Saira Votes for Peace

friend #69
Who? :)
Though I seem to remember YLH or someone did quote some lines from this same book, to demonstrate to Indian chowkies, that EVEN an eminent person like BR Ambedkar supported the creation of Pakistan, see.

sadna #67
I wonder if Yasser Latifa will now call Ambedkar a Hindu communalist. He used to be very fond of Ambedkar.

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btw, since I quoted Ambedkar, for those interested here is the reference
Pakistan or the Partition of India Part IV Chapter X1 Communal aggression:

http://www.ambedkar.org/pakistan/40E1.Pakistan%20or%20the%20Partition%20of%20India%20PART%20IV.htm#c11

To have the gall to piously lecture Indians on pluralism/secularism on one hand and to do everything to undermine Indian Muslims at the same time - Mr Kuldip Nayar gets it right about Pakistani attitudes for once:

http://www.dawn.com/2003/02/08/op.htm#3

``...My purpose of visiting Pakistan a few weeks ago was to tell Pakistani(s) how their policy of cross-border terrorism had strengthened the BJP on the one hand and harassed Muslims on the other. I found very few responsive ears. At the government level, I suspected a fiendish satisfaction over the emergence of Hindu fundamentalism in India. In any case, what Indian Muslims might face because of Pakistan`s policy was not a factor in the reckoning of Islamabad. ...``

re:#28 by ahmadzai
You forget that J and K was ruled by a Maharaja, a hindu, to make matters worse. As per the conditionalities, he had to either accede to Pak (which would have been logical thing to do considering the subjects were majority muslims) or to India. The guy dithered and this ensured a hasty tribal invasion by your highly esteemed Jinnah (a great blunder) and the rest is history. Mountbatten had no part to play in all this. Not even Radcliffe could have foreseen what would happen but he earned eternal damnation from Pakis by gifting away Gurdaspur to India.
On a different note, when are yu guy ever going to say: let us compromise on Kashmir and move on? The writing is on the wall. When is your dictator gonna learn to read it?
Sridhar

PS:
And btw, its also not true that everyone has a color complex, far from it.

jay #62
``In general it is rare to find a rich young dark skinned person marrying a dark skinned women through the arranged marriage system``

When I think about it, I have not seen this to be a universal rule. Economic mobility carries the women up the ladder too, and they too get married to someone. Also, there is often a wish to marry within one`s region, community or subcommunity or sub-subcommunity and this gives `value` to males and females, over and above their skin color. I dread the day we all become so homogenous that we have only our skin color to define us :).

Sadna,

Colour in india is a factor in arranged marriages primarily because it is a major attribute of beauty. There is a migration of low income but fairskinned boys and girls up the economic ladder. In general it is rare to find a rich young dark skinned person marrying a dark skinned women through the arranged marriage system. After caste , creed and blah comes the colour, and the rich get the fairer skinned.

Samina

Just to clarify, my previous post was about my experience in India. But I know what you mean. I have heard that black children who work hard and do well in school are often accused by their peers of trying to be `white`, another sad instance of reverse racism.

Actually Indians can be very racist particularly when in the US, sometimes because of the unfortunate correlation between blacks and unsafe neighbourhoods, but also simply because Indians can be very racist.

Claiming an implicit POLITICAL ascendancy over others of darker skin color or even North vs South is however something I haven`t come across in India, though perhaps other Indians can correct me. There seems to be a tribal/nontribal divide currently in play in some states due to infringement of tribal or adivasi lands and there are always sufficent other factors for divisions such as caste/religion/language, of course.

Recently I read a couple of books on the 1971 crisis and it seemed that a major factor in the crisis was that leaders of one part of the country could not see beyond their implicit assumption (based on skin color/race/ ethnicity ) of their political ascendency over the population of the other part of the country. Thats why to me a presentday manifestation of the skin color thing in Indo-Pak affairs is a bit of red rag, sorry :).

Sadna,

We shouldn`t trust Tom Cruise for several reasons, the first one being that he is involved with that gorgeous but not very talented little tapas Penelope :)

The color struck thing is weird and you get all kinds of slippery evasions of why people stick to their prejudices. I def. get a whole other aspect of this in my personal life re: my mian sahib :). Sometimes I get the he`s-a honky-so-he-cant-trusted vibe from some Race Folks in America...I kind of feel sorry for them; he`s more supportive and down of humanistic struggle way more than a lot of men across the rainbow...

Saima #50
btw, since Saira is so honest and frank about her views on skin color, let me be so too in interests of full disclosure.

Personally like most Indians, I have seen color prejudice operating in matters of shaadi, as in matrimonial `value` of a person, or sometimes as deciding an unspoken pecking order among a group of teenagers, when I was a teenager.

However, I have not seen color prejudice operating in more general situations, such as in the workplace or in deciding personal equations among groups of adults and certainly not in the `public` sphere - for example take a look at the leaders we elect.

In summary, my experience is, that however strong each person`s prejudice in determining their attitudes towards other people and towards themselves, people give importance(if any) to skin color in a mostly personal sphere of influence, but not outside.

After reading so much about skin color on chowk over the last many months, I began to examine what weightage I myself give to it. My family has the whole range of colors and I myself fall somewhere in the middle. After thinking hard, I realised that where women are concerned I have no `prejudice` that I can discern. I find Chinese women and West Asians very pretty but so do I beautiful darkeyed black women and white women with their brilliant colors. I happen to have a special soft corner for the subcontinental brown skin and big eyes combination though.

Where men are concerned, it seems my first instinct is to consider a darker-skinned guy more trustworthy and to anticipate that the fairer-skinned guy is an unreliable smoothtalker, even those among my relatives. As an example, my first instinct would be to trust Shahrukh Khan(or Denzel Washington) but to distrust fairskinned Rishi Kapoor and definitely Tom Cruise. I honestly don`t know where this comes from( my parents are fairer than I am, I think). But my preconceptions arising out of skin color hold good only until I actually meet the people in question, after which their skin color becomes irrelevant and its very hard to even recall the first involuntary assessment.

Of course in matters of intergroup, interstate or international relations, I consider skin color is totally irrelevant which is why chowk interactions bringing skin color into these subjects puzzle me and I tend to consider this tendency to be a symptom of a deeper more important prejudice which has IMO actually yielded a lot of grief in the last many years(such as `dispossessed Mughal complex`, the operative word being the sense of being `dispossessed`, and I mean Mughals generically, no disrespect to the actual Mughals).

And yes, Urstruly #51, as a Hindu . . . I don`t judge your religion.

Before you ask, as an Indian . . . I don`t judge your nationality.

But hey, yes, a sense of humour helps.

Dear Urstuly,

Thank you for your recent post, with quotes / interpreatations from the Bhagvad Geeta. I leanr more everyday, and for that I am thankful, that I am able to learn, and as I learn from you, I am grateful to you, too.

The essential question ``Who am I``, which fills much of humanity`s scriptures, also tries to define the concept of ``one``. Within that come in issues like ``small infinity`` and ``large infinity``, but I am sure we have all analysed Stephen Hawking, too.

One God, or a trillion Gods, One within me or all trillion within me, Ram the human and Ram the Adi Shakti . . . but I don`t want to get bogged down into religion.

I actually want to see if I can bring in a few regulars at chowk to, for maybe a month, swear off starting or reacting to anything to do with religion, at chowk?

What do you think? Do you think, as they die, our soldiers think about dying for religion or region or their mothers?

sincerely/veeresh

Urstruly #51
It is good that you have started reading hindu scriptures. Keep it up. By bhagwan`s kripa you will soon get enlightment. Do you live in Detroit? do visit Krishna temple. Hinduism is not an exclusive religion, unlike Islam and you can be Hindu even when you believe in Allah or any other manifestation of that supreme being.

Now start...

#51 Urstruly

The reality is that your scriptures include calls for violence against non-muslims. The reality is that founder of your religion was a militarist who justified the genocide of jews from Saudi Arabia. The reality is that your scriptures call for an attitude of islamo-supremacy and are obsessed with their imagined superiority over other traditions.

These are all realities. The day muslims and their scholars accept and discuss these issues and understand them to be part of their history, that is the day we can all come to the same level. Till then stay in your fantasist world....