Kalam’s Address Faulted by Comrades

India’s good for nothing comrades have created another meaningless controversy over nothing.

February 23, 2007- President Kalam’s address to Parliament on Friday stirred up a row with the Left parties asking the Central government to take cognizance of the Hindi translation of the word secularism used in the address, saying ‘dharmanirpeshkta’ (secularism) had been wrongly termed as ‘panthnirpeshkta’ (only Hindu religion).

Perhaps if they can assemble ten people who can spell either of those two words let alone know what the difference between them really is.

At a joint press conference convened to brief the media about the issues the Left proposed to raise during the Budget Session of Parliament, Communist Party of India parliamentary group leader Sitaram Yechury said whether it was a ‘bureaucratic’ or the translator’s mistake, it had to be corrected as Indian Republic was based on separation of religion from the state.

Maybe Mr Sitaram Yechury should better spend his time finding out why his parents gave him such a communal first name- It has both Sita and Ram in it.Perhaps he will blame it on the “imperialist conspiracy” and in true Maoist style denounce his own parents as “reactionaries”.

It is noteworthy to remember that the left had opposed Dr Abdul Kalam’s nomination for President back in 2004. Since according to them he was not pseudo-secular enough.

They are creating all this unnecessary nonsense while even after 60 years of Socialist rule India is at the bottom of every development index and hundreds of millions of our countrymen are living in inhumane conditions and the left parties on the other hand are blocking every meaningful reform that would raise all those people out of poverty and instead are protecting the labour aristocracy in the PSUs and ofcourse creating useless controversies to distract the people from the real issues needing urgent attention.

B Raman’s Open Letter to Kasuri

B Raman writes a open letter to Kasuri who called for intelligence co-operation between Indian and Pakistani agencies, recounting the history of the attempted Indo-Pak intelligence co-operation from the 1980s onwards calling it a dialogue of the deaf where the Pakistanis repeatedly stonewall and lie through their teeth even in the face of overwhelming evidence.He ends his letter by summarizing as follows.

You would now understand, I hope, why there is not much enthusiasm in India to the idea of a Joint Mechanism for Counter-Terrorism Co-operation. They say once bitten, twice shy. India has been bitten thrice — after the Shimla talks between Indira Gandhi and Z A Bhutto; after the meetings between Verma and Hamid Gul; and after the meeting between A B Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif at Lahore in February 1999.

Mr Foreign Minister, Pakistan has handed over so many terrorism suspects to the US and other countries. Forget about terrorists. Can you recall even a single instance where Pakistan has handed over even a cattle-lifter to India? Whenever India has asked Pakistan to hand over a terrorist or other criminal, Pakistan’s response has been that India has not been able to produce convincing evidence against him. And whenever India has asked Pakistan to hand over a non-Muslim terrorist, Pakistan’s response has been: ‘Yes, we agree you have good evidence against him, but your information that he is in our territory is wrong.’ The handing-over of the Sikh army deserters is the only instance of such action by Pakistan that I can recall. I cannot understand even today why Gul did it. Was he planning to use them to collect military intelligence from India?

All Pakistan has to do to demonstrate its sincerity is to hand over some of the terrorists from India living in Pakistani territory before the first meeting of the Joint Counter-Terrorism Mechanism. It will have a big impact in India and many sceptics will start supporting the mechanism.

India would do well to heed this lesson of history and dump that nonsense called the joint anti-terrorism institutional mechanism. It too is doomed to suffer the same fate as above.

Nike’s Cool New World Cup Cricket Ad

Pakistan Forcelifts Samjhauta Train blast Survivors

Why the hurry to forcibly take away all the injured still recuperating from their wounds? Is it because the Pakis were afraid that some canaries will sing? What is Pakistan hiding from the World?

NEW DELHI: Seven survivors of the Samjhauta Express tragedy were forced on Thursday to leave Safdarjung Hospital on short notice and taken away to a waiting Pakistan Air Force aircraft to be flown back home.

All of them were badly burned and a few of them pleaded that they be allowed to stay back for a few days more for their wounds to heal. Some said they had no one at home to look after them. But the doctors said they were helpless; these were orders from above.

It transpires that Pakistan was adamant to take back their citizens who had survived the blast, no matter what their medical condition. To make matters worse for them, they were rushed out of the sanitised burns unit in the afternoon, but until the time of writing their aircraft had not taken off, ostensibly due to ‘‘technical reasons’’. In other words, they are waiting in the plane without medical attention.

Some of them need it badly. For instance, 9-year-old Shamim was on ventilator when he was almost dragged out of Safdarjung’s ICU along with six others and put on a PAF special aircraft to be airlifted to Lahore. Some of the blast victims cried in vain to be allowed to stay back till they recuperated.

This is even more puzzling considering what Kasuri had said a day earlier in front of the Safdarjung Hospital. But his full account is somehow missing in all of the Media. This is what he said.

“I express my appreciation to the doctors who are attending on the (Pakistani) patients. They are taking really good care of them,”.” We Will be guided by the doctors advice on when we can take them back”.

Kasuri in Front of Safdarjung Hospital(Video Link)

But that last line has been quietly edited out by the media. It is nowhere to be found even though i myself saw it atleast 3 times on different news channels.

I think it is a wise idea to get a TV tuner card and record the videos ourselves so that we can catch the media lies, cover-ups and distortions red handed. Perhaps it is also a good idea to keep an eye on some online articles and see how they are being quietly edited over a period of time when they think that no one is looking and also compare them with the circulated hard copies of their newspapers and magazines.

Camlin’s new Permanent Marker Ad

This Ad is a parody on the Rudali custom in India. Hopefully this shameful and humiliating custom has by now joined the ranks of Sati and Child marriage in the dustbin of history where i fervently hope it will soon be joined by the likes of the caste system and female infanticide.

Anyway I thought this Ad was funny. Everyone i showed it to thought it was funny. But the question is why has Camlin not dared to put it on air in India. Perhaps they feel in their bones(that might be broken soon) that there are some people who have appointed themselves as guardians of public morality and humor who might not think it’s funny .

Gas Pipeline Blown Up by Baloch Rebels

That too in the very area where that accursed pipeline from Iran to India will have to pass through if built.

Quetta, Balochistan: Suspected Baloch militants blew up a gas pipeline near Quetta on Tuesday, cutting supplies to a power plant and several areas, a gas company official said. Gas supplies were cut to four districts near Quetta and a 95 MW city power plant. Supplies might be restored to some areas within 24 hours, Nawaz said. No one was hurt in the early morning blast in the outskirts of Quetta. “They planted explosives under an 18-inch pipeline that blew out a 4-foot piece of the pipe,” said Sheikh Nawaz, general manager of Sui Southern Gas Company.

If that pipeline is built not only will India have sleepless nights worrying about when the Paki goverment will pull the plug on this vital line. One has to also worry about when the Baloch militants will want to use it for some target practice.

Added to that India will have to pay several hundreds of millions of dollars as transit fees to Pakistan. That’s a lot of easy money for Pak to finance its terrorist campaigns against India.

The whole hair brained pipeline deal therefore is a lose-lose bargain all the way and should be scrapped right away, if it has not been already. A very viable alternative to this is to use the sea route since

1) India can then import all the gas it needs from every friggin part of the world including Iran and even Venezuela.

2) The Indian Navy can very much handle anyone who wants to play some mischief along the way.

Samjhauta Train Blasts handiwork of Pak-based militants: India

End of ALL Speculation. It is not the Martians, not the mythical Hindu terrorists and certainly not the flying spaghetti monster but terrorist militant charity “freedom fighter” groups based in the territory of our own “loving neighbour” to the west having nearly 28 years of worldwide experience in doing these kind of things -butchering innocent civilians and then hiding behind a wall of lies and denials.

February 21, 2007- Security agencies probing the Samjhauta Express blasts on Tuesday night said the incident was the handiwork of Pakistan-based militant groups.

Highly-placed sources in Union Home Ministry said they had “vital clues,” which included a telephonic conversation between a caller from Delhi to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The sources declined to give out the identity of the militant groups behind the blasts, but hinted at sleeper cells of Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

These militant groups, the sources said, have adopted a new modus operandi of detonating low-intensity blasts with explosive materials comprising readily available combustibles.

China’s One Child(Only for the Poor) Policy

In the socialist worker’s paradise of China, the rich and the priviliged have the de-facto right to bear more than one children inspite of the official One-Child policy.Whereas women from the poorer sections of society have to endure forced and most often botched abortions even at later stages of their pregnancies so that the local “officials” can meet the ‘annual targets’ for population growth set for that particular county by the central government in Beijing.

In recent years, more and more affluent people and social celebrities have born a second or third child. Based on a report by China’s Xinhuanet, Mou Weiyong, vice director of Liaoning Provincial Commission of Population and Family Planning, said that out of those who have more than one child, the number of people with high incomes is on a dramatic increase; most of them are private enterprise owners or self-employed.

According to Zhong Liyan, director of the Bureau of Population and Family Planning in Heping District, Shenyang City, the privileged and celebrities bear more than one child for two main reasons. First, they want a boy to inherit the estate; second, they want to keep the only child from feeling lonely.

China’s government agents at all levels will be punished according to party discipline or be discharge from public employment once they fail to adhere to the one-child policy. But no effective measures have been taken to stop the rich and celebrities from bearing more than one child.

Govt Plans Cradle Scheme to ‘Save the Girl Child’

This is something that should have been done much earlier. This is a worthy effort to check the menace of female infanticide and foeticide in the country.And unlike the many hair brained social schemes cooked up by this government till now. This one might actually work if implemented properly.

Centre mulls ‘cradle scheme’ for girl child

“Don’t kill your daughter. The government will raise her.” Taking to desperate measures to check the alarming rise in female foeticide, the Centre is planning a “cradle scheme” for abandoned girl children.

Under the proposed ‘palna’ or cradle scheme, the government plans to open a centre in each district where parents can leave their girl children if they do not want to bring them up themselves.

“We want to put a cradle or ‘palna’ in every district headquarters. What we are saying to the people is have your children, don’t kill them. And if you don’t want a girl child, leave her to us,” Minister of State for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury said in an interview.

The ‘palna’ scheme has been proposed to be put in place during the 11th Five Year Plan as part of a slew of measures to fight the menace of female foeticide.

Now atleast the unwanted girl child will have a chance to live and perhaps some lucky ones will even find a new home and a new life somewhere else rather than ending up in the garbage dump in the backyards of hospitals across the country.

More Assaults On the Freedom Of Speech

And this latest assault comes from two of our own kind in the Indian Blogdom and not from establishment figures like Barkha Dutt, Sagarika Ghose et al who bemoan that the “irresponsible” masses are speaking their mind bypassing their propoganda machinery editorial process. Or I &B Minister Priyaranjan Dasmushi who considers himself the sole “moral” authority in what is to be broadcast or not by the TV channels. Or the Shivsena which routinely takes to the streets seeking ban on this or that.

The said two bloggers both went ballistic in the same week because they came across points of view opposite to their own which they found “offensive”.

One of them even sought a ban on what he considered as a “hate website”.The other questioned the motives of a prominent Indian News portal for giving people whom he considered as “hate mongers” and “fascists” a platform to express their opinion.

They both tried to justify their stand by using the same tired old vacuous argument used by many establishment crusaders all over the world to stifle dissent, that the Freedom of Speech should come with some kind of “responsibility”.

But the paradox is who gets to define what is responsible and what is not? Who gets to define what is hate speech and what is not? Since everyone carries his or her own prejudices, opinions and points of view. Everyone is therefore at sometime or the other going to ‘feel’ offended by something or someone.