The Great Ganesha

Today’s WSJ has a front-page write-up about Azim Premji and his “muslim-ness” (or lack of it, thereof). His secular stance is pissing off a lot of imams, but the article also highlights how imbalanced the Hindu-Muslim equation is, in terms of employment and opportunities for education. Here are some excerpts: Mr. Premji’s rise is already [...]

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Was browsing through last week’s Economist when I came across this full-page spread on page 84: This is what the first paragraph reads: The State of Maharashtra is the third largest and the most progressive and industrially advanced state in India….Mumbai, country’s leading financial, trading and service centre warrants aviation facilities of highest order. To [...]

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Uber geeky blog BoingBoing links up to a video mashup of Rafi‘s ‘Jaan Pehechaan Ho’ (from Gumnaam) with a Primus number on the WFMU blog. I can’t say that I’m a Primus fan, but I’ll tell you – it appealed to some primal part of me, because I couldn’t stop watching it. Meantime, also on [...]

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In today’s New York Times: As Beijing?s influence in Asia and around the world has grown, their common interests have forced Tokyo and New Delhi to begin warming their historically chilly relationship and to start forging closer economic ties. ?The key issue facing the whole region is how to accommodate the rise of China,? said [...]

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Was browsing around YouTube this morning and I came across a bunch of animated Ramayana clips. Here’s one on Hanuman (in Hindi), since I’ve blogged about him before, though in another context. They’re made to be in the style of Japanese Anime and I was intrigued, so I did a little bit of research (well [...]

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  ? So it looks like the theory that calculus in India predated Newton’s and Liebnitz’s calculus is back in the news again. I blogged about it in a series of three posts some time back, and it’s good to see that it’s getting some traction. I seriously doubt it will enter the mainstream any [...]

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Picture Source On the 60th anniversary of India’s and Pakistan’s independence (and partition), here’s a quote? from Pankaj Mishra’s recent article in the New Yorker. Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister, was flown to Delhi and given forty days to define precisely the strange political geography of an India flanked by an eastern and a western [...]

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I heard on NPR yesterday, that an Italian DJ named Gaudi (a namesake of the original, obviously) has remixed some of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s early work to a reggae beat. He got some forty-year-old reel-to-reel of tapes of unreleased sessions from Khan’s record label and spent two years wading through all of it, isolating [...]

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Picture Source 19th century bazaar in Calcutta Today’s WSJ has an article about the Indian retail baron Kishore Biyani who founded Pantaloon Retail (currently the largest retailer in India, in terms of revenues) and owns the supermarket chains Big Bazaar and Food Bazaar. For the supermarkets, he initially tried to emulate the Western model of [...]

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SAJA (the South Asian Journalist’s Association) has an article on their forum today, highlighting an excellent montage of magazine covers featuring anything and everything South Asian leading all the way back to 1921. My favorites are from the real early years, like this New Yorker cover from 1931 (when it cost fifteen cents!). These covers [...]

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