The question of Afghanistan's question for India...

Indian security presence in Afghanistan from The Hindu
Read full article... it is worth it.

THE INDIAN "debate" about Afghanistan is narrowing down to a single agenda: ensuring the security of hundreds of Indian nationals involved in Indian projects in that country. Since the killing of Maniappan Ramankutty in November last, the Government began substantially augmenting the paramilitary forces deployed in Afghanistan. It reportedly decided on deploying the CRPF in Afghanistan even ahead of Suryanarayana's death last week.

It took the Dutch parliament an agonising six months to make up its mind whether a few hundred troops could be sent to Afghanistan. The "debate" deeply divided the Dutch public. An entire team of parliamentarians from the House of Commons travelled to Afghanistan at great risk to their personal safety before the parliamentary select committee could decide what conditions and preconditions had to be fulfilled before British troops were despatched to southern Afghanistan under the commitment to NATO. (Of course, senior British journalists separately travelled to Afghanistan for making their own assessment.)

India, regrettably, is yet to reach that level of sophistication in policy-making — its tragic experiences in Sri Lanka nearly two decades ago notwithstanding. Secondly, Afghanistan is — it has been for a long time and may well remain for the foreseeable future — an enigma. Ambiguities shroud every "incident" like the one involving Maniappan or Suryanarayana. Things are never quite what they may appear to be. This is inevitable when intrigues double up as politics. What Selig Harrison wrote in his classic work Out of Afghanistan — that the Soviets actually blundered into Afghanistan in 1978 — has since been borne out by the declassified archival materials of the Cold War period in Moscow and Washington. A perception was deliberately created by the Western intelligence that they were using Afghanistan as a battlefield to threaten long-term Soviet strategic interests.

That is to say, there must be greater clarity as to who killed Maniappan and Suryanarayana. All that can be said with a measure of confidence is that they were political murders (which does not make them any less horrendous). Intriguingly, Hamid Karzai did not blame the Taliban for Suryanarayana's murder. Actually, for the past few days Kabul has been excited about the new overtures being made by the United States and Mr. Karzai to the Taliban leadership for a genuinely serious political dialogue aimed at working out a credible power-sharing arrangement.

The discourse in India has been to point to the possibility of a Pakistani intelligence hand in the killing of Indian workers in Afghanistan. The possibility is fast becoming a probability. With that, the "case file" is all but closed. And, it is time to move on to modalities of augmentation of the Indian security presence in Afghanistan.

While speaking of a Pakistani animus to an Indian presence in the sensitive Afghan border regions, would we countenance with equanimity Pakistani nationals appearing in their hundreds on India's border regions with Nepal or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka? Yet another question arises. Without compromising the commitment to "reconstruct" Afghanistan's economic infrastructure, is it not possible for Indian activities to sidestep for the present the highly explosive region bordering Pakistan and instead concentrate on the west, north, east, and the centre of the country till such time as there is less volatility in Pakistan's Balochistan or Waziristan regions?

We are older than we think ;)

Universe may be much older than we think, say cosmologists from The Hindu

THE UNIVERSE we live in might just not be the real McCoy, but only the latest in a line of repeating Big Bangs stretching back through time, according to the latest theory from cosmologists.

Instead of being formed from a single Big Bang some 14bn years ago and destined to expand and eventually peter out, leaving only the cold dead remains of stars, the universe is, instead, possibly an endless loop of explosions and contractions, stretching for ever.

The latest theory has been postulated to try to account for what Einstein described as his "biggest blunder" - the Cosmological Constant, a force he proposed to account for the galaxies being driven apart but which has subsequently caused problems for physicists as it appears to be too small.

The Cosmological Constant is a mathematical representation of the energy of empty space, also known as "dark energy", which exerts a kind of anti-gravity force pushing galaxies apart at an accelerating rate.

It happens to be a googol (1 followed by 100 zeros) times smaller than would be expected if the universe was created in a single Big Bang. But its value could be explained if the universe was much, much older than most experts believe.

Comment from the channel 7 talk show "Mudda"

Two comments that really struck me that how can someone think in such a way...
First was

"App hote kaun hai najma ka theka lane wale"

... I forgot the name of the guy but he was a politician.
Second was

"Tali kabhi ek hath se nahi bajti, per zyada galti aurto ke hi hoti hai"

someone from the audience
(and then there was a classic statement that never fail to outrage me)

"Rape unhi ladkiyo ke hote hai jo kam kapde phanti hai."

again someone from the audience

This episode was discussing a how can there be "sabhy samaj" (especially related to Muslim society) An interstice fact there was only one female in the audience.
I will not say anything to the last comment cause that is just a peace of bullshit and so is the second one.

Now lets look at the first statement coming from a politician (elected by the people of the country called India) who represents one of the minorities(Muslim). The context of the statement... to refresh your memory it was about the case when a man and his wife wanted to stay together even after one of the members of the guys family raped the wife which is wrong because the wife has become haram.(I totally don't buy that is actually true according to Islam I will have to cross check this) And the girl went to the court asking to stay with her husband. And this Mr. Politician has the guts to say that who are you(court or anyone else) to stand against the fatwa that was issued that this two cannot say together. Is it just me or is there someone else who thinks that the leadership of this country has gone down the drains. If this comment was by some random XYZ I would maybe let it pass... but a educated(supposedly) leader that is suppose to uplift the society that is a very much a part of this country is saying as if he is running some random kingdom of his own and that to taking them backwards. And ofcourse people support these kind of people.

Internet, plagiarism and Kaavya Viswanathan

In Internet Age, Writers Face Frontier Justice from NYTimes

Frontier justice? Mob rule? Perhaps.

But last week, not just petty gadflies fueled by schadenfreude and bloodlust (though there was that), but also armchair defense attorneys and the merely curious were discussing the books — as well as whether Ms. Viswanathan's status as a) immigrant, b) minority, c) child of privilege or d) hottie — played a role in her treatment.

Many online commentators detected an underlying racism, for instance, in even good-natured rants — perhaps typified by Gawker's cheeky (and occasionally misinterpreted) comment on Tuesday: "Isn't it kind of awesome to see an overachieving Indian kid finally do something wrong?"

But others pointed to the fact that Ms. Viswanathan had only one week earlier told The Newark Star-Ledger that "nothing I read gave me the inspiration" for the novel, but now, under scrutiny, suddenly recalled adoring Ms. McCafferty's books and claimed to have unconsciously channeled them. Given that, her critics charged, she was being treated better than other fabulists of late.

"If Viswanathan weren't young, attractive and a student at the best brand name in higher education, wouldn't she be James Frey II?" Jane Genova, a marketing consultant in Connecticut, wrote on her blog (janegenova.com) on Thursday. "You bet," she continued. "The pile-on would have been fast and massive."

But what if she had been deaf and blind?

That was a question raised in a discussion at Metafilter, where Andrew Shalit, in a defense of Ms. Viswanathan's claim of unconscious copying, pointed to the Helen Keller archives at the Web site for the American Foundation for the Blind.

There, in her autobiography "The Story of My Life," Ms. Keller describes how, at age 12, she wrote a story — "The Frost King" — that created her own publishing scandal.

"Mr. Anagnos was delighted with 'The Frost King,' and published it in one of the Perkins Institution reports," Ms. Keller wrote (Chapter 14 at afb.org/mylife). "This was the pinnacle of my happiness, from which I was in a little while dashed to earth. I had been in Boston only a short time when it was discovered that a story similar to 'The Frost King,' called 'The Frost Fairies' by Miss Margaret T. Canby, had appeared before I was born in a book called 'Birdie and His Friends.' The two stories were so much alike in thought and language that it was evident Miss Canby's story had been read to me, and that mine was — a plagiarism."

It was surmised that Ms. Keller must have heard Ms. Canby's story read to her as a child and unconsciously retold the story years later as her own, an event that left her in dread of trying to write anything original again.

Back at Metafilter, Keith M. Ellis wondered if Ms. Keller would have received a fair shake in the rush to judgment that is now de rigueur in the Internet age.

"It seems to me we give zero consideration to the possibility that it might be plagiarism, but unintentional," Mr. Ellis wrote, adding: "If we changed the name and obscured the disability-indicating details, would we still be willing to consider innocence?"

A piercing question, that — though so, too, is whether Ms. Viswanathan's case warrants a comparison to Ms. Keller's. And as mercenaries stampeded to eBay to peddle copies of Ms. Viswanathan's suddenly scarce book (a first edition was selling for $80 on Friday), the hope for any larger lessons in the "Opal" episode began to dim. Yet here, too, the Internet presented something of a solution.

Thought

I havn't been really good with blogging these days... there is so much that i hear and see that needs to be put down here but somehow when there is time there is no access and where there is access there is no time. I need to do something abt it.

Quote

May you live all the days of your life.
--Irish Blessing (Now that is a true blessing)

Intresting site....

Killing The Buddha via ALDaily

I olny read this (I broke up with Jesus) article and it seems intresting. I don't know what this whole site is about but will look through it in due time(as religion seems to be one of my fav topics :))

extract from the site about the site --

Killing the Buddha is a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the "spirituality" section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. It is for people who somehow want to be religious, who want to know what it means to know the divine, but for good reasons are not and do not. If the religious have come to own religious discourse it is because they alone have had places where religious language could be spoken and understood. Now there is a forum for the supposedly non-religious to think and talk about what religion is, is not and might be. Killing the Buddha is it.