1. The letter sent by Deccan Mujahideen (Updated on Dec 1)
2. DesiPundit latest updates
3. CNN-IBN Live Feed
4. Twitter feeds from people in Mumbai
5. Who are the Deccan Mujahideen?
6. Vinu’s photographs from the ground
7. DesiPundit has updates and sites from where you can get more news
8. TweetGrid collects all twitter feeds related to Mumbai.
9. Google Trends
10. Wikipedia page on the terrorist attack
11. Google Maps showing the sites
12. Maharashtra Times has pictures of two terrorists coming out of CST.

I hope no one writes blog posts about the “Spirit of Mumbai” where everything is forgotten and people wait for the next terrorist attack.

Who thought that Aravind Adiga winning the Booker Prize would have such serious after shocks.? Our beloved New York Times Delhi bureau chief Somini Sengupta is leaving her position. The news of the transition of this South Asian reporter was published on the SAJA forum, a site covering “South Asians”, an imaginary species.

For almost four years Ms. Sengupta worked tirelessly to prove to fellow “South Asians” that “India” was not shining. Her propensity to cover the downtrodden and the ones who were stomped on by upper class members of the Hindu caste system was unparalleled. Sadly that nectar is insufficient for winning awards these days. 

The new man in town is Pulitzer Prize-winner Jim Yardley who comes from the Beijing bureau. A person from any other bureau would have been highly insulting. We hope Mr. Yardley realizes that the cheat sheet has limitations – it cannot even win you a Nehru-Gandhi peace award.

Ms. Sengupta spawned a cottage industry of satirists and social scientists who won’t have, to paraphrase an American President, “Somini to kick around anymore.” The revival of our cottage industry depends on Mr. Yardley’s ingenuity; we will be watching with bated eyelids. Ms. Sengupta meanwhile is moving to Amsterdam, an arcadia, where countless people have found salvation thinking about “social” issues.

The recent violence in Kashmir also bought out the intellectual pygmies in India. They wrote columns advocating the separation of Jammu and Kashmir along religious lines so that they could watch genocide and make a livelihood out of it. These people have serious thrill issues.

During such times, the Sept 2008 issue of Pragati reassures that sanity and historical perspective are present in adequate amounts among foreign policy analysts.

“According to the Pentagon today, secret surrender negotiations are now underway with key Iraqi military officials. That’s what the Pentagon said: We’re in secret negotiations, so for God sakes, don’t tell anyone. … What we’re doing basically is giving these key Iraqi military officials instructions on how to surrender. See, this is where we could have used the French.” —Jay Leno

In India, we don’t need the French.Esteemed columnists like Swaminathan Aiyar and Vir Sanghvi have called upon the nation to wave the white flag and kneel before the secessionists. We should thank our stars (or Richard Dawkins if you are an atheist) that such people did not exist in 1947.

On August 15, 1947, when India became Independent, the Maharajah of Kashmir signed a standstill agreement with the government of Pakistan, a precursor to accession. The Pakistanis also took over charge of Jammu and Kashmir’s post and telegraph system, food supplies and essential commodities. But in September armed groups from Pakistan came from West Punjab and started looting and raping the the Muslims in Kashmir valley, the same people whom they had come to liberate.

A desperate Maharajah turned to India. Even though Chacha Nehru and Lord Mountabatten were running the show, they got the Maharajah to sign the Instrument of Accession and Kashmir joined the Indian Union. If these columnists were around at that time, they would have taken umbrage at the Maharajah for not letting his people be murdered.

In 1965 several thousand armed men — mainly professional Pakistani soldiers and non-Kashmiris — crossed the Line Of Control to liberate Kashmir. The Kashmirs stood by India but our columnists would have encouraged them to surrender.

In the 80s Sikh separatism was a major problem in India. Delhi was a fortress and Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale used to run the show from the Golden Temple. Our columnists would have written op-eds praising him and would have flown the Khalistan flag in their homes.

These are your regular columnists. Then there the award winning types – the Booker and the like. They missed the 1947 and 1971 genocides. The ones they saw in 1984 and 2002 were not up to their standards. They now want a Balkanization of Jammu and Kashmir so that they will get fodder for some books, columns and lucrative speeches on the speaking circuit.

These grandees are not confined by the parochial boundaries of nations. They are mobile republics who unfortunately were born in India. Instead of floating in international waters like true mobile republics, they live prosperously in the comforts of the Indian state carrying out the ISI agenda of a death by thousand cuts.

All of them — the regular and award winning ones — claim they are drinking the liberalism Kool-Aid. It is time they checked the contents of the bottle because this drink tastes like communalism. They encourage communalism and want the division of India along communal lines and call others communal. As Plato once said to Aristotle: If it walks like a duck…

Instead let me suggest a new drink. Liberal Nationalism. Neither shaken nor stirred.

(via Niraj)

Recently Santosh Madhavan aka Swami Amritachaithanya, a self proclaimed godman, was arrested in Kerala for among other things molesting girls and blackmailing them with videos of it. The Communists were all over the news marching against godmen and speaking sanctimoniously.

Then the other day a television channel showed the image of a woman being groped by a Communist party district leader as the Chief Minister was inagurating a bridge. The abused woman, it turns out, was a Communist MLA and the image was shown on Kairali TV, a Communist TV channel, thus making the whole thing an in-house entertainment package.

“We did not know that the lady in it was an MLA. So we went ahead and included it in the episode. We thought if there was anything against any party member, the channel would cut it out during preview. But the pictures were broadcast with her face masked,” said Leen.[MLA files complaint against TV channel (via Ranjith)]

This January, the Indian Govt. cut funding for a Sanskrit program because it is now a sin to learn an ancient language and the reason: India has a large Muslim population.

Such camps, run by volunteers from Hindu nationalist groups, are designed to promote a language long dismissed as dead, and to instill in Hindus religious and cultural pride. Many Sanskrit speakers, though, believe that the camps are a steppingstone to a higher goal: turning back the clock and making Sanskrit modern India’s spoken language.

Their endeavors are viewed with suspicion by many scholars here as part of an increasingly acrimonious debate over the role of Sanskrit in schools and society. The scholars warn against exploiting Indians’ reverence for Sanskrit to promote the supremacy of Hindu thought in a country that, while predominantly Hindu, is also home to a large Muslim population and other religious minorities.

“It is critical to understand Sanskrit in order to study ancient Indian civilization and knowledge. But the language should not be used to push Hindu political ideology into school textbooks,” said Arjun Dev, a historian and textbook author. “They want to say that all that is great about India happened in the Hindu Sanskrit texts.”[Summer Camps Revive India’s Ancient Sanskrit]

When the Supreme Court of India writes judgements admiring the language in which Indian minds expressed noblest ideas, it takes the UPA Govt. to accuse that it is communal. Instead of whining about the Govt. the best course of action would be to organize a Samskrita Bharati camp in your area.