bq. The Bombay high court on Thursday directed the Maharashtra government to file an affidavit by February 4 in response to a bunch of petitions asking the Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party to pay Rs 50 crore for losses suffered by citizens due to the bandh organised by them in the city in July last year. [“Rediff”:http://us.rediff.com/news/2004/jan/08bandh.htm]
Kerala High Court has banned bandhs in the state. So people just renamed it to “hartal”:http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&edition=in&q=kerala+hartal&btnG=Search+News and still bring the state to a halt. I hope the court passes the judgement that political parties who prevent people from earning their living, pay for the damages they cause.

Sonia Gandhi, the Congress(I) President recently made a statement that “it is the right of the people of India to say who shall be prime minister”. TVR Shenoy gives a lesson in history and explains how Nehru became the “first Prime Minister of India”:http://in.rediff.com/news/2003/dec/30flip.htm
bq. Let me take you back to the year 1946. Everyone knew that Independence was around the corner (though the precise date remained undecided). The choice of Congress president became crucial since it was certain that the Viceroy would invite him or her to head the interim government. Twelve of the 15 Pradesh Congress Committees proposed the name of Sardar Patel; not one of them sent up the name of Jawaharlal Nehru — not even his native United Provinces (as Uttar Pradesh was then titled). It was at this point that Mahatma Gandhi made his last decisive intervention in the affairs of the nation.
bq. He asked Acharya Kripalani — who, if I remember correctly was the choice of the United Provinces Pradesh Congress Committee — to circulate a note to the Congress Working Committee asking that body to nominate Nehru. From this distance in time, the Mahatma??s reasons seem less than convincing. ‘He, a Harrow boy, a Cambridge graduate and a barrister, is wanted to carry on the negotiations with Englishmen.’ Again, the Mahatma believed that Nehru could ‘make India play a role in international affairs.’ More realistically, ‘Jawahar will not take second place.’ Whatever the rationale — and the last suggests that our much-worshipped first prime minister was a spoiled brat in the Mahatma’s estimation — the fact remains that Bapu??s suggestion carried the day, and Sardar Patel, the choice of the people, failed to become prime minister through a palace coup.

Sify News has an series on the “NRIs who have made India proud”:http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=13341259. The list includes Kalpana Chawla, Deepak Chopra, Sabeer Bhatia, Jhumpa Lahiri to name a few. What is missing in the list is the countless number of Indians who are working in countries all over the world.

John Laxmi, a member of the board of directors of South Asian Journalists Association ( a group of people who think that India should not retain its own identity, but be grouped along with terrorist nation Pakistan, under the “South Asia” label), has an article in Rediff in which he expresses the opinion that Indians should not fight against the negative image of India being portrayed. For example
bq. There are hundreds of reputed academic scholars in the West who study and expound India’s history, culture and economy. Some of these scholars are now being attacked unjustly for all the negative perceptions of India. A fanciful notion suggested by some is to deploy rival academic scholars to ‘market’ a positive image of India.
John thinks that scholars who portray negative images of India should not be corrected. He says it is their right, fair enough. But he in the same vein denies the right of Indians to correct it. If you would like to know what is being portrayed and what is being corrected, please read Rajiv’s article “RISA Lila – 1: Wendy’s Child Syndrome”:http://www.sulekha.com/expressions/column.asp?cid=239156
But then John goes onto attack NRIs in general with statement without any basis.
bq. Whether Indians like it or not, most NRIs are not interested in marketing India. This is not because they are ashamed of their origins (as some Indo-philes frequently claim, using some vague Vedic psychiatry) but because most NRIs are preoccupied with their personal lives and, as they assimilate into new societies, they develop a greater level of interest in advancing the interests of their host nation than the interests of the country of their origin. One can debate whether this is right or wrong, but that is a separate issue. Many NRIs in America are, at heart, more American than Indian, although most may not admit it or even realize it fully.
Perhaps John has never heard of an organization called “USINPAC”:http://washingtontimes.com/world/20031219-093705-9413r.htm (Please note that this is an Indian Political Action Committee, not South Asian Political Action Commmittee). This organization is made up of the same NRIs whom John accuses of not being intrested in India. More than a year old, this organization has 27,000 members
bq. Next on USINPAC’s domestic list of issues is immigration and the controversial H-1B visas that allow foreign professionals with special skills to come to the United States to work. Indians currently are major beneficiaries of the program, obtaining 40 percent of the 65,000 visas issued annually. It is lobbying hard for the United Nations to admit India as a permanent member of the Security Council.
John does not know that many NRIs here do not go for the South Asian brand and like to promote the Indian identity, as a democratic secular nation.

The Communist Party of India, Marxist Leninist is an organization that has chosen the path of violence to spread communism

It is significant that the erstwhile CPI(M-L)-PWG had been similarly formed in 1980 by the merger of seven splinter Communist outfits operating in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The CPI(M-L)-Party Unity of undivided Bihar merged with the CPI(M-L)-PWG in August 1998 in a new avatar called the CPI(M-L) People?s War. Since then, the outfit has acquired a national dimension and today accounts for about 64 per cent of country-wide Communist violence, with its activities being reported from 12 states.

And guess who these murderers are honoring ?

• Mahashweta Devi
• Arundhati Roy, author of God of Small Things
• Sandeep Pandey, founder of ASHA
• Rajinder Sachar
• Praful Bidwai, liar and columnist
• Anand Patwardhan, film maker

Kerala’s Chief Minister AK Antony, Cong (I) has urged the Prime Minister of India to tell United States to provide “humane treatment”  to Saddam Hussein

“Saddam was the head of a state and his case should be taken up as per existing international norms,” Antony said in a letter faxed to Vajpayee.

When Saddam was inhumanely killing his own citizens Antony did not bother to fax letters to Saddam Hussein.

It seems Malayalam film industry is in “a crisis”:http://sify.com/movies/malayalam/fullstory.php?id=13334644
bq. The shooting of Mammootty?s Vajram has stopped temporarily as it looks like the film will not make it to the theatres for Christmas. Mohanlal?s Vamanapuram Bus Service is on the verge of a breakdown are theatres are refusing to advance money to producer Anand after the colossal failure of Hariharan Pilla Happy Aanu.
bq. Dileep?s Pattanathil Sundaram is not able to get the kind of advance that his earlier films got. In Ernakulam producer ?Liberty? Basheer wanted Rs 10 lakhs as advance but theatres are offering only Rs 4 lakh!
bq. Three films of Suresh Gopi are lying in the cans with no takers for months and no distributor or exhibitor wants to touch it with a barge pole
Malayalam movies are low cost productions, with simple stories involving family and human relations. Now with the proliferation of Cable TV, all such stories are available to people as Mega Serials. So there is no incentive for people to go to a movie theatre, pay lot more money and watch sometimes pathetic movies. Many of the film stars are now migrating to the small screen and super stars have turned to Serial producers.
What is the way out ? One way would be to mount lavish productions like Tamil movies. This is something which the TV industry cannot match.

“Companies outsource to India”:http://www.eveningstar.co.uk/Content/news/story.asp?datetime=03+Dec+2003+17%3A38&tbrand=ESTOnline&tCategory=News&category=News&brand=ESTOnline&itemid=IPED03+Dec+2003+09%3A38%3A18%3A880
bq. The announcement, as revealed in yesterday’s Evening Star, by Royal Sun Alliance to close the More Th>n call centre in Ipswich with the loss of 240 jobs in the town came on the same day that Norwich Union’s parent company Aviva, said it was axing 2,350 jobs nationwide to “outsource” them to parts of India.
“Companies retreat from outsourcing”:http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,558743,00.html
bq. In Web.com’s case it wasn’t so much antiforeigner sentiment among customers as frustration with tech-support people who were simply too far from headquarters to reach the people who could solve problems quickly. “If it’s a binary decision process?yes or no?then you should consider outsourcing,” says Pemble. “But if there’s a maybe in there anywhere, then you can be sure that all your customer-support difficulties will gravitate to that like iron filings to a magnet.”

The Guardian has “an article”:http://www.sulekha.com/redirectnh.asp?cid=319613 on outsourcing which it thinks is the reversal of colonialism
bq. Britain’s industrialisation was secured by destroying the manufacturing capacity of India. In 1699, the British government banned the import of woollen cloth from Ireland, and in 1700 the import of cotton cloth (or calico) from India. Both products were forbidden because they were superior to our own. As the industrial revolution was built on the textiles industry, we could not have achieved our global economic dominance if we had let them in. Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries, India was forced to supply raw materials to Britain’s manufacturers, but forbidden to produce competing finished products. We are rich because the Indians are poor.
bq. Now the jobs we stole 200 years ago are returning to India.

How old is democracy in India ? 56 years ? But from “some inscriptions”:http://www.sulekha.com/redirectnh.asp?cid=318876 in a temple near Kancheepuram in Tamil Nadu, it is atleast 1000 years old.
bq. The village is known for its historic inscription of a written constitution that deals with elections to the village assembly, qualifications required of candidates contesting in elections, circumstances under which a candidate may be disqualified, mode of election, tenure of the elected candidates and the right of the public to recall the elected members when they failed to discharge their duties properly and so on.
And also if an elected person was found to be corrupt, he and his near relatives were debarred from cotesting an election for seven generations.
How old is India as a nation ? Did it ever exist as a nation before or was it just a British creation, an artificial entity. That’s what some westerners and secular Indian historians would like us to believe. Sankrant Sanu lays that theory to rest in this brilliant essay “Why India Is A Nation”:http://www.sulekha.com/expressions/column.asp?cid=305879