Chowrangi

Welcome to the blunder world of advertisement. The Year 2010 has become an embarrassing year for both Indian and Pakistani authorities so far as their advertisements are being mistakenly feature each others logos and persons. Indian Railways Authorities are embarrassed after an advertisement being published in almost all the leading newspapers on the day of inauguration of Maharajas’ Express from Kolkata to Nalanda showed Delhi in Pakistan.

The map showed Kolkata, Gaya in Bay of Bengal, Varanasi in Orissa, Gwalior in Maharashtra and Delhi in Pakistan. The advertisement was published by the Eastern Railway, India. The Railway authorities completely absolve themselves of responsibilities like wise Punjab police Pakistan ad controversy, saying it was the fault of the concerned advertising agency.

Undoubtedly the Red Shirt, one of the strongest progressive bonding in Thailand created history yesterday by reminding their so called democratic executives their task in a unique way….. they assembled themselves outside the PM house, ,nearly 30,000 in number and flooded the gates of the building with blood… just to remind them that when people’s representative become arrogant, ignorant and un accountable… they are no different than the fictional “Lord Dracula” of Romania !!!

Back in his era he was only sucking the blood out of his adverseries vein, but when people’s representative assume this role their massacre also involve future of masses, their expectations and their well being!!!

While the world was still bracing through the devastation of earthquake in Haiti, another catastrophe struck yesterday when Chile was hit by magnitude 8.8 earthquake.

According to Associated Press, one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded tore apart houses, bridges and highways in central Chile on Saturday and sent a tsunami racing halfway around the world. Chileans near the epicenter were tossed about as if shaken by a giant, and the head of the emergency agency said authorities believed at least 300 people were dead.

In so-called “secular India” which treats Muslims and other minorities like dirt, the famous creative painter and genius M.F. Hussain was forced to leave his homeland because of threats against his life. His crime, of course, is that he’s a Muslim. Now, after living in self-exile since 2006, he’s been given honorary citizenship by the Islamic government of Qatar. Naturally, he has surrendered his Indian nationality.

In “secular” India, 1,747 tribal Christians were recently re-converted to Hinduism. As reported in the Times of India, “The camp to reconvert tribals, who had embraced Christianity was held in the city for the first time and nearly 5,000 people from Maharashtra and Gujarat participated in the ceremony.”

Events like these are unique to modern India where many in the vast Hindu majority (80 percent of the population) cannot digest the fact that people want to convert to other religions (despite the professed secularism of the country’s constitution).

Here’s something very interesting from across the border (and I’m not referring to their semi-naked, near-nude actresses): there’s a community in India whose members are Muslims as well as Hindus. They’re known as the Cheeta-Meharats, and are mostly settled in Ajmer, Pali, Raj Samand, Bhilwara and Udaipur (I believe this area was known as C.P. once). Their population is a million and a half, and about 70 percent live below the poverty line (an improvement over the rest of India, where about eighty percent are perpetually hungry).

The FBI used the photo of a Spanish politician to show how Osama Bin Laden might look like today. The politician, Gaspar Llamazares says he no longer feels safe and his life is in danger as his hair and parts of his face appeared on a most-wanted poster. He said the use of a real person for the mocked-up image was “shameless”. The FBI has admitted that one of their forensic artists had obtained certain facial features from a photograph on the internet. So this is how American intelligence agencies work!

Haiti, officially the Republic of Haiti (République d’Haïti ; Repiblik Ayiti) is a Haitian Creole- and French-speaking Caribbean country. Along with the Dominican Republic, it occupies the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago. Ayiti (land of high mountains) was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the mountainous western side of the island. The country’s highest point is Pic la Selle, at 2,680 metres (8,793 ft). The total area of Haiti is 27,750 square kilometres (10,714 sq mi) and its capital is Port-au-Prince. [wikipedia]

Incredible India? It seems that what we see on Indian TV channels is not at all true. The latest news from “incredible” India is that Indian graduates who cannot find suitable jobs are applying for jobs as “coolies” (porters).

Now I can’t say this is an improvement. I assume that being a porter is much better than being a sweeper, but still, one would have thought with all that hype about India being an emerging superpower, its graduates at least wouldn’t have to stoop so low. But then, with more than eight hundred million Indians living below the poverty line, getting any job in India is a miracle.

The male female ratio in China is increasing dramatically. “More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses in 2020, state media reported on Monday, citing a study that blamed sex-specific abortions as a major factor”.

The study, by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, named the gender imbalance among newborns as the most serious demographic problem for the country’s population of 1.3 billion, the Global Times said. Men with lower incomes and those living in rural areas will be badly affected. The imbalance in some areas is as high as 130 males for 100 women! The major reason for the widening gap between males and females is the government’s “one-child” policy, which restricts couples to have only one child. This has resulted in women having abortions after scanning reveals that they will give birth to females (this is also a serious problem in India, where some small towns have virtually no women of marriageable age).