The Christmas tree came from Saxons and the pine is indigenous in central Europe. The ancient Zoroastrian contributed a LOT to Christianity but I’m not sure if it was in the Manner you suggest. Zoroastrians came up with monotheism, fairies, unicorns, halos, angels, heaven/hell (or house of song and house of ignorance), and the three Zoroastrian priests visited Jesus when he was born.
Persian culture and people…
Hmmm…they look down on desis and their use of the term “Indian” is inclusive of Pakistanis and Bangldeshis. The are very proud of being Iranian but only to the extent that they are not Indian or Arab. Like Indians they are color conscious, fictitious of their pedigree.
On the other hand many have a value set that’s quite honorable. They can be sweet, brainy.
It’s not overstatement to say Arunachalam Muruganantham should be a hero to many–creating a ultra low-cost manufacturing process to produce women’s sanitary pads that were previously priced out of most rural peoples’ reach–but is it also too much to say that the company which is responsible for the explosive growth in American retail productivity in the 1990s might have made more than a dent in the cost of the same product? Who’s responsible for that?
I couldnt help posting this Eminem song to commemorate Zardari’s return to Pakistan (proving a lot of “pundits” wrong, who thought he was gone for good): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVkUvmDQ3HY
Zardari is definitely an Eminem fan. There can be no question about the fact that he does have guts. If only he was a shade less corrupt and had a team that was a shade more competent…on the other hand, even the most competent team may not have been able to outfox the team of foxes at aabpara..their tentacles are embedded too deep into the “body politic” by now. Its going to be a long and painful process to pull them out and he may not be the one bringing home the halal bacon…still, he is not as worthless as his enemies believe..and he and Nawaz Sharif are both better than having Aabpara fulfil their dream of an efficient capitalist police state (see Ahmed Quraishi for details). Not because efficient capitalist police states have no future, but because the efficient police state THEY have in mind may make the trains run again for a few days, but the wars they start will lead to disaster as surely as the cart follows the horse (to quote the immortal Mahatma Buddh)….
The problem with the dream state of aabpara, in short, is that their national narrative remains suicidally anti-Indian and anti-peace and they prefer to sell nuisance value rather than selling underwear and hosiery made in Faisalabad. Its not like they dont have capitalist dreams (they do, and they think big brother China will solve all their capitalism related problems) but they want to have their one-unit-jihadi cake and eat their capitalism too and its not a workable formula. But it continues to tempt not just some bankers in Karachi, it also tempts some officers in the US embassy. The dream of a Pakistani Pinochet is not dead yet.
PS: aabpara, for those not in the know, is a market in Islamabad and is shorthand for the ISI, which supposedly has its offices in the neighborhood. One-unit was a scheme much beloved of army think-tanks, in which all of West Pakistan was combined into one province to better balance the population in East Pakistan. The new “one-unit” dream is to make MANY provinces so that they wont correspond to existing subnationalities and will become more like smaller administrative units in a strongly federal structure supervised by the all-knowing army. The aim is one folk, one leader..an efficient unitary state. Bankers in London would agree, but by now they have their doubts about the jihadism that accompanies this beautiful capitalist dreamworld….
Also the Christmas tree has its roots in Persian Yalda. What does a pine tree have to do with the birth of Jesus? Nothing, but it has a lot to do with Persian Mehr/Mitra in Yalda/Yule, that in a temple in Rome each March 22 a pine tree would be carried and decorated with flowers and carvings.
Iranians celebrated Yalda and decorated an evergreen tree, the sarve. The sarve (Rocket Juniper – what a name! – also known as the cypress tree), being straight, upright and resistant to the cold weather (symbol of hardship) was thought appropriate, to represent Mitra. The younger girls had their “wishes” symbolically wrapped in colorful silk cloth and hung them on the tree with lots of presents for Mitra, to answer their prayers.
This may just be what nationalism looks like through the prism of insanity but Dr. Nalin de Silva, staunch Singhalese nationalist and theoretical physicist, who formulated a theoretical plank of modern Singhalese nationalism (and is probably most famous for ‘studying’ arsenic levels in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka, refusing to submit the findings to peer review and then asserting that the data came from communications with a higher power) is facing a mass revolt by his science faculty at Kelaniya University. They are, understandably, quite upset that he view ‘Western science’ as Said viewed Orientalist scholarship:
It’s simply like this. We can see professors. Professors cannot see Arsenic. We cannot see gods. Gods can see Arsenic. I like this because there is certain symmetry in it… I know very well that the so-called objective scientific method is a lie.
In a country where leading professional athletes and the Executive President rely on a ”doctor” who routinely consults the supernatural for treatment options, an uneducated lowest-common-denominator citizen who hypothesizes that there are environmental causes for trends in disease may not find it unreasonable to consult “Natha” rather than a spectrometer.
Lest you think me a monocled scourge of Said, peering only at functional breakdowns in cultures abroad, check out this young Portland mother proclaiming her faith in humanity (and, apparently, her ignorance of the physics of bringing tons of steel on wheels to a standstill):
Max Fisher, at The Atlantic, writes about a particularly compelling photo of a group of soldiers stomping on a woman (and then distributing this public service to good samaritans with the temerity to be concerned about her safety.) Movement conservatives seem to be preoccupied with the Muslim Brotherhood, or if they’re a bit more aware the boogeymen are Salafists who appeal to poor Egyptians, but, to me, it’s the willingness with which the military takes and keeps power that is most frightening.
Some of the figures dont add up or may be wrong. The air force, for example, was never committed in full strength by air marshal Rahim ,who took the line that victory was not an option, so why waste planes? .. the number of aircraft lost may not be as given by Waseem sahib.
It is also worth keeping in mind that India’s operations in East Pakistan are an exception to the usual style of India-Pakistan warmaking, in which both armies have fought on a much smaller scale than the huge size of their armies would dictate. In some ways, we were lucky that the Pakistani commander in East Pakistan was an incompetent goof and the Indian high command was above average (well above average for our part of the world), so things ended relatively quickly and with few casualties. If Eastern command had been more competent it probably wouldnt have changed the final outcome, but it would have made it much messier and more drawn out, with many more deaths on both sides (and in the civilian Bengali population).
Of course, it would have been far better not to go down this road at all, but after March 1971, some sort of endgame was inevitable. If not by Indian action, then it would have happened with a long drawn out Bengali resistance and many many years of suppression. Pakistan’s army would probably have managed to establish control for a while, but the economic costs would have continued to rise, international (meaning American) support would have declined over time, Bengali collaborators would have become more and more brutish and incompetent with time, and so on…I dont think the combined intellectual abilities of GHQ, in the best possible scenario, were up to the task of successfully suppressing East Bengal or learning to make a good compromise.
Though I speak it in a stilted and incomplete manner and comprehend it only at slow speeds, Tamil is a fascinating language–which just like other languages spoken in south asia has integrated many English words to use as convenient referents for things and concepts that, while having a meaning in Tamil, are somehow found easier to deploy while using the English. A group of Tamil actors and singers produced the following (which, to my disappointment, omits the omnipresent “tension.”) a combination of the most popular English substitutes:
Omar is a Pakistani-American with an interest in history. He also moderates the Asiapeace discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/asiapeace/