Opinion
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| | How my experience of Diwali in Karachi took me to a city I never knew | | | | Karachi is often termed as a dull city, sometimes even dangerous. In a city of 20 odd million, there is a dearth of public spaces and limited avenues for cultural activities.
The much praised diversity has also come under scrutiny, with minorities migrating to greener pastures abroad and those staying back choosing to remain discreet.
The uncertain security situation restricts religious festivities of non-Muslims as well as the nurturing of our communities' collective imagination. Festivals come and go but they don’t manage to make headlines for the right reasons.
But anyone who has lived in Karachi for some time would know that the city opens up to its denizens gradually. There are pockets across the city that light up annually with festivities, religious and cultural, showing a fasci... |  | |
| | | Taj Mahal as Tejo Mahal | | Once again "There is a Bee in the Bonnett" | | | While Oak's weird theories like 'Christianity and Islam being both derivatives of Hinduism' or 'Like Taj Mahal, Catholic Vatican, Kaaba, Westminster Abbey were once Hindu temples to Shiva' or 'Vatican being originally a Vedic creation called Vatika and that the Papacy was also originally a Vedic Priesthood' or his complete denial of Islamic architecture in India could not find any takers in the mainstream, in fact were rejected in academia, they gathered a popular following in the Hindu Right which is still in search of a grand theory to further its agenda.
It was probably late sixties or early seventies - when a gentleman called P N Oak started appearing in Marathi magazines peddling his weird theories about well known monuments in and outside India. An article which made lot of news ... | | |
| | | A part-time Chief Minister | | | | Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has said that he would be taking five days off in a month to attend to his duties as the head priest of the Gorakhnath Temple. Television networks ran this part of his speech only once. Either the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) forced the channels to take the story off or the Chief Minister himself felt so embarrassed that he withdrew his statement. That could be the reason why the speech did not see the light of the day in print.
What the Yogi had said was that he would continue to be the head priest and attend to the religious duties along with his callings as the Chief Minister of the State. But this is only for the consumption of the people. Otherwise, he is continuing as the head priest of the temple and also in his post as the Chief Minist... | | |
| | | Keeping Cool..! | | | | He is about the coolest person I know. My office makes at least a dozen calls to him, as our computers sprint a virus, emails get stuck or my mouse goes into a tizzy, but he handles all with a calm I envy. And it’s that calm that has taken him from a tiny room to a lovely two bedroom flat, in just two years.
And yet knowing how keeping cool helps us grow, we continue being hot headed, impatient and quick tempered. Here’s an example:
The man was a regular customer and the management did its best to please him. So when he complained one day that only one piece of bread was being given him with his meal, the waiter promptly brought him four slices.
“That’s good,” he said, “but not good enough. I like bread – plenty of it.”
So the next night he was given a dozen slices. “Good,” he said.” ... | | |
| | | Emergency-type situation bares Modi's authoritarianism | | Scams belie good governance claims | | | Most politicians do not practise what they profess. Modi is not an exception. His government and the party have been trying to undo the country's diversity by asking the people what to eat, what to wear and what to pray.
English Daily National Herald established in Lucknow on December 9, 1938 with Jawaharlal Nehru as its first editor had carried on its masthead "FREEDOM IS IN PERIL, DEFEND IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT". Had the legendary cartoonist Jimmy Friell been alive today, he would have re-captioned his cartoon "INDIA'S DEMOCRACY AND ECONOMY ARE IN PERIL, DEFEND THEM WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT".
The developments that have been taking place on political and economy fronts for the past few months would have justified the suggested change in the now resurrected Herald's masthead. With 20 month... | | |
| | | The Ninety - Ten Principle..! | | | | Was reading an article by Stephen Covey the other day and found it so meaningful and true I thought I'd share it with you today: It's called the 90/10 Principle. It will change the way you manage your life. What is the 90/10 Principle?
Ten percent of life is made up of what happens to you. 90% of life is decided by how you react. What does this mean? We really have no control over 10% of what happens to us. We cannot stop the car from breaking down. The plane will be late arriving, which throws our whole schedule off. A driver may cut us off in traffic. We have no control over this 10%.
The other 90% is different. You determine the other 90%. How? By your reaction. You cannot control a red light, but you can control your reaction. You can control how you react. Let's use an example:
Yo... | | |
| | | Wrongful Rhetoric And Trump's Strategy on Iran | | | | Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years because he blew the whistle on Israel's secret nuclear weapons program. He felt he had "an obligation to tell the people of Israel what was going on behind their backs" at a supposed nuclear research facility which was actually producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. His punishment for breaking the silence about Israel's capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons included eleven years of solitary confinement.
Yesterday, reading about President Donald Trump's new strategy on Iran, Vanunu's long isolation and sacrificial commitment to truth-telling came to mind.
Donald Trump promised to "deny the Iranian regime all paths to a nuclear weapon." But it is Israel, which possesses an estimated 80 nuclear warheads, with fissile material... | | |
| | | Stay Inside; There's Nothing Outside..! | | | | "Terrible! Terrible!" shouted a senior official of the government, "We can't implement any projects without people complaining! The bullet train is in a controversy because commuters want to first make the existing railways safe! We can't build metros in the cities, because people say buildings are shaking!"
"And sir, in Mumbai, they don't want the metro to run under a Fire temple because it will upset the magnetic waves! Another line has activists fighting against trees being cut!""
"Trees, people, temples! All are conspiring against us! Even roads can't be widened because there are crosses or temples which can't be shifted! People are coming up with all sorts of reasons and at this rate we will not have anything ready by 2019!"
"Is that an auspicious year sir?" asked his junior.
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| | | Environmental Protection | | The Seeds of Agroecology And Common Ownership | | | The increasingly globalised industrial food system that transnational agribusiness promotes is not feeding the world and is responsible for some of the planet's most pressing political, social and environmental crises. Localised, traditional methods of food production have given way to globalised supply chains dominated by transnational companies policies and actions which have resulted in the destruction of habitat and livelihoods and the imposition of corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive (monocrop) agriculture that weds farmers and regions to a wholly exploitative system of neoliberal globalisation.
Whether it involves the undermining or destruction of what were once largely self-sufficient agrarian economies in Africa or the devastating impacts of soy cultivation in Argentina or p... | | |
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