This mango business is no joke! Despite my best efforts and those of my fellow mutineer Ennis to steer the whole mango conversation in absurd and salacious directions, it seems that out among the high and mighty, the triumphal return of the Indian mango to the American market is proving to be a very serious deal. Mango Diplomacy is being discussed at the White House, courtesy of none other than…

Raghubir Goyal of the India Globe held up a basket wrapped in colored cellophane. “Mangoes from India arrived, and here is a basket for President Bush,” the reporter offered. “My question is: What message does mangoes bring, as far as India-U.S. relations are concerned?”

In return Snow had only this:

For one of the few times during the briefing, Snow smiled. “I don’t know. It is my first mango-related inquiry,” he admitted.

Undaunted by this callous official indifference, however, Mango Nationalism is, um, ripening among proud Indians and Indo-Americans here, if submissions from Fareed Zakaria, David Davidar, and Shashi Tharoor to SAJAforum are any indication. Apparently Tharoor thinks that American ignorance of true mangoes, while surely just as grave as our ignorance of cricket, is a more redeemable condition:

After years of penury, where what passed for mangoes in American supermarkets was a travesty of the term, we at last have the real thing! I used to believe that true mango lovers could sue American groceries for false advertising — the tasteless, fibrous, tart and flavor-challenged fruit they sold did not deserve the name of mango. Now we should urge every American we know to try a real Indian mango. They’ll never think of mangoes the same way again.

Full quotes from all three eminences plus a comment thread here. Mango pride is sweeping across the land. Will there be a backlash? Continue reading →

According to the BBC [thanks, Sena X], the following ad is running in several major Urdu-language newspapers in Pakistan:

BBC translates as follows:

The adverts urged members of the public to inform officials if they found any “lost or stolen” radioactive material. They were published in major Urdu-language newspapers in Pakistan.

A spokesman for the nuclear authority said that there was a “very remote chance” that nuclear materials imported 40-50 years ago were unaccounted for. (link)

That’s right — they don’t even know whether the material described in the advertisements is actually even missing. Which should make us even more confident that they know what they’re doing, right?

But officials say they need to heighten public awareness of nuclear issues to ensure that decades-old nuclear material is fully accounted for.

“This could have been before the creation of Pakistan, and may relate to nuclear material that could not be taken under our charge,” Zaheer Ayub Baig, information services director of Pakistan’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority, said in a letter to the BBC.

Mr Baig said that the adverts were merely a public awareness campaign to make people aware of the dangers of radiation from material that might have been used in hospitals and industrial plants.

He said the advertising campaign was being expanded.

“There is nothing to worry about,” Mr Baig said. (link)

Thank you, Mr. Baig. I feel very reassured that you don’t know about an unspecified quantity of radioactive material that might have potentially gone missing at an unknown date, and which might now be in unknown hands — or even, for that matter, mixed into the cup of chai some guy is drinking at this moment in Lahore.

Thank you very much, indeed. Continue reading →