While the day started with reading Indian newspapers, it filled me with awe after reading what Arundhati Roy said on Kashmir. You may ask, Arundhoti Roy - who? Even I would also be tempted to ask such question, had it not been for these controversies. Thanks to all the controversies and the english media run by her very own cousin(Pronoy Roy), she is still alive and regarded as a celebrity.
At every possible opportunity she is ready to criticize India and USA but the same person has no qualms about visiting US for her own personal benefit or for using Indian tolerance for her ramblings. She should have known well the ideology she is professing if come into force, she will loose all her freedom of speech! While, I would care less of what she said, but she somehow demands an intellectual tag for herself for having won booker award many moons ago. After that all that she does is stirring up an issue or talking about a controversy. I read a nice artcicle today by someone who analyzed why Arundhati Roy is the way she is. Article can be found here. The article nicely correlates the mindset of people brought up in communist regimen with hypocrisy. While that explains it all , she released a statement and it was published in none other paper than NDTV(her cousins news paper) to make her sound good. Here is the excerpt.
"I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir. This morning's papers say that I may be arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said at recent public meetings on Kashmir. I said what millions of people here say every day. I said what I, as well as other commentators have written and said for years. Anybody who cares to read the transcripts of my speeches will see that they were fundamentally a call for justice. I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; for the Indian poor who pay the price of this occupation in material ways and who are now learning to live in the terror of what is becoming a police state".
Lets analyze this in pieces: she says she is saying what millions say in Kashmir. I say: Why don't you say something that billions of Indians say instead of saying what just the millions of Kashmiris say. She again says something that makes no sense at all, she says Kashmir lives under terror, and at the same time she says the poor soldiers are getting killed. Now who is oppressor here? Soldiers belong to Indian force and if they are innocent and Kashmiris are innocent then how can she say kashmiris are living under brutal millitary rule. She again says something very stupid on Kasmiri pundits. Does she know why Kasmiri pundits are out of the valley? They are thrown out of their own state because of the same millitants she is supporting. So, she can't just support the millitants and also the Kashmiri pundits at the same time. So, my analysis now shows that she is a highly deranged person lacking logical thinking. She can use jargons to dissuade masses and write mumbo jumbos in NDTV, but she can't fool the educated masses. With this I hope she is stripped of Indian citizenship and thrown to the place she truly belongs- Pakistan. Here is a nice article I read by a articulate write, I could not stop admiring the article, so reposting it here:
Why Arundhati Roy is dangerously wrong on kashmir: (By Venkatesan Vembu)
There’s a mesmeric, seductive quality to Arundhati Roy’s prose. For all its verbiage, it teases, tempts and torments the mind and lures it into the parlour of a contrarian world; it then persuades it, with the sheer power of its eloquence that the natural order of things in the ‘real’ world as we know it is wholly unnatural and completely flawed.
“So you think India is a superpower in the making?” it says, and marshals compelling arguments for why India is more in the “bhookey-nangey” category. “So you think big dams are great for development?” it asks. “Perhaps you’ll feel differently if it were your home and your livelihood that needed to be sacrificed for the greater good”.
A fair-minded person might concede that Roy has at least half a point, even if, once the seductive power of her prose has worn off, her polemical pounding of that half-point is grating in the extreme. Heck, she’s not even the only one who holds an unflattering mirror to Indian society and forces us to reflect on our failings.
The social historian Ramachandra Guha does it no less trenchantly, no less controversially and no less eloquently; but he does it with a far greater sensitivity to the burden of history, and he at least has the intellectual honesty — and the good grace — to acknowledge the merits, such as they are, of India’s democracy, flawed though it is.
But whereas the soundbite-savvy Roy’s polemics were once merely infuriatingly dishonest (even when they had half a point), her most recent public articulations on Kashmir, coming on top of her unvarnished defence of Maoist resort to violence, cross the threshold of what any self-respecting, law-bound nation-state can tolerate. Roy may have declared herself an ‘independent mobile republic’, as she did after the 1998 Pokhran nuclear tests in order to dissociate herself from the BJP’s nuclear jingoism; but she’s still bound by the sedition laws of the decidedly immobile republic she inhabits.
Apart from being historically inaccurate, Roy’s words also betray an inadequate sensitivity to the enormous gravity of any loose talk of azaadi or self-determination at a time when the separatist campaign in Kashmir finally stands exposed before the world as having been propelled all along by Pakistan-backed jihadis who are playing for much larger stakes: the disintegration of secular India.
Perhaps in parlour room polemics, among calm and politically sanitised minds, there may be little risk from intellectual explorations of the merits of Kashmiri self-determination. But the Kashmir mind today is in a fevered state as a result of years of hot-headed jihadi indoctrination; only when that fever subsides can other cures be contemplated. Right now, given that inflamed state, Roy’s words have the potency to bestir indoctrinated minds into extreme action.
History doesn’t flow in straight lines, but in contours, and in Kashmir’s tortured history there are many contours to negotiate. The Indian state may not always have got it right in Kashmir, but Roy’s black-and-white delineation represents a colossal and intellectually dishonest oversimplification of the problem without sufficient appreciation of the fanatical geopolitical forces at work. It also takes her farther down the slippery slope of shrill and decidedly dangerous sloganeering which has enormous lethal consequences in the real world. Perhaps she should break the spell that her own hypnotic prose appears to have on herself and her increasingly fanatical flock of followers.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/arundhati-roys-statement-on-possible-sedition-case-62566?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ndtv%2FLsgd+%28NDTV+News+-+India%29&cp
This is a personal web space on my daily personal, spiritual, philosophical ramblings, ravings and musings... It greatly reflects my moods and opinions on religion, politics, people on a daily basis... However, you are most welcome to stop by and pass on a piece of your mind as well. I will be more than eager to hear what you have to say.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
My Tuesday Ramblings
Posted by
Sucheta Tripathy PI @ Computational Genomics Group at IICB, Kolkata
at
12:34 PM
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Sunday, October 3, 2010
Travel vouchers - What they are worth!
Recently on our trip to Seattle we were almost bumped off the flight without being told. The flight was overbooked for the football match, and the flight staff kept telling us our seat allotment has not been done and they will let us know. Let us know when? I would go to the front desk and ask, but their answer had always been "you will be given a voucher". The flight staff assumed that it should be a great option for us since we are being compensated with a voucher for our time. Although personally I am not very fond of vouchers, my husband opted for it. What we missed because of the voucher? We missed the entire day of sight seeing at Seattle plus had no lunch and got delayed for everything.
Today finally I thought of using my voucher for another trip. When I went to expedia, I did not see any option for redeeming a voucher. Then I went to AA web site, there also while purchasing I saw no option. Finally, I was reading the FAQ's and got a number (18004331790), that said can be used for e-voucher and gift coupons. Being totally intuitive, I decided to give it a try although my gift voucher was neither a evoucher nor a gift card. The number connected immediately. However, on their web site for gift vouchers, there was another number that said from Monday through friday from 9 am to 5 pm. All this could be very misleading.
So, now my advise is: If you get a travel voucher at the airline counter in an airport you have to book the ticket through them using the phone number given above(For American Airlines). The guy at the other end will ask you the flight number for forward journey and for backward journey(You must have it before hand). Then you can provide other information like your name, date of birth etc. They will ask you your postal address and email address. You have to post your hard paper travel voucher to the address they ask you to. In my case, it was to:[LCZACS}
American Airlines, Box - 109, 6570, caroline street, Suite-103, Milton, FL-32570-4778. On the top of the envelope, I am asked to write my address, followed by my last name, followed by the flight number for the forward journey, followed by the date of forward journey. Fun ha... Enjoy using the voucher!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Today finally I thought of using my voucher for another trip. When I went to expedia, I did not see any option for redeeming a voucher. Then I went to AA web site, there also while purchasing I saw no option. Finally, I was reading the FAQ's and got a number (18004331790), that said can be used for e-voucher and gift coupons. Being totally intuitive, I decided to give it a try although my gift voucher was neither a evoucher nor a gift card. The number connected immediately. However, on their web site for gift vouchers, there was another number that said from Monday through friday from 9 am to 5 pm. All this could be very misleading.
So, now my advise is: If you get a travel voucher at the airline counter in an airport you have to book the ticket through them using the phone number given above(For American Airlines). The guy at the other end will ask you the flight number for forward journey and for backward journey(You must have it before hand). Then you can provide other information like your name, date of birth etc. They will ask you your postal address and email address. You have to post your hard paper travel voucher to the address they ask you to. In my case, it was to:[LCZACS}
American Airlines, Box - 109, 6570, caroline street, Suite-103, Milton, FL-32570-4778. On the top of the envelope, I am asked to write my address, followed by my last name, followed by the flight number for the forward journey, followed by the date of forward journey. Fun ha... Enjoy using the voucher!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted by
Sucheta Tripathy PI @ Computational Genomics Group at IICB, Kolkata
at
2:48 PM
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