A few excerpts from Kanchan’s article:

[Dr Singh] remained blissfully ignorant about the CBI giving a clean chit to those accused of leading murderous mobs during the ghastly slaughter of Sikhs in 1984 till a national outcry forced him out of his slumber, should do a reality check before he indulges in further chest-thumping. Ever since he was nominated as Prime Minister in the summer of 2004, Mr Singh has presided over a Government whose actions have encouraged terrorists aided, abetted and armed by Pakistan to strike remorselessly and repeatedly. . .

Tough guys don’t cry, Mr Singh says, but he forgets to add that when Mohammed Haneef was detained by the police in Australia for possible links with Islamist bombers of Indian origin in Britain, he, by his own admission, spent sleepless nights, agonising over the plight of the terror suspect and his parents. In the last five years, Mr Singh is not known to have spent a few moments, forget spending sleepless nights, worrying about the victims of terrorism in India — the children who have been orphaned, the women who have been widowed, the parents who grieve for their sons and daughters, the families which have lost their sole bread-earners. If he has expressed any concern, it is for the families of terrorists killed in encounters with security forces and offered them financial compensation. . .

We could go on and on and cite example after example of how Mr Singh is responsible for the collapse of internal security. But that would be of no consequence to him and his admirers. But since he has raked up the issue of conceding the demands of terrorists, it would be in order to remind him that a Government of which he was the Finance Minister had ensured safe passage for terrorists who had taken over Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine. And, till such time they were holed up inside the shrine, the Government had fed them biryani and oranges. But they would have blown up the mosque if we had not done so, Mr Singh will argue. Sure. Just as the hijackers of IC 814 would have blown up the plane with the hostages had the NDA Government not released three terrorists. Mr Singh, representing the Congress in discussions with the Government, would repeatedly assert one point: Do whatever it takes to ensure the safety of hostages — something which he forgets today. Strong men have strong memories, Prime Minister.

Let’s also raise a toast to the Indian voter for having chosen so wisely. The UPA and what it has achieved cannot be evaluated without reference to the wisdom of a sizable portion of the Indian voters who voted them to power. If it is a bitter harvest, the seeds were deliberately and voluntarily planted.

It’s all karma, neh?

Tropical Cyclone Sidr was continuing its northward progress over the Bay of Bengal on November 14, 2007. It was moving north toward the Mouths of the Ganges at a speed of 13 kilometers per hour (8 miles per hour), and winds in the storm system were raging at 220 km/hr (140 mph) near the storm’s center, making it a Category 4 strength tropical cyclone.

It is a great tragedy. So many lives needlessly wasted. So many children dead, so many more with little hope of a decent human existence. Millions homeless without proper water, food, healthcare and education. Entirely preventable because we have the technology and the resources to avoid all this suffering and death. In the end it comes down to human frailty–greed, short-sightedness, ignorance, the lust for power.

And then there was an incident on Sunday when an earthquake unleashed a tsunami in the Indian Ocean and killed about 50 thousand, give or take 10 thousand. It is getting a lot of press and appeals for help on the internet are beginning to rival the pedelers of Viagra in the volume of email and the urgency of their appeal.

Yesterday 55,000 children died premature deaths, a few hundred million people didn’t have adequate housing, hundreds of millions were hungry. About half of all children in South Asia are malnourished. Poverty, a clear cause of malnourishment, is a also a consequence. It is a Silent Emergency.

We are a strange lot. We get on with our lives as if nothing is the matter with the world, when 10 million children die needlessly every year.

Then a stupid large wave hits and a few thousand die and we run around like headless chickens. Some sobering statistics:

Every year, over 10 million children under the age of five die from readily preventable and treatable illnesses such as diarrhoeal dehydration, acute respiratory infection, measles, and malaria. In half of the cases, illness is complicated by malnutrition. [Source]

Where is the breathless reaction to that? The advanced industrialized economies (the so-called “developed nations”) spend hundreds of billions of dollars bombing and killing hundreds of thousands–and spending trillions of dollars in arming themselves to the teeth–and no one bats an eyelid. It is a man-made calamity of global proportions. Then one Sunday morning, a natural event wipes out a few thousand people–almost a rounding-off error to the numbers involved in the man-made calamity and everyone and his brother wakes up and runs around as if the sky is falling.

Two hundred billion dollars or so to bomb some stupid country; and an awesomely magnanimous gesture of promising $0.015 billion in aid for the natural disaster from the US. The sheer incongruity of the figures stuns one catatonic.

Why? Bounded rationality? Or as I see it, unbounded stupidity. Fifty-thousand dying each and every day is not news. Being essentially innumerates, we do not find statistics very useful. What we need is pictures of great devastation for entertainment and distraction. The pictures of tsunami-ravaged coastlines compel our attention unlike the numbers we read in the annual reports of global institutions such as the World Bank.

OK, now back to our regularly scheduled entertainment interspersed with random events of destruction and death.