Muslims have a particular responsibility because these extremists are part of their community. We do not mind where people come from, as long as they become Australians. We went through a period in the 1980’s and ‘90s of sort saying, we can build a federation of cultures in this country.
Author: T R Jawahar
Our masters of the past, the British, rarely fig ure in our mental frame, barring vis-a-vis cricket. Pakistan dominates our mind for all the wrong reasons, including cricket. George Bush too has said something about cricket in the context of India
Come Budget ‘06, it will be sixteen years on the trot for reforms and liberalisation, often referred to as Manmohanomics. The man who engineered this economic coup of sorts and pulled India out of its self-imposed socialist shackles is now the PM.
Hamlet’s hesitation is legion, but he was a shade lucky. The Danish prince of Shakespearean lore at least had a choice, though a difficult one. Does the moderate man, longing for a simple, safe and secure middle path on various issues, macro or micro, confronting him day after day have any hope in these troubled times?
The material, and pre-dominantly Christian,West is not known for reverence. And tolerance is not a virtue of the Islamic Middle-East. Given such genetic proclivities, the ongoing imbroglio over the caricaturing of the Islamic prophet by European publications is neither a collision of cultures nor a clash of civilisations; these are lofty tags.
The north thrives even as the south wanes (Vadakku vazhgirathu, therkku theikirathu). This slogan used to stir scores of southerners in TN, in the fifties and early sixties. Those were heady times when the India beyond the Vindhyas was forbidden land of ‘Madarasis’ for the ‘northerners’.
I shall begin without a preamble because the events of the present are self-evident. Of course, these days you often claim to be unaware of even obvious things, that either you were misled or no one told you. But even schoolboys have stopped putting up such excuses. A PM can certainly do better than that.
In India, it pays to be a foreigner. Doubters can check with Quattrocchi on that. Now, who’s this Quattrocchi? Well, one can check with Sonia, pardon, Soniaji, on that. Of course, there is no guarantee of a response, because her voice appears to have been frozen on this issue, unlike the defreezed money of her Italian compatriot and close family friend.
Tapping of telephone lines of important persons is probably as old as the invention of the telephone itself. And the practice of intercepting messages or other private communications must be as old as humanity itself. From messengers on horseback to pigeons