Quite obviously, I've been mulling over topics that most people have been mulling over the last few days - under water basket weaving.
Seriously though, this post is to list some of the talking points which I hope to address - some aspects of the whole affair which have not been adequately addressed everywhere else - on this blog.
These include:
a) The sucky media coverage. The Indian media has clearly failed miserably. I can't decide what sucks more - the completely disgusting and inept media coverage, or the Indian government not having a consistent PR strategy that may have contributed to the perceived ineptness.
b) Bias in the western media towards Pakistan. While I have to give it to the suave Pakistani spokespeople (compared to the slobby, overweight people put out by the Indian Govt. as official spokesmen), the western media has had a consistent bias against India for a long time.
c) Political Correctness - that I think is one of the single biggest factors of the continuing decline of civilization as we know it - and how it is affecting the current crisis.
d) Colossal ineptitude of the Indian Authorities: This is sure to ruffle the feathers of many readers, but it has to be addressed. The image of pot-bellied Mumbai cops storming to
engage the terrorists does not exactly inspire confidence.
Stay tuned.
...and raise you Hanuman?
OK, it didn't go down in exactly that fashion, but Obama
carrying around a small good luck charm in Hanuman's image has India going ga-ga. I'm sure he didn't realize the significance of it, and of course at some point someone in McCain's camp will try to label him as a pagan idol-worshiper. And then will that insult result in Indian-Americans fleeing to the Democrats in droves? What's that? Their only religion is money? Oh...
So what does this mean for Obama? Is he steadily taking up his position as the anti-Bush? Clearly, he is becoming increasingly popular around the world, and this can only mean an improvement of America's international image down the road.
By the way, for all that Bush-McCain talk about not negotiating with your enemies, in the end they found diplomacy an apt solution to at least one of their
problems.
A good friend suggested that instead of sending emails with links and commenting on them, I should instead start blogging for the benefit of mankind and all.
If nothing else, this would presumably save the otherwise innocent bandwidth.
Anyway as a first topic, I decided to take up something slightly controversial - India, with its nukes and the precarious situation it is in with its neighbors. As a catalyst, here is a recent
editorial in IHT which largely echoes my thoughts.
The basic problem is India has China on one side, Pakistan on the other. Both have nukes.
The question is - should India have gone nuke in the first place knowing that someday it'll be surrounded by nuke-toting countries?
While the pseudo-official line is that India went nuke because of China, surely someone should have thought of the ramifications - it ain't pretty surrounded by nucular
countries.
Is this a case of a country applying a greedy heuristic at the given time (going nuclear in the 70s), only to be left in a local minima decades later (now).
Perhaps a dynamic programming approach might have been more fruitful..
