Pakistan, ostensibly created to safeguard the interest of the Muslims of India, but in actual fact to save the Muslim landowners of West Pakistan from land reforms which were on the plank of Indian National Congress platform, had a large impact of the more reactionary of the Muslim clerics. Main-stream Maulanas, not recognizing nationalism as a driving force in Islam,[Read More…]
In the early days of World War II, activism was in a state of suspended animation on the political front in India. Nearly the whole of the Congress leadership was in jail and their followers were lying low. British forces had suffered reverses everywhere; they had been driven out of Europe and thrown out of their far Eastern[Read More…]
The US believed that Muslims between Greece and China, ‘The Arc of Islam’ would function as fire wall against the USSR, and might even incite the restive Muslims inside the USSR to open rebellion. 1. The U.S. and other Western countries and Israel have in turn befriended, manipulated, double crossed and cynically used the Mujahideen as cold war allies. After[Read More…]
Religious revival and highly charged conflicts in a shrinking world make it difficult for people of competing faiths to live together. Fundamentalists of all creeds exhibit a striking commonality; an inability to think rationally. Menachem Begin bombed the King Edward Hotel in Jerusalem 1945, communal riots in Jabalpur India in 1961, religious riots in Beirut in 1983, Babri[Read More…]
Jean Paul Sartre in the preface to, ‘The Wretched of the Earth: The European elite manufactured a native elite by picking up promising adolescents, branded them with western culture, stuffed them with high sounding phrases, brought them to the ‘mother country’ and sent them back’ white washed’, where they echoed European slogans.1 The third world is not a homogeneous[Read More…]
The US believed that Muslims between Greece and China, The Arc of Islam would function as fire wall against the USSR, and might even incite the restive Muslims inside the USSR to open rebellion. The U.S. and other Western countries and Israel have in turn befriended, manipulated, double crossed and cynically used the Mujahideen as cold war allies. After the[Read More…]
My ancestors were directly affected by the momentous turn history took. Though not in the eye of the storm, living far from the center of action, and being academics rather than men of action, yet they lost a great deal because they would not collaborate with the ghasib (usurper), the term my nana used for the British till[Read More…]
Humans started building cities four thousand years ago, in Mesopotamia, then in Egypt, China, India. 1. Complexities of life arose, Myth of Cain, Ziggurat, Tower of Bavel. Human empowerment led to diminution of gods, Other gods emerged, Marduk, Chinese Pangu, Vedic gods, Adonis of Greece. 2. Axial age was the beginning of organized religions-Confucian, Tao, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mid-Eastern Monotheism,[Read More…]
South Asians have a long and honorable history of migration. They took to the high seas for adventure or to escape political persecution for daring to challenge foreign rule. A substantial number left their homes to seek a better future, as the countries of their birth had suffered from plunder at the hands of colonists. Colonial rulers transported a great[Read More…]
I would like us to give serious consideration to alternative media in the USA. I know a lot of us watch/listen to NPR, Pacifica Radio, Link TV and Democracy now. I am sure quite a few are members of the organizations. We are all cognizant of the fact that the so-called mainstream media are not mainstream in their out look..[Read More…]
Jean Paul Sartre in the preface to, ‘The Wretched of the Earth: The European elite manufactured a native elite by picking up promising adolescents, branded them with western culture, stuffed them with high sounding phrases, brought them to the ‘mother country’ and sent them back’ white washed’, where they echoed European slogans.1 The third world is not a homogeneous place.[Read More…]
“Hum jo Tareek rahoan mein marai gai,” (We, who were ambushed in dark alleys…) — Faiz Ahmad Faiz.1 During their 200-year rule over India, the British colonizers had, among other self-serving measures, introduced an education system which would inhibit innovation and produce clerks for their administration. In spite of that, the movement for liberty and social justice grew among Indians.[Read More…]
My submission is that the Feudal system, Army, Bureucrats and Mullahs constitue the Evil Quad of Pakistan. What do we mean by feudalism? It has several facets-moral and ethical values, political and economic system ,market economy integrating with it etc. In my view all the above are a composite whole. Moral and ethical values get far more exposure as they[Read More…]
The problems Pakistan has faced over time. Here they are in brief: 1-The population explosion. 2-Education and health care. 3-Unemployment. 4-Water and Electricity. 5-Public works. 6-Discrimination against ‘other’ sects, non-Muslims, ethnicities. 7-Fully 75% of the budget goes to Defense’ and interest on loans. 8-Early Blunders. 9-The Genesis of the Evil Quad. -Population Explosion-Again from 35 million to 220 million in[Read More…]
Corruption in the sense of civil and military servants and Public officials and politicians of Pakistan pocketing public funds or taking bribes is too well known and documented by in-country and international agencies, to be worthy of any unusual notice. After all, the country has had the dubious distinction of being on the top of the list of corrupt countries[Read More…]
“Suppose there are ten people in this room. Seven are starving, and one is winning medals, and two are doing OK. And I say, ‘Look at these seven people who are starving,’ and you say, ‘Oh, don’t be so negative, no, things are not so bad – look at the other three.’ Really?” Arundhati Roy. Globalization of the economic[Read More…]
Till the 1960’s, Neoliberalism had the same status in economics as Wahhabism (a supremacist, fundamentalist and intolerant version of Islam) had in Islam. (1). How it became the guiding principle of Western countries is an interesting question. Neoliberalism claims that human beings are best served by liberating the entrepreneurial class through strong private property rights, free market and free trade. State’s only role was to[Read More…]
America is the richest nation in history, yet it has the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented amount of Americans living in dire straits. Over 50 million citizens are living in poverty and need food stamps to eat, and 50 percent of U.S. children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhood. Approximately 20,000 people are added[Read More…]
Organized religion is like organized crime. It preys on people’s weaknesses, generates huge profits for its operators and is almost impossible to eradicate-Mike Hermann The above quote is defeatist. Violence in the current day and age is regarded by most mainstream Muslims as a reaction to inequity, injustice, and disempowerment, real or perceived. Stronger nations attack weaker ones when the[Read More…]
In his weakened post-1965 war state, Ayub could never hope to withstand the combined onslaught of East and West Pakistan. The campaign against him, led initially by students and industrial workers, had caught the imagination of the people. This was the last time people of the two wings were to unite on one platform. In a desperate attempt[Read More…]
An Overview Corruption in the sense of civil and military servants and Public officials and politicians of Pakistan pocketing public funds or taking bribes is too well known and documented by in-country and international agencies, to be worthy of any unusual notice. After all, the country has had the dubious distinction of being on the top of the list of[Read More…]
Pakistani expatriates in the USA have developed a consensus that the genesis of what ails Pakistan can be traced to the feudal system our former colonial masters imposed on India as a corp of supporters which they continued to throw crumbs to till the very end of their rule. The colonizers declared them and their vassals martial race,and used them[Read More…]
In order to understand the edicts of a religion in an objective fashion, one has to look at the norms of the times the religion was offered. Islam was offered in a tribal-mercantile milieu. Women in the tribal age were treated as children, to be chastised when necessary. Islam, reflecting its mercantile face, eased their situation by ordaining that[Read More…]
Marxists advocate bourgeois revolution to break the fetters of feudalism. Capitalist markets are only the most advanced form of exchange. Industrialization was the inevitable outcome of human instincts. In the Marxist version, petty commodity production freed of feudalism grows into capitalism. 1 Many people came to believe, especially after the collapse of communism, that capitalism was the natural condition of[Read More…]
19th century civilization was based on balance of power, gold standard, self- regulating markets and liberal state. Self-adjusting market is a Utopia and could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society. Civilization springs from interaction of a great number of independent factors, not reducible to simplistic[Read More…]
Humanity carries an historical baggage. Religion is arguably the most important component of the burden. Defined as a set of beliefs in the super natural causation of natural phenomenon, it most likely arose when humans acquired the faculty of coherent thought and communication skills. Prior to that, at the point of divergence from their closest cousins the chimpanzees, and like[Read More…]
There are literally thousands of NGOs, the better known being Oxfam, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International . NGOs are primarily a modern phenomenon, though The World Alliance of YMCAs was founded in 1855, and the International Committee for the Red Cross came into being in 1863. 1 According to one estimate, some 40,000 now qualify as international NGOs (with programs and affiliates[Read More…]
IMF and WB do not function like UN agencies on a ‘One nation, one vote’ system. Voting power is pegged to the size of economy and on financial contribution to the WB. The after effects of some of the decisions of IMF/WB are as under: In 1994, Zambia declared that it could not hire an additional 9,000 school teachers it[Read More…]
The West seeks to preserve present relations, which enable it to make immense profits by exploiting natural and manpower resources of the whole world. It also molds socioeconomic development of neo-colonial states to the purpose, by adopting development models, which will be based on foreign capital for finance, technology and know-how. There is good reason behind the billions of easy[Read More…]
Violence against women has been a universal phenomenon in the East and the West. In the West measures have been taken against it. They have met a certain degree of success. In the East and Africa, identification of the problem has just begun in the last two decades and little by way of effective measures against it has been done.[Read More…]
Religious revival and highly charged conflicts in a shrinking world make it difficult for people of competing faiths to live together. Fundamentalists of all creeds exhibit a striking commonality; an inability to think rationally. Menachem Begin bombed the King Edward Hotel in Jerusalem 1945, Communal riots in Jabalpur, in India in 1961, religious riots in Beirut in 1983, Babri[Read More…]
“Economic Hitmen (EHM) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the Globe of trillions of dollars…funnel money from W.B, US.AID, …into coffers of huge corporations and into the pockets of a few wealthy families…tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, pay off, extortion, sex and murder…” (1). EHMs arrange loans larger than the country’s ability to pay; it defaults and[Read More…]
“A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.” – Joseph Pulitzer A media system set up to serve the needs of the Financial Institutions will not serve the interests of the majority of the population. Media ownership, since the Bill Clinton deregulation, has been greatly concentrated and globalized. 1. Its[Read More…]
“A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.” – Joseph Pulitzer A media system set up to serve the needs of the Financial Institutions will not serve the interests of the majority of the population. Media ownership, since the Bill Clinton deregulation, has been greatly concentrated and globalized. 1. Its[Read More…]
Religion is not rational, yet attempts are made all the time to prove it is. One example is the Templeton Study. The Templeton Foundation arranged for Christians to pray for 1800 heart patients and tracked the results. It conducted a double-blind study to see if patients who were prayed for, did better. In actual fact, the group, which knew that it[Read More…]
An Overview of Systems of Government. H.L. Mencken said the typical American voter was a boob and the system was booboisie. In order to understand the submission “ Democracy is a Function of Capitalism” one has to delve deep into Social, economic, and political evolution of human race and subject it to critical analysis. Let us start with a few[Read More…]
Bhutto fell victim to a delusion, common to all tin pot dictators; he started taking his own bombast seriously and made a critical mistake. He called a conference of all the nuclear physicists of the country and demanded that they produce a workable nuclear device in the next four to five years. The nuclear scientists in Pakistan were, one and[Read More…]
Religious revival and highly charged conflicts in a shrinking world make it difficult for people of competing faiths to live together. Fundamentalists of all creeds exhibit a striking commonality; an inability to think rationally. Menachem Begin bombed the King Edward Hotel in Jerusalem 1945, communal riots in Jabalpur, in India in 1961, religious riots in Beirut in 1983, Babri mosque[Read More…]
In the 17th century AD, a wave of depression struck Europe. It seemed to affect especially men of genius-John Bunyan, Thomas Gray, John Donne, and Samuel Johnson in England, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Baudelaire in France, Leo Tolstoy in Russia, Max Weber in Germany and in America William James. One Dr George Cheyne lamented in 1733, “Frequency and wanton…self-murders…by this distemper” and[Read More…]
Of all the evils spawned by the tribal/feudal society, honor killing is arguably the most heinous. Apologists try to equate it with “crime of passion” but crimes of passion are abrupt, unmediated, and impulsive acts of violence committed by persons who, in their own lights, have come face to face with an incident wholly repulsive and unacceptable, and who technically[Read More…]
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My Amma (Malayalam word for Mother) passed away on August 22, 2023 at 3.10 AM. It is always difficult to deal with the passing of a parent, that too one’s mother. I thought the grief would go away. No it didn’t. All those bitter sweet memories won’t go away. At night I lie awake for hours. My friend, guide and[Read More…]
