The assault on Pelindaba would make quite a movie. But it’s a thriller that is all too real, with consequences that might have threatened the world. It was a daring break-in at a heavily guarded nuclear plant that holds enough weapons grade uranium to build a dozen atomic bombs. What happened at Pelindaba is the kind of thing that keeps presidents awake at night. More→

The visit of the 44th president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, and his wife, Michelle, was covered by the Indian media in a way reserved historic occasions like the sinking of the Titanic or the invention of penicillin would have been, if only there was 24×7 television.

Everything else that happens in our wide and wonderful land—and everything that is conveyed to us as “Exclusive-Breaking News-Flash-First On” in normal times—was summarily relegated to nanosecond bits before the weather forecast, or bunched together ‘in other news’.

As if nothing else mattered.

If ever there was an overdose of verbal and visual onslaught on, this was one.

Channel after channel, hour after hour, minute after minute, spewed forth raw and unprocessed data of every bit of the Obamas’ three-day trip as if there was no tomorrow. Thankfully, secret service didn’t allow cameras to record and beam footage after the couple retired for the night. More→

The Armenians call it their holocaust – the 1915 forced deportation and massacre of more than a million Armenians by the Turks. But the Turks and our own government have refused to call it genocide.  The House Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. Congress narrowly voted to declare the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians to be an act of genocide.  The first genocide of the 20th Century occurred when two million Armenians living in Turkey were eliminated from their historic homeland through forced deportations and massacres. More→

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.

Yesterday I traveled to Shopian, the apple-town in South Kashmir which had remained closed for 47 days last year in protest against the brutal rape and murder of Asiya and Nilofer, the young women whose bodies were found in a shallow stream near their homes and whose murderers have still not been brought to justice.

I met Shakeel, who is Nilofer’s husband and Asiya’s brother. We sat in a circle of people crazed with grief and anger who had lost hope that they would ever get insaf—justice—from India, and now believed that azadi—freedom— was their only hope.

I met young stone pelters who had been shot through their eyes. I traveled with a young man who told me how three of his friends, teenagers in Anantnag district, had been taken into custody and had their finger-nails pulled out as punishment for throwing stones.

In the papers some have accused me of giving ‘hate-speeches’, of wanting India to break up.

On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians.

It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one.

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi today announced his government’s plan to build a Statue of Unity, a 182-metre high statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel “two times taller than the Statue of Liberty and easily the world’s tallest statue”. Modi’s announcement came on the eve of his completion of nine years as Chief Minister on October 9. A separate society formed under his chairmanship will monitor implementation of the idea, according to the BJP’s official project brochure. It will be in the nature of a private-public partnership and will involve inviting suggestions from experts across the world.

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The Commonwealth Games 2010 have been a stupendous PR disaster for a country that likes to think that it is racing alongside China. What was to have been New Delhi’s response to Beijing’s Olympics, has become a 21st century epitaph of ancient Indian specialities such as corruption, nepotism, inefficiency, unaccounability and worse. More→

On May 28, an overnight passenger train en route to Mumbai derailed, roughly 55 miles southwest of Kolkata. It was then hit by a freight train barreling along the parallel track, killing over a 100 people and injuring over 200 passengers.

The incident is believed to be the latest in a rash of violent attacks by left-wing Maoist rebels, also known as the Naxalites. As investigators try to ascertain whether an explosive was used to blow up a section of the tracks or whether tracks were removed by the miscreants manually, the Indian government is devising strategies to contain the growing insurgency. More→

“Scandal” and “controversy” are the middle names of ISKCON.

Weighed down by the dum maaro dum bestowed inflicted on it by Bollywood, the cult has been accused of being a CIA outfit; its gurukuls have been infamous for sex scandals, child abuse, molestation and homosexual abuse; there have been whispers of its founder being murdered.

It falls to a pattern, therefore, that ISKCON’s proposed Krishna Lila theme park on Kanakapura Road in Bangalore, for which the bhumi pooja took place today (in picture), should have been begun on a litigious note, with charges of land grabbing flying around between ISKCON and the Congress’ D.K.Shiva Kumar.

Money for the 28 acre, Rs 350 crore “family edutainment” theme park inspired by Disneyland, and aimed at weaning Indian kids away from western comic-strip icons Superman and Spiderman, will be raised by developing a “heritage township” on the 42.5 acres near the hillock.

Cayetano Ordóñez—or El Niño de las Palmas—on whom Ernest Hemingway modeled Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises, sired a son named Antonio. After his father, Antonio was perhaps the greatest bullfighter of the 20th Century. Hemingway followed Antonio’s battle with Luis Miguel Dominguín in the summer of 1959, and wrote a fine book about it called The Dangerous Summer. Antonio’s son, Francisco “Paquirri” Rivera, was killed by a bull in Pozoblanco in 1984. Paquirri’s sons, both quite fine looking, now fight bulls in Spain. More→