Rumi Nations

I realized with a start that this week is the birthday of my favorite character from the pages of history. When I flip through the pages of history and of course I am no professional historian, I find that I have more regard and affection for Jawaharlal Nehru than anyone else. Of course, there is Mahatma Gandhi. And there are others belonging to India and to other nations whose achievements I find awe inspiring or admirable or creditable or inspirational. Internationally, there were men like Washington to Jefferson to Lincoln – three of the great presidents of the United States. There was Napoleon and there was Lenin. And Mao. The 20th century was a period that provided enough scope for megalomaniac men of varied hues to chase their dreams. So, recent history is replete with larger than life characters – some who achieved an astonishing amount of infamy such as Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini to others who have left their mark on human history which is essentially positive: ...

The rich Indian shall spend her honeymoon basking in the sun draped sands of the beaches in Mauritius and Seychelles and Pattaya and elsewhere. She shall go saree and shoe shopping in Dubai and London. Depending on her social class, she shall sashay down the London High Street (is that where the top brand-name shops or boutiques or whatever they are called are located?) and shoo in to Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and then Bergdorf Goodman and also visit the Bijan boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. These are surely the immutable laws of nature --> enforced more stringently by the ruling gods of the universe than other may-be laws such as those said to have been discovered by Newton upon the fall of an Apple iPhone. Indians will surely continue to perform these activities even in the 22nd century. Or till all the hydrogen in the interior of the sun runs out and the dying sun blows out like a grotesque, bloated corpse in another five billion years and devours Earth itself...

Honestly, I got thinking about this after reading this article in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-making-friends-as-an-adult.html? So we make friends when we are younger. Well may be we are less choosy and have more time. Let's face it, we are not very smart when we are just KIDS! We do not choose our school or classmates. Our parents decide those based on their economic circumstance or their religion or whatever. We do not choose our relations, our cousins. If even after we grow up, we continue to confine our lives to a small circle of family relations, we prove that we are pretty antiquated in our mindsets. As we grow older, we have less time. We do less exploring. I think that's our loss. And how do you RETAIN those old friendships if and/or when you discover that the paths you have chosen in life diverge rather than converge. Just because you happen to have studied in school together, you cannot ov...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n13/perry-anderson/gandhi-centre-stage Excerpts: All countries have fond images of themselves, and big countries, inevitably, have bigger heads than others.  The subcontinent as we know it today never formed a single political or cultural unit in premodern times.   The ‘idea of India’ was a European not a local invention, as the name itself makes clear.  When the British arrived, it was the sprawling heterogeneity of the area that allowed them, after a slow start, to gain such relatively swift and easy control of it, using one local power or population against the next, in a series of alliances and annexations that ended, more than a century after the Battle of Plassey, with the construction of an empire extending further east and south, if not north-west, than any predecessor.  The mutineers in Delhi having sought restoration of Mughal power, Muslims were suspect as recruits thereafter, becoming the exception in an army bas...

It isn't as absurd an idea as it might appear at first sight. Which is to say, it would be easy to find folks who might peddle this idea or believe in it. Of course, you better just listen to such ideas without your jaws hitting the floor and not try to argue or anything. Others blame Gandhi for the partition of India. I don't know what they wish for ... a Great India encompassing present day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh perhaps. Which would translate to a current population of a cool billion and a  half  people. Some people praise the great deed of the great hero Godse. They do not see him as a killer or a murderer. They see him as a great scholar intellectual who had authored Great Books. So, with a few million published books out there to choose from, people seek out Godse's book to read.

The recent 'outbreak' of 'racist' attacks against Indian students has created quite a stir in India. Indians — some of them, at least — have suddenly discovered that Australians are a racist bunch . . . I wonder what happened to all the happenings on the cricket field from years past which gave very voluminous hints that Australians were not quite a combination of Mahatma Gandhi/Nelson Mandela/Dr. Martin Luther King . . . I am completely at a loss to understand why some Indians expect to be treated as anything but 'outsiders' in a foreign land . . . I do not understand why Indians have to go to Australia . . . Oh, they apparently go there to 'study' . . . Well, I don't know that Australia boasts of many world-class universities . . . I am sure India has got many institutions of caliber . . . Somehow, I suspect the reason why some Indians like to go to Australia is not purely because of 'academic' reasons — I think these folks just want to get...