Brilliant and very true. I studied at a school in Kolkata that was akin to Cathedral. Same rules applied. There was one guy on the debate team who would always start by saying….The great Chinese Sun Tzu said “blah blah blah”. We all knew he was making it all up.

It is amazing that you brought this up. Now that I re-read FZ’s column, it reminds me of the college application essays that were floating around in high school.

this guarantees an invitation to davos, or more importantly, oprah.

You may have something there Manju. I remember that Oprah was the spring-board for another desi : Dr. Deepak Chopra.

I think we need to cool off the “Zak Attack”. I am sure a lot of his colleagues think that the only reason he gets invited to CNN etc. is because of the color of his skin. Maybe he appears superficial, but remember TV is the medium of the sound byte, and how erudite can you be in 30 seconds.

its important to note that zakaria is lean. this guarantees an invitation to davos, or more importantly, oprah.

Manju, is that you throwing up in the bathroom after lunch? Seriously, I am getting worried that you have an eating/body-image disorder. And contrary to what Rush says, self-medication is not a great idea. I know real conservatives have the self-reliant-marlboro-man thing going, but really, get some help if you think something’s wrong.

I’m saying this only because my heart bleeds for you. And the earth. And post-modernists.

Does India really have a tradition of nose-to-the-ground, investigative journalists or at least commentators who do not write while drawing exclusively from an ideological form book

Yes, but not in the regular press. The financial press seems to throw up a lot more such commentators. Sucheta Dalal springs to mind.

I don’t know much about the 80s. I knew about Donald Duck and not Donald Trump, just because I was a kid. If he is claiming that people in India used to know and talk about Donald Trump in 80s and not talk about Bill Gates in 200s it’s a lie. Bill Gates is a big hero even now not just for the IT crowd, but the arts / politics crowd too.

If the jihadist in Basra had a regular job, and good economic prospects in the future, would he be so willing to spend his weekends fashioning an IED in his home/garage, or would he rather try and cram for the Series 7 exams (or the local equivalent thereof) so that he could show his ma-in-law that he’s not all that useless?!

It’s interesting that the very globalization you celebrate helps deprive that very resistance fighter in Basra of a job rebuilding her/his country because that very globalization makes it cheaper for the American-taxpayer-funded construction firms to hire labor from India and the Philippines than “those jihadists in Basra.”

I’d also like to take issue with your painting anti-occupation resistance fighters with the dismissive and reductive “jihadist” brush. Don’t believe the hype. Iraqi resistance does not equal Al Qaeda.

8 · desiriksha said

the process of globalization is the source of anxietes, anxietes about westernization as a threat to their way of life and culture, which drives some people in non-western countries to resort to violence to stop the process of globalization.

Define “western” and “non-western.” Do you think that English/US/Japanese/whatever-you-call-western culture developed in a vacuum, free from the corruptive influence of “eastern” cultures? When you’re done with that, can we talk about all of the “west’s” peaceful methods of colonization over the past 500 years and how colonial apologists like to blame their own brutality on those uppity natives’ tendency to resist exploitation.

Among the big time uber billionaires, the only one who is into real estate is the DLF group. Most others are into resource based industries, and some billionaires lead almost a spartan lifestyle. The flashiest billionaire (?) -Vijay Mallya – isn’t all that wealthy by Indian billionaire standards.

Yeah the dlf guy is the wealthiest real estate mogul in the world but there are a few Indian real estate players who are wealthier than Donald Trumph, most don’t have the high profile. Also lot of them have diversified portfolios. Godrej is one of the largest land owners in Bombay but when you think of Godrej you think of Locks, Soaps, Cupboards etc. The Ruias of Essar are big real estate players but again you think of them as Telecom, Shipping and Steel guys. Palonji Mistry (He became an Irish citizen last year) is a major real estate construction tycoon, but when you think of him you think of Vacuum Cleaners, Water Purifiers and Tata Group. There are very few pure real estate players in the country.

If Basra was occupied with a foreign power no amount of regular job and good economic prospects would stop him from being a jihadist.

‘No people exists that would not think itself happier even under its own bad government than it might really be under the good governance of an alien power…’ – M K Gandhi.