Desicritics Author: Shanti

Bomb Blasts in Varanasi

Shanti — Tue, 7 Mar 2006 10:18:35 EST

Four killed in blasts in Indian holy city | Reuters.com

LUCKNOW, India (Reuters) - At least four people were killed and over a dozen wounded in two separate explosions on Tuesday in the Hindu pilgrimage town of Varanasi in northern India, police said.
Television reports said up to 12 may have died.

"So far four people have died, 17 are hospitalized with injuries," V.N. Rai, inspector-general of police in Uttar Pradesh state, where Varanasi is located, told Reuters. "All entry points to the area have been sealed."

At least the beasts have done their homework - they know Hindus are going to be in a Hanuman temple on a Tuesday. I hope they will rot in hell for an eternity for trying to kill people in a temple. Just imagine. A temple in the evening during the aarti time - whom do you see the most? Older people who are mostly helpless, of course. Whatever kind of God stands for this kind of bloodthirst in his name?

Book Review: ASP.NET 2.0 Cookbook

Shanti — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 15:32:38 EST

Full Disclosure: I am a Senior Java Developer who sometimes plays a C# developer on TV.

Just kidding....about the TV part. I work as a contractor and as is wont of contractors, I am required to jump into different technologies at a moment's notice and fix stuff and make things work - hit the ground running, so to speak. Even though my primary focus has been Java for years now, I have had to work on C# development on many occasions. How does all this rambling preamble apply to the book I am reviewing? It has been written for me.

Yes, the cookbook has been written for people like me, who have to instantly become experts in various technologies depending on need but are atleast familiar with the basic foundation ideas of the technologies they are working with. The Cookbook is broadly divided into 16 different categories of quick-fix solutions that adhere to the best practices and can be used by someone who doesn't want to re-invent the wheel. It allows a developer with basic knowledge of the technology jump in and deliver solutions to commonly faced problems without too much trouble.

The ASP.NET 2.0 version of the book includes both newer technologies like the Master Pages, new & improved Profiles and Themes along with the age-old problems of a good security model, tracing and debugging and caching. My favorite chapters were the "Web Parts" and "Web Services" - both of which being technologies I tend to deal with on a daily basis whether on C# or on Java side.

Overall, I found the book very lucidly written, easy to understand as long as you know the basics of the ASP.NET paradigms and makes the development of solutions for your most common problems a lot easier. I highly recommend this wheter you are a C# expert or an occasional dabbler - it is especially useful as a primer for most C#-specific design patterns scattered all over the solutions.

There is tons of sample code provided on a companion website that I had no trouble running and seemed to work as advertised. Every example had both the C# and VB versions of code, so this is useful for all ASP.NET developers.

Muslims and Inclusion in India

Shanti — Wed, 1 Feb 2006 19:02:27 EST

Here is an interesting link I found via Desipundit - Shobak: Outsider Asians - I don't know who wrote this and I am still in the process of reading through this paper that claims to investigate the depiction on Muslims in India via three blockbuster movie - Sarfarosh, Mission Kashmir and Fiza. For those who don't realize it, one of the movies was directed by a Christian, one by a Muslim and the other by a Hindu. The main character in Sarfarosh is a Hindu played by a Muslim, in Fiza the main characters are two Muslims played by Hindus and in Mission Kashmir, they are a Muslim played by the son of a Hindu and Muslim and a Muslim played by a Hindu. Quite interesting when you put it that way isn't it - the entire intermingling of cultures, religions...

Anyway, here was a passage that stood out me as I was reading it -

As the police take their position against Amaan, he begs his sister to shoot him, saying, "I died a long time ago on the streets of Mumbai. Let me die with honor." And Fiza pulls the trigger. In this complex and heart rending climax, Fiza stands for the assimilated Muslim and Amaan for that trajectory beyond the pale of normality. In their dialogue honor can be taken ironically to mean both living by the duties of the proper minority citizen and dying with the cry of those who will never be allowed into the nation.

Can you tell what is askew in the picture? What the heck is an "assimilated" Muslim in India? How can someone who can trace their origin in the country centuries back (I am talking about most Indian Muslims here) be anything but native? What kind of a mindset looks at them as some kind of other that needs to assimilate into the nation instead of implicitly being of the nation?

And then there is this doozy - "Similarly, in Mission Kashmir the drama centers on the possibility of Muslims being included in the nation." Well, we want to include them in our nation and along with the Hindus and Buddhists who also call the region home. Kashmir is not all about Muslims, y'know!

Ok, I am done - I am not going to read any further - in spite of stuff like "In Mission Kashmir, Altaaf is that element of infection that challenges the fantasies of immunity that animate contemporary discourses of Indian nationalism." (yeah, really! Indians feel very immune..from what?), I was willing to give this article a chance. I was willing to read with an open mind and try to understand the author's perspective and where he was coming from - this made me stop - "(constellated around such bogeys as "jihadi terrorism," the internal Muslim "threat," cross-border infiltration, and global and Asian balance of power, etc.)," So, according to this guy, "Jihadi Terrorism" is just a made up thing - why don't we tell that to the school teachers beheaded in Thailand, the clubbers blasted apart in Bali and numerous such instances where the only link seems to have been the belief in fanaticism. Before putting the internal Muslim "threat" in scare quotes, I invite the author to examine the speeches given by Islam's luminaries in public places such as Delhi's Jama Masjid against India. Of course, cross-border terrorism just never, ever happens in India - no one obviously crosses over to kill migrant Hindu workers in Kashmir - it is all just a bogey, you children!

It really bothers me when people still talk of accepting Muslims in India as if they were immigrants - people forget the shared history - the shared trauma - the not-so-distant past whose painful memories still have not completely faded from the Indian psyche. Why is it that there are only Hindu nationalists and not Muslim nationalists? Don't Muslims feel proud of their India? Why is every single article aimed at pointing fingers at someone or the other while conveniently forgetting there is another side to every story? I am absolutely tired of this. In my opinion, not every Muslim in India is guilty until proven innocent the same way not every Hindu-oriented program considered somehow discriminating against Muslims.

The author also very conveniently glosses over the fact that each of the movies mentioned also feature nefarious Indian Hindu characters as well as virtuous Muslim characters. There is an incredible amount of effort dedicated to striking a balance between religious reality and religious frenzy in the movie that is sadly lacking in the author's papers. It is almost like he had a set of ideologies and was trying to work backwards to prove them from movies, no less. Think about it - think about to my first paragraph that outlined the main characters and the actors and directors of the movies and it will be clear how the author could not have been any more wrong.

(Also cross-posted at Dancing with Dogs)

Movie Review: Crash (2004)

Shanti — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 21:27:33 EST

Wow! I really don't know how to describe this movie. I could say it is a study of race relations, racial tensions and emotions in America, but that would make the movie sounds too artsy and stodgy -- which this movie is completely not. (Now, Birth is another issue and might be the topic of another review). Crash in a nutshell is the story of a complete day in the lives of a lot of people living in LA, how their lives intersect through the day and in my husband's words, "set off a chain reaction" that ultimately ends in the death of a black man.

The movie has pretty much every racial stereotype you can think of - Hispanic housekeeper, thuggish black people, racist white people, Chinese people who say "blake" for "brake," and illegal immigrants. There are Persian shopkeepers who think all Hispanics are out to cheat them, there are black guys who think the Whitey's keeping them down, and there are white people who think all black people are out to rob them. What keeps the movie from becoming a parody or a preachy lecture is the heart that the movie manages to find in its characters -- the characters are all shades of gray -- none really evil (well, maybe a couple who frame an innocent white cop so they can get the black vote).

I thought the most complex interesting characters were those of the black director (Terrence Howard) who thinks he has to shut up and let people walk over him so he can get on with his life -- he doesn't want to cause any ripples. He is too afraid to even speak up when Matt Dillon's racist white cop (another very interesting character) pretends to search his wife while actually feeling up her skirt. He would rather stand there and let his wife be publicly humiliated than do something. All this pent-up frustration causes him to erupt at quite an unlikely time that puts his life in real jeopardy.

Matt Dillon's portrayal of a racist cop seemed run-of-the-mill initially till you realize there are layers of empathy, frustration, and hurt below his hard surface once you get to know him. It was commendable of the movie makers to not take any sides in the argument, but simply present the various sides of the race story. What got me were the scenes of confrontation between Thandie Newton who plays the wife humiliated by Matt Dillon and her husband. The wife is screaming at her husband in frustration -- angry that he, her protector simply stood by and watched while she was being molested on a road by another man. She is humiliated not only for herself, but also for him that he couldn't muster up the dignity to fight back. He, on the other hand is passive-aggressive and punishes the only person whom he can safely stand up to -- his wife -- by refusing to talk to her, and playing the martyr while at the same time choosing to ignore the fact that it was she who was molested and she who is in greater pain than he could possibly be in.

Ryan Phillippe has an interesting little arc playing the honest sidekick to Matt Dillon who requests a reassignment since he cannot stand his partner's racism, but in the end realizes there in inherent racism within himself too -- whether he acknowledges it or not.

All in all, a very interesting movie -- well-made with gripping characters that stay with you long after the movie has ended. A well-told tale that probably comes as close to balanced as it can when it comes to the state of race relations in America.

For some weird reason, a lot of this movie reminded me of Magnolia - I think it was two things - firstly, the way all characters in the movie have some connection to each other and secondly, remember the ending of Magnolia when frogs rain down? The snowfall-in-LA ending of this movie seemed very similar.