Dear Dr Buragohain
Hearty Congratulations!!! -bhuban -----Original Message----- From: assam-request <[email protected]> To: assam <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 6:31 Subject: assam Digest, Vol 80, Issue 2 Send assam mailing list submissions to [email protected] To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to [email protected] You can reach the person managing the list at [email protected] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of assam digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: [For some women, the misery of Mumbai's dance bars looks like a big step (Bhuban Baruah) 2. Re: [assam] Face of Hope Reflects Calm in Kashmir & other stories in the NY Times (Bhuban Baruah) 3. Re;[assam] An Islamic perspective (Bhuban Baruah) 4. Gririjananda Chowdhury Institute of Management and Technology (GIMT). (Buljit Buragohain) 5. Re: Gririjananda Chowdhury Institute of Management and Technology (GIMT). ([email protected]) 6. Re: [assam]NRIs flay limit for UK settlement (Bhuban Baruah) 7. The Culprit has the last laugh-- who cares - it is only money-"Catch me if you can"- .Indians elected US DEMOCRATICALLY-- World's LARGEST DEMOCRACY. (mc mahant) 8. Pursue the Truth, Not its Messenger (mc mahant) 9. Re: [assam] India begins use of Iran port (Bhuban Baruah) 10. Re; [assam[ Dignity and the wealth of nations & other stories fon the NY Times (Bhuban Baruah) Attached Message From: Bhuban Baruah <[email protected]> To: [email protected] CC: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Assam] [For some women,the misery of Mumbai's dance bars looks like a big step Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 04:51:02 -0500 (EST) Dear Friends:: The article below is actually a book review that, I am sure, you would like. Someday I might comment on it but not at the moment. -bhuban FOR SOME WOMEN, THE MISERY OF MUMBAI’S DANCE BARS LOOKS LIKE A BIG STEP UP ‘Beautiful Thing’ by Sonia Faleiro By DWIGHT GARNER Published: February 29, 2012 ELEELA, THE YOUNG EXOTIC DANCER AT THE CENTER OF “BEAUTIFUL THING,” IS A GENIUS OF VULGARITY. IN THIS INTIMATE AND VALUABLE BOOK OF LITERARY REPORTAGE BY SONIA FALEIRO NEARLY EVERY WORD OUT OF LEELA’S MOUTH IS SPIT LIKE A CARTOON HORNET. FEW OF THESE SENTENCES, ALAS, ARE PUBLISHABLE HERE. Enlarge This Image Ulrik R. McKnight Sonia Faleiro BEAUTIFUL THING Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars By Sonia Faleiro 225 pages. Black Cat. $15. Nineteen when Ms. Faleiro met her, Leela was the highest paid bar dancer in a seedy Mumbai club called Night Lovers. She wore an “imported-padded” bra and had butterscotch streaks in her long hair; she sneered at most of the men who paid to watch her. When they’d toss small denomination rupee notes, she’d mock them: “Is this all you think I’m worth? Why shouldn’t I commit suicide? Why shouldn’t I stick my head into an oven?” Leela’s way with a dirty phrase seems to infect Ms. Faleiro, a gifted young Indian-born writer who is previously the author of a novel called “The Girl” (2006). Her language, like dots of colored light pinging from a smudgy mirrored ball, casts an intoxicating if unsettling glow. About one aggressive man at Night Lovers, the author observes: “Leela’s customer stank of vodka-chicken-onion-chili-lemon and clearly he was no hi-fi-super-badiya-tiptop type. He had no upbringing.” Plenty of Ms. Faleiro’s best sentences are unpublishable too. “Beautiful Thing” is a book about Mumbai’s notorious sex industry, and the news it brings about young women’s lives will break your heart several times over. Most are from small villages. Most were raped repeatedly when young, often by relatives. Many were sold to other men. Leela ran away to Mumbai when she was 13, after her father tried to film her nude and in suggestive poses, hoping she could be a porn actress. When she protested, he had her arrested, and she was raped by policemen. She fled from the general horror inflicted on India’s poor young women, in search of a better life. Dancing at Night Lovers was, socially and financially, a step up for her. Bar dancers ranked above other sex workers, Ms. Faleiro explains, “because selling sex wasn’t a bar dancer’s primary occupation and because when she did sell sex she did so quietly and most often under her own covers.” What Leela wants, Leela rarely gets. She dreams of a Bollywood career, and of a good marriage. She’s forced instead to live by her taut body and her even-more-taut wits. “She squeezed the men in her life like they were lemons,” Ms. Faleiro writes, “and once she was through, she discarded them like rinds.” Leela is aware of the limited but genuine power she wields. “They think I dance for them,” she declares of her customers. “But really, they dance for me.” Ms. Faleiro’s book has a resonance that belies its compact size. She focuses on only a few characters: Leela, some of her dancer friends and Shetty, the wily owner of Night Lovers. If “Beautiful Thing” were to be made into a film, Shetty would be played by whomever is the current Bollywood equivalent of Paul Giamatti. With a few strokes Ms. Faleiro conjures a world, and it is mostly a world of hurt and confusion. She spent five years researching and writing this book, and its lessons are presented frankly. “Poverty eventually made criminals of everyone,” she writes of the women and the shady men in their milieu. Noting Mumbai’s unforgiving nature, she says, “Naïveté was fair prey and beauty unguarded deserved what it got.” In another writer’s hands Leela’s story might have become an op-ed tract. But Ms. Faleiro’s book is not a dirge. For one thing Leela is simply too quirky and alive on the page. She might be wealthy from the tips she makes, but the author catches her in unguarded moments. “She loved not paying for her pleasures,” Ms. Faleiro writes. “After the dance bar closed for the night, Leela would waltz from table to table helping herself to half-smoked cigarettes. She would press her cherry-red lips to abandoned beer bottles.” There’s a feminist spark in Ms. Faleiro’s portrayal of these women. One who was raped repeatedly before the age of 10 says to her, “I decided that if this was going to keep happening to me, then at least I should profit from it, I should eat from it.” Leela urges the author not to pity her. “When you look at my life, don’t look at it beside yours,” she implores. “Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road.” This story can’t end well, and of course it does not. The dance club closes; Leela vanishes into prostitution while the author searches for her. Ultimately Leela loses a tooth in a beating, and she and a friend leave to work in Dubai at the urging of a gangster. You hate to think where she is at this moment. This book, by its end, seems to have taken something out of Ms. Faleiro. You get the sense she’d like to close with even a hint of optimism, but that’s hard to muster. Instead she quotes the gangster, Sharma, who explains that Leela will probably someday preside over a small brothel herself. Sharma issues a line that will ring in your ears. “She will sell her daughter, even if she is her only child, her only family, because her mother sold her, and who is her daughter to deserve better?” Attached Message From: Bhuban Baruah <[email protected]> To: [email protected] CC: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Assam] [assam] Face of Hope Reflects Calm in Kashmir & otherstories in the NY Times Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 05:31:15 -0500 (EST) Dear Friends: The following are the recent post to the New York Times.The first post is the Hope Reflects Calm in Kashmir by Manu Joseph In the story Dr Shah Faesal, 29, says peace in kashmir is the first sign that common sense is finally winning. He wants most of it to bring development to the region's poor. For some women the misery of the Bombay's dance bars looks like a big set up (I've posted this story separately to Assamnet today) Image of the Day, February 29 India's Newest Export:Whiskey Prime Minister Singh's latest interview Have a nice day. -bhuban LETTER FROM INDIA Face of Hope Reflects Calm in Kashmir By MANU JOSEPH Published: February 29, 2012 RECOMMEND TWITTER LINKEDIN SIGN IN TO E-MAIL PRINT REPRINTS SHARE NEW DELHI — There was the smell of hay and soil in the crowded village hall in the Kashmir Valley. The men were on plastic chairs in the front rows, and the women were in the back ones. The doorway was packed with adolescent boys and young men with fierce, translucent eyes. The only sound in the room belonged to the speaker, with occasional deep-throated exclamations of men and honest applause of all. A district magistrate in India usually does not enjoy such attention. But in this cluster of farming villages on the slopes of a hill, 60 kilometers, or 40 miles, from Srinagar, a city of paradisiacal beauty and the capital of the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, people will listen with great care to any man who tells them how he plans to bring roads, electricity, jobs and good schools to their villages, which have been impoverished by decades of strife. In recent times, especially the last year, there has been relative calm in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir, a mostly Muslim region held by India and claimed by Pakistan. The attacks of militants demanding that the region be removed from India’s control have abated after nearly two decades of violence. Local support for the militants has diminished considerably, although the desire for freedom from India and to become a sovereign republic has not, nor has hatred for the Indian Army, which has a formidable presence here. Facing the villagers in the hall was one of Kashmir’s stars, the 29-year-old deputy district magistrate, Dr. Shah Faesal, who has a degree in medicine. Almost everybody in Kashmir is beautiful, and Dr. Faesal’s clean, studious, good-boy charms are somewhat unremarkable in this room. What made him the center of attention is the fact that two years ago, he ranked first among more than half a million candidates in the Union Public Service Commission examination, one of the most prestigious in India. Dr. Faesal was the first Kashmiri to top the civil service exam, an achievement that brought a procession of ecstatic, drum-beating people to his home when news broke on television channels. When it was Dr. Faesal’s turn to speak to the gathering, there was spirited applause. A young woman, a local journalist whose head was covered, blushed as she stood holding a recording device close to his face. She almost never met his eyes through the course of his speech. Dr. Faesal has a firm but reverent style of speaking. He told me after the meeting: “I respect everyone. It is very useful to be that way, but I am not putting on an act. I address every person I meet as ‘Sir,’ including the village women. They love it when I call them ‘Sir,’ and they start laughing. Nobody has ever called them that.” He said that the recent period of peace in the region was not a window of deceptive calm, but the first sign that common sense was finally winning. He wants to make the most of it to bring development to Kashmir’s poor. Vivanta by Taj, one of the two five-star hotels in Srinagar, is an immediate beneficiary of peace. The hotel is set on top of a hill of tulips and ancient trees and is surrounded by great, snow-capped mountains. It is guarded like a fortress by armed men, but many of its defenses are not visible to the pampered guests. A security official, who had undergone a month’s counterterrorism training in Israel, told me that the hotel had its own intelligence gathering system, which includes using a network of local residents for information about anything unusual in their neighborhood. It had been about 10 months since the hotel opened, and all its 48 operational rooms were booked, even though February was not peak season in Srinagar. The revival of the tourism business is evident all over Srinagar. Honeymooning couples from across India are arriving in droves, confident that they will return alive. The simplicity of peace can end at any moment in Kashmir. There can be another attack by militants, or street protests of Kashmiris against the Indian Army that can last days. But the people here are growing confident that this may be a new beginning they had wished for. The restaurants and cafes are filled with happy conversations. The joy is visible in the people walking down the streets, many of whom look pregnant because they are holding, under their long checked robes, a cane-wrapped pot filled with burning embers of coals to keep warm. They are so used to it that they, including Dr. Faesal, can go to sleep with the pot of red coal between their legs. When the meeting in the village hall was over, some elders, the district magistrate and Dr. Faesal went upstairs for a feast. There were huge pieces of fried river carp, and chicken and lamb, which the men tore into with both hands, their fingers growing luminous with oil. And they boisterously discussed things to be done in the villages. Dr. Faesal has a cheerful face even though his life has been marked by tragedies that are common to thousands of Kashmiris. His father, a schoolteacher who spoke against violence, was killed by unidentified gunmen a decade ago. Before that, Dr. Faesal’s father was one of the thousands of Kashmiris who were routinely humiliated by the Indian Army, he said. “Once, after a terrorist strike, the army just picked up some men in revenge and beat them up,” he said. “My father was among them.” According to Dr. Faesal, his father was also forced to recite a Hindu chant, “Ram, Ram.” After the meal, the district magistrate left in a car that had a red light on it, and he was followed by armed guards and an old, battered ambulance, which had nothing in it but a narrow bed. It might as well have been a hearse. As the ambulance made its way through the unpaved village lane, two little girls mimicked the sound of the ambulance siren. During the long years of conflict here, that had been the predominant sound of childhood. Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “Serious Men. ” A version of this article appeared in pr Attached Message From: Bhuban Baruah <[email protected]> To: [email protected] CC: [email protected] Subject: [Assam] Re;[assam] An Islamic perspective Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 06:07:17 -0500 (EST) Dear Fiends; In the recent past, I posted an email which stated that Islam has better provisions for looking after females than in some other religions. Here is a letter from Craig Seaton from Brighton,UK to the Metro of London (01 03 2012) from another angle: It is amazing that in a 21st century society, women still have to fight and argue the case for not being identified as single or married by their title (Metro, Wed). In Islam, often criticised for its treatment of females, women have had this right for centuries, with no titular difference between single and married women -and no debate about being referred to as Ms, Miss or Mrs. Also, as alluded by one correspondent, we have a custom in which a woman loses her family name on marriage. In Islam a woman keeps her family name on marriage. Until relatively recently, we used to have a practice in which upon marriage, a woman's assets were no longer her but belonged to her (hence why women were not allowed bank accounts). Again, in Islam, women's pre-marital assets (cash, property etc) remain theirs. Despite the criticisms some make about the status of women in Islam, in this respect, they are well ahead of us. ------------------------------------------------------ -bhuban . Attached Message From: Buljit Buragohain <[email protected]> To: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: [Assam] Gririjananda Chowdhury Institute of Management andTechnology (GIMT). Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 22:26:58 +0800 (SGT) Dear All, I want to inform all of you that today (01.03.2012), I have joined in Gririjananda Chowdhury Institute of Management and Technology (http://www.gimt-guwahati.ac.in/ ) as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering . Thanks Buljit Buragohain Attached Message From: [email protected] To: Assam Mailing list <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Assam] Gririjananda Chowdhury Institute of Managementand Technology (GIMT). Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 14:28:14 +0000 Congrats! Sent from BlackBerry® on Airtel -----Original Message----- From: Buljit Buragohain <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 22:26:58 To: <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>; <[email protected]> Reply-To: A Mailing list for people interested in Assam from around the world <[email protected]> Subject: [Assam] Gririjananda Chowdhury Institute of Management and Technology (GIMT). Dear All, I want to inform all of you that today (01.03.2012), I have joined in Gririjananda Chowdhury Institute of Management and Technology (http://www.gimt-guwahati.ac.in/ ) as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering . Thanks Buljit Buragohain _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org Attached Message From: Bhuban Baruah <[email protected]> To: [email protected] CC: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Assam] [assam]NRIs flay limit for UK settlement Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 16:34:05 -0500 (EST) Dear Friends: This is a news item from the Times of India today(03 03 2012). The UK Government wants to curb immigration from the subcontinent b raising the threshold of the monthly salaries, The entire eport is below; NRIs flay pay limit for UK settlement LONDON: A leading campaign group espousing the cause of Indian and other non-EU professionals has strongly opposed the proposal to introduce a salary threshold for migrants who wish to settle in the UK permanently after working here for five years. Immigration minister Damian Green yesterday announced that for the first time, the link between the number of years a migrant spends in the country and permanent settlement was proposed to be broken with the requirement that they can settle only if they earn at least 35,000 pounds annually. "Settlement in the UK should not be a right of the wealthy few. It is high time that these morally bankrupt politicians stopped preaching lessons on morality and human rights to the developing countries and turned its attention on the migrants who come to UK by ensuring them a fair and a reasonable chance of making a home in the UK irrespective of their class of earnings," the HSMP Forum said in a statement. Until now, permanent settlement was automatic: if a migrant spends five years in the UK in an immigration route that leads to settlement, and has not committed major criminal offences, permanent settlement was granted, irrespective of the salary level. The new measure is scheduled to take effect from 2016 and is likely to reduce the number of Indian and other non-EU migrants granted permanent from 60,000 to 20,000 every year. The salary threshold would mean that many teachers, nurses and others from outside the EU would need to leave the UK after working for five years because they cannot meet the 35,000 pounds annual salary threshold. -bhuban Attached Message From: mc mahant <[email protected]> To: assam assamnet <[email protected]> Subject: [Assam] The Culprit has the last laugh-- who cares - it is onlymoney-"Catch me if you can"- .Indians elected US DEMOCRATICALLY-- World'sLARGEST DEMOCRACY. Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 06:59:55 +0530 http://www.lokraj.org.in/?q=blogs/president/2g-supreme-court-verdict-it-blow-against-corruption Any comments -- Do blog direct mm Attached Message From: mc mahant <[email protected]> To: assam assamnet <[email protected]> Subject: [Assam] Pursue the Truth, Not its Messenger Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 07:11:56 +0530 Wikileaks vs. Stratfor: Pursue the Truth, Not its Messenger Among the emails was a short one-liner that suggested the U.S. government has produced, through a secret grand jury, a sealed indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.Dilli will promptly copy and implement this - as they did for Parag Das . mm Attached Message From: Bhuban Baruah <[email protected]> To: [email protected] CC: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Assam] [assam] India begins use of Iran port Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 00:30:51 -0500 (EST) Dear Friends: The article below is from today's the Telegraph UK (02 03 2012]: In case of difficulty please click Google for the full text. -bhuban India begins use of Chabahar port in Iran despite international pressure India remains undeterred by US and EU pressure to stop importing Iranian oil, indicating clearly that it would continue to be driven by its own domestic interests in the matter. Vessels sail past Malta-flagged Iranian crude oil supertanker "Delvar" (L) anchoring off Singapore. Western trade sanctions against Iran are strangling its oil exports even before they go into effect. Photo: REUTERS/Tim Chong By Rahul Bedi in New Delhi 12:57PM GMT 01 Mar 2012 Reacting to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comments that the US was engaging in "very intense and very blunt" conversations with India and others like China and Turkey to stop importing oil from Iran in order to pressure Tehran over its covert nuclear programme, officials in New Delhi yesterday said they would not be "coerced" by any country. And reinforcing its stand defying Western sanctions, India recently used Chabahar port in southeastern Iran for the first time ever to transport 100,000 metric tons of wheat to Afghanistan as part of its humanitarian aid to the war-torn country. India helped build Chabahar a decade ago to provide it access to Afghanistan and Central Asia- banned by neighbouring nuclear rival Pakistan- and is involved in constructing a 560-mile long rail line from the Zabul iron ore mines in southern Afghanistan to the Iranian port. Along with Iran and Afghanistan it also has an agreement to accord Indian goods, Chabahar, an arrangement it plans to exploit imminently. A defiant India was also dispatching a large trade delegation to Iran later this month to explore business opportunities created by Western sanctions. According to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry in Delhi the Islamic republic offered massive potential for export of Indian products and commodities annually worth over $10 billion. "The potential of trade and economic relations between India and Iran can touch $30 billion by 2015 from the current level of $13.7 billion" Association secretary general D S Rawat said. Importing around 12 per cent of its oil and gas requirements from Iran for an estimated $12 billion, India maintains it will abide only by UN sanctions in this regard and not implement those imposed by individual nations or groupings. Over the past few weeks it has also been examining ways to step up trade with Iran amid trouble in settling its oil bills as sanctions were closing down banking routes. An Iranian Central Bank delegation is presently in Delhi to determine options for India to pay for crude imports and is negotiating to offset a proportion of this against acquiring oil refining machinery, heaving engineering goods and pharmaceuticals all of which the Islamic Republic badly needed. Till recently Indian companies were routing route payments through Turkey's Turkiye Halk Bankasi AS after EU pressure forced German-based Europaisch-Iranische Handelsbank AG to stop handling the payments last year, but it remains uncertain how long this arrangement would continue. Last month India's finance minister Pranab Mukherjee rejected pressure from the Obama administration to join the US-EU led sanctions against Tehran. Speaking to reporters in Chicago he declared that it was "not possible" for India, the world's fourth largest hydrocarbons consumer to reduce its oil and gas imports from Iran as it desperately needed them to sustain economic growth. Attached Message From: Bhuban Baruah <[email protected]> To: [email protected] CC: [email protected] Subject: [Assam] Re;[assam[ Dignity and the wealth of nations & other stories fon theNY Times Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 00:47:43 -0500 (EST) Dear Friends: Recent post to N Times (02 03 20120 - bhuban March 02 Dignity and the Wealth of Nations Political movements backed by middle-class protesters undermine theory that continuing prosperity is all people want. March 02 Tata and Vodafone Eye Cable and Wireless C&W's operations in developing countries are attractive. March 01 4 Newswallah: Who is Narendra Modi? The staunch politician refuses to get bogged down by the ghost of the Godhra communal riots of 2002. March 01 Image of the Day: March 1 Oliver Ridley turtles enter the Bay of Bengal. March 01 Meet Gurgaon’s Top Cop: Former Engineer K.K. Sindhu In the fast-growing city of Gurgaon, vehicle theft and traffic are top prioritie _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
