Rumi Nations

No well-known person or personality would perhaps say what I’m going to say here. It’s merely stating the obvious to say that the world of Kabir Bedi does not exemplify the life of the average Indian. I am all for live-in relationships. Some talked about ‘blowing the brains off’ of the perpetrators. It’s worrying to see such over-the-top reactions. Is it too much to expect that people react calmly and in a measured way? What gave the incident prominence was clearly the fact that it was caught on video. We do not have video footage of those incidents of rape in moving cars and elsewhere. Imagine what the reaction would be if there was. Much killing of various sorts happened in Punjab in the 1980s and in Kashmir in the 1990s. But none of that was captured on video. Unmarked graves and skeletons are all that still give mute testimony to some of the chilling reality of Kashmir. The lack of video footage from inside the death chambers of Auschwitz and elsewhere do not...

Heaven uses an open-source, Linux based email server. Since Oprah is now over, let me confess on my blog. I've fathered three babies unbeknown to my imaginary wife. My co-conspirators were sequentially: my office intern, a member of my household staff, and inevitably, the proverbial (but quite literal) maid. The inspirations for these acts (and therefore the owners of authorial credit) are messers Clinton, Arnold, and DSK. So, I'm giving them due acknowledgement. Also, thanking them for not copyrighting or trademarking these techniques. Instead, these are available to all those who seek to enjoy the benefits of democracy combined with atheism under the Creative Commons License. Anyone can therefore use these techniques and modify them to suit their specific needs and then share the results with the world at large. There. I've done it! Or is there more? Well, I just remembered a fourth baby that I had with the hot, young TV journo lady. That was inspired by Mr. ...

Or, rather why that is an unlikely event. Dreaming of revolutions might appear quite romantic for middle class Indians but when you dig deep, you’ll see that the situation is both better and worse than Egypt of 2011 or America of 1776. The American War of Independence was driven mostly by economic factors and Britain enacting a host of draconian laws to augment His Majesty’s revenue not to mention to offset the losses suffered in misadventures against the French. All of which sound suspiciously familiar to an Indian … the British apparently learnt nothing and went on to repeat the same things in India in the early part of the 20th century. The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 is too recent and the discontents that may have fuelled it are yet to be distilled by historians. The per capita GDP of Egypt however is way higher than India’s. It would appear that people in different nations have different thresholds of tolerance towards what is broadly known as ‘poverty.’ Indians seem to have an ex...

Manmohan Singh is hardly Hosni Mubarak. Although most Indian prime ministers occupy the office only in the seventh or eight decade of their life — that's about the only similarity. Be that as it may. At the end of the day, I do not like to paint all politicians with the same brush. I also do not believe in blaming politicians for all that ails India. Indian voters choose who they wish to represent them. Indians are a nation of believers. Hinduism has a range of gods across the whole spectrum of possibility. Some gods are male while others are female. Some are neither male nor female. Some gods like vegetarian dishes while others prefer non-vegetarian dishes. Some gods are benevolent while others are ferocious as well as capricious. Indians love their gods. They not only love them, they like to anoint ordinary humans with godly qualities too. So, we have a plentiful supply of demi-gods too. The office of the prime minister has been elevated to that level as well where t...