By Nadeem F. Paracha

Daddy?
Yes, son.
Are we going to have a war with India?
Perhaps.
Oh, goody. We will thrash them, right? Like we did in 1857!
It wasn’t in 1857, son.
Oh, okay. But whom did we thrash in 1857?
The British, son…
And the Hindus too, right?
Well…
Did Quaid-i-Azam fight in that war along with Muhammad bin Qasim and Imran Khan?
No, son. The Quaid and Imran were born much later and Muhammad bin Qasim died many years before.
Then who ruled Pakistan in those days?
There was no Pakistan in those days, son.
But there was always a Pakistan! It has been there for 5,000 years!
Who have you been talking to, son?
No one. I’ve just been watching TV.
It figures.
Daddy, why are all these people against us Arabs?
Arabs? But we aren’t Arabs, son.
Of course we are because our ancestors were Arabs!
No, son. Our ancestors were of the subcontinental stock.
Sub-what?
Never mind.You seem to like wars, son.
Yes. I like to watch them on TV.
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By Anthony Gottlieb

If a Martian were to look at a map of the Earth’s religions, what he might find most surprising is the fact that such a map can be drawn at all. How strange–he might say to himself–that so many of the world’s Hindus are to be found in one place, namely India. And how odd that Muslims are so very numerous in the Middle East. With the disconcerting curiosity that is so typical of Martians, he might wonder what explains this geographical clustering. Do people move countries in order to be close to others of the same faith? Or do people simply tend to adopt the religion they grew up with?

The answer, of course, is the latter–on the whole. There are exceptions: Jews moving to Israel, for example, and there are many other cases of religious migration. Still, the huddling of the faithful is mainly explained by the fact that religion runs in families. If you have a religion, it is probably the same one as your parents. Earlier this year a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that nearly three-quarters of American adults professed the religion in which they were raised. But instead of finding this glass to be three-quarters full, newspapers preferred to notice that it was one-quarter empty. It was the minority of Americans who either switched religions, or abandoned religion altogether, who were highlighted in reports of the survey (“Poll Finds a Fluid Religious Life in US”, ran a headline in the New York Times). Plainly it does not count as news that religion remains largely a family affair. Yet it should do, because of its largely unnoticed consequences. Some religious groups are dramatically outbreeding others, in ways that have an impact on America, Europe and elsewhere.
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By Ian Sample

Charles Darwin’s “tree of life”, which shows how species are related through evolutionary history, is wrong and needs to be replaced, according to leading scientists.
The great naturalist first sketched how species might evolve along branches of an imaginary tree in 1837, an idea that quickly came to symbolise the theory of evolution by natural selection.
But modern genetics has revealed that representing evolutionary history as a tree is misleading, with scientists saying a more realistic way to represent the origins and inter-relatedness of species would be an impenetrable thicket. Darwin himself also wrote about evolution and ecosystems as a “tangled bank”.
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New studies suggest people need to respect the body’s desire for nighttime darkness
By Janet Raloff
Web edition : Friday, January 23rd, 2009

NIGHT LIGHTS AND CANCER

…
To stay healthy, the body needs its zzz’s. But independent of slumber, human health also appears to require plenty of darkness — especially at night. Or so suggests a pair of new cancer studies.
One found that among postmenopausal women, the lower the overnight production of melatonin — a brain hormone secreted at night, especially during darkness — the higher the incidence of breast cancer. The second study correlated elevated prostate cancer incidence around the world with places that have the brightest signatures of light in satellite imagery.
Trends seen in both studies bolster animal data indicating that natural nighttime peaks in blood concentrations of melatonin, which tend to occur during sleep, depress the growth of the hormonally sensitive cancers.
Light will depress the body’s natural secretion of that hormone, whether someone is awake or asleep.
In 2001, Eva S. Schernhammer of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and her colleagues found an elevated risk of breast cancer among women who worked night shifts. The data, gleaned from participants in the long-running Nurses’ Health Study, fit with the idea that the light encountered while working nocturnal hours would have suppressed the women’s melatonin production.
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By BEN WHITE
Published: January 28, 2009

By almost any measure, 2008 was a complete disaster for Wall Street — except, that is, when the bonuses arrived.
Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.
That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller.
While the payouts paled next to the riches of recent years, Wall Street workers still took home about as much as they did in 2004, when the Dow Jones industrial average was flying above 10,000, on its way to a record high.
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By Uri Avnery
Of all the beautiful phrases in Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, these are the words that stuck in my mind: “You are on the wrong side of history.”
He was talking about the tyrannical regimes of the world. But we, too, should ponder these words
In the last few days I have heard a lot of declarations from Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert. And every time, these eight words came back to haunt me: “You are on the wrong side of history!”
Obama was speaking as a man of the 21st century. Our leaders speak the language of the 19th century. They resemble the dinosaurs which once terrorized their neighborhood and were quite unaware of the fact that their time had already passed.
During the rousing celebrations, again and again the multicolored patchwork of the new president’s family was mentioned.
All the preceding 43 presidents were white Protestants, except John Kennedy, who was a white Catholic. 38 of them were the descendants of immigrants from the British isles. Of the other five, three were of Dutch ancestry (Theodor and Franklin D. Roosevelt , as well as Martin van Buren) and two of German descent (Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower.)
The face of Obama’s family is quite different. The extended family includes whites and the descendents of black slaves, Africans from Kenya, Indonesians, Chinese from Canada, Christians, Muslims and even one Jew (a converted African-American). The two first names of the president himself, Barack Hussein, are Arabic.
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by Siddharth Varadarajan

India needs to guide Richard Holbrooke in his work as envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and tell him the core issue is no longer Kashmir but the nature of the Pakistani establishment.
If Richard Holbrooke is to deliver on the promise of addressing the “deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the veteran American diplomat who has just been named U.S. President Barack H. Obama’s special representative for the two countries will have to resist the temptation of mission creep.
It is an open secret that Mr. Holbrooke’s original brief included India, mainly because Mr. Obama let it be known that he believes the Kashmir issue forms an integral part of the military-strategic puzzle the U.S. is dealing with in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But that was before New Delhi unleashed a silent but strenuous campaign to ensure that the ‘I word’ did not figure in any official announcement of the special envoy’s mandate. India told the outgoing Bush administration through Richard Boucher and David Mulford and sent strong signals to the Obama people directly as well as through key business interest and lobbying groups that any appointment which smacked of linkage with Kashmir would be seen as an unfriendly act.
In the event, the Indian government has had its way on this point. An envoy with the words ‘Kashmir’ in his designation would probably not even get a visa to enter the country and would end up poisoning the bilateral relationship in every sphere. India hands in the Beltway know this only too well. No administration would like to sabotage a strategic partnership that has been so assiduously built over a decade-and-a-half, especially when the long-awaited military payoffs are believed to be just round the corner.
At the same time, New Delhi would do well to remember that Mr. Obama’s special representative revels in the image of being a troubleshooter. For his efforts in the Balkans, Mr. Holbrooke has been nominated seven times for the Nobel Peace Prize. The temptation of getting an eighth nomination by trying to “solve Kashmir” would be too great for a man of his ambition. Indeed, his remarks at the State Department last Thursday, just after being named to the job by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, make it clear that Mr. Holbrooke does not see his work as confined to the Durand Line. “In Pakistan,” he said, “the situation is infinitely complex and I don’t think I would advance our goals if I tried to discuss it today … But I will say that in putting Afghanistan and Pakistan together under one envoy, we should underscore that we fully respect the fact that Pakistan has its own history, its own traditions, and it is far more than the turbulent, dangerous tribal areas on its western border. And we will respect that as we seek to follow suggestions that have been made by all three of the men and women standing behind me [President Obama, Vice-President Joe Biden and Ms Clinton] in the last few years on having a more comprehensive policy.”
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By Aijaz Ahmad

Identity politics in the widest sense is now quite the norm, and it comes to us in many guises, in the actual conduct of politics as well as in political theories and analyses, from the right, the left, the liberal center. Culturalism, or the view that culture is the primary and determining instance of social existence, is a by-product of this identitarianism, and wherever politics and religion come to inflame each other, religion itself becomes synonymous with culture, and culture with religion, so that, for example, a constitutive difference between Islam and Christianity, as regards the scope for egalitarian politics in their respective zones, can be posited from the left, while the most hard-nosed geopolitical prescriptions can come to us from the right, in the guise of a discourse on religion, culture and civilization.
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“Excerpt from the play: THE LAST OF THE RED HOT MAMMAS, OR, THE LIBERATION OF WOMEN AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE WORLD (1969) This play was performed at the founding convention of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. A play performed by an entire audience, and by Marylee A., Ellen A., Amy C., Pat M. Sherry Jenkins, Amy Kesselman, Naomi Weisstein (1969)”

I am all women, I am every woman.
Wherever women are suffering,
I am there.
Wherever woman are struggling,
I am there.
Wherever woman are fighting for their liberation,
I am there.

I am at the bedside of the woman giving birth,
screaming in labor;
I am with the women selling their bodies
in third world countries so
that her children may eat;
I am with the woman selling her
body in the streets of american cities
to feed the habit she acquired
from her boyfriend.

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