Pakistan has effectively called our bluff. When they attacked Parliament last December, we mobilized our entire army and made a lot of grunting noises. No one in India believed that we actually planned to carry through our threats. Pakistan didn’t either. Everyone knew that the show was being put up just?to scare the US into reining in its client state.
Didn’t work out did it? Now that they have struck again, attacking the Swaminarayan temple and killing more than 30 people, what are we going to do?

A simple guide
(Okay I have violated my site charter. I think it is due for amendment anyway)

Green killers and pseudo science
His earlier column General Dyer’s Gaurav Yatra was also spot on.
His comments are always thought-provoking. When every one else was blaming the BJP reflexively for the riots, he wrote Secular Parties have hobbled Secular Institutions, which I think is the best analysis so far. I won’t keep plugging him. He writes every sunday. Read him.

In increasing order of stupidity:
3) India Today.
Hides all its content behind a *four digit* subscription number. Because there are only a a thousand possible numbers and more than a million subscribers, what is the chance that an enterprising guy can be kept away from the content? And what are the chances that a genuine subscriber will take the effort to visit the site?
2) The Economist
Offers some content free, has some premium content for which, like India Today, you have to enter the subscription number. But unlike India today, the subscription number is 10 digits long. So far so good. I go to the page where I am supposed to enter the subscription number. The instructions contain a 10-digit sample subscription number. On a lark, I enter the number into the space provided, thinking “They can’t be that stupid.”

Turns out they were.
1) landmark.sify.com
Contains a good collection of books (but a badly normalized database). Asked me for a credit card number. “Do they accept debit cards?” My curious mind wants to know. I enter my debit card number. It accepted the number then. A day later, I get a rejection mail saying that they don’t accept debit cards after all. Two days later, I get the book.
My debit card wasn’t charged.

Just why is Bush planning to attack Iraq?
If he has real evidence that Saddam Hussain conspired with the Al Qaida, then all he has to do is state that evidence clearly and coherently. Then he doesn’t need the world’s permission to attack, any more than we needed UN permission to defend ourselves when Pakistan invaded us in Kargil.
Instead, the American government drops dark hints laced with innuendo to that effect. When challenged about terrorism, it shifts base and talks about nuclear weapons. If someone asks why America is specifically concerned about Iraq on this score(as against North Korea, India or Pakistan), it points to Saddam Hussain’s record as a tyrant and hints that he is unhinged and capable of anything. It hastens to tell its citizens that asking the UN’s permission is purely symbolic, and hopes that the rest of the world is not listening.
Now, I don’t defend Saddam. If Americans can attack Iraq and replace that tyrant with a half-decent alternative, and do so with as little bloodshed on both sides as can be reasonably expected, Iraqis would be grateful, and so should the world.
Americans are capable of it and have ocassionally done such things, but their overall foreign policy record resembles the history of Mongols’ European invasion.
They have a long history of creating a mess and leaving it for the next President to solve.

It happened for the second time in as many days. The sight of a well-dressed man performing menial work for me made me squirm. First it was the owner of the fast-food joint. There was no one else to do it, so he prepared the sev puri. Then there was the guy who came to take away my home computer. He asked for a piece of cloth and dusted the monitor.
In both cases I was embarrassed and showed it.
I suppose that is why they give uniforms to people once they are no longer so poor that they cannot afford decent clothes.

The Prime Minister has accused Musharraff of lying. That is undiplomatic. He could have accused him of creating “epistemological problems of sufficient magnitude to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear”
But it is not Musharraff’s fault. The War on Terrorism is open season as far as distortion of language goes. So Pakistan is an ‘ally’ in the said war. Its army is actually a bulwark against the assault of fundamentalists, not the ones who introduced fundamentalism in the first place. And Pakistan is actually concerned about democracy in Kashmir and about the fate of religious minorities. If elections get disrupted in Kashmir because terrorists go around murdering people, it will actually prove that India’s commitment to democracy is a sham.

Now that I have developed my own commenting system (after a painstaking 6 days worth of work – at the rate of 30 minutes a day) (and which works like a charm, if I may say so), I consider myself entitled to throw stones at others’ glass houses. Particularly Yaccs.
So I go to someone’s site and find a post that says ‘5 comments’. I go in, expecting to read those five comments, only to find that I can see only the first comment. It is the same one I saw one day back. Yaccs has frozen that moment for prosperity. And no it is not a cache problem, because I get the same problem from another computer in my office. But not at home. What happens there is too spooky to describe. If I post any comment from home, I cannot see that and subsequent comments in my office! But I can see all comments at home! How does Yaccs know that the guy who posted from home is the same one as the guy at office?
It is a conspiracy to prevent me from effectively participating in the blogosphere.

According to the Government, it is in the ‘Public Interest’ to exempt Sachin Tendulkar from paying customs duty of 1.5 crores on the Ferrari that was gifted to him. Others think the decision has caused a loss of that much amount to the nation.

The public interest question should be easily resolved. There are a hundred crore of us. Sachin can ask us for 1.5 paise each. Some may refuse, some will pay more. I am sure that it will be easy for him to raise the 1.5 crores required to pay off his duty.

But is the nation losing 1.5 crores by exempting Sachin from paying taxes? Customs duty on import of cars is 105 percent. If you were offered a ‘gift’ and it turns out that you have to pay more than the price of the ‘gift’ to get it into India, what would you do? I’d sell off the gift and get the money into India. (Or better still, sell it off and keep the money in a Swiss bank.) Would the country get its 1.5 crores then?

The real loss the country suffers is not when it exempts Tendulkar from paying tax, but when it charges such extortionary taxes. For these tax rates are designed to prevent people from importing cars to India. These tax rates are designed to benefit car companies.

On this day a year back a momentous event occurred which would have no effect on the course of history. 19 terrorists hijacked 4 planes and rammed them into three American buildings. These terrorists were members of an organization which was established by insurgents financed and armed by Americans.
There were some lessons in this for Americans. Unfortunately they haven’t learnt any of these:

1. You cannot finance and arm a gang of thugs to fight another such gang.
2. You can either pursue your own interests or be the world’s policeman. You can’t be both. Your government claims to you that it is pursuing self-interest abroad. To everyone else it is claiming to fight for international peace and democracy. This might seem like good tactic, but it isn’t. Your citizens won’t let you fight the global war. Everyone else will see through your game. Worst of all, your own government will get confused whenever it needs to act.
3. Even if you sincerely try to be the world’s policeman everyone else will accuse you of not doing enough if you try to ignore them. They will hate you and accuse you of ‘imperialism’ when you do too much and they don’t like what you have done. The worst case scenario of course, is that they will ram your planes against your buildings.
4. You can’t prop up puppet dictatorships in other countries and then express complet? surprise that citizens of those countries hate you for your democracy and freedom and condemn both as a sham.
5. You can’t prop up puppet dictatorships anyway. Running an empire requires a government’s undivided attention. You are a democracy. Every two years you have elections, where the issues could be range from Enron’s skullduggery to your President’s definition of sex. While you are thus distracted, your friendly dictatorships get toppled and replaced by rulers who hate you.
6. Which also means that if you have to get involved, you better make sure that you can get out fast. Also, don’t get involved unless you have a good reason and your people are solidly behind you. And don’t pretend to the rest of the world that you are going in for anything other than a selfish cause.
7. Friendship with a democracy is messy, but longer lasting. You may disagree often with your democratic ‘friends’ and it might seem more efficient to prop up a dictatorship, but please revise lessons 4 and 5.

India has repeatedly flunked International Relations 101 so history gave it only three elementary lessons which she too hasn’t learnt.

1. The American government is elected by the Americans to look after American interests. The Indian government is elected by Indians to look after Indian interests. Really. Look up the respective constitutions.
2. ‘War of words’ is only a figure of speech. International fora may look like debating clubs, but the job of the government is not to win debating points. Revise lesson 1 to find out what it actually is.
3. India’s job is not to establish world peace. Not nuclear disarmament. Not to acquire third world leadership. Revise lesson 1 once again.

I was travelling through ‘CBD Belapur’ yesterday and suddenly remembered that CBD stood for ‘Central Business District’. The place is a realistic reconstruction of how Daulatabad would have looked after Tughlaq deserted it to return to Delhi. There are broad roads with no traffic, flyovers where no congestion could possibly be expected, and infrastructure with no buildings.
These brand new ruins are of the new downtown – the ‘New Bombay’ that was supposed to take pressure off Bombay’s Central Business district. But no offices have moved there. These Bombayites must actually love congestion and crowds no?
Actually, the planners made the fundamental mistake a software product maker can make – not having a migration plan, in this case, literally.
When offices shift, employees cannot move all at once and find new homes right? They have to be able to commute from their original homes (Yes -New Bombay has excellent residential facilities – even then) In Bombay, this means a train link. Unfortunately that is not available.
So the ‘Central Business District’ is deserted. Vashi has essentially developed as a residential locality, with more people commuting to Bombay everyday. This is how the best laid plans of men mice and governments go wrong.
The best laid roads of governments however, are doing pretty ok. The lovely Bombay-Pune expressway is an example of how things can go right – sometimes.

Almost 2 years after Bjorn Lomborg published his pathbreaking book “The Skeptical Environmentalist” the first reference to the book by an Indian was sighted yesterday.
As I had hoped, it is India’s best economist – Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar who has done it, in his irrepressible style. Sample:

“The world has many serious environmental problems. Polluted water is by far the biggest, causing millions of deaths and illnesses. Polluted air is the second biggest hazard.
Smoke from indoor cooking causes more havoc through respiratory diseases (not to mention burns and house fires) than factory smoke or auto smoke. Industrial pollution has wrecked rivers and canals, and toxified acres. Overfishing has wrecked fish stocks, overfelling and overgrazing have wrecked forests.
These problems cry out for priority, especially in developing countries. Yet, so firmly have green imperialists of the West hijacked the global agenda that the focus has shifted to global warming and genetically modified crops”.

Another one – on global warming!:

I explained that some weather experts had forecast that, 100 years from now, world temperatures might be higher by a few degrees.
Rustam’s face widened in amazement, and he said, “But Papa, they can’t even forecast tomorrow’s weather properly. How can they forecast 100 years ahead?”

(Incidentally, “the Skeptical Environmentalist” is said to debunk a whole lot of claims based on exaggerations, misplaced priorities and outright lies propogated by the environmentalists. I haven’t read the book yet – too expensive! – but the first chapter can be downloaded from Lomborg’s site. A good summary of his arguments is available
here )

(Incidentally #2: India’s largest selling newspaper the Times of India, hides its online content so well that one day after I read something on its paper edition, I have to google to find the stuff on their site. But of course, they run a portal that offers dating chat, email and a photogallery full of bikini models. They have their priorities just right. )