Regarding the Stupid White Men

Paging Sigalph,

Kindly sir, Your perspective as an upstanding Bangladeshi is required on the Post 913 posted by Rsidhar on `Mahatma`s progeny`.

Sincerely

Yasser

t,

As always M B Naqvi makes a cogent case. I wouldn`t be surprised if there is some truth in his thesis.

Prem

scouty,

{{smoking weed? i believe in natural highs....the kind you get when you walk on a beach, see the a vast blue ocean heaving, smelling it, feeling the warm softness of sand underneath your feet....i know it sounds gay but it works for me.}}

Aw, scouty, you know nothing about natural highs:)...

You should try sex...sometimes..(AFTER youre married, ofcourse)...you`ll feel mundane activities like sniffing a stupid ocean totally boring.:)

Unless ofcourse , by luck of the draw , your husband turns out to have a personality similar to Saxena`s...oops ..sorry..I would`nt wish that on my worst enemy!

I sincerely hope pretty Pakistani punjabi nuns are allowed to marry:)

Global Vigil for Peace Between

Pakistan and India

Organized under the banner: People for Peace Between Pakistan and India

When: Saturday, April 27, 2002, 7:00p.m.-7:30p.m.

Where: Lytton Plaza, 220 University Ave., Palo Alto, CA. 94301



Background

As the military standoff between India and Pakistan enters its fourth month, a fourth of humanity lives under the threat of nuclear annihilation, and concerned people are continuing their vigils for peace in South Asia. The build-up of troops and arms along the India-Pakistan border can lead to a disastrous war--a war, that like previous wars, would only bring death, destruction, misery and impoverishment to the citizens of the two nations.

Peace-loving people in Pakistan, India, and all over the world, are demonstrating for peace. SIMULTANEOUS PEACE VIGILS are being held in India and Pakistan, and around the world, on the last weekend of every month. In Bay Area, these vigils are being organized by Friends of South Asia.



Memorandum

We urge the governments of both Pakistan and India to:

1. Reopen all communication and travel links between the two countries.

2. Sign a No War Pact.

3. Set up a Permanent Dialogue Process for continued and uninterrupted negotiations to settle all outstanding issues, including Kashmir (involving Kashmiris from both sides of the border) and cross border terrorism.

4. End and reverse the nuclear weapons race, actively engage in Global Nuclear Disarmament initiatives.

5. Establish long-term trade and commerce links.

We would like to call upon all peace-loving people to come to this peace vigil and we request you to sign on the above memorandum of demands.

PLEASE COME TO THE SIMULTANEOUS GLOBAL PEACE VIGIL

BRING YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY ALONG

COME AND STAND UP FOR PEACE



Friends of South Asia 408-265-2795 FOSA_US@yahoo.com

Qaumantri Punjabi Bhaichara Group of California 408-935-9160 newsmailus@yahoo.com







Information on Past Vigils:

Report and pictures of first vigil:

http://www.friendsofsouthasia.org/custom3.html

Report and pictures of second vigil:

http://www.friendsofsouthasia.org/custom4.html

Report and pictures of third vigil:

http://www.friendsofsouthasia.org/shopping_page.html



Important Note:

Whereas previous vigils were arranged in different cities around the Bay, we now plan to keep the venue of the vigil fixed—vigils will be held on the last Saturday of every month at Lytton Plaza in Palo Alto. Please come on time as we plan to break up at 7:30 p.m. sharp to hold our monthly meeting at Stanford.

The Anti-American

by Ian Buruma

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Post date 04.18.02 | Issue date 04.29.02 E-mail this article

Power Politics

by Arundhati Roy

(South End Press, 132 pp., $40)

The Algebra of Infinite Justice

by Arundhati Roy

(Penguin Books India, 299 pp.)

Brilliant people can be remarkably obtuse. The critic and novelist John Berger declares, in his introduction to Arundhati Roy`s collection of political essays, that the American war in Afghanistan is an ``act of terror against the people of the world.`` He also states that the nineteen hijackers ``gave their lives`` on September 11 ``as did three hundred and fifty-three Manhattan firemen,`` as though there were no difference between people who die to commit mass murder and those who die to save lives. And the killings in New York and Washington, Berger informs us, were ``the direct result of trying to impose everywhere the new world economic order (the abstract, soaring, groundless market) which insists that man`s supreme task is to make profit.``

The soaring market in Algeria? The new world economic order in Sudan? Profit-making in Afghanistan? Ah, if only. There were no doubt many reasons for the suicidal murder spree at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but global capitalism surely comes low on the list. Islam ism flourishes precisely in places that are relatively or even absolutely untouched by IBM or Motorola or even, strange to say, McDonald`s. If the new economic order were the problem, why didn`t the terrorists come from Bangkok, or Hong Kong?

Still, John Berger is the right man to introduce Arundhati Roy`s collection of political polemics. Few intellectual voices have been as ubiquitous as Roy`s after September 11, and few quite so shrill. Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, a novel read by millions all over the world. Her articles have appeared all over the world, too, in--among other publications--The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, and Der Spiegel. One reason people listen to her, apart from her literary fame, is that she has positioned herself, successfully, as an authentic Third World voice. And like Lee Kuan Yew, a very different kind of Asian voice, she is highly articulate in English, a winning combination.

Roy does not like to be called an ``activist,`` but she has stuck her neck out for a variety of causes. Some of them, such as the protest against potentially catastrophic dam-building projects in India, are certainly worth fighting for. So for that she should be commended. Yet, at the same time, Roy has a tendency to sound preposterous. Her reaction to the events of September 11 was that we would never know what had motivated the hijackers, but that ``Mickey Mouse,`` that is to say, the United States, was not a viable alternative to ``the mullahs.`` (She made this pronouncement on ``Nightline`` on November 3, 2001.) The snobbery of her tone alone betrays the lingering, if perhaps unconscious, influence in India of British lefties from the end of the Raj. It is the language of the Bloomsbury drawing room. You could well imagine Bertrand Russell taking this line.

The question is whether Roy`s preposterousness undermines the causes that she promotes. Ramachandra Guha, a well-respected scholar and writer in India, thinks that it does. In a sharp attack on Roy`s political statements, published in the newspaper The Hindu in November 2000, Guha argued that Roy should stick to writing novels, because her vanity and her self-indulgence devalues the work of more serious activists. He mentioned as an example her efforts on behalf of the movement against the huge expensive dams in western India, which will displace hundreds of thousands of poor people. The cause is just, but Guha believes that Roy`s grandstanding on its behalf, which recently earned her a well-publicized night in jail, made a spectacle of her at the expense of the anti-dam movement.

The quarrel between Roy and Guha has implications that go beyond the Indian borders. It touches upon celebrity culture, on the uses of literary fame in political causes, on the public role of the writer in a democracy, and on the intellectual roots of anti-Americanism. For these reasons alone, Roy`s recent writings merit closer attention.

Arundhati Roy may have come late to the anti-dam movement, as Ramachandra Guha says, but she did so in 1999, when the movement was in poor shape. She revived flagging spirits among the activists and put their goals back in the public eye. Building huge dams has been almost a fetish of Indian governments since Nehru, who made the famous statement (later regretted) that dams were ``the temples of modern India.`` The Hoover Dam was the original model for this kind of thing, but it was Soviet-style nationalist machismo that inspired developing countries such as India. Dams are the very models of Stakhanovite enterprise, the perfect symbols of massive modernity. The Chinese are still at it, too.

The results, as Roy has been at pains to point out, have often been disastrous. During the last fifty years, as many as fifty million mostly poor, low-caste Indians have lost their homes and livelihoods as a consequence of big dam projects. The benefits go mostly to the urban rich, while many peasants still have no access to safe drinking water. And even the benefits are often exaggerated. In the case of one big Indian dam, only five percent of the area that was promised irrigation actually received any water.

All this is bad enough, especially for the dislocated poor. There is really no need for tasteless comparisons. But Roy writes: ``Shall we just put the Star of David on their doors and get it over with.`` It is not immediately clear what gallery she is playing to here--her essays were written for Indian readers--but the effect diminishes the power of her message.

The Sardar Sarovar plan to build 3,200 dams on the Narmada River, which runs through three states in western India, is designed to be the biggest dam project of all. Roy says that it will submerge and destroy 4,000 square kilometers of forestland, and displace hundreds of thousands of people without adequate plans for re location or compensation. The other odd aspect of this huge irrigation scheme is that it will benefit only one of the three states, Gujarat, while the sacrifices are all to be born by villagers in the other two, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Guja rat is naturally all in favor of this, as was the World Bank, at least initially. An enterprise that began as a form of Third World mimicry of Soviet methods now finds its most vociferous defenders among free-marketeers, right-wing Hindu chauvinists in the Indian government, and Western corporations. One of the most disturbing stories in Power Politics, Roy`s essay against the dams, is about the way Enron squeezed billions of dollars out of the state of Maharashtra for a power plant that most local industries cannot even afford to tap.

Critical studies of big dam building began to appear in India in the 1980s. The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), a movement of protest specifically against the Sardar Sarovar dam, organized demonstrations and strikes through the 1980s and 1990s. Independent reports, commissioned by the Indian government as well as by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union, were highly critical of the dam, for environmental reasons as well as social reasons, and after much pressure from activists the World Bank withdrew its support. Still, the Indian Supreme Court, after being petitioned by the NBA, decided to let the project go ahead anyway.

Anti-dam activists, including Roy, were smeared in the pro-government press as traitors, and accused of assaulting a group of lawyers at the Supreme Court. There was no evidence for this, but the case went to court, and Roy wrote in her affidavit that this showed ``a disquieting inclination on the part of the court to silence criticism and muzzle dissent.`` As a result, she was charged with contempt of court, spent her night in jail, and paid a fine. Unwise, perhaps; but more people read about the dam problem because of her than would otherwise have been the case.

When Roy got involved in the anti-dam movement, she was already a famous writer. But it was not her first brush with organized protest. Her mother, Mary Roy, is a well-known promoter of women`s rights in India, so Arundhati imbibed dissent with her mother`s milk. But she is also rather melodramatic about the public role of the writer. To be a writer, she says, ``in a country that gave the world Mahatma Gandhi ... is a ferocious burden.`` Quite where Gandhi fits in is unclear. Still, Roy writes about politics not as a famous novelist, but as a citizen, ``only a citizen, one of many, asking for a public explanation.`` She has no ``personal or ideological axe to grind.`` She has no ``professional stakes to protect.`` It is simply ``time to snatch our futures back from the `experts.` ``

There is nothing wrong with this. Experts are fallible. Famous novelists are citizens, too. But there is in fact something professional at stake here. For Roy goes further than saying that a writer should use her fame to promote worthy causes. She believes that what ``is happening in the world lies, at the moment, just outside the realm of human understanding.`` But help is at hand: it is ``the writers, the poets, the artists, the singers, the filmmakers who can make the connections, who can find ways of bringing it into the realm of common understanding.`` Some of the reactions among the writers, the poets, and the artists to the events of last September make this kind of special pleading less than convincing.

Roy`s efforts on behalf of the victims of dam-building show her to be a good citizen; but if her aim, as a writer of political essays, is to promote common understanding, she is less than a success. The essays express her convictions and her prejudices with great passion, but by her own account she aims higher. Roy wants language to cut through platitudes and lies: ``As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and thought. `Language is the skin of my thought,` I remember saying to someone who once asked what language meant to me.`` If so, her thoughts could do with a course of Clearasil.

Roy showed a fondness in her novel for overlush imagery and showy stylistic flourishes. The same thing is true in her essays, where her literary mannerisms often obscure understanding. The text is pockmarked with flip haiku-like clichés of the following kind: ``My world has died. And I write to mourn its passing.`` (This is about India`s development of the nuclear bomb.) Or this tired old dictum: ``One country`s terrorist is too often another`s freedom fighter.`` There is also the constant hyperbole, which actually weakens the power of language. Privatization, Roy writes, is a ``process of barbaric dispossession on a scale that has few parallels in history.`` Really? On the same topic: ``What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain. But it is a terrible, terrible thing.`` Well, perhaps it is, but this judgment does little to help my own human comprehension of international economics. And if we are really dealing with matters outside human understanding, then human reason is obviously an inadequate tool, so why bother to write an essay at all?

Next: Roy`s ``foaming-at-the-mouth, eye-rolling quality of the mad evangelist.``

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Tahmed: Ur 160 went rite over my head, however, i did find ur first point on #157 do be highly debatable.

teMporal: iM sure this is gonna Make ur day. How would u like to share a blunt with yours truly (not that other guy, iM talking about the Man who`s cooler then a dead penguin)? Get back at Me. Regards! (Hundred points if u get the subliMinal hint)...

Scout: Im glad u said ``gay`` urself, cuz thats just what i was thinkin. What in the hell kinda natural high do u get when u look at the ocean??? (Were u ``naturally high`` when u posted that)? Being blunted teachs u self control, and all kinda of other spiritual lessons i cant explain to people who`ve never tried it. Anyways, next time my dealer gets arrested, i might try that beach thing. it better work. Shalom.

Following is a relevent article about the state of numbness that Indian middle-class particularly Indian intelligentsia finds itself after Gujrat mayhem. A large segment of Indian intelligentsia did support BJP because of its ``cultural nationalism`` but these people are now dumbfounded after what had happened in Gujrat. This segment is disillusioned after witnessing the horrors of Gujrat unleashed by VHP thugs. IMO, this will in due course of time willtranslate into, the beginning of an end of communal forces. BJP gained legitimacy and strength from middle class and intelligentsia. It will either mend its ways or will die out once this class abandons it.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/250402/detoff01.asp

What else died in Gujarat alongside the women and children? Which idea throbbed to death as rapidly as the foetus which was knifed out of its mother’s womb? ‘Soft Hindutva’. Soft Hindutva is dead. The amorphous category defined as genetically anti-Congress, (thus anti-‘secularist’) instinctively pro-Hindu, vaguely anti-West and secretly (but only secretly) suspicious of ‘Muslims’ are in a torment. Their brand of genteel Hindutva is in crisis.

...

Yet law and order remained soft Hindutva’s crucial need. The basic sanctity of bourgeois life was its central justification. Today, soft Hindutva confronts a different enemy. The enemy of law and order is no longer only the Muslim. The enemies are the Hindu killers of children.

...

Thugs murder in Gujarat but there is silence in other parts of India. There is numbness, a quest for a new way. A quest like Gargi’s. Gargi who in the Brihdaranyaka Upanishad refused to accept the easy answers about religion that the sages gave her. A quest like Akbar’s, who when he debated in his Ibadat Khana, had everybody confused on whether the emperor was a Christian or a Zoroastrian or a Hindu or a Jew. A quest like Gandhi’s who said, “I will fight it out with my life if a Muslim can’t walk with self respect.” On the debris of soft Hindutva, a new quest has begun.

Re: Trial of accused for Daniel Pearl`s execution, is this the standard operating procedure whenever anybody else is killed in Pakistan, or is it because of . . . the subject of this article?

whatever.

white?

tahmed#158,

Islam is secular to its adherents, but consider this as I remarked to Zafar.

Since in Islam the relationship between God and human beings is that of Master and slave, God is the Sovereign Monarch and humans must submit. This overpowering picture of God in the Qur’an has created its own tension in Muslim theology regarding God’s absolute sovereignty and human free will. Despite protests to the contrary; Islam teaches the absolute predestination of both good and evil, that all our thoughts, words and deeds, whether good or evil, were foreseen, foreordained, determined, and decreed from all eternity, and that everything that happens takes place according to what has been written for it.

If we take this further - and Iam assuming we do ; can we say that Islam is ``almost ` secular.

temporal #161
You may have noticed, since the Indian Army was `deployed` a number of things have happened namely
1. Musharraf`s Jan 12 speech
2. No major terrorist attacks in India
3. There is almost no talk of UN resolutions or `disputed` territory by foreign commentators and media, now the talk is of reduction of tensions
4. If dialogue or UN resolutions are mentioned, the list of 20 is also mentioned.
5. Meanwhile jihad is no longer as low cost an option as before because the counterdeployment of Pakistani troops costs money

M B Naqvi


The enigma of India`s coercive diplomacy


Could it be that the Indian troops are on the borders to mainly ensure there is no rebellion against General Musharraf? It is tempting to think so. But it is such a startling new thought? Since there is no other rational explanation of the Indian troops being still where they are, in the closing days of April -- so long after the December 13 incident means that the troops` presence is related to something else and different from even Kashmir -- and as for the list of those 20 persons, it is surely, an afterthought, if not a red herring.

From april 24 news

http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/

DRUMZ #151 On the lota discussion: this embarrasses you? I bet the Lord had a good laugh when designing the human digestive (and reproductive) systems. A reminder that we are all a bunch of apes.

You write ``Smoke weed. This sh1t...`` How true.

amina shah #153 you say ``As a sindhi I like to see Panjabi Superirity debunked.`` and provide a lengthy article to do that. All you had to do was ask, and as a panjabi I would have debunked this for you simply by saying ``Please review exhibits A and B, namely NS and Zia. Having presented these two rotten panjabi mangoes, I rest my case.``

Expatriate Pakis: A chance to participate in the referendum. Go to the following website:

http://www.pakistan-embassy.com/pages/default.asp

You can download the voting form (see above website) and mail it in.

Due Date: 30TH APRIL, 2002

Hayat #152 You make two points, and I am afraid are wrong on both counts. As follows:

Point 1: Islam is intolerant of other religions. If you read my post below carefully, you would see that I equate Islam with the Quran, NOT with the actions taken in the name of Islam by Saudi rulers, or khalifahs and sultans through history. Indeed, by not permitting other religions to flourish in Saudi Arabia (as you say), the Saudi kingship is violating the basic message of the Quran. By destroying Somnath, Mahmud Ghazni also destroyed his own credentials as a believer in the teachings of Islam.

It is easy to see who the Quran and secularism are the same thing: (a) the Quran puts Islam at par with other religions, not superior, and it puts ITSELF at par with other holy books, not superior in a number of places. Read the Quran carefully yourself if you dont believe me. (b) the Quran explicitly places implementation of the Quranic message out of bounds EVEN for the Holy Prophet. This makes the concept of an ``Islamic State`` a non-starter, and the use of the term ``Islamic`` in the name ``Islamic Republic of Pakistan`` a violation Islam. Hard to believe, I know, but quite true if you read the Quran and you use your own head rather than blindly accepting the bs that is dished out and taken for granted by unthinking people in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Point #2: On Stanford - I am all for education, and I think it is the best investment. (I pay, for example, to have my children go to private schools rather than to have them go for free to public schools that produce almost equally good SAT scores). HOWEVER: Education does not mean what you learn at the university level. What they teach you in kindergarten (or even in good homes), they dont teach you in universities. And that is why I pay, and pay a lot, to send my kids to private shools. And what you learn at kindergarten in many important ways is different and more valuable than what you ever learn in universitites, and these are basic values like modesty, honesty, decency, and so forth. That is why people like BB are total failures in life despite being sent to the finest schools in the UK and the US, while people like Edhi are big successes. Or (if it is the dollar sign that you equate with success), check out some of the Pakistani heads of corporations in the US and you wont find any ivy leagues among them. First rate universities often produce third rate individuals and vice versa.

DRUMZ #151,

saying hello to strangers within seven feet of me? done

smoking weed? i believe in natural highs....the kind you get when you walk on a beach, see the a vast blue ocean heaving, smelling it, feeling the warm softness of sand underneath your feet....i know it sounds gay but it works for me.