Making A Song And Dance About My Ramayana
Despite the mention of my Ramayana series, I have nothing to do with this theatrical production. But I suppose it’s a sign that my retelling has filtered down into the culture in some way.
Not sure how that makes me feel. On one hand, it was my culture that made it possible for me to write my Ramayana retelling. Being a product of my times, of this age, as against Valmiki’s or Kamban’s or Tulsidas’s times. Being the person I am, flaws and all, because it takes a flawed person to truly appreciate Rama’s idealized perfection and Ravana’s idealized imperfections. Being a person of mixed race, no definite religious upbringing, devoid of caste-communal-religious baggage (or at least not indoctrinated in it), bearing an iconoclastic and questioning, even challenging attitude to all things (and I’m being euphemistic here), the movies I watched, the books I read, the places I visited, the things I lived through, everything contributed to my retelling, and it all shows on every page.
So to hear (or in this case, to read about) someone else being inspired enough by my retelling to mount an entire theatrical production that draws from the books and uses elements from them–completely without any involvement on my part, and only with the barest of awareness (a brief email written a year or so ago mentioning that this was being planned and was it okay with me)–is odd to say the least. I haven’t seen the actual production, although there’s a video on Youtube that I’ve embedded at the end of this post (I haven’t watched the video either). And I don’t know if I want to see either the actual production or the video excerpt from it.
Because that would be cannibalistic in a sense. Or would feel like it. Besides, I’m already on other stories, other worlds of the imagination, and have, in a sense, done with the Ramayana. This is someone else’s journey now, and I wish that person all the best with her own personal voyage of self-discovery.
Ultimately, the Ramayana is a mirror. You see it in what you want to see, or not. If it makes you angry, the anger comes from within you. If it makes you sad, ditto. Happy. Pious. Fanatical. Aroused. Inflammed. All you. You. You. You.
This is You too. Or in this case, her. Her being Shobana. And Shobana being anyone who takes up the song and sings it forward. For her own reasons. So be it. Sing on. The song belongs to everyone. Some have no voice. Some sing for others. They also sing who only listen and love.
“Sorry for the slavery”: US issues formal apology for racial oppression but is it too little too late?
It’s about time.
WTF were they doing all these centuries?
Too little too late.
And similar responses come to mind when reading about the formal, official apology issued by the House of Representatives (Congress) to black Americans for slavery.
No mention of reparation to the families of stolen, kidnapped, tortured, maimed, murdered, raped, uprooted and otherwise oppressed generations of African Americans over the past centuries. No word of recompensation for the wrong done to them. Not even a whisper of admission that the entire nation’s economy, culture, prosperity was all built first on land stolen from the brutally massacred indigenous people (Native Americans), then developed by slave labour (African Americans) and then driven to its position as the foremost nation of the world through the efforts of numerous immigrant communities (Asians, Hispanics, etc) to make the America of today.
But at least it’s a start. Hopefully, now the dialogue will begin. And the history of oppression on which the American nation is founded, so long denied and kept hidden–often glossed over or even ignored completely in school textbooks and even in formal histories–will be brought out into the open so every white American can acknowledge the debt he or she owes to the non-white people his or her ancestors exploited so that the present generations can enjoy a lifestyle that the majority of non-white citizens in USA can only dream of.
You can read about the official story here as well as on every US newspaper’s website and all the major newswire services.
Dearly Loving “Dexter” – Season 3 of the TV series that’s to die for
Dexter was that rarest of rare things, an adaptation that was actually better than the original source material. That’s right the TV series was actually better than the novel on which it was based! And Season 2 went beyond the books to create its own independent niche.
What’s it about? Simple. Dexter Gordon is a Miami PD forensic pathologist by day and a serial killer by night. But there’s a twist: he only kills killers, preferably other serial killers if he can find them. And he does. Find them. Often.
It’s made-for-cable, which means it’s replete with gore, profanity, nudity, simulated sex. Not for the squeamish, faint-hearted, or network TV viewer. But if you like your chills thrilled and your thrills chilled, this is a must-see series. Perhaps the best in its genre ever.
This is the trailer for the upcoming Season 3. I’m so looking forward to it, and to prepare for another season of glorious slashing and burning, I’m going to watch the first two seasons all over again.
They’re to die for.
The tale that lived forever, through the voices of its singers
It is easy to blame people and hate people and kill people; it is difficult to forgive people and let go of anger and hatred.”
I’ve always enjoyed the scholarship and work of Devdutt Patnaik. I have all his books and often refer to them as reference tools in my research.
Of late, in the past couple of years, I’ve started noticing his articles as well. And now I look for his byline. Writers who specialize in mythology are rare; good writers even rarer.
Recently, I was very pleased to read an article by him in a Mumbai Sunday newspaper. It was about the Mahabharata. But more importantly, it talked about the fact that the Mahabharata is an argument for peace, not an exhortation to war.
That’s my precise understanding after years studying, researching, reading and rereading, even attempting to translate a few shlokas in my own self-educated way.
And as those of you who have read the early chapters of my Mba as I call it already know, it’s an interpretation of the epic as the greatest anti-war argument ever composed in world literature.
Here’s the article by Devdutt Patnaik archived on his blog.
There are several more excellent articles on the same blog, all just as interesting. And all his books are worth reading and collecting. They remind me of the pleasure and excitement I experienced when I first discovered Iravati Karve’s Yugantar decades ago (then in a Disha edition).
There’s a sense of delight and wonder in our culture and epics that is so refreshing compared to the fashionable snobbishness that most journalists and writers display towards Indian epics–or worse, a mean-spirited left-leaning revisionism. Devdutt Patnaik, like Iravati Karve, writes with a genuine love for his subject, and sees the beauty and wonder and greatness of these eternal tales and story cycles.
So do I.
We sing because we love. And we love what we sing.
Violence ends when hatred ends
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it…Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate….
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Dr. Martin Luther King
Every time there’s a series of bomb blasts, or a threat of blasts, or even when there aren’t any, the hate bombs are flung in full force.
“More security!”
“Shoot them on sight!”
“We should wipe them all out!”
And similar diatribes issue from the mouths of the naive. I’m not talking about editorials by Page 3 intellectuals or armchair columnists. I’m talking about ordinary citizens.
A day after the Ahmedabad blasts, two days after Bangalore, I’m between a middle aged woman and a 30-something man at the gym, on a cross-trainer between their cross-trainers.
The conversation between them starts with jalebis the night before and the need to burn it off, and whether ‘galo’ or ‘jalao’ is a proper translation for ‘burning’ calories.
It soon turns to the bomb blasts.
The man’s outlook is crystal clear: “We should kill them all. Just hunt them down and shoot them. Doesn’t matter if innocents get killed in the process, we should just keep hunting till they’re all dead. No mercy.”
The woman offers a more humane side. But the man is adamant in his outlook.
He’s not a fanatic, or a fundamentalist. He’s someone completely unaffected by the blasts. Has no relatives, friends, or even distant associates. He has no connection to the blasts, except that they happened in his lifetime and in his country.
But he’s willing to suspend the law of humanity itself, to authorize the massacre of innocents to ‘hunt down’ and declare ‘war’ against terrorism.
Sadly, he’s not alone.
Too many people around me seem to be voicing the same opinion.
The overwhelming noise on the blogosphere and even on micro-blogging and social networking sites is the cacophony of similar shouts for the blood of the terrormongers.
It sounds tragically fanatical, rabid, extremist…the kind of hatred and ruthless outlook a terrorist would display.
Is this really what people believe? That terrorism is a security issue? That these things happen only because the guards at malls don’t shoot suspects on sight instead of searching them? That the police and government are too ’soft’ on terrorism? That our nation’s streets–and homes and everyplace else–should be patrolled by armed ‘hunters’ with laissez faire authority to do as they please, kill whom they like, no questions asked, and to continue doing this as long as they wish, all in the name of ending terrorism?
Is the USA really being held up as a champion in this so-called ‘war’ against terror? Does no one know the history behind the USA’s own role in creating most of these so-called terror groups over the past several decades, as tools to covertly fight its unofficial wars around the world?
Or is history considered irrelevant now alongwith all the facts. Is policing the only thing that matters. Policing so ruthless that terrorism seems almost passionate and justifiable in comparison.
I’m not afraid of terrorism. Yes, I could be a victim to it, or my loved ones could be–god forbid. And on a personal level it would be unspeakable, something I can’t begin to imagine.
But I am not afraid. And because I am not afraid, I am not angry. Because anger comes from fear. And that is all terrorism seeks to achieve: to terrorize us. And when we are angry enough to spout rubbish like that, that means they have succeeded.
When we are angry enough to actually empower our authorities to violate our own civil and fundamental rights, to kill innocent people, to use lethal force arbitrary in place of legal measures, then terrorism wins.
It’s so easy to hate. To spout angry solutions. To vote hate in and put it in the driver’s seat.
But only peace can beget peace. Hatred is what drives terrorists. Hatred is what started this campaign of hatred. Hatred and the use of violence in place of dialogue, in place of humanity, in place of love and understanding.
And yes, I would rather be blown to pieces by an arbitrary bomb, low or high intensity, and forgotten in a second, than to pick up a weapon and resort to violence.
Any idiot can use a gun. It takes a human to use the shield of peace. And in the long run, that shield is the only defense and protection against future attacks.
If you can’t see that, you’re not seeing at all.
Check out what Martin Luther King, Jr. said. He knew what he was talking about, he did.
Ramayana Retold…in 4 lines
Anita Varma wrote on my Facebook Wall: “Came across this interesting shloka… you’ve probably heard this before it’s called the Eka Shlokam Ramayanam (!!)”
/Poorvam Rama tapovanaadi gamanam hatva mrgam kaanchanam/
//Vaidehi haranam jataya maranam sugreeva sambhashanam//
/Bali nigrahanam samudra taranam lankapuridahanam/
//Paschaat ravana kumbhakarna hananam etatdhi ramayanam//
In case your Sanskrit is a little rusty, that’s the complete story of the Ramayana told in a single shloka.
And here I am, 8 volumes and over 4000 pages on.
Then again, maybe there’s such a thing as too concise? :~)
Was Draupadi disrobed? Maybe not, says Mahabharata scholar
Interesting article on Boloji.com about a recent posting on the online Mahabharata Study Group (a Yahoo Group moderated by Dr A. Harindranath) in which a renowned scholar Pradip Bhattacharya, IAS, puts forth the theory that perhaps the disrobing of Draupadi, the most notorious incident in the whole Mahabharata, might never have taken place at all. And that it might have been a later addition to the epic.
Mr Bhattacharya’s scholarship is solid and his arguments cogent. Of course, as the author of the excellent article points out, when an incident is so integral a part of the tradition of the epic as the Cheer-haran one, it no longer matters whether it was factually accurate or not, simply that it is now a part of the tradition.
This is something that’s fascinating to me personally, because so many incidents that most people associate with one epic or another are in fact later interpolations or only present in folk retellings, and yet you would have a hard time convincing them that the incidents in question were not in the original Valmiki or Vyasa text.
Read the full article here.
(Thanks to Anita Varma for bringing the article to my notice, and for the link!)
“Weight Loss”: A Short Story by… You!
I wrote the following opening to a short story during my coffee break (well, Diet Pepsi break, to be exact) this morning, and had no idea what I was writing, or why I was writing it. I tend to do this a LOT–hundreds of times a year, even. It’s physically impossible for me to finish every story I write, nor would I want to. Some are just idle explorations of casual ideas I get, and trust me when I say, I get ideas ALL the time. They’re not a dime a dozen, they’re a paisa a ton. The important thing is not the idea, it’s how you develop it.
So, I’m going to offer this partial here under a Creative Commons license to anyone and everyone who wants it. What does that mean? Well, it means you’re free to take this partial story opening, write the rest of the story, and then go ahead and publish it anywhere. The only conditions are that you can’t change any part of what’s already written. You have to keep it exactly as it is. Also, if and when you do finish the story, you can even take credit for it and put your name under the title “by Yourname” and offer it for publication, and even cash the cheque if you get one. All I ask is that you add the line ‘Based on an unfinished story by Ashok Banker’ at the end of the story in as tiny a font size as possible, just to acknowledge my contribution. That’s only for politeness, nothing more.
The story is your’s to do with as you like. I’m not even asking you to acknowledge me or credit me! It’s your story, and whatever you do with it, earn from it, etc, is entirely your’s. I deny any and all claim to it now and forever more! How’s that as an example of ’sharing is caring’. Write on!
So go ahead. Do what you like with the rest of the story. Treat it as a writing exercise, an experiment, or a professional short story. It’s up to you. You can do anything you like with the rest of the story. It’s all your’s now. Enjoy!
–Ashok K. Banker,
10 July, 2008
WEIGHT LOSS
by Yourname
So this dude walked in and said he wanted to lose weight. I handed him a form without looking up and continued playing Solitaire on the reception comp. I keep the monitor turned at an angle so nobody can see the screen. For all they know, I’m typing out a path-breaking study on the effect of liposuction on post-menopausal Punjabis in white-collar jobs. I was winning. That’s why I like Solitaire–you always win. I suck at RPGs and MMOGs and everything else. But when it comes to Solitaire, I’m Ace.
“Excuse me,” he said to me. “I need to see someone urgently. I don’t have time to fill in this form.”
I told him he needed to fill in the form to get an appointment with one of the doctors.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t have time. It’s really serious. Can’t you just call somebody and let me explain the problem?”
I glanced at him disinterestedly. He looked normal, decently dressed, average height, average build, bit on the skinny side. Not bad looking, but not handsome or anything. Sort of clean cut and honest-looking.
I repeated the part about filling in the form.
He shook his head. “No, no, no. You don’t get it, it’s urgent! I really–”
“What seems to be the problem, Ashu?”
My left hand flicked out and hit the Escape button, quitting the game. I stood up at the same time, smiling my polite receptionist smile at Dr Archana. “I was asking this gentleman to fill up the form so I could schedule an appointment. But…” I trailed off, waggling my fingers at the client.
The dude turned to Dr. Archana. “I have a serious problem, I need help right away. Please, will you help me?”
“Of course, Mr…?” Dr. Archana flashed her winning smile.
“Vinay. Vinay Upadhyay. Really, I need to lose weight right now.”
Dr. Archana blinked but never lost her smile. “I’m sorry? Vinay, did you say–”
“Yes, Vinay. I need to lose 300 kgs today. Right now. You have to help me.”
I looked the guy up and down again, this time paying serious attention. Now, I’m no electronic weighing scale but there was no way on earth the dude could have been a gram over 50 kgs. Maybe if he had heavy bone structure, 55 kgs. I’ll even go up to 75 to show I’m open-minded, though you would have laughed if you had seen him. He had the kind of gangly bony structure that you see on some people, the kind who usually came in when they were teenagers desperately wanting to pack on weight and beef up, the kind that joined gyms and went on high-protein high-carb diets and struggled to put on 5 kgs over a year, and usually ended up losing half of that when they stopped going to the gym for a week or two. The kind who could eat pizza and burger and samosas all day and never show it.
Dr. Archana glanced at me. She had a slightly concerned look on her Maharashtrian features. There was a wrinkle on her forehead which crinkled her bindi. Her gold bangle jangled on her wrist. I wondered if I should call security, just in case. I could see in her eyes that she was thinking the same thing.
Vinay looked around, perhaps sensing something. “There’s a weighing scale there,” he said, pointing across the reception. It was pretty much empty this time of day. Not many fatties come in at 10:20 a.m. on a weekday morning. We had barely opened a few minutes earlier, and the staff had only just got in. I hadn’t got to the end of my first game for the day.
Vinay walked over to the weighing scale. He looked back at Dr. Archana. “Can I use it?”
Dr. Archana broke off eye contact with me. She smiled, evidently deciding to play along a bit longer. Maybe she figured that once the dude took his weight, he would render his own ‘lose 300 kgs’ bullshit meaningless and be hoist with his own petard, whatever the hell that means, I read it in a story online the night before.
“Please,” she said.
Vinay hesitated, glancing at me as well, as if looking for a witness. I returned his look, wondering idly if the dude was some nutcase. We got a few every now and then, and of course, you could argue that anyone who needed to pay a small fortune just to be told to eat less and exercise more was a nutcase through and through, but this guy was nothing like any client I had seen before. For one thing, he was thin, bone-ass skinny thin. You could see the shape of him through his bush shirt and his knobbly knees through his trousers. My aunt had a Labrador Retriever that weighed more than him, I would bet.
“If anything happens to this weighing scale,” he said, speaking both to me as well as Dr. Archana, “I’ll pay for it. Don’t be concerned.”
I had no idea what that meant. Did he expect us to feel touched by his concern for the weighing scale? Maybe he thought it had senti value? “Be our guest,” I said dryly, unable to resist.
He looked down, then put a foot on the scale, then another foot, in quick succession. He was standing on it now.
There was a moment when nothing happened. Dr. Archana started towards the machine, no doubt to check his weight and start some sales spiel.
Before she took two steps, there was groaning sound. Then a grinding. A kind of gnashing metal noise.
And the weighing scale grunted and dropped several inches, tilting sideways, then, with a loud metallic protest, warped and twisted and bent. The glass display and various plastic or non-metal parts inside it shattered and snapped and cracked. Then it lay still, and silent. And dead. He had just killed the weighing scale.
Vinay Upadhyay got off the scale and looked at us, arms spread by his sides, slightly raised, palms up. His head was tilted down, turned at a questioning angle. “You see?” he said. “Do you see now?”
Dr. Archana moved to the weighing scale, staring down at it as if at a dead cat she had suddenly discovered in the waiting room. “I don’t understand,” she said.
Vinay smiled for the first time. “The scale had a limit of 150 kgs, yes?”
She nodded, still frowning.
“My weight today is about 400 kgs,” he said. “And increasing every minute. I’m not sure exactly, but I think it’s going up at the rate of around 10 kgs every hour. If I don’t bring it down to below 100 quickly, it may be too late. Please, will you help me now?”
Blast From The Past: Ashok Banker on US Foreign Policy + Osama Bin Laden, circa 1999
The following is an article by me that appeared on Rediff.com for whom I wrote regularly in the late Nineties. This one appeared on 23rd November 1999. You can find the original article still archived on Rediff.com here. For what it’s worth, I actually travelled to Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh, all the way to Kargil and beyond, close on the heels of the Kargil War, doing ground research interviewing the army, civilians, and yes, even an ex-mujahideen and several anonymous contacts who aided active mujahideen. The overall research was for a book which I finally never finished, but I was also covering the immediate aftermath of the war for Rediff.com in my own way, more a roving columnist and feature writer on-the-scene than a hardcore news reporter. Still, I thought the article was interesting enough to post here, if only to provide a glimpse into a rarely seen side of me.
Oh, and don’t miss the mention of Osama Bin Laden towards the end. Yes, he and his threat to hit the WTC Towers were a cliche back then in journalistic circles. As was the knowledge of his former CIA affiliations and US funding. To know more about that ugly nest of worms, and how the entire Bin Laden family was then and even now remains fairly close to Bush’s family, you need to do your own research elsewhere. In fact, it’s ironic that the article was addressed to Bill Clinton, because it proves that it’s the US Government and nation’s continuing foreign policy that is responsible for the worldwide situation today, not merely GWB, Jr, as people now mistakenly assume. As with all things concerning history, there is no real beginning or end, but only the point where you come into the story and start listening, or reading…
The Rediff Special/ Ashok Banker
Is This Your Rocket Launcher, Mr Clinton?
Recently, when the Lashkar-e-Toiba, a self-admitted hardline terrorist faction, organised a meeting of like-minded militant groups in Lahore, Indian diplomacy protested to the US. Even setting aside the decades of armed activism, terrorist acts and policy of ruthless Islamic jihad by these groups, how could you ignore the recent upsurge in their activities in J&K.
As Indian spokespersons put it to their US counterparts for the umpteenth time, these groups were virtually fighting a proxy war in J&K on behalf of Pakistan. This was why the casualties in terrorist attacks in the post-Kargil war period were already mounting past the casualty figure of the actual war itself!
And as if to underline their arrogance, just days before their meet in Lahore, the Lashkar-e-Toiba attacked the PRO office of the Indian army’s 15 Corps headquarters in Srinagar, killing the army’s chief PRO and making international headlines — which was just their intention.
Yet, the Americans’s only response to this was: “They are exercising their democratic rights!”
The US policy on Indian and Pakistan has always been skewed in Pakistan’s favour. The reason for this is simple: Ever since the Cold War days of the 1950s, the US always perceived its greatest enemy to be the USSR. It took elaborate precautions against any possible Soviet aggression by becoming the world’s supercop, financing regimes that resisted Communism, providing arms, training and funds to revolutionaries who sought to overthrow legitimate communist regimes, in short doing anything under the sun to ensure that the erstwhile Soviet Union never outgrew its bounds. Its fiasco in Vietnam taught America that a direct engagement was far too expensive. Better to pursue a policy of proxy support.
This it did with resounding success in Afghanistan, a nation that the USSR had effectively annexed by force. Supporting the mujahideen movement in the country, the USA pumped resources to enable the rebels to fight back and fight back hard. Allegedly, the CIA and some high-level military agencies set up training camps to indoctrinate the tribal rebels in the art of high-tech warfare. Estimates of the US funding of the mujahideen movement in the eighties are usually figured at around $ 2 billion a year.
This enormous financial and technological support created a Frankenstein’s monster. Today, long after the Soviets have been sent packing and the Soviet Union itself has long since collapsed and ceased to be a danger to anybody, the same mujahideen are being employed by their neighbour Pakistan to fight the ongoing proxy war within our borders. The original intruders who first captured the heights in Kargil and held them through the winter of 1998 were mainly Afghan mujahideen. It was only in April 1999, with the breaking of spring, that the un-uniformed Pakistan army regulars moved in. Even now, the daily spree of terrorist attacks on military positions in J&K are the handiwork of these same mujahideen.
Every day for the past decade, shockingly large quantities of arms, ammunition, and evidence of high-tech support are discovered in search-and-destroy operations in the besieged state. On an average day, it is not unusual to read in the daily army reports that among the arms recovered were Stinger Missiles, Kalishnikovs, grenades, mortars, and other heavy-duty weaponry. These are expensive weapons, and expert training in their use doesn’t come cheap either. Military intelligence has learned that the most experienced mujahideen — veterans of the rebellion — are often paid as much as Rs 30,000 a month, a far cry from the pittance that most civilians-turned-militants were being paid during the days of the local insurgency in Kashmir.
So where do all these arms, training, and veterans come from to inflict wounds on our already bleeding borders? From those same US-funded and supported programmes, of course. Today, all those billions of dollars pumped into Afghanistan by the USA are being used against India. No wonder then that after a hiatus of almost thirty years, the Clinton administration became the first US government to actively involve itself in dialogues with India and Pakistan over the Kashmir problem. Not since Kennedy has any US president shown such a keen interest in resolving this issue.
Of course, the detonation of India’s nuclear weapons and the similar nuclear response from Pakistan has been a major factor in this renewed US interest. But Pokhran-II, as the name suggests, was India’s second round of tests. Whatever the public claims may be, the US knows quite well that India possessed the ability to build a nuclear weapon for almost two decades. What they’re really worried about now is not that a nuclear conflagration might explode in the region, but that their own past errors of commission and omission might come home to roost.
Already, the US has seen the bitter result of funding what can only be called terrorist regimes in Third World countries. The growth of Osama bin Laden is a perfect example: Where do such monsters come from if not from US foreign policy? Would the mujahideen have the resources, the men and the confidence to wage its proxy war on behalf of Pakistan in J&K if not for all that US support? The spate of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, the CIA head office at Langley, the bombing in Ohio, and other events were all part of the backlash created by previous US “interference” in other nations’ affairs. Today, more and more American bureaucrats and senators are increasingly protesting against any continuation of the supercop approach to foreign affairs management.
The defeat of Clinton’s pet CTBT bill in his own senate underlined this fact. What right does the world’s most nuclear-prolific nation have to police other nations? India’s demand for total nuclear disarmament is not a stalling tactic, as some critics have groused, but a legitimate demand. We’ll do as you do, not as you say, is the message that Vajpayee has thrown back at the US. Hopefully, someone in Washington is getting the message.
A perfect example of the USA’s double-standard is visible in its Cuba policy: After the US military’s 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, the Americans wanted the entire world, starting with Mexico, to declare Cuba a security threat. In 1997, still seething over the matter, the Clinton government pushed through the Helms-Burton Act, which proposed sanctions against any corporate entity, in the US or outside, which did business with Cuba. This includes the stopping of all humanitarian aid such as the supply of food and medicines in a crisis!
In contrast, after the recent military coup in Pakistan, not only has the US not been half as stringent in imposing sanctions, it has been almost benevolently watchful in its attitude. While a democratically elected government is overthrown and with no sign of a return to democracy in the near future, the US buffs its nails and manages to look blissfully unconcerned. Even if the threatened sanctions against Pakistan are imposed, they don’t entail anything even remotely similar to the harshness of the Helms-Burton Act. Business will continue, so will various aid packages, and even World Bank loans for certain categories.
The reason for this dichotomy in the US approach to Pakistan versus Cuba is simple: Cuba is within easy missile-launching distance of the US coast. Never mind that it poses no threat at all to the world’s largest superpower. Its existence is enough to make America’s skin crawl. While Pakistan is much too far away to harm the US directly in any way. The fact that it can and is harming its neighbour India, using US-provided funding, weaponry and militant training doesn’t seem to bother America. American blood and borders are inviolate: India’s on the other hand, are cheap.
It is time to tell the US to get off its high-moral ground and atone for its own mistakes. Helping clean up the mess it has indirectly contributed to in Kashmir would be one way to start. It was the threat of imminent US back in 1953 that probably led Nehru and his government to back off from a direct confrontation with Pakistan over Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. If not for the fear of US military involvement, today Kashmir might well be united, Indian, and peaceful.
But most of all, it’s time to demand that the US takes action to clear up its own backyard. The demand for the extradition of Osama bin Laden is a good start. But it came only after repeated clandestine attempts, allegedly by the CIA, to have the terrorist ganglord assassinated: It was these attempts that caused Laden’s supporters to retaliate by bombing the World Trade Centre and similar targets. The US has made a career out of interfering in other nations affairs and leaving messes that have impacted adversely on regional politics in Asia, South America, and even central Europe for decades afterwards. Today, the mujahideen are just as active in Kosovo and Chechnya as in Kashmir.
Take back your rocket launchers, Mr Clinton. Take back your CIA-trained terrorists,your dollar-funded mujahideen, your anti-communist hoodlums. Take all the billions of dollars worth of lethal weaponry being used in Kashmir today. Take it all, and shove it up your…um, arsenal.
Sold out on pre-order! 
Available only from me directly. 
Available only from me directly. 
Available only from me directly. 