Dear Friends: Thanks to your unstinted support and encouragement, what started as a simple newsletter almost six years ago has turned into a repository of 1200+ articles and 16000+ comments on subjects ranging from “An Indian Identity” to “Women in Hinduism and India“
In the process, some of the user-friendliness may have been lost. This brief primer is meant to help you make the most of my personal “knowledge management system”!
There are now 1200+ posts on this blog. You can rely on serendipity to …

I recently came across an interesting article by Mark Fidelman provocatively titled, “Where Are India’s Innovative Companies, Products and Solutions?”
I would encourage all of you to have a look…Feldman has written persuasively about what ails innovation in India…but the real “action” is in the comments…one of which caught my eye and provided the inspiration for the title of this post. Bhamy V Shenoy commented on May 15 (emphasis mine):
“…The biggest problem (in India) in my view is the non-functioning governance system because of (the) indifference (of) educated people who …

My�distrust of the Indian mainstream media deepens by the day.
Courtesy Dina Nath Mishra’s article,�”Amarnath land grant and the reality around it“, I learnt today how even “..in this age of widespread and fast communication”, it is possible to hide facts.
Fact #1:�The land was to be transferred NOT allocated
Fact #2: It was to be only for a period of two�months in a year when Amarnath pilgrims visited
Fact #3:�No permanent structure was to be constructed, for Article 370 forbids the same
And yet, we had the Hurriyat and assorted leaders crying hoarse over …

From a Sify report on a seminar held last Friday at IIC on ’1914 Shimla Convention Agreement and Consequences’ (emphasis mine):
The fact that the Chinese refused to ink the 1914 Shimla Convention agreement between India and Tibet puts question mark over the legality or morality of China’s claim of sovereignty over Tibet, a group of India’s top jurists, scholars and security experts feel.
…The participants – who included senior Supreme Court Advocate Rajeev Dhavan, Arunachal MP Khiren Rijuju, Lt Gen. (Rtd.) F.R. J. Jacob, veteran diplomat Dalip Mehta, and writer Dr …

For many of us, the government’s craven capitulation on the Amarnath issue was less of a surprise and more of a denouement of something we had feared all along…i.e. our political leadership can no longer be trusted to look after India’s national interest.
Parama Karuna-ji summed it up neatly in one of her posts on a Yahoo! group:
I understand your point…I (we) have been trying my (our) best to be as diplomatic as possible, for many years. My point is that I think we don’t have much time left now.
Our task …

I am no fan of Ashis Nandi and disagree strongly with many of his views but I just cannot accept the argument that his writings or thoughts should be banned/censored.
There are other (better) ways of dealing with his arguments and deconstructing them…
Calling for a ban on his writings or calls for his arrest puts us in the same league as fanatics calling for Taslima’s blood.
For those of you who missed it, here is the original article – which started it all. Many of you will find the comments on this …