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Dear Bimbo: As an alumni of the noble institute, I humbly request you not to take the name of ISI in the same breath as that of trash institutions like the CSDS. ISI is a great place, it is where the genius of R.C Bose and C.R. Rao and D. Basu flourished, while CSDS is a sty where idiots like Yogendra Yadav are parked. I am sure you will agree that hard sciences should never be equated with glorified pseudo science aka soft sciences aka social studies, political (ha ha) “science”

Yogendra BS Yadav has 0 background in statistics, his knowledge of survey sampling is 0, he just talks general bullcrap.

Minimizing skew (I assume you mean skewnes), that is interesting. How do they do that, minimize the skew?

I am reposting this

Firstly to clear away some nonsense from no mind - OK never mind

…they do, as I (having worked among them and drunk their tea) can testify/ never mind looks like you have licked their boots as well. Grow a spine.

Now about Prafool the profound fool.

He’s a Trotskyite, so strictly speaking, he is against the Indian fifth columnists - aka the commie crook groups or chinichaddis. This gos back to the early post-Leninist tussle between Trotsky and Stalin - actually a power struggle. Stalin it is said wanted to establish socialism in one country while Trotsky wanted to remain true to the cause of communism - total global revolution. This is all moonshine, because it is nothing but a way to apply a veneer to violent, thuggish, idealistic, autocracy. Think Reign of Terror (Robespierre), and Caliphatism, Martin Lutherism, Maosim, Nazism, etc. It is all the same. But Prafool finds something to identify with in the Indian commie crooks’ ideology - which rejects Indian national interest (in favor of Chinese/world social interest) and that is to his liking.

Fascism is, though odious, a different creature from Nazism. It has to do with ordered imposition of revolutionary change, and draws much from methods of Ancient pre-Cesar Rome. Nazism is Hitler’s gloss on Fascism. Commies hate to use the word Nazism, because, as you rightly guessed, it is a shortened form of National Socialism. And you can’t possibly criticise Socialism. Can you? The world has generally been tolerant of Fascism. Franco around the end of 2nd WW adroitly repackaged himself into an anti-communist leader (much as Hitler had done some years earlier) and lived in peace (sheltering Nazis) for decades. Our commie crooks too don’t mind fascism - see how eager hacks like Sid Varadarajan, and Sukumar Muralidharan are, to lick the boots of a fascist thug like Hugo Chavez.

The Western liberal/leftconservative/right spectrum is not the right way to analyse any polity outside the West.

Firstly to clear away some nonsense

…they do, as I (having worked among them and drunk their tea) can testify/ never mind looks like you have licked their boots as well. Grow a spine.

The Western liberal/leftconservative/right spectrum is not the right way to analyse any polity outside the West.

Informed and a rather candid corrective is what I was hoping for; a corrective to your intial ad hominem that is. Though I am not surprised that you are still hung up on “small things.” Nevermind of course.

Looking at smaller of the small things, Conrad Black is found guilty alright but not sentenced yet, rendering the conviction incomplete as of yet. The choicest adjectives will have to wait tell early next month, apparently, when he will be sentenced.

Any way, the issue was whether Conrad Black’s association is enough to discredit any and everything of the newspapers that he was part of. But I guess you insist on mass indictment, which doesn’t jive with the laurels lent to Nehru later. NYSun is a highbrow newspaper, nothing close to the schmaltzy tabloids published by Zuckerman and Murdoch. It seems to me that its centre-right position is the only criterion that has warranted its dismissal as serious paper. If so I have no complaints, but do insist that that is a formulation that serious people can disagree upon.

Regarding the opinion polls and Kashmiri terrorists: The opinion polls are wrong most of the time, something widely observed in regard to Indian polls atleast. And borrowing the marketing jargon is hardly going to correct the perception that is as close to reality as it can get. Ask 10 people around you and confirm it rather than arguing for the sake of it. There’s a reason we find the likes of Yogendra Yadav hard at spin every so often. You might console by getting hung up on the 99% figure, but then perception is reality; and one might as well accept it.

Now, the so-called militants have been butchering innocent unarmed civilians with sophisticated weapons. Is that not an effort to influence public policy through terrorizing unarmed populace? Should that not incur the terrorist label then? If not that what else do they need to do?

Though I didn’t have the luxury of sipping tea with the dozen or so Kashmiris that I know, my experience differs from yours in that not one of that motley crew calls these people terrorists. But since that’s not large enough a sample I would refrain from judging the Kashmiris largely. Anyway, proof lies in the pudding. For all their faith in Kashmiriyat, how many secularists would advocate a plebiscite there? That in itself tells on the militant-terrorist dichotomy in the so-called “emic” mind, except that a significant portion of those emics are now etics languising in dilapitated camps outside New Delhi.

I won’t add to the questions already raised about your incorrect assertions regarding Godse and Savarkar except mention that Savarkar was not religious - he advocated meat eating, shunning cow worship etc, and RSS, chiefly Hedgewar and later Golwalkar, differed with him. Savarkar was hardly a poster-boy of RSS; in fact he was anything but.

Nehru was close pals with dictators like Tito and Nasser. His singular contribution to democracy can also be witnessed by the feudalistic dynasty that still reigns supreme over his party. For all his democratic protestations Nehru died a sorry dictator, humiliated by “Our Chairman” no less. Of course such indictment won’t be enough unlike the case of Conrad Black rubbing on NY Sun.

Lastly, as impressive as is the furnished list of authors(missed poor Amartya?), they remain a pint-size group of fellow travellers, with a concurrent perspective. You might as well quote the court historians, Schlesinger, Bugliosi and Galbraith (economist), on the dark side of Camelot. Guha, btw, is environmental scientist by training (check his published books: Environmentalism, Varities of Envi., Ecology and Equity, to name a few) and not a social scientist. He has also been called, separately, a court historian and a cricket historian( by Arundhati and Dalrymple I guess).

I hope to see more substance and less verbal firework. For the sake of tautology: Nevermind.

http://chicago.indianconsulate.com/Countime.htm

I presume these are national holidays too.

There are 2 “Hindu” holidays and 4 “Muslim” national holidays.

So much for “muslims having first right to resources”. Never knew this included major chunk of public holidays as well…

But by your coin, the Afrikaaners would have been completely right in their assertion that Mandela was a ‘terrorist’ rather than a freedom fighter
Better analogy would be Brits perception of Mahatma Gandhi as a terrorist.

They do science, you see. 99% of the time.
Yeah..the new transparency announced last week will helps up evaluate it, wouldn’t it? Wonder why for over 50 years they felt a need to keep the “science” all hush-hush.

Never mind the fact that Godse was a past member of the RSS, current member of the Hindu Mahasabha
Godse was member of INC too. Nevermind.
Current member of Hindu Mahasabha!!! Current?? Neither Godse is current nor is Hindu Mahasabha. Nevermind.

R. Guha’s magisterial ‘India after Gandhi’ (the social historian’s perspective).
Err… Guha and historian. Nevermind. Though it’s good to see where your idealogical anchors are moored.

Question: Does ‘nevermind’ mean person with no mind?

- These analogies are problematic, I feel. Would you explain please?

On Godse, you are more correct but not entirely. He was a past member of the RSS…AND fell out with it. He found Savarkar to be more suited to his temperment. In fact, the RSS and Savarkar did not get along well at all. These are all documented facts.

That the RSS “accepted” Savarkar later on…without really accepting him, is another story alltogether. However, that still does not prove Godse was intellectual kin to the RSS…much less, the RSS was his sponsor.

Thank you.