Movement

The CM visits the Beggars Colony in the city and which ultimately results in headline from DH:

Plight of beggars in colony moves CM

So one expects a lot of sympathy and a firm commitment to help improve the plight of the people in the colony. Instead one realises that the CM was so moved that all he could think of was to move the colony to some other, "better", place:

The government is now contemplating to shift the Colony to a new location, a better place. The Chief Minister has now proposed to shift the Beggars’ Colony and establish a ‘Mini-Lalbagh’ along with a government hospital on a five acre land in the location.

“Being in the centre of the City and worth around Rs 1,000 crore, the land can be used for various purposes. This would be decided in the next Cabinet meeting,” he said.

Land worth Rs 1000 crores! The possibilities are endless and the imagination goes wild. Will be interesting to see how and to whom they sell it off.

America: Where Even The Prostitution Is Better

From the NY Times:

Prostitution in America isn’t as brutal as it is in, say, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Cambodia and Malaysia (where young girls are routinely kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured by brothel owners, occasionally even killed).

But the only problem is, it isn't!

“If you don’t earn enough money, you get beat,” said Jasmine, an African-American who has turned her life around with the help of Covenant House, an organization that works with children on the street. “If you say something you’re not supposed to, you get beat. If you stay too long with a customer, you get beat. And if you try to leave the pimp, you get beat.”

The Nuclear Deal

And all that it was to do for the Indo-US partnership are in reality far from the touted ideal. Who could have known!

The United States-India nuclear deal was promoted as a transformative initiative — one that would put the bilateral relationship on a much-higher pedestal. In his valedictory speech, President George W. Bush declared: “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India.” By contrast, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not made a single statement on the deal — not even to Parliament — ever since the vaunted deal came to fruition, othe r than to admit recently that he got his party to back the deal by threatening to resign.
...
Seven months after the deal’s realisation, there is no sign of its transformative power. Rather, doubts have arisen over the supposed “global strategic partnership” with America. The policy frame in which Washington is viewing India is not the larger Asian geopolitical landscape, but the southern Asian context. But even on regional matters of vital interest to India, the U.S. has sought to ignore New Delhi or pursue antithetical policy approaches. To the chagrin of Indian neocons — who ingenuously marketed the nuclear deal as a U.S. move to build India as a world power and counterweight to China — Washington has declared that its “most important bilateral relationship in the world” is with Beijing.

Link.

The Class Dialectic

Class:

Declasse: