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| Home Blog Sitemap About Us Contact Us Archives Advertise with us | Thursday, Mar 11, 2010 |
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 By LYDIA POLGREEN NEW DELHI — The upper house of India’s Parliament passed a bill Tuesday that would amend the Constitution to reserve one-third of the seats in India’s national and state legislatures for women, after the measure stirred two days of political chaos that could whittle the governing coalition’s majority to a dangerously thin margin. The vote, which is an early step in the process of amending the Constitution, brought pandemonium to Parliament, as a ... Read More  Threat ... a Dongria Kondh girl and, right, her idyllic homeland By DAVID LOWE DEEP in the lush jungle, colourfully dressed tribesmen pray to the god of the sacred mountain. Theirs is a simple way of life, lived with devotion to their deity in harmony with nature. But their idyllic habitat and very existence is under threat from a huge corporation planning to mine the holy hill. It sees the Na'vi tribe on the planet Pandora battling to stop humans ... Read More  Robert Matas Vancouver The perjury trial of Inderjit Singh Reyat was suddenly halted yesterday after the court was told that a juror had made a remark that another member considered to suggest racial bias. Mr. Justice Mark McEwan of the B.C. Supreme Court, dismissed the entire jury of 10 members and two alternates. He told them that concern was raised about a remark that may have been made during the jury selection process. After consulting with ... Read More  Arti01 Recur ‘In Hindu culture, nudity is a metaphor for purity' Maqbool Fida Husain tells SHOMA CHAUDHURY why his faith in India’s secular and tolerant traditions remains undiminished Husain saheb, what do you feel about the fundamentalist attacks against you? I’m not really perturbed by all this. India is a democracy, everyone is entitled to their views. I only wish people would air their views through debate rather than violence.The media comes to me looking — almost ... Read More  By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN The thing I love most about America is that there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the word — somebody who doesn’t understand that in a Great Recession you’re supposed to hunker down, downsize and just hold on for dear life. I have a couple of friends who fit that bill, who think a recession is a dandy time to try to discover better and cheaper ways to do things. They both happen ... Read More  By SADANAND DHUME Bangalore No longer the preserve of colonial masters, it's the language uniting—not dividing—the country. At 8 p.m. on a Saturday, Rajeev Chamoli could be glued to a television screen watching cricket, or out with friends at one of this city's many pubs. Instead, Mr. Chamoli, a 27-year-old software programmer, sits under a ceiling fan in a boxy classroom practicing his English along with five other students. "I would say I'm a very positive attitude guy," ... Read More  Fazle Hasan Abed has built one of the world’s most commercially-minded and successful NGOs Feb 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition SMILING and dapper, Fazle Hasan Abed hardly seems like a revolutionary. A Bangladeshi educated in Britain, an admirer of Shakespeare and Joyce, and a former accountant at Shell, he is the son of a distinguished family: his maternal grandfather was a minister in the colonial government of Bengal; a great-uncle was the first Bengali ... Read More  By PAUL BECKETT About once a week, the Australian High Commission in New Delhi puts out a press release or sticks another official in front of the cameras, to prove that the country is trying to reverse all the negativity surrounding the attacks on Indian students. "We do not need any convincing that this is a serious matter, that needs to be addressed seriously," Peter Varghese, Australian High Commissioner in New Delhi, told CNN-IBN Feb. ... Read More  By Saman Gunadasa Sri Lanka's industry — thriving or crashing? Despite the efforts of the Sri Lankan Government and Central Bank to paint a picture of a vibrant economy on the brink of a historic expansion, the island confronts a worsening economic crisis. Like a number of European countries, Sri Lanka is burdened with heavy foreign debts and a ballooning budget deficit, in large part due to the huge military spending needed to wage war ... Read More  In praise of a film star who has seen off the violent mob running India's commercial capital Feb 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition Illustration by M. Morgenstern LAW-ABIDING Mumbaikars, as residents of India’s tinsel-town are known, celebrated the release of Bollywood’s latest offering with gusto this week. The film, “My name is Khan”, depicts the fictional trials of Rizwan Khan, an Indian Muslim with Asperger’s syndrome, living in California. Shortly after September 11th 2001 ... Read More  By Lalit Garg Senior BJP Leader and Ex-Deputy Prime Minister Mr. Lal krishna Advani said that it is necessary to promote humanity and non-violence in our country. This is possible only by instigating such feelings in people internally and not by legalizing matters. We should always be ready to render our support in such a mission like Sukhi Parivar Abhiyan. Social and non-governmental institutions should come forward and participate in services like education, health ... Read More  By RAY A. SMITH NEW YORK—One of Saturday's most-anticipated runway shows belongs to young designer Prabal Gurung. The pressure is on Mr. Gurung to prove he's worth the fuss made over him last year. Gurung Guns for NY Fashion Week Rebecca McAlpin for The Wall Street Journal See Mr. Gurung's Fall 2010 collection and his red carpet looks. "It's pressure but it's a good pressure," he says one recent morning, as he conducted fittings on ... Read More  By NIKHIL GULATI NEW DELHI -- Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. will stop selling its lowest-priced model, the Maruti 800, in 13 of India's biggest cities from April 1, when the federal government implements new, more stringent emission standards, its chairman said Friday. File photo of Maruti 800 cars are parked at the sales and dispatch area at the factory of Maruti Udyog Limited (MUL) in Gurgaon, Haryana on December 12, 2008. "We have ... Read More  India's government resurrects the Frankenfood scare. Few countries have benefitted more from the Green Revolution than India, which in the 1960s succeeded in averting famine by introducing genetically modified strains of wheat and rice. So it's a pity to see the government backsliding on the next generation of GM foods, this time in the form of a campaign against the humble egglplant. Environment and Forestry Minister Jairam Ramesh announced Tuesday that he would halt indefinitely the commercial ... Read More  John Barber From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Published on Tuesday, Feb. 09, 2010 4:34PM EST Novelist Rabindranath Maharaj occupies a land every bit as exotic as his lavish name suggests, a mysterious east few literary explorers have ever imagined, let alone visited. Magnificently alone in the crowded bazaar, he works assiduously to infect the Canadian imagination with his strange foreign notions. But it would be wrong to prejudge the quality of Maharaj’s work just because he ... Read More  By AMRIT DHILLON Actress and model Pooja Mishra does some chores in a Mumbai slum. It isn't easy being rich when you're plucked from your cushy environment and plopped into a Mumbai slum. That's just part of the premise of the popular Indian reality show "Big Switch." "The stench was overwhelming," says Natasha Suri, a 25-year-old model and former Miss India. "There were goats and pigs, droppings, piles of stinking rubbish, mosquitoes, flies, unbearable heat, and 20 of ... Read More  Shankar Vedantam “Colorism” may be harder to combat than racism, as research studies have shown that skin tone and other racial features play powerful roles in who gets ahead. Mirko Ilic LAST week, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, found himself in trouble for once suggesting that Barack Obama had a political edge over other African-American candidates because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Mr. Reid was not expressing ... Read More  By Raman Nanda NEW DELHI, India — Sixty million pilgrims can’t be wrong. But even so, I questioned the point of dousing myself with holy water from the Ganges that looked muddy and uninviting. It was 2001, and I was living at the Mahakumbh grounds in the north Indian town of Prayag as part of the U.K.-based Channel 4 television team covering the year’s kumbh festival, which is an ancient Hindu gathering featuring holy bathing, prayer and ... Read More
Upset by U.S. Security, Pakistanis Return as Heroes
By JANE PERLEZ ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A tour of the United States arranged by the State Department to improve ties to Pakistani legislators ended in a public relations fiasco when the members of the group refused to submit to extra airport screening in Washington, and they are now being hailed as heroes on their return home. “People should be thankful, you made them so proud,” said Hamid Mir, the host of a popular national talk show, ... Read More
The changing face of Canada: booming minority populations by 2031
Joe Friesen A massive demographic change is taking place that could alter Canada's economic, political and education systems and exacerbate the divide between rural and urban communities. By 2031, one in three Canadians will belong to a visible minority. One in four will be foreign-born, the highest proportion since the end of the last wave of mass immigration that began around 1910, Statscan said in a release Tuesday. Never before have those who identify themselves as ... Read More
The Terror of Bollywood
While American blockbusters shy away from Islamist villains, Indian films give them a showing. By ARUN VENUGOPAL Can "The Hurt Locker" win the Academy Award for Best Picture? For movie fans outside the U.S., it's a moot point—it earned just $4 million abroad. The film suffers from the bigger problem afflicting post-9/11 movies about Iraq and the global war on terror: They tend to be weighed down by their own dull historicity and obsession with America's conduct ... Read More
Burqa and the prophet
By Irfan Engineer Mobs on the streets of Shimoga and Hassan protesting against an article that appeared in Kannda Prabha allegedly written by Taslima Nasreen has once again kicked up a debate on freedom of expression and need to place some reasonable restrictions on that freedom. Taslima Nasreen has described the article Purdah hai Purdah to be distorted. She has in a statement clarified that she did not write any article for any Kannada daily. The ... Read More
Abuse Case Rouses India’s Middle Class
By LYDIA POLGREEN PANCHKULA, India — She was a gifted 14-year-old tennis player who idolized Steffi Graf and hoped to turn pro. He was a senior police official and president of the state lawn tennis club. He lured her to his office with a promise of special coaching that could make her tennis dreams come true, then groped her. This encounter set in motion a saga that has taken almost 20 years to unfold. The family ... Read More
INDO-PAK RELATIONS AND THE COMMON MAN*
Special to South Asia Mail By Dr P S M Chandran Melbourne 25 March 1992, Cricket World Cup finals. The last England Batman Ray Illingworth is caught by Ramesh Raja off the bowling of Imran Khan. Pakistan wins the World Cup. Abey, my 6 yr old son sitting on my lap and watching the telecast jumps out and shouts, “Papa, we have won”. I was stunned. ‘Hi Abey, India is not playing, it is Pakistan who ... Read More
India’s Rise: The Role of the Diaspora
By Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Senior Fellow for International Economics. My long-standing friendship with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh began when we were both students in Cambridge in the mid-1950s. One personal anecdote in particular underlines dramatically why the Indian diaspora has a critical role to play in the country’s present and future. Recall that the Indian policy framework had degenerated into an unproductive, even counterproductive, set of policy choices that had produced the abysmal growth rate of ... Read More
Frosty Vibes at Chatwal's Ava Lounge
A federal lawsuit accuses two upscale bar lounges in Sant Singh Chatwal's Dream Hotel of labor law violations. The "chilled out vibe" at controversial hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal-owned Dream Hotel's Ava Lounge, which boasts of being "part Riviera, part Rome with inflections of South Beach," is getting decidedly frostier. Eight former cocktail waitresses and bartenders at the lounge, located in the penthouse of the Chatwal-owned Dream Hotel in Manhattan, as well as Rm. Fifty5, a bar in the ... Read More
Let India Train the Afghan Army
It's the most effective and economical way to prepare troops for counterinsurgency operations. By SUMIT GANGULY Training the Afghan army is "the most critical part" of America's "long-term strategy" in the country, U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke said Monday. Pakistan agrees, and has suggested it can help, too. Yet the best candidate for the task is the Indian Army. This million-strong force has had close to 60 years' of intense counterinsurgency experience in a variety of terrains. ... Read More
Al-Qaeda threatens Indian Premier League, Commonwealth Games
Australian athletes competing in India will be targeted by terrorists, a Pakistani militant with links to al-Qaeda has warned. international athletes should not travel to India to compete in the Indian Premier League cricket tournament, the hockey World Cup or the Commonwealth Games, Ilyas Kashmiri was quoted as saying by the Hong Kong-based Asia Times website. . Kashmiri sent the warning by email, Asia Times reported. . "We warn the international community not to send their people to the 2010 ... Read More
Drug Makers Decry Indian Patent System
By GEETA ANAND MUMBAI—Multinational drug companies have pushed big-time into India in recent years after the country agreed to respect intellectual property rights for pharmaceutical products. But India's patent office and courts have repeatedly declined to defend patents widely accepted in many other countries on some of the world's best-selling medicines. As a result, multinational pharmaceutical firms have been thrown a curve ball as they seek to expand in one of the world's fastest-growing markets. In the ... Read More |
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