dealings and everything in between.
Marriage, divorce, interpersonal relationships, business, inheritance, government, everything has been covered by Islam.Even topics such as personal hygiene, dressing and manners are all covered. There is a code of conduct for eating, sleeping, waking up and everything in between. There is no area of life that the Quraan and Sunnah (Traditions of the Prophet Muhammad S.A.W) have not covered. No other religion is as comprehensive and complete.
Islam has given us the answers to questions that philosophers have battled about for ages "What is the purpose of life?" "How did the Universe come into existence?" "What happens after death?"
To go to Heaven and earn eternal reward, a Muslim must not only believe in these fundamental teachings but also integrate Islamic principles into all areas of his daily life.
Islam means surrender, submission, sincerity and peace. A Muslim is a person who has surrendered his life to complete submission to God, (whom we refer to as Allah) with utmost sincerity and with peace . Allah is the one and ONLY Creator of the Universe. In his beliefs, conduct and daily life, a Muslim conducts his life according to the teachings of Islam and not in accordance with his own desires.
The beliefs and life of a Muslim are one and the same and in complete harmony. It is this fundamental difference that separates Islam from all other religions, and is also why I made the bold assertion that Islam is not a religion. It is so much more than that!

Islam is a Religion...!!

-By Islam for Today

Enough of this "way of life" business. "What's wrong with admitting that your own religion is, in fact, a religion?" asks American convert to Islam, Yahya M.
In the Islamic community, I frequently hear Muslims saying that "Islam is not a religion—it is a way of life!"
But the first I remember hearing this sort of statement when I was a youngster, it was said by Evangelical Protestants. They were saying exactly the same thing of their faith: "Christianity is not a religion—it is a way of life!" There are members of the Greek Orthodox denomination who say the same of Greek Orthodoxy.
I have heard from Jews who state quite assuredly, "Judaism is not a religion—it is a way of life!"
You will also find plenty of Hindus saying "Hinduism is not a religion—it is a way of life!" And Buddhists who say "Buddhism is not a religion—it is a way of life!"
You can verify this for yourself by searching on the World Wide Web using the phrases "not a religion" and "way of life" together. You will find nearly every religion making this claim. It practically goes without saying that various New Age religions say exactly the same thing. (The one religion that has not had this said about it is the Roman Catholic Church. Does that mean all the others are defining themselves in opposition to Catholicism? Could the Latin origin of the word religion be of significance—so that Catholics will not disavow it?)
As far as I can tell, the apologists for each of these religions honestly believe they are stating something uniquely theirs which sets their religion apart from all the others. The faithful of every religion earnestly believe in their own exceptionalism. But when we look at all of these claims together, objectively, what conclusion can we draw?
Something must have gone wrong with the whole concept of "religion" in the modern world! It is as though people have decided to dump all the negative associations of religion into the word "religion" and drive it out of their fold, as the "scape goat" was used by the ancient Israelites. Each of them redefines "religion" as The Other and therefore inferior. The positive side of their faith that they wish to emphasize is then blessed with the phrase "way of life," which must now be thought of as preferable, more appealing to the Zeitgeist. The implication is that all the other religions are mere "religions," hence inferior—while ours is better because it's a "way of life." This semantic shift has probably occurred because the materialism of the modern world has put all religions on the defensive, trying harder and harder to justify their existence in the face of skepticism and indifference, or to attract new converts. This is evidence of the threat from the modern world having forced religious believers into a retreat, implicitly accepting the blame placed on "religion" for all kinds of ills, making them feel forced into denying that their religion has anything to do with such problems.
I would say enough is enough. What's wrong with admitting that your own religion is in fact a religion? There is nothing wrong with the word in its origins. From the Latin re + ligare, it means that which reconnects humans with God, with the Origin. That had always been the supreme goal of existence in the traditional world. Perhaps the recent emphasis on "way of life" is meant to convey that the faith has comprehensive practical applications in worldly life. But in the traditional, orthodox view, that is of course implicit in the whole picture. Everything good in life—good thoughts, good speech, good actions—is meant to be comprehended in the religious worldview, and made to serve on the way to the supreme goal of existence. Something is missing from the understanding of religion if believers feel it necessary to represent their faith otherwise. Somehow it became fragmented by the impact of the modern world.
Nowadays there are Islamic revivalists who call Islam an "ideology." But this word and concept are of modern European origin and foreign to traditional Islam. The essential reality of Islam is a spiritual path bringing humans back to God. Everything adjunct to that in this world—establishing justice, performing good works, reforming society—should be seen as subordinate to the supreme purpose of the religion. Good works take place on the plane of the will and love of God is on the plane of the soul. Both of these are comprehended in the fullest meaning of religion. Realization of the ultimate Reality is on the plane of the Intellect, and that too is religion in the profoundest sense.

References:
(i) BellaOnline's Islam Editor

(ii) Islam for Today

2011-09-09T08:18:00.000-07:00

It is not the Huji, IM or reconstructed SIMI. Brutal Jihad in Islam is responsible for this loss of Humanity.

~ Upananda Brahmachari.

NIA (National Investigation Agency – India) is a multilateral high agency that does not only investigate any aftermath of a tragic blast or the untoward invasion of the terrors and the foreign agencies and their outfits or some murders or assassination of high orders, obviously it has the responsibility to make all liaison and lexicon of the national surveillance and the security reasons of public life. I am afraid, how far the corruption, irresponsibility, inconsistency and the un-patriotic attitude engulfed us in India, so that we can’t stand erect to accept the challenge of these Pakistan or Bangladesh linked Jihadi groups in the long run. Our reluctance to root out the theory of Jihad enabling Islamists ‘to make a society of believers and kill all the disbelievers’, has created our permissiveness to accept all these routine blasts (Jihad) here and there, mainly due to our information gap about Islam. It can give us only death. It is the only punishment in all terrible ways for the Kaffirs, which is rewarding us all these deadly blasts and head counts by our Quran loving, Allah follower terrorists belonging to Islam.

It’s a fun that to search out the internet protocol numbers connected with the email id of some proclaimed HuJI (Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islam) threads from harkatuljihadi2011@gmail.com or so called Indian Mujahedeen email as chotoominani5@gmail.com, all claming (discarding others) their sole responsibilities for the Delhi Terror Blast as to glorify Jihad exclusively done by them. But actual protocol of Jihad is lying in Quran, the only source of these Jihadi havoc, really or wrongfully explained, whatever the case may be. And if the Delhi Blast is revealed any connection of it with the banned SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India), the main source of such Jihadi handiwork will remain intact with the teaching and instigation of Quran, nothing else in no way.

If our inertia or hesitation if deter us to speak the truth without strength, it will decay us under the onslaught of Jihadi provocation and they will speak, listen and follow these sermons: “…Allah is an enemy to unbelievers. (Qur’an. The Cow: 2.98)” or “Oh ye who believe! Murder those of the disbelievers and let them find harshness in you.” (Qur’an. Repentance: 9.123) or “Humiliate the non-Muslims to such an extent that they surrender and pay tribute.” (Qur’an. Repentance: 9.29) or “When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly. Anyone who insults or even opposes Muhammad or his people deserves a humiliating death- by beheading if possible” (Qur’an. Mohammad: 47:4). Or “Those who reject Islam are the vilest of creatures and deserve no mercy” (Quran. The Clear Proof: 98:6)…….. and many more in the post prayer session-Khutba in Mosques, in the lessons in Madrasah or in the instigations in the Jihadi Training Camps. One can try to justify all these as appropriate in the times of Mohammad and the misunderstanding or the misinterpretations etc. Damn it! All these are still doing the most harmful and terrible operations against the human society from the very beginning.

One of my friends in facebook tried to find other reasons for the blast in Delhi caused to put a pressure upon a soft and spineless Govt. in India, demanding the ‘repeal of the death sentence of Afzal Guru‘, the Jihadi terrorist attacked Indian Parliament in 2001. The other reasons are (i) this year is the 10^th anniversary of the Jihadi attack on India Parliament and Afzal Guru still survives; (ii) it is the jubilation and their way of celebration by Bangladeshi HuJI for getting the permission from Indian PM, Sardar Manmohan Singh to use Tinbigha corridor for 24 hours for infusing Islamic Trades of all kind (Narcotics, Trafficking, Arms and Ammunitions) and to snatch out all the rights of the Jimmies in Indian enclaves (chhitmahals) of 111 numbers having 200000 populace all together and (iii) to celebrate the auspicious return of Sonia Antonia Mino (Sonia Gandhy) to Delhi from US treatment retreat and a magnificent Delhi Dhhammkkaa (blast) happened with a huge war cry of Allah-ho-Akbar in Kashmir Valley, at Afghan-Pak border hides or in HuJI bases is Bangladesh. What can be happened worst than this for a soft and ‘sorbitrate’ state like India which prefers damn hobnobbing with the Islamic states like Pakistan and Bangladesh? India cannot claim its secular identity as it always promotes all kind of fundamental forces very much active in the Mosques and Churches.

India must settle the Jihad issues with hardest perseverance. One day for hanging the entire row of terrorists like Afzal Guru, Kasab and others who waged war against this ‘land of embracing all’. One week for accession of Pak occupied Kashmir (POK) and to resolve the entire Kashmir issue for ever. And a month to make this land terror free state, expunging every signs of Jihad in India including shooting down all venomous ISI and DGFI agents hiding here and there. Yes, even we can lead the world right now.

Courtesy: Struggle for Hindu Existence

2011-09-06T06:46:00.000-07:00

INSIDE STORY OF THE RISE OF "ISLAMIC FANATICISM" IN BANGLADESH:

CHITTAGONG: Militant Islamist outfits Hizbut Tawhid and Hizb ut-Tahrir appear to have revived their organisational activities including recruitment of members through internet. Interestingly enough, they have chosen Facebook for their social networking.

A good number of activists belonging to these militant groups have Facebook accounts with similar profile pictures to propagate their ideas and confrontational thoughts to the young. Both the groups tend to incline youngsters to join them in Jihad.

Hizbut Tawhid was banned by the government several years ago. The organisation publishes Jihadi booklets from 31/32 PK Roy Road, Pustak Bhaban, Bangla Bazar, Dhaka. Hizb ut-Tahrir has also a ban on its activities since October 22, 2009.

It was found that members of Hizbut Tawhid sign up for Facebook and use the same cover picture of ‘Dajjal’ — a book banned for inciting extremism — as profile picture.

Written by Bayazid Khan Panni, alias Selim Panni, the book ‘Dajjal’ compares the western civilisation to the marauding demon Dajjal. It calls for elimination of Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims and instigates Jihad against the United States, West and Israel. Bangladesh government banned publication and marketing of the book on May 10, 1998. Hizbut Tawhid men on the Facebook site only confine themselves to posting link of the book and tagging the like-minded people with the cover of the book instead of taking part in exchanges.

The Facebook accounts opened with fake names by Tahrir men show similar activities and interface with similar security and personal settings, appealing to teens to join Jihad.

Hizb ut-Tahrir men continue networking and making useful exchanges, maintaining highest security. Hizbut Tawhid men have over 15,000 Facebook accounts using the cover picture of ‘Dajjal’ as profile picture.

Of them, one Moshiur Rahman Fazlu had 1,176 friends in his account as of Friday. At least 700 of his Facebook friends have the same profile pictures of Dajjal. Fazlu and most of his friends confine activities only to posting the same thing over and over again and tagging the others with a picture. Zim Zubaer, a potential Hizb ut-Tahrir activist, identified himself as a BUET student in his profile and said he is for establishing “Comprehensive Implementation of Sharia Laws — The Caliphate”.

Tahrir men mainly have two Facebook groups -- “Hizb ut-Tahrir Bangladesh” comprising 46 members and “One khilafah” comprising 1,357 members.

In the Facebook accounts they identify themselves mostly as brother, sister or soldier of Khilaphah. They also have at least 500 more such groups under different names keeping the same ideology and messages on their profile info.

There are also some 2,000 accounts and 1,785 groups on the Facebook supporting Hizbut Tawhid and Hizb ut-Tahrir. These groups include Ayman Bin Moshi, Dajjal, The Judeo-Christian Civilization, Islam, Islam and Dajjal, Anti-Dajjal, Awareness of Dajjal, Beware of Dajjal, Dajjal Representative, Dajjal and True Islam, This Islam Is Not Islam, and Dajjal Documentary. Through these accounts they call for subscription for CAUSE and raise fund in the name of helping Palestinian children and carrying out movement.

Hizbut Tawhid brings out a publication named “Tawhid Prokashan”. It publishes an e-paper titled “Akhbare Tawhid” that contains articles of Imam Mahadi (a leader of Hizbut Tawhid), notes from Bayazid Khan Panni, news of arrested operatives, the phone numbers and addresses of their local leaders, and even wedding news of their activists. The last edition of the paper was published on March 02. On its website, Hizb ut-Tahrir also released an announcement of the rally they held at Muktangan in Dhaka on August 13 and requested people to join it. Besides, they post notes or articles very carefully and carryout campaign through local blogs and other social media.

Such networking by the militant outfits will influence common people and inspire them to join them. A source requesting anonymity observed that this type of cyber-activity has become a great threat to the national security. The rules and regulations of the internet service providers of Bangladesh need to be more stringent to check subversive activities.

Law enforcers in Bangladesh succeeded much in containing militancy through continuous drives. But they seem unaware of their activities through internet.

IT experts think if the government wants, such activities via internet can be stopped within a minute. Major Md Asfaque of Rapid Action Battalion-7 of Chittagong said they are watching the activities of the militant outfits closely. [Source: Hizbut Tawhid, Tahrir active on Facebook-->by Nirjhar Mazumder, Daily Sun, 5th September, 2011]

Additional Inputs:

Courtesy: Facebook Group*

It is not new that Islamic fundamentalist organisations are very active in Pakistan and Bangladesh and its direct victim is India, a Dar-ul-harb ("Abode of War"--A land ruled by infidels that might, through war, become the "Abode of Islam," or dar-ul-Islam) for these bands of Fundamentalists Muslims; who are the flag bearers of Political Islam. A little Internet search and assimilating inputs from my sources in Bangladesh says that they (Hizbut Tawhid and Hizb ut-Tahrir) are mainly active in many private universities ( Mainly North South University), where the the presence of the Chatra League, affiliated to Awami Leagure is almost absent or negligible. They are covert in Public Universities. They brain wash the students towards militant political Islam and probably do not believe in Bangladeshi multi-culturalism. According to my close sources in Bangladesh, their numbers are rapidly increasing in Bangladesh and is becoming a threat to Bangladesh's plurality. Since they are banned in Bangladesh, hence they are believed to work slyly in indoctrinating the young students.

What is dangerous is that one of thes banned organisations in Bangladesh, has a branch in India. Hizb ut Tahrir India organized a demonstration against Israel's latest atrocities on Sunday, June 6th, 2010, at 7.30 pm in Batla house, New Delhi. Their official website says, "Hizb ut-Tahrir members within only 2 days were working to prepare and invite people to the demonstration while distributing 1500 flyers, sending thousands of SMS and posters at over 50 masjids. They also made announcements at masjids. In this activity, about 1000 people turned up at the demonstration. The demonstration started at 7.30 pm and ended at 8.30 pm. Also had slogans such as: "Patience Patience oh Yahud, the armies of Muhammad will return" , "There is no god but Allah and the rulers are the enemies of Allah."

"Prior to our event on Friday the 4th of July, Jamate Islame Hind had invited Hizb ut-Tahrir India to speak at the demonstration they had organized along with all the other Muslim groups of India at the Israeli embassy. Also one of the members of Hizb ut-Tahrir advocated at the Supreme Court of India spoke at the protest. Around 200 people had attended that protest".
In July, 2009, a very strange article came up in Sunday Times, with the heading, "British Islamists plot against Pakistan". In the article which was penned by Nicola Smith from Lahore said, the following: British militants are pushing for the overthrow of the Pakistani state. Followers of the fundamentalist group Hizb ut-Tahrir have called for a “bloodless military coup” in Islamabad and the creation of the caliphate in which strict Islamic laws would be rigorously enforced.
Members of the group, which describes itself as the Liberation party in Britain but is banned in Pakistan, revealed last week that it had targeted the country as a base from which to spread Islamic rule across the world.
The Sunday Times has obtained the names of a dozen British Hizb ut-Tahrir activists based in Lahore and Karachi, or commuting between Britain and Pakistan. There are believed to be many more.
Tayyib Muqeem, an English teacher from Stoke-on-Trent, said he had moved to Lahore to convert Pakistanis to the movement.
At Lahore’s Superior College, where Muqeem has set up a Hizb ut-Tahrir student group, he said the organisation’s aim was to subject Muslim and western countries to Islamic rule under sharia law, “by force” if necessary.
In a caliphate, “every woman would have to cover up” and stoning to death for adultery and the chopping off of thieves’ hands would be the law, he said.
He added that Islamic rule would be spread through “indoctrination” and by “military means” if non-Muslim countries refused to bow to it. “Waging war” would be part of the caliphate’s foreign policy.
One of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s strategies in Pakistan is to influence military officers, he revealed.
Shahzad Sheikh, a Pakistani recruit and the group’s official spokesman in Karachi, talked openly about persuading the army to instigate a “bloodless coup” against the present government who, he said, were “worse than the Taliban”.
“It is the military who hold the power (in Pakistan) and we are asking them to give their allegiance to Hizb ut-Tahrir,” he said. “I can’t explain to you in detail how we are trying to influence the military . . . We never disclose our methodology of change. You may say it’s a coup.”
In 2003 four army officers were arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of being linked to extremist groups, although the groups and men have not been named. A Hizb ut-Tahrir insider at the time claims they were recruited by the organisation’s “Pakistan team” while training at Sandhurst.
The group is believed to have been set up in Pakistan in the early 1990s by Imtiaz Malik, a British-born Pakistani who may still be operating underground as its leader in the country. In 1999 a call was sent to British Hizb ut-Tahrir members to move to Pakistan. This prompted the movement of some of the UK’s “top quality” activists to south Asia.
“Pakistan was neglected and ignored until it had a nuclear bomb and then the global leader realised it would be a good strategic base for the caliphate,” said Maajid Nawaz, one of the organisation’s pioneers in Pakistan, who has since renounced the group.
Nawaz claimed at least 10 British activists were planted in each of Pakistan’s main cities. “The traffic has been increasing ever since and people are always going back and forth (to the UK),” he added.
“Hizb ut-Tahrir sets the mood music for suicide bombers to dance to,” said Nawaz, who has now started an initiative to “claim Pakistan back” from extremists.
Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a former professor in Lahore who is now a security analyst, said: “This organisation was brought to Pakistan by Pakistani Britishers. People were impressed that these young, educated Brits were so committed to Islam that they came to Pakistan.”
The group spreads its message through a secretive network of small groups. Its recruitment campaigns among students are clearly bearing fruit: evidence was found of cells in Lahore’s major universities and private colleges.
Last month, precisely on, 15th August, 2011, an article appeared in a Bangladeshi English portal, where it was mentioned that "of the 15 activists of banned Islamist outfit Hizb ut-Tahrir arrested from a procession in the city on Saturday, at least 10 are the students of different educational institutions. According to Paltan police, detained Radi Shafiq, Jamil Ur Rahman, Sabbir Ahmed alias Akash are the students of the Institute of Business Administration and A M Sayedul Islam of mathematics department of Dhaka University.
Syed Jaim Abdullah is a student of a private university, Ashiqur Rahman of North South University, Safayet Ullah Shaon of Dhaka City College, Habibur Rahman of Tejgaon College and Sharif Shah Miraj of Government Science College. Manirul Islam alias Piyas, Asif Rahman and Mohammad Faysal are former students of Udayan College, Dhaka College and Dhaka Polytechnic Institute respectively while Ahmed Nizam is an employee of a private firm", which raises lot of questions regarding indoctrination of students. The government of Bangladesh, banned Hizb ut-Tahrir on October 22, 2009 citing it had been carrying out subversive and anti-democratic activities in the country.
Bangladesh is a Bengali Muslim majority country where people in general do not support extremist ideas of "Political Islam", but off late the things are changing very fast, with the active participation of the Islamic--ultras, like Jamaat-e-Islami, Hizb ut tahrir, JMB, Harkatul Jihad etc who have been trying their level best to make this country another pakistan. But the good point is that in general the people of Bangladesh have not responded to this brand of "Fanatical Islam" too much. The influence of 24 hour Islamic fanatical channels like Peace TV, is having a devastating effects on the young mind-set, in whole of the Indian sub-continent.
The official website of Jamaat-e-Islami states that, "Jamaat-e-Islami further believes in the universality of al Din (The Religion) which Allah revealed to mankind through a succession of Messengers who all contributed to evolving an equitable system of life (Al Din al Haq) until its completion with the arrival of Mohammed (peace and blessings be upon him), the last Prophet, sent by Allah as "the seal of the Prophets" ...which interpreted correctly says that it believes in the concept of '"Political Islam". Their official website further says, "Acting Ameer of Bangladesh Jamat E Islami Mr Maqbul Ahmad told that the oppression and tyranny is the historic trend.Followers of Islamic movement are to march forward to achieve desired goal. Virtually oppression and tyranny upon leaders & workers of Jamaat have been going on because of two reason (sic): one of the reason is that we are firmly determined to establish Islam in our society and also we are uncompromised to establish the truth. So it is possible to ensure human freedom only by establishing Deen to overcome all sorts of tyranny & oppression by the activist of Islamic movement".

Hizb ut-Tahrir: Terrorism is not the Issue:

Hizb ut-Tahrir, a jihadist group that is currently holding a conference in a Chicago suburb, is trying to spin their way out of bad publicity by denying ties to al Qaeda. From Fox News today

Roughly 500 members of Hizb ut-Tahrir -- a global Sunni network with reported ties to confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Al Qaeda in Iraq's onetime leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- met inside a Hilton hotel in Oak Lawn, Ill., to host "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam."

Hizb ut-Tahrir insists that it does not engage in terrorism. The organization is not recognized by the State Department as a known terror group. Its supporters, however, blasted capitalism while calling for a rise of Islam during Sunday's conference.

"Free market, organization, capitalization -- all has failed and brought disaster to America," said one of the group's speakers.

Whether they engage in terrorism or are linked to al Qaeda is irrelevant. The purpose of the jihad is to spread the faith by any means possible, and for Hizb ut-Tahrir the goal is to reestablish the caliphate and impose sharia law on all Muslim ruled dominions.

Fortunately the protesters outside their conference near Chicago get it:

Walid Phares gets it too. From the Fox story.

But some terrorism experts say Hizb ut-Tahrir may be even more dangerous than many groups that are on the State Departrment's terror list.
"Hizb ut-Tahrir is one of the oldest, largest indoctrinating organizations for the ideology known as jihadism," Walid Phares, director of the Future of Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told FOXNews.com.

Phares said that Hizb ut-Tahrir, rather than training members to carry out terrorist acts like Al Qaeda, focuses instead on indoctrinating youths between ages of 9 and 18 to absorb the ideology that calls for the formation of an empire -- or "khilafah" -- that will rule according to Islamic law and condones any means to achieve it, including militant jihad.

Hizb ut-Tahrir often says that its indoctrination "prepares the infantry" that groups like Al Qaeda take into battle, Phares said.

"It's like a middle school that prepares them to be recruited by the high school, which is Al Qaeda," he said. "One would compare them to Hitler youth. ... It's an extremely dangerous organization."

Phares said Hizb ut-Tahrir has strongholds in Western countries, including Britain, France and Spain, and clearly is looking to strengthen its base in the U.S.
"The aim of this conference is to recruit within the Muslim community in America," he said. "The Middle East governments go after them, but in the U.S. they are protected, so having a base here is going to help their cells around the world."
They're "more dangerous than many groups that are on the State Departrment's terror list" because we tend to focus on terrorism, and figure any Muslim not engaged or linked to ut must be a "good Muslim." As Phares says in his books, the problem is a lack of education in this country. During the Cold War we understandably focused on the communist threat. During the 1990s we thought we could ignore the world and concentrate on spending the "peace dividend." The Bush Administration had a golden opportunity to educate the public about jihadism, but chose to tell us the problem was just terrorism. President Obama has dumped the term "War on Terror." Unbelievably, we're moving backwards.
Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Party of Liberation) has a propaganda video on Youtube. They've disabled the link enabling others to post it elsewhere, so you'll have to go over there to watch it. [This is an old article. Source: theheadhunter.com]

In this connection Wikipedia writes: Anti-Hindu prejudice is a negative perception or religious intolerance against the practice and practitioners of Hinduism. Anti-Hindu sentiments have been expressed by Muslims in Pakistan, Bangladesh, leading to significant persecution of Hindus in those regions, such as the 1971 Bangladesh atrocities by Pakistan, and the recent demolition of Hindu temples in Malaysia.
There are also allegations of Anti-Hinduism voiced by members of the Hindu diaspora in the West against their host societies, notably in the United States, where these form part of the so-called "culture wars", with cases such as the California textbook controversy over Hindu history.
SO ULTIMATELY WHERE ARE WE HEADING OR WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF THE HINDUS....!!
References:

(i) Hizb ut-Tahrir, America

(ii) The Daily Star

(iii) Bengal Under Attack

(iv) The Sunday Times
(v) Facebook Group: Beware of JAAMAT-E-ISLAMI,HIZB UT TAHRIR and other fanatics in Bangladesh..
(vi) Jamaat-e-Islami
(vii) *Photo Courtesy: Facebook Group: Beware of JAAMAT-E-ISLAMI,HIZB UT TAHRIR and other fanatics in Bangladesh..
(viii) The Red Hunter
(ix) Bare Naked Islam
(x) Counter Terrorism Blog

2011-09-03T08:29:00.000-07:00

Biggest businesses run by college dropouts

No Diploma, No Problem!

Ever wonder where the chief executives of some of the world's most successful companies went to college? Well, don't tell your kids, but some CEOs never graduated college-and some never even bothered to apply.
From computers to cruise lines, these 10 CEOs made it to the top without a college degree and defied the idea that to be successful you have to have a diploma.

(i) Alfred Taubman:
Position: Founder, Taubman Centers
Market Cap: $3.3 billion
Alfred Taubman, the founder and former chief executive of Taubman Centers , began his career in retail at age 11 at a Sims department store, where he continued to work through high school. After Taubman graduated, he attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for less than a year, when he was called to military service during World War II. After his service was complete, Taubman returned to the University of Michigan to study art and architecture. Soon after, he proposed to his college sweetheart and transferred to night school.
Instead of finishing college and receiving a degree, Taubman saw opportunity in the real estate business. According to his book, 'Threshold Resistance,' Taubman recognized the immense expansion of the middle class after the war and decided to cash in by starting Taubman Centers, a realty company.
Over a period of about 50 years, Taubman continued to expand his company and took the company public in 1992. Today, the company's CEO is Robert Taubman, Alfred oldest son and, yes, he did graduate college.

(ii) Richard Schultz
Position: Founder/Former CEO, Best Buy
Market Cap: $10.1 billion
Richard Schultz, the former CEO and founder of Best Buy , started working as a paperboy at age 11 and had a series of jobs throughout high school. He had planned to go to the University of St. Thomas, but military service in the Minnesota Air National Guard stopped him from fulfilling his college-bound dream.
After his service in the military, Schultz worked for his father selling electronic components. A few years later, he founded his own company, The Sound of Music , which sold audio components, sheet music, records, tapes, and instruments.
In the 1980s, Schultz realized that a small business was not going to survive in a widely evolving industry, so he changed the name of his company to Best Buy and expanded his product line. Schultz felt that consumers would be drawn to his stores if they could see the products they were buying on shelves, instead of keeping them in the back room. This technique helped create a new experience for shoppers.
Although Schultz relinquished his duties as CEO, he still serves as chairman of the board for Best Buy. Shultz may not have attended the College of St. Thomas, but he was awarded with an honorary doctorate of law degree

(iii) Ralph Lauren:
Position: CEO, Polo Ralph Lauren
Market Cap: $11.9 billion
Ralph Lauren, the chief executive of Polo Ralph Lauren , established his company in 1967 as a line of men's ties and developed the company into a global fashion empire. Lauren's successful clothing line came from his unique, classic style that went against conventional fashion of the time.
According to the Ralph Lauren website, Lauren said, 'I never went to fashion school-I was a young guy who had some style. I never imagined Polo would become what it is. I just followed my instincts.'
With only a high school diploma in hand, Lauren followed his instincts. His decision to ditch college and focus on running his business lead to a series of breakthroughs in the fashion world, including the first shop-within-a-shop designer boutique for men in Bloomingdale's department store in 1969. Lauren continued to build his empire, expanding it to include women and children's fashion, fragrances, and home furnishings.
Today, Polo Ralph Lauren is one of the most successful fashion companies in the world.

(iv) Richard Branson
Position: CEO, Virgin Group
Company Worth: $18 billion
Virgin Media Market Cap: $8.1 billion
Forget graduating from college, this chief executive didn't even finish high school. Richard Branson, the current CEO of Virgin Group , dropped out of high school at age 16 to start Student Magazine . Four years later, Branson founded Virgin Group as a mail-order retailer. He opened his first record shop in London and two years later built Virgin's first recording studio. In 1977, Branson signed his first big name group, the Sex Pistols, and continued to sign popular artists such as the Rolling Stones and Culture Club.
In 1984, Branson developed Virgin Atlantic and the brand began to grow. Today, Virgin Group provides mobile, broadband, TV, radio, finance, health, tourism, leisure, and travel services.

(v) Micky Arison
Position: CEO, Carnival
Market Cap: $19.6 billion
Instead of spending four years in college, this chief executive spent time working his way up the chain of command at Carnival .
Micky Arison, the CEO of Carnival, started in the sales department and was promoted to reservations manager in 1974. He was later promoted to vice president of passenger traffic and just three years later he was named president of the company.
Arison helped acquire Holland America Line, Windstar Cruises and Westours, allowing Carnival to become one of the leading cruise lines in the industry.
In 1987, he was appointed chairman of the board and in 2003 he reached the highest position in the company as CEO.
Arison showed that it's possible to work your way from an entry-level position to CEO without a college degree.

(vi) Michael Dell
Position: Founder/CEO, Dell
Market Cap: $30 billion
Most 19 year olds would spend a thousand dollars on a spring break weekend, or a put it toward buying a new car, but Michael
Dell spent his $1,000 founding Dell .
The founder and CEO of Dell expanded his company with the idea that 'technology is about enabling human potential.' In 1992, he became the youngest chief executive to earn a ranking on Fortune magazine's 'Fortune 500' list. His staff also grew from a one-man operation to 100,000 employees in just eight years.
Today, the company provides information-technology services for global corporations, governments, health care providers, small and medium businesses, education institutions, and home computing users.
Dell is not the only company this CEO has had a hand in creating. Dell founded MSD Capital in 1998 and a year later launched the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, a philanthropic organization for global issues.

(vii) Mark Zuckerberg
Position: Founder/CEO, Facebook
Company Value: $100 billion (Recent estimate)
Although Facebook isn't publicly traded, we can't leave this chief executive out of a successful college-dropout list-besides you are probably on his site everyday.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, showed an early interest in computers. As a child, he created early communication tools and games from his bedroom. In high school, he created an MP3 program and soon received offers from AOL and Microsoft , which he ignored.
After being accepted at Harvard University, Zuckerberg built a program called Facemash, which showed pictures of students and allowed their peers to vote on who was more attractive.
Eventually, word of Zuckerberg's talent spread and fellow Harvard students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss asked him to work on an idea for a social networking site called Harvard Connection. Zuckerberg decided to drop out of the project soon after and began work on a different social networking site, which he originally named TheFacebook.com. (The Winklevoss brothers later sued Zuckerberg , claiming he stole their idea.)
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard before graduating to put all of his focus on the social networking site, which could be worth as much as $100 billion if Zuckerberg ever takes the company public.

(viii) Paul Allen
Position: Co-Founder, Microsoft
Market Cap: $226.2 billion
Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, his childhood friend, is another chief executive who never got a college degree.
According to Allen's memoir, 'Idea Man,' Allen was inspired to write a coding language when he saw the Altair 8800 computer on the cover of a Popular Electronics magazine. Allen knew Gates and he both had the skills to code a programming language for the Altair and after convincing his friend to collaborate, the pair ushered in a new technological era.
Today, Allen has a multibillion-dollar investment portfolio, which includes multiple technology and media companies, along with a major real estate redevelopment in Seattle.
Allen also owns the Seattle Seahawks football team, the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team, and is part of the primary ownership group for the soccer team Seattle Sounders Football Club.
Allen has given away more than $1 billion toward his philanthropic efforts and has said he plans to leave the majority of his estate to charities.

(ix) Bill Gates
Position: Co-Founder &
Chairman, Microsoft
Market Cap: $226.2 billion
College dropouts such as Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz are not the only successful business founders who attended, and then left, Harvard University.
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft , enrolled at Harvard as a freshman in 1973. Gates, who lived down the hall from Microsoft's current chief executive, Steve Ballmer, created BASIC, a programming language for the first microcomputer, during his first year of college.
Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior year to concentrate all his efforts on a company he called Micro-soft with his childhood friend Paul Allen.
As if founding Microsoft wasn't enough, Gates went on to found Corbis , one of the world largest resources of visual information. He also earned a seat on the board of directors for Berkshire Hathaway , an investment company engaged in diverse business activity.
Today, Gates serves as Microsoft's chairman and as an advisor on key development projects.

(x) Steve Jobs
Position: Founder/CEO, Apple
Market Cap: $362.4 billion
As a young boy, this college dropout showed an early interest in computers.
When he was 12, Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple , called Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett Packard , after finding his number in the phonebook. When Hewlett answered, Jobs said, 'Hi I'm Steve Jobs. I'm twelve years old and I'm a student in high school. I want to make a frequency counter. I was wondering if you had any spare parts I can have?'
Hewlett gave Jobs the spare parts and hired him that summer to work on the assembly line at his company. During this time, Jobs formed a friendship with Stephen Wozniak, a soon-to-be dropout from the University of California at Berkley.
Jobs enrolled at Reed College after high school, but he later dropped out. He connected once again with Wozniak and the pair quit their jobs to start production on a computer in Jobs' garage.
There are different versions of how the pair came up with the name for Apple. The best-known story comes from Jobs summer spent working on an apple orchard and his love for the fruit. The bite in the side of the apple is said to be a play on the computer term 'byte.'
In a biography, Jobs said he was worth more than $1 million when he was 23, $10 million when he was 24, and $100 million when he was 25.
Apple went from a garage-based operation to a multibillion-dollar, worldwide corporation, and it all started with two college dropouts tinkering in a garage.

Source: Sify.com

2011-09-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

Conquering Veils: Gender and Islams
by Asma T. Uddin

Photo:1

Spiritual evolution works like a standardized test taken on the computer. Every time you get a question right, the computer moves you on to a harder question. But if you get it wrong, it moves you to an easier question. Similarly, if you interpret God’s signs correctly, a veil is lifted, and you comprehend God and the purpose of life more clearly. With each “right answer,” you see more signs and keep moving to the next level of increased revelation and awareness. Eventually, you encounter reality. The final veil to be lifted is that which covers the face of your beloved in the hereafter.

Although I have a long way to go and many more veils to conquer, the struggles of my life thus far have resulted in at least a few “right answers,” evidenced by a spiritual peace previously unimaginable. During some of these struggles, it was less than obvious that I was anywhere near the right answer. Inner turmoil and severe cognitive dissonance — to the point where I felt myself teetering on the precipice between faith and unbelief — convinced me that my inquisitive mind was going to be the end of me.
In the Qur’an, God admonishes us to reflect. Sometimes, reflection brings anguish. It can take us through complex mazes we never really escape until we are ready to move beyond the maze to a greater challenge.

Photo: 2

My simultaneous encounter with Muslim extremism and a feminist realization of self is one of the more philosophical mazes I have encountered. I spent my youth enchanted by a relatively warm and fuzzy Islam. In middle school, my enthusiasm and love for my religion made me an unintentional proselytizer. By high school, I was studying comparative religion. When the news vilified Islam, I defended it passionately, writing manifestos against the manipulative media representations of Islam.

Photo: 3

I eventually recognized this concept of Islam was naive. Moving past it required a lot of tumultuous soul-searching. The journey began when I entered college, where I was assaulted by Muslim extremism. Countless pamphlets extolling the virtues of simplistic Wahhabi thinking floated around the university campus. Books outlining this ideology were stacked up in the prayer room, and the fiery Friday sermons embodied the intense anger behind those words.
feminist
Some of these books were written for women by men, purporting to discuss Islam’s mandates on various women’s issues. The books spoke of women only in terms of subjugation. My innocence was ravaged by the descriptions of women as sex slaves; house servants; satanic temptations; and moral, physical, and intellectual inferiors. The books claimed Islam required these roles for women and that any resistance to this destiny was a sign of impiety — ensuring those women were headed to an indescribably horrid hell.
As I read these books, my identity as a woman was, for the first time, clashing with my Muslim identity. It occurred to me that what I wanted as a woman may not fit with what I wanted as a Muslim. The more I researched the matter, the worse the dilemma became. Islam detractors come in many forms, with some more purposefully destructive than others. When I googled “Islam + women,” I stumbled across endless scores of Islamic texts quoted out of context, mistranslated, or citing weak hadith (oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of the prophet Muhammad). The websites argued that these mangled quotes constituted Islam’s view of women. At the time, I believed them. After all, they were quoting prophetic traditions and other religious texts. How could they be anything but Islamic?
The practical effects of this turmoil were many. Representative of them was my struggle with the hijab, which I had always told myself I would start wearing when I began college — a promise to which I stayed true. It was unfortunate that my adoption of the hijab coincided with my naiveté being shattered by extremist rhetoric. The pride I felt when I wore it was often penetrated by the fact that there were other Muslim women who were being forced to wear it to satisfy some male’s whim.
For those women, hijab was not a symbol of independence and liberation, but precisely the opposite. It held them down, suppressed their individuality, and made them compliant to another’s will. And these women were not just abstract figures described in a textbook. I ran into them frequently around school and at social gatherings, where they were almost uniformly timid, slinking back from attention. I knew it was a logical fallacy to equate oppression with hijab — once I adopted it, I wore it for many years, and in subsequent years, I have met hundreds of incredibly inspirational, strong women in hijab. But at that fragile point in my spiritual growth, observing what was around me, I couldn’t help but increasingly come to fear that my wearing the hijab helped legitimize its use as a tool of subjugation.
Even worse than the male imposition of the hijab was what I call the Hijab Cult, developed by Muslim women in the community. This group ostracized women who didn’t wear hijab, making them feel like lesser Muslims, somehow weaker in their faith than those who wore it. Even though members of this cult were backbiting or constantly judging others’ actions according to their personal rubric of proper Islam, they were still elevated as a symbol for all of those “immodest” women to emulate. The hypocrisy was stifling.
Associating the hijab with harshness, I found my relationship with God was becoming primarily based on fear, rather than being properly balanced between love and fear. I worried incessantly about being judged by Him, and it sometimes felt like His disapproval was manifesting itself in the anger I sensed within my community.
Looking back, I see my plight as a necessary struggle. We all have important causes to which we are innately drawn. My cause has always been twofold: women’s equality and Islam. For the world to make sense to me, women and men had to be of equal worth and dignity, just as Islam had to be the true religion. Before I encountered the extremist interpretation of Islam, my world seemed wonderfully whole. Afterwards, my world became fragmented. To glue it back together, I had to reconcile sex equality and Islamic piety.
It took years for me to achieve any semblance of peace, which came largely through long periods of observation and contemplation of what I later discovered to be God’s signs. He was initiating dialogue, and through time, I came to embrace that interaction. As I continued to read, I encountered a wide variety of books about spiritual purification and other issues beyond the extremist rhetoric. I questioned the reasons behind my feminist bent. Following hours of meditation and, eventually, greater self-realization, I learned to better distinguish between the environmental and instinctual sources of my ethics. And more importantly, I discovered an Islam that was welcoming — similar to my high school Islam, but far richer and more complex than any Islam I had before encountered. For me, the intricacies of Islamic legal interpretation, the depth of Islamic spirituality, and the breadth of Islam’s acceptance of variable practices forever disproved the extremist version.
Whereas before I had always feared subjectivity and variability in religion — mistaking these characteristics as somehow being antithetical to absolute truth — what I learned from my studies of Islamic law and legal interpretation is that subjectivity actually underscores religious authenticity. If Islam, aside from its essential core, is about interpretational diversity — allowing room for people’s cultures and personalities to determine what is religiously “right” or “possible” for them — then there is a greater likelihood that Islam is the true religion. After all, truth must be accessible to all, and universal accessibility is impossible with black-and-white interpretations that place most of the world outside the parameters of “proper” Islam. And it was precisely this that I learned of my religion: Islam is, at its core, a religion of dissent. It is not premised on an endless list of do’s and don’ts but is instead multifarious and openly accepting of multiplicity.
One of the bases of multiplicity is culture. As Dr. Umar Abd-Allah explains in his article “Islam and the Cultural Imperative,” Islam spread throughout the world by adopting the culture of the people it sought to convert. Muslims did not brand these cultures “foreign” and invalidate them in the name of “Islam”; instead, they incorporated everything except those ideas that clearly contradicted Islamic principles and used those elements to make Islam acceptable and, eventually, indispensable to the people. Islam spread when Muslims stayed true to all of the Qur’an’s fundamental principles, including its message of acceptance.
It was precisely this message that helped heal the rupture between my identities as a woman and a Muslim. My understanding of Islam continues to evolve, but it has finally found a solid foundation. As a woman and an American, I have certain values and inclinations that are, at the core, moral. And I had finally encountered an Islam that embraced this core and encouraged me to use it to do good things for myself and others. In realizing these actions would draw me closer to God, I obliterated yet another barrier between Him and me. It was a momentous victory.

Photo:1: "I knew it was a logical fallacy to equate oppression with hijab," the author writes. Here, a feminist marches in the Minneapolis May Day parade in 2006. Creative Commons/Laggard.

Photo: 2: AltMuslimah.org.

Photo: 3: A mural outside Daniel's tomb in Shush, Iran, calls on women to veil themselves. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Pentocelo.

Note: Asma T. Uddin is the founder and editor-in-chief of altmuslimah.com. She is also an international law attorney with The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public interest law firm based in Washington, DC.

Source: Tikkun

2011-09-01T03:10:00.000-07:00

Same-Sex Weddings, Hindu Traditions, and Modern India

by Ruth Vanita

Painting by Raja Ravi Varma

Over the last three decades, Indian newspapers have reported same-sex weddings and joint suicides taking place all over the country, both in urban and rural areas. Most of the couples are non-English-speaking young women from lower-income groups. Most of them are Hindus (not surprising since Hinduism is the majority religion in India); there have been a few Sikhs and Christians, and some interreligious as well as many inter-caste unions.

At first glance, this phenomenon might appear related to the push for gay marriage in the West, but in fact, it is not. None of these young women were connected to any movement for equality; most of them were not aware of terms like "gay" or "lesbian." Many of them framed their desire to marry in terms drawn from traditional understandings of love and marriage, saying, for example, that they could not conceive of life without each other, and wanted to live and die together. The closest counterparts to these same-sex unions are heterosexual "love marriages" and joint suicides that are also regularly reported in the Indian press.

Modern Homophobia or Traditional Authoritarianism?

Same-sex desire and even sexual activity have been represented and discussed in Indian literature for two millennia, often in a nonjudgmental and even celebratory manner, but a new virulent form of modern homophobia developed in India during the colonial period (more specifically after the decisive crushing of indigenous cultures, such as the urbane culture of Lucknow, following the revolt of 1857).

This homophobia was part of a more generalized attack on Indian sexual mores and practices undertaken by British missionaries as well as educationists. It is evident not only in the anti-sodomy law introduced by the British in the Indian Penal Code of 1860 (overturned by the Delhi High Court in 2009), but also in the deliberate heterosexualization of entire literary canons and genres (such as the Urdu ghazal, or love poem, which gendered both lover and beloved as male). Saleem Kidwai and I explored this extensively in Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History.

Most Indian nationalists internalized this homophobia and came to view homosexuality as an unspeakable crime, even as they also attacked polygamy, courtesan culture, matriliny, polyandry, and other institutions that were seen as opposed to heterosexual monogamous marriage. Prior to this, homosexuality had never been considered unspeakable in Indian texts or religions.

The new silence surrounding homosexuality is one reason modern institutions such as the police force and educational as well as religious organizations today typically respond to same-sex unions with horror and even violence. However, I would argue that in contrast to these public institutions, most families respond to same-sex unions in the same authoritarian spirit with which they respond to disapproved heterosexual unions. Most Indian families tend to be suspicious of and resist love marriages of all kinds—not just cross-caste, cross-class, cross-religion, or international marriages but even eminently "suitable" marriages that they themselves might have arranged. The degree of resistance varies widely from family to family.

Female-female unions are always love unions. Hence families respond to them as they do to male-female love unions. Depending on family dynamics, the responses range from wholehearted acceptance to hesitant tolerance to virulent opposition. When female couples elope and marry in temples, their families often enlist the help of police to track them down and separate them. Such families usually invoke the law against abduction, which is also commonly used against eloping heterosexual couples.

The violent intervention of right-wing Hindu organizations has the effect of strengthening parental opposition and inhibiting traditional types of compromise. Thus, when nineteen-year-old Seeta attempted suicide by poisoning in Meerut in January 2006, because her bride, eighteen-year-old Vandana, whom she had married in a Shiva temple, had been locked up in her parental home, the local activists of two right-wing organizations—the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Association) and the Shiv Sena—held a rally outside the district magistrate's office. In an uncanny echo of the demonstrations at Matthew Shepard's funeral, they also protested outside the hospital where Seeta lay battling for her life, shouting slogans like, "Stop perverse marriages, stop anti-social impulses," according to The Telegraph. Both young women are from poor families and were workers in a hosiery factory.

It is important to remember that these same Hindu right-wing organizations are also opposed to cross-sex dating and romance. For over a decade, they have protested and attacked establishments that offer Valentine's Day cards or gifts, threatening young heterosexual couples who go out together to celebrate.

Homophobia is thus only one aspect of their larger opposition to all forms of erotic love outside marriage, which they view as products of globalization, Western neo-imperialism, and market forces that commercialize sex. They forget that there is a tradition in Hinduism, dating back two millennia, of worshiping the god of love, Kamadeva, especially at spring festivals like Madanotsava, from which the modern festival of Holi, which has strong erotic overtones, descends.

Unapproved young couples (whether same-sex or heterosexual) are often violently separated and then pushed into family-arranged marriages. On the eve of such a marriage or following it, they often commit joint suicide. Lovers often perform private wedding rituals before killing themselves and leave behind notes that frame the suicide as a type of wedding in death. A typical example is that of high school teacher Ranu Mishra, 21, and college student Neetu Singh, 19, who consumed poison together in May 2005, when Ranu's parents forcibly arranged her marriage to a man. Before taking poison, the women married each other privately, Neetu applying sindoor (vermilion) to the parting-line of Ranu's hair. Application of sindooris a common ritual in many Hindu weddings.

Compromise and Acceptance:

Not all families oppose love marriage or even same-sex marriage. Many families first resist and then accept a marriage, incorporating it into that flexible arena called "tradition." Like families, Hindu priests, too, adopt a range of attitudes to love marriages, including same-sex love marriages. In North India, family-arranged weddings generally take place at home, while a wedding disapproved of by parents often takes place in a temple. Runaway heterosexual couples frequently get married in temples. Female couples have been marrying in temples all over the country, from the first such reported case in 1987 when two policewomen, Leela Namdeo and Urmila Srivastava, married in a temple in Bhopal in central India, to the present day. Many cases have been reported of families coming to accept same-sex unions and participating in, as well as arranging, wedding ceremonies for the couple.

Hinduism and Democracy:

The law courts, the media, and some Hindu spaces are the three forces that have proved most helpful to female couples (as well as heterosexual couples in cross-caste and cross-religion unions). Whenever female couples have managed to get past local police and appeal to the law, the courts have consistently upheld their right to live together. If the women have some economic resources and social support, they may then be able to live independently, without police harassment. However, if local communities or their families subsequently harass them, courts have not been able to offer timely protection. Nevertheless the courts' declaration that two women have a constitutional right to live together as consenting adults is important.

The national, English-language media have helped by generally portraying the women's feelings and relationships sympathetically, upholding their right to liberty, and also by bringing them to public attention, thereby putting them in touch with civil liberties and sexuality rights organizations, who have helped out some of them.

Hindu spaces, often seen by the Indian Left as irredeemably reactionary, have in fact often worked in tandem with these democratic institutions to support female couples. Both in India and Nepal, many female couples have married in Hindu temples. The media, the women themselves, and their supporters have also used Hindu vocabulary and doctrine to legitimize these marriages. Among these doctrines are Hindu ideas of "love marriage."

Hindu Ideas of Love and Marriage:

Ancient and medieval Hindu scriptures list eight to twelve forms of marriage. The two best known today are family-arranged marriage and gandharva vivaha, marriage based on mutual love and attraction between two individuals. The Sanskrit term "gandharva" is routinely used in modern Indian texts, including popular cinema and newspapers, to indicate a marriage based on romantic love. Gandharva marriage is constituted by mutual consent and requires no witnesses, no officiant, and no parental consent.

Gandharva marriages are often celebrated with truncated or symbolic Hindu rituals such as an exchange of garlands or walking around a fire together. Hindu sacred texts debate the status of gandharva marriage; while it has a lower status in law books, some texts consider it a superior form. For example, the fourth-century Kamasutra (III.V. 29-30), which is a sacred text, states that gandharva is the best form of marriage because it is based on mutual attraction (anuraga). Perhaps the most famous gandharva marriage from an ancient text is that of Shakuntala; the story highlights both the pleasures and the risks of gandharva marriage as the hero, who weds the heroine with a ring but without witnesses, disowns her when she gets pregnant by him but is unable to produce the ring.

While many homosexually inclined individuals in India signal their difference by refusing to enter family-arranged marriages, the female couples who marry choose a path that may be both more difficult or may be easier, depending on their particular family dynamics. When they declare that they will marry each other, they are perceived as choosing a somewhat unusual but nevertheless comprehensible form of gandharva marriage.

Many Hindu texts insist that everyone has a duty to marry and have children. If one renounces the world, one may be freed of this duty, but not otherwise. It is this social dharma that powerful family members invoke to bully the individual into submission.

However, this doctrine of social dharma has always been in conflict with the doctrine of individual dharma (in the sense of the law of one's being), which is inseparable from the doctrine of rebirth. An individual is reborn in order to work through attachments from previous births and thus move towards freedom from attachment, which enables liberation from the cycle of rebirth. This urge to work through one's attachments constitutes individual dharma; it is inborn and cannot be erased. If an attachment is forcibly suppressed in one lifetime, the individual will be reborn with the same attachment in the next life.

Repeatedly, in Hindu narrative, authority figures who oppose an individual's passionate love are compelled to give in when they realize that this love is irresistible. As the eleventh-century Sanskrit Kathasaritsagarastory-cycle states, in the context of an intense male-male attraction at first sight: "Vakti janmaantarapritim manah snihyadakaaranam" (Affection that arises in the heart without a cause speaks of love persisting from a former birth).

While modern Hindu families' initial response to socially disapproved love affairs, cross-sex or same-sex, tends to spring from the perspective of outraged social dharma, the second perspective—that of individual dharma—often creeps in and helps families adjust and compromise with the couple.

Beginnings of Doctrinal Debate:

Apart from the more popular views of love based in Hindu doctrine, there are also specifically religious views expressed by priests and teachers in modern India that consciously draw upon ideas derived from ancient texts. In her 1977 book, The World of Homosexuals, mathematician Shakuntala Devi recorded an interview with Srinivasa Raghavachariar, Sanskrit scholar and priest of the major Vaishnava temple at Srirangam in South India. Sri Raghavachariar, himself married and the father of thirteen children, said that same-sex lovers must have been cross-sex lovers in a former life. The sex may change but the soul remains the same in subsequent incarnations, hence the power of love impels these souls to seek one another.

In 2002, I talked to a Shaiva priest from India who conducted the wedding of two Tamil Brahman women in Seattle. He explained that when the women requested him to officiate at their wedding he thought hard about it and, although he realized that other priests in his lineage might disagree with him, he concluded, on the basis of Hindu scriptures, that "marriage is a union of spirits, and the spirit is not male or female."

The beginnings of a debate were evident at the Kumbha Mela in 2004, when Rajiv Malik, a reporter forHinduism Today, asked several Hindu swamis gathered there for their opinion of same-sex marriage. The swamis disagreed even with others from their own lineages who were present. The answers ranged from Swami Avdheshananda's condemnation of same-sex marriage as unnatural and unheard-of, to Mahant Ram Puri's remark: "There is a principle in all Hindu law that local always has precedence.... I do not think that this is something that is decided on a theoretical level," according to Malik's article "Discussions on Dharma." He went on to point out that Hinduism has "a hundred million authorities."

Unlike some other religions, Hinduism has not one but thousands of sacred texts. If a line disapproving of same-sex unions can be found in one text, a story celebrating it can be found in another. Modern Hindu right-wing organizations are attempting to stamp out this diversity by imposing a uniform authoritarian version, with little scriptural backing, from above. The range of practices and community responses around female-female unions is just one small example demonstrating the ultimate futility of this attempt.

The swami's understanding of Hindu law coincides with that of legal historians, because custom in all schools of Hindu law does in fact take precedence over written laws. This principle was recognized even by the British rulers and is enshrined in post-independence law, such as the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, which recognizes as valid any marriage performed by a ceremony customary in one of the partners' communities, regardless of whether a license is obtained or the marriage registered with the state. In my book Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West, I argue that same-sex marriages performed by customary ceremony and with community participation are legal under the provisions of the Hindu Marriage Act, even if the state refuses to recognize them.

In 2004, I interviewed Swami Bodhananda Saraswati, a Vedanta teacher, on the question of same-sex unions, and he said, "There is no official position in Hinduism. From a spiritual or even ethical standpoint, we don't find anything wrong in it. We don't look at the body or the memories; we always look at everyone as spirit."

Ruth Vanita, a professor at the University of Montana, former reader at Delhi University, and founding co-editor of Manushi from 1978 to 1990, is the author of several books and a well-known translator from Hindi to English. This article is an adaptation of her scholarly essay "Same-Sex Weddings, Hindu Traditions, and Modern India," in "Special Issue on South Asian Feminisms," eds. Firdous Azim, Nivedita Menon, Naila Kabeer, & Dina Siddiqui, Feminist Review 91 (2009): 47-60.

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Vanita, Ruth. 2010. Same-Sex Weddings, Hindu Traditions, and Modern India. Tikkun 25(4): 43.

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Source: Tikkun