Keep the Faith, and Keep Dwindling

I like this article, maybe it’s because one of my only two first cousins (so in actuality REAL Cousins ) who are married ;is married to a Parsi … ( FYI ..the other is married to an American.. ) …I wonder what precedent that sets for me ..being next in line and all ….anyhow.. there’s kind off a running joke in my dad’s side that goes something like “ I don’t what it is with these kids and Parsis!!” …my second cousin got married to his Parsi girlfriend last year, adding to the Parsi connection on Pop’s side … so yea my cousin's in-laws and her kids (being half Parsi) have been very, very good exponents of Parsi Culture for me…. that’s it though ; not having been brought up in Mumbai ;I don’t have many Parsi friends , but for what it’s worth …Family Matters and A Fine Balance are two of my favorite books !!! Yes I have an affinity for that community , though my connections are through intermarriages; I wonder how much the traditionalists will like that??!?? … I checked out all the links in the Sepia Mutiny article ..

Here’s the NYT Article that inspired it … I feel it means a lot to all of us, how people from a dwindling community marry outside for love ; and how us folks who might belong to communities in no danger of getting wiped out ,stick so strongly to community for marital purposes ..( I belong to a largely endogamous community myself , not getting wiped out soon.. I can relate to parts in the NYT article where they speak about maintaining age old traditions , but I can also relate to the Parsi girls dilemma of ,for whatever reason, not finding a person to marry in the small subset she had to choose from. )

September 6, 2006
Zoroastrians Keep the Faith, and Keep Dwindling
By LAURIE GOODSTEINBURR RIDGE, Ill. — In his day job, Kersey H. Antia is a psychologist who specializes in panic disorders. In his private life, Mr. Antia dons a long white robe, slips a veil over his face and goes to work as a Zoroastrian priest, performing rituals passed down through a patrilineal chain of priests stretching back to ancient Persia.
After a service for the dead in which priests fed sticks of sandalwood and pinches of frankincense into a blazing urn, Mr. Antia surveyed the Zoroastrian faithful of the Midwest — about 80 people in saris, suits and blue jeans.
“We were once at least 40, 50 million — can you imagine?” said Mr. Antia, senior priest at the fire temple here in suburban Chicago. “At one point we had reached the pinnacle of glory of the Persian Empire and had a beautiful religious philosophy that governed the Persian kings.
“Where are we now? Completely wiped out,” he said. “It pains me to say, in 100 years we won’t have many Zoroastrians.”
There is a palpable panic among Zoroastrians today — not only in the United States, but also around the world — that they are fighting the extinction of their faith, a monotheistic religion that most scholars say is at least 3,000 years old.
Zoroastrianism predates Christianity and Islam, and many historians say it influenced those faiths and cross-fertilized Judaism as well, with its doctrines of one God, a dualistic universe of good and evil and a final day of judgment.
While Zoroastrians once dominated an area stretching from what is now Rome and Greece to India and Russia, their global population has dwindled to 190,000 at most, and perhaps as few as 124,000, according to a survey in 2004 by Fezana Journal, published quarterly by the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America. The number is imprecise because of wildly diverging counts in Iran, once known as Persia — the incubator of the faith.
“Survival has become a community obsession,” said Dina McIntyre, an Indian-American lawyer in Chesapeake, Va., who has written and lectured widely on her religion.
The Zoroastrians’ mobility and adaptability has contributed to their demographic crisis. They assimilate and intermarry, virtually disappearing into their adopted cultures. And since the faith encourages opportunities for women, many Zoroastrian women are working professionals who, like many other professional women, have few children or none.
Despite their shrinking numbers, Zoroastrians — who follow the Prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek) — are divided over whether to accept intermarried families and converts and what defines a Zoroastrian. An effort to create a global organizing body fell apart two years ago after some priests accused the organizers of embracing “fake converts” and diluting traditions.
“They feel that the religion is not universal and is ethnic in nature, and that it should be kept within the tribe,” said Jehan Bagli, a retired chemist in Toronto who is a priest, or mobed, and president of the North American Mobed Council, which includes about 100 priests. “This is a tendency that to me sometimes appears suicidal. And they are prepared to make that sacrifice.”
In South Africa, the last Zoroastrian priest recently died, and there is no one left to officiate at ceremonies, said Rohinton Rivetna, a Zoroastrian leader in Chicago who, with his wife, Roshan, was a principal mover behind the failed effort to organize a global body. But they have not given up.
“We have to be working together if we are going to survive,” Mr. Rivetna said.
Although the collective picture is bleak, most individual Zoroastrians appear to be thriving. They are well-educated and well-traveled professionals, earning incomes that place them in the middle and upper classes of the countries where they or their families settled after leaving their homelands in Iran and India. About 11,000 Zoroastrians live in the United States, 6,000 in Canada, 5,000 in England, 2,700 in Australia and 2,200 in the Persian Gulf nations, according to the Fezana Journal survey.
This is the second major exodus in Zoroastrian history. In Iran, after Muslims rose to power in the seventh century A.D., historians say the Zoroastrian population was decimated by massacres, persecution and conversions to Islam. Seven boatloads of Zoroastrian refugees fled Iran and landed on the coast of India in 936. Their descendants, known as Parsis, built Mumbai, formerly Bombay, into the world capital of Zoroastrianism.
The Zoroastrian magazine Parsiana publishes charts each month tracking births, deaths and marriages. Leaders fret over the reports from Mumbai, where deaths outnumber births six to one. The intermarriage rate there has risen to about one in three. The picture in North America is more hopeful: about 1.5 births for one death. But the intermarriage rate in North America is now nearly 50 percent.
Soli Dastur, an exuberant priest who lives in Florida, is among the first generation of immigrants who started the trend. Mr. Dastur grew up in a village outside Mumbai, where his father was a priest, the fire temple was the center of town and his whole world was Zoroastrian.
He arrived in Evanston, Ill., in 1960, where he knew of no other Zoroastrians, to attend college on a scholarship provided by one of the Parsi endowments in Mumbai, which have since provided scholarships to many others. He earned a Ph.D., worked as a chemical engineer and married an American Roman Catholic he met on a blind date 40 years ago.
Mr. Dastur is a priest in much demand to perform ceremonies because of his melodic chanting of the prayers. He and his wife, Jo Ann, have two grown daughters. Neither married a Zoroastrian.
“They’re good human beings,” Mr. Dastur said. “That’s more important to me.”
The very tenets of Zoroastrianism could be feeding its demise, many adherents said in interviews. Zoroastrians believe in free will, so in matters of religion they do not believe in compulsion. They do not proselytize. They can pray at home instead of going to a temple. While there are priests, there is no hierarchy to set policy. And their basic doctrine is a universal ethical precept: “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.”
“That’s what I take away from Zoroastrianism,” said Tenaz Dubash, a filmmaker in New York City who is making a documentary about the future of her faith, “that I’m a cerebral, thinking human being, and I need to think for myself.”
Ferzin Patel, who runs a support group for 20 intermarried couples in New York, said that while the Zoroastrians in the group adored their faith and wanted to teach it to their children, they in no way wanted to compel their spouses to convert.
“In the intermarriage group, I don’t think anyone feels that someone should forfeit their religion just for Zoroastrianism,” Ms. Patel said.
Despite, or because of, the high intermarriage rate, some Zoroastrian priests refuse to accept converts or to perform initiation ceremonies for adopted children or the children of intermarried couples, especially when the father is not Zoroastrian. The ban on these practices is far stronger in India and Iran than in North America.
“As soon as you do it, you start diluting your ethnicity, and one generation has an intermarriage, and the next generation has more dilution and the customs become all fuzzy and they eventually disappear,” said Jal N. Birdy, a priest in Corona, Calif., who will not perform weddings of mixed couples. “That would destroy my community, which is why I won’t do it.”
The North American Mobed Council is so divided on the issue of accepting intermarried spouses and children that it has been unable to take a position, said Mr. Bagli, the council’s president. He supports accepting converts because he said he can find no ban in Zoroastrian texts, but he estimated that as many as 40 percent of the priests in his group were opposed.
The peril and the hope for Zoroastrianism are embodied in a child of the diaspora, Rohena Elavia Ullal, 27, a physical therapist in suburban Chicago.
Ms. Ullal knew from an early age that her parents wanted her to marry another Zoroastrian. Her mother, a former board president of the Chicago temple, helped organize Sunday school classes once a month there, enticing teenagers with weekend sleepovers and roller-skating trips.
The result was a core group of close friends who felt more like cousins, Ms. Ullal said recently over breakfast.
Both of her brothers found mates at Zoroastrian youth congresses, and one is already married. Ms. Ullal stayed on the lookout.
“There were so few,” she said. “I guess you’re lucky if you find somebody. That would be the ideal.”
Ms. Ullal’s college boyfriend is also the child of Indian immigrants to the United States, but he is Hindu. [They married on Saturday and had two ceremonies — one Hindu, one Zoroastrian.] But Ms. Ullal says that before they even became engaged, they talked about her desire to raise their children as Zoroastrians.
“It’s scary; we’re dipping down in numbers,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt his parents, but he doesn’t have the kind of responsibility, whereas I do.”

The idea of India

From here.

18 January 2006
The idea of India
Shashi Tharoor on India's mosaic of multiplicities

India’s constitution recognises 18 official languages, and there are 35 that are spoken by more than a million people each

When India celebrated the 49th anniversary of its independence from British rule in 1996, its then prime minister, HD Deve Gowda, stood at the ramparts of Delhi’s 16th-century red fort and delivered the traditional Independence Day address to the nation in Hindi, India’s ‘national language’. Eight other prime ministers had done exactly the same thing 48 times before him, but what was unusual this time was that Deve Gowda, a southerner from the state of Karnataka, spoke to the country in a language of which he did not know a word. Tradition and politics required a speech in Hindi, so he gave one – the words having been written out for him in his native Kannada script, in which they, of course, made no sense.

Such an episode is almost inconceivable elsewhere, but it represents the best of the oddities that help make India India. Only in India could there be a country ruled by a man who does not understand its ‘national language’; only in India, for that matter, is there a ‘national language’ which half the population does not understand; and only in India could this particular solution have been found to enable the prime minister to address his people. One of Indian cinema’s finest ‘playback singers’, the Keralite K J Yesudas, sang his way to the top of the Hindi music charts with lyrics in that language written in the Malayalam script for him, but to see the same practice elevated to the prime ministerial address on Independence Day was a startling affirmation of Indian pluralism. For the simple fact is that we are all minorities in India. There has never been an archetypal Indian to stand alongside the archetypal Englishman or Frenchman. A typical Indian stepping off the train, let us say a Hindi-speaking Hindu male from Uttar Pradesh, may cherish the illusion he represents the ‘majority community’, an expression much favoured by the less industrious of our journalists. But he does not. As a Hindu, sure enough, he belongs to the faith adhered to by 82 per cent of the population. But a majority of the country does not speak Hindi. A majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise when you go there. And, if he were visiting, say, my home state of Kerala, he would be surprised to realise a majority there is not even male.

Worse, this archetypal Hindu male has only to mingle with the polyglot, multi-coloured crowds – and I am referring not to the colours of their clothes but to the colours of their skins – thronging any of India’s major railway stations to realise how much of a minority he really is. Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of his majorityhood, because his caste automatically puts him in a minority. If he is a Brahmin, 90 per cent of his fellow Indians are not. If he is a Yadav, or another ‘backward class’, 85 per cent of his fellow Indians are not. And so on.

The question of nationhood

If caste and language complicate the notion of Indian identity, ethnicity makes it worse. Most of the time, an Indian’s name immediately reveals where he is from or what her mother tongue is: when we introduce ourselves, we are advertising our origins.

Despite some intermarriage at the elite levels in our cities, Indians are still largely endogamous, and a Bengali is easily distinguished from a Punjabi. The difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonality. A Karnataka Brahmin shares his Hindu faith with a Bihari Kurmi, but they share little identity with each other in respect of their dress, customs, appearance, taste, language or even, these days, their political objectives. At the same time, a Tamil Hindu would feel he has much more in common with a Tamil Christian or a Tamil Muslim than with, say, a Haryanvi Jat, with whom he formally shares the Hindu religion. What makes India, then, a nation? What is an Indian’s identity?

When an Italian nation was created in the second half of the 19th century out of a mosaic of principalities and statelets, one Italian nationalist (Massimo Taparelli d’Azeglio) wrote ‘We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians.’ It is striking that, a few decades later, no Indian nationalist succumbed to the temptation to express a similar thought. The prime exponent of modern Indian nationalism, Jawaharlal Nehru, would never have said ‘we have created India, now we have to create Indians’, because he believed that India and Indians had existed for millennia before he articulated their political aspirations in the 20th century.
Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time; a state that divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time; a state that asked a Keralite peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pundit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time.

So, under Gandhi and Nehru, Indian nationalism became a rare animal indeed. It was not based on any of the conventional indices of national identity. Not language, since India’s constitution recognises 18 official languages, and there are 35 that are spoken by more than a million people each. Not ethnicity, since the ‘Indian’ accommodates a diversity of racial types in which many Indians have more in common with foreigners than with other Indians – Indian Punjabis and Bengalis, for instance, have more in common ethnically with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, respectively, than with Poonawallahs or Bangaloreans. Not religion, since India is a secular pluralist state that is home to every religion known to mankind, with the possible exception of Shintoism. Not geography, since the natural geography of the subcontinent – the mountains and the sea – was hacked by the Partition of 1947. And not even territory, since, by law, anyone with one grandparent born in pre-partition India – outside the territorial boundaries of today’s state – is eligible for citizenship. Indian nationalism has therefore always been the nationalism of an idea.

It is the idea of an ever-ever land – emerging from an ancient civilisation, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy. India’s democracy imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens. The whole point of Indian pluralism is you can be many things and one thing: you can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite and a good Indian all at once. The Indian idea is the opposite of what Freudians call ‘the narcissism of minor differences’; in India we celebrate the commonality of major differences. If America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.

So the idea of India, as Rabindranath Tagore and, more recently, Amartya Sen have insisted, is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, colour, conviction, culture, cuisine, costume and custom, and still rally around a consensus. And that consensus is about the simple idea that in a democracy you don’t really need to agree – except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.

Hindutva and history

That consensus has been threatened in the last two decades by the rise of Hindu nationalism, offering an alternative view of Indian identity – one that is explicitly narrow and definitional (pro-Hindu and pro-Hindi, sectarian and anti-secular). Its followers asserted their idea of Indianness most spectacularly in the destruction of a disused sixteenth century mosque, the Babri Masjid, in 1992, and most brutally in the murder of up to 2000 Muslims in sectarian killings in the state of Gujarat ten years later.

To them, an independent India, freed after nearly a thousand years of alien rule (first Muslim, then British), and rid of a sizeable portion of its Muslim population by Partition, had an obligation to assert an identity that would be triumphantly and indigenously Hindu. They are not fundamentalists in any meaningful sense of the term, since Hinduism is uniquely a religion without fundamentals: there is no Hindu Pope, no Hindu Sunday, no single Hindu holy book, and indeed no such thing as a Hindu heresy. They are, instead, chauvinists, who root their Hinduism not in any of its soaring philosophical or spiritual underpinnings – and, unlike their Islamic counterparts, not in the theology of their faith – but rather in its role as a source of identity. They seek vengeance in the name of Hinduism-as-badge, rather than of Hinduism-as-doctrine. To most Indian Muslims, the debate over identity goes to the heart of their place in Indian society. For decades after independence, successive Indian governments had guaranteed their security in a secular state, permitting the retention of Muslim Personal Law separate from the country’s civil code, and even financing Haj pilgrimages to Mecca. Three of India’s presidents have been Muslims, as also innumerable cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals, and Supreme Court justices (and chief justices). At least until the mid-1990s, India’s Muslim population exceeded Pakistan’s. The destruction of the mosque and the killings in Gujarat seemed an appalling betrayal of the compact that had sustained the Muslim community as a vital part of India’s pluralist democracy.

The irony is that the advocates of Hindutva are profoundly disloyal to the religion they claim to espouse, which stands out not only as an eclectic embodiment of tolerance, but as perhaps the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. All ways of worship, Hinduism asserts, are equally valid, and religion is an intensely personal matter related to the individual’s self-realisation in relation to God. Such a faith understands that belief is a matter of hearts and minds, not of bricks and stone. The true Hindu seeks no revenge upon history, for he understands that history is its own revenge.

Geography helps, because it accustoms Indians to the idea of difference. India’s national identity has long been built on the slogan ‘unity in diversity’. The ‘Indian’ comes in such varieties that a woman who is fair-skinned, sari-wearing and Italian speaking, as Sonia Gandhi is, is not more foreign to my grandmother in Kerala than one who is ‘wheatish-complexioned’, wears a salwar-kameez and speaks Urdu. Our nation absorbs both these types of people; both are equally ‘foreign’ to some of us, equally Indian to us all.

For now, the Hindu chauvinists have lost the battle over India’s identity. The sight in May 2004 of a Roman Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) – in a country 82 per cent Hindu – caught the world’s imagination. India’s founding fathers wrote a constitution for their dreams; we have given passports to their ideals. That one simple moment of political change put to rest many of the arguments over Indian identity. India was never truer to itself than when celebrating its own diversity.

Invisible Borders

Barkha Dutt

Managing Editor, NDTV 24x7

Sunday, July 30, 2006:

As an adamant agnostic I don't have a religious identity. But if I were religious, I'm pretty sure I would hate to be a Muslim in India today.

Think about how claustrophobic it must be to find yourself sandwiched between two horrifying realities: -to confront the fact that nearly two hundred people were killed in the name of your religion, by someone who also prays to your God; and then to have to justify yourself over and over again to a country trembling with rage.

On the one hand is a twisted and sick world of those who claim to act on your behalf, a world to which you do not belong; and on the other side is a No Entry sticker plastered across the front door, a world that treats you with suspicion and hostility.

Sadly the secularism debate in India mirrors these two extremes. Minority-bashers will paint the entire community in the same broad stroke; and the liberal orthodoxy will pretend that radical Islam has no roots in India.

Well it's time to end the pretence.

The Bombay blasts have hammered home one terrible truth. The Indian Muslim is no longer entirely immune to the insidious influence of global extremism. We may recoil in discomfort when we hear the phrase "Islamic fundamentalism," but like it or not, the global pattern is slowly beginning to leave it's imprint on India.

And this is our failure, both as a society and a nation.

By now we all know how President Bush had asked the Prime Minister in Washington, just how it was that in a country with 130 million Muslims, not one could be linked to the Al Qaeda. What did India have, he wanted to know, that other countries didn't?

For years we have gloated about our secularism and rubbished theocracies with a barely disguised contempt. We have watched countries like Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia struggle to build a bridge between Reason and Radical Islam. And we have always said proudly: look at us. There are more Muslims in India than in any other country in the world except Indonesia. But while the rest of the world wrestles with an increasingly politicized Islam, we have always boasted about how our robust democracy has helped us sidestep the storm

Can we really and truthfully say this any longer?

Like you, I can barely follow the elaborate twists and turns of the Mumbai investigations. But if the cops are to be believed an ominous new face of terror is slowly taking shape. The hammer and chisel may belong to Pakistan-based terrorists, but the clay is Indian.

Look at the arrests made so far. They include a doctor, an engineer, an electrician from Dubai; most are professionals with no criminal background; they could just as easily be the neighbors down the road from your or my house.

Earlier when terror hit our nerve centre, we could always blame Kashmir. The valley, we would say, had become a launching pad for violence; desperate terrorists were trying to spread their tentacles outwards to capture headlines and derail peace. And then we would use the Kashmir conflict as an example of how well integrated the Indian Muslim is. We would tell the world that not single a Indian Muslim had ever backed the separatist movement in the valley; that Kashmir was a political conflict, not a religious one; and that pan-Islamic sentiments could never capture public imagination in the Indian mainstream.

But for the first time perhaps, the cops have found no significant link between Kashmir and the Bombay Blasts. Nor are the investigating agencies able to point a finger at the Underworld.

And the question we must ask ourselves is this: If in all these years groups like the Lashkar failed to mobilize a single Muslim outside the Kashmir valley, what has changed now?

Are we ready to look homegrown terror in the eye? And are we ready to look at the fact that this is a scathing comment on our failure to be an integrated society?

And no, this is not, and cannot be, about falling back on justifications. Such politically correct formulations are also an example of extremism, just of a different kind.

So those who point to the horrific Gujarat riots of 2002 to explain the Bombay blasts should be careful. Extend that argument another level, and you won't be able to counter Narendra Modi who also rationalized the anti-Muslim riots as an emotional outburst against the torching of the Sabaramati Express in Godhra. To locate responsibility in the endless cycle of cause and effect is not just over-simplistic, but also self-defeating.

Yet, there's no doubt, that ultimately the war against terror is a war of the mind; extremism can only grow roots in soil that has been under-watered and under-nourished.

Anti-Muslim riots in which the state secedes responsibility will in turn break down trust. But a riot is still an event, an aberration if you will. Sometimes it's just the business of living that is tougher.

Bombay's biggest icons may include Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan. But ask an ordinary Muslim in the city just how tough it is to rent a flat in a regular building; the glitzy acceptability of Bollywood makes no difference to his daily life. Our cities are collapsing into ghettos, with invisible borders dividing our people.

And the statistics tell their own sorry story. Less than four percent of India's police force is Muslim; no more than two percent of India's bureaucracy is Muslim; and Muslims are five percent behind the national literacy rate, making them the most educationally backward religious community. Yet if a government appointed committee attempts to gather data on just how representative our political and military institutions are, we accuse it of fomenting communalism.

If the Indian Muslim remains on the margins of development, isn't there a good chance that he will remain on the periphery in every other way as well? It's this imbalance; the sense of being an outsider; a person with no stake in the system that could provide the perfect breeding ground for terror.

So next time, don't just stare at the bearded man with the skullcap.


Look beyond, and look within.

What Clash of Civilizations?Why religious identity isn't destiny.

“The response to Islamic fundamentalism and to the terrorism linked with it also becomes particularly confused when there is a general failure to distinguish between Islamic history and the history of Muslim people. Muslims, like all other people in the world, have many different pursuits, and not all their priorities and values need be placed within their singular identity of being Islamic. It is, of course, not surprising at all that the champions of Islamic fundamentalism would like to suppress all other identities of Muslims in favor of being only Islamic. But it is extremely odd that those who want to overcome the tensions and conflicts linked with Islamic fundamentalism also seem unable to see Muslim people in any form other than their being just Islamic.
…………….”

Thanks friend for the link..may be you all have a point ..there is definitely more to my friends than being Muslim..as there is much more to me than just being a Hindu….But the fact remains that the muslim world gets a lot of bad press …not all of which it deserves……..

What Clash of Civilizations?Why religious identity isn't destiny.
By Amartya Sen
This essay is adapted from the new book Identity and Violence, published by Norton.

That some barbed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed could generate turmoil in so many countries tells us some rather important things about the contemporary world. Among other issues, it points up the intense sensitivity of many Muslims about representation and derision of the prophet in the Western press (and the ridiculing of Muslim religious beliefs that is taken to go with it) and the evident power of determined agitators to generate the kind of anger that leads immediately to violence. But stereotyped representations of this kind do another sort of damage as well, by making huge groups of people in the world to look peculiarly narrow and unreal.
The portrayal of the prophet with a bomb in the form of a hat is obviously a figment of imagination and cannot be judged literally, and the relevance of that representation cannot be dissociated from the way the followers of the prophet may be seen. What we ought to take very seriously is the way Islamic identity, in this sort of depiction, is assumed to drown, if only implicitly, all other affiliations, priorities, and pursuits that a Muslim person may have. A person belongs to many different groups, of which a religious affiliation is only one. To see, for example, a mathematician who happens to be a Muslim by religion mainly in terms of Islamic identity would be to hide more than it reveals. Even today, when a modern mathematician at, say, MIT or Princeton invokes an "algorithm" to solve a difficult computational problem, he or she helps to commemorate the contributions of the ninth-century Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the term algorithm is derived (the term "algebra" comes from the title of his Arabic mathematical treatise "Al Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah"). To concentrate only on Al-Khwarizmi's Islamic identity over his identity as a mathematician would be extremely misleading, and yet he clearly was also a Muslim. Similarly, to give an automatic priority to the Islamic identity of a Muslim person in order to understand his or her role in the civil society, or in the literary world, or in creative work in arts and science, can result in profound misunderstanding.

The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness. An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels may want Muslims to forget that they have any identity other than being Islamic. What is surprising is that those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world. The world is made much more incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of single-dimensional categorization of human beings, which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence.
A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be found in Samuel Huntington's influential 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The difficulty with Huntington's approach begins with his system of unique categorization, well before the issue of a clash—or not—is even raised. Indeed, the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines, which closely follow religious divisions to which singular attention is paid. Huntington contrasts Western civilization with "Islamic civilization," "Hindu civilization," "Buddhist civilization," and so on. The alleged confrontations of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of hardened divisiveness.
In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other partitions, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to "the Islamic world," "the Western world," "the Hindu world," "the Buddhist world," the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.
The difficulty with the clash of civilizations thesis begins with the presumption of the unique relevance of a singular classification. Indeed, the question "Do civilizations clash?" is founded on the presumption that humanity can be pre-eminently classified into distinct and discrete civilizations, and that the relations between different human beings can somehow be seen, without serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilizations.
This reductionist view is typically combined, I am afraid, with a rather foggy perception of world history that overlooks, first, the extent of internal diversities within these civilizational categories, and second, the reach and influence of interactions—intellectual as well as material—that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations. And its power to befuddle can trap not only those who would like to support the thesis of a clash (varying from Western chauvinists to Islamic fundamentalists), but also those who would like to dispute it and yet try to respond within the straitjacket of its prespecified terms of reference.
The limitations of such civilization-based thinking can prove just as treacherous for programs of "dialogue among civilizations" (much in vogue these days) as they are for theories of a clash of civilizations. The noble and elevating search for amity among people seen as amity between civilizations speedily reduces many-sided human beings to one dimension each and muzzles the variety of involvements that have provided rich and diverse grounds for cross-border interactions over many centuries, including the arts, literature, science, mathematics, games, trade, politics, and other arenas of shared human interest. Well-meaning attempts at pursuing global peace can have very counterproductive consequences when these attempts are founded on a fundamentally illusory understanding of the world of human beings.
Increasing reliance on religion-based classification of the people of the world also tends to make the Western response to global terrorism and conflict peculiarly ham-handed. Respect for "other people" is shown by praising their religious books, rather than by taking note of the many-sided involvements and achievements, in nonreligious as well as religious fields, of different people in a globally interactive world. In confronting what is called "Islamic terrorism" in the muddled vocabulary of contemporary global politics, the intellectual force of Western policy is aimed quite substantially at trying to define—or redefine—Islam.
To focus just on the grand religious classification is not only to miss other significant concerns and ideas that move people. It also has the effect of generally magnifying the voice of religious authority. The Muslim clerics, for example, are then treated as the ex officio spokesmen for the so-called Islamic world, even though a great many people who happen to be Muslim by religion have profound differences with what is proposed by one mullah or another. Despite our diverse diversities, the world is suddenly seen not as a collection of people, but as a federation of religions and civilizations. In Britain, a confounded view of what a multiethnic society must do has led to encouraging the development of state-financed Muslim schools, Hindu schools, Sikh schools, etc., to supplement pre-existing state-supported Christian schools. Under this system, young children are placed in the domain of singular affiliations well before they have the ability to reason about different systems of identification that may compete for their attention. Earlier on, state-run denominational schools in Northern Ireland had fed the political distancing of Catholics and Protestants along one line of divisive categorization assigned at infancy. Now the same predetermination of "discovered" identities is now being allowed and, in effect encouraged, to sow even more alienation among a different part of the British population.
Religious or civilizational classification can be a source of belligerent distortion as well. It can, for example, take the form of crude beliefs well exemplified by U.S. Lt. Gen. William Boykin's blaring—and by now well-known—remark describing his battle against Muslims with disarming coarseness: "I knew that my God was bigger than his," and that the Christian God "was a real God, and [the Muslim's] was an idol." The idiocy of such bigotry is easy to diagnose, so there is comparatively limited danger in the uncouth hurling of such unguided missiles. There is, in contrast, a much more serious problem in the use in Western public policy of intellectual "guided missiles" that present a superficially nobler vision to woo Muslim activists away from opposition through the apparently benign strategy of defining Islam appropriately. They try to wrench Islamic terrorists from violence by insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, and that a "true Muslim" must be a tolerant individual ("so come off it and be peaceful"). The rejection of a confrontational view of Islam is certainly appropriate and extremely important at this time, but we must ask whether it is necessary or useful, or even possible, to try to define in largely political terms what a "true Muslim" must be like.
******
A person's religion need not be his or her all-encompassing and exclusive identity. Islam, as a religion, does not obliterate responsible choice for Muslims in many spheres of life. Indeed, it is possible for one Muslim to take a confrontational view and another to be thoroughly tolerant of heterodoxy without either of them ceasing to be a Muslim for that reason alone.
The response to Islamic fundamentalism and to the terrorism linked with it also becomes particularly confused when there is a general failure to distinguish between Islamic history and the history of Muslim people. Muslims, like all other people in the world, have many different pursuits, and not all their priorities and values need be placed within their singular identity of being Islamic. It is, of course, not surprising at all that the champions of Islamic fundamentalism would like to suppress all other identities of Muslims in favor of being only Islamic. But it is extremely odd that those who want to overcome the tensions and conflicts linked with Islamic fundamentalism also seem unable to see Muslim people in any form other than their being just Islamic.
People see themselves—and have reason to see themselves—in many different ways. For example, a Bangladeshi Muslim is not only a Muslim but also a Bengali and a Bangladeshi, typically quite proud of the Bengali language, literature, and music, not to mention the other identities he or she may have connected with class, gender, occupation, politics, aesthetic taste, and so on. Bangladesh's separation from Pakistan was not based on religion at all, since a Muslim identity was shared by the bulk of the population in the two wings of undivided Pakistan. The separatist issues related to language, literature, and politics.
Similarly, there is no empirical reason at all why champions of the Muslim past, or for that matter of the Arab heritage, have to concentrate specifically on religious beliefs only and not also on science and mathematics, to which Arab and Muslim societies have contributed so much, and which can also be part of a Muslim or an Arab identity. Despite the importance of this heritage, crude classifications have tended to put science and mathematics in the basket of "Western science," leaving other people to mine their pride in religious depths. If the disaffected Arab activist today can take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the many-sided richness of Arab history, the unique prioritization of religion, shared by warriors on both sides, plays a major part in incarcerating people within the enclosure of a singular identity.
Even the frantic Western search for "the moderate Muslim" confounds moderation in political beliefs with moderateness of religious faith. A person can have strong religious faith—Islamic or any other—along with tolerant politics. Emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all.
The point that needs particular attention is that while Akbar was free to pursue his liberal politics without ceasing to be a Muslim, that liberality was in no way ordained—nor of course prohibited—by Islam. Another Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, could deny minority rights and persecute non-Muslims without, for that reason, failing to be a Muslim, in exactly the same way that Akbar did not terminate being a Muslim because of his tolerantly pluralist politics.
The insistence, if only implicitly, on a choiceless singularity of human identity not only diminishes us all, it also makes the world much more flammable. The alternative to the divisiveness of one pre-eminent categorization is not any unreal claim that we are all much the same. Rather, the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of uniquely powerful categorization.
Perhaps the worst impairment comes from the neglect—and denial—of the roles of reasoning and choice, which follow from the recognition of our plural identities. The illusion of unique identity is much more divisive than the universe of plural and diverse classifications that characterize the world in which we actually live. The descriptive weakness of choiceless singularity has the effect of momentously impoverishing the power and reach of our social and political reasoning. The illusion of destiny exacts a remarkably heavy price.

From Slate

B.L. and I

God bless America and all that.. I’m going to use initials ..ok here B.L. stands for public enemy number one … you must have guessed it, the entire world has one major public enemy right now…

So I was in India during 9/11 , a few days later the name of the perpetrator was unveiled as a terrorist organization led by a certain O.B.L., that guy was a fanatic, it was really sad watching the whole September 11 tragedy happening on TV, I can imagine how it would be for people directly affected…. Any way it wasn’t the first time I’d heard the name B.L. , I hadn’t heard of this particular person, but from a very young age I was acquainted with his family ..my aunt ( you know how in India ,any lady who may or may not be related is your Auntie) , anyway we felt a close kinship with our Aunt, she is Mangalorean Catholic by the way, my dad and his other good friends ( my uncles ;who in my childhood away from blood relatives served as family (god bless them all !!) were paying guests with this Aunt and Uncles family in their bachelor days….any way my aunt worked here ..see picture (interesting huh!!!)


So courtesy my aunt we used to have stationary with the name inscribed throughout our stay in Dubai( in fact most of my school life i wrote exams on a clipboard courtesy the BL company ) ,we used to go to the office whenever my mom needed to borrow Femina’s or Eve’s Weekly from my aunt … apart from the fact that the office is located across the road from the house we used to stay in !! So yea we were familiar with the name from a very early age. My aunt worked there before I was born and she still works there (that’s a pretty long time !) . I think she rather likes her employers….

So when all this happened and we found out the tyrants name it was all a bit surprising… “That guy is related to the folks Aunty works for , the people who own that rather boring looking ( by Dubai standards) building … we even have stationary with the last name inscribed!!! …hmmm” , we didn’t throw away the stationary…. How ever much we abhor(red) the Jihad “martyr” psychos ..the fact is we didn’t throw away the stationary (atleast the last time I checked ) … because we understood that one man didn’t represent his entire family(it’s a big family) ….and just extending a bit does not represent his religion .

The Clash of Civilisations !!??!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Inspired by this post in Sepia Mutiny. Excerpt:

“Given that one of the objectives that led to 9/11 was Al-Qaeda’s desire to prompt a Clash of Civilizations between the West and Islam, is this evidence that the terrorists are winning?”

I recently had a conversation with a friend , he thought we would probably see a major world war in our lifetime, and it wouldn’t be between countries as such but between religions/civilizations , given the mixed religious makeup of most countries nowadays it probably meant civil wars within , and more interesting was the idea of what could be the cause ? Well , the fact that people in other parts of the world resent the idea of western dominance and the idea that the western way is only way ( yes maybe but may be not, I’m eastern..and I’m in the US right now!!) , anyway it was an interesting concept.

Thanks to the SM post I looked up the Clash of Civilizations theory, while I don’t believe it, and surely don’t want it to happen i.e. the fact that for some people religion may be more important than country , (but who says country is most important?? Shouldn’t it be world or universe ??) .I appreciate however that the theory looks into the reasons such jingoistic religious feelings may exist , we should at least try to understand where such feelings (if any)come from….

From the wiki on clash of civilizations

In his book Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman proposes another criticism of the civilization clash hypothesis. According to Berman, distinct cultural boundaries do not exist in the present day. He argues there is no "Islamic civilization" nor a "Western civilization", and that the evidence for a civilization clash is not convincing, especially when considering relationships such as that between the United States and Saudi Arabia. In addition, he cites the fact that many Islamic extremists spent a significant amount of time living and/or studying in the western world. According to Berman conflict arises because of philosophical beliefs between groups, regardless of cultural or religious identity.

It has been claimed that values are more easily transmitted and altered than Huntington proposes. Nations such as India and Japan have become successful democracies, and the West itself was rife with despotism and fundamentalism for most of its history. Some also see Huntington's thesis as creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and reasserting differences between civilizations.[citation needed] Edward Said issued a response to Huntington's thesis in his own essay entitled "The Clash of Ignorance." Said argues that Huntington's categorization of the world's fixed "civilizations" omits the dynamic interdependency and interaction of culture. According to Said, it is an example of an imagined geography, where the presentation of the world in a certain way legitimates certain politics.

Another question , so yeah the western world may have committed intrusions in the Middle east , but why are they attacking India ?? I haven’t been keeping track but I know of the bombings in Mumbai , (the wars with Pakistan are territorial disputes)..and India has been attacked by non muslim terrorists as well……

Any attack is bad ,sad as they are in some cases we have to admit they were probably retaliatory Mumbai Blasts of ’93 -> attributed as response to the Babri Masjid demolition ; the Mumbai Train Bombings ->possibly in response to Gujarat violence (Godhra)


I’m a practicing Hindu, and I find all the previously mentioned acts of terror horrifying. ( I wont try to call myself a liberal hindu, there is no such thing as a radical hindu,it goes against the very essence of our religion, if you find your self getting riled up , read what God says and take a chill pill, we are supposed to be the most chilled out people on the planet, and that isn’t a bad thing , no I don't think we run the danger of being wiped out of the face of the earth!! I'm not saying that we are the only ones doing wrong and everyone else is innocent, but i don't think the religious twist everything is taking nowadays is helping,especially when what we see around are the most irreligious of acts!).


Like I learn at Gita class...we are in Kaliyug... in the face of the evil around just chant the name of the lord, remember him/her ,have faith and he/she will save you.

Of Airports and Stupid Questions...

I was really glad that I didn’t have to fly the past couple of days( the queues in the airports last December , with all the shoe taking off, and screening ..it was all a bit bugging , small price to pay though for supporting the war against terrorism .and of course coming out alive at the end of a flight!!! Cuts on my duty free window shopping/shopping time but whatever! I remember the days when a security check was a five minute swipe with a wand ). Anyway back to my point, I was glad I wasn’t on a plane but my roommate was via Dubai via London to Alabama ..Via Bush Country (Texas)..Anyways she made it . though she had to part with cosmetics that she carried in hand baggage ( which really kind off sucks , especially if you haven’t even used them yet and have spent a lot on them!) so she arrived safe and sound , but she said she might not travel via Dubai again. I asked her why ..Because Emirates is one of the best airlines in the world. It was good she said but somehow she didn’t like Dubai airport, English/Arabic messages, Arab security guys…. And with all the stuff in the news these past days, she felt sorry but yeah she was a bit prejudiced.. Well needless to say I was a bit shocked.Though i am happy she chose to travel Emirates in the first place ………….. Dubai Duty Free, Arabic, Arab security people.. that’s home for me man, and just yesterday I met someone else who was going to India, and very promptly said yea she was paying a bit extra ,but wanted to avoid stopping over in the Gulf…and yes lots of other people have said the same thing( I just mention my roomie because she might not take me mentioning her viewpoint as a personal attack!!).

I don’t like this one bit, neither does my mom or dad or sister , when you say something against Dubai or Arabs or Muslims I take it personally!!! And frankly doesn’t make too much sense … I don’t think people stopped traveling to India when Kargill was happening and it was the country involved!!!… Iraq, Israel, Lebanon ..they are no where near Bahrain or Doha or Abu Dhabi….
Oh well, I just feel everyone else is losing something by not wanting to Fly Buy Dubai!!!!

Anyway what George Bush is saying doesn’t help much :

08.11.2006
Can I Ask A Dumb Question? What's An Islamic Fascist?
James Boyce


"The Islamo-fascists are fighting us on an asymmetrical, global battlefield that spans from Baghdad to Pakistan to Indonesia to the streets of London. To retreat from any battlefront where we are engaged with this enemy is foolish and reckless."--Wade Zirkle, Veterans For Freedom, a Republican-led 527, August 11, 2006.

"The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation." President George Bush, August 11, 2006

"In World War II we fought Nazism and Japanese imperialism. Today, we are fighting against Islamic fascism," Senator Rick Santorum, Republican Senator, July 20, 2006


Islamic Fascism. I have never heard the phrase and I evidently didn't get the memo from the RNC detailing its use (the DNC sends out memos on Together, America Can Do Better - the RNC plays a different game.) I envision millions of good Republicans out there nodding their heads in agreement - after all, can you imagine a world run by Islamic Fascists? Hitler dressed like Osama? Can you goosestep in those robes he wears? Frankly, we can hardly afford to find out. If we don't fight these here Islamic Fascists over there, well, you know the rest. But before we fight an phrase that doesn't exist or apparently make any sense, I decided to take a moment to make sure I wasn't missing anything.


As my first grade teacher used to tell me, if you don't understand a sentence or a word, try breaking it down. First, Islam. Now, Islam is one of the world's oldest and most revered religions. One definition of Islam is a monotheistic religion characterized by the acceptance of the doctrine of submission to God and to Muhammad as the chief and last prophet of God.

So we have one of the world's most popular religions functioning as an adjective creating a new type of Fascism. There was German Fascism, Italian Fascism but I can't find any evidence of there ever being any form of Fascism based upon religion. Furthermore, I have deduced that the reason it is not Fascist Islam is that Islam is an older as a religion than Fascism is as as system of government so Islam goes first. I know it sounds stupid, but it's the best I can do, being a Democrat and all.
Next word, Fascism. Fascism is defined as a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government. Oppressive, dictatorial control.

Put the two together and you have? Well, a system of government oppressively controlled through terror and censorship where the religion is Islam and there's a policy of belligerent nationalism. But Osama Bin Laden does not run a government, the terrorists in Iraq aren't a government, the 9/11 hijackers weren't fascists, so who are the Republicans saying is a threat here?

Sounds to me like we're not fighting terrorists anymore, because it sure sounds to me like we're about to fight Iran.

From Here
( sidenote ..i don’t have a problem with Iranians either… I’m not too sure about their regime, but the people are pretty cool!!)

The deluded world of Airconditioning

Because it’s waaay too hot this summer, and Pacific Islanders are scared there home countries wont exist after a few years…………..We had a bad hurricane season last year, imagine a world without the ice caps??? No snowy coke ads…No “March of the Penguins “ :(

Don't waste ...just because you can!!!!.
From Slate:

human nature
A/C D.C.
The deluded world of air conditioning.
By William Saletan
Posted Saturday, Aug. 5, 2006, at 8:15 AM ET

Have you heard the news? Scientists have found a planet that can support life. Its atmosphere is too hot for year-round habitation, its gases impede breathing, and surface conditions are sometimes fatal. But by constructing a network of sealed facilities, tunnels, and vehicles, humans could survive on this planet for decades and perhaps even centuries.

The planet is called Earth.
If you've seen this planet lately, you know what's going on: temperature records shattering, scores of Americans dead. By summer's end, the toll will be in the hundreds. It's not as bad as 2003, when a heat wave killed 30,000 people in Europe. But according to global-warming forecasts, within 40 years, every other summer will be like that one.

Thank goodness for air conditioning. To keep old folks alive, cities from Washington to Los Angeles are opening artificially cooled buildings to the public. Meanwhile, people are lining up to buy window units. According to the Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute, shipments of air conditioners and heat pumps have tripled over the last three decades. The percentage of single-family homes built with central air has gone from 36 to 87. The percentage of cars built with air conditioning has risen from 61 to 98. In 1970, only 42 percent of occupied mobile homes had it. By 2003, that percentage had more than doubled.

It's a heartwarming—or, more precisely, a heart-cooling—story. Unfortunately, the story doesn't end there. Air conditioning takes indoor heat and pushes it outdoors. To do this, it uses energy, which increases production of greenhouse gases, which warm the atmosphere. From a cooling standpoint, the first transaction is a wash, and the second is a loss. We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable.

All over the country, power consumption is breaking records, and air conditioning is a huge reason why. We use about one-sixth of our electricity to cool ourselves. That's more than the total electricity consumption of India, a country whose population exceeds 1 billion. To get the electricity, we burn oil and coal. We also run air conditioners in our cars, which reduces urban fuel efficiency by up to four miles per gallon, at an annual cost of 7 billion gallons of gasoline.

More burning of oil and coal means more greenhouse gases. Based on government data, Stan Cox, a scientist at the Land Institute, calculates that air-conditioning the average U.S. home requires 3,400 pounds of carbon-dioxide production per year. The effects of this are particularly bad at night. Over the last five summers, very high minimum daily temperatures—those that score in the top 10 percent historically—have been far more widespread in this country than during any other five-year period. This is what's killing people. Outdoor air used to cool at night, allowing us to recover from the day's heat. Now it doesn't. To fuel our own air conditioning, we're destroying nature's.

The hotter it gets, the more energy we burn. In 1981, only one in three American households with central air used it all summer long. By 1997, more than half did. Countries once cooled by outdoor air now cool themselves. In Britain, 75 percent of new cars have air conditioning. In Canada, energy consumption for residential cooling has doubled in 10 years, and half the homes now have central or window units. Kuujjuaq, an Eskimo village 1,000 miles north of Montreal, just bought 10 air conditioners. According to the mayor, it's been getting hot lately.

Instead of fixing the outdoors, we're trying to escape it. On every street in my neighborhood, people have torn down ordinary homes and put up giant air-conditioned boxes that extend as far as possible toward the property line. They've lost yards and windows, but that's the whole idea. Outdoor space is too hard to control, so we're replacing it with indoor space. From 1991 to 2005, the median lot size of single-family homes sold in the United States shrank by 9 percent, but the median indoor square footage increased by 18 percent. If you can't stand the heat, go hide in your kitchen.

Seven years ago, when my wife and I moved into our house, we built a garden and patio in the back yard. Now, overcome by heat and mosquitoes, we're thinking of replacing them with something a bit more climate-controlled. We still want to look at nature. We just don't want to feel it. And for better or worse, we'll probably succeed. Two months ago, we saw Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Walking out of the air-conditioned theater, we agonized over what we could do to fight global warming. The conversation ended when we realized that our most useful contribution would be to cancel the renovation. Wrapping ourselves in a climate-controlled bubble can't make global warming less true. But in the short run, it can make it a lot less inconvenient.

That's the problem in Washington today. Policymakers aren't facing global warming, because they aren't feeling it. They gave themselves air conditioning in the 1920s and '30s, long before the public got it. White House meetings and congressional hearings on climate change are doomed hours beforehand, when the thermostats are set. One minute, you're watching video of people sweltering in New Orleans. The next minute, you're watching senators dispute the significance of greenhouse gases. Don't ask whether these people are living on the same planet. In effect, they aren't.
When outdoor heat leaks into the Washington bubble, like crime into a white neighborhood, officials treat it as a faux pas. Three weeks ago, House Majority Leader John Boehner told reporters in a Capitol press gallery, "It'd be nice if they could get you a little more air conditioning up here." This week, President Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, assured White House correspondents that their briefing room would soon be renovated. "Gathering from the temperature in this room at this moment, I think everybody agrees that it's probably about time to have a new and updated air conditioning and heating system," he joked. But maybe the air conditioning system we need to fix is the one outdoors. And maybe we won't face that truth till it becomes more inconvenient.

Happy 25th Birthday MTV!!!!

Happy Birthday MTV !!!
You pretty much changed my life…. I never used to listen to music .. then you bought all those cool videos that came along with basic cable .. and effectively bought me somewhat up to speed, (even though I got into the bandwagon a little late )….. you were more music then ,and wow I totally loved those MTV ad’s …they were really cool ….. there wasn’t too much reality TV or cartoons and the VJ’s didn’t hog up the entire show, of course this was MTV Asia , VJ’s have changed , channel names have changed … … you’ve transformed in to one long Hindi movie-trailer show back home in India …. And there’s no way I would know what’s popular out west if I watch you now ……as for right now…I hardly ever watch MTV or MTV 2 , Laguna beach and My Super Sweet Sixteen bore me … I prefer your sister channel VH1…it seems you’re aren’t celebrating your 25th birthday …you’re older than your target audience …but you kind off did define a generation…My generation … Here are some excerpts the wiki for the MTV generation

Global factors defining the MTV Generation

Most notable factors relevant to the MTV Generation is the overall nihilistic attitude of the teenagers growing up through the 1990s having been brought up in the 1980s and recently becoming adults of the 3rd millennium, as well as
• The launch of MTV in its early period before its mid-1990s makeover for predominantly pop music, rhythm and blues, hip hop culture and reality television. Also included in the early period of MTV is the creation of Beavis and Butt-Head cartoon. The popular tagline: "I want my MTV"--uttered by Veejays and performers on the network's advertisements and later included in the Dire Straits' Money for Nothing track--reflected the era's fascination with the new medium.
• The fall of the Berlin Wall.
• The First Gulf War.
• The Waco Siege.
• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, with its' vague associations with Bushido, white rap, and surf slang. Interest in some of the Asian martial arts (including, of course, Ninjutsu) temporarily spiked among teenagers in some areas due to the franchise's influence.
• Madonna and Michael Jackson (The Like A Prayer & Dangerous years), as well as Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
• The introduction of the Nintendo and Atari gaming systems.
• The premierships of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and the presidency of Ronald Reagan succeeded later by George H. W. Bush.
• The worldwide popularity of The Simpsons.
• The second generation to mostly be influenced through Television (especially Music Television) as the primary medium for information and entertainment (the first being the baby boom generation crossing over to the early Generation X - when TV came into becoming an item in every household during the 1950s) especially from children growing up in the 1980s to their teens in the 1990s.
• The end of the Cold War and break up of the Soviet Union.
• The re-invented Dream Date Barbie doll, G.I. Joe: Action Force and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures.
• Transformers, M.A.S.K., Masters of the Universe and other toyline (franchises) centered around the primary theme of alien/high tech/supernatural combat occurring at large in a disguised form, but also containing strong modernist/morally absolutist themes which have been more recently removed in revised versions of these fictional scenarios.
• The Cabbage Patch Kids and Garbage Pail Kids craze of the late 80s.
• The Neverending Story franchise.
• The acting careers of Macaulay Culkin and Michael J. Fox.
• The release of Nelson Mandela and end of Apartheid in South Africa.
• The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.
• The last generation to appreciate its significance in a changing culture, as most of them can still readily recall now-obsolete items of the pre-digital era such as VHS tapes and audio cassette tapes.


Culture (political and social)

This generation was also the first to experience:
• June 18, 1981, the official date for the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and the 1985 World Health Organization AIDS surveillance case definition.
• 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion and Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster.
• The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
• The fall of the Berlin Wall November 9, 1989 and German reunification on October 3, 1990. - One of the two major moments to define the MTV Generation.
The distinct end of Generation X.
• In 1989, Czechoslovakia became a democratic country again through the Velvet revolution. In 1992, the federal parliament decided to split the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as of January 1, 1993.
• Nelson Mandela is released from Victor Verster prison, near Cape Town, South Africa February 11, 1990.
• The Gulf War in 1991. - The war that truly defined the MTV Generation, just as the Vietnam War defined Generation X and the Iraq War define Generation Y.
• The fall of the Soviet Union, and beginning of "New World Order" July 1991 marking the end of the Cold War since 1941 between the United States and Soviet Union. - The second of the two most important moments in defining Generation XY.
• November 22, 1992, at just after 9.30 am, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher announced to her cabinet that she would not be a candidate in the second ballot of the vote to determine the leader of the British Conservative Party, thereby bringing her term of office as Prime Minister to an end.
• The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ceases to exist. Slovenia and Croatia gain independence January 15, 1992
• Signing of the Maastricht treaty, which founded the European Union February 7, 1992.
• Bill Clinton defeats George H. W. Bush and Ross Perot in the U.S. presidential election, 1992, November 3.
• 1993 confrontation between U.S. federal agents and the Branch Davidians - Siege of Waco.
• Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, is found dead April 8, 1994, in Seattle, Washington. He had apparently committed suicide three days earlier. - A death that marked the MTV Generation as opposed to Jim Morrison for Generation X and Elvis Presley for the baby boomers.
• May 1, 1994, Formula One driver Ayrton Senna is killed during the San Marino Grand Prix.
• The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir on November 4, 1995, after attending a rally promoting the Oslo process at Tel Aviv's Kings of Israel Square (which was renamed to Yitzhak Rabin Square after his death).
• The Dunblane massacre occurring at a primary school in the small town of Dunblane in central Scotland on Wednesday, 13 March 1996.
• September 7, 1996 Tupac Shakur was fatally shot in a drive-by shooting. This was later followed by the murder of Christopher Wallace aka The Notorious B.I.G. who was shot and killed in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997 - resulting in the end of the Hip hop rivalries between East Coast's Bad Boy Records and the West Coast's Death Row Records.
• The end of British sovereignty over Hong Kong July 1, 1997.


Crossover with beginning of "true" Generation Y:• The international one hit wonder song, Macarena by Los Del Rio became a worldwide summer hit in 1996 until the end of 1997.
• The Yugoslav wars, a series of violent conflicts in the territory of the former Yugoslavia that took place between (1991-2001) - including the Bosnian War.
• Thirty-nine bodies found in Heaven's Gate cult suicide March 26, 1997 - coinciding with the comet Hale-Bopp.
• Diana, Princess of Wales is taken to a hospital after a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris, August 31, 1997. She is pronounced dead at 4:00 the next morning followed on September 3 by the death of Mother Teresa.
• The Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, followed by Bill Clinton's impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives.
• The Matrix, a science-fiction / action film with wide cultural influence that was released on March 31st, 1999.
• The premonition of the Y2K problem occurring in 2000 12:00 AM, January 1, New Year's Eve, and resulting fears about the coming 'Millennium'
Technology/Media experienced by the generation

This generation used or witnessed the following technology from their teenage years (born during the 70s) and preteen years (born early 80s):

• Launch of CNN allowing access to world news (1980), and MTV entering a new era with the Music Video culture (1981).
• The development from the 8-bit era with the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System and Atari 7800, into a new 16-bit era: SNES, Sega Mega Drive/Sega Genesis and Neo-Geo.
• The Internet from its process into a prolific and developed form (1990s).
• PCs and the Power Macintosh with modern operating systems and GUIs (1990s onwards).
• Sophisticated computer graphics in many video games, animated movies and television shows (mid to late 1990s).
• Cellular phones (1980s and beyond).
• MP3s, file-sharing and Napster before it was shut-down (late 1990s).
• ICQ and other Instant messaging applications that would later follow (early 1990s and onwards).
• VHS tapes, Audio cassettes which would later be replaced by CDs (mid 80s), the Minidisc (mid 1990s), and the CD-R (1994).

The MTV Generation unlike the core Generation Y and core Generation X were caught in the middle of a surge in media and technological advances which would later prevail towards the end of the millennium for Generation Y. Partakers of this generation will recall libraries still using index cards for looking up books, how writing letters and corresponding with pen pals and mail-by-order books/comics were fashionable, as well as communication via telephone landlines, prior to the mobile phone phenomenon of the mid 90s. Also most people partaking within the MTV Generation will remember having personal computers as a child without an internet connection, along with the rise of hip hop musical styles within pop music and fall of rock and roll and metal.

I love nostaligia …….*sigh*

Who wants to be the banker???

Yay… I always hated to be the banker….now it doesn’t seem too bad…and yea, debit cards seem the way to go!!!!!!
Monopoly moves with the times
Found out from Marginal Revolution

The English Divide

Posted by Barkha Dutt

Managing Editor, NDTV 24x7

Saturday, June 24, 2006:

One of the most awkward - and yet, strangely compelling - things about journalism is that sometimes your work makes you hold a mirror to your own life.

This past week, a quiet, but determined 16-year-old became an unexpected reflection of my education.

I have always believed that my school and college years were the first architects of my personality; like every middle-class Indian, I take pride in where I studied and what I was taught. And yet, the gentle idealism of this young girl made me pause to wonder: Had my public-school education been shamefully elitist?

At first, the story seemed straightforward enough. Garima Godara, a CBSE topper, with an astonishing 97.6 per cent had taken the entrance exam for the Delhi Public School (Dwarka), the school closest to her village.

The daughter of a police constable who earned less than Rs 6,000 a month, the school's fees would have been a problem. But the family was undeterred; perhaps there would be a scholarship or a loan; surely the school would be keen to admit the girl who had topped the national capital's merit list.

Garima's proud father had spent months battling the entrenched patriarchy of his peers, fending off nosy neighbours who gossiped about why she didn't spend enough time in the kitchen. Now, he was even more determined to give his daughter the best education her marks could buy.

This could have been the story of New India and its emerging, self-made middle class; a proud milestone for a country that dares to dream.

Instead, here's what happened: DPS turned her down. Her results were good, it conceded. But marks aren't everything, said the school principal to NDTV, and besides, her English was poor, and just didn't cut the grade.

Later, listening to Garima in the studio, it was hard not to feel both angry and moved. Angry because of the obvious injustice: not only was she as bright as her results indicated; there was nothing about her spoken English that suggested that she would have been unable to keep pace with the syllabus.

Yes, she spoke with a regional accent that some would consider insufficiently sophisticated. But there was no doubt that she could not only follow a complex argument, she could also make herself understood to any English speaker.

But it was her calm that was almost heart breaking; a quiet courage that belied her teen years. It was almost as if we were more outraged and indignant than she was. During the course of the programme, a principal from a well-known school in Dehradun called in, offering her admission and a scholarship; others promised to get DPS to change its mind.

But betraying only the slightest sense of hurt, she said firmly that her aim now was to show DPS that she would do better than any of its students. She had already got herself admitted to another school, and DPS could quite simply, take a walk.

As she spoke, viewers clearly shared my anger. The online poll showed that 90 per cent of viewers believed that the English language exerted a disproportionate influence over the education system.

Yet, were we all being hypocritical and dishonest? This time it was DPS under the microscope, but were any of us any different?

Let's say she continued to do outstandingly well in school. The next stage would be college. I pictured her trying to take the entrance interview at my old college, Delhi's St Stephen's. Would she get in? And even if she made the cut, how would other students react to her presence? Would they admire her for her academic brilliance? Or would they snigger at her accent, titter each time she made a grammatical error and then, melt away, leaving her alone to find her own friends?

Garima's story is a metaphor for India's twisted tryst with the future. I learnt after the programme was over - and it is significant that neither she nor her parents brought this up themselves - that she is an OBC.

For some months now, as the debate over reservation has raged, opponents of the quotas have made the same point again and again: we should be a society where merit matters. It's a compelling argument, and one that I have personally supported.

But what do the anti-quota street fighters have to say now? Here's a girl who competed in the mainstream, her own Hindi medium DAV pitched against the trendier, richer, big names. But her merit was swallowed up by prejudice.

Is it any wonder then that supporters of reservation believe that the system is stacked against them, and that merit is a con-word used by upper-caste tricksters?

Her story is also a scathing comment on the class divide in India. It is fashionable for marketeers and economists to talk about the burgeoning middle class. Each day a new figure is conjured up to demonstrate the size of the Indian market, and the clout of the new middle class; is it 250 million this week or has it already reached 300 million?

We embrace these statistics, because we like the idea of India as this century's favourite financial destination. We feel flattered when Time magazine puts our country on its cover, and we talk glibly, especially to foreigners, of social mobility and how the gap between the rich and poor is closing; we argue that India's tomorrow is being built by its industrious and enterprising middle class, and we feel like the future is unfolding, right here and right now.

But here's what we never admit. We're just the worst sorts of snobs.

The social mobility of the last decade has meant that the new middle class does not consist of people like us. Instead, it is made up of people like Garima, who we still find excuses to exclude; we sneer at their lack of Westernized sophistication; make fun of their accents, and we try and ensure that our children have nothing to do with theirs.

Finally, Garima's story exposes India's paradoxical relationship with the English-language. Nobody in the world speaks English like us. We have our own idioms, our own words and our own accents.

We pretend to love our own English and brag about how it is India's great selling point; the reason we dominate the global outsourcing business. But of course deep down we know that our English is not the English that the West really wants. And so, each time we talk to Britons or Americans, we subtly alter our diction and inflection.

When we set up our call centers, we drop the subtlety entirely and start accent classes to teach our young people to abandon the speech patterns of our own society and to migrate to a virtual, linguistic middle America, where they become impersonators of people they will never meet and never know.

But within India, we still treat our own English as the great social decider. We laugh at regional accents, smirk at those who make grammatical errors and feel most at home with those who talk like us.

Everyone else belongs on the other side of the English divide. And as it turns out, the other side of the class and caste divide as well.

Maybe we cling so tightly to this tiny community because secretly we are just insecure. Outside of our little bubble, India is changing. Every major institution in recent times - Parliament, the bureaucracy, the military, our colleges and schools - is being forced to re-write the rules.

A new breed of Indians who no longer look towards the West for self-affirmation, is making its presence felt. We like to call this a decline in quality. But actually, it's the rest of India waiting to get in.

How long are we going to keep the gates shut?

Busted....

Ok , so the Times of India has tried to put a damper on one of my more favored fancies , Oh well!! I agree with the quality of links argument made in the article , but the fact that 95% of the letters weren’t sent out could be attributed to the fact that some people in the network were just too plain lazy to send them out!!!

Publication:Times Of India Mumbai; Date:Jul 18, 2006; Section:International; Page Number:13


BUNK BUSTERS
WHERE WE EXPLORE POPULAR MYTHS

Can everyone in the world be connected in six steps?

One of the most famous claims is that anyone can reach anyone else through a chain of acquaintances no more than six people long. This idea, known as “six degrees of separation”, is a measure of our social networks.

The phrase was coined by an American academic, Stanley Milgram, after experiments in which he asked people to pass a letter only to others they knew by name. The aim was to get it, eventually, to a named person they did not know living in another city. The average number of times it was passed on, he said, was six. Hence, the six degrees of separation.

It is a seductive idea. Films have been made about it and mathematics has begun to propose theories for why it should be true. But is it?

Judith Kleinfeld, a professor psychology at Alaska Fairbanks University, went back to Milgram’s original research notes and found something surprising. It turned out, she told us, that 95% of the letters sent out had failed to reach the target. Not only did they fail to get there in six steps, they failed to get there at all. Milgram was a giant figure in his world of research, but here was evidence the claim he was famously associated with was not supported by his experiments. “I was shocked,” she said.

And when she looked for other studies, none of those matched up to the claim either. In the most recent, two years ago, only 3% of letters reached their target. “If 95 or 97 letters out of 100 never reached their target, would you say it was proof of six degrees of separation? So why do we want to believe this? The pleasing idea that we live in a ‘small world’ where people are connected by ‘six degrees of separation’ may be the academic equivalent of an urban myth,” she says.

Kleinfeld argues that what is more important is not the number of links, but the quality. Even if you were able to say you could get to the Queen in three steps, it would tell you little about how well you are really connected with her. We like the idea of six degrees of separation, she says, because it makes the world feel more intimate. THE BOTTOM LINE: The belief that it has been proved that we live in a world of six degrees of separation does not seem to be true.

AGENCIES

Blogspot banned in India

Yes Indian government thank you for doing the needful, this is exactly what we
were wating for…who says they weren’t fast to act on terrorist attacks… NOW how will my sister and parents and friends in India read this blog??HOW will bloggers in India continue to blog..i for one hope it's a rumor or something... darn Government Dinosaurs, seems they follow the policy of if you can't beat repressive regimes ..Join Them

Monday, July 17, 2006
Report: Indian government blocking all Blogspot blogs
BoingBoing reader Jace says,
India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*.

Links
India Censors Blogspot
Sepia Mutiny
Rediff

Questions....

If you are left liberal and are Indian, which Indian political party should you support???

My parents think India should become like Israel when it comes to handling terrorists, also that India’s become a dangerous place to stay , that even Mangalore may be a target and that the unofficial number of people who lost their lives last week might be around 1000…..

My next question ..has the world become a worse place to be in recent years?I guess not; some terrorism prone areas have quietened down, may be this time because it hit closer to home it feels like our world's changing for the worse ….

This is so totally NOT what we should be doing...

I haven’t watched much TV coverage of the Mumbai blasts, just was constantly updating myself on the internet searching for news the whole day yesterday, but the whole time I was worried about friends and relatives who could have been on any of those trains, more than thinking about what the affiliation of the people who caused this could be , I do fervently hope that things like this don’t happen again, but I find this article disturbing
This is so totally NOT what we should be doing!!!

…. The people who were killed in the blasts were innocents from all faiths.. if you want a reason about why no one's been put in prison for the 1993 bombings, well when has anything happened in time in India ? I would honestly blame politicians (WORLD OVER!!!)…I seriously don’t want India to be a soft target but all this Jingoism is seriously STUPID!!! I wonder who calls for vengeance ; relatives who are grieving for a lost loved one or bystanders who seriously could damage what could be better border relations with all this rhetoric…

Six Degrees of Seperation

I’ve always been interested in this concept, at least ever since I’ve heard of the movie.

Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called "Chains."

Of course when I joined Orkut the coolest thing for me was that I could see how people were connected to me as distant as three to four connections away.. nowadays I think we can just see the link between friends of friends ….

I can imagine being connected to everyone in Mangalore by six degrees .. India even I guess ,but everyone in the world?

"I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find that extremely comforting, that we're so close, but I also find it like Chinese water torture that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It's not just big names -- it's anyone. A native in a rain forest, a Tiero del Fuegan, an Eskimo. I am bound -- you are bound -- to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It's a profound thought -- how Paul found us, how to find the man whose son he claims to be, or perhaps is, although I doubt it. How everyone is a new door, opening into other worlds."

-Character Ouisa Kittredge from the movie Six Degrees of Separation

It’s the interconnectedness aspect of The small world phenomenon that appeals to me , the fact that you are only a few people away from anyone else on the planet!! The theory has its uses as well, it seems scientists can use this sociological experiment to track the spread of infectious diseases…( if I remember right from the movie 'And The Band Played on' ( I love HBO and HBO movies, this one's good!!), Patient Zero, vilified controversially as the mass spreader of AIDS in New York, was an Air steward who singly infected people in his network, and onwards to the rest of America, and then to the rest of the world ??!!!!, )

I guess at a subconscious level we should all know that we are connected … how quick we are to claim only six degrees of separation from George Bush , but imagine that we are several times removed from the peace loving Indian mullah in Ahmedabad..( I seriously don’t believe this is happening , it's so totally wrong ,and to the folks that propogate this ,(the few and far between that you are) Stop the HATE !!!

Siblings

TIME magazine’s Cover story on Siblings…..
“From the time they are born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and co-conspirators, our role models and cautionary tales.

Our spouses arrive comparatively late in our lives; our parents eventually leave us. Our siblings may be the only people we'll ever know who truly qualify as partners for life.

"Siblings," says family psychologist Katherine Conger of the University of California, Davis, "are with us for the whole journey."

Read the article here.

Courtesy calls....

According to this ,already very much in the news ,Readers Digest Ranking New York City is the most polite city in the world, while Mumbai carries the distinction of being the least polite.

I want to move to NYC, LOL….. Mumbai ( I’ll take it as representative of India) fared the worst, well I won’t contest that, I mean after all that smiling at strangers and wishing them good morning , and thanking bus drivers, etc ,etc in NZ and to some extent in Alabama , if I did the same thing in India I’d get weird stares…may be ,just may be the folks who conducted the survey are prejudiced but it’s a dog eat dog world back home ,and people don’t try to hide it .

A simple hello in the West is just that, a greeting, sometimes you feel “Oh wow! That person keeps greeting me and saying hi, they must really like me”.. But the fact of the matter is, that it’s just force of habit, don’t expect the person who greeted you so nicely a to listen to the problems in your life.

Getting back to India , its tough , some times you get chided by peers just for saying please and thank you, and in the process lose any good manners you were brought up with , people think twice before giving up a hard earned bus seat to some one who probably needs it more, not everyone treats domestic help with respect , I don’t see many young nineteen year olds treating fifty five or sixty year old strangers with any particular respect , I like to think that under that core of brashness exists a national heart of gold , I bet it still exists , but it's getting harder and harder to find these days!!!

Read..Read ..Read (Books!!)

Is this a sign of things to come?
It’s eight minutes long ,but made me think , are we gearing away from print media of all types and towards a future of internet based, narrow dimensional perspectives…I have to admit i may have fallen prey myself..
Epic

What's your ecological footprint???

Try this quiz to measure ( to an arguable degree of accuracy) your ecological footprint (i.e. how your existence and lifestyle has affected planet earth !!)
Earth Day Footprint Quiz

My Result
When I did the quiz for my lifestyle in the US my total Footprint was 9 ,as compared to a US average of 24. If everyone lived like me, we would need 2.1 planets.

For India my total foot print was 2.7 compared to India’s average of 0.8 global hectares per person!!! If everyone lived like I do in India ,we would need 1.5 planets to live in.