January 06, 2010


A writer I admire, and am proud to call a friend, has a post about my Roadrunner. That's Amitava Kumar, writing here. (He's mistaken. That photo really is me).

While you're over at his place, check the news of his new book.

1 comment:

Chandru K said...

Amitava Kumar may be a good writer, but, on the subject of India-Pakistan, he is also a shameless advocate of the pernicious "both sides are equally guilty" garbage. You can just hear him now saying something like "The people on both sides want peace, but the governments...etc". Without even so much as a bother as to what either government represents in terms of ideology, behaviour and structure. In India, the government does represent, and certainly tries to stand for, the people, the poor, all classes of people, people from all walks of life. There is an accent on empowerment, however slowly that is taking place. The government, not excluding the maligned BJP, strongly emphasizes democracy, freedom( of movement, association, expression), secularism and pluralism. Even the BJP will not abjure secularism( and positively not freedom and pluralism), only what it calls 'pseudo-secularism'. Development, economic, social and technological are issues in India in politics,in media and academia. In Pakistan, everything is about the military, landlords, fundamentalists, the super-elite(starting with Jinnah and Moslem League cronies) and of course India and the Kashmir issue, a major Pakistani preoccupation from day one. There is, needless to say, an obsession with Pakistan being the homeland of subcontinental Moslems, of emphasizing to the exclusion of everything else, Pakistan's Islamic founding ideology and character. And in order to buttress this ideology, there are repeated references to the 'plight' of Moslems on the subcontinent today, thus justifying Pakistan's own insecurity and belligerence. Pakistan as a country, consequently, has no vision of being an economic or technological force in the world, nor any alternative, constructive vision of how secularism and pluralism should play out. It's all negativism and negation of India.