Guns and America

An engrossing and perceptive article by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian on gun culture in USA carried by The Hindu. Here is the link.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article1081344.ece

Maoists Versus Indian State

"As for the Maoists, they need to realise this is not a war they can win. The Indian state’s capacity to absorb punishment is far greater than the Maoists’ ability to inflict violence. Whatever else its lacks, India certainly doesn’t need more soldiers, guns and IEDs. What it could use is a strong political movement to give voice to the aspirations of ordinary workers, peasants, tribals, women and other marginalised sections. Mao may have said power flows out of the barrel of the gun. But he also said to put politics in command. Alas, in Chhatisgarh today, there is no politics."

A well-written piece by Siddharth Varadarajan. For full article go to http://svaradarajan.blogspot.com/2010/05/this-war-cant-be-won-by-mines-and.html

Does India Need More States ?

Burning topic of the day.

In BBC site http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/

Hiroshima bomb anniversary

"Sixty four years ago on this fateful day, on August 6, 1945 at 8-15 a.m., Brigadier Paul Tibbetz of the U.S. Air Force flew over in a B-29, named Enola Gay after his mother, and dropped a 16-kiloton uranium fission bomb on an unsuspecting Japanese city of Hiroshima. A parachute opened, a flash of light and blasts followed, and suddenly all hell broke loose. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute melted and their faces became bloated blisters. Ferocious fires raged through the city and temperatures rose to 4000 degrees, melting iron and vaporising human bodies. Skin dangled from the fingernails of extended hands seeking help. Houses were reduced to rubble by the enormous blast and people trapped inside were burned alive. Within seconds, thousands perished. The toll rose to 140,000 within a year. Three days later another bomb, named ‘Fat Man,’ was dropped on Nagasaki, which suffered a similar fate."

"On this day of Hiroshima’s devastation, humankind needs to heed what an aging hibakusha (survivors) had to say: “There is only one way to end this threat and that is to abolish these weapons. Either nuclear weapons must be eliminated or human beings face the threat of extinction by weapons of their own creation.”

For the full article go to http://www.hindu.com/2009/08/06/stories/2009080651710900.htm

Politics of Statues

"Statues make powerful statements about their time and context. They can be abiding symbols of civic pride or relics of a long-ago past .The toppling of statues is the Kodak moment for historical change. The Karnataka-Tamil Nadu statue saga though is something else altogether. It is a monument to intransigent identity politics, the squabbles that can erupt out of apparent nothings and feed into a vast and pointless animus."

Read the full article at http://www.indianexpress.com/news/casting-the-first-stone/498171/0

Secularism

Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express:

“Secularism, like communalism, is no longer a first principles debate; it is a pretext for forcing issues where none exist. The only two interpretations of secularism that are current in India are deeply warped: secularism as erasure of identity, or secularism as communal parity. Neither interpretation has room for the core meaning: secularism is about the freedom of individuals to make of themselves what they will; it is about making “identity” irrelevant to politics, not about its enforced erasure.”

I feel the author has perfectly hit the nail on the head.

Professionals in Politics - Misfits ?

Yesterday, on NDTV We The People program, the topic discussed was Can Professionals Be Good Politicians ? Amongst the participants were two "star" independent candidates, Captain Gopinath (Deccan Airways) and Ms. Meera Sanyal (ABN-AMRO) contesting from prestigious Bangalore South and Mumbai South Lok Sabha constituencies. The limited influence of independent MPs was brought out by eminent lawyer Mr. Harish Salve. Of course, there were lot of people who vociferously supported these two and said it is time professionals enter politics and "clean up" the system. Though winnability of the independent candidates is doubtful, I feel it is a good sign that professionals are taking an interest in politics. One among the audience pointed out that Ajit Singh, who was earlier with IBM, did not do very well in politics. One swallow does not make a summer. Professionals can definitely make a mark. It is indeed a good sign that instead of shunning politics, some professionals are evincing interest and I am sure this will bring lot of people, who so far have avoided polling booths like plague, to come out and cast their ballots.

USA heading for a Split ?

We have come across Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man in which he predicted the triumph of political and economical liberalism and ideological war coming to an end and Prof. Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations in which he identified eight civilizations - (i) Western, (ii) Latin American, (iii) Islamic, (iv) Sinic (Chinese), (v) Hindu, (vi) Orthodox, (vii) Japanese, and (viii) the African, and there will be a clash between these groups. But now comes Russian academic Igor Panarin's prediction that USA will disintegrate in 2010 ! He paints this apocalyptic scenario rather dryly. Please click on this link for the full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html

Parliatainment !

For the past two days, it was virtual ball-by-ball commentary of things happening in the Lok Sabha on all major English news channels. All of them, NDTV, CNN-IBN and Times Now vying with one another in covering the debate on the trust motion in Lok Sabha and the murky goings on outside the Parliament. It was "entertainment"! I wonder how Ms. Jayanthi Natarajan, Outlook editor Mr. Vinod Mehta and Mr. Rajiv Pratap Rudy of BJP never tire of appearing on the news channels stoutly defending their party line/point of view. Curtains came down around 8 pm Tuesday night with Speaker Somnath Chatterjee declaring Government has won the trust vote.