Why Doesn’t the World Care?

Re: # 336
//....a rarity as an Indian Christian, Parsi, or Muslim who has studied, say, Sanskrit or classical Tamil...//

And it`s even rarer [in %age terms] to find an Indian hindu who has studied Sanskrit, or Gita or whatever.... Sanksrit/Classical Tamil should be good to study as part of research on heritage/culture - but at this time, that don`t really get you any jobs....

So let people study what works for them.... it`s a free country ....

As for paki minorities knowing arabic or whatever - well, if that brings jobs/security to them - well and good.....

+++

If it makes you happy - there is atleast one muslim I know who studies Sanskrit etc - Dr Kalam and he is the president of India.... I think that`s sufficient for time being.....

re: Dharma # 335, Behram

Indians may be making a big mistake. They may believe that they have found the `right path` that everyone else must follow. There is no actual support for that belief.

Empirically, minorities seem to be far more in sync with the mood of the Pakistani society than with the Indian one. Pakistani minorities report themselves to be far happier and much more satisfied with their existing status than do the minorities in India. Culturally, Pakistani minorities are one with the Pakistani nation. A Pakistani Christian, Parsi or even Hindu who has learnt some Arabic or Persian is not half much a rarity as an Indian Christian, Parsi, or Muslim who has studied, say, Sanskrit or classical Tamil.

So instead of dismissing the entire Pakistani approach as unfair, or deriding it as `dhimmitude,` Indians need to closely study it and implement it at home. That is the only fair and intelligent thing to do. Forcing the self-righteous ways of the majority on minorities, as Indian followers of Gandhi and Nehru have been blindly doing since independence, is plain wrong and enormously counterproductive.

Re: # 333
dear besharam1
i did not mean to disrespect parsi culture or religion in anyway. I have utmost respect for them. I was only calling you besharam for your behavior. it has nothing to do with your religion or culture. Dont hide behind them. I can not respect any nation which does not give equal if not more (most civilized nations give more rights to minorities) rights to minorites, and i have even less repsect for persons who willingly settle for less rights either because they believe they are lesser humans than the majority or because they are scared of the majority or for any other reason. You come in to that category - as a pakistani citizen you can not become its president and yet you have no problems with it. You have convinced yourself that you are second class citizen and yet you support the cause of pure muslims. thats why i called you besharam1. why are you a mouthpiece for muslim majority country which does not give equal rights to all citizens? what is in it for you?

shamlessly submitted

Re: # 330

Dear Sridhar:

Of course, you should be proud of Indian muslims....[In all this drama, Indian muslims have kept themselves out of this global jehad. This is something that they should be proud of.] because you have a long way to work on those Pakistani sugar cane oozing inside you.

It will take you a long time to get your empty skull operational.

Respectfully submitted,

Re: # 326

Dear Shameless,

I will not scoop so low to call you by any other name, because I know the meaning of what ``dhram`` means to you. But, you did not realize that in your zeal you have just insulted the purest of the pure Parsi fire - Atash Behram.

Nevertheless, I will

Respectfully submit,

Re: # 328

Dear rsridhar:

The rocks are still bouncing around inside your empty skull, eh!

Or is it the Pakistani sugar cane that is now oozing inside?

I will eventually get your Aatish-e-ga@nd quelched. Trust me.

Nobody else claims your empty skull. Nobody wants you poor, ugly duckling.

Your poor soul needs some some solace. Does it not?

Respectfully submitted,

Re: # 330 from the article in your post
[.....This is the tightrope that the British state and population will now have to walk for the foreseeable future; and the sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced, in a single day, by the nightmare of permanent conflict...]

For once - the white man was trying to do the right thing by going for ``mult-culturalism`` and all that... but our friends from land of pure [and elswhere] have managed to turn the whole concept on it`s head.....

But who is surprised???

re: The clash of civilizations
The battle lines are already being drawn. I am sure many Chowkies have read about the rioting going on in France. The people rioting are mostly muslims. They may have some genuine grievances but they are being coaxed on by some fundamentalist elements (muslim clerics) from within and without.
Similar scenario is being enacted in Denmark. It is a matter of time when U.K will be a victim too.
A sad truth is that muslims do not known how to integrate with the rest of the community.
http://www.time.com/time/europe/html/051114/story.html

In Denmark, the story is different.
http://www.nsm88.com/articles/denmark%20-%20something%20rotten%20in.html
Excerpts:
(SOMETHING ROTTEN IN DENMARK?
By DANIEL PIPES & LARS HEDEGAARD August 27, 2002 -- A Muslim group in Denmark announced a few days ago that a $30,000 bounty would be paid for the murder of several prominent Danish Jews, a threat that garnered wide international notice. Less well known is that this is just one problem associated with Denmark`s approximately 200,000 Muslim immigrants. The key issue is that many of them show little desire to fit into their adopted country.

For years, Danes lauded multiculturalism and insisted they had no problem with the Muslim customs - until one day they found that they did. Some major issues:

* Living on the dole: Third-world immigrants - most of them Muslims from countries such as Turkey, Somalia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Iraq - constitute 5 percent of the population but consume upwards of 40 percent of the welfare spending.

* Engaging in crime: Muslims are only 4 percent of Denmark`s 5.4 million people but make up a majority of the country`s convicted rapists, an especially combustible issue given that practically all the female victims are non-Muslim. Similar, if lesser, disproportions are found in other crimes.

* Self-imposed isolation: Over time, as Muslim immigrants increase in numbers, they wish less mix with the indigenous population. A recent survey finds that only 5 percent of young Muslim immigrants would readily marry a Dane.

* Importing unacceptable customs: Forced marriages - promising a newborn daughter in Denmark to a male cousin in the home country, then compelling her to marry him, sometimes on pain of death - are one problem.

Another is threats to kill Muslims who convert out of Islam. One Kurdish convert to Christianity, who went public to explain why she had changed religion, felt the need to hide her face and conceal her identity, fearing for her life.)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4389538.stm
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_4_suicide_bombers.html
A poignant article on the muslim problem in Europe.
Excerpts:

1. (Muslim immigrants and their descendants are more likely to be poor, to live in overcrowded conditions, to be unemployed, to have low levels of educational achievement, and above all to be imprisoned, than other South Asian immigrants and their descendants. The refusal to educate females to their full capacity is a terrible handicap in a society in which, perhaps regrettably, prosperity requires two household incomes. The idea that one is already in possession of the final revealed truth, leading to an inherently superior way of life, inhibits adaptation to a technically more advanced society.)
2. ``Many young Muslims, unlike the sons of Hindus and Sikhs who immigrated into Britain at the same time as their parents, take drugs, including heroin. They drink, indulge in casual sex, and make nightclubs the focus of their lives. Work and careers are at best a painful necessity, a slow and inferior means of obtaining the money for their distractions.

But if in many respects their tastes and behavior are indistinguishable from those of underclass white males, there are nevertheless clear and important differences. Most obviously, whatever the similarity between them and their white counterparts in their taste for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, they nevertheless do not mix with young white men, even in the neighborhoods devoted to the satisfaction of their tastes. They are in parallel with the whites, rather than intersecting with them.)

3. (Another obvious difference is the absence of young Muslim women from the resorts of mass distraction. However similar young Muslim men might be in their tastes to young white men, they would be horrified, and indeed turn extremely violent, if their sisters comported themselves as young white women do. They satisfy their sexual needs with prostitutes and those whom they quite openly call “white sluts.” (Many a young white female patient of mine has described being taunted in this fashion as she walked through a street inhabited by Muslims.) And, of course, they do not have to suffer much sexual frustration in an environment where people decide on sexual liaisons within seconds of acquaintance.``

4. (... young Muslim males have a strong motive for maintaining an identity apart. And since people rarely like to admit low motives for their behavior, such as the wish to maintain a self-gratifying dominance, these young Muslims need a more elevated justification for their conduct toward women. They find it, of course, in a residual Islam: not the Islam of onerous duties, rituals, and prohibitions, which interferes so insistently in day-to-day life, but in an Islam of residual feeling, which allows them a sense of moral superiority to everything around them, including women, without in any way cramping their style.

This Islam contains little that is theological, spiritual, or even religious, but it nevertheless exists in the mental economy as what anatomists call a “potential space.” A potential space occurs where two tissues or organs are separated by smooth membranes that are normally close together, but that can be separated by an accumulation of fluid such as pus if infection or inflammation occurs. And, of course, such inflammation readily occurs in the minds of young men who easily believe themselves to be ill-used, and who have been raised on the thin gruel of popular Western culture without an awareness that any other kind of Western culture exists. )

5. (According to Islamism, the West can never meet the demands of justice, because it is decadent, materialistic, individualistic, heathen, and democratic rather than theocratic. Only a return to the principles and practices of seventh-century Arabia will resolve all personal and political problems at the same time. This notion is fundamentally no more (and no less) bizarre or stupid than the Marxist notion that captivated so many Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century: that the abolition of private property would lead to final and lasting harmony among men. Both conceptions offer a formula that, rigidly followed, would resolve all human problems.)

6. (The other bombers had passions for soccer, cricket, and pop music. They gave no indication before their dreadful deeds of religious fanaticism, and their journeys to Pakistan, in retrospect indications of a growing indoctrination by fundamentalism, could have seemed at the time merely family visits. In the meantime, they led highly Westernized lives, availing themselves of all the products of Western ingenuity to which Muslims have contributed nothing for centuries. It is, in fact, literally impossible for modern Muslims to expunge the West from their lives: it enters the fabric of their existence at every turn. Usama bin Ladin himself is utterly dependent upon the West for his weaponry, his communications, his travel, and his funds. He speaks of the West’s having stolen Arabian oil, but of what use would oil have been to the Arabs if it had remained under their sands, as it would have done without the intervention of the West? Without the West, what fortune would bin Ladin’s family have made from what construction in Saudi Arabia?

Muslims who reject the West are therefore engaged in a losing and impossible inner jihad, or struggle, to expunge everything that is not Muslim from their breasts. It can’t be done: for their technological and scientific dependence is necessarily also a cultural one. You can’t believe in a return to seventh-century Arabia as being all-sufficient for human requirements, and at the same time drive around in a brand-new red Mercedes, as one of the London bombers did shortly before his murderous suicide. An awareness of the contradiction must gnaw in even the dullest fundamentalist brain.)

In all this drama, Indian muslims have kept themselves out of this global jehad. This is something that they should be proud of. I am hearing some news oflate that some IMs are being coaxed into joining the jehad by LeT. One hopes that does not happen. IMs will be a final reminder to muslims around the world that a benign face of Islam does exist and if they want to countenance it, they may have to from now-on face not towards Mecca but towards India!
Sridhar

re: a temple of tolerance
Akshardham temple was attacked by muslim extremits some years ago. The answer to that attack is a new temple built by the same sect. The temple is now dedicated to religious tolerance and was inaugurated by Indian PM Manmohar Singh, a sikh with Abdul Kalam (muslim) and L.K.Advani being present on the occasion.
http://www.sulekha.com/news/nhc.aspx?cid=437835
(President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and opposition leader L.K. Advani of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party joined in pushing open the door of the main hall of the Swaminarayan Akshardham Temple in New Delhi Sunday.

The presence of the three leaders reflects the country`s entrenched communal diversity, which has been tested often by religious riots.

More than 7,000 sculptors built the colonnaded temple over five years. It sits on 234 pillars topped by nine domes and is bedecked by more than 20,000 statues of gods and goddesses, encompassing the gamut of the Hindu pantheon.)
Pak likes to think it is competing with India. How about building a mosque and dedicating it to religious tolerance?
Sridhar

re:#326 by dharma
Parsees in India seem to be different from those in ``the land of pure``. I believe they have been indoctrinated into a different kind of belief system. It is scary what a society with fundamentalist agenda can do to u. You can get a glimpse of that indoctrination at work from this guy Besharam Aatish-e-ga@nd`s posts. I would not waste time on such idiots.
Sridhr

dharma, harish

Let it go :) We already have had endless discussion on that .... Besides you don`t want to endure another round of acute verbal diarrhea from YLH and family....

Re: # 325 besharam1
``Pakistan was founded because Muslims were all united for a better and independent society for themselves. ``

tera kya hoga kaalia? what is your position in pakistan as a parsi if the unity is only for muslims? harish has good point that if the reason for creation pakistan is because hindus and musilms can not live peacefully together, then how can they suddenly start living peacefully after the creation. just give up and get converted or get yourself kidnapped
besharam1.

shamelessly submitted

Re: # 323

Dear harish_hyd:

Thank you for a response.

You ask.....[You don`t take him seriously, do you?]...Yes, I do. And if we all come together we could start a new Pakistan that is strong and independent and has respect all over the world.

You suggest....[Because how is unity possible in a country that was founded on the basis of differences?] Pakistan was founded because Muslims were all united for a better and independent society for themselves.

You assert...[How is faith possible for a people who were told not to have faith in another community?] Muslims tried their very best to understand the other community. And once, they came to the conclusion that this is not possible, they chose to better themselves independently. And that is exactly what they did.

Your notion...[How is discipline possible for a people who resorted to rioting and murder to achieve their ends?] That is absolutely bogus. Muslims were the first to be killed and masacred.

Regardless, harish_hyd, past is past and for the most part Pakistanis are comfortable with their glorious history. We must start respecting those feelings and accept the present situation. Constant tirade by United-India lovers, notwithstanding, will not change the dynamics on the ground.

I love my Pakistan, because that is where I was born.

Respectfully submitted,

Re: # 306

Dear Parthaab

just went over some sites of newspapers (Dec 27th, 28th, 2004). The death toll of Tsunami was initially about 13,000. Let me know if you have a source which quoted higher numbers.

Thanks.

#218 by behram1

[As Mohd. Ali Jinnah had said long time ago: Pakistanis must have Unity, Faith and Discipline.]

You don`t take him seriously, do you? Because how is unity possible in a country that was founded on the basis of differences? How is faith possible for a people who were told not to have faith in another community? How is discipline possible for a people who resorted to rioting and murder to achieve their ends?

Pakistani Police Arrest and Fire Tear Gas Azad Kashmiri Quake Victims



from BBC available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4413318.stm




Pakistani Police arresting a victim

Tear gas fired at Kashmir border

Pakistani police arrest a Kashmiri man at the LoC

Pakistani police have fired tear gas shells to disperse hundreds of angry Kashmiris as a crossing on the region`s de facto border was opened.

India and Pakistan struck a deal to open five points along the heavily militarised Line of Control to help victims of last month`s earthquake.

But only relief materials are being exchanged and civilians are not being allowed to cross yet.

Hundreds of Kashmiri villagers on the Pakistani side of the divide approached the Line of Control (LoC) shouting ``Let people cross`` and ``What we want is freedom``.

Police fired in the air and lobbed tear gas shells after which they left the scene, reports say.

On Monday, Pakistani and Indian army officials shook hands as they threw open the LoC at the Rawalakot-Poonch crossing.

Relief trucks than backed up to the line and Indian porters began handing over sacks to their Pakistani counterparts.

Immigration, customs and foreign currency exchange facilities have been set up, along with public telephones and a mosque.

But Kashmiri civilians may have to wait another 10 days before they can travel to get first-hand news of their relatives.

One villager, Mohammed Saleem, described it as mere drama.

``If we can`t go in there,`` he said pointing to the Indian side, ``then it does not make much difference for us.``