DesiPundit

A Little Wit. A Little Wisdom. Lots of India.
Nov 16, 2012
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(via Drawing from the City: Exquisite Indian Folk Art Meets Women’s Empowerment)

Nov 12, 2012
Who Milks This Cow?

This was a selective but not unrepresentative sample of the mails I have received over the years from the intensely chauvinistic tribe of Internet Hindus. I have replied, as courteously as I possibly could, to each e-mail I received (a practice I still maintain), but discontinued the correspondence if (as was often the case) the mailer proved incapable of reasoned discussion or debate.

Oct 26, 2012
High and Dry

How Sabrina De Sousa, a former US diplomat of Indian origin, was swept up in the undertow of the war on terror

Oct 26, 2012
Death on the Path to Enlightenment: Inside the Rise of India Syndrome

Every year thousands of westerners flock to India to meditate, practice yoga, and seek spiritual transcendence. Some find what they’re looking for. Others give up and go home. A few become so consumed by their quest for godliness that it kills them.

Oct 24, 2012
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Happy Dusshera by Vikram Nandwani

Sep 22, 2012
The man who made way for progress

Dasrath Manjhi, the ‘hillman of Bihar’ who single-handedly cut through Gehlaur hill from 1960 to 1982, chip by chip with a chisel, to build a road to connect Atri block and Wazirganj, lives on three years after his death. After building pucca roads between Atri and Wazirganj and Atri and Gaya, the government is about to open the six-bed Dasrath Manjhi Hospital, which will cater to at least 50 villages.

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Sep 13, 2012
Sovereignty For the State Not For the People?

LIKE CHANDRASEKHAR AZAD, Aseem Trivedi, the cartoonist arrested recently in Mumbai, too has family origins in central Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao district. The purpose of recounting that piece of trivia is not to compare the revolutionary hero of the 1920s to Trivedi. The two are very different individuals, and any comparison would be odious. However, one intriguing question does link them: was Azad’s relationship with and threat to the British Indian State exactly the same as Trivedi’s relationship with and threat to the Indian State? The answer is plainly “no”. If that be the case, how does one explain that a charge of sedition — the same legal clause that the Raj may well have deployed against Azad and other freedom fighters — has been used by authorities in Maharashtra to arrest Trivedi?

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Sep 12, 2012
India’s Dairy King Leaves Behind ‘a Butter Place’

India mourned the demise on Sept. 9 of Dr. Verghese Kurien, whose pioneering work at the intersection of dairy-farming technology, the cooperative sector, and branding and marketing created one of the nation’s greatest business success stories. Kurien, who died at 90, was a revolutionary in the dairy sector, and the brand that he created, Amul, today enjoys more name recognition and goodwill than almost any other.

Sep 11, 2012
What was the right strategy for Abhimanyu to defeat the Padmavyuha formation from the Mahabharata?

First off, it is difficult to imagine the scale of this formation. The Mahabharat was one of the largest wars ever fought, and armies used a scale of measure known as Akshauhini to measure strength. As single Akshauhini consisted of 21,870 chariots, 21,870 elephants; 65,610 cavalry and 109,350 infantry[1]. Now, it is said that over the course of the war, 18-20 Akshauhini senas (armies) were killed. I do not have to do the calculations for you to figure out how huge the armies actually were. And this in a concentrated around the Kurukshetra, which is roughly 48 x 128 Km in area[2]. That makes a very dense war.

And it gets more interesting.

Sep 10, 2012
India's Gandhi family: The Rahul problem

Part of the problem is presumably the coterie of advisers who surround Mr Gandhi. Western-educated, bright and eager to cosset their leader within a very small bubble, they appear unready for the messy realities of Indian politics: the shady alliances that are required to win elections; the need to strike deals with powerful regional figures who increasingly shape national politics; the importance of crafting a media strategy in an era of cable TV news. More basically, they seem not to have developed any consistent views on policy. What does Mr Gandhi stand for: more liberal economic reforms; defensive nationalism; an expansion of welfare? Instead they prefer to focus on tactics. Perhaps because of their poor advice, their man too often looks opportunistic and inconsistent.

Sep 10, 2012
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Aam Aadmi Free Speech [by Vikram Nandwani]

Sep 9, 2012
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2 notes

Sep 8, 2012
When in a news coverage famine...

I don’t read Indian magazines and haven’t since 1996. I stopped reading Indian newspapers five years ago, and haven’t watched news television in the last seven. The thing is—the news is all dated. From the 1700s. Corrupt society, incompetent state, extreme poverty, illiterate population quick to religious violence and divided by caste. A parasitic dependence on Europe. All this is unchanged, and latest reports of the same thing hold no interest for me.

What I am interested to know is why.

Why are we corrupt? Why are we illiterate? Why are we poor? This the newspapers don’t know. If they do, they don’t say. We must all try and figure it out ourselves, assuming we’re interested.

I said I had stopped reading “Indian magazines”. I meant general interest ones. I still subscribe to many magazines in several languages.

Sep 7, 2012
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From the 2012 Democratic Convention at Charlotte. 

PBS production-assistant Meena Ganesan wears a “Hatcam”, a Go-Pro camera, a shotgun microphone and a transmitter attached to a plastic hat, as she collects live video reports for the PBS NewsHour at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, on September 5, 2012 [via]

Sep 7, 2012
Nurturing Puttenahalli Lake back to its pristine glory

This project is an execution in the field of Preserving our “Public Open Spaces”, specifically a lake in an urban setting in Bangalore city, through citizen participation. PNLIT is the first citizens’ group to assume responsibility for nurturing a lake (Puttenahalli Lake) in the city. PNLIT’s focus is on reviving lakes, using the experience that it has with this project as the model.

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