Month: July 2022

Noted Hindi Writers Slam Police Complaint Against Booker-Winning Author Geetanjali Shree

After winning the prestigious international award, Shree, one of the best Hindi authors in the country, was not felicitated by the government and was instead targeted on social media.

New Delhi: Several noted Hindi litterateurs and writers have slammed the targeting of author Geetanjali Shree nee Pandey through the attempted registration of an FIR against her in Uttar Pradesh, calling it another “despicable” moment of great alarm and shame. Shree brought laurels to Indian literature when the English translation of her work, Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand), became the first Hindi language novel to win the prestigious International Booker Prize this year.

A complaint was filed against Geetanjali Shree  by a Hathras resident who claimed that her book Ret Samadhi had hurt Hindu sentiments.

However, Hindi writers who have known Shree for years and have read her works believe that this is just politicking of a very low order. They also point out that after she won international acclaim, no one in the government stepped up to congratulate her. Instead, she was unreasonably targeted on social media as several fundamentalists attacked her because she had done her post-graduation from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

‘Instead of being felicitated by the State, Shree was unfairly targeted’

As well-known Hindi poet and writer Bharat Tiwari said, “When it comes to Geetanjali Shree, we have seen that since she received the Booker, and became the first author in Hindi to get one, neither did the Prime Minister nor the UP chief minister congratulated her. In fact, on social media, we saw a lot of hate against her – she was described as part of the ‘JNU gang’.”

“Everyone knows the tilt of the state. They would have been on the hunt for an opportunity, on the lookout for something in her work to target her with and create a controversy,” he said, referring to the registration of the FIR, which led to the cancellation of a felicitation programme she was invited to in Agra.

‘Those who don’t following state’s idea of tradition become anti-national’

“These are times when people’s sentiments get hurt very easily. It is tragic. We have two traditions – one is our Hindustani tradition and the other is the one today’s powers-that-be believe is ‘real tradition’. So anyone who does not it in the parameter of what the state believes to be ‘real tradition and culture’ is branded as an anti-national,” Tiwari added.

The writer-poet said, “It is very unfortunate that while such a big award should have been viewed as a watershed moment in Hindi literature, we are losing that in petty politics. This is one moment where we can take a jumpstart and take Hindi to a different level, but we are moving in a different direction.”

‘Despicable and a matter of collective concern for all writers’

Journalist and author Mrinal Pande said it was shocking that a petty point has been used to target Shree. “I am really taken aback by this because I am a long-time admirer of Geetanjali Shree’s writings and she is a brilliant person and one of the best writers in Hindi and other languages. I am shocked beyond words that somebody should pick up on a petty point like this and make such a big deal out of it. She deserves all the praise and respect that she has got not just in India, but also abroad,” she said.

Pointing out that “Geetanjali has always kept her head down on the radar – she is not one of those people who have stood up and come out as chest-beating radicals”, Pande insisted that the award-winning writer has “always been away from most of these literary dos which create controversy”.

Also read: Agra: Event Honouring Geetanjali Shree Cancelled After ‘Offensive Content’ Complaint

The former editor-in-chief of Hindi daily Hindustan said: “I am really surprised that someone so gentle and self-effacing should be subjected to this and it is a matter of collective concern for all writers of all languages. I hope they redress this as soon as possible because she is one of the most prominent voices in Hindi literature.”

On what the impact on Hindi literature of such a move is, she said, “I wouldn’t really connect it because it looks more like something addressed to a particular writer. So I would just keep it focussed to where it should be focussed – on her personally as a writer. I think she is brilliant and she deserves all the support and praise that she gets and more.”

Pande, who is also a known television personality, called the action against Geetanjali “despicable”. “I think such things are not just despicable, they are also alarming because there are in any periods, or in any literature, very few writers who are truly good and she is one of them. That she is being subjected to this is a matter of great alarm and shame,” she said.

‘Illiterate people, ignorant of literary expressions make such complaints’

Writer and former editor of Jansatta, Om Thanvi, said, “Unfortunately many people in our country are illiterate, meaning they are not unlettered or did not go to school, but that despite acquiring education they remain ignorant about or do not have the understanding of the different modes of expression of literature and various arts.”

“What Nupur Sharma or Yati Narsinghanand say may be political in nature, but what is said in literature cannot be taken at the same face value. It is usually in a manner of speaking,” he said. “I have read the award-winning book by Geetanjali Shree and I did not find anything in it that was objectionable or could have led to controversy.”

‘Not in Geetanjali’s nature to write anything controversial, provocative’

Moreover, he said, “When I was editor of Jansatta, the Hindi daily of Indian Express group, she used to regularly write articles for us. It was not in her nature to write anything controversial or provocative. I never found her to be thinking extra loudly on political, communal or religious issues. So, whosoever has complained against her obviously does not understand literature.”

Stating that he was sure that there would be no ground to take cognisance of the complaint, Thanvi said that “the award-winning novel is about the society, about the elderly and family relations, it is not religious by any standard”.

Thanvi said it was really unfortunate that some people have also been attacking Shree on the social media. “She is a writer who believes in working silently. She may have her sympathy towards activism and her thinking may be progressive, but she has never used literature as a tool for activism or to promote her ideology. At least I have never come across any such instance in the over 30 years that I have known her.”

‘Action against author shows communalism is on the rise’

On the government not congratulating Geetanjali when she was selected for the prestigious Booker Prize award, he said, it should have been a cause for celebration but the prime minister did not congratulate her and neither did his staff deem it necessary to issue words of appreciation for her.

“And then, when Indian society respects her work, invites her, felicitates her, they try and thwart that too. This only shows how narrow-mindedness and communalism is spreading,” he said.

Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that an FIR has already been registered against Shree. The police has responded to the complaint it received with a statement to the effect that it will take appropriate action after studying her novel.

Review: A Comprehensive Background To Understand Sri Lanka’s Present Political Crisis

Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits has written the most complete political biography of post-colonial Sri Lanka, located in the background of two inevitable and very long shadows: hegemony-building and state-building.

I began to read Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits’ book, An Uneasy Hegemony: Politics of State-building and Struggles for Justice in Sri Lanka, in the midst of the country’s present crisis – after spending nearly one month in Colombo, taking part in anti-government agitations and experiencing first hand some of the quotidian hardships like most other citizens, and then returning to Delhi, thereby experiencing an immediate physical distancing from what was unravelling on the ground in Lanka.

The duality of this experience and its discomforting proximity allowed for a more reflective and cautious reading of her very long book than otherwise would have been possible. My immediate sense was that Jayasundara-Smits has written what I consider an ‘impossible’ book to write. That is, to write what might well be the most complete political biography of post-colonial Sri Lanka located in the background of two inevitable and very long shadows: hegemony-building and state-building. I said ‘impossible’ because to draw such a broad and overarching canvas of a nation’s political life as the author has done, is not the kind of intellectual effort most scholars would attempt in contemporary times.

Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits
An Uneasy Hegemony: Politics of State-building and Struggles for Justice in Sri Lanka
Cambridge University Press, 2022.

If someone wants a single and comprehensive politico-historical background to understand Lanka’s present political crisis, my sense is Jayasundara-Smits’ book is perhaps the only source available at present. One of the most intellectually distressing things I saw in Lanka even amidst the unfolding crisis and the incessant popular and supposedly academic debates surrounding it is the inability of many scholars in the public domain to see the crisis for what it is, without allowing their political affiliations and ideological predispositions to cloud their judgments.

I was intrigued to see the author commenting on this dilemma early in her book when she noted, “… many scholars are either unable or unwilling to let go of their political background, and embrace identity politics as if it were part of their professional and civic responsibility as citizens…” (p. 2). Though the author does not elaborate on this astute observation, which is a considerable intellectual and political burden for the country, in real terms her work is an attempt to transcend this unenviable situation in the work of scholarship, and to do so self-consciously.

What she has attempted in the book at the most fundamental level is to offer a broad socio-historical and political understanding of state-building in Sri Lanka while making the central claim that this process has simultaneously also been an effort to establish a hegemony of the right as well. In this effort, Jayasundara-Smits very deliberately moves away from the consistent overemphasis on ethnicity, religion and conflict in understanding Sri Lankan politics and state formation that has occupied much of the post-1970s scholarly efforts on Lanka.

In effect, she has ‘rescued’ Sri Lankan scholarship from the lens of ethnicisation that has been difficult to dislodge – by pointing out there are other more comprehensive and layered ways to comprehend the country’s post-colonial politics. Into this space, she has ushered in a long-term concentration on class and patronage politics, and through these vantage points, offers a more reflective look at Sinhala-Buddhist identity politics over time.

She notes at the very outset, “by not adopting ethnic conflict and violence as my primary frame of investigation, I make a consistent effort to paint a bigger picture and tell a longer and more complex story of how Sri Lanka came to be what it is today” (p. 3). She maintains this approach throughout the book. And she proceeds to paint this larger picture through considerable detail, and that too with the nuances available only to a well-connected, well-trained, and reflective ‘insider’.

Also read: Review | History Flows for All: The War and Its Aftermath in Sri Lanka

In addition to the introduction, the main contribution of the book towards engaging with its broader theme comes from chapter 3 which discusses the politics ‘From Nationalism to Ethnic Supremacy’; chapter 4 which presents a clear cartography of  ‘Political Patronage: Underbelly of Everyday Politics’; chapter 5 that looks into ‘State Institutions and Patronage Politics’; chapter 6 that paints a detailed picture of  ‘War and Peace as Politics by other Means’ and chapter 7 attempts to answer the question, ‘What Came after War?’

Chapters 4 and 5 together offer a fairly complete trajectory to explain how Lanka’s ‘model’ democracy at the time of independence began to unravel to create what it has become today – a dismantled democracy and a case study of political and economic mismanagement. This occurred through a consistent process of patronage politics that ended up politicising state institutions and practices in the service of political parties in power as opposed to the service of the state in the interest of citizenship (p. 113-222). But this was also a process that was often welcomed and even expected by the polity itself as these practices offered jobs to political supporters that have now ensured the country’s public sector is not only over-staffed, ethicised and politicised, but also essentially inefficient.

Chapters 6 and 7 offer an important reading of the Sri Lankan civil war and its aftermath that presents multiple and unpleasant realities camouflaged by Lanka’s official triumphalist post-war rhetoric often accepted without contradiction by the public in the south as well as many mainstream writers (p. 223-303). These chapters take the readers through the trajectory of military-led Sinhala-Buddhist triumphalism in the immediate pre-war and post-war periods, particularly under the regimes of the Rajapaksas, and the steady militarisation of society and the entrenchment of authoritarian politics.

Collectively, the strength in the chapters referred to above in terms of the cartography of politics and history they offer and the analytical possibilities they allow for, comes not only from Jayasundara-Smits’ grasp of relevant material including popular local sources, but also from her decision to speak in detail with people ‘in the know’. Methodologically, what has added much of the nuance in her work comes from these detailed interviews, and makes the author’s presence within the pages she has written obvious.

I have only one criticism of the book. That is, the book could have been more creatively and thoughtfully structured without compromising its main contribution. In the present form, it still reads like a dissertation to some extent, mostly due to lapses in editing out sections that could have been easily done. In the same vein, the second chapter and the afterword could have been done without, as in their absence too, the book’s strength could easily have been maintained.

It is particularly chapter 2 with its consistent references to her dissertation, supervisors etc. that gives the book a dissertation-like persona. Much of the information in it could have been presented elsewhere in the book, in footnotes and in acknowledgements. The slim afterword is also unnecessary given the fact that the ongoing collapse of the Lankan economy and the unravelling of its politics are an effective afterword to this book.  I see these avoidable lapses as the jitters associated with writing one’s ‘first’ book, which many of us have gone through. I still recall the difficulty I personally had in editing out things I had so passionately written down in my early writing irrespective of the reviewers’ suggestions.

Beyond this, my sense is that Jayasundara-Smits has missed an important opportunity as well.  That is, given the vast and important canvas on Sri Lankan state formation and post-colonial politics she has presented, the same canvas could have been used as a springboard for theorising this material by asking why Lanka has gone this way, and if this structure of events can explain state formation and its ruptures elsewhere in South Asia or beyond? Perhaps that can be her next project.

Finally, beyond and despite these dissenting notes, Jayasundara-Smits’ book is an important contribution to Lankan studies, and that too presented with considerable detail in a very readable fashion at a time many academic tracts tend to end up decidedly dis-communicative.

Sasanka Perera is a professor of Sociology and Dean of Social Sciences at South Asian University, New Delhi.

Elon Musk and Silicon Valley’s Overreliance on Artificial Intelligence

Not knowing or caring how machine learning works, what it can or can’t do, and where its application can be problematic could lead society to significant peril.

When the richest man in the world is being sued by one of the most popular social media companies, it’s news. But while most of the conversation about Elon Musk’s attempt to cancel his $44 billion contract to buy Twitter is focusing on the legal, social, and business components, we need to keep an eye on how the discussion relates to one of tech industry’s most buzzy products: artificial intelligence.

The lawsuit shines a light on one of the most essential issues for the industry to tackle: What can and can’t AI do, and what should and shouldn’t AI do? The Twitter v Musk contretemps reveals a lot about the thinking about AI in tech and startup land – and raises issues about how we understand the deployment of the technology in areas ranging from credit checks to policing.

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At the core of Musk’s claim for why he should be allowed out of his contract with Twitter is an allegation that the platform has done a poor job of identifying and removing spam accounts. Twitter has consistently claimed in quarterly filings that less than 5% of its active accounts are spam; Musk thinks it’s much higher than that. From a legal standpoint, it probably doesn’t really matter if Twitter’s spam estimate is off by a few percent, and Twitter’s been clear that its estimate is subjective and that others could come to different estimates with the same data. That’s presumably why Musk’s legal team lost in a hearing on July 19 when they asked for more time to perform detailed discovery on Twitter’s spam-fighting efforts, suggesting that likely isn’t the question on which the trial will turn.

Regardless of the legal merits, it’s important to scrutinise the statistical and technical thinking from Musk and his allies. Musk’s position is best summarised in his filing from July 15, which states: “In a May 6 meeting with Twitter executives, Musk was flabbergasted to learn just how meager Twitter’s process was.” Namely: “Human reviewers randomly sampled 100 accounts per day (less than 0.00005% of daily users) and applied unidentified standards to somehow conclude every quarter for nearly three years that fewer than 5% of Twitter users were false or spam.” The filing goes on to express the flabbergastedness of Musk by adding, “That’s it. No automation, no AI, no machine learning.”

Perhaps the most prominent endorsement of Musk’s argument here came from venture capitalist David Sacks, who quoted it while declaring, “Twitter is toast.” But there’s an irony in Musk’s complaint here: If Twitter were using machine learning for the audit as he seems to think they should, and only labeling spam that was similar to old spam, it would actually produce a lower, less-accurate estimate than it has now.

There are three components to Musk’s assertion that deserve examination: his basic statistical claim about what a representative sample looks like, his claim that the spam-level auditing process should automated or use “AI” or “machine learning,” and an implicit claim about what AI can actually do.

On the statistical question, this is something any professional anywhere near the machine learning space should be able to answer (so can many high school students). Twitter uses a daily sampling of accounts to scrutinise a total of 9,000 accounts per quarter (averaging about 100 per calendar day) to arrive at its under-5% spam estimate. Though that sample of 9,000 users per quarter is, as Musk notes, a very small portion of the 229 million active users the company reported in early 2022, a statistics professor (or student) would tell you that that’s very much not the point. Statistical significance isn’t determined by what percentage of the population is sampled but simply by the actual size of the sample in question. As Facebook whistleblower Sophie Zhang put it, you can make the comparison to soup: It “doesn’t matter if you have a small or giant pot of soup, if it’s evenly mixed you just need a spoonful to taste-test.”

The whole point of statistical sampling is that you can learn most of what you need to know about the variety of a larger population by studying a much-smaller but decently sized portion of it. Whether the person drawing the sample is a scientist studying bacteria, or a factory quality inspector checking canned vegetables, or a pollster asking about political preferences, the question isn’t “what percentage of the overall whole am I checking,” but rather “how much should I expect my sample to look like the overall population for the characteristics I’m studying?” If you had to crack open a large percentage of your cans of tomatoes to check for their quality, you’d have a hard time making a profit, so you want to check the fewest possible to get within a reasonable range of confidence in your findings.

Also read: Why Understanding This ’60S Sci-Fi Novel Is Key to Understanding Elon Musk

While this thinking does go against the grain of certain impulses (there’s a reason why many people make this mistake), there is also a way to make this approach to sampling more intuitive. Think of the goal in setting sample size as getting a reasonable answer to the question, “If I draw another sample of the same size, how different would I expect it to be?” A classic approach to explaining this problem is to imagine you’ve bought a great mass of marbles, that are supposed to come in a specific ratio: 95% purple marbles and 5% yellow marbles. You want to do a quality inspection to ensure the delivery is good, so you load them into one of those bingo game hoppers, turn the crank, and start counting the marbles you draw, in each color. Let’s say your first sample of 20 marbles has 19 purple and one yellow; should you be confident that you got the right mix from your vendor? You can probably intuitively understand that the next 20 random marbles you draw could end up being very different, with zero yellows or seven. But what if you draw 1,000 marbles, around the same as the typical political poll? What if you draw 9,000 marbles? The more marbles you draw, the more you’d expect the next drawing to look similar, because it’s harder to hide random fluctuations in larger samples.

There are online calculators that can let you run the numbers yourself. If you only draw 20 marbles and get one yellow, you can have 95% confidence that the yellows would be between 0.13% and 24.9% of the total – not very exact. If you draw 1,000 marbles and get 50 yellows, you can have 95% confidence that yellows would be between 3.7% and 6.5% of the total; closer, but perhaps not something you’d sign your name to in a quarterly filing. At 9,000 marbles with 450 yellow, you can have 95% confidence the yellows are between 4.56% and 5.47%; you’re now accurate to within a range of less than half a percent, and at that point Twitter’s lawyers presumably told them they’d done enough for their public disclosure.

Printed Twitter logos are seen in this picture illustration taken April 28, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

This reality – that statistical sampling works to tell us about large populations based on much-smaller samples – underpins every area where statistics is used, from checking the quality of the concrete used to make the building you’re currently sitting in, to ensuring the reliable flow of internet traffic to the screen you’re reading this on.

It’s also what drives all current approaches to artificial intelligence today. Specialists in the field almost never use the term “artificial intelligence” to describe their work, preferring to use “machine learning.” But another common way to describe the entire field as it currently stands is “applied statistics.” Machine learning today isn’t really computers “thinking” in anything like what we assume humans do (to the degree we even understand how humans think, which isn’t a great degree); it’s mostly pattern-matching and -identification, based on statistical optimisation. If you feed a convolutional neural network thousands of images of dogs and cats and then ask the resulting model to determine if the next image is of a dog or a cat, it’ll probably do a good job, but you can’t ask it to explain what makes a cat different from a dog on any broader level; it’s just recognising the patterns in pictures, using a layering of statistical formulas.

Stack up statistical formulas in specific ways, and you can build a machine learning algorithm that, fed enough pictures, will gradually build up a statistical representation of edges, shapes, and larger forms until it recognises a cat, based on the similarity to thousands of other images of cats it was fed. There’s also a way in which statistical sampling plays a role: You don’t need pictures of all the dogs and cats, just enough to get a representative sample, and then your algorithm can infer what it needs to about all the other pictures of dogs and cats in the world. And the same goes for every other machine learning effort, whether it’s an attempt to predict someone’s salary using everything else you know about them, with a boosted random forests algorithm, or to break down a list of customers into distinct groups, in a clustering algorithm like a support vector machine.

You don’t absolutely have to understand statistics as well as a student who’s recently taken a class in order to understand machine learning, but it helps. Which is why the statistical illiteracy paraded by Musk and his acolytes here is at least somewhat surprising.

But more important, in order to have any basis for overseeing the creation of a machine-learning product, or to have a rationale for investing in a machine-learning company, it’s hard to see how one could be successful without a decent grounding in the rudiments of machine learning, and where and how it is best applied to solve a problem. And yet, team Musk here is suggesting they do lack that knowledge.

Once you understand that all machine learning today is essentially pattern-matching, it becomes clear why you wouldn’t rely on it to conduct an audit such as the one Twitter performs to check for the proportion of spam accounts. “They’re hand-validating so that they ensure it’s high-quality data,” explained security professional Leigh Honeywell, who’s been a leader at firms like Slack and Heroku, in an interview. She added, “any data you pull from your machine learning efforts will by necessity be not as validated as those efforts.” If you only rely on patterns of spam you’ve already identified in the past and already engineered into your spam-detection tools, in order to find out how much spam there is on your platform, you’ll only recognise old spam patterns, and fail to uncover new ones.

Also read: India Versus Twitter Versus Elon Musk Versus Society

Where Twitter should be using automation and machine learning to identify and remove spam is outside of this audit function, which the company seems to do. It wouldn’t otherwise be possible to suspend half a million accounts every day and lock millions of accounts each week, as CEO Parag Agrawal claims. In conversations I’ve had with cybersecurity workers in the field, it’s quite clear that large amounts of automation is used at Twitter (though machine learning specifically is actually relatively rare in the field because the results often aren’t as good as other methods, marketing claims by allegedly AI-based security firms to the contrary).

At least in public claims related to this lawsuit, prominent Silicon Valley figures are suggesting they have a different understanding of what machine learning can do, and when it is and isn’t useful. This disconnect between how many nontechnical leaders in that world talk about “AI,” and what it actually is, has significant implications for how we will ultimately come to understand and use the technology.

The general disconnect between the actual work of machine learning and how it’s touted by many company and industry leaders is something data scientists often chalk up to marketing. It’s very common to hear data scientists in conversation among themselves declare that “AI is just a marketing term.” It’s also quite common to have companies using no machine learning at all describe their work as “AI” to investors and customers, who rarely know the difference or even seem to care.

This is a basic reality in the world of tech. In my own experience talking with investors who make investments in “AI” technology, it’s often quite clear that they know almost nothing about these basic aspects of how machine learning works. I’ve even spoken to CEOs of rather large companies that rely at their core on novel machine learning efforts to drive their product, who also clearly have no understanding of how the work actually gets done.

Not knowing or caring how machine learning works, what it can or can’t do, and where its application can be problematic could lead society to significant peril. If we don’t understand the way machine learning actually works – most often by identifying a pattern in some dataset and applying that pattern to new data – we can be led deep down a path in which machine learning wrongly claims, for example, to measure someone’s face for trustworthiness (when this is entirely based on surveys in which people reveal their own prejudices), or that crime can be predicted (when many hyperlocal crime numbers are highly correlated with more police officers being present in a given area, who then make more arrests there), based almost entirely on a set of biased data or wrong-headed claims.

If we’re going to properly manage the influence of machine learning on our society – on our systems and organisations and our government – we need to make sure these distinctions are clear. It starts with establishing a basic level of statistical literacy, and moves on to recognising that machine learning isn’t magic—and that it isn’t, in any traditional sense of the word, “intelligent”– that it works by pattern-matching to data, that the data has various biases, and that the overall project can produce many misleading and/or damaging outcomes.

It’s an understanding one might have expected – or at least hoped – to find among some of those investing most of their life, effort, and money into machine-learning-related projects. If even people that deep aren’t making those efforts to sort fact from fiction, it’s a poor omen for the rest of us, and the regulators and other officials who might be charged with keeping them in check.

This article was originally published on Future Tense, a partnership between Slate magazine, Arizona State University, and New America.

Henry Kissinger Is Guilty of Ignoring Our Supreme Leader

From the Vishwaguru Archives: His book on leadership doesn’t include the Prophet of Raisina Hill. Can it be banned? Can multiple FIRs be filed in America against the author? A plan of action for implementation by competent authority is underway.

This is a work of fiction. Although it may appear closer to reality than fiction.

“This is nothing short of blasphemy,” shouted the Supreme Leader’s Empowered Representative.

“He has committed a sin and we must find ways of making him pay for it,” SLER was livid.

The accused man is Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state and now a distinguished historian. The charge against him is that he has just written a book on Leadership in which six world leaders are included but our own Prophet of Raisina Hill is not one of the chosen. 

The book is not yet available in India but the vishwagurus’s attention has been drawn to a review of Kissinger’s meditation on leadership in the latest Economist. The statesman-historian’s catalogue of great leaders consists of: Konrad Adenauer (the first chancellor of West Germany), Charles de Gaulle (of France), Richard Nixon (the disgraced rpesident of the United States), Lee Kuan Yew (of Singapore), Anwar Sadat (the assassinated leader of Egypt) and Margaret Thatcher (the first woman prime minister of England). 

From left: Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Lee Kuan Yew, Anwar Sadat and Margaret Thatcher. Photos (from left): Bundesarchiv (CC BY-SA 3.0 de), United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division (public domain), U.S. Army Audiovisual Center (public domain), White House Photographic Office (public domain), U.S. Air Force (public domain), and The Thatcher Estate (copyrighted free use).

Kissinger’s exclusion of our own Supreme Leader is deemed nothing short of a national crisis. 

An emergency meeting of the Crisis Management Committee was called. Quorum: SLER (chair); the foreign office operative (FOO), social media man (SMM); and, NRI overseer (NRIO).

All the four had photo-copies of the Economist’s review in front of them. The NRIO was the only one who had read a little longer review in the Wall Street Journal of July 9 and he made bold to point out that the 99-year-old Kissinger  had confined himself to leaders of the 20th century and could not possibly include our Supreme Leader, whose first assumed high office in 2001, two years into the new century.

“On the other hand, Kissinger has excluded Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi,” said the FOO, pleased with his ability to spin a crisis into an opportunity. “Had Kissinger included either the father or the daughter, we would have had a bone to pick with him.”

An unappeased SLER shouted: “He may be 99 years old; but he is not blind. Can’t he see that our Leader is the only man providing transformative leadership. Who is there in the world to challenge his stature? Boris is gone; Trump is history; Abe is done with; Netanyahu is very, very iffy. “

Now fully riled, the SLER was unstoppable: “ Look all the qualities that this biased  historian locates in these so-called six leaders – personal discipline, self-improvement, charity, patriotism and self-belief – all these qualities are over-abundantly visible in our very own Leader.”

Being men of action and being accustomed to having their way at home, the principals at the Crisis Management Committee were in agreement that it is imperative that Kissinger be made to see reason.

The social media man piped in: “To begin with, we can unleash a tsunami of trolls that the old fellow will never be able to have any peace of mind. We do have the wherewithal to demonise the man right in the heart of the United States. We can make him feel the awe of Naya Bharat’s reach and its capacity for venom.”

Not the one to be left out, the FOO put in his oar: “We can easily ask all our missions, especially in Europe and the Americas, to write letters of protest to Kissinger’s publishers, with a threat to boycott the book. We can make these westerners realise the power of Modi ji’s India.” 

The social media man, too, was now worked up: “We can easily ban the book; formally or informally. Even better, we can demonstrate and agitate in front of any book-shop that dares to sell Kissinger’s latest. Perhaps an easy and cheaper way of energising our cadres.” And, in what he hoped would be a masterstroke, he added, “We can ask pravasi patriots to file FIRs against Kissinger in four of five different police stations across the United States since their religious and ethnic sentiments have been hurt.” 

The NRIO thought that this might not be possible but chipped in with a suggestion of his own: “We can tap our overseas friends to make Kissinger a lucrative offer which he cannot possibly refuse. We know how the Chinese have enriched him over the decades. We can also do it. He can be asked to appear for an interview on one of our national television channels. And, then leave him at the mercy of our anchors who would extract the most lavish praise out of this seasoned diplomat for our own Supreme Leader.  Our friends tell us it is entirely doable – provided the price is right.” 

SLER: “Money is no issue. What is a million dollar here or a million pounds there when national interest, national image or national prestige is involved. But I am really cheesed off with our “concerned” ex-IFS crowd. They preen themselves as being on top of global things yet they didn’t have a clue that Henry Kissinger was not going to include our Supreme Leader in his book.” 

Addressing himself to the NRIO, the FOO wondered aloud whether it would be worth our effort to hire a lobbyist in Washington to remind the American people of our own Supreme Leader and his outstanding leadership qualities.

A plan of action was agreed upon, to be sanctioned by the competent authority. 

Kissinger will hear from Naya Bharat.

MVA Govt in Maharashtra Had Maximum Pending CBI Probe Requests

Out of the 168 cases pending, 91 requests were sent by CBI in the last six months of the Maha Vikas Aghadi government.

New Delhi: As many as 168 requests from the Central Bureau of Investigation have been pending with the Maharashtra government under Uddhav Thackeray in the last two years, the government has revealed in parliament.

Out of them, 91 were sent in the last six months of the Maha Vikas Aghadi government, Indian Express has reported.

Maharashtra is the state with the highest pending requests. As many as 39 requests are pending for longer than a year and 38 for longer than six months, data presented by the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions in the Rajya Sabha reveals.

This data is till June 30. It is not known whether the Maharashtra government under Eknath Shinde has given consent for investigation into any of these cases yet.

The CBI is governed by the Delhi Special Police Establishment (DSPE) Act, 1946. Section 6 of the DSPE Act states that no member of the Special Police Establishment shall be allowed to exercise the powers and jurisdiction afforded them by the Act without the consent of the concerned state government.

Nine states have withdrawn ‘general consent’ to the CBI to investigate cases within the state since 2015, most ruled by opposition parties. They are Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Mizoram and Meghalaya.

Bengal had comparatively fewer cases pending – a total of 27. Punjab had five pending for over six months and four for less.

Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh have four, six and seven requests pending.

The government said the total amount involved in these cases was in excess of Rs 30,000 crore with Maharashtra alone accounting for Rs 29,000 crore, the Express report noted.

Commonwealth Games 2022: Sanket Sargar Wins Silver to Open India’s Account

The 21-year-old looked on course to win the gold but two failed clean and jerk attempts came in the way, as he lifted a total of 248kg (113kg+135kg) to finish second.

Birmingham: Indian weightlifter Sanket Sargar opened the country’s medal count at the Commonwealth Games by claiming a silver in the men’s 55kg category here on Saturday, July 30.

The 21-year-old looked on course to win the gold but two failed clean and jerk attempts came in the way, as he lifted a total of 248kg (113kg+135kg) to finish second.

Malaysia’s Mohamad Aniq (249kg) smashed the Games record in clean and jerk as he lifted 249kg (107kg+142kg) to win the gold, while Sri Lanka’s Dilanka Isuru Kumara 225kg (105kg+120kg) took home the bronze.

Sargar cruised past all his opponents in the snatch section, leading by six kilograms to head into clean and jerk.

India’s Sanket Sagar after winning silver in the 2022 Commonwealth Games

But the Indian was only able to execute one lift in the clean and jerk section as he picked up an injury and looked in agony after failing to lift 139kg in his second and third attempts.

In the last edition, Indian lifters brought home a rich haul of nine medals, including five golds. This year too they are expected to reign supreme.

(PTI)

Monkeypox: Brazil, Spain Report First Deaths Outside Africa

The current outbreak started in May, with 20 cases recorded in the United Kingdom. Since then it has grown to more than 20,000 cases in 78 countries.


Brazil reported the first monkeypox-related death outside the African continent on Friday, shortly before Spain confirmed Europe’s first known death in the outbreak.

The current outbreak started in May, with 20 cases recorded in the United Kingdom. Since then it has grown to more than 20,000 cases in 78 countries.

Last Saturday, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the monkeypox outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern,” its highest level of threat.

It has been endemic for decades in West and Central African countries, but 70% of the current infections are in Europe and 25% in the Americas.

What do we know about the fatalities?

According to the state health ministry of Minas Gerais, the Brazilian victim was a 41-year-old man who also suffered from lymphoma and a weakened immune system.

“The comorbidities aggravated his condition,” the ministry said.

He died from septic shock after being taken to the intensive care unit.

Spain is one of the world’s worst-hit countries, and 4,298 people have been infected with the virus, according to the Spanish health ministry’s emergency and alert coordination centre.

“Of the 3,750 [monkeypox] patients with available information, 120 cases were hospitalized [3.2%], and one case has died,” the centre said.

WHO had so far reported five confirmed monkeypox deaths in countries in Africa.

New WHO monkeypox advice

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday that 98% of monkeypox cases had been identified in men who have sex with men.

He urged them to limit their number of sexual partners while monkeypox cases increase within their community and to swap contact details with any new partners.

“This is an outbreak that can be stopped… The best way to do that is to reduce the risk of exposure,” Tedros told a news conference from Geneva. “That means making safe choices for yourself and others.”

Vaccines are available to help protect against the virus but there’s a limited supply.

Monkeypox is not as transmissible or fatal as smallpox.

The WHO says monkeypox has a fatality rate of between 3-6%.

Symptoms of monkeypox infection include fever, muscle pain and a rash that forms blisters.

This article was originally published on DW.

Delhi Government Decides to Withdraw New Excise Policy, Private Liquor Shops to Close

The 468 private liquor shops operating in the city will be shut from August 1 as the term of their licences and that of the new excise policy expire on July 31.

New Delhi: The Delhi government has decided to withdraw the new Excise Policy for the time being and directed the sale of liquor only through government-run vendors, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said on Saturday, July 30.

The 468 private liquor shops operating in the city will be shut from August 1 as the term of their licences and that of the new excise policy expires on July 31.

Targeting the BJP, he alleged they were “running an illegal liquor business in Gujarat” and they wanted to do it in Delhi also.

The deputy chief minister, who also holds the excise portfolio, said in a press briefing that the Delhi chief secretary has been directed to ensure that liquor is now sold through government shops only and there is no chaos.

He also alleged the BJP was using agencies like the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED) to threaten liquor licensees, many of whom have now shut shops, and the excise officials who were scared to start open auctions of retail licences.

“They want to create a shortage of liquor so that they can run an illegal liquor trade in Delhi like they are doing in Gujarat. But we will not let this happen,” Sisodia said.

He claimed that if the legal sale of liquor is stopped in Delhi then it may witness a “hooch tragedy” on the lines of Gujarat.

Forty-two people from Botad and the neighbouring Ahmedabad district in Gujarat died after consuming spurious liquor on July 25, while 97 people are admitted to hospitals in Bhavnagar, Botad and Ahmedabad.

Under the Delhi government’s new excise policy, nearly 468 liquor stores are running in Delhi at present. The policy, that extended twice after April 30 for a two-month period each, will end on July 31.

Addressing reporters at his residence, Sisodia said in the old excise policy there were many government liquor vends and there used to be “huge corruption” in such stores. But that was stopped with the new excise policy, the deputy chief minister said.

In the new excise policy, licences were issued through open tenders in a transparent manner, he said.

“Under the old regime, the government used to earn a revenue of Rs 6,000 crore, while through the new excise policy the government was set to get Rs 9,500 crore revenue in the entire year,” Sisodia said.

Accusing the BJP of threatening licensees and excise officials through CBI and ED, Sisodia claimed out of 850 liquor shops, only 468 could open as many were shut by shop owners following “threats from the BJP”.

More shop owners wanted to shut shops following such threats, he alleged.

“They (BJP) want to reduce the sale of legal quantities of liquor. Like Gujarat, they want to promote the sale of spurious, off-duty liquor by threatening Delhi’s shop-owners, officers,” Sisodia said.

Comparing the number of shops in BJP-ruled states with Delhi, Sisodia said in Haryana’s Gurugram one liquor shop is opened per 466 people while in Goa the ratio is 761 people and in Noida, one liquor shop is opened per 1,390 people.

At present, Delhi has one liquor shop for 22,707 people, Sisodia said.

(PTI)

Wickremesinghe Invites All Parties to Form Government

‘The government is currently engaged in great efforts to gradually restore normalcy to the political and social unrest created by the economic crisis that the country is facing today,’ Wickremesinghe said in a letter on Friday, July 29.

New Delhi: Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe has written to members of Parliament, inviting them to form an all-party national government to help the bankrupt country to recover from the worst economic crisis.

“The government is currently engaged in great efforts to gradually restore normalcy to the political and social unrest created by the economic crisis that the country is facing today,” Wickremesinghe said in the letter on Friday, July 29.

“Accordingly, initial plans required to implement a systematic economic programme are being formulated while preliminary measures are also being undertaken for the creation of economic stability,” he added.

Wickremesinghe said a programme could only be implemented with the participation of all political parties represented in Parliament, expert groups and civil society.

According to The Telegraph, citing The Daily Mirror, the talks are expected to be completed in a week. Wickremesinghe on Thursday held talks with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) of former president Miathripala Sirisena.

The main opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) party, however, will not join the government. However, some of its MPs are considering switching allegiance and joining the ruling side individually, the report said.

Meanwhile, the National Freedom Front (NFF) led by MP Wimal Weerawansa pledged support to Wickremesinghe.

Weerawansa said there were two options before the country today – to lead it down the path of an anarchical situation as in Haiti or to salvage it from the current mess at least at the last moment through consensus.

Minister of Justice Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe on Thursday said that all parties have been invited to form an all-party Government.

The minister said that the government will wait for a limited period of time to see whether the other parties would come forward to join it.

Also read: Sri Lanka Parliament Extends Emergency Amid Continued Crisis

The president also proposed to start a dialogue with parties on the reintroduction of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

The 19A adopted in 2015 pruned presidential powers by empowering Parliament above the executive president.

Wickremesinghe was the main sponsor of the 19th Amendment in 2015.

However, the 19A was scrapped after Gotabaya Rajapaksa won the November 2019 presidential election.

Sri Lankan MPs on July 20 elected Wickremesinghe as the country’s new president, with the majority of the vote coming from lawmakers representing ousted President Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party.

There were only two non-SLPP lawmakers in the Cabinet appointed on Friday. Constitutionally, the Cabinet can be extended up to 30 members.

The 73-year-old President was appointed for the rest of the term of Rajapaksa who initially fled to the Maldives and then to Singapore.

Watch | ‘Wickremesinghe Lacks Popularity, Talent for Challenge; Next Few Days Critical’

Rajapaksa is accused of mishandling the economic crisis, the worst since 1948.

Wickremesinghe was appointed prime minister by Rajapaksa in mid-May.

He was tasked with reviving the economy by giving early solutions to fuel, cooking gas and power shortage problems, which triggered mass agitations against Rajapaksa.

The government declared bankruptcy in mid-April by refusing to honour its international debt.

Wickremesinghe on Wednesday said his government’s main priorities are to fix the country’s ailing economy and end the severe fuel shortage that has exacerbated after the last shipment under the Indian credit line arrived in the country in June.

(With PTI inputs)

‘Mumbai Would Have No Money If Gujaratis, Rajasthanis Are Removed’: Row Over Koshyari’s Remark

As opposition leaders slammed Koshyari and sought an apology from him, the governor said his comments were misconstrued.

New Delhi: Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari’s comments alleging that Mumbai would have no money if Gujaratis and Rajasthanis were to leave triggered a massive controversy on Saturday, July 30, forcing Chief Minister Eknath Shinde to state that he disagreed with the governor.

As Opposition leaders slammed Koshyari and sought an apology from him, the governor said his comments were misconstrued.

Koshyari made the controversial comments during a function to name an intersection in suburban Andheri on the evening of Friday, July 29.

”I tell people here that if Gujaratis and Rajasthanis are removed from Maharashtra, especially from Mumbai and Thane, you will be left with no money and Mumbai will not be a financial capital,” he said.

As the comments drew widespread condemnation, Koshyari said on Saturday that the statement was misconstrued, and asked political parties not to create a controversy. There was no question of belittling the contribution of Marathi-speaking people and “lauding one community does not mean insulting another,” he said.

Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray demanded an apology from Koshyari. The former chief minister, whose relations with Koshyari were often strained while in office, accused the governor of “dividing” Hindus living in Mumbai and Thane.

At a press conference, Thackeray said, “The hatred that the governor harbours in his mind against the Marathi people has inadvertently come out.

“Time has come to decide whether to send Koshyari back home or to jail…In the last three years, he has insulted Marathi-speaking people despite staying in Maharashtra. Now with these comments, he has brought disrespect to the governor’s post,” the Sena president said.

Amid the backlash, Chief Minister Shinde, leader of the rebel Shiv Sena faction, said he disagreed with Koshyari’s remarks. Talking to reporters at Malegaon, Shinde said, “We don’t agree with Koshyari’s remarks. It’s his personal view. He has now issued a clarification. He occupies a constitutional post and should take care that his actions do not insult others.

“The Marathi community’s hard work has contributed to the development and progress of Mumbai…No one can insult Mumbai and Marathi people,” he added.

Speaking in Dhule, Deputy Chief Minister and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis said Marathi-speaking people played a major role in the development and growth of Maharashtra.

“Even in the industrial sector, Marathi-speaking people have made global strides. We don’t agree with the governor’s remarks,” the former chief minister said.

State NCP president Jayant Patil said it was unfortunate that the governor has “scant respect for the Marathi-speaking working class due to whose hard work Mumbai progressed and developed.” Koshyari doubted Marathi people’s capability to create wealth and this was an insult to Maharashtra, he said.

State Congress chief Nana Patole said Koshyari’s remarks were outrageous and he had always “insulted Maharashtra through his actions and words.” “The Centre should seek Koshyari’s resignation and send him to Gujarat or Rajasthan,” he said.

Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Ajit Pawar said the governor shouldn’t create unnecessary controversy. “Marathi-speaking people were instrumental in creating the state of Maharashtra with Mumbai as its capital and nation-building was not possible without Maharashtra,” the NCP leader said.

Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut tweeted that the governor wanted to imply that Marathi people and Maharashtra were “beggars.”

Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray said Koshyari should not make such statements if he is not aware of Maharashtra’s history.

“Outsiders come to the state and start businesses here because Marathi speakers created a conducive atmosphere in the state,” he said, adding that the governor should not provoke Marathi people.

(With PTI inputs)