"We want quotas in the Indian Institute of Management, the Indian Institute of Technology and law colleges of India. India should not ignore us," said Shafquat Ali Inqlabi, a resident of Gilgit, told rediff.com.
. . .
Inqlabi says, "Indian maps always show Gilgit and Baltistan as part of India. The Constitution of India mentions that we are part of India. In your eyes, we are Indians and Pakistan has 'occupied' Indian territory. Then, why should we not get admissions in the IIMs and the IITs?"

If what one witnesses on Huai Hai road is Chinese communism, it is not all that unattractive a proposition.

More global brand names. L'oreal, Pepsi, McDonald. The magnificent garden along Maoming Road has nine huge posters of Christian Dior.

All these glitzy display of free market shenanigans begins to make sense as part of a national policy of broad-mindedness. Ma Xuejie, Vice-Director in the Press and Information Office of the People's Government, Shanghai Pudong New Area, spells out the policy: "The investor has come [to China] to make money, protect him, not be jealous of it."

In a night market in a Chinese city, I once watched with horrified fascination while a street vendor casually took a thin, harmless-looking rat snake out of a cage filled with a writhing mass of other snakes, and banged its head against a tabletop to stun it. He then attached its head to a clothesline with a large clothes peg. It hung like a thick rope, motionless, stunned.

Then the man took out a sharp knife, grasped the snake's tail, and sliced it vertically with a single, fluid motion. His assistant carefully caught the snake's blood in a glass as it writhed in its death throes, suddenly awakened. A bystander bought the glass of snake blood and drank it down neat. Another bought the snake's gall bladder or penis, I couldn't tell which. And soon enough, the rest of its body was chopped up for soup.

In a revealing comment, the publishers of The Hindu admitted in their plea that such a certificate issued to the Deccan Chronicle "would adversely affect the circulation and advertising revenues of The Hindu" and would "also adversely affect the business interests of The Hindu, which has a dominant market share in Chennai." The statements implicitly recognised the fact that the Deccan Chronicle, which started printing in Chennai on March 28, 2005, had effectively eroded the claimed monopoly of The Hindu in Chennai.

Kasturi & Sons added that "there is every possibility that their advertising market would be hampered" and claimed damages "on account of losses and hardships they suffered."

Fighting off competition is not new to the family that runs The Hindu. The editor of The Hindu, N.Ram, claims that globalization is "anti-working class" and "anti-people" in nature and opposes globalization when others benefit from it, but his wife owns a firm named TnQ that makes money by executing projects offshored from the Western countries.

In an unrelated issue, The Hindu came out in support of Aamir Khan whose film faces a peaceful social boycott in Gujarat. The newspaper termed the social boycott as a ban. Aamir Khan has allied with people who oppose globalization, but he makes a lot of money endorsing Coca Cola.

A radical Christian fundamentalist named Dolphy D'Souza was among the first to protest against the freedom of artistic expression. A Congress MP, Churchill Alemao, threatened to use force to stop the screening of the movie.

Many of those who oppose the social boycott of Aamir Khan's film Fanaa support the use of force to ban The Da Vinci Code. Among those in this group are India's alleged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Marty Peretz notices a New York Times euphemism: "of South Asian descent." It means fanatical Islamists who are Canadian citizens and interested in murdering infidels. Just a clarification in case you don't read other papers that report the news.