Irregular Musings of a Compulsive Thinker!

Indians have culture but not civilization. Culture is how we entertain ourselves; civilization is how we entertain others. Culture is our attitude to beauty and ugliness, to power, to religion, and to family. It shows in our music, in what makes us laugh. Civilization is our attitude to mankind. It’s defined as social development of an advanced stage, but civilization never actually arrives; it is only reached for. It assumes there is high purpose to life, to wealth, to culture. It believes that man will exhibit the signs of his evolution. He will improve upon man. For this he must build—but what? The Birlas built six temples (India always being in urgent need of more religion). They built temples in Jaipur, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Patna and Kolkata. Most of these are to Lakshminarayan, and these are only the big ones. No Indian family has built more, or bigger, temples than the Birlas, and that is their contribution to our culture. Mukesh Ambani is building on Altamount Road a ...

In the United States and Europe, people worry that their well-paying, high-skill jobs will be, in a word, “Bangalored” — shipped off to India. People here are also worried about the future. They fret that Bangalore, and India more broadly, will remain a low-cost satellite office of the West for the foreseeable future — more Scranton, Pa., in the American television series “The Office,” than Silicon Valley. Even as the rest of the world has come to admire, envy and fear India’s outsourcing business and its technological prowess, many Indians are disappointed that the country has not quickly moved up to more ambitious and lucrative work from answering phones or writing software. Why, they worry, hasn’t India produced a Google or an Apple? Innovation is hard to measure, but academics who study it say India has the potential to create trend-setting products but is not yet doing so. Indians are granted about half as many American patents for inventions as people and firms in Israel an...

Of the many countries that gorged on debt in the boom years, Dubai stood out. In the space of a few years the emirate’s investment arm, Dubai World, racked up $59 billion in debt, borrowing to build lavish developments like a giant island shaped like a palm tree to entice celebrities like Brad Pitt, and to invest in glittery properties like the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas. Now that the boom has gone bust, both in Dubai and in the United States, Dubai is stuck with a glut of real estate that no one wants to buy or rent. Creditors and markets had always assumed that when push came to shove, its oil-rich neighbor Abu Dhabi would bail out Dubai. But that assumption was called into question this week, and the resulting fear that Dubai might not be able to pay its bills sent a wave of uncertainty rippling through markets just as investors thought the worst of the global financial instability was over. The anxiety reached Wall Street on Friday, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down ...

It's been a year since the ghastly terror attack on Mumbai which stunned the not just India but humanity at large. But one thought still lingers among all Indians - ARE WE YET SITTING DUCKS FOR TERRORISTS??? From the initial sloganeering (to attack Pakistan militarily) to promises to shore up our defences (intelligence and modern equipment) to rolling of heads in the administration (though they've all been rehabilitated since) , we seen them all but none of this has been reassuring to the people who matter most - US - THE AAM AADMI ... What started as a direct threat to Pakistan ended up with a senseless joint statement at Sharm el Sheikh (truly a shame just as the name of the city) ... On the other side of the border, we have the Pakistani Government which keeps rejecting the several dossiers that India has provided them with. Hafiz Saeed still remains a freebird fueling the anti India sentiments through the length and breadth of Pakistan . While on the...

Fate has a strange sense of humour. At least for those who believe that their lives oscillate under its whimsical influence. We all have an assortment of beliefs and bear them fiercely. Reality doesn’t care for what we believe in or perceive and every now and then, it obliterates our illusions. For some, the event is a sharp uninvited finish. Others, reality inflicts so sharply, ruthlessly vapourising their sense of being that neither turn of fate holds much appeal. Very little belief is left to hold up either. None of these weighty thoughts were filling my head as I lazed through a typical day at work on the Wednesday of November 26, 2008. I have nothing to say for my existence. I unrepentantly lead a dull, shallow life devoid of anything interesting or inconvenient. I don’t read and have never felt the need to challenge myself in the world outside my comfort zone and do not despair for meaning nothing to anyone. I drink enough alcohol to kill off any potential realisation of emptines...

The trip from a strict Pakistani boarding school to a bohemian bar in Philadelphia has defined David Headley’s life, according to those who know the middle-age man at the center of a global terrorism investigation. Raised by his father in Pakistan as a devout Muslim, Mr. Headley arrived back here at 17 to live with his American mother, a former socialite who ran a bar called the Khyber Pass. Today, Mr. Headley is an Islamic fundamentalist who once liked to get high. He has a traditional Pakistani wife, who lives with their children in Chicago, but also an American girlfriend — a makeup artist in New York — according to a relative and friends. Depending on the setting, he alternates between the name he adopted in the United States, David Headley, and the Urdu one he was given at birth, Daood Gilani. Even his eyes — one brown, the other green — hint at roots in two places. Mr. Headley, an American citizen, is accused of being the lead operative in a loose-knit group of militants plotting...

The leaking of a long-awaited confidential report on one of the most divisive attacks in modern Indian history raised a furor in India’s Parliament on Monday, with lawmakers demanding to know how the report made its way to a newspaper and cable news channel. The report, 17 years in the making, is an investigation of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, a mosque in the town of Ayodyha, by radical Hindu activists who claimed the site as the birthplace of the god Ram. They claimed Muslim rulers had destroyed the temple and replaced it with a mosque in the 16th century. After years of heated protest over the site, a Hindu mob stormed the mosque in 1992, reducing it to rubble. The destruction of the mosque set off violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims that left more than 1,000 dead, mostly Muslims. The scale of the violence was among the worst since the partition of British India, and bitterness and recrimination over the event have reverberated for years. According to the Indian Expre...

Its election time again, possibly the most crucial elections in Indian history. So have things changed since the mid 80s or early 90s???? Sure as hell, it has... Not sure if it's for the worse or better though. Is India safe??? This query will evoke different responses from different quarters. The Politicians, Babus and the Elite are rarely targeted and are always safe owing to the millions of Rupees (mostly taxpayer money) they spend on their own security. But are you and me "the aam aadmi" safe?? I doubt that. We have seen violence in our very own backyard... women ruthlessly beaten up in the name of Indian culture, women being told what to wear and whom to speak with. In response, our good ol' politicians and the police labelled these incidents as "normal incidents" that keep happening in big cities and sat on their fat backsides doing absolutely nothing.  It is extremely sad and unfortunate that we have forgotten that WE are INDIANS. We are either Hindus...