Painful reading.

One of the indisputable merits of Newsinger’s book is that the author is relentlessly candid in advancing the argument that the British empire was not merely gained at the point of bayonets but was down to its last days a very bloody affair…. What Newsinger offers instead is an annotated catalogue of British crimes, [...]

I was pleasantly surprised to receive several comments on my Entebbe book review. Most commenters have asked me where (if) it is available in India. My unfortunate answer: I’m sorry, I can’t help you much as I would like to. Good places to look for the book are the run-down second hand bookshops or the [...]

A reader comments:

As far as our government is concerned, don’t you feel happy that they have not imposed zazia on Hindus again?

Incorrect. We have Jaziya in several different forms imposed on us already. I can safely call it the Dhimmi Jaziya (=Jaziya imposed by Dhimmis on themselves). Over the recent months, the gentle Manmohan Singh [...]

This Danish party gets it mostly right.

A political party called Stop Islamisation of Denmark has claimed that 67th and 69th verses of Quran are violating the Danish constitution and the mosques across the country should be closed according to the 78th article of the Danish constitution… Graves said: “Denmark is our country. Some verses of [...]

This interesting post on Desicritics seeks to examine the controveries surrounding the rewriting of, or the politicizing of history textbooks by governments around the world. Diganta, the author of the article digs up several interesting findings related to this controversy. I’m not knowledgeable enough about textbook controversies around the world.
The controversy around Indian history textbooks [...]

This one should be easy. Who said this? (no Googling)

I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

Is one word: awareness. In bold.
Barely six years, and the publishing world has grown richer by millions of dollars. A whole chunk of the riches flowing in is courtesy the enormous amount of literature dedicated to examining Islam/Islamic terrorism/whatchamacallit, which is being churned out almost everyday (okay, I’m exaggerating).

Dreadful tidings from (New York Times: Free Registration Required) Madhya Pradesh.

The police in central India came across a grisly mystery on the grounds of a hospital over the weekend, with the discovery of 396 small bones and bone fragments that they say could be the remains of newborn babies or fetuses. The bones were found [...]

Baptism: A Christian sacrament signifying spiritual cleansing and rebirth.
Apparently, it is put to novel uses.

A CNN-IBN and Cobrapost investigation has found that some unscrupulous members of the church are selling baptism certificates, which are needed to prove that a person is Christian.
Father Benjamin Das, pastor of the Idgaah Baptist Church in Paharganj, New Delhi, sells [...]

If you want to bash Hinduism/caste system/whatever, do it based on solid understanding of the issue you’re writing about. But when you write absolute nonsense that stems from the dark depths of your abysmal ignorance,

Valuing fairness of skin is part of Hindu ideas of ritual purity; after all, the word ‘varna’ — which comprises the [...]