India and its Toilets

42% of the rural residents in Tamil Nadu have TVs. Only 14% have toilets.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dissidence in Iran

An insightful and sometime exhaustive look at dissidence in Iran. Many parallels are drawn with the Czech dissident movement and India's own independence movement. The anti-Shah revolution was not hijacked by the clerics, he said, just as the Bolshevik revolution was not stolen by Stalin, as Trotsky had claimed. “We began revolution, in order to create a paradise, but we created hell.” An unjust regime can be changed only by civil disobedience, nonviolently, he holds. Invasion cannot export or impose democracy either. The basic thrust of the article is the claim that the fight in this world is not between civilizations, but between open secular societies and religious worlds. This fight happens, according to the author, in all societies including the western ones.
Read more

On Jinnah

An excellent article on Jinnah, debunking his secular credentials, in the wake of Advani's comments about Jinnah having wanted a secular Pakistan. Despite wiping out Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Parsis, the Muslims of Pakistan have become more sectarian and intolerant about their Islamic faith than they were 50 or 100 years ago. Islam has assumed dangerously virulent forms today and Pakistan has come to be associated with terror and tyranny, rather than democracy and secularism. These developments are intrinsic to Jinnah’s ideology rather than unintended, unexpected by-products. Jinnah's legacy, says Madhu Kishwar, is a planted seed of hatred that consumes Pakistan and burns India in its wake. Another comment of note is about how the Sangh and Shiv Sena are but mirror images of Jinnah's politics. The Sangh Parivar hates Jinnah because Jinnah succeeded in his mission of dividing India by "uniting" Muslims into an ethnically cleansed state, whereas a whole century ...
Read more

A historical perspective of India

Excerpts from what promises to be a brilliant book by Ramachandran Guha. The great 19th-century poet Ghalib thought that God was indeed on the side of India. All around him there was conflict and privation, but doomsday had not yet come. "Why does not the Last Trumpet sound?", asked Ghalib of a sage in the holy city of Benares. "Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?" he continued. This was the answer he got: The hoary old man of lucent ken Pointed towards Kashi and gently smiled. 'The Architect,' he said, 'is fond of this edifice Because of which there is colour in life; He Would not like it to perish and fall.'
Read more