And now for some music

I have enjoyed listening to ghazals for many years now. Here is one that I have liked a lot, back since I first heard it around 1982.

Film: Arth
Lyrics: Kaifi Azmi
Singer: Jagjit Singh
Music: Jagjit Singh

झुकी झुकी सी नज़र बेक़रार है कि नहीं
दबा दबा सा सही दिल में प्यार है कि नहीं

तू अपने दिल की जवाँ धड़कनों को गिन के बता
मेरी तरह तेरा दिल बेक़रार है कि नहीं

वो पल कि जिस में मुहब्बत जवान होती है
उस एक पल का तुझे इंतज़ार है कि नहीं

तेरी उम्मीद पे ठुकरा रहा हूँ दुनिया को
तुझे भी अपने पे ये एतबार है कि नहीं

[

Jhuki Jhuki si nazar bekarar hai ki nahin
daba daba sa sahi dil mein pyar hai ki nahin

Tu apne dil ki jawan dhadkanon ko gin ke bata
meri tarah tera dil bekarar hai ki nahin

Vo pal ki jis mein muhabbat jawan hoti hai
Us ek pal ka tujhe intezaar hai ki nahin

Teri ummeed pe thukra raha hoon duniya ko
Tujhe bhi apne pe ye aitbaar hai ki nahin

]

My attempt at a translation:

Is the gaze, lowered, restive or not
Is the love, muffled, in your heart or not

Count your callow heartbeats and tell
Is your heart restless like me or not

The instant in which love attains youth
Do you await that instant or not

Hoping for you, I spurn the world
Do you believe in yourself as much, or not

I think I would have been unable to appreciate poetry were it not for ghazal singers like Jagjit Singh. It's not that every one of his songs is great, but sometimes, everything is just right and the result is a masterpiece.

This song qualifies as a masterpiece, in my opinion. By itself, there is nothing spectacular about the lyrics, but the melody, the music, and the words fit in perfect harmony with the gentle melancholic mood. The result is magical. Listen to it here.

Martin Lee Anderson

In June 2005, Martin Lee Anderson, a Florida teenager, took a joyride with his sister, a cousin and two friends in his grandmother's jeep. They had an accident. The grandmother had to press charges in order to receive money for the vehicle. Martin was put on probation. A few months later, he was charged with violating the terms of his probation for trespassing at a school. His parents had to choose between a distant detention center and a boot camp nearby. They chose the boot camp. (Narrative drawn from this account).

Martin arrived at the boot camp on January 5, 2006, his "intake day". On an intake day, boys were made to run 16 laps and do multiple push-ups and sit-ups. Martin fell while on his last lap. Nine Guards beat, kneed, and kicked him, in addition to applying pressure-points behind his ears several times, while a nurse watched. They forced him to inhale ammonia while closing his mouth. After about half-an-hour of this, when the boy did not respond, they called in medical help. The boy died at a hospital a day later. He was 14 years old.

The county medical examiner later said in an autopsy report that Martin died from internal bleeding arising from "sickle cell trait".

In February 2006, the Miami Herald (and CNN) obtained a video of the beating recorded at the boot camp. The ensuing furore led to a tortuous investigation which ended yesterday with the guards and the nurse who played onlooker being charged.

Florida now has a law which closed its boot camps and replaced them with facilities focused more on education and counseling.

I will leave it to you to guess Martin's race.

More on the Indian economy

Shunya has made a few interesting points about my previous post on the Indian economy. My response was getting a bit long, so I have elevated it to an independent post by itself.

The Gini coefficient tends to magnify small differences between Lorenz curves. I speak from experience with ROC curves, which are close cousins of Lorenz curves. I would be wary of reading a great deal into small Gini index differences.

In any case, income inequality is a bit more tolerable if the lowest income levels are well above subsistence levels. To visualize this, imagine two histograms of income, A and B. Distribution A is relatively compact, but its left tail extends almost to zero. Distribution B is more spread out (more inequality) but its left tail is at a much higher value than that of A. (In other words, B is shifted substantially to the right and is wider). I think most people would agree that distribution B would be better for a country than distribution A.

To make this point concrete, consider poverty levels in the US and India. In the US, the threshold is set at an annual income of about $20,000 for a family of four and the percentage of the population below the threshold is about 12.6%. In India, a very low level of income is used for the poverty threshold (the better to get a good number for the fraction of the population below it). Using numbers from this report for reference, a threshold of Rs. 500 per person per month in 2005 seems to be an appropriate definition of the official Indian poverty line. About 23.6 % of Indians are below this poverty line. This amounts to an annual income of Rs. 24000 for a family of four. Conversion to US dollars (at an exchange rate of Rs. 45 to the dollar) and multiplication by a PPP factor of about 5 brings the poverty level to about $2700. To summarize:

	Poverty line	Fraction below
India	$2,700	23.60%
US	$20,000	12.60%

A heck of a lot of people are a heck of a lot poorer in India.

The last point about India's democratic freedoms is very important, but tangential to the issue I am addressing. Economic performance may be measured and evaluated on its own. Adding political freedom to the criteria for deciding which country is more admirable is a personal preference, one that coincides completely with my own. Nevertheless, it is a personal preference and, speaking in economic terms, changes the utility function altogether.

Shunya's defense of the urban middle-class Indian's celebratory mood is a defense of the mindset I described in my previous post. Having come 10 m from the starting line in a 100 m race is certainly an achievement. You only have to agree not to look at how others are doing. Bring the champagne along. I would be more than happy to raise a toast.

(Robber) Baron Clive of Plassey

On June 23, 1757, Robert Clive, a Lieutenant Colonel in the King's Army, led the East India Company's troops to victory against Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah at Palashi . It was less a battle and more of a skirmish, what with the English having ensured the non-participation of about two-thirds of Siraj-ud-Daulah's army through a conspiracy. In the immediate aftermath of the victory, Clive arm-twisted his puppet Mir Jafar into paying huge sums of money to the British. He helped himself to about 20,80,000 rupees, an amount that is quoted in several places as £234,000.

I have always been frustrated at not being able to fathom the scale of the looting. Here are some indicators of scale that I have come across recently:

• According to this account of historical money and prices in the 18th century, the upper limit of a nobleman's annual income was about £25,000. Clive's take from Palashi was nearly ten times the annual income of perhaps the richest people in England.
  
• This House of Commons Library research paper tells us that the 1750 £ was worth about 150 times the 2005 £. This means that Clive's earnings amounted to £35.1 million, when expressed in modern terms. I suspect that this would be hard to beat in terms of remuneration for a day's work.

The total amount that the British extracted from the Murshidabad treasury was about £3 million. That would work out to £450 million today.

Time for the champagne

I kept reading about the booming Indian economy doing very well, so I decided to check out some of the data:

• World Bank measures of economic size (2005 data):

• GDP in US dollars: India ranks 12th, with a GDP of $785 billion. The US tops the list, with a GDP of $12.5 trillion. China is 4th, with a GDP of $2.2 trillion.

• GNP in US dollars: India ranks 10th with $ 793 billion, China is 4th with $2.6 trillion and the US is 1st with $13 trillion.

• GDP with Purchasing Power Parity: India ranks 4th, with a PPP GDP of $3.82 trillion, China is 2nd ($8.6 trillion) and the US is first ($12.4 trillion).
  

• Per capita PPP GDP:
  
• US: $43,000
• China: $6615
• India: $3473

(The populations are, roughly, China: 1.3 billion, India 1.1 billion and the US 300 million).

• In PPP terms, the pie in India is large, but unfortunately so is the population. Even if we make the totally unreal assumption that everyone gets an equal share of the pie, the slice is very very small. If we look at the size of the 2005 pie slice relative to other countries, we find that India ranks 144th and China is 107th. The US is 3rd.

• Of course, income distribution is extremely unequal in both India and China, so poverty is widespread. Rural-urban disparities are huge. However, China is doing much better than India on a variety of fronts, both in terms of infrastructure as well as in terms of basic human development. This article provides the details.

In India, people revel in the media hype about growth rates and celebrate how economic reforms undertaken in 1991 (or liberalization/globalization) have worked wonders. As this paper points out, a look at the data makes it apparent that the high growth period started at least a decade earlier. This makes India's growth period roughly coincident with China's. China is already far ahead of India and pulling away even further.

One more indicator of China's rapidly increasing economic power is the astounding level of its foreign exchange reserves. These are now close to the $1 trillion mark, growing at about $20 billion a month. India's forex reserves are at a mere $167 billion.

I have an analogy for the Indian frame of mind. Imagine you are running a 100 m race. When you reach the 10 m mark, you turn around, look back, and say: "Look at how wonderful I am! I have come so far from the starting line!" Most of the other runners are beyond the 60 m mark. The only other runner comparable to you is at the 40 m mark and gathering speed. You pat yourself on the shoulder and start looking for the champagne.

Men in black

Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian descent, was arrested in the US in September 2002 and later sent to Syria to be tortured. He was released after 10 months in confinement. Now, a Canadian commission, after a two-and-a-half year enquiry, has found that he was completely innocent. According to the Washington Post, "U.S. officials refused to cooperate with the Canadian inquiry". Arar's lawsuit in the US has been dismissed by a judge, citing "national security". Try and recall this the next time you watch "Law and Order" and marvel at the intricacies of the American justice system.

The Washington Post, with an eye for telling detail, claims: "Those renditions are often carried out by CIA agents dressed head to toe in black, wearing masks, who blindfold their subjects and dress them in black."

Black deeds they might be, but who says they have to be carried out in unfashionable attire ?

Omkara

I recently watched Omkara on DVD. This hyped film is the second in a series of adaptations of Shakespeare plays by director Vishal Bharadwaj, who continues to be a very competent music composer for Hindi films. Omkara is based on Othello, and is a fairly successful transplant to an Indian context. The plot stays true to the original story line. The casting is quite good and the characters are well-etched. Saif Ali Khan is absolutely brilliant as Langda Tyagi, the movie's version of Iago. There are only two other comparably outstanding portrayals of villainy in the last 30 odd years of Hindi films that I can recall: Amjad Khan's Gabbar from Sholay and Sadashiv Amrapurkar's Rama Shetty from Ardha Satya.

One of the highlights of the film is its dialogue. It is carefully crafted, idiomatic, harsh and funny. It freely uses the Western U.P. dialect, which is close to Haryanvi. It is not easy to follow unless you know Hindi quite well. Cuss words, which have been taboo for so long in Hindi films, abound in Omkara. Gaalis referring to maa, behen and beti are aplenty. (If you are unfamiliar with Hindi, a gaali is a swear word and maa, behen and beti mean mother, sister and daughter respectively).

Strangely though, the script writers for this film (and others as well) suddenly turn coy for certain words. The ass is referred to, somewhat weakly, as the pichchwada. At one point, Langda Tyagi, in conversation with his sidekick, bemoans his fate by saying : "Teri aur meri kismat gadhe ke ling se likhi gayi hai" (Our fate has been written with a donkey's dick). Hundreds of millions of men who live in India and speak Hindi will readily be able to supply the correct words. I am not sure why this misplaced concession to good taste was made.

An interesting sidelight that caught my eye is that the main characters are all Brahmans, as is obvious from their last names - Shukla, Tyagi, Tiwari, Upadhyaya etc. My knowledge of Western UP is limited to recognizing it as the preserve of Jats and so the Brahman gangsters struck me as being unusual. A quick Google search reveals that gangsterism in western Uttar Pradesh is an equal opportunity employment scheme. I was worried there for a moment that the Brahmans were grabbing yet another coveted profession.

Gangster or Mafia backdrops are becoming quite common in Hindi films now. The first few of these were interesting for being realistic. Nowadays, the main point of the Mafia setting is to allow the director to show some gratuitous violence and to create a sense of menace. I generally found the earlier Mafia films (for example, Company) interesting for their reputed realism. Despite the highly competent performances and all round good film-making, somehow the Mafia goons in Omkara didn't feel as menacing and murderous as the ones in reality are.

Watch the movie if you get a chance. Saif Ali Khan's performance makes it worthwhile.

Simple things

The 5th anniversary of September 11, 2001 has resulted in a lot of deep thought on the web and elsewhere about terrorism. Much American writing perceives this as a unique evil, a successor to fascism, nazism and communism. As America battled the great evils of the 20th century, so shall it win this "struggle for civilization", Bush said, and "lead the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty".

In all the noise about terrorism, I believe some simple things remain unsaid. I offer some here:

• Terrorism is not a uniquley American problem. Defining terrorism as violence against randomly targeted civilians by non-state groups, we can identify several countries that have suffered for long: Israel, India, Sri Lanka and Colombia are examples. People in other countries like Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, Britain and Spain have been victims of occasional, albeit brutal, incidents. If it is not a uniquely American problem, it is unlikely to have a uniquely American solution.
  

• In almost every case of terrorist violence, there is a political context. This does not mean that the political context justifies the terrorism. Nevertheless, it is necessary to understand the underlying political problem in order to solve it. Good police action will likely mitigate the problem but will not solve it. Terrorism is the symptom of an underlying disease. Treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease is a bad idea.
  

• The elephant in the room is the unacknowledged political context of terrorism against Americans. The context has many dimensions, but one common underlying thread: the use and abuse of military and economic muscle to project power and earn profits around the world. In the middle east, what started with Iran in the 1950s is still continuing in Iraq today.

• Terrorism is not an ideology. It may well be a tactic adopted by some ideologues, but that does not make it an ideology. Most often it is employed in the service of some political aims - Palestine, Punjab and Kashmir are good examples. Any particular strand of terrorism dies out only when adherents to its underlying cause dwindle in number.
  

• Terrorism is too broad a category. Wanting to defeat terrorism is somewhat like wanting to end all violence. We may be able to curb violence (and control terrorism) but it is not likely that we will eradicate either of the two.
  

• A good analogy for terrorism is cancer. Cancers are of many different kinds and depend a lot on context and individual circumstances. There is no panacea for cancer. Prevention and careful disease management are the keys to prolonging life. There are no guarantees that a particular regimen of treatment will be successful. (It is surprising how far the analogy goes. Radiation therapy is like the often brutal action by security forces. It damages healthy tissue without necessarily curing the sickness).
  

In the 1970s, the Nixon administration had declared a war on cancer. After about 35 years, even with the best scientific talent that the world has had to offer, cancer is not completely understood, let alone vanquished. I don't foresee the current war on terror faring that much better.

Brand strategy

So much of American consciousness is dominated by advertising and marketing that it is no surprise that the serious business of regime change, war and democracy promotion in the middle east has to be branded exactly right. First, we had the GWOT (global war on terror). Since that wasn't really catching on, a rebranding was ordered. Unimaginative Pentagon types came up with G-SAVE (global struggle against violent extremism). This time around, with the civil war raging in Iraq, poll numbers stubbornly stuck in the 30s and with elections looming, it is time to roll out a new brand. What better way to revive the flagging fortunes of the glorious struggle (and, incidentally, the poll numbers) than to sneak in a new term ?

The occasion for the launch was the discovery of the alleged plot in the UK to blow up airliners traveling to the US. From now on, the believers will faithfully replace "terrorists" with "Islamic fascists" and claim that the US/Western Civilization/the world is locked in a bitter struggle with the totalitarian ideology of Islamic fascism.

The term has been used, mostly in its variant form of Islamofascism, by the clash-of-civilization brigade for a few years. It is freely employed to describe the supposed ideology of a motley crew which includes the Taliban, Al Qaeda , Hamas, Hezbollah and any other member of the axis-of-the-generally-disagreeable.

Being an advocate of truth in advertising, I feel compelled to protest the inaccuracy of the description. Fascism, my trusted Oxford English Reference Dictionary tells me, means

1. the principles and organization of the extreme right-wing nationalist movement, prevailing in Italy under Mussolini (1922-43).
2. any similar nationalist and authoritarian movement.

A further note adds:

.... Although there is no coherent body of political doctrine associated with Fascism, it tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group over others .....

The Taliban were clearly medieval, misogynistic and puritanical brutes. Al Qaeda phrases its ideology in terms of injustices wreaked upon the Muslim ummah. Hamas and Hezbollah cast themselves as resistance movements. Hezbollah is a Shia organization while the other three are Sunni. The Taliban are Pushtuns who speak a different language than the other three groups. In other words, they are all quite different from each other.

What they have in common is that they are Islamic. It can probably be said that they endorse fundamentalist interpretations of religion and society, though Hezbollah and Hamas are not emphasizing that very much. It is also likely that many of them believe in the inevitability of the restoration of a universal caliphate, just as many fundamentalist Christians believe in the rapture.

I don't see fascism in evidence here. The crucial ingredients of aggressive nationalism and assumptions of racial/ethnic superirority are missing.

Maybe a slightly more descriptive term for the common features of these groups is Islamic fundamentalism. However, that still ignores the political contexts in which these movements flourish. Of course, nuanced understanding is no match for snappy slogans. And then, fundamentalism as the evil of our times is so retro, having had its day during the Reagan era.

Onwards, then, in the glorious struggle with the Islamic fascists who hate our freedoms.

And justice for all

I have come to regard the Guantanamo bay detentions as being the most despicable example of blatant injustice in the modern world. Arbitrary detention without recourse to the courts or due process is an utter disgrace for any civilized society.

The detentions are now almost into their fifth year with barely a whimper of protest. It is perhaps true that worse injustices have occurred and continue to occur all over the world. However, the detentions by the US government are particularly despicable because they are such blatant violations of justice taking place in a country with a long tradition of emphasis on individual rights. That this can happen so easily in an open society such as the US is chilling.

The mythology of the US justice system is a long-standing staple of books, movies and TV dramas . We all know that defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Despite this, Bush, Cheney and other administration officials keep repeating that the prisoners are all terrorists, without it being proven. In fact, these frequent assertions are contradicted by some simple facts:

• The number of prisoners has gone down over the years from over 650 to 450, due to many people being released or being handed over to their home countries. A further 120 are scheduled to be transferred or released. If they were all terrorists, why were so many of them released ?
  
• According to this report based on US government conclusions, 55% of the detainees have not committed any hostile act against the US. 86% of the prisoners were originally picked up by the Northern Alliance or Pakistan and exchanged for bounties. This makes it very likely that many of them were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If indeed some of the prisoners are terrorists, they should be tried, convicted and punished duly. The US justice system, never shy of handing out death penalties, has a full range of harsh punishments available to it. The aim of detaining dangerous terrorists can be easily achieved through the normal judicial system.

The various contortions started by being merely bizarre . Consider, for example:

• the creation of the new category, "enemy combatants" in order to dodge the Geneva conventions,
  
• the "military commissions", "administrative review boards" and "combatant status review tribunals", all designed to bypass the courts,
• the arguments claiming that US courts had no jurisdiction over Guantanamo bay.
• the scornful response to allegations of torture by claims that prisoners are fed honey-glazed chicken and lemon fish.

They have now gone over into the surreal. We recently had six sigma examples of moral obtuseness. Three detainees committed suicide by hanging themselves with clothing and bedsheets. The camp commander called it asymmetric warfare waged against the US. Another official called the suicides a good PR move. I actually felt physically dizzy when I read about it. I doubt if even Kafka could have dreamed up characters such as these.

The recent Supreme Court decision gives me some hope that this executive absolutism may be reversed. I am not holding my breath for any prosecutions though. Fine legal minds such as "Geneva-conventions-are-quaint" Gonzales and "torture memo" Yoo have surely figured out by now that:

(a) breaking the Geneva conventions is illegal according to the war crimes law and
(b) the Supreme Court agrees with this.

That is why they are seeking changes to the law itself.

Air power

Tom Engelhardt, whose site has been an island of sanity in the cacophony that is commentary on the web, has a superbly crafted essay on the brutality of Air wars. He expresses what I have felt for a long time. Qana provides yet more evidence of the horrific consequences of the ultimate in asymmetrical warfare. I urge you to read this essay and visit the site often.

Next time you are enjoying a quiet suburban evening and an aircraft flies by, imagine what it would be like for it to rain 500 pound bombs down on where you are. Imagine what happens to the kids you see around you. And then think about 'shock and awe' and ponder the varieties of barbarism.

D. D. Kosambi

I have just finished reading a book I have been planning to read for a long time: An introduction to the study of Indian History by D. D. Kosambi. It is one of the most unusual books I have ever read. The innocuous title is a bit misleading - the book is a how-to manual for anthropological field work and numismatics in addition to being a radical approach to Indian History. It is not easy reading for the casual reader, and I also suspect that a scientist or an engineer would appreciate the rigor of the methods more than a traditional historian. After all, not very many books on Indian history will have a note telling you that the distribution of weights in a hoard of coins (deposited in the Prince of Wales museum in Bombay) is skew-negative and platykurtic, with a weight standard of 3.51 g and variance 0.0307 ! (If you have to know, this is from note 37 of the commentary to the illustrations, 1956 edition, Popular Book Depot, Bombay).

Damodar Dharmanad Kosambi (1907-1966) was perhaps exposed to rigorous scholarship early on, being the son of a renowned Buddhist scholar who had to move his family to Cambridge, MA after accepting a teaching position at Harvard. Kosambi studied Mathematics, History and languages at Harvard and returned to India in the late 1920s. He taught for short periods at Banaras Hindu University, Aligarh Muslim University and for over a decade at Fergusson College in Pune. From 1946 onwards, he held a chair for mathematics at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Bombay. He lived in Pune and commuted to Bombay every day on the train called the 'Deccan Queen'. The preface to the book is datelined 'Deccan Queen, December 7, 1956'.

A list of Kosambi's works spanning different fields is given at the end of this brief biography, from where I obtained the details for the short sketch above. His father seems to have been a polymath and a remarkable personality in his own respect, according to this online account.

Kosambi is a master of all he surveys in this book - his dexterity, scholarship and decisive judgments reminded me of Eric Hobsbawm. The book is fascinating in many respects - the choice of photographs, the detailed endnotes, the insistence on deducing historical information from observing ritual and practice among the various castes and tribes in India, the obvious comfort with the ancient history of Iran and the near east, the deep knowledge of Sanskrit and Sanskrit literature, Kosambi's scientific studies of coin hoards etc. His contempt for poor scholarship is expressed without reservation and with caustic precision. His writing is terse and elegant. It often rises to the eminently quotable:

• Chapter 1, Note 11, on sources of information about castes and tribes:

The Indian decennial Census reports are useful before 1951, when the whole idea of classification by caste was officially abandoned as a Canutian method of abolishing caste distinctions.

• Chapter 3, Section 3.1, p.51, describing the blocks of 12' x 20' two-room tenements discovered during excavations at Mohenjodaro and Harappa:

These were called 'coolie lines' by the excavators, whose ingenuity had found modern names for the streets, but rarely any explanation beyond the mental reach of an Imperial Briton.

Unfortunately, this does not mean the book is well-written. The organization of the material is unintuitive and the flow from one section to another is not obvious. My guess is that the book arose from a set of notes which were later woven together. In many places, I got the feeling that either too much was being made of thin evidence (something which Kosambi accuses others of doing) or that I was being rail-roaded into some conclusion based on current anthropological observations.

Kosambi's offers his definition of history early on: it is "the presentation, in chronological order, of the successive developments in the means and relations of production". He goes on to show that given the conspicuous absence of any chronologies or historical narratives for the ancient period, this is the best that a historian can do. He also implies that in any case, this is exactly what a historian ought to be doing. I am not convinced that this is all one ought to do, especially for later periods in Indian history.

Standard talking points

The Israel Hezbollah clash continues to claim more civilians. As of yesterday, about 350 Lebanese and 20 Israeli civilians were dead. Israel's ground invasion is not going as smoothly as , say, the 1967 war, which lasted all of 6 days. Fighting is reportedly heavy. Hezbollah seems to have anticipated the ground invasion much as Israel did.

I got sucked into a water cooler discussion with a few colleagues yet again. The most striking thing is the consistency of the talking points used in defense of Israeli actions. The faithful parroting of these talking points by the ever compliant American media has had the desired effect - people who are otherwise perfectly reasonable have internalized them.

The first rhetorical question that gets asked is: who started it ? The schoolyard logic is that if we are able to establish that Israel did not start the conflict, that would absolve it of blame for all subsequent actions. While it is clear that Hezbollah triggered this round of fighting, both sides seem to have planned for it for a while. My problem though, is not with the fact that Israel responded, but with the exact nature of that response. I can't see how Hezbollah's having started the whole thing this time around justifies large scale bombing of civilian areas and infrastructure, such as a dairy farm.

In any case, Gideon Levy tackles the rhetorical question far better than I can. The man restores my faith in humanity.

When I make this point about civilian casualties and suffering, I find that people refuse to acknowledge it. The most I can get is the canned response: "it is unfortunate, but hey, what are you gonna do ?". One of my interlocutors exclaimed, "it happens in every single conflict!", somehow implying that it was nothing to get worked up about.

The second question is almost always "So what do you think is the solution ?". The burden is now upon me to suggest solutions to an intricate set of knotty problems which have persisted for decades. In a futile gesture, I suggest that the root of the problems is ultimately political. That doesn't wash. I then say that in the short term, it is better to tackle militancy with police action such as arrests and trials than by firing missiles into apartment buildings. I am then told that I am naive and that such action is not possible, despite the fact that precisely such action has resulted in about 9000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.

The clincher I find most puzzling is "We can't talk about what is happening while sitting here in America" or a variant thereof. Somehow, we forfeit the right to discuss or criticize anything that Israel is involved in because we are not in Israel. By the same token, we can't discuss any problems anywhere in the world, whether they be the horror that is Iraq, the inevitable disaster that is Afghanistan or the plight of the Darfuri people. The injunction is perhaps a way of saying that unless one has been at the receiving end of terrorism, one is forbidden from discussing responses to it. I don't buy that argument either, because other countries have had problems with persistent terrorism as well.

One major ethical escape hatch is to refuse to contemplate the numbers of civilian deaths. Casualty counts are not considered admissible evidence. No reason is ever given, of course, but "you can't think like that !" is thrown at me. My guess is that word has gone out that the moral high ground is impossible to achieve in the face of large casualty counts, so they should not be allowed in to the debate. This tactic is of course not new. It has been repeatedly used by the "we don't do body counts" hyperpower as well.

The use of these talking points by professional purveyors of propaganda (journalists, op-ed writers, think tank experts) is not surprising. Their livelihood depends on their ethical blindness. What is astonishing is that a lot of ordinary people have been completely bought the sophistry. I guess this is what willful blindness looks like.

Israel Hezbollah conflict

The Israel-Hezbollah war is into its sixth day. More than 200 people are dead in Lebanon and about 15 in Israel. The magnitude of Israel's reaction was a bit of a surprise, since skirmishes with Hezbollah are presumably not unusual and hostage/prisoner swaps have taken place in the past. The reasons may have to do with Ehud Olmert wanting to appear tough domestically. While that may be so, the military or strategic aim of the attacks remains a bit unclear. However, support for the Israeli reaction is widespread, with dissenting voices being in the minority.

This won't last long, for several reasons. First, there are not that many targets in Lebanon. Secondly and perhaps more importantly, citizens of western countries are beginning to suffer. Some have been killed. Now, we can't have that happening for too long, can we ? Indeed, there seem to be some noises from Israel which indicate that a search for a quick way out is on. The indispensable hyperpower itself is reportedly setting a deadline .

The comments sections of online news sites are teeming with people supporting Israel's right to "defend" itself. The suggestion that perhaps the Lebanese people have little control of Hezbollah and thus do not deserve to die is not entertained. The debate is in terms of entities ("state of Israel", "Lebanon", "Hezbollah") and notions of crime, punishment, fault and retaliation applied to them. Human casualties rarely enter the picture, if ever.

In any case, for the inside angle on Hezbollah, check out what Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke learned first hand. Robin Wright of the Washington Post has done something similar, though she feels compelled to strive for the obligatory neutrality so dear to American journalism. If you are looking for a quick primer, this serves quite well.

Mumbai

The train blasts in Mumbai on July 7th have left 200 dead and scores injured in their wake. As Prem Shankar Jha points out, this is but one more attack in a series that seems deliberately designed to unleash communal killing in India. I was immensely surprised when the Varanasi attacks did not lead to riots and killing. Varanasi is a deeply religious town and is not exactly renowned for liberal cosmopolitanism. It has a sizeable Muslim population living cheek-by-jowl with Hindus in a very densely populated city. That there were no riots is close to a modern miracle. Riots in India occur with far less provocation.

What worries me is that this may not last. The fact that these attacks are carried out by Muslims (albeit jihadi psychopaths) is not lost on anyone. At some point soon, the tendency to lash out against Muslims in general will be impossible to control.

Some of my recent conversations with expatriate Indian acquaintances about these happenings have been a bit distressing. Along with the justifiable denunciations of Pakistan and the ISI, I heard the regulation stereotyping of Indian Muslims as well: they never support India in cricket matches, they have too many wives and too many children, they never condemn terrorist acts in India, they are anti-national etc. The alarming new development is the admiration my acquaintances had for Israeli tactics in the middle east. When I argued that Israeli collective punishment is usually disproportionate and morally wrong, I found that I was making no headway. Basically, people are fairly comfortable with the killing of innocent civilians in retaliation for terrorist attacks.

When I responded to the rhetorical question: "So, what is the solution ?" by saying that there is no easy solution, the dissatisfaction was evident. People seem to prefer the simplicity of violent retaliation. The bombing of Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir and some major Pakistani cities was thought to be a good idea.

I was bothered by the fact that people I was talking to were utterly oblivious to the death and suffering their suggested retaliation would cause. These are people who are living in comfortable circumstances in the US and most likely do not know anyone who would be harmed in the least bit by the purported bombing.

I have often wondered what aspect of the personality allows otherwise reasonable people to endorse large-scale violence - is it the inability to imagine and empathize with other people's agony, the remoteness of the ultimate victim or just plain, raw hatred ?