Hardy Har

“Bungalow blow to Arundhati”:http://www.sulekha.com/redirectnh.asp?cid=308813
bq. Rights crusader Arundhati Roy has been caught on the wrong foot � a hilltop bungalow her husband owns near Panchmarhi stands on notified forest land and has to be pulled down.
bq. The Panchmarhi district administration last week informed the couple that the allotment of the land on which the bungalow stood had been cancelled on grounds of violation of forest law. Section 18 of the law bars buying and selling of notified forest land.
I weep for my country when so called activits who preach morality to the world blatantly violate the law of the land. Who the hell is this person to decide where she can build her house and turn everything we love – our earth, our skies, our mountains, our plains, our rivers – to her personal property in an instant? Think of the amount of wild life she has destroyed by building her house on protected land ? Doesn’t she owe an apolgy to that eco system that was destoyed by her illegal abode. I weep for those ferns and trees and that little crow whose nest was destroyed by this inhuman activity.
No freedom for rest of the world to do as they please, but only for me.
(The Editorial adapted from “The End of Imagination”:http://www.zmag.org/southasia/endofimagination.htm)

Why India should remain nuclear

“Pakistan offers nuclear-free deal”:http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/05/05/pakistan.india.nuclear.ap/index.html
bq. “As far as Pakistan is concerned, if India is ready to denuclearize, we would be happy to denuclearize,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan said. “But it will have to be mutual.”
This is one trick we should not fall for as Scott Draker warns
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Monsoon and Politics

“As I was saying before”:https://varnam.org/archives/000072.html, the monsoons are the most important weather phenomena affecting everything in India. General elections are due in 2004 and political parties are gearing up to face the fact their prospects maybe affected by a less than normal rainfall this year.
“How Ballot Hopes Rest On Good Monsoon”:http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=32684
bq. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is drawing up a contingency plan to boost its electoral prospects in case the monsoon fails for the second year in a row. The plan includes involvement of non-government organisations (NGOs) to augment food distribution network. The plan is aimed at neutralising the impact of drought.A bad monsoon is not good news for the ruling party which is gearing up to face elections.
Around this time, the most important person in the country is the head of the India Meteorological Department (IMD), who makes the weather prediction. In his book, Chasing The Monsoon, Alexander Frater mentions that the Prime Minister’s Office makes regular calls to the IMD to keep track of the arrival of the rains.
Update: “Salomon says Indian monsoon a source for worry “:http://reuters.com/financeArticle.jhtml?storyID=2684164&newsType=usGoldRpt&menuType=markets
bq. “Some of the long-term global circulation models are indicating a dry bias across much of India during the time frame of June through September — the Indian monsoon season,” Russo and Davis said. This does not mean there will be a replay of last year’s poor monsoon, but the “guidance…raises the possibility for a dry bias this season,” the two concluded.

Yanni!

Last week it was “Dave Barry”:https://varnam.org/archives/000073.html. This week I met “Yanni”:http://www.yanni.com/ at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. The Hollywood Bowl is no Taj Mahal, Forbidden City or Acropolis, but the music was out of the world. The energy in his music is so high and has a grand majestic feeling to it. If he is playing near your area, don’t miss it.

3500 years back

“Ancient site discovered in Bihar”:http://www.ndtv.com/morenews/showmorestory.asp?slug=Ancient+site+discovered+in+Bihar&id=37419
bq. They have found a 3500-year-old site in Pandavsthan village and some 2,000 artifacts that are said to date to around 1500-2000 B.C. Pandavsthan’s residents always believed their village got its name from the Mahabharata and that the Pandavas spent some time here.
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