Monthly Archives: June 2005

Nixon, Kissinger and Indira

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Recently declassified documents reveal what Nixon and Kissinger thought about Indira Gandhi, with Nixon calling her a “witch” and a “bitch” and Kissinger referring to all Indians as “bastards.” Gandhi had come to the US in the period just before the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971. At that point, the US had a “special relationship” with Ayub Khan, the dictator of Pakistan, and India was flirting with the Soviets. The US did not want East Pakistan to form an independent Bangladesh.

Here are some snippets of the discussion between Nixon and Kissinger, just after Indira Gandhi left:

Nixon: This is just the point when she is a bitch.

Kissinger: Well, the Indians are bastards anyway. They are starting a war there. It’s–to them East Pakistan is no longer the issue. Now, I found it very interesting how she carried on to you yesterday about West Pakistan….

Kissinger: While she was a bitch, we got what we wanted too. You very subtly–I mean, she will not be able to go home and say that the United States didn’t give her a warm reception and therefore, in despair, she’s got to go to war.

Nixon: We really slobbered over the old witch. [US State Department]

This wasn’t just about Indira Gandhi herself, they had a pretty low opinion of Indians in general:

Indians are “a slippery, treacherous people,” Nixon said.

“The Indians are bastards anyway,” Mr Kissinger replied. “They are the most aggressive goddamn people around.” [Guardian]

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Jayant Kadian confessed

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In a grand jury filing two weeks ago, D.C. prosecutors revealed that Jayant Kadian confessed to killing his mother:

The 20-year-old Great Falls resident told a Fairfax County detective that the tension between them escalated after he was arrested in connection with marijuana possession a third time… his mother, Kiran V. Kadian, told him she wanted him to see a psychiatrist, he told police… “He said at that point, he picked up a butcher knife out of the butcher block, and he said, ‘I . . . axed her. It was weird.’ ”

… Kadian stabbed or slashed his mother 23 times in the neck and seven times elsewhere… he said… he stabbed her once from behind and she dropped to the floor, Allen said. “I wanted to kill my mother real quick,” Allen quoted Kadian as saying. “I did my best to make it quick.” [Washington Post]

There’s a special pit in hell reserved for this guy, who allegedly did the deed while she was making him food:

KADIAN’S MOTHER, 52, was preparing food for her son when she was murdered, according to testimony from Allen, a homicide detective. When Allen arrived at the Kadian’s house, an untouched plate of food remained on the kitchen counter above her body which was surrounded by a pool of dried blood…

Kadian thought the purpose of meeting with a psychiatrist was to place him in a 28-day inpatient treatment center, according to Allen, who said Kadian didn’t want to go… after the murder, Kadian washed the knife, placed it on the dining room table and went upstairs to get $4, shoes and socks and to put a Band-Aid on two cuts he suffered during the stabbing. He set the alarm to the house and drove to the Great Falls Shopping Center, where he parked behind the CVS Pharmacy, according to Allen. Later he drove back by the house and saw the police cars and “decided he wasn’t ready to be caught and drove to James Madison,” Allen said… [The Connection]

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Drawn to the march

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Just a reminder to set your TiVos because Wednesday night FX will air the “30 days” episode that I blogged about a few weeks ago. In the episode a white Christian man will live for 30 days as a Muslim man in America, to see what it feels like when people stop being polite and start getting real. I am a little hesitant to watch this episode because I tend to be very impresionable. During the first season of Alias I was so convinced that I was Sidney Bristow’s CIA handler that I kept meeting her for dead-drops in the middle of the night. She never showed up. Will other viewers like myself suddenly feel like becoming Muslim for 30 days?

Well, it turns out that organizers in Lodi, CA (yes, that Lodi) are planning a million Muslim march. Some would say they are doing so after being manipulated into it by a conservative talk show host. WebIndia123.com reports:

Plans are under way for an anti-terror Million Muslim March in Lodi, Calif., inspired by challenges from a controversial Sacramento radio talk show host.

Since five Lodi-area Pakistani men were arrested for lying to federal authorities about terror camp training two weeks ago, KFBK-AM personality Mark Williams has repeatedly challenged the Muslim community to publicly denounce terrorism.

Mayor John Beckman took Williams up on the offer, and offered to help organize the march in late July, the Sacramento Bee said Wednesday.

Anyways, after tomorrow night’s show I have a feeling that I’ll be drawn north for the march. That might be just what the CIA wants. Continue reading →

HIV Pos, caste no bar

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Two satisfied clientsIndia’s first marriage bureau for the HIV + has opened up in Gujurat. This is hard work in India, a country where weddings are cancelled just because one party has an inauspicious birthdate. Nonetheless, Daksha Patel (who is HIV positive herself) has already helped seven couples get married.

Both Daksha and her clients approach marriage with a typical Indian matter-of-factness. They don’t hold wishy-washy “ishq conquers all” sentiments; they know very well that life is hard and money is important.

In one exchange, Daksha interrogates a client who earns 3,000 rupees (roughly US $70) a month:

“You will have to look after yourself and your wife – you are both HIV positive, maybe you will have to spend on medicines,” says a concerned Daksha.

“Will you be able to manage all this with your income?” [BBC]

Similarly, one satisfied client explains:

“I had read about this organization which worked with HIV positive people and ran a marriage bureau. I had come to find out more about the bureau – for the purpose of marriage only … I did not want a very handsome person, or a very rich person. I just wanted a husband who can understand me – and who can provide for three square meals a day.” [BBC]
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Real Life Russian Dolls

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russian_dolls_semyenov_c.jpgThe shiznit rarely gets weirder than this –

Doctors in Bangladesh say they have removed a long-dead foetus from the abdomen of a teenage boy who was complaining of stomach pains. They said the foetus would have become the boy’s twin had it grown normally in their mother’s womb. They said it was a case of an extremely rare condition where two foetuses are conceived as conjoined twins but one absorbs the other. …”Apart from the head, all other limbs of the baby were developed.”

Ewww. Just plain ewww. The villagers reacted as villagers in da homeland usually do – not content to wait for the Enquirer to put its alien autopsy spin on the story, they flocked to see it first hand –

Hundreds of curious locals flocked to the hospital on hearing a rumour that a boy had given birth to a baby.

Kuato Lives! Continue reading →

Tech campus Babylon

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News.com just posted photos of the Infosys campus in Bangalore. Wow, Karnataka really can be sterilized so it’s just as boring as Santa Clara. But it’s nice to see homo technorati in their natural habitat.

Their signature building looks like the retro-Jetson TWA terminal at JFK. The landscaping makes it look like those SoCal Spanish-style haciendas rented out discreetly for porn shoots.

Don’t you think you’ll be telling your nieces and nephews to work here someday?

Here’s a surfeit of campus snapshots. Related post here.

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‘The Internet has crashed’

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Remember those fake chain emails about some event making the entire Internet crash? Or all those lame sci-fi plots about bringing down an empire by destroying a single ship or one little exhaust port? Leave it to the subcontinent to make an urban legend come true (thanks, o anonymous one):

An undersea cable carrying data between Pakistan and the outside world has developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, telecommunications officials said. The system crashed late on Monday and was still down on Tuesday evening. Many offices across the country ground to a halt…

“It’s a worst-case scenario. We are literally blank,” said a senior foreign banker who declined to be identified… Airlines and credit card companies were among the businesses hit by the crash. “It’s a total disaster,” said Nasir Ali, commercial director of the private Air Blue airline. “We have a Web-based booking system which has totally collapsed.”

PTCL provided satellite back-up for the link, which meant some people were able to get access to a very slow Internet connection, Hussain said, but users complained it was too slow to be of any use.

Both the Net and the connection to the cellular networks are down. The company in charge is saying it’ll take two weeks to repair:

Reports quoting engineers said the fault would likely to take two weeks to repair. The breakdown affects the main fibre-optic link beneath the Arabian Sea, 35 kilometres south of the city of Karachi. The cable is owned by a consortium of 92 countries – with SingTel acting as its operating agents.

The complex repair work may require a complete shutdown, potentially causing disruption in India, the United Arab Emirates, Djibouti and Oman, which are also linked to the damaged cable.

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The criminals got away…but we saw some naked women

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I am all for nudity, but I care even more about trees and the state of our global environment. That is why the following story from India left me feeling conflicted. From Reuters:

Women in an eastern Indian forest are stripping naked to distract police and to help a criminal gang avoid arrest while illegally chopping down trees, the Hindustan Times reported on Tuesday.

Some of the women belong to a timber mafia in the heavily-forested state of Jharkhand while others are paid to strip in front of the police, who are too embarrassed to arrest them or too distracted to hunt the gang down, the daily said.

“It is proving tough to deal with these women,” Jharkhand forest official B.K. Singh said. “It has almost become a regular practice for them to strip.”

The story gets even more absurd when you read the headline of a similar article at Sify.com: Women terrorise Jharkand forest guards. Hmmm. I guess anyone can be a terrorist these days. Fear not though because Chief Wiggum and his posse have a solution: “But the guards are not stumped — they are planning to recruit women guards to deal with the problem.” Continue reading →

You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to?

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Last week Amardeep mentioned the new book by Biju Mathew who organizes and fights for the rights of taxi workers in New York City. The book is titled, Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City.

FROM THE PUBLISHER: A back roads ride through the yellow cab industry of New York City by lead Taxi Workers’ Alliance organizer Biju Mathew.As the point of entry for many of the city’s visitors, the yellow cab has become an enduring metaphor for New York City and its exuberant twenty-four-hours-a-day rush. But just as the city has changed in recent years, so too has the industry that keeps it on the move. Indeed, as Biju Mathew reveals in this highly readable, fast-paced survey of New York’s taxi business, just about everything has been dramatically altered except the yellow paint. Drawing on conversations with the drivers themselves, Taxi! details both the pressures and triumphs of life behind the wheel, from the effects of ex-Mayor Giuliani’s “quality of life” and “zero tolerance” programs and the structure of car and medallion ownership that often results in minimal earnings after a 12-hour shift, to the unexpected ease with which a workforce representing 80 ethnicities—and at least as many languages—organized, culminating in the 1998 strike of 24,000 taxi workers. One of the organizers of the Taxi Workers’ Alliance, Mathew is uniquely qualified to survey the fascinating world of the yellow cab. Buckle up, sit back, and enjoy the ride.

This week’s New Yorker has an article about Biju’s book and the drivers that he writes about.

A book party with no cocktails: ouch. In fairness to the folks at the New Press, which helped organize such a dreaded event recently, at a restaurant on West Twenty-ninth Street, there were a few limiting circumstances. For one thing, almost all of the invited guests were driving. Also, most of them were Muslims and, more to the point, among the city’s best experts on the consequences of excessive social drinking. They were cabbies. The book being celebrated was “Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City,” by Biju Mathew, a business professor at Rider University, and a founding member of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a fast-growing labor union.

Compounding the problem was the fact that the party didn’t begin until 1 a.m.—the start of the slow period for drivers working the night shift. Many of the cabbies, at least, would likely have been in the neighborhood anyway. The stretch of the upper Twenties bounded by Lexington and Broadway is their sanctuary—featuring not only the union’s headquarters but also free and plentiful late-night parking, a popular mosque, and several subcontinental restaurants, including Lasani, where the party took place.

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Not depressing. At all.

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As previously discussed on this blog, a woman in Uttar Pradesh was violated by her father-in-law and then ordered to marry him via an outrageous fatwa, much to the horror of sentient beings everywhere. Unfortunately, this story doesn’t have a great ending:

“Me and my husband are willing to abide by the fatwa if the Darul Uloom Muftis want us to,” Imrana said.
Mufti Habibur Rehman of Darul Uloom Deoband said in a fatwa on Sunday that the Imrana’s life with her husband Noor Ilahi has become untenable as per Islamic law after the alleged rape on June 3.
Reacting to the ruling, Imrana, who has been staying with her parents at Kukra village, on Sunday said she has full faith in the Shariyat. Noor Ilahi also said he would take steps as per the fatwa.

You do remember why she was ordered to go home, right? To purify her. Tell me, dear readers, how do you “take steps” so that your wife transitions to the role of stepmother? I’d think about it myself, but I can’t stop shaking my head and I’ve gone dizzy.

Despite the disapproval of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and the work of women activists, it looks like the local panchayat will win. The victim’s own brothers are fine with the fatwa. While at the protest at the Pakistani Embassy last week, I heard activists discussing how Mukhtaran Mai’s mother supported her as she commenced her quest for justice. I wish Imrana’s family had reacted similarly. If she was brave enough to report this assault to the authorities in the first place, I can’t help but think that she has a flicker of defiance within her. If only someone close to her could fan that tiny flame…

It saddens me to the point of migraine that here’s where the story ends. Though the magistrate who heard this case denied the alleged rapist/father-in-law’s bail, to me, even if he’s convicted of the crime he’s been accused of, it sounds like his daughter-in-law and future wife will never win. Continue reading →

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