During a recent visit to Delhi I managed to find some time to visit
Humayun’s Tomb. I had heard about the renovation work that had
happened there and though during my earlier visits to Delhi I had
visited most of the other landmarks I never happened to visit the Tomb.
I was in for a surprise. I thought it to be a simple but elegant structure
housing the grave of the second Mughal Emperor. But when I saw it I found
it to be rather grand in scale and quite well-kept, as is not the case with
many sites, but pretty under-promoted as is the case with many other sites in India. It is one of the better-kept
monuments, thanks to it being declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. It was also a relief to find relatively
fewer marks by the common public celebrating their romantic aspirations but yet there were
various like ‘Ramesh loves Asha’. Read More
Will the future ever arrive in Pakistan? It is back to the past again. Technically, President Musharraf has declared an
emergency, but in reality, it is a coup against the democracy creeping in; which he reluctantly promised eight
years ago. This time General Musharraf overthrew the government of the other infernal co-resident in his body,
President Musharraf.
Those familiar with the 1885 opera, The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan may take a cue; the General is everything
and everywhere; all the institutions of power reside in him. To Pakistanis, this is not an opera. It is deadly serious to
the lives of one hundred and sixty million, caught in the vise of external forces and internal instability exacerbated
by an unrepresentative government.
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Tehelka, the intrepid news magazine did what the Indian government should have done in the past five years. The nation owes a debt of gratitude to the editor of Tehelka, Tarun Tejpal and reporter Ashish Khetan who took enormous risk to procure evidence on video tapes about the planning of the genocide perpetrated by the Gujarat state government in February – March 2002. The tapes also record admissions of suppression of evidence and bribery by the public prosecutors to protect the guilty.
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The term ‘Wahhabi’ is a deeply contested and much debated one. It is derived from the name of the eighteenth century Najdi Hanbali Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, although, interestingly enough, Abdul Wahhab was not his name but that of his father. That itself clearly indicates that the term is rather loosely used and is often employed to refer to different, sometimes mutually contradictory phenomena. It is instructive to note here that the term is not used by any Muslim group to define itself. Rather, it is used in a derogatory sense by critics of some Muslim groups that uphold a different, indeed opposed, understanding of Islam from theirs. Incidentally, not all these forms of Islam are associated with the particular vision of Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab. More…
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