With gold and other jewels tumbling out of the vaults of the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Trivandrum—figures upto and beyond Rs 100,000 crore are being mentioned, more than twice Rs42,000 crore of Tirupati—newspapers are busy calculating the true value of the haul (at current gold prices) and what can be done with the windfall.

The Times of India reports that one lakh crore rupees is almost equal to Wipro’s market capitalisation of Rs 1.04 lakh crore, nearly one-third of Reliance Industries, and the more than twice Posco’s proposed investment of $12billion in India.

ToI says the gold will…

# Almost meet the cost of rolling out food security Act (around Rs 70,000 crore) and NREGA spend (Rs 40,000 crore)

# Meet central government’s education budget for two-and-a-half years

# Help meet government’s interest liability for over four months and seven months’ defence spending

Mail Today reports that Rs 100,000 crore can be used to…

# Build 290 super-speciality hospitals

# Lay 14,000 kilometres of national highways

# Buy 255 multi-combat aircraft such as the Eurofighter

# Build 1,000 sports arenas like the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium

The Supreme Court will, of course, decide who the money belongs to: the temple, the temple board, the State government or the Centre.

The first gun to have been reported as the weapon used to take down Bin Laden was

the Sig Sauer P226 pistol.  There is nothing wrong with the Sig P226. It is a very fine pistol, but it is hard to believe that the elite of the elite would assault a highly fortified compound armed with a pistol in a relatively weak cartridge (9mm or .40 S&W) that is unable to penetrate even Type II body armor.

Soldier System updated their original report, saying instead that the H&K HK416 rifle was used by SEAL Team 6 to kill Osama.

While not the most exotic gun, it is a highly regarded piston-operated version of the AR-15. It makes a lot more sense that the SEALs were using short-barreled carbines rather than a submachine guns or pistols. The HK416 is also notably used by the USMC as the M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle.

Unlike the Colt CM901 or MP7, civilians can purchase the HK416 as the civilian legal H&K MR556A1.

We will probably never know exactly what the SEALs used, but the HK416 is more feasible than most.

Al Jazeera presents: Gods Business: Swaminarayan

Swaminarayan is best described as cultural & ethnic propaganda.  While the religion has done much good for the progressive mind, it has come at a very big sacrifice both on the views For life & financial responsibility. The religion plays as a 5 million person social network which has set their foundation on possibly one of the best Marketing scheme’s that most fortune 500 companies would die to master.  From articulate temples, priest who speak only to brainwash & the scent of money in all aspects of the religion, this sect could soon be a publicly traded company in the near future.

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.

More→