Sunday, January 17, 2010

3 Idiots

Went to see it with trepidation: a 40 year-old lead masquerading as a college student was a recipe that was sure to go horribly, predictably, utterly, irredemiably, excruciatingly, writhingly-embarassingly wrong.

So as penance the least I can do is give a constipated smile here :-\

There. I was wrong.

Loved every moment of it - almost. Loved the oh-so-real contrast of Chatur. Loved the downplaying of mushy-mushy moments. Loved the absence of cynicism. Most of all, loved the unabashed idealism; not the preachy Swades kind, but a more believable kind of let's-go-about-it-and-let-the-devil-take-the-hindmost-kind of glowing goodness.

The childbirth sequence is painful, but it is a small price to pay. The only other crib: why make the prospective dulha, the Wildesian guy-who-knows-the-price-of-everything-but-value-of-nothing, a caricature? (Sigh! I'm in the mood for hyphens today. Well, let me make the most of it)

To me the standout thing about the movie was the attempt at mainstreaming hitherto obscure elements of India and Indians. Wangdu is the unlikeliest of names for a hero in Hindi commercial cinema. Here it was slipped in without a whiff of majority-smarminess that we often see when dealing with any minority issue. The Muslim character and his family are not built-up as a shining beacon of secularism - they are a regular family with regular problems who happen to be Muslims. Chatur could have been seen as a madrasi-from-uganda jester who mixes up his tenses and genders while wafting in noxious farts; but we see him as a desperate anally-retentive man who takes himself so seriously that he loses any sense of proportion that might have given him a peaceful night's sleep. We don't make fun of him. We want to shake him by the scruff of his Hugo Boss jacket and drill some sense into him.

The Director played by Boman Irani teeters on the edge of caricature but redeems himself as only an artiste can. It is not difficult to find such people in our campuses and schools - isolated from the world by years of cotton-balled environs, so devoid of a sense of otherness! I know of headmasters and teachers and lecturers who are uncannily like the character we saw - maybe each with different tics and idiosyncracies, but vivid in their colouration and exotic as a menagerie.  

All of these elements mingled in this film and they crafted a story for us that was both overdue and is boilingly-hot. After this film one should not now be surprised to see many more youngsters in our IITs and IIMs and RECs questioning the relationship between career and desire. They have found an ally and a tongue. However, it is not just Kapil Sibal who is responsible to open the windows, it is actually the parents and teachers and employers who need to look out of this opened window and realise that the horizon really meets at infinity.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Google Games

An interesting fact from the google pages - as this article shows, Google shows Arunachal as Chinese to users in China; Indian to the users in India; and disputed to the rest of the world.

I thought I'd check it for myself at the maps.google.com instead. Here's what I see: All of J&K is shown as disputed, all of AP is. However Tibet is shown as Chinese and Taiwan is left to interpretation as it is not on mainland, hence no contiguous boundary. As it happens, google maps don't show international maritime boundaries. So there is no way of knowing.

Tomorrow if India were to claim Bhutan as it's own, would it be seen as disputed by Google? After all, one sovereign nation, India, thinks Bhutan is her's.

Another case: Srinagar is shown as India, Gilgit as Pakistan; and funnily enough, Siachen too is shown as Pakistan!

Further afield, in Palestine, the land between the '49 Armistice and the '74 Ceasefire line is shown under Israel, and not as disputed. It is occupied by Israel.

So, what to make of it all? Siachen is occupied by India, but is shown as Pakistan. But Ein Zivan, for instance is occupied by Israel but not shown as Syria.

Clearly, there is evidence to show that Google it towing the US line - it is in alignment with the overt and covert US foreign policy. It cannot be termed as business sense; it is anything but that. It is jingoistic.

So why can't India, a country that has some clout, not make it difficult for Google? China has. Israel has. Why should India be seen as pusillanimous? I'm all for making it tough for companies like Google - companies who, in the military parlance, are nothing more than mercenaries; ronin.

They should be treated as one.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

India's 'new' military doctrine

This article by Dr. Maleeha Lodhi raises some interesting points.

The summary of the thesis is that India has over-reached and has aspirations that it cannot possibly meet in the future. This has been translated as a show of arrogance and misplaced self-importance.

There is merit to this argument. It is not for the first time that Indian foreign policy has been discussed  by people who should know better and by people who ought to be discreet. Our FO mandarins have never shied away from bombast. Pity! It does not behoove a country of India's pedigree to allow such loose talk from its elite.

It would have been far more effective to not discuss the specifics at this stage and to bend all the powers of the mind, statecraft and the military to achieving the vision.

However, let's examine the main points of the new strategy. First the cold-start doctrine. It's been in place since 2004. This doctrine is totally Pak-centric. And that is my first objection. When we sat down to craft a Pak-centric strategy, why did we not at the same time sit to design a China-centric strategy? Surely we have the thinkers in this country and enough experts in geo-politics and military strategies? It seems inconcievable that the only foe which has defeated us does not figure in our primary strategy. Well, perhaps the think-tank is and has a strategy; maybe it is chary of revealing it. If it is so, then kudos, well done!

The cold-start strategy itself has its pros and cons. The ultimate idea of creating smaller and more mobile 'Integrated Battle Groups' (IBG), capable of being deployed on the western front within 96 hours is a laudable one. Since it is being seen as an integrated exercise, the Navy and the Air Force will also bring their respective strengths on board. Whether or not we will even exercise this option and attack Pakistan is very moot. Perhaps a combination of political and tactical events may make it necessary - example: another Paliament-like/Mumbai-like attack by Jihadis and with Al Qaida being chased on Pakistan's western borders, India might think it is the right time to do large-scale damage to specific targets in Punjab or Sindh.

However, I doubt if we would ever think of a controlled strike as a strategy to retaliate against the game of attrition being played in the Kashmir vale - as this article from Walter Ladwig suggests. That game has become far too complicated.

Second, to the articulation of a 'two-front war' - Ms. Lodhi has a pathogenic dislike to anything that the Indians might want to say about themselves that throws them in good light. Is the 'two-front war' only a rhetoric meant to boast about our military prowess of handling two formidable foes at the same time? Is it not a reality for India that there could be a situation in the future where China and Pakistan gang-up on us? Is that too outre? I don't think so. In which case, is it not a smart thing to be prepared for that eventuality? If Raja Mohan is to be believed, the strategic think-tank has not been too active in making these plans. In fact, he raises a far more disturbing point: that under the current political dispensation we have lost at least two opportunities to stake our leadership in this region.

Either way, if there is a move to articulate our defence and offence strategy for the northern border it ought to be welcomed. One only wishes that not too much is divulged - or only misleading bits are divulged. We need to be far more crafty in dealing with China - we need to believe in Chanakyaneeti. The buff and raucous way that we behave in dealing with such matters needs to change, or it needs to be part of a brilliant side-stepping strategy to pull several fast ones. If the latter is true then even as I write and as we speak, we are being out-flanked by the FO mandarins. In which case, FO guys (and gals), Good show!

The only way to figure what is the reality would come from mapping the strategy to the purchases and from the recruitment and from the slow and invisible changes in the command-structure. I'll post something about this later - at the moment I don't even have the starting data. Readers are welcome to direct my attention to links and web resources.