COLUMNIST: SUSENJIT GUHA
Brain Storm
Susenjit Guha is a freelance writer based in Kolkata, India. He has a colorful and varied background, having worked as an accountant, run his own export business and served as a consultant to companies seeking government contracts on supplying minerals and other materials to Bangladesh. He has traveled extensively throughout the subcontinent. He is an independent thinker on global issues and international affairs, and his opinion pieces are published in The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle in India. He can be contacted at squha60@yahoo.com.
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June 19, 2008Kolkata, India — U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain may differ on domestic and foreign policy, but China will be a headache for whoever occupies the White House next year. The president will have to scale down anti-China rhetoric, even as China continues to ignore ethical and democratic parameters.
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May 23, 2008Kolkata, India — Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherji’s visit to Pakistan this week followed the Jaipur bomb blasts and skirmishes in Kashmir, and coincided with a truce between the Pakistan government and militants in the Swat Valley. Is Pakistan really ready for closer ties with India?
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May 12, 2008Kolkata, India — Burma once conjured up images of a land of plenty, until the junta made it morph into a land of the poorest of the poor. Cyclone Nargis laid bare to the world the intensity of misery that hapless Burmese have to endure. The regime wallows in power, but the world should help loosen its iron grip.
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May 05, 2008Kolkata, India — If India desperately needs gas from Iran in the face of rising oil prices, Iran too cannot afford to lose an old friend in the region. That is why Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is suddenly pushing for a quick deal on the Iran-India-Pakistan gas pipeline.
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April 23, 2008Kolkata, India — Pope Benedict's visit to the White House in an election year seems to be manna from heaven for the Bush administration. The papal visit also accidentally coincided with the furor over Barrack Obama's "bitter" speech, in which he described the religion of small-town Americans in unflattering terms.
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April 16, 2008Kolkata, India — Startling revelations about U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney sanctioning the torture of terrorist suspects, President George W. Bush's decision not to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq, and the naming of Iran as the biggest threat to Iraq and the United States, all warn of another Bush-made catastrophe.
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April 09, 2008Kolkata, India — Back in the 1990s, a Bangladeshi acquaintance back home in Dhaka from a U.S. university told me how he still remembered the tune in the Indian Gold Spot fizz drink advertisement he had listened to as a kid. He had thrown garlands in 1971 at Indian soldiers as their trucks rolled onto Dhaka streets.
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March 31, 2008Kolkata, India — It is no surprise that Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would kick off his round-the-world tour with a visit to the United States and announce that he would fulfill his election pledge to pull out 550 Australian troops from Iraq. He is different from his predecessor.
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March 24, 2008Kolkata, India — Three first-time events took place in quick succession over the past week in Pakistan. A woman was named speaker of the National Assembly, a compromise politician was named prime minister, and President Pervez Musharraf reviewed a parade in civilian clothing. The country is changing.
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March 17, 2008Kolkata, India — Suddenly the U.S. greenback has fallen out of favor. Tour operators and travel agents in and around India's Taj Mahal -- the monument of love -- are not in love with dollars anymore. They now prefer the euro or any other stable currency, after decades of saving greenbacks to resell at a handsome profit.
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March 10, 2008Kokata, India — When a top-drawer editor and author like M. J. Akbar is forced out of office for his independent editorial stance and India's mainstream print and electronic media choose to ignore the development, serious questions arise about the ethical parameters of this fraternity.
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March 06, 2008Kolkata, India — An American I met online was at first surprised I was a non-Christian. Then he thought I was a Muslim since I was from India. His knowledge of my Hindu faith was vague. Few Americans know much about the world outside, despite the U.S. presence in nearly every corner of the globe.
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February 25, 2008Kolkata, India — Although Pakistan's "mother of elections" yielded a simple majority to the Pakistan Peoples Party and Pakistan Muslim League-N, reflecting a vote against President Pervez Musharraf and his PML-Q, the root cause of the people's ire remains firmly rooted -- and Musharraf is in no mood to budge.
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February 20, 2008KOLKATA, India — Hot on the heels of a comment by the Archbishop of Canterbury on BBC Radio 4 that recognition of some aspects of Islamic Sharia law was unavoidable, Chancellor Alistair Darling is now mulling over the issue of Islamic bonds to pay for Gordon Brown's public spending program.
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February 09, 2008Kolkata, India — "Honor killings" are on the rise among Asian immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in the United Kingdom. These crimes are committed mostly against women by men from tribal, feudal and patriarchal rural societies with little or no education. They have nothing to do with Islam, Hinduism or Sikhism.
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January 29, 2008Kolkata, India — The U.S. obsession with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, taken in as an ally in the war on terror, may finally come to an abrupt end. With the Taliban dug in inside Pakistan, al-Qaida still entrenched, and civil society alienated, the United States must be in a fix about its fixation.
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January 17, 2008Kolkata, India — As the White House hopefuls, both Democrat and Republican, lace their speeches with the primary U.S. concerns -- Iraq, internal security, immigration, healthcare and the economy -- they may have to add a nuclear armed Pakistan to their list in future.
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January 09, 2008Kolkata, India — The real casualty of the 10-month East Pakistani resistance that climaxed in Bangladesh in 1971 was not the West Pakistanis who lost a jute-laden East, or the minority Bengali Hindus who fled to India. It was the Bihari community, which is still denied citizenship.