Non_Naachgaana

May 17, 2008

Pen in One Hand, Cricket Bat in the Other
By CHARLES McGRATH
LINK

There are no longer any Staten Islanders in the Staten Island Cricket Club, one of the country’s oldest. The members are from places like Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, St. Vincent and Grenada. There are just two Europeans; one of them, Joseph O’Neill, a 44-year-old Irishman who grew up in the Netherlands, was educated at Cambridge but has lived in New York since 1998.

That Mr. O’Neill in his other life happens to be a novelist is a matter of indifference to most of his teammates. They’re more interested in him as an accomplished batsman, a sure-handed fielder and a decent off-speed bowler. He’s also handy at contributing articles to the club bulletin.

He has clung to cricket, he said recently, because it’s his “athletic mother tongue,” and to learn baseball, say, would be like taking up a foreign language. Even if he became proficient, he wouldn’t get the jokes or the poetry.

‘GDP will not define the leadership in Asia’

When Bill Emmott arrived in Tokyo in 1983 as a correspondent for The Economist, he got his first major assignment wrong. A trial had found Japan’s ex-Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka guilty of accepting bribes and sentenced him to four years in jail. “I wrote a story saying what a watershed this could prove, which is just what it wasn’t,” recalls Emmott. Tanaka won a huge election the next year. Chastened, Emmott went on to build a deep insight into the affairs of the world’s second biggest economy, publishing over the years seven books on Japan. He has now expanded his field of inquiry to include Asia’s two other powerhouses in his latest book, Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade. Emmott, 51, served as the editor of The Economist for 13 years — on his watch, the magazine’s circulation more than doubled to 1.1 million. He left his job two years ago to write full-time. Emmott is a member of the US think-tank, the Trilateral Commission. Editorat- Large AJIT SAHI interviewed Emmott over two sittings in New Delhi. Affable, given to precision and not dithering, Emmott spoke with the clarity of a journalist, not an academic. Excerpts:

Photo: Shailendra Pandey
There is an overwhelming consensus that India is on the rise. You puncture this picture by saying China will stay far ahead of India on virtually every front for decades. Is India destined to play second fiddle to China?
Yes, India’s economy is likely to be smaller than China’s for a very long time. China is so far ahead that it’s unpredictable if and when this might ever change. But as India’s economy develops, it will only be second fiddle to China in a technical sense — in that its economy will be smaller. But in all the senses that matter — international power, influences around the world, interdependences with other countries, soft power or cultural power, hard power or military power — India will, more and more, be a force to reckon with. Whether China’s economy is 20 percent or 40 percent or 100 percent larger will cease to matter because India will be increasingly more capable.

China’s GDP is three times India’s. Its foreign exchange is six times higher. It is far ahead on FDI, exports, overseas investments, health and education. Yet, you write that both can play the role of Asian leaders.
Leadership in Asia is not going to be defined by who has the largest GDP. For leadership you do need economic size and a degree of openness to trade and capital flows that produce interdependence. But then political will and persuasive powers with other countries — what Joe S. Nye of Harvard University calls “soft power” — can be just as important as either hard military power or the ‘sticky power’ of economic weight. I think India will be a match for China in terms of soft power; its sticky power will increase; its hard power is already substantial, particularly in naval terms. So I don’t think it’s true that China is going to be the dominant country of Asia.

[Dedicated to Nitesh, RKS, and Rocky — Qalandar]

OUTLOOK
May 05, 2008
LINK

Bihar: A Shade Different

After the storm, the calm. A ravaged Bihar finds succour and sustenance in its CM, Nitish Kumar.

SABA NAQVI BHAUMIK
Governance: Nitish Style

[This should have passed long time back]
High voltage drama marks Women’s Bill introduction in RS

Press Trust Of India
New Delhi, May 06, 2008

High voltage drama marks Women’s Bill introduction in RSThe controversial Women’s Reservation Bill was introduced in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday and the fresh legislative attempt of the government too was marked by high voltage drama and unruly scenes involving scuffles between ministers and opposition Samajwadi Party members.

PTI

Warne wishes Tendulkar as many playing years as he wants

LINK 

JAIPUR, April 23: On Sachin Tendulkar’s 35th birthday on Thursday, legendry Australian leg-spinner Shane Warne wished the master batsman as many playing years as he wanted.

Warne said cricket fans would have to wait for long to have another player of Tendulkar’s calibre, so he should be allowed to continue his career instead of critics suggesting him to retire in the wake of his injuries and occasional form-slumps.

“He is a great player. We may have to wait for many-many years to have another player like him. He should be allowed continue till he wants to,” said Warne while his stay in the city for a recent Indian Premier League match.

But is it really cricket?

Ah, The Human Race

Today China, tomorrow India? In the pro-Tibet, anti-repression march, are we on sure ground?

ROHIT MAHAJAN
What The Rights Groups Say

Amnesty International Doesn’t support boycott of the Olympic Games, sees them “as an opportunity to get some results” on human rights. Will do the same for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.

This post has nothing to do with Amitabh Bachchan’s movie or movies in general.

Aaj ka Arjun

Rajdeep Sardesai

April 17, 2008

link

New Delhi: At least 44 people, mostly schoolchildren, died when their bus fell into a canal on the Narmada river in Bodeli near Vadodara early Wednesday.

Early reports say that out of the 44 dead, there are 41 school children. Among the other casualties, driver of the bus, the conductor and an old lady are reported dead.

The Gujarat Transport Corporation bus was carrying around 60 school students and teachers. The accident took place at around 6:30 am. Early reports say the driver lost control when the bus was on a bridge and fell into the canal.

What Have We Learned, If Anything?
By Tony Judt

The twentieth century is hardly behind us but already its quarrels and its achievements, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory. In the West we have made haste to dispense whenever possible with the economic, intellectual, and institutional baggage of the twentieth century and encouraged others to do likewise. In the wake of 1989, with boundless confidence and insufficient reflection, we put the twentieth century behind us and strode boldly into its successor swaddled in self-serving half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of History, the unipolar Ameri-can moment, the ineluctable march of globalization and the free market.

The belief that that was then and this is now embraced much more than just the defunct dogmas andinstitutions of cold war–era communism. During the Nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by a perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion. We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach us. Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.

Perhaps this is not surprising. The recent past is the hardest to know and understand. Moreover, the world really has undergone a remarkable transformation since 1989 and such transformations are always unsettling for those who remember how things were before. In the decades following the French Revolution, the douceur de vivre of the vanished ancien régime was much regretted by older commentators. A century later, evocations and memoirs of pre–Word War I Europe typically depicted (and still depict) a lost civilization, a world whose illusions had quite literally been blown apart: “Never such innocence again.”[1]
Little Bookroom-Paris Books

But there is a difference. Contemporaries might have regretted the world before the French Revolution. But they had not forgotten it. For much of the nineteenth century Europeans remained obsessed with the causes and meaning of the upheavals that began in 1789. The political and philosophical debates of the Enlightenment had not been consumed in the fires of revolution. On the contrary, the Revolution and its consequences were widely attributed to that same Enlightenment which thus emerged—for friend and foe alike—as the acknowledged source of the political dogmas and social programs of the century that followed.