Dilip Simeon's blog

NB: Letter to Editor, ToI, Sept 29, 2013: Sir, in an article titled ‘Hyderabad 1948: India's hidden massacre’ (September 24, 2013), the BBC has represented the Pandit Sunderlal Committee’s report into the communal violence in 1948 as a matter deliberately kept hidden from the Indian public. A sentence starting ‘But now’ says that a Cambridge historian ‘has obtained a copy of the report as part of his research in this field.’ Further down, the BBC reporter says that the report is ‘now open for viewing’. These statements are misleading, as is your columnist S.A. Aiyar's suggestion in ‘Declassify report on the 1948 Hyderabad massacre’ (TOI November 25, 2012), that the report is classified.  The report has been available in the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library since 1968, when it was donated to the Library by Pandit Sunderlal’s heirs. In his 2001 article ‘Of a massacre untold’ in Frontline Vol. 18, # 05, March 2001, Mr A.G. Noorani states that the Director of Pandit Sund...

Dear Pakistan, Late last year when i was told that I would have to leave you, I was heartbroken. I had tried hard and wished with all my heart that I could have a few more years with you....despite your troubled state. I felt then that i wanted to be by your side, to see you through it, to offer some kind of help or just to not abandon you in your most difficult time. But it seems, destiny had paved a different path for me, a road that would lead me to watch and observe you from a very different perspective. As I packed up the pieces of our time together Pakistan, I smiled at our many memories but cried at the possibilities that never saw the light of day. You had so much potential to become a strong independent nation, so many talented and highly intelligent people to support you but, somehow you seem to have drifted from the dream your fore fathers had for you, fallen into bad company and collected a group of rather nasty and selfish friends. You trusted the wrong people who prom...

A photograph may be worth a thousand words, but even at its most revealing it never tells an entire story. It is the capture of a single moment, a split-second version of the truth. But if it is an  effective photograph , it moves the viewer toward a larger truth.  That’s certainly the case for a front-page   photograph   published Nov. 15, an image of a man’s anguish as he held the   shrouded body of his 11-month-old son,   who was killed in a bomb strike on the man’s house in Gaza. That the man is Palestinian — not a terrorist but a journalist — and that the bomb was dropped by Israelis, to my mind, is almost beside the point. This photo depicted loss and pain, the horrific cost to innocents on both sides of the violence in the Middle East. But many Post readers saw it differently. Jewish groups and American Jews in large numbers wrote to the ombudsman and to Post editors, protesting the photo as biased.  MaryAnne Golon, The Post’s director...

Alber Saber Ayad, an Egyptian Christian activist who ran a Facebook page for atheists, has been in custody since September for “insulting religion”. His alleged offence was posting a link to an infamous YouTube video that caused protests in the Islamic world that month. He was arrested by a Christ ian policeman A MOB attacked Alexander Aan even before an Indonesian court in June jailed him for two and a half years for “inciting religious hatred”. His crime was to write “God does not exist” on a Facebook group he had founded for atheists in Minang, a province of the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Like most non-believers in Islamic regions, he was brought up as a Muslim. And like many who profess godlessness openly, he has been punished. In a handful of majority-Muslim countries atheists can live safely, if quietly; Turkey is one example, Lebanon another. None makes atheism a specific crime. But none gives atheists legal protection or recognition. Indonesia, for example, dem...

Even as the uproar over the recent arrest of two Thane girls over an allegedly "inflammatory" message posted on social networking site  Facebook is yet to fade away, a similar case has now come to light wherein two men from Mumbai had to spend 12 days behind the bars and even lose their jobs. In the shocking example of the alleged misuse of Information and Technology Act , the men -- K.V. Rao and Mayank -- were arrested for allegedly posting offensive comments against some Congress leaders on their Facebook group earlier this year. The duo was employed with the national carrier, Air India. They were arrested in May on the basis of a complaint filed last year. After suffering all these months, they have ended their silence for the first time on Headlines Today on Friday. Out on bail, they narrated their tale of alleged harassment. The two accused had shared a joke and distorted Congress party's election flag to express their angst against the politicians. They alleged that...

If you own a mobile, it's probably held together by tin from the Indonesian island of Bangka. Mining is wrecking the environment and every year it claims dozens more lives Official figures show that mining accidents have quadrupled in the past two years, with the number of deaths increasing from 21 in 2010 to 44 in 2011. But activists say the number of dead actually averages around 100-150 every year, with many cases going unreported.  Suge doesn't have a mobile phone, so he uses a friend's to tell us the news: he doesn't want any visitors and he won't talk. His boss has told him not to say anything. They're neighbours and the mine's just up the road and he needs this job – the job he hopes to go back to when he gets better, inshallah – because  mining  is good money. Everything is OK. Just please don't come. We leave at dawn. In the black morning sky the two-lane highway cuts west across the island towards Suge's village, a cluster of wooden ...

Global greenhouse-gas emissions already have passed the point where the worst effects of global warming could be averted, and they are still rising, according to the third annual United Nations report on the so-called emissions gap. Some countries have made pledges to help reverse this trend by lowering their emissions. However, the report by the U.N. Environment Programme warns that the gap between these pledges and reductions necessary  to cap average global warming  at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2020 continues to widen. "In addition we have one year less to close it," said Niklas Höhne, one of the UNEP report's lead authors. The report, released shortly before an annual round of climate talks set to begin on Monday (Nov. 26) in Qatar, seeks to balance a heightened sense of urgency with a positive message. "It is technically feasible and economically feasible that the gap can be closed," Höhne, director of energy and climate ...