Resistance is the first step towards Iraqi independence

#165 D. Mitter.... my email address is aminapk@yahoo.com. Obviously you know my home minister is woman named Amina.

Gujju Bania:

As usual your garbage is based on superficial knowledge and blatantly untrue.

Punjabis never dominated politics. It is the Cow Belt (UP, Bihar) that dominated and still does dominate politics in independent India.

The Central Bureaucracy too is dominated by Cow Belt ethnicity. The Armed Forces is not dominated by anyone in terms of absolute majority. The Punjabis did have a disproportionate number in the officer cadre, that too because post partition the Armed Forces provided a career for those who had lost property, business etc but belonged to educated families.

All of your generalizations, be it about ethincity or religion, do not stand to even basic scrutiny. Your posts reveal you for what you are, a shallow, immature kid. Your self delusions about capitalism and the free market do not consider even the basic rule of exponential prosperity which is based on a win win scenario.

`Having been educated, worked and lived in the states for 10 years, I can safely say that your inspiration is not the American model but something akin to Nazi Germany which was superficially pro-freemarket but was inherently contradictary in its support of free enterprise but its suppression of individual liberty.

If the rightists of todays India, and I was a rightist when it was unfashionable to be one in India, are represented by the likes of you, then all Pakistan has to do is sit back and wait and not waste any money on weapons. People like you will wreak havoc enough.

ahmedmadani#150:
I recently read about the murder of an Indian engineer in Kabul. I wonder if it had anything to do with what you wrote about. BTW do you have an email address where you can be contacted?
Regards.

tahmed#157:
Beware of generalisations based on small sample size!
I agree with you wrt bengalis and your observations, I believe, are based on a larger sample. About panjabis, I think that we may not be emotional but we do tend to be passionate and sentimental fools. The feelings of love and hatred are easily aroused in us, but they dont last long. Nor are we very good at hiding those feelings. In Canada, I find ourselves more similar to French Canadians with their jois de vivre than with the Anglos.

Punjabis and Others

It’s truly sad that while rest of the enlightened world, after bitter experiences, is getting away from the curse of ethnicity, if Chowk can be used as a gauge, South Asia with its heavy weight of inferiority complex is emphasizing ethnicity more than ever.

Overemphasis on ethnicity is a cancer that destroys the social fabric of a nation. Perhaps South Asia is doomed after all, if not with its nuclear bombs or Hindu-Muslim hatred, then certainly with its emphasis on ethnicity. Divide and destroy. One can see its victims, but its beneficiaries? Does one see it? Wonder who that would be...

gujjubania #159 We panjabis may LOOK mentally retarded but i like to think that we are not totally stupid, at least not all of us. (this was meant to be a joke incidentally).

While you are correct in saying that panjabis call everybody in deccan a ``madrassi`` ignoring internal differences, that is human nature that you yourself display as well in the very same post: you refer to all panjabis as if we are a monolithic entity (as many non-panjabis do), when in fact panjabis to vary widely as individuals and even in terms of cultural and other groups. So, i dont think this is a legitimate complaint.

you say ``Punjabis always put up a facade of sophistication , but underneath it all is a very debased mind possibly because of frustration/inadequecy``. I must admit to having been all of the above at times: frustrated, feeling inadequate, and having a debased mind (particularly when seeing an attractive female) and pretending to be sophisticated (like when i put on my suit and tie and pretend to be a gracious gentleman, or gen-tul-man as we unsophisticated panjabis say). However, that just makes us human. One would have to be a god (and the only god we have on chowk is Romair) to never feel frustrated, feel inadequate, or have debased thoughts.

You say you call yourself gujjubani because panjabis despise both these. Why are you letting your concern for what panjabis think (or pakistanis think) define your entire presence on chowk? I am sure you are a nice fellow and smart too (and as i said to stuka, i am assuming this until i get evidence to the contrary and so far i dont know you well enough since you are new to chowk). Why the hell do you care what panjabis think of you?

Finally, as for the GNP of India, that would be very good if the GNP of India rises of course. This can only translate into good for pakistan. Since the example set by India is the best defense we pakistanis have against the anti-democratic forces in pakistan (military or religious). and in a number of other ways as well. $1000 seemed to be too high a number though, and i checked the 2002 figures from the world bank and those are $2450 vs $1940 (PPP method) or $480 vs. $410. The important thing is that both indian and pakistan remain almost rock bottom in the list. India is 145th and Pakistan 158th in the PPP method, and both are still considered ``poor countries`` (not even middle income, like Mexico). So there is a long way to go, and there are too many poor people in both countries who have more serious problems to worry about than getting into these pointless gloating and insulting matches.

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

Actually, Ii am sorry I posted that last comeback. Gijjubania, feel free to go on and on about how great you, Hindus and Gujratis are and how useless Indian Muslims, Pakistanis and even Indian Punjabis are.

Pretty soon you`ll be talking to yourself.

``So Stuka`s penis talk is typically Punjabi. ``

But why does your Gujju Mom love it so?

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

stuka #156 i wrote the post to gujjubania on the premise that a man is innocent unless proven guilty - that is, his post indicated weak self-confidence and immaturity but was not malicious (and certainly not malicious to the point of mental derangement as in case of jay).

so, i felt a nonmalicious post, even if i didnt see much point to it, deserved a respectful response. and my response was geared to assuring him that he did not need to convince me on anything that is plain to see, and nor do i as a pakistani have a need to be anything but happy to see good things happening in india.

hope all is going well with you.

dost mittar #152 i have developed a theory after coming to chowk that there is a significant cultural difference in the subcontinent: but the divide is ethnic, not religious. and the difference is that northern western people in the subcontinent tend to be more stolid and less given to emotional upswings and downswings than those in the south and in bengal. and this is what accounts for the fact that every every other board, no matter what the subject matter, seems to swing back into the same tired refrain: how indians and pakistanis ``feel`` about one another.

this is the basis for my theory:

in pre-1971 days in pakistan nearly all east pakistani students at my college in lahore would be constantly talking east-west pakistan politics and walking around with chips on their shoulders. the rest of us had plenty of other things to discuss (girls generally). i remember one poor friend of mine who shared a room with three bengali students who said all these fellows talked about was the politics of east-west pakistan and so were driving him nuts. after 1971, many west pakistanis, after some misgivings in the months following what they saw as being the loss of part of the country, actually started commenting on how life was easier now that we no longer had to listen to the constant complaining about how east pakistan being exploited and so on.

on my first visit to bangladesh back in 1996, i was pleasantly surprised to see that (despite my expetactions based on my pre-1971 memories), the mood had swung 180 degrees and people in fact met me, a pakistani, with great warmth and even emotion (an ex-mukti bahini fellow who spent 6 months fighting us in 1971 embraced me like a long lost brother and talk with great fondness of his west pakistani colleagues in the army before 1971).

on chowk, i have noticed that this constant harping about how great india is and how bad pakistan generally comes from non-panjabi posters: the most friendly and least hostile indian posters on chowk are disproportionately panjabi - yourself, harpreet, stuka, and some new posters like this panjabizulu chap.

anyway, that is my theory and like all theories it may prove to be crap. but i present it in this idle moment for consideration by you and anyone else on chowk.

TAhmed:

``as a young indian, you are rightly proud of your nation`s achievements and indeed there is much that we poor pakistanis can learn from them. ``

Hhmm, u are wasting your time with Gujjubania. As a young Indian albeit one with a small penis, he has too many complexities that give rise to irrational paranoia. Better to leave well alone.

Godot:

``If people start correcting the wrongs done to them based on history, what do you think this world would look like? Why speculate. Bosnia provides a very good example of it. And if you don’t call those people lunatics, what else would you call them? “Justified”? ``

I agree 100%

AnOrdinaryHindu #148
Things will not change until some leader stands up and says that its wrong to send young men to their premature deaths on promises of heaven when in fact the policies they die for are man-made in some government office.
That its wrong to incite potentially productive young men to throw away their lives militating against the global financial system, not in some meaningful way for some credible futuristic vision but simply to enable their leaders to make fast bucks in the same system.

SterlingCrown #149 Finally....someone who actually knows what he is talking about on the subject of this article. Thank you for sharing your observations of the situation there following your recent visit to Iraq.

As one should have expected I suppose, things are more serene in Iraq for the average Iraqi than would appear from the newspapers. Before the war I had written an article on chowk supporting it on this very account: that no matter what the stated aims of the war (WMD, democracy in the middle east), it had seemed quite certain that the average Iraqi would be better off with Saddam being kicked out and the US becoming involved in trying to improve in Iraq.

I hope you will consider writing a more detailed account of your visit on chowk.

godot/tahmed:
I think there was too much generalisation in godot`s statment about how Hindus view Pakistan and how Pakistanis view India. While the rise of a muslim hating hindutva (represented by gujjubania on chowk - not Jay, his hatred is more Pakistan than Muslim-specific) is an undeniable fact in India, it is by no means pervasive - not yet, anyway. And the Indian resentment against Muslims, ironically manifested itself after a local incident, the Shah Bano case. There was no anti-muslim wave in India after the 1965 and 1971 wars - indeed the media-presumably encouraged by the govt.- went out of its way to highlight the heroic role played by the muslims in the army.

And Pakistani view of India is not without historical prejudices and bias. Afterall it names its offensive weapons after heroes -those too not Pakistanis but Afghans, Arabs and Persians-whom the hindus hate. It is hard to read Pakistani newspapers -even the moderate english ones- without seeing this bias on display. But there are also many Pakistani journalists who are unbiased and unprejudiced. Khaled Ahmed talks about this bias in today`s Daily Times, as follows:

``The host was pretending to be righteous on false grounds when he said that Indian films carried anti-Pakistan comment. We do it all the time on film and TV and do it with such lack of taste that it is obscene. Actor Yusuf Khan says his best film was the one in which he killed numberless Hindus. Our media have a Hindu stereotype (cowardly, ugly, cunning, cruel, scheming, hating) and indignity is heaped on India by showing a Hindu girl falling in love with a Muslim religious warrior. And she invariably abandons her cruel parents to side with our pious warrior! PTV did it even with its play on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre!``

I have always been a great votary of people-to-people contact. Not because it will solve all the problems between the two countries, but because it will hopefully lead to people thinking of their counterparts on the other side of the divide as humans and not ogres.