Passionate About India

Since time immemorial, the entire global media fraternity has been divided between Israel and Palestine. While on one hand, a set of media has been strongly supporting Israel, on the other, there has been as staunch a support for Palestine. Amidst all this, the debate still lingers – which one of the two, Israel or Palestine, is wrong? But then, how can one be right and how can the other be wrong? In other words, how can any one of them be right! Supporting any of these nations would essentially and fundamentally mean supporting the very doctrine of war. In no given circumstance has a war been the appropriate route to a solution! Thus, the very discussion of which country is wrong or right gets futile, if one were to view the entirety of the situation through the lens of humanity. War, has always – especially in recent history – been a tool to display a nation’s military might. It is a way of flaunting newly developed state-of-the-art weaponries and defence technologies. War today...

As I went through the shocking footages of the hotel cameras which reveal what went on inside the Taj on 26/11 (made public now for the first time as an exclusive by The Sunday Indian – read the cover story that follows), my blood boils once again in rage. Rage against Pakistan, rage against our spineless government which allowed it to happen and though there can be no justice at all for what happened, I demand that Kasab be hanged immediately. Shocking and Exclusive from the The Sunday Indian : 26/11 snaps from hidden cameras inside Taj. To check them out Log on now to http://facebook.com/Chaudhuri.Arindam I fail to understand what more does the Government of India need to punish Ajmal Kasab, who was caught red handed, causing mayhem in Mumbai on 26th of November 2008. More so, at a point in time where across the globe, governments have a zero tolerance policy towards terrorism! Such is the extent of intolerance that if on one extreme, the United States of America, under the guise ...

In Chattisgarh, more crpf jawans get killed by mosquito bites than by Maoists! Yes, that’s the ironic piece of research my friend Prasoon dug out for his article in the last issue of The Sunday Indian! It does tell a big story. Of course, on one hand it tells the pitiable story of our CRPF jawans, as Prasoon pointed out in his article last week. Thanks to the Maoist attack recently, which left 75 dead, the government suddenly is feeling concerned about the jawans’ lives! However, before this incident, in the last two years over a hundred of them had died of malaria, which was more than the numbers killed on duty. But previously, of course, the government was not concerned about the lives of jawans because malarial deaths obviously don’t happen in a dramatic newsworthy manner. Is it not ironic that our paramilitary forces die more of curable diseases than of bullets? Well, that’s the crux of India's problems. That more CRPF jawans are today scared to die of malaria than of Maoist b...

In our previous issue of The Sunday Indian, after my editorial, we had carried a special feature by Mr. Lasantha Wickrematunge, the late Editor of the Sri Lankan newspaper, The Sunday Leader. We carried this as a special feature just because Mr.Lasantha almost knew that he was going to be assassinated, before he actually was! He also knew that his assassinator was already known very well to none other than his long time ‘friend’ and the current President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who strangely (or perhaps, not so strangely, given his clear complicity) refused to take any action. In fact, the civil war in Sri Lanka between LTTE and government forces is reaching its culmination with a decisive victory for the Sri Lankan army. While the defeat of LTTE, one of the world’s deadliest terror organizations and the one which pioneered the concept of suicide bombings, is no doubt great news (all the greater, because of the fact that it was this LTTE that has been responsible for the assas...

Just as I was about to write this editorial, in the Times Now channel, a young man among those thousands who had gathered this evening near the Gateway Of India, said in the most unabashed manner, which typically reflected the mood of India now. He said in clear terms that he simply doesn’t understand what Manmohan Singh speaks and that he would rather prefer to die fighting a war than to die while dining in a hotel with his family. Just beside him was a placard in which was written, “A nation of lions led by donkeys”. The person stated that as a layman, he knew that there are terrorist camps in PoK, but couldn’t fathom why the Government of India was not doing anything about the issue, instead of begging to Pakistan. The man continued that a country like Bangladesh, which got its independence from India, is now becoming the biggest nemesis of India, sending Huji terrorists across the border every other day for terror attacks in Assam and West Bengal. What that young man was stating cl...

As I remained hooked on to Times Now (which, by far, gave the best coverage possible and reminded me of CNN’s Iraq war coverage way back in 1991), and without sleeping for a moment for the first twelve hours, saw the mockery of our democracy, I really felt sad for our brave policemen who gave up their lives – just like the many innocent people who also paid the price – for a non-committed, spineless, political class ruling this great country. Every time a political leader spoke, it was a feeling of shame that I felt somewhere deep within, and couldn’t help but wonder when we would see the end of this rotten, old and decaying lot who can sell this country to the dogs for a few hundred crores. It was indeed sad to see the nation pay the price for their uncommitted, visionless leadership. Haven’t we had enough of disgusting and shameless statements like ‘we are planning to modernize our equipments and increase budgets for our intelligence departments...’ etc? Forget having any kind of mor...

With the shootouts and arrests of a number of suspected terrorists, the police seem to have cracked the series of bombings that have been rocking India of late. The interesting thing is that most of those arrested have two things in common. Firstly, they are from Azamgarh (and our cover story focuses on that); and secondly, they all seem to be educated. I was recently there for an interview on a TV channel and the topic being discussed was – “Educated terrorists! Is it the new face of terrorism?” What really shocked me was the complete lack of perspective on the entire issue that the speakers had. While one top police officer said that it was not his concern, the other speaker – the head of a well known university – started blabbering that it’s the result of alienation, discrimination, economic marginalisation and the Gujarat massacre, etc., etc., almost giving his tacit support to the heinous act of barbarism that happened recently in Delhi and other cities. He even tried to compare t...

When the body bags of American soldiers started their return journey from Iraq, it was reason enough to revive the haunting nightmares of the Vietnam war. A war where several hundreds of thousands of American soldiers had to pay with their lives for an ideological war between the American and Soviet policymakers. A war whose end was not in sight for forty long years and which served little for the betterment of mankind, except for the eternal tension of an incumbent war – or what was commonly known as the Cold War era. For President Bush and his coterie, it was too much of a risk not to mitigate the domestic backlash against the body bags and continue with the loot of Iraq. And yet, the stakes in Iraq in terms of oil reserves and the potential contracts for reconstruction were too luring to be given up just for the sake of preventing the body bags from coming home. After all, the body bags are nothing but a petite collateral price for the big Iraq pie in the offing. In these days of ou...

What happened on 9/11 is something that the world would never forget. Memories of the twin towers coming down are impossible to erase but more than that what made this event even more ‘memorable’ is the manner in which the US government has gone around hunting for terrorists in Afghanistan, and followed it up with an engagement in Iraq, thus changing the future course of global geo-politics. Similarly, 7/7 would also remain a memorable day as that brings forth the memory of the gruesome London blasts; and more than that the way the UK police had gone about chasing the perpetrators of the crime, making the incident even more unforgettable, almost giving a new definition to terrorism. What the US did to Afghanistan and then to Iraq would always remain a matter of contention globally, and has left a lot of room for criticism, but then the way the Indian government has been sleeping on terrorism over the past so many years, and allowing innocent citizens to be killed, is probably worse tha...