VINDICA

Bangladesh sees its first suicide bombers. After years of winking and allowing the extremists to take root in there, Bangladesh is now seeing the beginning of the blowback. This is nothing new. Pakistan did the same while providing "moral and diplomatic" support for what has essentially become a terror campaign in Kashmir. India did the same, training LTTE in Tamil Nadu, only to see them kill our own Prime Minister. Of course, Indira's use of Bindranwale for her political purposes was yet another case of the same desease. It is time for all south asian countries stop imagining they can ride the tiger. They all need to resolutely reject use of terror (by which i mean use of non organized militias for creating violence) as valid statecraft.

Manjunath Shanmugam, an IIM (L) graduate and Indian Oil Corporation officer is killed after trying to fight adultration of oil in UP. Comming in the wake of the Satyendra Dubey's murder, this is a damning indictment of all that government regulations foster upon our society. In her Indian Express column Ila Patnaik argues this case.

A couple of days ago, the Election Commission announced that there shall be no more aloo in samosas. Laloo has lost.

When Indian national kidnapped by Al-Qaeda in Iraq can be returned safely, why could not an Indian be secured from the hands of the Taliban. What exactly did the government do here? P.M. Kutty was shot dead on the orders of the Taliban's council at 6:00 pm, after a deadline passed for his company to pull out of Afghanistan, Qari Mohammad Yousuf said. The thought of someone calmly announcing murder is chilling. Taliban needs to met with strong force. However, America is so bogged down in Iraq that it is willing to consider new creative definitions like "good Taliban" and "differences between Taliban and Al-Qaeda". While American interest surely dictate their own policy, it is a fact that Taliban presents a much more clear and present danger for Indian interests. It needs to be wiped out, with or without American help.

Two actresses are hounded by the self proclaimed guardians of "Tamil Culture" for making comments about safe sex in the context of HIV/AIDS. ‘Tamil culture’, as they define it, has been reduced to effigy-burning, a display of chappals and brooms, and the inability to contest an opponent’s personal point of view in a civilised manner—especially if it is a woman.

Found this slightly old (05/2005) piece from Richard Dawkins warning against creationism in the wake of Kansas school board's attempt to throttle the teaching of evolution in that state. Intelligent design is a new theory that claims that nature is so complex that it could not have evolved simply by natural selection, and in effect should in fact have been created by some form of external intelligence. The theory banks on "gaps" or "mysteries" that they claim Darwins evolutionary theory cannot explain. Since such "intelligence" is a transparent reference to God, this new theory has found significant funding and favor from the religious right. However, it has not found much purchase among the scientific community. In his essay, Dawkins warns against such political interference in science: Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive adm...

A brilliant essay by KPS Gill about liberalism and how the apologists are wrong in finding "root causes" for heinous acts of terrorism. On Kashmir: over a decade and a half of Islamist terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir - explicitly engineered and supported by Pakistan - is blamed on the failure to 'assimilate' the Kashmiri Muslim into the 'national mainstream', and to discriminatory policies that resulted in 'poverty' and 'unemployment' in the state - and the fact that Jammu and Kashmir was far from the poorest region in the country has had no bearing on these arguments. On Punjab: Khalistani terrorism - again backed by Pakistan - was attributed to supposed 'discrimination' against a community that was unique in the extraordinary honour and prominence that had been conferred upon it, in its exceptional achievements, and in its comparative wealth within the Indian context. Finally, there is a call to explicitly recognize the mischief and vi...

AA Gill says he is a wittist (which is a humourist without the laughs), and then writes this witty piece about the English and Anger. It was anger that built the Industrial Age, which forged expeditions of discovery. It was the need for self-control that found an outlet in cataloguing, litigating and ordering the natural world. It was the blind fury with imprecise and stubborn inanimate objects that created generations of engineers and inventors. The anger at sin and unfairness that forged their particular earth-bound, pedantic spirituality and their puce-faced, finger-jabbing, spittle-flecked politics.