Brown Pundits

Remember those people talking animatedly to themselves in public who
you used to give a wide berth to before you realized that they weren’t
crazy, just the first users of a new Bluetooth technology with wireless
devices tucked behind their ears?

Well, get ready for the next
wave of people acting strange publicly, gesturing and waving their
fingers in your face, with colorful rings around their thumbs. Because
they’re coming, and those rings are the newest addition to the “internet
of things” — wearable technology that promises to change the world. The
rings, called Fins, make your entire palm a gesture interface with
which you can control multiple connected devices.

regards

Will the immigration officers (who may now lose their jobs over this) have the guts to tell him that it is possible to hold a white-man’s visa, yet appear asian? Perhaps Malaysia has a no-naturalization policy for differently-skinned (whites, browns and blacks) people? That may help explain (but not excuse) things a bit.

Malaysia’s
interior minister said two passengers who used stolen passports to
board a Malaysia Airlines plane that went missing with 239 people aboard
had “Asian facial features”, according to a report.

“We will conduct an internal probe, particularly on the officers who
were on duty at the KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport)
immigration counter during flight MH370,” Zahid said.
regards

I would blame loud and proud members of both British Islamists and British Firsters for this turn of affairs, whereby threat of violence can be used to get your way. The protagonist on the Islamist side is Haitham al-Haddad who gets off while making offensive statements about Jews, gays and also about the permissibility of Female Genital Mutilation (in brief: some versions are sunnah or proper).

In response you have Richrd Littlejohn referring to the muslim group visit as a “Jolly Jihadi Boy’s Outing” One would argue that payback (at a personal level and only as speech) is fair-play but certainly not as wholesale intimidation of groups. With every such incident the vicious circle keeps getting twisted into a tighter knot.

Far-right extremists gloated with images of Lego Taliban figures after a Muslim fun day at Legoland was cancelled. The images formed part of an outpouring of glee, spearheaded by EDL
splinter group Casuals United, which greeted news a fun day for Muslim
families at the theme park in Windsor been pulled, following a campaign
of threats and intimidation against it. Opponents of the event – dubbed “halal entertainment” by organisers –
posted jihadi fighter versions of the much loved children’s figures on
social media. They are grasping heavy weaponry and have grenades
strapped to them. 

The cancelled event was planned by the Muslim Research and
Development Foundation and was controversial because its leader, Haitham
al-Haddad, has a history of anti-Semitic comments. Anti-Muslim tweets
and threats of violence on social media forced the decision, which was
made in consultation with Thames Valley police.

Legoland said it was “appalled” at pulling the plug on the event.  Police are investigating a number of offensive messages. A spokesperson for the theme park said: “These alone have led us to
conclude that we can no longer guarantee the happy fun family event
which was envisaged, or the safety of our guests and employees on that
day – which is always our number one priority. 

regards

Over the past six months, our media group has been attacked thrice.
In the first instance, two employees were injured. In the most recent
attack, which took place on a DSNG van of Express News in
January, three staffers were shot dead. The TTP took responsibility for
the last attack. We still have no clue about the other two.


While it is difficult to work under such circumstances, it is not
impossible. But as an editor, one has to be cautious about what appears
in print or online, more so for the safety of our staff.


While we have a duty to inform our readers, we also have a duty to
our colleagues to not put them in unnecessary danger. Being part of the
Coalition for Ethical Journalism, I have repeated time and again to
colleagues that no news story is worth the death of a journalist.
Stories cannot be killed. But people can.


After the attacks, we looked at our policy on the comment and opinion
pieces. On some occasions, we felt contributors went overboard. We did
not stop reporting on militant outfits. We did not censor incidents. We
are in the business of journalism, we know what our readers want. For
some reason, many  have accused us of cowing down. I ask these armchair
analysts to come and spend a day in the field, like my staff do, and
then tell us what to do. 


Working in the media in Pakistan is a fine balancing act these days.
We are one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists. The
public’s expectations have to be balanced with those of different
players, some of whom are extremely sensitive on how we portray them.

We have worked hard to report on the real Pakistan. As an editor, I am
of the firm belief that Pakistan’s main issues are not what the prime
minister or president said that day but health, education, population,
poverty and yes, polio. We have consistently written about the plight of
religious minorities, marginalised communities, crimes against women
and on subjects as varied as human rights and poor governance.


I concede that the space for our media is receding. But Pakistan
still has one of the most vibrant media in the Muslim world. It is an
irony that under the dictatorship under Gen Zia-ul Haq, journalists were
routinely threatened and in some instances incarcerated by authorities.
Now that we are comparatively freer, we are still under threat and
adhere to self censorship as the state has stepped aside and non-state
players are threatening us.


It is somewhat misleading to assume that only the ‘liberal’ media in
Pakistan is under threat. All media houses are affected. What
disappoints me today is that the state has in some ways abdicated its
role of protecting the media. And if that is not enough, some media
houses are playing petty. Instead of rallying behind us when we were
attacked, the largest media house in Pakistan and its allies instead
chose not to run the story. That for me is the bigger tragedy.

regards

Steady buying by foreign investors has led to a strong rally in Indian
markets. Overseas investors have bought heavily into India as a sharply
narrowing current account deficit and a more stable rupee have increased
confidence in a country that only last year was in the midst of its
biggest market turmoil since the balance of payments crisis of 1991.

Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) bought Indian shares worth Rs. 1,273 crore on Thursday, extending their buying streak to a 15th consecutive day for a net of over $1 billion. (Read: FIIs mark their biggest daily purchase since December 19)

Market analyst Sanjeev Bhasin told NDTV that Friday could see more
gains though the real bull market could be witnessed in broader indices,
where stocks have given almost 50-100 per cent returns from recent
3-month lows.

“Foreign flows have turned positive amid an easing in inflation, better
cash management by the government with current account deficit hitting
an 8-year low and the rupee rising to a 3-month high. All this has meant
that India has outperformed the emerging markets,” he added.

This is an useful site for latest updates in election news…we now have poll tracker for individual states….IMO multi-corner contests will be highly tricky to predict (much more so than the USA)

current forecast for  
UP: BJP (41-49) out of (80), 36% of the vote
Bihar: BJP+LJP (22-30) out of (40), 38% of the vote

This is a good article (conclusions below) on electoral studies. In this respect it is imperative that Indians engage in better data gathering and analysis and building better tools (rather than trying to suppress information anytime the ruling party is in trouble…as it usually is).

In view of the quantity and quality of election studies in India, it may
be said that relative to other developing countries, India is
advancing. But compared to studies in developed countries, there is
still much to be done. A systematic accumulation of data for individual
voting behaviours seems to be necessary. The Lokniti programme of CSDS
made a breakthrough in the study of electoral behaviour by inventing
most effective methodology unlike other studies in the field. The
publications in this direction provide enormous materials to carry out
the different aspects of electoral behaviour. Most studies which
examined the confidence of people in the election system or the efficacy
as citizens showed that people had faith in the election system.
Socio-economic status like gender, caste, religion, education, and
income were important in explaining political awareness, exposure to
political propaganda, sense of personal effectiveness in politics, and
party preference. Caste, religion, and to a lesser degree, economic
status, are especially important variables for explaining party
preference. Opinion polls of large-scale samples conducted after the
1980’s are important indicators of overall popular issues and
sentiments. The most important issues of the electorate are those
related daily lives of people such as rising prices or unemployment.
These are undercurrents affecting the party preference of people.

regards

For a (closeted) optimist like me, it seems that this is a precursor to 1792 (or if you prefer 1979). The divine right of kings to rule (backed by clerics backed by royalty) may be coming to an end in the Sunni world. Yusuf Qaradawi is the new Khomeni and he will take over as the most righteous Caliph. If all this happens, it will be certainly a case of living in interesting times.

At the least it is good to imagine the fat-cat exporters of global jihad trembling as they see the pitchforks assemble outside the castle walls. Could not happen to a nicer bunch of people.

Saudi Arabia
has formally designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist
organization, in a move that could increase pressure on Qatar whose
backing for the group has sparked a row with fellow Gulf monarchies. The U.S.-allied kingdom has also designated as terrorist the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq
and the Levant, whose fighters are battling Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad, the Interior Ministry said in a statement published by state
media.

Riyadh
fears the Brotherhood, whose Sunni Islamist doctrines challenge the
Saudi principle of dynastic rule, has tried to build support inside the
kingdom since the Arab Spring revolutions.

In an unprecedented move, Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors
from Qatar on Wednesday, saying Doha had failed to abide by an accord
not to interfere in each others’ internal affairs.

Saudi
Arabia and the UAE are fuming over Qatar’s support for the Muslim
Brotherhood, and resent the way Doha has sheltered influential cleric
Yusuf Qaradawi, a critic of the Saudi authorities, and given him regular
airtime on its pan-Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera.

The
Interior Ministry said on Friday the royal decree would apply to both
Saudis and foreign residents who joined, endorsed or gave moral or
material aid to groups it classifies as terrorist or extremist, whether
inside or outside the country.

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It bears repeating: if all these battles join up into a world war of sorts, it will be a royal mess with all big powers (including China) on one side of the fence. The islamic communities in the border regions will likely be devastated (people will not care much about what goes on in the hinter lands).

 

Matazu, 29, survived the double bomb blast earlier this month in Maiduguri, north-east Nigeria, that killed about 45 people and destroyed seven buildings. It was the latest blow by the terrorist group Boko Haram to shake the foundations of Africa’s most populous state.

Boko
Haram is believed to be responsible for killing at least 1,300 people
in the past two months and more than 130 people in the past week. The radical sect claims ties to al-Qaida and has ambitions to impose sharia law
on Nigeria’s 170 million people. In Boko Haram’s heartland, even the
national military is outgunned in what is fast becoming a lesson to the
world in how not to tackle an Islamist insurgency.

“What is clear
is that they are as ruthless as any Islamist group or terrorists
anywhere in the world,” said Antony Goldman, a west Africa risk analyst
at London-based PM Consulting. “They’re quite happy to hit soft targets,
including schools. Some in the Nigerian administration expect this to be a problem for another 10 years.”

In
some ways, the paradox of Nigeria in 2014 captures that of Africa
itself. The continent has enjoyed a decade of economic growth and the
phrase “Africa rising” has become widespread among investors and
journalists. Yet at the same time the past six months have seen
conflicts erupt in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, while
economic growth has gone hand in hand with deepening inequality.

So
it is with Nigeria which, with oil wealth and a decade of annual growth
around 7%, is set to overtake South Africa as Africa’s biggest economy,
with a value close to $400bn. It has been anointed one of the “Mint” emerging economies – along with Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey – by economist Jim O’Neill. Nigerians drink more champagne than Russians do.

For centuries, the region enjoyed the fruits
of Islamic civilisation. Then in the early 19th century its sultanates
succumbed to a jihad by Shehu Usuman Dan Fodio, who created a unified
caliphate that was the biggest pre-colonial state in Africa, ruling
swaths of what is now northern Nigeria, Niger and southern Cameroon. It
had a strict interpretation of Islam and a culture of scholarship and
poetry. 

Northern
Nigeria did not escape the expansion of the British empire into Africa
and was conquered in 1903. Since then, there has been resistance to
western education, with many Muslim families refusing to send their
children to government-run “western schools”. Shehu Sani, a human rights activist and author of Boko Haram: History, Ideas And Revolt,
said: “The north fought the British colonisers because they thought
they were bringing in western ideas and this would erode Islamic values
and erode their culture. 


The north-east
remained a centre of Islamic learning for children from all over Nigeria
and west Africa, Sani said. Its madrasas did not necessarily encourage
extremism but did shape the founders of Boko Haram, who embraced the
Qur’anic phrase: “Anyone who is not governed by what Allah has revealed
is among the transgressors.”

Some believe the trigger for the
group’s inception was a gubernatorial election campaign in Borno state,
when an opposition candidate organised a militia known as Ecomog, after
the east African intervention force deployed in Sierra Leone and Liberia
in the 1990s. Following the election, the candidate disbanded Ecomog
but did nothing to look after its members.

One of the militia’s
leaders, Mohammed Yusuf, was able to exploit the frustration and
disappointment and blend it with an Islamist agenda that rejected the
failings of secular government to form Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati
wal-Jihad, People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s
Teachings and Jihad. In the north-eastern city of Maiduguri, where
the sect had its headquarters, it was dubbed Boko Haram. Loosely
translated from the Hausa language, this means “western education is
forbidden”. 

Like
so many self-appointed rebels and revolutionaries, Yusuf was not poor.
He was said to be well-educated and to drive a Mercedes. In an interview with the BBC,
he set out the group’s anti-science philosophy: “Prominent Islamic
preachers have seen and understood that the present western-style
education is mixed with issues that run contrary to our beliefs in
Islam. Like rain. We believe it is a creation of God rather than an
evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain. Like
saying the world is a sphere. If it runs contrary to the teachings of
Allah, we reject it. We reject the theory of Darwinism.”

Yusuf set
up a religious complex, which included a mosque and an Islamic school
that attracted many poor Muslim families. In 2009 Boko Haram attacked
several police stations and other official buildings in Maiduguri. The
Nigerian security forces hit back and more than 1,000 people died, not
all of them Boko Haram supporters. Yusuf was captured and killed, his
body shown on television. Boko Haram was finished.

But its
fighters regrouped under a new leader. In 2010 it attacked a prison in
Bauchi state, freeing hundreds of its supporters, and carried out deadly
bombings in Jos and military barracks in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.
Its main modus operandi was to deploy gunmen on motorbikes to kill
police, politicians and other opponents. Since then, the waves of
shootings and bombings have continued and, according to the Council on
Foreign Relations, Boko Haram is responsible for nearly 3,800 deaths
since May 2011. The group has sworn allegiance to al-Qaida and, Sani
says, some of its members have fought in Somalia and Sudan, but a formal
link “cannot be independently confirmed”.

If anything, Boko
Haram has intensified its operations of late, including an attack that
saw 43 students shot and hacked to death and many girls kidnapped. In
response, the government closed five schools considered to be in “high
security risk areas”.

Some Nigerians who feel let down by
the government are taking the fight on themselves. Zakari Matazu,
survivor of the double bombing in Maiduguri, belongs to a youth
vigilante group in Borno state popularly known as the Civilian Joint
Task Force (CJTF). “Now Boko Haram are attacking everywhere because they
are strong – even stronger than the soldiers,” he said. “I am a CJTF
but I now know that Boko Haram can decide to attack and capture the town
of Maiduguri any time. Everybody knows that. The federal government has
abandoned us to be killed by Boko Haram. All the people in the villages
have fled to Maiduguri, so if Boko Haram does not see people killed in
the villages, they will come to the city.”

Last month Boko Haram
threatened to strike farther afield, with potentially catastrophic
consequences for the economy. Its leader, Abubakar Shekau, threatened
attacks on oil refineries in the mainly Christian south, saying in a
video: “Niger delta, you are in trouble.” but few analysts believe the group poses an existential threat to Nigeria.

Those
on the frontline are living in a parallel universe to the champagne
parties in Nigeria’s big cities. “We are in a state of war,” Kashim
Shettima, the governor of Borno state, said recently in a plea to the president. “Boko Haram are better armed and better motivated than our own troops. It is impossible for us to defeat the Boko Haram.”

regards

Indian writer Pankaj Mishra is one
of eight writers from seven countries winning a $150,000 Yale University prize
each in recognition of their achievements and to support their ongoing work. Mishra,
an Indian essayist, memoirist, travel writer and novelist, won the Windham
Campbell Literature Prize in non-fiction category, The Beinecke Rare Book &
Manuscript Library at Yale announced.

[excerpts from an interview with N.A.] Somebody once said about Picasso that in the Soviet Union they hated
his art but they loved his politics, and in the States, they loved his
art but they hated his politics. When my previous novel, The Wasted Vigil, was
published, I ended up giving readings in New York, Lahore, and New
Delhi, within a period of twenty days. 

In New York, someone stood up,
after I read a sequence and said “You are a pro-jihadi. It’s clear from
what you’re saying that you support jihadi violence. You should be
ashamed of yourself.” I went to Lahore and I gave a reading from the
same passage and someone stood up and said, “You are an American agent.
You work for the CIA. You should be ashamed of yourself.” I went to
New Delhi, and after reading the same passage, someone stood up and
said, “You are a conservative reactionary. You think of capitalism and
conservatism as the pinnacle of human achievement. You see no other
alternative. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

I never lose hope — I am not a believer but I do remember that in
Islam it is a sin to lose hope. You are not allowed to despair. This is
why suicide bombings were such a problematic issue for the
fundamentalists — suicide is a sin. So they have circumvented it by
saying they are not “suicide bombings,” they are “martyrdom bombings.”

So I can’t lose hope about anything — East-West, Islam, USA. But
that doesn’t mean you will find conventional “happy endings” in my
stories. I am puzzled when I am told that my books are dark or bleak. I
think to have gained knowledge of why things went wrong for the
characters in the stories, why things go wrong in real life for us, is a happy ending.

So I dropped out. I didn’t finish my biochemistry degree and I began
writing my first novel, which took 11 months to write, and I didn’t
have any idea of how to have a book published. But the writers I loved
were John Updike, Gore Vidal, V.S. Naipaul, Cormac McCarthy, and they
were published by a firm in London called Andre Deutsch. So I picked up
a copy of Naipaul’s novel, A Bend in the River, looked at the
copyright page and got the address. I sent them the manuscript and 10
days later I got a phone call inviting me to have lunch. And I said “I
can’t,” and they said, “why not?” I said, “I have no money,” and they
said, “we’ll give you money and we’ll have lunch.” So I borrowed £20
and I got on a coach.

After the book was accepted I thought because I couldn’t do my O
Levels, A levels, BA, MA, and PhD in the subjects I was interested in,
I’m going to educate myself. So over the course of the next 10 or 11
years I read everything. I would go to person A and say, “Tell me,
who’s a great writer?” William Faulkner. So I read everything by
William Faulkner. I would begin with the first novel and end up with
the last novel. I would go to person B and say, ‘Who’s a great writer?’
Thomas Hardy. I read everything by Thomas Hardy, sequentially. Who’s a
great writer? D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov,
Dostoevsky.

And then I wanted to know, how much thought is allowed in one
paragraph? How many images are allowed per page? What is a comma? And
so I copied out the whole of Moby Dick by hand. I copied out the whole of As I Lay Dying by Faulkner by hand. I copied out Lolita. I copied out Beloved. I copied out The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. 

And the inevitable: now that Garden has been planted throughout the world, what are you working on now? I am writing a novel about Pakistan’s blasphemy laws — One Thousand Miles by Moonlight.

After this, would you write a novel set in England again? And where is “home” for you now?

Yes, I’ll write a novel set in England again — I hope to return to
the English town of Dasht-e-Tanhaii which I created for my novel, Maps for Lost Lovers.
England is “home,” in inverted commas. Emotionally, I think of a map
in which Pakistan and England are fused. The Grand Trunk road passes
through Lahore and Peshawar, drops down into the Khyber Pass, and
emerges into Newcastle in the north of England. That is the “country” I
live in. Having said this, I wish to set a novel in the United States one
day, and in India also. Ultimately a writer’s only homeland is his
desk, his stories, and his language.

regards