इसीलिये रतन टाटा वन्दनीय और "सरकारी व्यवस्था" निन्दनीय हैं

• महाजाल पर सुरेश चिपलूनकर (Suresh Chiplunkar):
  

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  • 26/11 को ताज होटल पर हमला हुआ। तीन दिनों तक घमासान युद्ध हुआ, जिसमें बाहर हमारे NSG और पुलिस के जवानों ने बहादुरी दिखाई, जबकि भीतर होटल के कर्मचारियों ने असाधारण धैर्य और बहादुरी का प्रदर्शन किया। 30 नवम्बर को ताज होटल तात्कालिक रूप से अस्थाई बन्द किया गया। इसके बाद रतन टाटा ने क्या-क्या किया, पहले यह देख लें -
  • 3) होटल के आसपास पाव-भाजी, सब्जी, मछली आदि का ठेला लगाने वाले सभी ठेलाचालकों (जो कि सुरक्षा बलों और आतंकवादियों की गोलाबारी में घायल हुए, अथवा उनके ठेले नष्ट हो गये) को प्रति ठेला 60,000 रुपये का भुगतान रतन टाटा की तरफ़ से किया गया। एक ठेले वाले की छोटी बच्ची भी "क्रास-फ़ायर" में फ़ँसने के दौरान उसे चार गोलियाँ लगीं जिसमें से एक गोली सरकारी अस्पताल में निकाल दी गई, बाकी की नहीं निकलने पर टाटा ने अपने अस्पताल में विशेषज्ञों से ऑपरेशन करके निकलवाईं, जिसका कुल खर्च 4 लाख रुपये आया और यह पैसा उस ठेले वाले से लेने का तो सवाल ही नहीं उठता था।
  • 8) घायल कर्मचारियों के सभी प्रमुख रिश्तेदारों को बाहर से लाने की व्यवस्था की गई और सभी को होटल प्रेसिडेण्ट में तब तक ठहराया गया, जब तक कि सम्बन्धित कर्मचारी खतरे से बाहर नहीं हो गया।
  • 9) सिर्फ़ 20 दिनों के भीतर सारी कानूनी खानापूर्तियों को निपटाते हुए रतन टाटा ने सभी घायलों के लिये एक ट्रस्ट का निर्माण किया जो आने वाले समय में उनकी आर्थिक देखभाल करेगा।
  • 10) सबसे प्रमुख बात यह कि जिनका टाटा या उनके संस्थान से कोई सम्बन्ध नहीं है, ऐसे रेल्वे कर्मचारियों, पुलिस स्टाफ़, तथा अन्य घायलों को भी रतन टाटा की ओर से 6 माह तक 10,000 रुपये की सहायता दी गई।
  
  • हो सकता है कि कुछ लोग कहें कि इसमें टाटा ने कौन सा बड़ा काम कर दिया, ये तो उनका फ़र्ज़ था? लेकिन क्या किसी अन्य उद्योगपति ने अरबों-खरबों कमाने के बावजूद इतनी सारी दुर्घटनाओं के बाद भी कभी अपने स्टाफ़ और आम आदमी का इतना खयाल रखा है?

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First to enter Babri Masjid were CRPF men

• First to enter Babri Masjid were CRPF men

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  • BJP leader Vinay Katiyar today claimed that a group of about fifty men who had first entered the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya were not VHP workers but CRPF jawans in plainclothes who started demolishing the mosque and provoked the 'Kar Sewaks' to charge at it.
  • AYODHYA

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WEBCommentary(tm) - A Statistical Analysis of President Obama's renewed Strategy

• WEBCommentary(tm) -

  
  
  • A Statistical Analysis of President Obama's renewed Strategy
    Part One: Focus on the Middle East
  • This commentary is in two parts for the purpose of getting a clear and concise understanding of just how complex the war in Afghanistan is, and to point out why the President's strategy will not work in the long run, but rather shift the venue of fighting from the Middle East to the North American continent, only in a different form.
  • This commentary deals with why I believe President Obama's strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan may fail. One of the biggest obstacles to his impending success is opium.
  • This realization alone is one of the major reasons Obama may run into industry road blocks politically as he pursues an end to terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan in a fight to reduce the illegal trade of opium. Something that has not been done ever. The grappling with this necessary evil goes as far back as the nineteenth century when the Opium Wars loomed between the British and the Chinese. Yet opium is still around and ostensibly shall always be with us.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Pioneer > Minarets as bayonets

• The Pioneer >

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  • Kanchan Gupta
  • Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was being faithful to his creed when he declared, “Mosques are our barracks, minarets our bayonets, domes our helmets, the believers our soldiers.” Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, a fascist Sunni imam with a huge following among those who subscribe to the Muslim Brotherhood’s antediluvian worldview, was more to the point when he thundered at an event organised by London’s then Labour mayor Ken Livingstone, “The West may have the atom bomb, we have the human bomb.”
  • For 57.5 per cent of Swiss citizens, the minaret, an obligatory adjunct to a mosque which is used by the muezzin to call the faithful to prayers five times a day, is now a “political symbol against integration”. They view each new minaret as marking the transmogrification of Christian Europe into Islamic Eurabia. The Islamic minaret, according to Swiss People’s Party legislator Ulrich Schluer, has come to represent the “effort to establish sharia’h on European soil”. Hence the counter-effort to ban their construction.
  • Resentment against assertive political Islam has been building up in Switzerland for almost a decade, triggered by refugees from Yugoslavia’s many civil wars seeking to irreversibly change the Swiss way of life to suit their twisted notions of Islam’s supremacy.
  • The resultant vote — 57.5 per cent endorsing the proposed amendment to the Constitution with 42.5 opposing it — provides some interesting insights. For instance, the Swiss Government and Parliament, which are opposed to the amendment, clearly suffer from a disconnect with the Swiss masses. The voting pattern also shows that the spurious ‘cosmopolitan spirit’ of Zurich, Geneva and Basel, where people voted against the ban by a narrow margin, is not shared by most Swiss. The initiative has got 19.5 of the 23 cantonal votes — Basel city Canton, with half-a-vote and the largest Muslim population in Switzerland, barely defeated the initiative with 51.61 per cent people voting against it. This only goes to show that the Left-liberal intelligentsia may dominate television studio debates, as is often seen in our country, but it neither influences public opinion nor persuades those whose perception of the reality is not cluttered by bogus ‘tolerance’ of the intolerant.

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Politics and the art of making money

• Organiser - Content

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  • Politics and the art of making money
    By MV Kamath
  • Andhra Pradesh has been liberally spending government money for construction of churches and mosques and subsidies to Christian and Muslim pilgrimages and grants for marriages among the ‘minority communities. Reddy, it is necessary to say, was a Christian. Some Rs 10.8 lakh were given to 12 churches in Chittoor district, Rs 20 lakh to 20 churches in Kurnool district, Rs 29 lakh to 27 churches in Guntur district and in all over Rs one crore to 188 churches in the state. Is that secularism?
  • So much has been written about Madhu Koda. As Chief Minister of Jharkhand, a predominantly tribal state, he apparently made over Rs 4,000 crore which sounds unbelievable considering that Koda is a tribal, lacking financial sophistication and high education. How did he make his fortune?
  • Could a simple tribal have done that all on his own? One requires highly knowledgeable mentors to advise on how to make massive and worldwide financial commitments. Who are these mentors who guided Koda in indulging in questionable deals around the world? If a mere tribal who was once dismissed as a simpleton could amass over Rs 4,000 crores, one must take a fresh look at tribal leaders in all their professed innocence.
  • But Koda is not an exception. What comes as a shock-and a vastly greater shock-is the amount amassed by the late YS Rajasekhar Reddy during his five-year rule in Andhra Pradesh. The total value of his assets comes to nearly Rs 10,000 crore which makes Koda’s assets chicken feed.
  • the Government of Andhra Pradesh has been managing and administering temples and other places of Hindu worship, but not mosques and churches. Why this discrimination? A temple is a private institution. If its authorities misuse funds it is for the public to take action. Even more annoying is the fact that many of the government-appointed temple administrators are non-Hindus, as if Hindus cannot be trusted. According to Chowdary-and there is no reason to question his credibility-"some of the non-Hindus are colluding with the predators of Hindus, namely evangelists and missionaries, to alienated the properties of temples to facilitate evangelism in and around Hindu temples".

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