VINDICA

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.'

Narayana Murthy has landed in the soup for saying at a Infosys funtion that singing the National Anthem would "embarass employees who were of foreign origin". Kannada Chaluvali Vatal Paksha MLA Vatal Nagaraj even went on to termed Mr Murthy a 'traitor' during a discussion on the issue in Karnataka Assembly on Tuesday. Raising the issue, Kannada Chaluvali leader Vatal Nagaraj demanded that an inquiry be held and Murthy "arrested" for "insulting" the National Anthem. "Murthy is anti-Kannada and anti-national," he alleged. Madhuswamy (JDU) said "nothing can be more insulting" than what Murthy had said and done and asked the Government to withdraw the facilities granted to Infosys. "Infosys has grown because of Bangalore," he said. So, firstly, how do we measure patriotism? If it means contribution to the well being of India and its citizens, then obviously Mr. Nagaraj is in solid ground and leagues ahead Murthy. After a...