Hey Iran, be like Pakistan

When it comes to Pakistan, all the rules regarding proliferation and democracy have a new angle for the Western World. Sometimes silence, sometimes a harsh word immediately followed by generous finacial assistance has now become a standard Pakistani handshake protocol. Now that the General has refused to step down, the Commonwealth in a big bold move actually, as WaPo says scolded Pakistan. We don’t know if the General wet his pants laughing.
Colin Powell, the buddy of Musharraf was always reluctant to criticize him, and it seems the new Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice too has the same DNA. Recently speaking in Luxemborg, she said that Iran’s support of terrorism, nuclear ambitions and lack of democracy are out of step with trends in neighbouring nations notably Pakistan.
Daniel Larison writes

We should remember that Musharraf seized power because of his frustration with the insufficiently militant stance of the Sharif government over Kashmir, which Pakistan was infiltrating in force in the Kargil region in 1999. There has been relatively little improvement in Indo-Pak relations since the near-war in 2002, and it would not be all together too biased to say that, were it not for Indian forebearance and goodwill, even these improvements would have been impossible.
It has been Pakistan’s basic foreign policy for at least the last 15 years to support Islamic fundamentalists along its borders, using them as cat’s paws against their main rivals, thus avoiding any further humiliating defeats at the hands of India’s military or direct confrontations with the Iranians. Within the last three and a half years, during which Pakistan has supposedly been doing so much to curb extremism, terrorists based in Pakistan organised and carried out the stunning attack on India’s parliament in Dec. 2001, and this was hardly the last attack in northern India by Pakistani terrorists. To ignore this sponsorship of terrorism by a principal ally is a blunder in terms of legitimate American interests and the egregious double standard our government has for Pakistan-based terrorism has not gone unnoticed in India. [Rice Foolishly Praises Pakistan]

I heard on her first trip abroad, the Secretary of State gifted some atlases to the correspondents traveling with her so that they would know the countries they were traveling to. A proper gift for Dr. Rice would be a good history book on Pakistan.

Book Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, Broadway, 560 pages


Popular travel writer Bill Bryson got curious about the world one day and wondered – How do scientists measure the size of the earth or its distance from the sun ?. How do they how old this planet is ? Why does the salinity of the ocean stay the same ? Pondering over these questions, he figured that he did not know much about science. So he started a quest to understand these issues and wrote the book A Short History of Nearly Everything in the process.

So this book covers, as the title says the history of nearly
everything – physics, chemistry, biology, geology, paleontology,
quantum physics, astronomy, and natural history to name a few fields. We go from the first
moments of the big bang to the most recent fossil discoveries. We go from
the life of sub atomic particles to the life of dinosaurs. The
information presented in the book comes from Bryson’s vociferous reading of  material from
science journals to popular books and interviews with scientists working in the
field.

Writing a book on science and making it interesting for 500 odd pages
is no easy task and I have to say, Bryson has done it well. Once I read an interview
with him where he said that when he was a travel writer he observed that
not even your spouse wants to read your writing. So his solution was to intersperse
the narrative with humor and if you have read his books, A Walk in the Woods or
In a Sunburned Country   you know what that
means. In this book he laces the scientific developments with the life of the
people who made the discoveries.

The result is that you end up knowing a lot more about
famous people and a lot of people whom the science books have left out. You get
to know about their passions, jealousies, quirks, influences and
motivations. But sometimes he gets too obsessed with trivia (French Chemist
Antoine Lavoisier had 13000 beakers in his lab, Max Plank’s son was caught in a
conspiracy for murdering Hitler, Darwin fathered ten children). But then a
justification for these hooks are the fact that only few people are interested
in all braches of science discussed, I for one like Physics and hate Biology.
These trivia and Bryson’s humor got me across the biology chapters without
getting bored.

If you are
interested in science and lot of trivia, this is the book for you.

Hindus and Buddhists in Nepal

While scholars try to portray a confrontational relationship between Buddhism and Hinduism, many facts point to the fact that they just co-existed. The book I am reading, Massacre at the Palace: The Doomed Royal Dynasty of Nepal has some information on the relations between Hindus and Buddhists in Nepal.
The Newars of Nepal developed a kind of Buddhism quite different from that practiced elsewhere. As Buddhists they were allowed to eat meat including buffalo and the pig. The Newars could have a Brahmin as a priest and Hindus would worship in Buddhist shrines. The Shiva temple at Pashupathinath has a strict prohibition on entry by non-Hindus, but Newars are allowed to enter.
There is a festival of the Hindus involving a Kumari, who is considered a living godess. In Indrajatra, she is pulled on a chariot through various parts of Kathmandu and she gives blessings to the King who is considered a partial reincarnation of Vishnu. This Kumari who features prominently in the Hindu festival is chosen from the Buddhist priestly clan of Sakyas (the same clan as Buddha).

Tsunami treasures

While writing about the shore temple at Mahabalipuram which survived the
tsunami, we mentioned about the mythology about six other temples which were
destroyed and also about the marine archaeology discoveries in the region. Now the tsunamis have unearthed some priceless historical artifacts in Mahabalipuram.

“The sea has thrown up evidence of the grandeur of the Pallava dynasty. These have been buried for centuries,” the archaeological body’s superintending archaeologist, T. Sathiamoorthy, said late on Thursday. “We’re all very excited about these finds.”
Among the tsunami “gifts” found in Mahabalipuram, 70 kilometers south of Madras, are the remnants of a stone house and a half-completed rock elephant, archaeologists say. There are
also two giant granite lions, one seated and another poised to charge. The statues are each carved out of a single piece of granite stone, testifying to the carver’s skill. The archaeologists
are also excited about a report from locals that just before the waves struck on December 26, the sea withdrew a great distance baring the sea bed on which lay a temple structure and several rock sculptures. “We’ll
be exploring the sea bed to document these Pallava relics,” Sathiamoorthy said, adding the Archaeological Survey of India would dispatch a team of marine archaeologists next month to the area.
Experts are examining as well a 15-centimeter tall bronze Buddha found inside a bamboo basket attached to a raft to determine its age and origin. The figure with Myanmarese writing on its back is seated lotus style and holds a begging bowl on his lap. [Tsunamis reveal ancient Indian sculptures via Zinken]

How did Subhash Bose die ?

Subhash Chandra Bose, after death seems to have become the Indian version of Elvis Presley. His death remains a mystery to date with many people suspecting that he did not die in that plane crash in Taipei in 1945. After that there have been many theories – he was a Soviet prisoner of war, he lived as a Hindu monk named Bhagwanji etc.
Recently Pakistan Cricket Board Chief Shaharyar Khan wrote about any eye-witness account of Bose’s death based on the statement of Brigadier Habib-ur-Rehman.

“They had boarded the aircraft at Saigon and after a refueling stop, the plane was flying over Northern Taiwan when one of the engines began to sputter.
“The plane rapidly lost height but the pilot managed to bring it down on a clearing where it crashed into heavy undergrowth. The occupants were severely injured, some dying instantly, others escaping with injuries.
Habib himself had been thrown clear as the plane plunged into a thicket because he was sitting near the tail of the aircraft,” Khan wrote.
“Though bruised and groggy, Habib found he could still move and ran immediately towards the burning aircraft to see if he could rescue his leader and others who may have survived. When he reached, he saw the charred body of Bose lying beside the aircraft. Bose had seemingly died because…his suit had caught fire and burnt his body beyond recognition,” Khan wrote in his book. [I saw Netaji dying: Pak Brigadier]

This indeed is a fascinating story, but for one small problem. According to the Taiwanese, there was no air crash in Taipei between August 14 and September
20, 1945. This information was revealed to Justice M K Mukherjee, heading the
one-man commission of inquiry into Netaji’s disappearance. The commission has
been asked to wrap up and submit its report by May 2005 and hopefully we will
get a treasure trove of conspiracy theories.

Hunting down dissidents


When it comes to the Iranian influence on the events in Balochistan, you get confusing signals from Pakistan. While officials in Islamabad think  there is no influence, officials in Balochistan think otherwise. Officially Iran has also stated that they are not playing in Balochistan.
Now in an intriguing event, an Iranian dissident has been shot dead in Balochistan. Ahmed Mashoof along with two others had illegally
entered Balochistan and rented a house in Quetta. They were members of the
Iranian dissident group Balochistan National Front and opponents of the Iranian
Govt. According to Pakistani police, it was Iranian gunmen who shot the three.

Assailants wearing masks attacked Iranian dissidents sheltering in Quetta on Monday night, killing one of them, police said.
The gunmen opened fire with AK-47 rifles inside a house in Killi Kabir, where three Iranians were staying, said Sher Nawaz Marwat, a Quetta police official.
Ahmed Mashoof, 29, was hit by four bullets and died instantly, Marwat said. The other two Iranians were unhurt. Marwat said police were investigating to determine the motive and trace the attackers.

Thank you God

I have been watching so many Hindi movies and at the end of each one I wonder, “Which brain dead person wrote this one ?”. But then I read this note from Suketu Mehta in National Geographic and was happy that this story did not get made into a movie. 

Hanging out with Shah Rukh Khan was great fun. He told me about the kind of bizarre scripts people propose to him. In one story idea given to him by a politician, Shah Rukh’s character dies. But there is no human body available for reincarnation. So he is born again as a dog. After nine months, he falls in love with a woman.

The politician had spent hundreds of thousands of rupees buying puppies and training them. He had many books about dogs on his table. I asked Shah Rukh if he was expected to act as the dog. In answer, he scratched his ear rapidly with his paw. [On Assignment from Bollywood]

Anger Management

Every other day there seems to be a story on meditation and yoga in the United States. Meditation has been found in scientific experiments to reduce hypertension as well as even alter the brain structure. Now Yoga alongwith some mantra meditation is used to cure anger of juveniles in a detention center.

“I got hooked on it and now I go every Friday,” the darkskinned girl says. “I didn’t really know you could find such a calm place in your body. It’s like you go off somewhere else; it’s like I’m not even in my body, like you go floating off the ground up in the sky. It’s really awesome.”
“(Gina) was really, really ADD at first,” Lord says, referring to attention-deficit disorder. “She could not even stop talking in the middle of a pose. She was incapable of closing her mouth, and now she is quiet in class. That’s a huge, huge change.”
After nearly an hour of poses, Lord directs the girls onto their backs for the “corpse” pose. She turns off the lights, hands out blue washcloths for the girls to cover their eyes and starts a new tape of Indian music. As the girls lie silently, muscles unclenched and hands open, a woman on the tape lightly chants the mantra, Om namah Shivaya (“I honor my higher self”). Some of the girls move their lips along with the words.
“Don’t pay attention to any sounds,” Lord purrs. “Focus on the mantra. If a thought comes into your mind, just pretend it’s a little butterfly floating across the blue sky of your mind. . . . Repeat this mantra whenever you need it. The mantra is a tool.” [Yoga Gives Young Offenders Tools Against Trouble]

Manufacturing news ?

The other day I chanced on a blog called the Great Separation which had an entry titled Christians in India Threatened with Death by Hindu Fundamentalists. Christians are about 24 million people, a numerically large number. So were all those Christians threatened by Hindu Fundamentalists ? No, on reading the entry, this title was put by the site owner based on an article whose title was “Christian Adivasi victims of violence and forced