Category: Open Thread

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A summons from the US Federal Court for the Southern District of New York…that sure rings a bell. The US Attorney for the Southern District is Preet Bharara, the cowboy lawyer who
(allegedly) ordered a top-to-bottom cavity search on Devyani
Khobragade. What is the chance that he and his marshals will NOT attempt to arrest
the “Hitler loving” Modi??  

Then again, if Hitler-praise counts as a global standard thought crime (GSTC), Madhav Sadashiv “Guruji” Golwalkar of the RSS has nothing on Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The latter was not just a Fuhrer fan, he actually collaborated with the Third Reich (another collaborator/admirer was “Netaji” Subhas Chandra Bose, grand-uncle of Prof Sugata Bose of Harvard and a hero to millions of secular Bengalis).
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The Mufti’s people, the Palestinian nationalists and their brothers in the Ummah, in the internationalist Left and in the nationalist Right, recently marched in Germany while chanting “Hamas, Hamas…Jews to the gas.” This is most remarkable: a rainbow coalition expressing robust admiration for the Final Solution in its very place of origin. Hitler would be justly proud.

Now as it happens, the Hindu Nationalists also have their own “Hitler” list…Yamīn-ud-Dawla Abul-Qāsim Mahmūd ibn Sebüktegīn (Mahmud of Ghazni), Mu’izz al-Din Muhammad (of Ghor), and many others…..who continue to receive undiluted admiration amongst the Ummah (and in school textbooks) for their unyielding endeavors in infidel crushing. This is the fundamental pillar of the two nation theory: our Ghazis are their villains. Are some Hitlers then superior to other Hitlers? 
 …….
Taking a step back now to the good old days when Indian monks used to travel to the USA to preach the message of goodwill to all. The story of Narendra-I aka Narendra Nath Dutta aka Swami Vivekananda who visited the United States in 1892 as representative of the Hindus is relatively well known.

What is not as well known is the story of Virchand Raghavji Gandhi who represented Jainism in the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 (his statue is displayed in the Chicago Jain temple).
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[ref. Wiki] Jain monk Acharya Vijayanandsuri, also known as Acharya Atmaram, had initially been invited to represent Jainism
at the Parliament, but as Jain monks do not travel overseas, could not
attend. He recommended Gandhi to go in his stead and serve as the
emissary for the religion. 
.
Atmaram and his disciple Vallabhsuri trained Gandhi for six months.  At the Parliament he said: 
“It is an astonishing fact that
foreigners have been constantly attacking India and in the face of all
this aggression the soul of India has stood vital and watchful. Her
conduct and religion are safe and the whole world looks at India with a
steady gaze.” 
….

With adequate qualifications one may still say of India today that “her conduct and religion are safe.” The Jains are of course at the top of the social, economic and political ladder: Amitbhai Anilchandra Shah is the first Jain President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he famously won the “man of the match” award (by Modi) in the campaign to crush a 50 year old dynasty. Another high-flying Jain (and a bosom friend of Modi) is Gautam Adani.
….
A sharp 152% jump in his
wealth saw Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani break into the list of 10
richest Indians even as Mukesh Ambani retained the pole position,
according to a latest report….Adani blazed into the top league
riding on the runaway share prices of his companies in recent past,
pegging his wealth at Rs 44,000 crore, said Hurun Report, published by a
China-based luxury publishing and events group, tracking the uber rich.
……

It is also the case that with the advent of the second republic in May 2014, the world “looks at India with a steady gaze” (and so presumably does Preet Bharara). In light of this our best wishes (meant sincerely) to Narendra-II as he prepares to make his entry on to the world stage. It is on rare occasions that the Madison Square Garden is sold out…..certainly not for (brown) leaders.

Truth be told, this is a coming out party for the Hindu-Americans spear-headed by the majority Gujarati-American community. And as a wise american once said with great eloquence: “elections have consequences” and “I won” ….this is true in India as well. 

If you do not like the results (and we do not), then you still have a choice to fight for your rights (and for the votes of the people). But merely  invoking Hitler will not stop Hindus from electing Hindu nationalists. Indeed what all this drama-bazi does is to permit Hindutva-vadis to wear the victim mask while doing nothing for the actual victims.

It is clear (from the track record of the past ten years) that Modi cannot be defeated using law-fare. The Islamists have also tried guerilla war-fare with limited success– simply more victims have been created. The only way is to defeat the Hindutva-vadis through elections. That should not be too difficult- the BJP got only 31% of the national vote share (the NDA alliance as a whole got 40%). 

All that needs to be done is for a “secular alliance” to ensure that the balance 60% is not wasted through ego clashes. Indeed such a grand alliance (Congress + Nitish Kumar + Lalu Yadav) recently crushed the BJP in the Bihar by-polls. It will be hard work to achieve such unanimity on an all-India basis (not to mention, how to rule, once elected, with a sense of purpose). But this will be the only way.   
 
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It is a rock ‘n’ roller’s dream to “sell out The Garden,” but for a
foreign politician to pack New York City’s most famous sports and
entertainment arena is another thing entirely.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on his first trip to New York as leader
of the world’s most populous democracy, will draw perhaps the largest
crowd ever by a foreign leader on U.S. soil when he takes the stage on
Sunday in Madison Square Garden before a crowd forecast to total more
than 18,000 people.

…
Thousands more are expected to pack New York’s Times Square to watch
his address in Hindi on big screens as well as smaller viewing parties
around the country and on TV in India.

The Indian diaspora hopes this visit by a leader who was until
recently barred from the United States will signify India’s importance
not only on these shores but in the wider world too.

The event is being emceed by prominent members of the Indian American
community, Nina Davuluri, who has just relinquished her crown as Miss
America 2014, and TV journalist Hari Sreenivasan.

…
“Indian citizens and diaspora over the world are hopeful that this
(Modi) administration will cut bureaucracy and focus on people,” said
Dr. Dinesh Patel, chief of arthroscopic surgery at Massachusetts General
Hospital in Boston, who arrived in the United States more than 50 years
ago.

…
Patel, who says he was given an award for work in education by Modi, a
fellow Gujarati, added: “People are passionate to see the new leader.
Another Narendra is coming to this country to let the USA know what
India is about.”

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The first Narendra was Swami Vivekananda, a 19th-century philosopher
and monk who propagated the Hindu faith in the United States. Modi often
cites a speech by Vivekananda, born Narendra Nath Datta, to the
Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, as a source of inspiration.

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“Let us remember the words of Swami Vivekananda and dedicate
ourselves to furthering the cause of unity, brotherhood and world
peace,” Modi wrote Sept. 11 to his 6.5 million followers on Twitter. India’s economy, the third largest in Asia, has struggled to recover
from sub-par growth, shackled by layers of bureaucracy anathema to the
diaspora. Modi’s general election triumph in May was driven in large
part by his entrepreneurial mantra.

…
On the eve of his U.S. visit, tensions remain between the Washington and New Delhi over trade and spying. The 64-year-old former chief minister of Gujarat was denied a U.S.
visa in 2005 over sectarian rioting that killed more than 1,000 people,
mainly Muslims, three years before. Modi, who denies wrongdoing, has
been exonerated by a Supreme Court probe.

..
Washington was late to warm to Modi. Its ambassador to India only met
him in February, when opinion polls already put his nationalists on
course for a big election win.

   


India’s U.S. diaspora is a highly educated population of nearly 3.2
million, making up about 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to
latest U.S. Census Bureau data.

….
As a group, they are more likely to be hooked to the internet than
their fellow Americans, far more likely to have a college or
professional degree and twice as well off with an average household
income of more than $100,000.

…
“Indians are generally very ambitious and entrepreneurs,” said Mike
Narula, the founder, president and chief executive officer of Long
Island, New York-based Reliance Communications, a distributor of mobile
telecom devices and accessories.

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Narula, who came to the United States 17 years ago, first working in
the garment industry, now has his own company with more than, 200
employees. He’s part of the host committee for Modi’s visit to
Washington, where the prime minister will meet with President Barack
Obama on Monday and Tuesday. “We attempted to do business in India. I hope Modi will look into
streamlining issues such as VAT, the role of FDI (foreign direct
investment) and find a way for American businesses to not have to go
through 19 red tape bureaucracies,” he said.

…
While Indian Americans are well represented in America’s professional
class, they are less visible in the military. Some 0.1 percent serve in
the armed forces compared to 0.4 percent of Americans as a whole. “The diaspora does very well on entrepreneurship, but not as much on
the physical sacrifices. It is not just enough to be a citizen and
taxpayer,” said Raj Bhandari, a 48 year old Mumbai-born banker from New
Jersey. “As a larger community I would like it to be more engaged on the
front lines.”

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A day
before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s landmark visit to the US, a human
rights group has obtained summons against him for his alleged role in
the 2002 Gujarat riots as state chief minister. New York based American Justice Centre (AJC) obtained the summons
from the US Federal Court for the Southern District of New York in a
suit filed with two survivors of what it called the “horrific and
organized violence of Gujarat 2002.”
…
Filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) and the Torture
Victim Protection Act (TVPA), the 28-page complaint charges Modi with
“committing crimes against humanity, extra-judicial killings, torture
and inflicting mental and physical trauma on the victims, mostly from
the Muslim community.”
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AJC said it is providing legal support and advice to the
survivors in their effort to hold “Modi accountable for his complicity
in the violence.
…
“The survivors are suing Modi for the loss of lives and trauma in
their families, and caused emotional, financial and psychological
devastation in their lives.
“The Tort Case against Prime Minister Modi is an unequivocal
message to human rights abusers everywhere,” said John Bradley, an AJC
director.

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“Time and place and the trappings of power will not be an impediment to justice.” The Alien Tort Claims Act, also known as Alien Tort Statute
(ATS), is a US federal law first adopted in 1789 that gives the federal
courts jurisdiction to hear lawsuits filed by US residents for acts
committed in violation of international law outside the US, AJC said.
…..

Link (1): in.reuters.com

Link (2): hindustantimes.com/us-rights-group-gets-court-summons-against-modi
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regards

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We are reminded here of Jurassic Park (the novel) where female dinosaurs had escaped from their habitat and had found a way to breed. Nature – it was famously said – will always find a way. And nature has found a way for creatures as immobile as snails to migrate from one continent to another by clinging on to the feet of birds.
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In June 2000, Alan de Queiroz became curious about an enormous,
ragged-looking garter snake that lived on the tip of Baja California.
Like many other biologists of his generation, de Quieroz had been taught
that species traveled the Earth to new habitats on slowly drifting
continents.  
…
This snake had relatives on the other side of the Sea of
Cortéz on Mexico’s mainland, and de Queiroz assumed that this population
ended up on Baja 4 to 8 million years ago, when the peninsula split
from the mainland.

…
But using a new method based on genetic
sequencing to estimate when the two populations split, he found that it
had occurred in the past few hundred thousand years. In other words, one
or more pioneering garter snakes had probably floated across 120 miles
of open ocean.

…
As de Queiroz prepared to write up the surprising
results of his snake study, he discovered that the reptile was not an
outlier. Biologists were finding that even after continents drifted
apart, plants and animals somehow hopped between them.  
…
“Obviously, the
continents had moved — nobody was claiming that the theory of plate
tectonics was wrong — and obviously, they had carried species with
them,” he writes, “but somehow, these facts did not explain nearly as
much about the modern living world as we had thought.” Chance ocean
crossings did.

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In his engaging new book, “The Monkey’s Voyage,”
de Queiroz makes the case that the vibrant and distinctive biological
communities we see today were created by organisms rafting across oceans
and soaring through the atmosphere. “The large number of these
colonizations tells us that, in the long history of this living world,
the miraculous has become the expected,” he writes.


To understand how contentious this notion is, de Queiroz takes us back
to the 1950s and ’60s, when a wealth of new information emerged about
continental drift. Geologists had long recognized that the coasts of
South America and Africa fit together like puzzle pieces and had
theorized that they were once a single landmass. 

But now measurements
from the ocean floor revealed several ridges, including one in the
middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where the sea floor was spreading before
the scientists’ eyes. These discoveries provided a clear mechanism for
how the continents creep along. Geologists determined that,
approximately 180 million years ago, there was an ancient uber-continent
called Gondwana, which sat on the equator and was composed of what are
now South America, Africa, Antarctica, India and Australia. 

Gondwana was also a revelation for evolutionary biologists. Its
break-up, they surmised, was probably etched in the history of life. For
instance, ostriches, emus and rheas, closely related birds found in
Africa, Australia and South America, became a textbook example of this
continental drift theory. Another famous example were southern beech
trees, which are found in South America, Australia and other smaller
pieces of Gondwana.

This theory was attractive because it was elegant and sensible, but,
as de Queiroz colorfully describes, its proponents became a little too
dogmatic about it. Léon Croizat, a self-trained botanist of French
heritage who lived in Venezuela, coined the phrase “Earth and life
evolve together” and believed that continental drift explained
everything about plant and animal distributions. To him, the idea that
plants or animals crossed oceans on their own was outrageous and
unscientific. 
…
He characterized Darwin as “congenitally not a thinker,”
in part because of Darwin’s suggestion that wolves may have reached the
Falkland Islands on icebergs. Croizat came in for criticism himself. An
eminent American paleontologist called him “a member of the lunatic
fringe.”

…
Indeed, there had always been evidence that, over the
long history of life on Earth, plants and animals made remarkable
journeys. Consider, for example, that young spiders are carried on the
wind by their silky threads and land on the decks of ships far from the
coastline. Freshwater snails cling to the feet of migrating birds. And
fishermen on the Caribbean island of Anguilla once watched a natural
raft of logs get washed onto shore with 15 green iguanas on it, a
species that had not previously existed there.

…
Proof of how
important these journeys are in evolutionary history finally arrived in
the late 1990s with genetic-dating studies, such as the one de Quieroz
conducted on his garter snakes. We now know that the evolutionary
history of ostriches, emus and rheas does not match the break-up of the
continents. Some scientists believe that their common ancestor could fly
and that they became flightless only after settling on their respective
continents. Among the other creatures de Queiroz considers are New
World monkeys and two other groups of mammals, which apparently rafted
to South America on a clump of earth. Today, these three groups
represent 73 percent of the land mammals living there.

…

Link: washingtonpost.com/monkeys-voyage-improbable-journeys-shaped-the-history-of-life-by-alan-de-queiroz

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regards

…. 
None of the above excuses the utterly horrific conditions in which peasants continue to lead their lives. If we enjoy living in a liberal democracy (however flawed) and not suffer from armed revolutions the elites will need to share. Every man, woman and child must be guaranteed dignity of life (and labor). To take just one example, all communities (and local governments) should learn from the example set forward by the Sikhs and adopt a no beggar policy.

The days of dividing and misruling are mostly behind us, as the BJP has discovered in the recently held by-poll(s) shocker – losing 9-2 to Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh and 3-0 in Uttarakhand and 3-1 in Rajasthan to a Congress party which is supposedly dead and buried. We live in hope for a better tomorrow, but there will be many a (non-fictional) Nitai Das who need help now and are unable to wait.
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A third of the way through the half-mile walk from the landlord’s house
to his hut, Nitai Das’s feet begin to sway. Or maybe it is the head-spin
again. He sits down on the lifeless field he has to cross before he can
reach his hut. There isn’t a thread of shade anywhere. 
…
The May sun is
an unforgiving fire; it burns his blood dry. It also burns away any
lingering grain of hope that the monsoons will arrive in time to end
this third year of drought. The earth around him is beginning to fissure
and crack. His eyelids are heavy. He closes them for a while, then, as
sleep begins to take him, he pitches forward from his sitting position
and jolts awake. Absently, he fingers his great enemy, the soil, not
soil any more, but compacted dust. Even its memory of water has been
erased for ever, as if it has never been.

He has begged all morning outside the landlord’s house for one cup of
rice. His three children haven’t eaten for five days. Their last meal
had been a handful of hay stolen from the landlord’s cowshed and boiled
in the cloudy yellow water from the well. Even the well is running dry. 
…
For the past three years they have been eating once every five or six or
seven days. The last few times he had gone to beg had yielded nothing,
except abuse and forcible ejection from the grounds of the landlord’s
house. 
…
In the beginning, when he had first started to beg for food, they
shut and bolted all the doors and windows against him while he sat
outside the house, for hours and hours, day rolling into evening into
night, until they discovered his resilience and changed that tactic.
Today they had set their guards on him. One of them had brought his
stick down on Nitai’s back, his shoulders, his legs, while the other one
had joked, ‘Where are you going to hit this dog? He is nothing but
bones, we don’t even have to hit him. Blow on him and he’ll fall back.’

His wife is sitting outside their hut, waiting for him to return with
something, anything, to eat. She can hardly hold her head up. Even
before he starts taking shape from a dot on the horizon to the form of
her husband, she knows he is returning empty-handed. The children have
stopped looking up now when he comes back from the fields. They have
stopped crying with hunger, too.

The youngest, three years old, is a tiny, barely moving bundle, her eyes
huge and slow. The middle one is a skeleton sheathed in loose, polished
black skin. The eldest boy, with distended belly, has become so
listless that even his shadow seems dwindled and slow. Their bones have
eaten up what little flesh they had on their thighs and buttocks. 
..
On the
rare occasions when they cry, no tears emerge; their bodies are
reluctant to part with anything they can retain and consume. He can see
nothing in their eyes. In the past there was hunger in them, hunger and
hope and end of hope and pain, and perhaps even a puzzled resentment, a
kind of muted accusation, but now there is nothing, a slow,
beyond-the-end nothing.

Inside the tiny hut, his daughter is sitting on the floor, shaking,
trying to drag herself into a corner where she can disappear. Perhaps
she has smelled the metallic blood, or taken fright at the animal moan
issuing out of her father, a sound not possible of humans. 
…
Nitai
instinctively rubs his right hand, his working hand, against his
bunched-up lungi and grabs hold of his daughter’s throat with both his
hands, and squeezes and squeezes and squeezes until her protruding eyes
almost leave the stubborn ties of their sockets and her tongue lolls out
and her thrashing legs still. He crawls on the floor to the corner
where their last child is crying her weak, runty mewl and, with
trembling hands, covers her mouth and nose, pushing his hands down,
keeping them pressed, until there is nothing.

Nitai Das knows what to do. He lifts the jerrycan of Folidol left over
from three seasons ago and drinks, his mouth to the lip of the plastic
canister, until he can drink no more. His insides burn numb and he
thrashes and writhes like a speared earthworm, thrashes and writhes, a
pink foam emerging from his mouth, until he too is returned from the
nothing in his life to nothing.

….

Link: http://www.firstpost.com/printpage.php?idno=1714685&sr_no=0

…..

regards

The song is set in Aiman Kalyan, also
called Yaman Kalyan, the evening raag prescribed for creating a mood of
romance.

Her ‘Aaj jaane ki zid na karo’ is delivered in this
semi-free vein: her wilful, uneven pacing of the lyrics creates the illusion of
a chase, a constant fleeing of the words from the entrapments of beat. (This
technique, which has the mark of her teacher—the erratic and perennially
intoxicated Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan—bears its sweetest fruit in Khanum’s ghazals,
where strategic lags and compressions in the singing can enhance the pleasures
of a deferred rhyme.)