A Journey Into Afghanistan

More stuff for stool(not armchair) Generals on Chowk.

Any comments?



Delta members wounded on raid of omar`s complex



Three seriously injured; pentagon rethinks `special forces operations`

In the wake of a near-disaster during the assault on Mullah Omar`s complex during the early morning of October 20th, the Pentagon has been rethinking future Special Forces operations inside Afghanistan.

Delta Force, which prides itself on stealth, had been counterattacked by the Taliban, and some of the Americans had had to fight their way to safety. Seymour Hersh has filed his report for the November 12, 2001 issue of the NEW YORKER.

Twelve Delta members were wounded, three of them seriously.

The intensity and ferocity of the Taliban response ``scared (profanity deleted) everyone,`` a senior military officer tells Hersh.

The Delta team stormed Mullah Omar`s complex, but found little of value, Hersh reports, and then, ``as they came out of the house, they faced severe difficulties (profanity deleted)`` one senior officer says. ``It was like an ambush. The Taliban were fighting with light arms and either [rocket-propelled grenades] or mortars.`` The team immediately began taking casualties and evacuated.

``The Delta team was forced to abandon one of its objectives: the insertion of an undercover team into the area and the stay-behind soldiers fled to a previously determined rendezvous point, using a contingency plan known as an E. & E., for escape and evasion,`` Hersh writes.

MORE

One Delta Force soldier told a colleague that military planners ``think we can perform (profanity deleted) magic. We can`t. Don`t put us in an environment we weren`t prepared for. Next time, we`re going to lose a company.``

One military man reports that Delta Force officers were ``still outraged`` last week as after-action arguments over how best to wage a ground war continued.

The Pentagon could not give details of what really happened near Kandahar ``because it doesn`t want to appear that it doesn`t know what it`s doing.`` Another senior officer says, ``I don`t know where the adult supervision for these operations is. Franks -- the general in charge of the U.S. Central Command -- is clueless.``

Speaking of Delta Force the officer adds, ``These guys have had (problems) since Mogadishu. They want to do it right and they train hard. Don`t put them on something stupid. We`ll get there, but it`s going to get ugly.``

Officers also criticized the Army Rangers` sameday parachute jump into a Taliban-controlled airbase because ``it was a television show. The Rangers were not the first in -- an Army Pathfinder team had already confirmed that the area was clear of Taliban forces.``

One senior official Hersh spoke to acknowledged that there were serious problems in the war effort thus far, but said, ``It`s like reading a six-hundred-page murder mystery. It`s solved on the last few pages, but you have to read five hundred and ninety-eight pages to get there.``



Source: Drudge ReportDRUDGE REPORT: SAT NOV 03, 2001

--------

The plot thickens:

.

(Reported in Hindustan Times today.)

A Saudi newspaper charged Saturday that the Israeli secret service Mossad was behind the September 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington that killed thousands of people.

The mass-circulation Okaz said in an editorial that an attack on such a scale could not have been carried out with such accuracy and precision without the help of parties inside the United States or with strong links in Washington.

``Six Israelis suspected of involvement in the attacks on New York and Washington were arrested in the US, to be later released. This confirms our strong suspicions about the involvement of Israel`s Mossad in the ugly crime,`` Okaz said.

``If we look carefully into this matter, we can find no more influential sides in the US than the Israeli Mossad agents, who have the ability to penetrate and the capability to execute with high efficiency,`` the daily said.

The paper said there was not sufficient evidence that Arabs and Muslims were behind the attacks, but it did not rule out the possibility that Mossad may have recruited some Muslims to carry out the atrocities.

``The main purpose of the conspiracy (attacks) is to undermine ties between Arabs and Muslims, especially moderate states, on the one hand and the US on the other, and to turn the Muslim and Christian civilizations against each other and incite hatred between their adherents,`` it said.

The positive change in Washington`s policy on Middle East peace and its support for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state confirms that the United States has laid its hands on important leads indicating a direct role by the Mossad in the attacks, the paper asserted.

``We don`t think we will wait too long before (the United States) reaches this result. This crime should not pass without knowing its actual masterminds, instead of focusing on `stupid` tools,`` Okaz said.

Saudi newspapers often reflect official thinking in Riyadh. The kingdom has accused the pro-Israel lobby in the US of orchestrating a US media campaign against it.

Some 15 of the 19 suspected hijackers of the four planes used in the September 11 attacks are believed to be Saudis.

Irony oh Irony:

`The emirate has an embassy in Islamabad, on Street 90, off Ataturk Avenue, presided over by Ambassador Mulla Abdul Salam Zaeef, `

November 3, 2001



Akar Are YOU Booker Prize ,Journalist,material???



An Indian Novelist Turns Her Wrath on the U.S.

By CELIA W. DUGGER

EW DELHI, Nov. 2 — Arundhati Roy, the lyrical novelist, has morphed into a rebel with many causes. Lately, as India`s most passionate polemicist, she has raged against the bombing of Afghanistan, which she calls ``another act of terror against the people of the world`` by the American government.

She says she has no desire to be an antiwar diva or ``the cool babe`` of those who are fighting, like her, against big dams, nuclear weapons, multinational power companies and, now, the Afghan war.

But here in the capital, her home, she has stepped into the limelight with a gusto for intellectual combat that has made her perhaps even more famous than her only novel so far, ``The God of Small Things,`` which has sold more than 6 million copies in 40 languages since it was published in 1997.

Her dark, luminous eyes, deep set in a delicately boned face, stare out from the covers of magazines that carry her long, metaphorically rich political essays. Photographers swarm about Ms. Roy, who is 41, snapping furiously, whenever she marches in a protest, as she did Tuesday.

She cut off her unruly mane last year because she did not want to be known ``as some pretty woman who wrote a book.`` Now her shorn head and big ears make her seem even more subversive in a country where long, glossy tresses are a measure of femininity.





Amit Bhargava for The New York Times

The novelist Arundhati Roy leaving the Indian Supreme Court after refusing to apologize for remarks critical of the judges. Her shorn head reflects her wish not to be known ``as some pretty woman who wrote a book.``













Her reputation for ferocious independence, which some see as evidence of her fearlessness and others of her intemperance, grew Monday when she refused to apologize to India`s Supreme Court, which has charged her with criminal contempt in a case that has its roots in her ardent opposition to a big dam project that the judges have allowed to go forward.

Earlier this year, the court ordered an investigation into allegations that Ms. Roy and other prominent dam opponents had threatened to kill some men during a protest outside the court. Ms. Roy replied in an affidavit that the charges were so ludicrous that not even the police had pursued them. The judges` decision to do so, she added, indicated ``a disquieting inclination on the part of the court to silence criticism and muzzle dissent, to harass and intimidate those who disagree with it.``

The outraged judges said it appeared that she had impugned their motives. In a new affidavit, Ms. Roy told them that she had had no such intention, but also said that if her criticisms were valid, ``the court cannot hope to restore its dignity by punishing or silencing the critic.``

In the hearing on Monday, the court brusquely declared itself unsatisfied with her reply and set a hearing for January. She could be sentenced to six months in prison.

``The way Rushdie is known for a fatwah, I don`t want to be known for this,`` Ms. Roy said, as she strode from her lawyer`s office to the domed Supreme Court, a cameraman trailing in her wake. ``I want to be known for my writing.``

In her latest writings, Ms. Roy has taken on the United States in two 4,000-word essays about the war in Afghanistan, published here in October issues of Outlook magazine.

She argues that Osama bin Laden is ``America`s family secret,`` the monstrous offspring of its support for the mujahedeen after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

``He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid waste by America`s foreign policy,`` she writes. The bombs raining down now, she says, are ``blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury`` and will inevitably spawn more terrorism.

Her words have struck a rich seam of anti-Americanism that lies just below the surface not only in Muslim countries, but in much of the third world. Outlook`s middle-class readers, who largely rejected Ms. Roy`s morally unyielding, 8,000-word case against India`s 1998 decision to conduct nuclear tests and become a nuclear power, have mainly embraced her dark views on the Afghan war. They have inundated the magazine with hundreds of letters, more than it has ever received in response to an article.

To date, all major American newspapers and magazines have rejected Ms. Roy`s new essays on the Afghan war, her agent, David Godwin, said. But her writings on the Afghan war have gained a wide readership in Europe, where The Guardian, Le Monde and El Mundo, among other newspapers, have published them. The war essays, like her other political work, reflect what she called her obsession with power and powerlessness. She described her own relationship with authority as genetically adversarial.

Her mother was a rebel in her own time. Mary Roy married out of her family`s Syrian Christian community in the southern state of Kerala, then divorced the Bengali Brahmin she had chosen.

She took her baby daughter and son back to Kerala in 1961, but the family paid a price for the mother`s defiance of social conventions. From the time Arundhati was 5 or 6, her mother explained to the girl that nobody from their community would ever marry her and that Arundhati would need a profession of her own to make her way in the world.

``I am a woman who is a granddaughter of a lady who used to be beaten on the head by her husband, of a mother who went through hell because she was divorced and had to bring up these kids,`` said Ms. Roy, now a millionaire because of her novel`s success. ``And I can take 10 men out to lunch and pay the bill and nobody even thinks twice about it. So don`t mess with me.``

One who has taken her on is the historian and cricket columnist Ramachandra Guha, who says he is of the moderate left. In articles last year in The Hindu, a national newspaper, he decried her essays as vain, shrill, unoriginal, oversimplified, hyperbolic and lacking any voices but her own.

In one article, he wrote that ``her demonology is more capacious than that of the Ramayana,`` the Sanskrit epic, and concluded another by tartly remarking, ``We would all be better off were she to revert to fiction.``

Ms. Roy fought back in an interview with Frontline magazine that went on for eight pages, taking Mr. Guha`s arguments point by point and belittling him as yet another of the ``academics-cum-cricket statisticians`` who have criticized her work. She mocked him for his biography of the social anthropologist Verrier Elwin, saying, ``I think we`ve had enough, come on, enough stories about white men.``

David Davidar, who heads Penguin Books India, has published both Ms. Roy, whose novel has sold more in India than any other English-language novel, and Mr. Guha, whom he described as perhaps the best of India`s nonfiction writers.

``The funny thing for me is that both are my friends,`` Mr. Davidar said. ``Each is very brave and contemptuous of those who don`t measure up.``

Next month, Penguin India will publish a complete collection of Ms. Roy`s political writings, all penned since her novel came out four years ago. She said she hoped this would clear the mental space for a return to fiction, but she is tentative.

``Fiction is such an elusive thing — a collaboration between me and something,`` Ms. Roy said. ``But I really hope so. Let`s see.``

Why do they send me these as if im going to go to Kachi just to get paper back from Regal Chowk ,Kachi .

AnNy ,see if it of interest to you .

NEW PAPERBACK SERIES FROM SCHEHERZADE



As part of its on-going programme of quality books at cheaper price,

Scheherezade announces the publication of four new books. Scheherzade is a

non-profit organization devoted to publishing and promotion of book-culture.

It

has already published a number of books and 3 issues of the anthology

``Duniyazad.``

This set focuses on national and international fiction. ``Raastey Mujhey

Bulatey

Hain`` is a collection of short stories by Pakistan`s woman poet Azra Abbas.

One

of the leading practitioners of prose-poetry, Azra Abbas belongs to the

avant-garde in contemporary Urdu literature. She has published three books of

poetry as well as an autobiographical narrative. Her stories deal with a

hidden

or suppressed dimension being revealed through the mundane and the ordinary in

daily life, men and women who dream themselves into another plane as they

refuse

the beckoning of roads not taken.

``Zindagi Say Kata Hua Tukra`` includes the short stories, poems and a detailed

interview of Wali Ram Vallabh, translated from Sindhi into Urdu by Bashir

Unwan.

Bvallabh is well-known in Sindhi circles for his translations but his handful

of

stories have been rather neglected. Focussing on the joys and sorrows of lower

middle class life and sometimes seeing it through oblique angels, Vallabh`s

fiction is the work of a cosmopolitan sensibility expressed in a subtle

manner.

His stories and poems have not been collected in a book-form in Sindhi to

date.

An interview and introductory material contextualizes his work.

``Diya Aur Dariya``, a short novel by Afzal Ahsan Randhawa, is one of the

best-known books in modern Punjabi literature. Novelist and politician,

Randhawa

has served as member of parliament before his political activities were banned

by the previous military regime. His novels, considered modern classics in

Punjabi, deal with the broad themes of love, revenge, honour and identity,

specially in a rural setting. This novel has been translated into Urdu by

Zahid

Hassan, himself a poet and novelist who writes in Punjabi and Urdu.

``Hala`` is the Urdu translation of Carlos Fuentes` novel, originally published

as ``Aura`` and hailed as a ``poisonous jewel``, a story of beauty and horror with

a

time-warp. It has been translated with an introductory essay by Asif Farrukhi,

who has already translated and selected a volume of Latin American short

stories.

Some more news from Scheherzade. Following Duniyazad 3, a special two-volume

book On Palestine, entitled ``Aashiq Min-al-Falestine`` is in the final stages

of

preparation. The upcoming issue of Duniyazad will look at ``the world which

has

almost lost its home s in terrorism and war``, according to Eduardo Galeano,

one

of the writers featured here. Meanwhile, Scheherzade is also doing what it

likes

doing best --- telling stories. Join our readings series by writers and poets

at

``Samovar`` at 3, Narendra Niwas Building, Preedy Street, Regal Chowk, Karachi.

FOR FURTHER DETAILS PLEASE CONTACT

Scheherzade@altavista.com

simi@khi.compol.com

Reply #: 51

anNy

ali1:

``For those of you who don`t remember, Aakar Patel fired Farzana Versey from Midday when she wrote an article on chowk.com that criticized India, albiet mildly. He then wrote a post on chowk.com bragging about this great service to the nation that he had performed``--youre kidding right?



AnNy & Ali #1

Rushdie talks about the same topic, you read it with reverence,

Mr.Akar Patel,hasnt Salman Rushdie ,being from muslim minority of India said the same thing as Hindutva & RSS supporting people of Hindutva .Please read the Sword of truth links & you will see Mr.Rushdie ,has not only renounced his religion but his people of minority India.Isnt it a fact that Hindutva is the single most threatening immediate problem of survival of them.Every day i hear moam over the telephone about Riots in small towns trough out India .

and call it

``nonsense`` if it is by others you do not know. If Naipal talks about the

same topic, you read it as well!

Murthy

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/02/opinion/02RUSH.html?searchpv=nytToday

After reading all posting, I did some search and found intersting links:



http://www.swordoftruth.com/swordoftruth/archives/byauthor/aditichaturvedi/d

pp23.html

Why is Salaman Rushdie Angry?

[begin quote]

To be specific it was Naipaul`s recent quotes in an interview to Outlook

magazine for their millennium issue, that had Rushdie in such a tizzy. In

the interview V.S. Naipaul was asked his opinion on what he thought of

India`s future and his appraisal of whether it is a civilization in decay.

In response Naipaul said the following:

``Fractured past`` is too polite a way to describe India`s calamitous

millennium. The millennium began with the Muslim invasions and the grinding

down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the north. This is such a big and bad

event that people still have to find polite, destiny-defying ways of

speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the

Muslims ``arriving`` in India, as though the Muslims came on a tourist bus and

went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one.

They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of idols and

temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves, so cheap

and numerous that they were being sold for a few rupees. The architectural

evidence-the absence of Hindu monuments in the north-is convincing enough.

This conquest was unlike any other that had gone before. There are no Hindu

records of this period. Defeated people never write their history. The

victors write the history. The vic!

tors were Muslims. For people on the other side it is a period of darkness.

..............

Interviewer: What do you think of the Hindu resurgence that has been taking

place in India over the last decade? Do you think it`s a dangerous militancy

that will eventually destroy India`s secular character?`` to which the

eminent author replied

Naipaul: You have asked a loaded question. You say that India has a secular

character, which is historically unsound. You say that Hindu militancy is

dangerous. Dangerous or not, it is a necessary corrective to the history I

have been talking about. It is a creative force and it will prove to be so.

......No doubt, a strong trace of envy is also evident in Rushdie`s idiotic

appraisal of Naipaul. Statements like the following demonstrate an element

of personal animosity in ample measure.

`` Naipaul has become a bit of a cheerleader for the BJP lately. He cheered

up about India when the BJP was emerging; that seemed the wrong moment to be

optimistic about India. He comes across as a Hindu nationalist. That`s

worrying when we see what that means on the ground. When Naipaul writes

articles which the BJP can use as recruiting material, it`s a problem.``

[end quote]



Arundhati Roy: Social activist of a different kind

by Keerthi Reddy

http://www.swordoftruth.com/swordoftruth/archives/byauthor/keerthireddy/arsa

oadk.html

[Apparently Ms. Roy is so blinded by her own hatred that she cannot tell the

difference between consumerism and science! She implies that both Coke and

the nuclear bomb belong to the West. If this were the case, then since India

is the source of Arithmetic, Language (in the form of Sanskrit) and given

that the Indus civilization is the oldest in the world, should Indians

assume that the West has no right to civilization itself? Science is not

owned by anyone.]



http://www.swordoftruth.com/swordoftruth/archives/byauthor/vinodkumar/dotbsi

oui.html

Destruction of the Buddha statues Islamic or Un-Islamic by Vinod Kumar

[The demolition of idols by the Talibans, however barbaric it might seem to

the rest of the world, is not un-Islamic as it is fully in accordance with

the traditions of the Prophet.]

Is this the SASIALIT member Vinod Kumar?

Trinity



``The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but

that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference,

then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the

darkness, we must supply our own light.`` --Stanley Kubrick

Ali#1:

``Similarly, Aakar Patel took time off from covering the Khatri prostitutes and Pimp Khans of Bollywood to write about Afghanistan. ``

Man, you know the predominant castes of prostitutes in Bombay? How? Personal experience? You`re one perverted f#ck.

What`s the obsession with Khatris by the way? I mean, if you were a Jatt, I could understand. If you were a Rajput, I could think you are mildly deluded. But you`re a goddamn Mohajir, not even a Punjabi. Your type are slapped around around by our type from Delhi to Karachi, and that`s just the way things are meant to be. Changing your religion will not change what you are my man, accept your lot in life and get on with it.

Maybe you have an inferiority complex, or a sense or persecution. I don`t know. But, gimme a break, a churidar kurta type half Khusra criticizing Punjabis doesn`t even gell. There`s just no comparison. Let it be.

anNy:

No, I am not kidding.

The sooner the younger Pakistanis cleanse their minds of the ``Amar Akbar Anthony`` view of Hindustan the better. The hindu hatred of Hindustani muslims, specially the Farzana Versey kind who are not afraid to speak their mind, is only comaprable to their hatred for Pakistan.

We have to understand our existantial enemy very very well if we hope to surrvive.

So this is what it is all about?

Has the world been held hostage by two former business partners(Bush sr. & Osama b.Laden) who could not agree to share the loot?

The one invoked Islam & the other his ``way of life`` to twist our collective tails?

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

Read & Weep.

````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

The target is Afghanistan but the prize is the Caspian



In the early 1990s it became an over-worn cliché that the Gulf war was all about oil. The unprecedented mobilisation of troops and military hardware became a point of discussion amongst many from the chattering classes of the West. The fact that the Gulf was awash with wealth raised levels of scepticism about the whole event. George Bush’s famous New World order speech summed up the whole of a decade of the US’s involvement in global affairs. In contrast, the issue of oil is not discussed, in relation to current events. Shady figures from the old Bush administration have been resurrected. In the same way the issue of oil has also resurfaced, only this time out of the headlines and topics for day-time TV talk shows.

Comparisons of Afghanistan and Iraq are limited as Afghanistan’s oil reserves are barely worthy of mention. However what are of major strategic concern are those of Afghanistan’s northern neighbours. In 1998, Dick Cheney, the then chief executive of a major oil services company, (now US vice-president) remarked: ``I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.`` The oil and gas there is worthless until it is piped out.

Transporting the fossil fuel of the Caspian through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia`s political and economic control over the central Asian republics. The US hardly wants to give succour to Russia now. Over the last ten years it has watched Russia decline into its current lowly position. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of ``diversifying energy supply`` and to penetrate the world`s most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and competition is intense. However in south Asia the demand has been created and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India is far more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe.

In 1995 the US oil company Unocal started negotiating to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea. The company`s scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Daily Telegraph (UK) reported that ``oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan``. Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying them 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered.

For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to have been determined principally by Unocal`s interests. In 1997 a US diplomat at the time said ``the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [the former US oil consortium in Saudi Arabia] pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.`` Thus the beginning of the US government`s covert backing for Kabul.

Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among war resisters shows, Unocal failed to get the message. In February 1998, John Maresca, its head of international relations, told representatives that the growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined that Afghanistan remained ``the only other possible route`` for Caspian oil. The company, once the Afghan government was recognised by foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped to build a 1,000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million barrels a day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in east Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.

But Afghanistan`s strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US energy information administration reported that ``Afghanistan`s significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan``. Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, are we to suppose that such plans no longer figure in its strategic thinking. The possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical concern.

American foreign policy is that the US should control military, economic and political development world-wide. The doctrine of ``full-spectrum dominance``. China has responded by seeking to expand its interests in central Asia. The defence white paper Beijing published in 2000 argued that ``China`s fundamental interests lie in ... the establishment and maintenance of a new regional security order``. In June, China and Russia pulled four central Asian republics into the ``Shanghai co-operation organisation``. Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to ``foster world multi-polarisation``. Translated from diplomat-speak in to English, this means “contesting US full-spectrum dominance”.

If the US succeeds in it`s current adventure, it will have flexed its military muscle, thus reaping any rewards from this, but also blunted the growing ambitions of both Russia and China.

Who says it’s not all about oil this time?

26 October, 2001

There is talk of partitioning Afghanistan in to two. Northern Afghanistan for the Uzbeks, Hazaras and Tajiks, and Southern for the Pashtuns. It`s quite obvious that the Afghans are incapable of living together as one nation.

Neither is one side capable of completely eliminating the other. Maybe Partition is a good idea. Or cut Afghanistan down to size by letting the Uzbekistan and Tajikistan take over some territory.

Top Ten Tips For Ambitious Indian Prime Ministers

....

See this is what drives me mad (sometimes :-)). How are we expected to look at the grey areas of complex issues like Kashmir when you are unable to glance with the slightest criticality (is that a word?) at your complicity in them.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

re bong_dongs #35

I too lived in Bombay in 93 and quite close to Dadar TT. I recall hearing a loud bang that afternoon and thought someone`s tyre had burst. I knew a guy who died in the Worli blast and they never found any part of his body, just a twisted heap of metal that used to be his car. I am all for pusnishing Tiger Memon and company, even if Bhagat and Tytler are never punished. In an ideal world they all will be punished.

ali1:

``For those of you who don`t remember, Aakar Patel fired Farzana Versey from Midday when she wrote an article on chowk.com that criticized India, albiet mildly. He then wrote a post on chowk.com bragging about this great service to the nation that he had performed``

youre kidding right?

Aakar Patel:

Did not the Kushans also rule over Kandahar and some other parts of Afghanistan? And wasn`t it during the reign of the Buddhist Kushan king Kanishka that Taxila, in Afghanistan, became a major Buddhist centre?

What are your views?

Incidentally, the contemporary Hindu calendar, the Saka calendar by which the Shiv sena ideologues want India to run, was a calendar given by the Kushans who came to the subcontinent from Central Asia

aaker #46 ``babar should have been referred to as great-great-great grandson of timur``

Babar could be a descendant of timur, although quite possibly an ``adopted`` one. I doubt if in late 15th century Farghana such things were documented any better than they are in the 21st century in most developing countries.