Rumi Nations

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice." My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947. Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

A Wall Street Journal journalist named Amol Sharma has written an article called My Seven Wonders of India here ... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125722422411624519.html This talks about the usual suspects. This is a newcomer to India and he finds the peculiarities of living in India to be rather funny and describes them with a typical American patronising tone. But I think no country is perfect and you have to adapt yourself to the peculiarities of that particular country. I am sure Amol would be familiar - far more so than me - with the parts of New York City or Harlem that he should avoid going to at night since he would be mugged at gunpoint otherwise. I am sure there are many cities in America where lawlessless is a problem: Chicago, Atlanta, etc.

Well, not quite. But the opinion piece columns in the New York Times as well as the Wall Street Journal were analyzing the results of the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia and a few Congressional elections and it was interesting to see the contrasting conclusions that they drew from the same results. While Obama supporters like Gail Collins and Maurren Dowd described the results as being not connected to Obama's presidency and local in nature and therefore having no bearing at all on Obama's performance or lack of it, WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan describes these results as a wake up call for the Obama White House. It seems to me that the results might be described using that rather ungainly phrase: "anti-incumbency" factor. That's a very popular phrase during elections in India when the voters find an outlet to show their anger at the government and throw out whoever is in power. I think it might be the same in the U.S. as well where lobbyists have ...