A part of a Buddhism sutra was found inside one of the two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, providing a hint for unveiling the mystery surrounding the creation of the statues, a Japanese news agency reported Sunday.

The fragment of the scripture was believed to be the original Sanskrit document, written with the letters often used in the 6th and 7th century, according to a Kyodo news dispatch from Kabul.

Although various scripts have been found inside Buddha statues in Japan, it was the first time a sutra was found inside an Afghan Buddha statue, Kyodo said. The script was written in “Gilgit/Bamiyan type one characters,” which were used in a region that spread over what is now northern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, Kyodo said.

The document was the beginning section of a sutra that spelled out the basic belief of Buddhism and said all things were mortal, Kyodo said. It was written on pieces of birch bark and wrapped in a piece of cloth with mud balls, which could have been symbols of Buddha bones, according to the researching team, Kyodo reported. [Secret sutra found in rubble of Bamiyan Buddha]

Last year a Buddhist residence was discovered by a Japanese team in Bamiyan and at that time I wrote

Archaeology has returned to Afghanistan in a big way. First there was the announcement regarding the Bactrian Gold.. Then there was constant news about the search for a third reclining Buddha in Bamiyan by Zemaryali Tarzi based on a note written by Huen Tsang. Now a Japanese archaeologist team has found some new structures in Bamiyan.

Besides this, the Japanese team also discovered Buddhist caves dating back to the eighth century about 120 KM west of Bamiyan, but when it comes discovering documents, this is not the first discovery in that region. Last year ancient documents, which for some reason is called Buddhism’s Dead Sea Scrolls were found in Bamiyan. Actually there were found in 1996 and was smuggled out to Pakistan. Some of these manuscripts, the earliest of which were dated to 1st century AD were some of the oldest Buddhist manuscripts ever written. While the recently discovered sutra was written in Sanskrit, more earlier ones were written in a language called Gāndhārī.

“Before the discovery of these manuscripts, Gandhari was primarily known through coin legends and inscriptions which are highly formulaic and have a limited vocabulary,” he said. “These manuscripts therefore substantially increase the corpus of documents in this language.”

The Gandhari manuscripts are constructed of birch bark which becomes brittle with age, or palm leaf. A large number are damaged or fragmentary, and they are exceptionally difficult to read: there are no spaces between words and the spelling was never standardized. For example, the Sanskrit word dharma, meaning ‘law’ or ‘teaching’ may appear in Gandhari as dharma, darma, dhama, dhrama, or dhrarma. [Master of Gandhari sheds light on Buddhism]

The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, Harvest Books (May 8, 2006), 320 pages

Travelogues are  interesting when they have an angle to it. For example Bruce Feiler’s Walking the Bible is a journey from Egypt to Jerusalem along the path followed by Moses. Chasing Che is a motorcycle trip along the route that Che Guevera took. Jaya Ganga: In Search of the River Goddess is travel from the origins to the end of river Ganga, Chasing the monsoon is a journey of a man following the path of monsoons in India and Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud by Shuyun Sun  follows the path taken by Huen Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim who toured India during in the 7th century.

All those writers had a peaceful journey and most of their interesting narrative comes when they meet very interesting people on the road. Compared to them, Rory Stewart did not have it easy. For one he decided to walk from Herat to Kabul in January when it was still snowing in the mountains and second it was the January of 2002 when it was still not safe for anyone to walk through Afghanistan. With his knowledge of the language, customs, and sometimes pure luck, he survives and writes one of the best travelogues I have read.

He decided to take the central route through Afghanistan because it was shorter and the Taliban were still fighting in the southern route, not because he wanted to follow the path of any historical person. As he finalized the trip, he discovered that Zāhir ud-Dīn Mohammad aka Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire had also walked along the same route in January, five hundred year back, and had recorded his journey in his diary. Armed with Babur’s diary, Stewart sets of on foot ignoring warnings by Afghanis themselves.

After warning him that he is guaranteed to be killed during this trip, the security service in Herat  gives him two armed body guards Qasim and Abdul Haq who walk with him for many days before turning back. From that point Stewart makes use of the Afghan hospitality in which the village chief or the tribal leader sends his son along with him to see him safely to the next village. Sometimes he walks alone, and for quite some part of the journey he walk along with Babur, a dog which was gifted to him in one of the villages.

Then as Stewart writes, “..never in my twenty-one months of travel did they attempt to kidnap or kill me. I was alone and a stranger, walking in very remote areas; I represented a culture that many of them hated and I was carrying enough money to save or at least transform their lives. I was indulged, fed, nursed and protected by people poorer, hungrier, sicker and more vulnerable than me”. While he gets food and shelter in most villages, he finds that in some villages people are reluctant. Then he has to remind them of Afghan hospitality and that he is a guest in their country and most of the time it worked.

Just before he enters the Darai-e-Takht village located in a gorge of the Hari Rud River, he gets shot at. When he is resting in an inn, he is joined by a thirty year old commandant of Obey, Mustafa, who had shot at him a while back.  Mustafa it seems had shot at Stewart because Mustafa’s cousin had bet that he couldn’t hit Stewart. After listening to Stewart’s story, Mustafa agrees to give him a letter of introduction and provide him with five armed men as honor guard.

Most of the people he meets have fought in some war, either against the Russians or for the Taliban or against the Taliban. An excellent anecdote comes in the chapter where he meets Seyyed Umar Khan in the village of Garmao and asks him why he became a Mujahid. “Because the Russian government stopped my women from wearing head scarves and confiscated my donkeys”, he says. When asked why he fought against the Taliban he says, “Because they forced my women to wear burqas, not head scarves and stole my donkeys”. As Kaplan mentioned in Soldiers of God, the Afghans want to be left alone.

He also meets quite a number of people, like members of the Hazara tribe who hate the Taliban for the the killings they did. In village of Gorak he meets the headman’s son who shows him a copy of Koran which was burned when the Taliban burned their house. When asked to recollect the names and number of people who were murdered by the Taliban, they are not able to for the only thing they cared about was the Koran. As he walks through the Shaidan pass he realizes that it is a ghost town where the Taliban had killed about eighty men in the bazaar. Stewart also meets a Taliban commander in Wardak who asks him if Stewart thinks Usama bin Laden or George Bush is better and if he is a Muslim. Using his wits, he survives the interrogation.

In Bamiyan he climbs up the destroyed statues of the Buddha and sees that the Taliban had torched the interior of rooms to destroy some frescoes and had boot stamps on ceilings which were twenty feet high. Stewart notes that Buddhism was weakened by the Hindu revival in the first millennium and was extinguished by Islam. Then the Taliban destroyed even traces of it.

Even though Stewart sees pictures of Hritik Roshan in Herat  and buxom Bollywood actresses in Kabul, there is one thing in which the Afghans will disagree with the Indians. The question is who owns the Koh-i-Noor? In the village of Dideros, a fat old man asks Stewart when the English are going to return the diamond to them. After Babur acquired it in Delhi, it passed hands from Humayun to Shah Jahan. In 1739 Nadir Shah, the ruler of Iran got it from Shah Jahan’s heir and took it to Iran across Afghanistan. Nadir’s son gave it to Ahmed Shah Durrani, the founder of modern Afghanistan who kept it in his capital in Khandahar and hence the Afghans think that the diamond is theirs.

Most of the people whom he met were illiterate villagers who did not have electricity or television. They knew very little about the outside world and the only thing that connected them to rest of the world was Islam. Even the rights of women varied from region to region. In some villages he never gets to see any women publicly whereas in some villages women talk to him. Even political power mean different things in different regions. Some people wanted a feudal lord and some hated a centralized government. In some places
violence had been inflicted by t
he Taliban and in some places the villagers had inflicted it on themselves.

Filled with anecdotes, excellent footnotes and drawings Stewart did on his journey, this book is a wonderful read. Once you read Kaplan’s book followed by Stewart’s, you will get a good idea about the politics and people of Afghanistan.

In our elections most of the candidates put by political parties are career politicians or thugs or both. The public is left with no choice other than to vote for the lesser evil. Under the constitution, there is something called Section 49-O which allows the voter to reject all the candidates on the ballot

So what’s the big deal, you ask?
Well, here it is:apparently, if the election is countermanded owing to negative votes, not one of the candidates who stood for the earlier election can contest the re-election.
Now imagine the consequences. Imagine what would happen if each time a party put up a goon, the voters forced an expensive re-election. The mind boggles. [Just do it!]

For such an event to happen there has to be tremendous coordination by the non-political voters. There also has to be a grassroots efforts to  make this into a mass movement within a constituency, which currently looks impractical. Even if a re-election is forced, career politicians will always find a way to get their folks in for in the circle of life, for every Lalu who is convicted, there is a Rabri Devi to take his place.

 

There is one requirement for political parties to be accepted by the 100% literate populate of Kerala – they should have atleast two factions. The nice thing about having two factions is that you don’t need to waste time governing the state. When you have to fight the opponent faction all the time, who has the time to improve the state. Then, what is there to improve in the state? We already rank #1 in suicides and unemployment.
Factionalism is an artform perfected by Karunakaran, former chief minister of Kerala and the only witness to Parasurama throwing the axe ( the act which created Kerala). He wanted his son Muralidharan, famous all around Kerala for being Karunakaran’s son, to be given a good position. Sadly Muralidharan lacked the qualification even to be a road side eve teaser, and hence the Congress party ignored him. Karunakaran, who according to carbon dating is as old as Giant Sequoia tree, got angry. He quit the Congress Party and formed a new party called DIC (K), to remind everyone that it was a fight about “positions”.
After thinking of various way to humiliate the Congress Party, Karunakaran decided to join the Communists. That honeymoon lasted less than the time it takes for Arjun Singh to count the hair on his head. DIC (K) came running back to the Congress camp and decided to contest in 18 seats. Even people who were going to commit suicide forgot their worries for a moment and watched this reunion with excitement. Newspapers covered this news ignoring everything else. In the elections, all 17 DIC (K) candidates lost their deposits.
Now the Communists are in power and the Chief Minister is Achyutanandan, who claims that he too saw Parasurama throwing the axe. First of all the Communists did not want to give him a seat in this elections. Due to pressure exerted by “public”, he was given a seat which he won convincingly. Then there was no other option but to make him the Chief Minister, since he is one of the oldest Marxists. In fact Achyutanandan was a Marxist even before Karl Marx was born.
Since Achyutanandan was named the Chief Minister, cronies of Pinarayi Vijayan, Achuyutanandan’s nemesis, took all other cabinet positions. The aim was to make Achyutanandan a Chief Minister without portfolio. Achyutanandan, who in fact suggested the title The Communist Manifesto to Karl Marx, knew better. He ignored the portfolio list given by the party and gave his own list to the Governor.
It has been less than a week since the new Govt. took over and we already have the build up to a Mahabharata. Newspapers are already drooling at the prospect of this new guerilla warfare between the politburo, party state committee and the new Chief Minister. If anyone in Kerala is hoping for development, they will have to wait. This is more important.

“We have enough helicopters. The United States brought in their helicopters and more will come. We are well-equipped now. Helicopters are crucial in first three and four days. Even now they are crucial. But we have enough now,” Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told a press conference in Islamabad.[No need for Indian helicopters: Pak PM]

That was the Prime Minister turning down an Indian offer to send helicopters. But the truth is that they don’t have enough helicopters and that has prevented rescuers from reaching many villages. Eight American helicopters have joined the search and 40 more were promised. 34 Pakistani military and civilian helicopters are also involved, but that is not enough according to the Army Spokesman. The UN says that Pakistan needs 50 more helicopters.
There are obvious risks for letting Indian helicopters into Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. What if they find out all the militant camp sites and decide to “help” people there.

Muzaffarabad and the Manshera district of NWFP, which were at the epicentre of the quake, have also been for many years the epicentre for international jihadi terrorism. The Jaish-e-Mohammad and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, both members of Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front, had their jihadi training infrastructure in Manshera district, particularly in Balakot, which is reported to have been totally destroyed by the quake. In the beginning of this year, the Al Qaeda too had shifted one of its training camps from the Waziristan area of the Federally-administered Tribal Areas to Manshera. There were also unconfirmed reports that bin Laden had taken up residence in Manshera district. The LET and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, which are also members of the IIF, had their training infrastructure in Muzaffarabad. The United Jihad Council headed by Syed Salahuddin of the Hizbul Mujahideen, an indigenous Kashmiri terrorist organisation with no known links to the Al Qaeda or the IIF, was also operating from Muzaffarabad.[Quake in Pakistan: The sequel]

The Pakistani Govt. would let those Kashmiris, the same people for whom they are fighting the proxy war, die than help them.
Update: As soon as the earthquake struck, I was wondering, who would be the first to blame America for this natural disaster. Seems like Arundhathi Roy has competition. Hugo Chavez, entertaining as always proposed his theory of natural disasters which put the blame on “world global capitalist model”, whatever that means. Tariq Ali is more down to earth. He blamed America for not sending more helicopters from Afghanistan. At the same time Tariq Ali does not wonder why the offer from India was not taken up by Pakistani authorities? Did the victims insist that they be rescued only in American helicopters?

Jagdish Tytler in his resignation letter

Since this unfortunate and unwarranted mention of my name is causing embarrassment to the government, I hereby voluntarily tender my resignation from the Council of Ministers. I also take this opportunity to thank you and the party for the faith reposed in me all along.

According to News Insight

Threatened with excommunication from the Sikh community, Manmohan Singh met Sonia Gandhi with the choice that either Jagdish Tytler would have to resign or he would have to quit, following which the overseas Indians’ minister, an accused in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, was asked to leave the government.
Soon afterwards, Manmohan Singh in his Parliament speech clearly hinted that Tytler would leave his government, but till the evening, he was not willing to budge, after which he was asked by Sonia Gandhi’s office to put in his papers.

When Pol Pot, who practiced a version of Maoism adapted for Cambodians, became the Prime Minister, he had a grand vision for his country. In his land there would be no private property. He introduced the idea of communal farms, communal property and communal education. Some people dissented and they were sent on the fast path to Communist hell. In his world there would be no rich nor poor and everyone would be equal and pigs would be flying as cows jumped over the moon.
About 1.6 million people, or about one-fifth of the population paid with their lives in this Communist experiment.
Now Communists have learned their lesson. It has been accepted that in Communist Paradise, there will be inequality. The Communist Party in India is worth about 4000 crore. In China too the gap between the rich and poor are increasing. According to an editorial in People’s Daily, written by some rich Communists for the poor Communists, this fact has to be accepted.

But the editorial said widening inequality is an inevitable phase of growth. “This is a golden period of development,” it said. “And it is also a period when conflict is becoming pronounced. The incessant deepening of reform must inevitably involve the adjustment of interests. “It is unavoidable that different people and different groups enjoy the fruits of reform and development to differing degrees.”[China warns protests won’t be tolerated]

In China, the Communist party controls the land allocation since ordinary people cannot be trusted with important decisions. The powerful and corrupt party leaders sell land to builders and pocket the money. It was such an abuse of power that resulted in violence that resulted in the death of six villagers in Shengyou village.

The battle of Shengyou village has come to highlight one of China’s sharpest social issues – the Communist Party’s complete control of land allocation. More than 66 million Chinese farmers have lost their land in the past 10 years. It is a land grab which has fattened the wallets of government officials and left tens of thousands of people homeless.
In recent years, however, more and more farmers have become aware of their rights, and have begun to resist – leading to rising social unrest. Some estimates suggest more than three million people were involved in demonstrations last year, and the government in Beijing is getting increasingly concerned. [China faces growing land disputes]

The Communist way of addressing unrest is to apply more force and limit freedom of expression and even theatre companies and artistes are not spared. The unrests by villagers, retirees, and ethnic minorities has now caused the ruling class to issue a stern warning to the population. In an unprecedented step an editorial appeared in the front page of People’s Daily with the threats of severe consequences.

The Chinese government has warned citizens that they must obey the law and that any threats to social stability will not be tolerated, a sign that top leaders are growing increasingly worried about unrest in the countryside. “Protecting stability comes before all else,” the editorial cautioned. “Any behavior that wrecks stability and challenges the law will directly damage the people’s fundamental interests.”[China warns protests won’t be tolerated]

There is widespread inequality, there is unrest among the population and the govt. is becoming more authoritarian. When Communists in India are offended, they just kick people out of the party. But that’s not how China is going to deal with its problems. Now with United States making friendly gestures to India and going bellicose on China, and with the nuke word entering the conversation, the external relations do not seem to be faring well either.
Right now with China being the 800 pound economic gorilla in the world, internal and external matters of China cannot be dismissed as regional issues. The stability of China should be of concern to every globalized country.

King Fahd, the dictator of Saudi Arabia died and here is what is happening

Members of the royal family have pledged allegiance to Abdullah. An official ceremony confirming him as king is due to be held on Wednesday.
King Fahd’s funeral is scheduled for Tuesday, while on Wednesday Saudi citizens will be able to pledge their loyalty to their new ruler at a palace in the capital, Riyadh[ King Fahd of Saudi Arabia dies]

And this is the crowd to which President Bush is preaching democracy! But then why make fun of Saudis when this is happening in our democratic India. Here is an editorial from when Sonia Gandhi “saved” the Congress Party from a crisis

There were legitimate fears that the collective wrath of the rank and file of the party might once again fall on senior leaders of the party at the AICC session resulting in torn clothes and broken bones. Also, to leave the AICC session without the last remaining mascot of the party might have emboldened closet rebels. Factions within the party would have vied with each other for the guardianship of the grand old party in absence of the glue that perilously binds them together. Instead, the AICC has hailed the saviour and pledged eternal allegiance to the first family and the totemic symbol of the Congress. The Congress banners on the streets leading to the AICC venue said it all: You love India, and we love you too.[Resigned to rule]

Related Links: No internal democracy

I couldn’t believe I was in the same room as Ted Kennedy, the legendary United States Senator from Massachusetts, whose volume of legislation dwarfs anything his brothers John and Bobby did for the American people.

Did Rediff send some fifth grader (no offence to fifth graders) to cover Manmohan Singh’s visit to United States ? Here are some more gems.

While I spotted hotelier and Clinton pal Sant Singh Chatwal and Republican Indian-American stalwart Dr R Vijayanagar in the same gallery, I couldn’t keep my gaze off the gallery to our left which had some of the Indian members of the CEOs Forum, set up on Monday.
The other person I kept returning to was Gursharan Kaur, dressed in a nice cream Kanjeevaram sari with a red border. Like her husband, her face rarely registers any emotion. But on Tuesday, one saw a trace of nervous anticipation before Dr Singh began speaking, and then more than a hint of pride as the gathering richly applauded his speech. Occasionally, she turned to K Natwar Singh, our flamboyant foreign minister, who was always willing to provide amplification. I can wager the erudite Kunwarsaab knows the process of the US Congress better than some of those who adorn it.[Dr Singh wows Congress]

This man, Nikhil Laxman seems to be amused by everyone and everything as if he has been released from prison after a long term. I am sure he spent the whole night staring at the Washington Monument.