The Aryan "invasion" of India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Historian Who Believes There Are No Good Guys, Bad Guys

Much of politics and history, especially in the U.S., is about Us and Them. Us, the Good Guys, versus much of the Rest of the World: the Bad Guys. If you're with us, with moral as well as material and diplomatic support, you're also good guys (though not as good as us). If you're against us, or simply not with us, you're bad guys. And our mission is to bomb, starve, and sanction you into changing your mind.

Historian Mark David Ledbetter does not accept such a simplistic view of wold affairs. His study of history, contained in three works of towering research, America's Forgotten History: Parts 1-3, tells him that every nation, at some point in its history, has been guilty of genocide or war crimes. It just happens that different nations are at different points of development and engagement with the rest of the world, and therefore, we don't all behave and think the same.

But that's just one element of Ledbetter's new book, Dancing on the Edge of the W…
Read more

The Mahatma, the Goats, and Young Cats: My New Humor Collection

Image
When I was in my late teens, I used to read Punch magazine, and one of my favorite writers was Alan Coren, who published a humor collection titled Golfing for Cats. It turned out that the book had nothing to do with either golfing or cats; but golfing and cats were the two hottest subjects on the bestseller list at that time, so he married the two and made up the title. (Alan Coren's book ended up doing quite well.)

My story is totally different. Neither cats, goats, nor Mahatma Gandhi are particularly hot at this moment (the Mahatma, if resurrected, would be horrified by Donald Trump and prefer to return to his grave), so the Alan Coren anecdote only partly explains the title of my new book: The Mahatma, the Goats, and Young Cats, all of which do occur in my collection of humor and satire, but are not its main subjects: this being a diverse humor collection ranging from Jesus to Ronald Reagan, from Indian politics to American nukes and deficits, from Adam and Eve to modern puber…
Read more

Malala Yousafzai, Pakistani Girl, Speaks of Gandhi, Peace, and Forgiveness

I cannot remember how many years back a speech moved me the way Malala Yousafzai's did. [A couple of days later, I feel the same.] Like Rosa Parks before her, whose action in refusing to go to the back of the bus changed the course of history, could 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai's speech at the UN today change history?

It reminded me of the time when I was 16, and was beginning to participate in debating competitions; while I delivered a few snappy and bold speeches, I could summon up nothing like the eloquence, depth of content, and breadth of vision that Malala Yousafzai displayed in her amazing speech.

Almost everything she said was meaningful and important, including her plea for the universal right to free education, which we can ensure with a mere one-tenth of what the world spends on armaments and armies. But what made it even more special for me was that she talked of peace, asking the leaders of the world to stop war and turn their attention to peace, education, toler…
Read more