Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Gujarat 2002 in perspective

It's official then - well - at least more official than it has been before. A lot of you may know about this already - Tehelka.com dug it all up recently. I'm referring to, what Dr. Manmohan Singh recently referred to as, the genocide in Gujarat in 2002 that followed the horrific killings of several dozen people in a train in Godhra, Gujarat. Tehelka just brought to light what a lot of us felt that we knew already- that the whole thing had indeed been planned right from the start and had the sanction of people in high positions of power.

We also know that this wouldn't have happened however if the groundswell of tacit support for committing such atrocities hadn't existed / didn't exist. That this culture of hate is rampant - is a reality that cannot be wished away. At least, not just yet.

Warning: The report is a disturbing read.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Excavation

Digging your nose on the day, or the day after, you've clipped your nails can be very frustrating - those nasty boogers seem to slip away at the last possible second.

Moral of the story: Don't clip your nails down completely. Leave a little bit on for digging in and for chewing on purposes (in any order - I don't necessarily favor a particular sequence of actions).

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

The world is a flat circle

... going round and round.

NY Times, which a couple of years ago had made its Op-Ed section a paid access site, has finally realized the error of their ways and are now back to allowing free access to all. In case you can't make the connection - they have come full circle. That's good news - right?! Perhaps. Trouble is, most of their columnists have really lost credibility, at least in my opinion, since their blind support for the war on Iraq and the no-questions-asked clean chit to the bullcrap fed to them by the Bush administration with respect to Iraq.

One of the chief defaulters on the credibility front is Tom Friedman, columnist and author who wrote, among others, the famous "The World Is Flat" which touts outsourcing as a great positive movement. Recently he wrote this column in the NYTimes.

While the article may not signify a full circle traversal by him - it clearly implies a backtracking from his earlier position of being gung-ho on the war on Iraq. In fact, he's backtracked so much so that, off late, he has been rather apologetic about that error in judgment. Well - good for him, I say.

But it's difficult though to figure out what his true intentions are with all this - to borrow a Republican term used very effectively against John Kerry - flip-flopping. Tough to figure out if he's just trying to win back credibility and through that, readership for his next edition on outsourcing or Iraq - or that he really thinks deep-down inside that he somehow screwed up and now he's trying to make amends for it. He may be back to being on Bush's case now - but when it really mattered in the buildup to the most useless and counter-productive war in recent times, he failed f***ing miserably in exhibiting good sense.

But then again, he wasn't alone in that.