Deadly Headley

So then Davidbhai, correction, Dawoodbhai, has appeared on a giant screen in our courtroom. Cool. And exactly what is he doing? Well, confirming the nefarious designs of our friendly neighbour, designs that we are already well aware of. Apart from ‘revealing’ young Ishrat Jahan’s credentials, he hasn’t shared anything sensationally new. Also, Dawoodbhai is a hardened terrorist who has entered into a plea bargain with a US court to escape the death sentence. So we can never be sure of any of his utterances. Perhaps he’s busy gassing about stuff, perhaps he’s singing the truth. Point is: We don’t know, therefore the television drama has zero value.

So then what next? Well, it’s certain the Indian government will dispatch a fresh set of dossiers to the Pak government. I have always wondered how these dossiers are sent out. Snail mail? Email? WhatsApp? Knowing the way governments operate, guess it’s snail. And exactly how does Pak treat these dossiers? Again, I would suppose they do what most good governments do to inconvenient files: Dump them inside a dusty storage room.

In other words, nothing will change. Except that we can look forward to another attack. Why am I so sure? Let me explain this situation in another way. A cardiologist can only tell you where the blockage lies inside the heart. You can visit him or her any number of times, you can visit any number of cardiologists, you can run any number of tests. That will not remove the blockage, it will stay in your heart, making your life miserable. To deal with that, you need to move to the next level: Meet a heart surgeon. He or she will open up your heart and solve your problem.

As far as our Pakistan strategy is concerned, we are still doing the rounds of cardios, we are still doing ECGs on different machines. And we are still dishing out reports, You get the point.

The Facebook ‘Unlike’

I am no tech geek, but common sense tells me that by killing Facebook’s Free Basics, the government, under pressure from the so-called net neutrality champions, may have killed a golden chance for the poor in India to access the internet. Currently, you have to pay a couple of hundred bucks if you want internet to function on your phone, and this denies the less privileged access.

If Facebook was allowed to operate its plan, the poor would have been compelled to only visit the sites Zuckerberg wanted them to, but what’s really wrong with that? Isn’t some access better than nothing? At the very least, Free Basics would have enabled the net ignorant to get a taste of the digital space, a free trial, so to speak. And with time and prosperity, and having tasted blood, these millions of people would have dumped the free subscription and graduated to full paid access.
 
The unfairness of it all is that a few upper and middle class wallahs have made sure the poor continue to be
deprived of access to the net. And this was done without even taking their opinion! If this is not elitism, what
is?

Breathe in India

As I write this post, ‘Make in India’ week has begun in Mumbai. ‘VIPs’ are flying in from across the world, and of course, a shiny image of the city will be projected to them. No one will tell them that right inside the heart of the city lies a dump yard that no one cares about or bothers to maintain. And that this dump yard routinely spews poison into the air, choking the lungs of residents who live nearby.

  

My thing is: Sure, we’ll make in India. But can we Breathe in India, first? Please? In case you missed it, here’s the link to the blog I wrote for NDTV last week:

Click here.

(Image courtesy: Phawker.com)