The Brits we miss!!!

Last week on the occasion of Ganesh Chathurthi, I was visiting my grandparents at my uncle’s place. My grandma had specially called me as she was planning to prepare some old delicacies especially for me. I have missed so many dishes that my mom used to make before I got married. Now I really don’t have the time and energy to make those.I finished my decoration, celebrations and prayers quickly.

Rangoli outside my house for Ganesha :)

Frankly Ganesh Chathurthi is such a grand celebration in Pune. I would start to decorate the Pooja room the previous night, with glittering party streamers, lightings, rangoli’s at each entrance…etc. I miss the loud celebration of Ganpati festival from Pune. Bringing the Ganesha idol in grand style from the store to your home, with the face covered, chanting Ganesha prayers. I am not a very religious person, but the only prayer I know is the Ganesh Aarti. I love it, the Sanskrit words and the tune of it! Miss all this now in Bangalore.

I reached my uncle’s place and they were close to finishing the entire menu for the day. My grandparents were making Kadabu, it’s a spicy item. Kinda like rice dumpling with spicy filling inside. For my husband it was new item. He has always eaten only the sweet version of it we call Modak  J.

After a delicious meal of varied items, we sat down just talking. Suddenly for some reason, I asked my grandma how old was she….82 she said…and grandpa was 84. So we eagerly asked “You were there when the Britishers ruled us. How was it then? Did they really harass you like we read in history books and see in the movies? ”Grandma said, “It was good then! They were very systematic, they had their rules. If you break the rules they would punish, else it was just a normal life style; it really wasn’t that bothersome. OR may only in big cities where there was struggle on, may be those people faced harassment. But we pretty much had a good time. And definitely better than the times today! These politicians who are running the country now are looting us. At least it wasn’t this bad during the British time. The Britishers are better any day compared to what is happening now in our country”.

Through my childhood, my dad used to always say that the Britishers shouldn’t have left our country; for we would have been a much better developed country. It was a mistake to fight for freedom and then take our country to dooms. The leaders who fought for freedom never came up with a proper plan of how to run the country. We know, all the technology that came into India was because of the Britishers. Railways, post office, schools and hospitals, eradication of so many blind belief and bad social practices. They brought these facilities for their easy of life in India… and it stayed after they left. So imagine if they stayed a bit longer we’d be a much developed forward country. True eh!

Now when we look at our country we are in such a bad shape. There is no equality in society; we have extremes of everything – rich poor, educated-illiterate etc. We studied how the freedom fighters sacrificed their lives for this country. Name one politician now who wants to do that? The congress govt. is a deaf govt. who is not listening to any needs of the common man. My civics book taught the govt. is “of the people by the people for the people”. So if the people don’t want this govt. anymore, shouldn’t there be simple way to remove them? How can the ruling govt. overpower the people? So where is the democracy in this democratic country?

Openings at CBI?

These days the news channels are full of ONLY scams in India. Corruption has taken places to such a great extent and in all offices and departments and fields, the Indian public can’t do much than just watch! Every day I watch the news; they show evidences against the corrupt leaders; these leaders shamelessly reply back saying they are innocent and the blame games goes on and on. There is no end to it. They try to set up a committee to fight corruption; the govt. tries to blame the committee for N reasons. At the end of day, corruption is all that survives and continues to grow.

Corruption has become part of our life, our being; we don’t see it as a mistake. Instead it is just an effortless way of getting things done! Every scam, murder, blast have CBI probes these days. Every time I see breaking news on TV channels – Supreme court orders CBI investigation in blah blah case; High courts orders CBI..UP govt. orders CBI…Mumbai blast…CBI! The thought that is stuck in my head since a week is – how busy the CBI officers must be! There are tons of projects to investigate and crack …all high profile projects….quick results are a must! Are they hiring?

No kidding at all! Really, do they have enough sincere, honest and smart officers to handle so many cases? The pressure I can’t imagine! Never until now had I thought about CBI officers, a detective’s life! In the 90’s we had the IT boom…should we have CBI boom now? I am sure they need more work forces to solve the never ending list of investigation in the current govt’s rule!

This picture below has been circling through the email forwards. Pretty cool what it says – Makes us wonder where is our country headed to..!!!!

Here is a summary of all scams since independence. These may not be the only ones. These are the ones that were caught and brought to the notice of the public.

In total, this is coming upto Rs. 910,603,234,300,000, which is equal to USD 20.23 trillion. With this huge amount, India will become a super-power overnight and can permanently kill all social problems mainly poverty and unemployment.

Take a detailed look at the list. Great work by the person who compiled it.

Forward this to all Indians!! Others also have a right to know where their money is going..

Article - Why My Father Hated India

I got this article in the email. I read it! Read the comments too for the article. And now I want to just share it than comment, as it is an issue that will last till eternity; issue with infinite layers of politics, sufferings and endless fight! There is no right or wrong; the politics that took place during the partition brought years of misery and war, leading generations to suffer. Opinions now don't matter!


Actual article - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304911104576445862242908294.html
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Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."
My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

Mohandas Gandhi visits Muslim refugees in New Delhi as they prepare to depart to Pakistan on Sept. 22, 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.
To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.
The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Wagah Border Face off

Every day at sunset, Indian and Pakistani guards on the Wagah border face off in a militaristic flag-lowering exercise called the Beating Retreat Ceremony. WSJ's Tom Wright reports on India's effort to tone down the bizarre display.
Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.

But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.
In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

Rex USA Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, in May 2009. He was assassinated in January 2011

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.
The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.
In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.

This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.

The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.
—Mr. Taseer is the author of "Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands." His second novel, "Noon," will be published in the U.S. in September.

Baba Ramdev – Give me a break!

What is with this man? Really! Baba Ramdev got famous with his Yoga and miracles of Yoga that can cure apparently any disease, including homosexuality! Pffff!!! I can relate the word Yoga only to one person in this world and that is Guruji Yogacharya BKS Iyengar. He is the pioneer of spreading Yoga to the whole world. And he performed Yoga just for the real cause of teaching it and spreading health benefits from Yoga.

But Baba Ramdev has commercialized the whole concept of Yoga. He has a range of medicines for whatever diseases he thinks he cures. I remember recently my mother was consuming Baba Ramdev’s Chyawanprash (Ayurvedic health tonic) for good resistance and soon she complained that she had lost sense of taste in her mouth. Of course my reaction was “You believe his medicine? God!”

Now he is part of political movements. To me he just looks like he is hungry for attention and wants publicity. He started as person to teach Yoga, why not stick to it than venture into all other fields when you have no knowledge or experience of them. Why do people really follow these Babas? I think the profession of Baba should be banned! It would save so much of money being wasted into fake trusts and could be utilized for better cause of society! Of all the Baba’s, Ramdev is somehow the most annoying one I have come across in my times!

Osama dead…again?

I was away for the weekend and Monday morning when I returned home the TV was flashing the breaking news of the century, “Osama is dead. US officials, US president…blah blah blah confirm!” As much as it must be the biggest news, that people have yearned for, I wasn’t at all surprised or happy!  My only reaction is “I am confused”.  About a year ago, I had come across a video on Youtube, an interview of Ex- Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto. The video talks about her fight to return to Pakistan politics, the danger to her life and the BIG truth that she mentions in the interview – Osama being dead.

The interview ‘Frost over the World’, looks very authentic; Ms. Bhutto starts to answer a question at minute 5.33 about the people that could be a danger to her life; she talks of a key military figure of Pakistan and mentions that he was involved in the murder of Osama Bin Laden at minute 6.15. The important points are that she talks about Osama being dead like it’s a known fact; moreover the interviewer Sir David also doesn’t look startled or surprised with the declaration that Ms. Bhutto just did. And this Interview as per the video record is from Nov 2007! What does it mean then?

How many countries, how many governments, how many secret agencies are involved in keeping the truth or lie of Osama’s death? Ms. Bhutto was a great politician of Pakistan and many of her people wanted her back. Her assassination was a bad day in Pakistan’s political history. The politics of Pakistan is of course, out of my scope of knowledge. Politics is dirty just anywhere, no doubt. It just makes me think how much of a puppet we are made by our leaders, and that too at such a large scale..on international level!

There are so many questions that come to my mind; now if Osama was killed in Pakistan’s capital city shouldn’t the focus be on Pakistan for harboring such terrorist groups? Shouldn’t there be some strict actions against these countries that support & breed such terrorist groups who eventually take lives of the innocent; our politicians are never hurt! India is one of the countries that always get affected with such groups.

Secondly, is this another conspiracy just before Obama’s second tenure? I truly wouldn’t want to believe this because I, like all other people around the world had rejoiced his victory in 2008; I still want to believe he is a good leader with goals to benefit the common man! (Too hypothetical?)

Thirdly, is it a mere coincidence that the whole Arab world is collapsing at the same time? I wonder how the leaders of the world make benefit with these kind of news and conspiracies. What we see or learn is really not the total truth, we all know that. For now if people are happy and rejoicing the death of the greatest terrorist that lived, so be it. I am still not sure when he really died but I would just pray that there are no more terrorist groups and attacks around the world killing innocent people. And hope this news is for real.

Congratulations Mr. Obama and your country. At least the news brings peace and a feeling of justice to those families who lost their loved ones in 9/11 and the soldiers who died trying to get Osama.