Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I was blown away by Paris the last time I visited it over 20+ years back. I was a bachelor with little forex, we stayed overnight at the (free) Youth Hostel, you get the idea… This time though, the trip to Paris would be on vacation, with family, it would be my 12 yo daughter’s first trip out of Asia, and I wasn’t on a tight budget. So I was hopeful that while the experience wouldn’t be novel, it would be better on many fronts.   The Europe trip started off badly. We’d planned to fly via Dubai, but with that city facing massive rains and floods, flights to/from Dubai were getting cancelled. So we switched airlines to Lufthansa. Both my wife and I had bad memories of Lufthansa – the cabin crew always felt arrogant. Not anymore. They were very courteous. Unfortunately, with the Iran-Israel flareup, our flight took a longer route avoiding those places, thus got delayed and we missed our connecting flight to Paris. Lufthansa had rebooked us on the next flight automatically – but we...

Kashmir, New York, London and now Paris: the list of terrific places worth visiting made unsafe by that scourge called Islamic terrorism. As suspected, ISIS was indeed sneaking militants in the sea of refugees that Germany was forcing Europe to absorb. France can seal its borders all it likes; Angela Merkel will get them in anyway. ISIS should send Merkel a big Thank You. Remember the photo of the washed up kid who had drowned trying to cross into Europe? Almost every newspaper in the world splashed that pic at the time. Wonder why they don’t show blood stained photos of corpses from Paris? So it’s ok to publish pics of Muslim victims but not those of others? Some commentators on BBC and CNN ask if ISIS, being an ideology, can/should be fought with guns and bombs. I remember this awesome YouTube video where an American lady responded to just that question a year back by asking: Nazism too was an ideology, so was it wrong to have fought that with guns and weapons? George S...

Charlie Hebdo is back. The Huffington Post reports : “The cover shows the Prophet Muhammad holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign with the caption, “All is forgiven.” The newspaper said that it will print over 1 million copies this week, with financial help from Google, Le Monde and other organizations. It usually prints around 60,000.” Imagine that: 60,000 went to 10 million! As Stephen Fry points out : “Had the brothers stayed their bloody hands it would have been 60,000 at the very most. Mohammed must be very cross indeed that his two cretinous representatives have spread the ‘insults’ so unimaginably far and wide.” Of course, not all of these new found “supporters” of Charlie Hebdo are exactly saints or angels. Daniel Wickham fired off tweets on “some of the staunch defenders of the free press attending the solidarity rally in Paris”. His barbs list included King Abdullah of Jordan, Turkey’s PM (“which imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world”), th...

After Islamic extremists opened fire inside Charlie Hebdo’s offices, editors worldwide had to decide whether or not to publish the offending cartoons. Some did, most didn’t. Big surprise. Christopher Massie cites the reason Slate’s editor-in-chief Julia Turner gave as to why she did publish them: “What kind of magazine is Charlie Hebdo? What kind of work does it publish? What are the controversies it’s been embroiled in in the past? To help our readers begin to understand the answers to these questions and grasp what happened this morning in Paris, we wanted to show them the work.” But hey, let not something as inconvenient as the facts or the truth get in the way of the offense takers and the never-give-offense-to-Muslims brigade who call themselves secular and liberal (Ironical, they call themselves liberal but don't want freedom of speech and expression!). Unless, of course, it ridicules or mocks Christians (in India, replace that with Hindus). Like Time ’s “giving i...

In Flirting with Disaster , Marc Gerstein wrote about the (short term) behavioral change due to terrorism and its consequence: “After 9/11, many people were terrified to fly, and they took to the roads instead…the shift of people from commercial airlines (which are extremely safe) to cars (which are less safe when measured on a comparable basis) meant that one thousand more people died in the three months after 9/11 than would have if people had travelled as they usually do.” It’s exactly this kind of behavioral change that Simon Phipps warned about more recently: “Terrorism isn’t just performing a terrifying act. It’s provoking society’s immune system into attacking itself, making its defence systems attack the values and people they are supposed to be defending.” During the recent Sony hack , and the related threats against airing the movie The Interview , David Carr wondered (he wrote this when Sony had yielded to the threats): “Now that cultural discourse has become ...