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Internet Analysts Question India\'s Efforts to Stem Panic

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

“The Indian government's efforts to stem a weeklong panic among some ethnic minorities has again put it at odds with Internet companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter,” Vikas Bajaj wrote in The New York Times.

Officials in New Delhi, “who have had disagreements with the companies over restrictions on free speech,” Mr. Bajaj wrote, said the sites are slow in responding to requests to “delete and trace the origins of doctored photos and incendiary posts aimed at people from northeastern India.”

The government has blocked 245 Web pages since Friday, he wrote. But many sites are said to contain “fabricated images of violence against Muslims in the northeast and in neighboring Myanmar,” meant to incite Muslims in cities like Bangalore and Mumbai to attack people from the northeast.

India has also restricted cellphone users to five text messages a day each for 15 d ays, in an effort to limit the spread of rumors, which led to tens of thousands of northeastern migrants to flee to their native states, he wrote.

Executives from Google and industry associations said they were cooperating fully with the authorities, he wrote. But some analysts noted that few requests had not been heeded as they were “overly broad or violated internal policies and the rights of users.”

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The Making of a \"Quality Suit\" in Kolkata\'s Bustling New Market

By SEAN MCLAIN

The first time I met Ajit Singh, I offended him.

It was the fall of 2010, and I was in Kolkata, looking for a tailor to turn several meters of shockingly expensive wool into a suit for my future father-in-law.

While my bride-to-be was trying on lehengas in New Market, I was in Paris Tailors skeptically fingering the lapels of Mr. Singh's suits.

“Is this fully canvassed?” I asked, holding the lapel of a suit between thumb and forefinger. The 83-year-old Mr. Singh looked like I had slapped him in the face.

I was feeling for one of the hallmarks of a well-made suit, a layer of canvas placed between the outer fabric and the lining. It is the difference between a suit that will look good for the rest of your life and a suit that will last for a few dry cleanings.

Mr. Singh, who â€" he later informed me â€" has been tailoring suits since 1946, took immediate umbrage at my ques tion. “Come here, young man,” he said, and proceeded to show me a half-finished suit, with the all-important canvas middle layer exposed. “I know all the latest styles,” he told me and pulled out that year's edition of the Sears catalogue, which did considerably less for my confidence in the quality of his craftsmanship than the sight of that wool canvas.

Luckily, my father-in-law inadvertently diverted Mr. Singh's indignation toward himself, by introducing me as his son-in-law.

“What law?” Mr. Singh exclaimed. “Sir, let me tell you something, this in-law business was brought in by the British. Indians never used this term before. He is your son.”

My father, as Mr. Singh insisted I called my wife's father, got his suit, and I was also measured at Mr. Singh's urging. The next day, I received my new favorite suit, a light gray linen number for the princely sum of 5,000 rupees ($90 at current exchange rates). It fit better than the far more exp ensive suits I had ordered from an outfit on the famed Savile Row in London.

Two years later, I was back in Kolkata, and I took the opportunity to get more suits.

I had difficulty finding the place. The omnipresent street hawkers seemed to have multiplied in New Market, filling the sidewalks and spilling onto the streets. I nearly walked past the store, since the sign is obscured by larger hoardings for Moustache Jeans and the umbrellas of the hawkers unless you are standing directly opposite the shop.

The market was a different place when Mr. Singh's store was established.

During the British Raj, New Market in central Kolkata became the favored shopping destination of the English. It was constructed by the British-controlled Calcutta Municipal Corporation in 1875 to satisfy the demands of English residents in India, who objected to the conditions of local markets. The market's gothic architecture was designed to mimic that of London.

In 1935, M r. Singh's father, K.J. Singh, established Paris Tailors on Lindsay Street, opposite the main market complex. The name of the store had less to do with the sartorial leanings of the Singh family than with the founder's patron and instructor.

“Madame Stanley gave the name - she was a French lady from Paris living in India,” said Mr. Singh. “My father apprenticed with her in 1926.”

Paris Tailors became known for making woolen coats for ladies, which might seem an odd business in humid Kolkata, but according to Mr. Singh, the store became a favorite of the city's so-called Britishers. “My father would brag that the Lady Viceroy was a customer,” he said.

In 1950, Mr. Singh was sent to London by his father to learn “gents cutting” so that bespoke suits could be added to the store's repertoire. While successive Sears catalogs have changed the style of Paris Tailors' offerings, the essential components, the innards of a quality suit, have remained unchanged.

“You should have seen the market back then,” said Mr. Singh. “Well-dressed men and women walked down the streets to shop â€" not like it is today.”

The source of Mr. Singh's disdain was the army of street hawkers, whose tables full of knockoff sunglasses and plastic toys encompassed all but a few feet of pavement. Outside, two groups of hawkers began a shouting match over “the rules of the pavement.”

“Good customers don't come here anymore,” he said. Thanks to its long presence at the same address in the market, the shop has a long list of regular customers, but new customers were rare, said Mr. Singh.

“In the 1980s, everyone in India wore tailored clothes. Today, everyone wants ready-made,” he said. “Even those who come to me usually don't want tailored suits. They come and try whatever I have on the racks, and whatever fits, they buy and give me half an hour for alterations.”

As if to hammer Mr. Singh's point home, a man came in with a pair of trousers he wanted copied. Mr. Singh quickly dismissed the pants and insisted on taking the man's measurements. “This is ready-made; it does not fit properly. If you wear a 44 ready-made, you may need a 45.”

The customer then insisted again that the pants be made in the same style of the sample trousers he brought in.

In a pair of mass-produced, machine-made pants, the seams are “double-stitched,” explained Mr. Singh. You see this on pairs of jeans or khakis â€" two parallel lines of stitching holding the pieces of cloth on the leg together. This is a sturdy enough method of making pants, but Mr. Singh's pants are hand sewn using a different method of stitching. It is designed to allow the size of the pants to be adjusted with the growth or, hopefully, the shrinkage of one's thighs and waistline.

Mr. Singh asked the customer to come in the next day for a fitting before making the final product. “A trial is not n ecessary,” the customer said. “I have no time. Please take your time; I am in no hurry. Please make it in the proper way, with double-stitching.”

Mr. Singh said nothing.

My second suit from Paris Tailors was charcoal-gray mohair with dark pink pinstripes. Like my first suit, this too fit like a second skin.

Unfortunately, Mr. Singh is getting older, and good tailors are increasingly hard to find. Mr. Singh's only son and apprentice died in a motorcycle accident in 2005. He has a variety of assistants and silent partners, who might attempt to stake a claim to Paris Tailors when the master tailor eventually passes away.

Mr. Singh, however, said he is not concerned about who will take over the store when he is gone. “Who knows what will happen tomorrow?” he said. “I only think about today.”

Nor is Mr. Singh considering retirement. “What would I do?” His brothers have moved to the West, as have his daughters.

But what keeps h im at his store is more than just the need of an elderly man to stay busy - he feels he is preserving the family's legacy and a piece of old Kolkata. “My father gave his blood for this shop,” he said. “I got married with the money we made from this shop.”

Sean McLain is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi, and a fan of a good suit. You can follow him on Twitter @McLainSean



United States Grants Broad Sanctions Exemption for Iran Quake Aid

By RICK GLADSTONE

The United States cleared the way on Tuesday for American charities to expedite relief to the victims of the double earthquake that struck Iran more than two weeks ago, issuing the charities a temporary but broad exemption to the regimen of economic sanctions imposed on that country over its disputed nuclear energy program.

The exemption, announced by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees the sanctions, authorizes charities “to collect funds to be used in direct support of humanitarian relief and reconstruction activities in response to the earthquake.” The exemption, which expires on Oct. 5, permits the charities to transfer up to $300,000 each to relief and rebuilding efforts, bypassing the restrictions on financial transactions that are enforced under the sanctions.

Advocacy groups in the United States had been pressing for such an exemption, arguing that it was necessary in order to secure the cooperation of banks and other financial institutions. Many have been reluctant to engage in money transfers to Iran for fear of violating the sanctions rules.

“This humanitarian gesture will empower the American people to help Iranians who've lost everything to this terrible natural disaster,” David Elliot, assistant policy director at the National Iranian American Council, a Washington-based group that represents Americans of Iranian descent, said on the group's Web site. “The White House should be commended for ensuring that emergency relief efforts won't be held hostage to the bad relations between the two countries.”

The Bush administration issued a similar exemption, known as a general license, for charities who aided victims of the earthquake in Iran's southern city of Bam on 2003, which left 25,000 people dead.

More than 300 people were killed and thousands left homeless in the pair of Aug. 11 quakes, which struck a Turk ish-speaking area in northern Iran. Senior officials in the Iranian government, which has faced some domestic criticism over its uneven response to the quake, have said they would accept foreign assistance. But the government has declined to accept a direct offer of help from the Obama administration, which characterized that decision as disappointing in a post on the official White House blog by Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser.



Anti-Islam Ads Remixed in San Francisco and New York

By ROBERT MACKEY

As my colleague Benjamin Weiser reported last month, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had violated the First Amendment rights of a pro-Israel group by refusing to run an ad that refers to Arabs as “savage” on 318 city buses.

The ad campaign was devised by Pamela Geller, the crusading anti-Islam blogger who fought to block the construction of an Islamic cultural center and mosque near the site of the World Trade Center two summers ago. The full text of the ad, which refers to a statement by Ms. Geller's intellectual hero Ayn Rand, reads: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.” Then, between two Stars of David, the tag line appears: “Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

While the judge gave the New York City transit system 30 days to consider its options for appeal, the ads have already appeared on the sides of buses in San F rancisco, provoking anger from Muslims and supporters of the Palestinian cause.

As the local ABC affiliate in San Francisco reported, the city's Municipal Transportation Agency took the unusual step of denouncing the ads and running huge disclaimers on the sides of the buses to disavow what a spokesman called the “repulsive” message from Ms. Geller's group it was forced to accept.

Earlier this week, some of the San Francisco ads were edited by Ms. Geller's opponents to invert their message. An image posted on Facebook on Sunday by an Oakland blogger showed that text was added to the side of one bus so that the ad now reads: “In any war between the colonizer and the colonized, support the oppressed. Support the Palestinian right of return. Defeat racism.”

As Nora Barrows-Friedman reported on the pro-Palestinian Electronic Intifada on Saturday, another ad was changed by superimposing a hand stamping the words “hate speech” over the original text on the side of another bus.

Ms. Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative has also succeeded in placing similarly themed ads in Metro-North stations in the New York suburbs. As an image of one of those ads posted on Instagram by a Sarah Lawrence College graduate student who blogs as @supertrampnyc shows, it reads: “19,250* deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01. *And counting. It's not Islamophobia, it's Islamorealism.”

Writing on her group's blog last week, Ms. Geller posted a reader's photograph showing that one of those ads, at the Hastings-on-Hudson train station, was torn down leaving only a tiny sliver of paper - on which someone had scrawled: “Countless acts of terrorism and violence have been committed by Christian extremists. Does this make all Christians terrorists?”

Although Ms. Geller has launched a number of similar initiatives in the past, she noted that a pro-Palestinian ad had been placed in Metro-North stations earlier in the summer. Liliana Segura, an editor at The Nation, posted an image of that ad on Twitter last month.

Ms. Segura's photograph shows, the ad from the Committee for Peace in Israel and Palestine illustrated “Palestinian Loss of Land” from 1946 to 2010 through a series of maps. The text next to the illustration said: “4.7 Million Palestinians Are Classified by the U.N. as Refugees.”

After that ad appeared in stations, a local CBS news reporter spoke to the man who paid it and to the editor of a Jewish newspaper in New York, The Algemei ner. The newspaper editor, Dovid Efune told CBS that the ad was anti-Semitic because “it paints Jews as aggressors, as imperialists - people that are stealing or taking land from others.”

A CBS news video report on a pro-Palestinian ad in a suburban New York train station in July.

While the language in the pro-Palestinian ad refrained from attacking any group, the original Ayn Rand statement Ms. Geller adapted her ad copy from is even more inflammatory, as Adam Serwer explained this week in a post on the Mother Jones Web site. During a lecture in 1974, Ms. Rand said:

The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind-the development of industry in that wasted desert continent-versus savages who don't want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don't wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I've contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.



Anti-Putin Hackers Seize Moscow Court\'s Web Site, Posting Calls to \'Free Pussy Riot\'

By ILYA MOUZYKANTSKII and ROBERT MACKEY

MOSCOW - Hackers briefly seized control Monday of the Web site of the Moscow district court that sentenced three members of the feminist protest band Pussy Riot to two years in a penal colony last week.

For three hours on Tuesday morning, Khamovnichesky Court's usually static Web site was enlivened with a recording of the new Pussy Riot song, “Putin Is Lighting the Fires of Revolution,” and an embedded copy of a music video for a song called “Hate,” by the Bulgarian gay icon Azis. The video was described as “a rather sleazy and erotic gay clip,” by the Russian news site Gazeta. A headline across the top of the site read, “Putin's Thieving Gang Is Robbing Our Country! Wake Up, Comrades!”

The site's navigation tabs were altered and other text was added to display slogans including, “Free Pussy Riot,” and, “Judges â€" I'd have executed them all.”

A video report on the hacking by the Russian business news channel RBC showed a message from the hackers in which they claimed to be part “American Anonymous,” referring to a loose collective of hackers (not usually identified as American) known for revenge attacks on the Web sites of organizations and states perceived as enemies of free speech.

According to a BBC News report, the hackers also wrote: “We don't forget and we don't forgive,” and, “The justice system has to be transparent.”

The hackers were apparently encouraged to attack the site early on Tuesday by an anonymous user of the Web forum 2ch - the Russian equivalent of the message board 4chan. At 6:17 a.m., a message was posted on the board with the login and password information needed to access the Web site's back end, along with a username and password that granted access to the court's e-mail inbox.

Within minutes, gleeful 2ch users began posting screenshots o f their progress in defacing the hacked Web site and discussing what video might be the most (in)appropriate to display.

Soon, a Twitter account linked to the Russian arm of Anonymous posted a link to archived copies of messages apparently taken from one of the court's e-mail inboxes. An analysis of the archive by the Moscow bureau of The New York Times shows that the vast majority of the 487 messages were e-mails sent to the court from users of the Web site change.org. Last week the site promised to deliver a “Free Pussy Riot!” petition signed by more than 136,000 people to the court and to officials including Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Officials regained control of the site later on Tuesday and Darya Lyakh, a spokeswoman for the court, told the Russian news agency Interfax that the hacking had been carried out “by people with bad imaginations.”

One of Pussy Riot's lawyers, Mark Feygin, wrote on Twitter, “Of course I do not approve of hac king attacks, but cannot hide genuine admiration for the daredevils from Anonymous daredevils. If they arrest them, I will defend them.”

Ilya Mouzykantskii reported from Moscow and Robert Mackey from New York.



Image of the Day: August 21

August 21, 2012, 11:06 am
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Indian Dance via Bollywood, by Way of Russia, Near Wall Street

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The weeklong Downtown Dance Festival closed Friday in downtown New York with its annual “Erasing Borders” program of Indian dance, Alastair Macaulay wrote in The New York Times. Despite the Indo-American label, the organizers included countries other than India and the United States, he wrote.

“So you had to laugh on Friday,” Mr. Macaulay wrote, “not only did the 90-minute concert begin and end with several chunks of Bollywood dance, but it was also Bollywood by way of Russia.”

The Russian dancers of the Mayuri Dance Group from Petrozavodsk were big hits, he wrote. “The dancing, often with lip-syncing and flashing eyes, had all of Bollywood's engaging vivacity.”

In a final bhangra number, “Jatt Ho Gaya Sharabi,” three male roles were so well played and the performers so convincingly bearded that few in the audience realized that the dancers were women (whom we'd seen dancing as such earlier). The most breathtaking item was “Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu,” a long and energetic solo danced by Natalia Fridman to a 1950s song (recorded by Geeta Dutt) of very bubbly Indian rock 'n' roll. You could tie yourself in knots over the politically incorrect ethnology here. The words “Chin Chin Chu” may have been based on the 1916 London hit show “Chu Chin Chow,” a vision of Chinese Orientalism now coming back to us via India via Russia. Ms. Fridman's unflagging brio was cause for delight.

Read the full article.



Indian and Western Colleges Set Up Joint Study Programs

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

“As colleges and universities worldwide wait for India's lawmakers to approve a bill granting full access to the country's vast education market,” Vir Singh wrote in The International Herald Tribune, “some institutions are reaching Indian students through twinning programs.”

“Twinning, where participants complete part of their studies in their own country and the rest abroad, is not widely known in India,” Mr. Singh wrote. But local partners of foreign institutions - usually from Britain, the United States and Canada - “say Indian students and their families are starting to appreciate the benefits of this option,” he wrote. The lower costs than a full overseas degree and a “ready-made peer group,” are some of the attractions.

The cost of a three-year bachelor's degree program at the India campus of Britain's Leeds Metropolitan University, for example, is a little o ver “1.5 million rupees, or $27,000, including travel and living costs for a mandatory six months in Britain,” he wrote. That is less than half of what it would cost to complete the program overseas.

Read the full article.



Indian and Western Colleges Set Up Joint Study Programs

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

“As colleges and universities worldwide wait for India's lawmakers to approve a bill granting full access to the country's vast education market,” Vir Singh wrote in The International Herald Tribune, “some institutions are reaching Indian students through twinning programs.”

“Twinning, where participants complete part of their studies in their own country and the rest abroad, is not widely known in India,” Mr. Singh wrote. But local partners of foreign institutions - usually from Britain, the United States and Canada - “say Indian students and their families are starting to appreciate the benefits of this option,” he wrote. The lower costs than a full overseas degree and a “ready-made peer group,” are some of the attractions.

The cost of a three-year bachelor's degree program at the India campus of Britain's Leeds Metropolitan University, for example, is a little o ver “1.5 million rupees, or $27,000, including travel and living costs for a mandatory six months in Britain,” he wrote. That is less than half of what it would cost to complete the program overseas.

Read the full article.



A Conversation With: Chef Vikas Khanna

By SHIVANI VORA

With temperatures high and the air sticky in most of the United States and India right now, the thought of eating a rich Indian meal has little appeal. But the Michelin-starred chef Vikas Khanna says that it is possible to enjoy the flavorful food India is known for without feeling weighed down.

The 41-year-old chef, who runs the upscale Indian restaurant Junoon in Manhattan's Flatiron neighborhood, was raised in Amritsar, Punjab, eating meals focused on seasonal produce and got into the culinary industry when he started a catering company at 17. He eventually ended up in the United States, where he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America.

Besides being known for his skills behind the stove, Mr. Khanna is also extremely health-conscious and believes that eating well doesn't mean eating heavy. He shared with India Ink one his favorite summer recipes, sol kadi, a chilled coconut soup, and talked about his latest pro jects, one of which was inspired by the Dalai Lama and another that brings Mr. Khanna back to India again and again.

Tell us about the sol kadi recipe.

It comes from Goa and is very cooling. And it's very simple to make and takes less than 10 minutes. The chiles actually add lightness. If you look at any region which is hot in India, like Madras, the food is really spicy. It may not sound intuitive, but eating hot food actually evaporates the heat from the body because you tend to sweat.

How would you turn it into a complete meal?

You can sauté shrimp and add to it the soup itself or you can serve it as a starter course with some flatbread. If that's the case, then I suggest serving a simple grilled meat as the entree. Take a chicken breast, for example, and rub it with lemon juice, olive oil and Madras curry powder and throw it on the grill. You can also do this with lamb chops.

What are some other good Indian-them ed summertime dishes?

Kichiri, which is like an Indian-style risotto made with lentils, is the ultimate summer dish to me. You can add lots of vegetables to it, and the lentils give you protein. Serve it with cool yogurt for a very refreshing meal.

What do you like to eat yourself, and how does that translate into Junoon's menu?

I am very into health. In fact, I was just shot for the cover of Men's Health in India. I am 41 but still try to maintain a 28- to 29-inch waist. I work out seven days a week and have a membership to 24-Hour Fitness, where I go at 1 or 2 a.m. after I'm done working.

I'm into grilling and eating healthy carbs. Thus, at Junoon, I try to lighten the dishes as much as possible. We have a lot of grilled options, and we offer red and black rice, which are very good for you. And we have homestyle recipes which naturally use less oil, such as saag with gobi and stewed chickpeas. And in dishes which traditionally use all cream, like ko rma, I use a mix of cream and yogurt. I also use meat bones to add flavor to curry dishes instead of oil or cream.

Can you talk a bit about your upcoming projects?

I am in the middle of working on encyclopedia of Indian cooking, which will be out in 2016. It chronicles 4,000 years of Indian cooking and will have 2,000 recipes. I've already been to India 11 times to do research for it.

Then, I just wrapped up a cookbook called “Return to the Rivers,” which will be published next year. It's an understanding of the cuisine between India and China and has recipes from Bhutan, Tibet, Burma, Nepal, as well the Himalayan region between India and China. It was inspired by the Dalai Lama, who actually wrote the foreword of the book.

How did that end up happening?

I met him for the first time five years ago at an event at the Waldorf-Astoria, and he was telling me about this lost cuisine. I immediately felt compelled to write a book on it. I met him a gain a few years later when he was in New York and told him about what I was doing. He seemed very enthusiastic about the project and hugged me. I contacted his team in India, and they told me that he would be happy to write the foreword, and soon he sent me a beautiful introduction.

Sol Kadi

Ingredients:

8 ounces kokum fruit (can substitute with tamarind, lime or lemon juice)

2 cups coconut milk

2 cups water

½ teaspoon cumin seeds, lightly roasted

1 large green chili

3 cloves garlic

¾ teaspoon salt, or to taste

2 tablespoons fresh coriander, finely chopped

Preparation:

  1. In a saucepan, combine kokum with the water and boil until the liquid reduces to 1 cup.
  2. In a blender, combine the kokum and the kokum water with all the other ingredients except coriander; blend until the chilies and garlic are coarsely chopped.
  3. Strain the mixture through a muslin or cheesecloth.
  4. Mix the chopped coriander into the liquid and refrigerate until chilled.
  5. Serve chilled.

Yield: Serves 4



Concerns About Al Qaeda in Syria Underscore Questions About Rebels

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

What is Al Qaeda doing in Syria?

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That question has recently moved to the forefront of the West's debate over how to respond to the uprising against President Bashar al Assad of Syria - the bloodiest, most protracted and most explosive revolt of the Arab Spring.

Reports from Western officials, militant Islamist Web sites, neighboring countries and, to a limited extent, inside the Syrian opposition indicate Al Qaeda and homegrown militants are joining the fight and competing for influence.

And that poses a vexing question for American policy makers and politicians. So far all sides of the debate in Washington have called for supporting the insurgency and the only question is how much. The Obama administration talks of diplomacy and economic sanctions, while some Republicans push to provide weapons to the insurgents. Is the Uni ted States acting side by side with Al Qaeda?

The short answer is no. A group as numerically tiny as Al Qaeda could never by itself steer a movement as large as the Syrian revolt. And even if Al Qaeda or other anti-Western militants are seeking to exploit or direct the Syrian uprising - why wouldn't they? - that merely makes them rivals to the West for influence over the course of the revolt.

The West, for its part, is eager to deprive Iran of its principle regional ally, the Assad government. It is dominated by the Assad's Alawite sect of Islam, an offshoot of the Shiites who govern Iran.

The question of Al Qaeda's presence in the Syrian uprising, though, is also a kind of shorthand for the larger conundrum of how to understand the composition, ideology and ultimate vision of the fighters of the so-called Free Syrian Army now driving the uprising.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood - the franchise of the pan-Arab Sunni Islam ist group that won Egypt's presidential election - has long been considered the principle opposition under Mr. Assad and his father before him. The father, President Hafez al-Assad, killed tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members in his efforts to crush the group.

But in the context of the democratic uprisings of the Arab spring, Sunni Islamists are a broad spectrum, engaged in their own debate over the objectives of their movement. They range from the relatively secular and Western-friendly leaders of Turkey and Tunisia to the more conservative but pragmatic and nonviolent Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt.

There is also its stricter and more militant offshoot, Hamas, in Gaza, and so on along the spectrum from moderation to radicalism. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is considered more conservative than its Egyptian counterpart; the Syrian Brotherhood also had more history of violent resistance to the Assads. But not much more is known about the current internal dynamics of the group.

Where the Islamist components of the Syrian insurgency might ultimately end up along that spectrum could determine the coming stages of the conflict. More radical or militant Sunni Islamists are most likely to see Mr. Assad's supporters, the Shiites or Alawites, as dangerous heretics, fueling their determination to fight on or face reprisals. Nor would a prominent role for Sunni militants make Syria's Christian and other religious minorities eager to join the fight.

On the other hand, more moderate or pluralistic Islamists are more likely to hold out the promise of a new government of national unity, enticing former Assad supporters to join them. Further down the road, if the Assad government collapses, militant dominance in Syria could also pose a threat to neighboring Israel and trouble the West in other ways as well.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta publicly acknowledged the question as far back as May. “We do have intelligence that indicates there is an Al Qaeda presence in Syria, but frankly we don't have very good intelligence as to just what exactly their activities are,” he said, adding, “They are a concern, and frankly, we need to continue to do everything we can to try to determine what kind of influence they are trying to exert.”

The New York Times is also attempting to answer those questions. One recent article focused on Al Qaeda's ambitions, the views of the Shiite government of neighboring Iraq (where an Al Qaeda branch has flourished among the Sunni opposition and the border is increasingly porous) as well as the assessments of Western analysts.

Another article attempted to look more closely at the dynamics on the ground among the Syrian rebels, including their internal debates over what kinds of Islamist symbolism and ideology they want to embrace.



A Low-Water Tour of the Mississippi River

August 20, 2012, 10:58 am
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

ABOARD THE MOTOR VESSEL MISSISSIPPI, at Alton, Illinois - The big room was crowded on Friday with people who had gathered mainly to complain. It's the annual low-water inspection tour, a summer ritual of the Mississippi River Commission, two weeks of travel and talk in which the panel that advises the Army Corps of Engineers on managing the mighty river and its tributaries speaks directly with the American people in their own towns, on their rivers. The tour was immortalized in a 1987 essay in The New Yorker by John McPhee titled “Atchafalaya.” That essay appeared in his wonderful 1990 book, “The Control of Nature.”

Congress formed the commission in 1879 in hopes of quieting the regional squabb les over methods of flood control, navigation and uses of the bounteous water. Some of those fights are still going on â€" water is a commodity worth fighting over.

The low-water tour (a high-water tour is conducted in the spring) takes place on the Motor Vessel Mississippi. The current Mississippi, the fifth towboat in Corps history to bear the name, is the largest towboat ever constructed in the United States. It was built in 1993. It's been fitted out by the Corps with formal meeting rooms and a pilot house fit for entertaining, with deep leather couches and enough floor space to outdo many New York apartments. When it's not being used for the tours, it makes its way around the lower Mississippi laying enormous concrete mats that stabilize the river banks.

The Mississippi River Commission, founded in 1879, is in the business of making the least number of people possible unhappy; everyone wants something different from the river . Brig. Gen. Margaret W. Burcham, a member of the commission, said that on this year's trip, gas drillers in North Dakota have expressed their need to use enormous quantities of water from the upper Mississippi for fracking, but farmers farther downstream want that water for irrigation; while others want the water in the river so they can get their good to market on barges. And there are many stops to go on the tour, and many more people to hear from. This week the tour will be heading to Memphis, where navigation issues on the drought-shrunken river will no doubt loom large.

More than 100 people showed up at Alton, not far up the river from St. Louis and a town that flooded catastrophically in 1993, and 27 spoke. The meeting began at 9 a.m. and ran until nearly 12:30; 27 people spoke, including environmentalists, barge operators, farmers and politicians.

A few speakers talked about the much-debated decision during last year's floods to blow the levees along a 135,000-acre spillway â€" the first time the spillway had been used since the flood of 1937. The breach caused the dangerously high water levels near Cairo, Illinois and below to drop by some two feet, and has been credited with avoiding sudden disaster elsewhere. Many have criticized the decision to put so much rich farmland under water, but Arlan R. Juhl, director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, argued that the corps had actually waited too long in deciding whether or not to blow the levee while floodwaters rose in Illinois. “During the last days, while you were struggling with that, we had many people sitting in the water, and the water was getting deeper.”

Others wanted to discuss the contentious issue of the levee system across the Mississippi from St. Louis, which has been declared substandard by the Corps. Locals are trying to come up with interim fixes that will provide enough protection to avoid a federal requirement that homes and busin esses buy flood insurance, but have bristled at having to meet corps standards for federal levees in doing so. Talks are ongoing, but the statements about the matter â€" for and against the Corps â€" were passionate. Patrick McKeehan, an engineering consultant who has worked with the Illinois communities on the problem, called the Corps position “devastating.” But Kathy Andria, of the American Bottom Conservancy, called for maintaining the Corps' standards of construction and design, asking, “What's to become of us when our levees give?” And, she added, “Notice that I said when, not if.”

The final speaker, Jim Bensman, gave a statement that veered from liberal to libertarian, speaking about “getting the military out of the Corps of Engineers” and cutting the federal budget deficit by getting rid of the commission entirely. “You guys are just lackeys for the barge industry â€" they can hire their own lobbyists.”

In closing the session, R. D. James, a member of the commission since 1981, apologized for the need to limit speakers to 5 minutes apiece, joking that a luncheon was waiting for all who attended, and if the limit “had not been initiated, we'd all starve to death, probably.”

He thanked people for coming and for expressing their views, which he said could influence corps policy on the river. “Continue the dialogue,” he said. “'Push, push, push â€" never give up' gets the job done.”



Myth About Rape and Pregnancy Is Not New

By ROBERT MACKEY

Last Updated, 12:22 a.m. Representative Todd Akin, the Republican Senate nominee from Missouri, gave new prominence to an old myth this past weekend when he downplayed the need for rape victims to have access to abortions. He claimed that pregnancies from rape are “really rare,” because, “If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

An excerpt from an interview with Representative Todd Aiken on Missouri's KTVI-TV.

As Sarah Kliff reports on the Washington Post's Wonkblog, there is no scientific evidence for the claim that Mr. Akin, a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, attributed to unnamed “doctors.” According to a study cited by the Centers for Disease Control, “an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year,” in the United States, meaning that a bout 5 percent of women who are raped do become pregnant.

Despite the facts, the ancient idea that women have some natural defense against being impregnated by rapists has been endorsed several times in recent years by elected officials who oppose abortion.

During a 1998 Senate campaign in Arkansas, the Republican candidate Dr. Fay Boozman claimed that hormones generated by fear usually prevented rape victims from getting pregnant, according to the doctor's remarks in a report in The Times that year:

His reasoning: Pregnancy rarely occurs after rape because the stress of the assault triggers a biochemical reaction in the victim that makes conception unlikely. The Senator, who also is an ophthalmologist, said he knew this to be the case from anecdotal information he had picked up over the years and from his own medical residency in the 1970's at the University of Arkansas Medical Center.

After he lost that election, Dr. Boozman was appointed to run the Arkansas Department of Health by the governor at the time, Mike Huckabee.

As David Waldman, a Daily Kos editor, noted on Twitter, the argument Mr. Akin advanced last weekend was even more similar to one floated in 1995 by a dentist named Henry Aldridge, who was then a Republican member of North Carolina's state legislature. As The Associated Press reported at the time, during a 1995 debate over a proposal to eliminate a state abortion fund for poor women, Mr. Aldridge claimed, “The facts show that people who are raped - who are truly raped - the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant.” When Mr. Aldridge was pressed to explain his comments, he added: “To get pregnant, it takes a little cooperation. And there ain't much cooperation in a rape.”

The Buzzfeed blogger who writes as Southpaw traced the idea back another decade, finding a 1988 report from the Philadelph ia Daily News on a Republican state legislator in Pennsylvania, Stephen Freind, who claimed that the chances of a woman getting pregnant from rape were, “one in millions and millions and millions.” Mr. Freind gave a version of the same explanation then that Mr. Akin relied on: the trauma of rape, he claimed, causes women to “secrete a certain secretion” that kills sperm. When the newspaper asked a professor of obstetrics and gynecology for a response, he said simply: “There's no basis for that. That's nonsense.”

Despite constant debunking, this old husbands' tale has endured for centuries. “The legal position that pregnancy disproved a claim of rape appears to have been instituted in the U.K. sometime in the 13th century,” the medical historian Vanessa Heggie wrote in a blog post for The Guardian on Monday. She explained that one of Britain's earliest legal texts, written in about 1290, included a clause based on this bit of folk wisdom: “If, however, the woman should have conceived at the time alleged in the appeal, it abates, for without a woman's consent she could not conceive.”

Ms. Heggie added: “the idea that a women had to orgasm in order to conceive (although not necessarily at exactly the same time as her male partner) was widespread in popular thought and medical literature in the medieval and early modern period. By logical extension, then, if a woman became pregnant, she must have experienced orgasm, and therefore could not have been the victim of an ‘absolute rape.'”

On Monday, Mr. Akin appeared on Mike Huckabee's radio program and said, “I was talking about forcible rape.” As Slate blogger David Weigel explains, the use of that term in a bill introduced by House Republicans last year - and the apparent effort to create tiers of rape in federal law - provoked controversy. While the term was eventually dropped from the legislation, Mr. Akin, and Representative Paul Ryan, were among the co-sponsors of the original bill.

While Mr. Akin's remarks about rape drew the most attention, another part of his answer explaining his opposition to abortion also contained some curious logic. When the subject of abortion was first raised (about two minutes in to a longer clip of the Missouri television interview), the congressman digressed to say:

One of the things that I love about this country is the fact that Americans do consider life really important. And it's not because of some theoretical thing, that you're on a talk show and somebody asks you about it, but you have September 11th, and you've got these guys that are running into a building that's about to collapse; they find somebody in a wheelchair - they never check their ID, or anything like that, or whether they're important - they grab ‘em and they get ‘em to safety and they run back and get another one.

An excerpt from an int erview with Representative Todd Aiken on Missouri's KTVI-TV.


New U.N. Envoy to Syria Offends Both Sides

By RICK GLADSTONE

Lakhdar Brahimi, the veteran Algerian diplomat, may have started on the wrong foot in his newly appointed role as the special Syria peace envoy for the United Nations and the Arab League. And technically he has not even started the job yet.

Mr. Brahimi, who will replace the resigning Kofi Annan at the end of the month, apparently offended both the Syrian government and opposition in comments to the European press on Monday. He told France 24 in a televised interview that Syria's nearly 18-month-old conflict had evolved into a civil war. “I believe that it has already been the case for some time,” he said. “What we need to do is to stop the civil war and that is not going to be easy.”

A France 24 interview with Lakhdar Brahimi.

His remarks drew a sharp rebuke from the Foreign Ministry of Syria, which said in a statement carried by the official SANA news agency that “to speak of civil war in Syria contradicts reality and is found only in the head of conspirators.”

Mr. Brahimi's perceived slight to the opposition came in a BBC News radio interview, where he said it was premature for him to conclude whether President Bashar al-Assad of Syria must resign as part of any solution to the conflict. “I am not in a position to say yet because I was appointed a couple of days ago,” Mr. Brahimi said.

By contrast Mr. Annan, in his resignation announcement more than two weeks ago, said the Syrian president must go, partly reflecting Mr. Annan's own frustrations with Mr. Assad during a fruitless effort to achieve a workable cease-fire and peace talks.

The Syrian National Council, the main opposition group in exile, said in a statement that Mr. Brahimi's remarks about Syria's president reflected “disregard for the blood of the Syrian people and their right of self-determination.”

Mr. Brahimi said in the interview with BBC's Radio 4: “I am a mediator and a mediator has to speak to anybody and everybody without influence or interest.”



Handcuffed Man\'s Death Ruled a Suicide

By CHRISTINE HAUSER

The death of a 21-year-old man found with a gunshot wound to the head while he was handcuffed in the back of a police car has been ruled a suicide, the Arkansas medical examiner said.

A report released by the medical examiner's division at the state crime laboratory also said that Chavis Carter was under the influence of methamphetamine at the time of his death. The determinations were based on both the autopsy findings and the conclusions of the Jonesboro Police Department. The report said:

At autopsy, the cause of death was a perforating gunshot wound of the head. At the time of discharge, the muzzle of the gun was placed against the right temporal scalp. The bullet perforated the cranial cavity, causing brain injuries, skull fractures, and death. The bullet exited the left side of the head.

The report also said the gunshot wound had “soot and searing” which would be consistent w ith smoke and fire at the entrance into the head.

Stephen A. Erickson, the deputy chief medical examiner, said in an interview that those effects indicated a gun muzzle in “tight contact” with the head during a suicide. But he added that such wounds could also show up when someone shoots another person at extremely close range.

“Anatomically you can't tell the two apart,” he said. “If someone had very good control of you and put a gun to your head in a threatening manner, you are under their control. The manner of death is certainly based on the conclusions of the investigators taken at face value.”

Mr. Carter's death has sparked intense scrutiny, protests and online petitions, after many questioned how a handcuffed man could shoot himself in the head, as the police department has said, using a gun that they did not find when patting him down during the arrest.

The Jonesboro Police Department, after releasing the report, said the investigation was still not complete.



Account of \'a Lynch\' in Jerusalem on Facebook

By ROBERT MACKEY

As my colleague Isabel Kershner reports, several Israeli teenagers who appeared in court on Monday following their arrest for beating a young Palestinian unconscious expressed little remorse for the attack after a hearing.

According to the Jerusalem Post, their attitude inside the courtroom was similar. The newspaper reported that a 15-year-old boy admitted beating the 17-year-old victim, Jamal Julani, claiming that it was in response to a perceived slight on his mother. “He insulted my mom,” the boy told a magistrate. “So I caught him and beat him. I hit him and I hope he gets it again. I hope he dies. You can't go by Damascus Gate without getting stabbed. So why do they come here? I beat him and I'd beat him again.”

A witness to the attack, who described it in an emotional account on her Facebook page, referred to it as “a lynch,” using the English loan word that is common in Hebrew. Mairav Zonszein, an I sraeli-American writer and translator, included a translation of the witness account in a post on the Israeli news blog +972.

It's late at night, and I can't sleep. My eyes are full of tears for a good few hours now and my stomach is turning inside out with the question of the loss of humanity, the image of God in mankind, a loss that I am not willing to accept. But today I saw a lynch with my own eyes, in Zion Square, the center of the city of Jerusalem.

The witness added that she watched in shock as dozens of young Israelis “started to really beat to death three Arab youths who were walking quietly.”

When one of the Palestinian youths fell to the floor, the youths continued to hit him in the head, he lost consciousness, his eyes rolled, his head at an angle started to twitch, and then those who were kicking him fled and the rest gathered in a circle around, with some still shouting wi th hate in their eyes…

When two of our volunteers went into the circle, they tried to perform CPR the mass of youths standing around started to say resentfully that we are resuscitating an Arab, and when they passed near us and saw that the rest of the volunteers were shocked, they asked why we were so in shock, he is an Arab.

When we returned to the area after some time had passed, and the site was marked as a murder scene, and police were there with the cousin of the victim who tried to re-enact what happened, two youths stood there who did not understand why we wanted to give a bottle of water to the cousin of the victim who was transferred to hospital in critical condition, he is an Arab, and they need don't need to walk around in the center of the city, and they deserve it, because this way they will finally be afraid.



India Asks Pakistan to Investigate Panic Tied to Northeast

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

India's top security official on Sunday “called on the Pakistani government to investigate Indian claims that ‘elements based in Pakistan' had orchestrated a fear-mongering misinformation campaign that helped set off last week's nationwide panic among migrants from India's northeastern states,” Jim Yardley wrote in The New York Times.

Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, speaking by telephone with his Pakistani counterpart, Rehman Malik, asked for “full cooperation” in “checking and neutralizing such elements,” according to a Home Ministry statement. “His telephone call came a day after a senior ministry official said that doctored images of dead bodies had been sent to thousands of northeastern migrants living in several of India's major urban centers,” Mr. Yardley wrote.

“We want people to know that the bulk of this was done from Pakistan,” Home Secretary R. K. Singh told reporters in New Delhi on Saturday night. He added, “A total of 76 Web sites were identified where morphed images were uploaded, and the bulk of these were uploaded in Pakistan.”

The Indian news agency, IANS, “quoted an anonymous Pakistani official denying any involvement,” Mr. Yardley wrote. Describing India's claims as “cooked up,” the official told IANS that “instead of indulging in mudslinging and the blame game, it's time for India to address its internal issues.”

Read the full article.



Private Schools Open Doors to Kids From Low-Income Families

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Like many 6-year-olds, Pankaj Disht clams up when speaking to a stranger,” Gayatri Rangachari Shah wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “But since switching to a private school, he has become more open and says he enjoys school and has many friends.”

“Under normal circumstances,” Ms. Shah wrote Pankaj's father, a household cook, “could have only afforded to send his son to a government-run school,” most of these schools “suffer from teacher absences, poor infrastructure and a lack of facilities.”

“But through a law upheld by the Indian Supreme Court this past spring, and the tenacity of Mr. Disht's employer,” Seema Talreja, who organized the boy's application, Pankaj is attending a private academy, the Mother's International School in New Delhi, “where he receives individual attention from motivated teachers,” she wrote.

Ms. Talreja, took adva ntage of the recent legislation, “which requires Indian private schools to admit 25 percent of their student body from ages 6 to 14 from families making less than 100,000 rupees, or $1,800, a year,” Ms. Shah wrote.

Read the full article.



What Happens in Patna, Stays in Patna?

By AMITAVA KUMAR

When the travel writer Trevor Fishlock went to my hometown of Patna, a journalist greeted him by saying, “Welcome to hell.” A few days later, that particular journalist, who had been zealous in his defense of the freedom of the press, was beaten unconscious.

I read the above story in a piece by Norman Lewis titled “Through the Badlands of Bihar.” But it is not only Western visitors like Mr. Fishlock and Mr. Lewis who portray Patna thus. If you have been keeping track of recent Bollywood movies, the badlands of Bihar have become fertile ground for reaping cinematic violence.

I am writing a book about Patna where I want to present what the people who live there think about it. A part of me believes that Patna might be the victim of bad press. Did you know, for instance, that somewhere in the dark recesses of history, Patna produced the best opium?

I remember making this discover y when I stood on a treadmill in a steamy gym in Florida. Bending down, I looked at what had drawn my attention. The picture in the glossy magazine left open on the treadmill showed swarthy, dhoti-clad men at work in an immense hall, arranging in neat lines circular mounds of - what?

The text above the picture offered a clue: “Connoisseurs, he says, argue as to the source of the finest opium. Some say the best opium comes from Patna, India, along the southern bank of the Ganges.”

Anything good is so rarely said about Patna that my seldom-exercised heart burst with joy. I stole the magazine from the gym. And on returning home, I cut out the picture and the text and stuck it in my notebook.

That was 12 years ago. I have unearthed my notebook now because I have been seized by a simple idea. I am currently in Patna to see my parents. I would like to post flyers on the city's busy roads that ask, “Does the best opium still come from Patna?”

The ins piration for acquiring knowledge about a city in this way came to me from a recently published book, “Jeff, One Lonely Guy.” This book was fashioned out of the 60,000 calls and text-messages received after Jeff Ragsdale, a writer and unemployed comedian, reacted to a breakup by posting flyers in New York City that simply said: “If anyone wants to talk about anything, call me. (347) 469-3173. Jeff, one lonely guy.”

The responses were varied and fascinating:

“I called to see what the story was.”

“We live in a disconnected society. Did you think up this idea while you were smoking a blunt?”

“I just flew in from L.A. and was in a bad mood, then I saw your sign on the street. Ha! I cast reality shows.”

“Heathcliff it's me Catherine!”

“Pablo Escobar had a hit out on my father, who was a Communist. My father fought against Escobar and got political asylum in the U.S.”

All this from the first handful of pages . The writer David Shields, who was one of Mr. Ragdale's teachers, helped edit these field notes from that occult zone Mr. Shields calls “Occupy Loneliness.” In Patna, however, where I have a dense network of family and friends, more mundane mysteries need to be solved.

In 1967, there was a famine in Bihar. I knew of this only because my father, a career bureaucrat, served in places like Purnea, a district in Bihar. But then I discovered a newsreel where I watched the actor Marlon Brando listening to villagers near Patna. I learned that Mr. Brando had come to Bihar as the ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund. You can hear the voices speaking in Hindi in the background complaining of hunger and grain being denied to them by corrupt officials.

And then the Englishman providing the voiceover says, “All in all, it was a modest performance from Brando, and definitely a nonspeaking part.”

So that could be another flyer: “Did you see Brando in Patna in 1967?”

One of my earliest memories is of standing on a railway platform at Patna Junction, saying goodbye to an uncle leaving for the United States. My aunt, who is waiting for her visa, is standing with me along with other family members. It is probably the year 1967.

Inside the railway carriage where my uncle is sitting, there is another man, with garlands around his neck. This man is Jayaprakash Narayan, the political leader who just a few years later would lead the country in the fight against Indira Gandhi after she had declared a state of emergency. I saw J.P., as he was known then, in my adolescent years. On a ferry on the Ganges, I once even had him autograph my school notebook.

This leads to the question: “Did you meet J.P. in Patna?”

A local rangbaaz, a ruffian, on the street where I lived would ask the man selling soft drinks at the corner to give us free drinks. This rangbaaz gave up his denim jacket and began wearing kh adi. He was now J.P.'s follower. The state of emergency hadn't ended. The reformed man went to jail, where the Bihar politician Lalu Prasad Yadav and others were his cellmates.

After Mrs. Gandhi was thrown out of power, the rangbaaz I had known became a junior statesman. By the time I was in college, he had become a corrupt minister.

“What happened to the idealistic young men and women of the '70s?” I would like to ask that question, or another one belonging to the same caste: “Where is the black money in Patna?”

At a garage sale in a small town in upstate New York, I bought an old copy of “India: The Rough Guide.” If I remember right, the book cost me 25 cents. Thumbing through the section on Bihar, I made the discovery that Napoleon's four-poster bed is in a museum in Patna. “What is Napoleon's bed doing in Bihar?”

It is easy for visiting writers to dismiss Patna. Shiva Naipaul set an example in 1982 by describing it as “a town wit hout the faintest traces of charm, a sprawling caravanserai of dusty roads and fenny lanes; a junk-heap of peeling, crumbling buildings, of squatter colonies earthed in tracts of mossy mud; a swarming hive of pan-chewing, meager-limbed men.”

But I know the sewers and the stench that Mr. Naipaul portrayed with such zeal. In fact, my parents have been living with a specific municipal problem - Patna is a city where rats carried away my mother's dentures. And so this question is urgent and unavoidable: “Are you knowledgeable about killing rats?”

Amitava Kumar is a writer and a professor of English at Vassar College in New York. If you have answers to his questions, write to him at patna.patrakar@yahoo.com.



Indians Celebrate Id al-Fitr

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Judge Dismisses Whistle-Blower Suit Against Infosys

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

A federal judge in Alabama on Monday dismissed a lawsuit by an American employee of Infosys, the Indian outsourcing company, who claimed “he was harassed and sidelined after he reported what he believed was visa fraud by managers there,” Julia Preston wrote in The New York Times.

Judge Myron H. Thompson of federal court for the Middle District of Alabama ruled that the “allegations by the whistle-blower, Jack B. Palmer, did not meet the standard under Alabama law for a worker to claim negligent or outrageous mistreatment by an employer,” Ms. Preston wrote. “The judge found in favor of Infosys on all six civil claims Ms. Palmer presented.”

Judge Thompson “made it clear that he reached his conclusion reluctantly, saying the nature of the case required him to base it on Alabama statutes, not federal law,” she wrote.

The judge described as “deeply troubl ing” the threats Mr. Palmer said he received after word of his visa fraud accusations circulated within the company. “Indeed,” Judge Thompson wrote, “an argument could be made that such threats against whistle-blowers, in particular, should be illegal.”

But, the judge wrote, “This court cannot rewrite state law.”

Mr. Palmer claimed that he witnessed Infosys managers making widespread fraudulent use of short-term business visitor visas, known as B-1 visas, to bring workers from India to the United States for longer-term projects. The short-term visas can be obtained more quickly than other temporary work visas, and foreign workers on those visas are less costly for a company.

Read the full article.



The \"Imaginary Line\" that Divides India and Bangladesh

By SAMRAT

Borders are significant barriers only in the minds of those who have never walked across one. Anyone who does that learns that in most places there is no crack in the earth where one country ends and another begins.

I walked across the border from India into Bangladesh in 2002. It was for love; I was young and foolish. My then-girlfriend, who is from the northeast, had gone to the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh on a research trip for a doctoral thesis. This involved meeting rebels from the Chakma tribe who had long been battling the Bangladesh government, and so I was concerned about her safety. I decided to go in after her.

It proved not to be easy. My visa application went into some kind of strange limbo. I would call every day, to be told my visa still had not been approved, and that I would have to meet the minister for press and information at the Bangladeshi embassy in New Delhi. I tried to make an appointment wit h him but never got one. I tried calling the man, whom I knew. He stopped taking my calls when he realized what I was calling about. Once, I called from a landline. He answered his mobile phone and asked who was speaking. When he heard it was me, he said: “Sir is not here.”

Meanwhile my girlfriend had reached Chittagong. I decided I needed to work out an alternate way of getting in. If the Bangladeshis were going to be difficult about the visa, I'd simply do what so many Bangladeshis have allegedly done: I'd cross the border without a visa.

My family, on both my father's and my mother's side, is from places that are now in Bangladesh. There is nothing in my appearance that distinguishes me from Bangladeshis of my economic standing. I speak Bengali and I follow some of the dialects. I had the phone numbers for a few people in Dhaka. I figured I'd be okay once I got across.

The question, of course, was how I could get across s afely.

I went to Shillong, my home town, and started asking around. Shillong is located in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya bordering the Sylhet district in Bangladesh. It is less than 150 kilometers, or 93 miles, from there to Sylhet town, but it seems very far to Shillong residents, because few of them ever make that journey.

There were ways across, I started to hear. A friend mentioned an uncle who lived close to the border and knew an agent who ferried people across in both directions. The going rate was 50 rupees (about $1) per person for the agent, not including bribes to the border guards, I was told. If you got caught you might end up in the slammer, but that rarely happened. There were other agents, my friend said, who had connections with the border guards on both sides, and charged a heavier fee that included a bribe.

Another friend pointed out that border trade was big and said I could easily get across as a trader from a border district. I would ne ed to get another set of papers, and that would take a week or so.

I decided to try the honest way one last time. A call to an influential friend in Delhi luckily led to a phone conversation with the press and information minister. He agreed to grant me a visa on the condition that I would not report while in Bangladesh.

So it was with a passport and visa that I made my way to the border checkpost in Dawki. A customs officer from the Indian side, who happened to know a friend of mine, said he would walk me across. We set off down the narrow road lined with trucks laden with coal.

At the end of the road was a barrier that was raised and lowered with a rope. Pedestrians could simply walk around it, and so we did. We were in Bangladesh.

The immigration office was one little hutment with a desk, around which a few men sat drinking tea. The Indian official, who was also Bengali, knew them well. We sat and chatted a while. After tea, we crossed the road for the customs check. The office was one room, stacked with files, and it was open, and empty. The Indian officer called out for his Bangladeshi counterpart by name, but the man was nowhere to be found. So we waited, until the Indian official started to get a little impatient. “I know where he keeps his stamps”, he told me. “I can stamp it for you.”

Just then a little boy came along. “Where is sahib?” the official asked. Sahib had gone to buy fish, we were told. It was the festival of Shab e Barat.

We waited until the man returned, and he completed the formalities with profuse apologies. My friend walked back to India some 100 meters away while I set off down the road to Sylhet. One last matter remained to be sorted. I had only Indian currency.

A ramshackle little shop selling betel leaves, cigarettes and cheap food was the first establishment I encountered on the road. I asked the man if he would change my currency. He readily agreed. I gave him my Indian rupees. He reached into his loincloth and brought out a wad of Bangladeshi taka that I gingerly pocketed.

That was that. I was in. After all the anxiety about the visa, it was quite anticlimactic.

So what's the point of the story?

Well, there are several: For starters, the border between India and Bangladesh is not the Great Wall of China. If you have friends and family on the other side, slipping across and merging in is not difficult. Nor is getting citizenship documents a problem. Cases of people bribing their ways to ration cards keep cropping up, and have for years.

It is almost certain that some people walk back and forth across the imaginary line. How many is impossible to tell, because once a chap walks over and gets a ration card who can say he's not Indian? Anyone who does is automatically labeled “communal.”

Some clever people try to make deductions from census figures for border districts, but that's not very useful. Ec onomic migrants are not likely to settle in border districts of northeastern India. The economy of those places is nearly as weak as on the other side of the border. Economic migrants go where the jobs are.

With facts proving little, we are left with differences of opinions. The right takes one extreme view, and suspects all Bengali Muslims in the northeast of being Bangladeshis. The left, Congress and parties that rely on Muslim votes assert the other extreme position, saying there is no illegal immigration. Both are wrong, in my view, and both spring from communal mindsets that look at the issue in terms of religious groups and ideologies. To me it is a question of citizenship and administration. Our country has laws governing immigration and citizenship that ought to be followed. Every government in the world follows its own laws, including the government of Bangladesh. Why do we in India make it a political issue, rather than an administrative one?

Many studi es and accounts on migration in the subcontinent have established that the major immigration from what was previously East Bengal into India following the 1947 Partition and the 1971 war with Pakistan has been of Bengali Hindus, not Muslims.

The vast majority of Bengali Muslims in this country are doubtless Indians. There are doubtless some, however, who walked across an imaginary line in search of better lives.

Samrat is the author of “The Urban Jungle” (Penguin, 2011) and editor of The Asian Age, Mumbai. He can be found on Twitter as @mrsamratx.



In Bangalore, Classrooms Turn Into Makeshift Homes

By NIHARIKA MANDHANA

A classroom on the third floor of the humanities block of St. Joseph's College in Bangalore now serves as a makeshift dormitory. Mattresses have been rolled out atop benches laid side by side and on the professors' wooden podium, surrounded by duffel bags packed for an indefinite stay. Since Thursday, five girls from India's northeastern states have made this space their home.

“My house is big and much more comfortable, but I don't feel safe there,” said Penmila Vashum, a 19-year-old from Manipur who ordinarily lives in an off-campus apartment. “Even though I am living like this, I am happy here because I am safe.”

Ms.Vashum is among 44 students from various northeastern states who have left their paying guest accommodations or rented homes in Bangalore for the security of the St. Joseph's campus. Since Wednesday, an estimated 30,000 northeasterners have fled Bangalore, a large number of them students, after receiving text messages saying they would come under attack by Muslim groups seeking revenge for the ongoing ethnic strife in Assam, which has resulted in the displacement of over 500,000 people. Northeastern migrants in Bangalore have reported instances of intimidation and assault, though no serious injury has come to light so far. Security arrangements in the city have been ramped up significantly, but many of those who remain in the city continue to fear attacks and abuse.

“This group of students is very insecure, very vulnerable,” said Daniel Fernandes, the principal of St. Joseph's. He has been asked several times if the threat against northeasterners is real, he said. “I don't know if the threat is real, but I know the fear is real,” Mr. Fernandes added.

At St. Joseph's, where about 600 students, or a third of the student body, are from the northeast, panic spread quickly last week. To allay fears and stem the spread o f disinformation, counseling sessions were arranged and an interfaith meeting was called with leaders of the Muslim community. Still, worried parents flooded the principal's office with phone calls, and hundreds of students rushed to the railway station. Many colleges in the city have declared a weeklong holiday for students from the northeast, and some have even postponed examinations.

“We have to wait and see what happens after Id,” said P.V. Joseph, a member of the college's Northeast and Tibetan Forum. Some of the inflammatory text messages that circulated last week warned northeasterners of violence if they didn't leave the city by Id al-Fitr, a major Muslim festival that was celebrated across the country on Monday. “Everything is uncertain right now.”

Many students who have chosen not to leave plan to stay indoors for a few days, as they watch the news for any signs of tensions flaring up again. They are soliciting the help of students from other pa rts of the country to run errands off campus, such as buying lunch or mobile phone currency. On Sunday, a student at St. Joseph's who left the campus to withdraw money from an ATM was threatened with a stone, he said, adding to the fear of students cooped up on campus.

Representatives of local organizations for northeasterners are advising those in Bangalore to keep a low profile, travel in groups and contact the police at the slightest indication of trouble. “We are telling everyone to be careful till this incident dies its natural death,” said Simanta Sharma, an adviser to the Assam Society of Bangalore.

Mr. Sharma expects most of those who have fled to return in a few weeks. “People have to return because their livelihood is in this city,” he said. But they will wait for things to cool down, he added, and will want to return unnoticed, in small groups.

Many, however, feel the damage is already done. Sajani Loi, a 19-year-old student at Baldwin Wo men's Methodist College, said it will take some time before she feels safe in the city again. “It seems fine now because there is so much police protection,” Ms. Loi said. But she wondered how long that level of security would be continued, and how students could be sure that this wouldn't happen again soon. Ms. Loi said she expected fewer students to come to Bangalore next year, with their parents newly worried about their safety in the city.

Golan Naulak, an assistant professor at St. Joseph's College, also said the incident would have far-reaching implications for northeasterners in the city, as they could have more trouble finding accommodation or even jobs. “People have already become wary,” Mr. Naulak said.

A large number of people from the northeast leave their home states, where development is patchy and jobs scarce, to work and study in the country's large cities like Bangalore, Chennai and Pune. In Bangalore, young workers find employment as sec urity guards, waitresses and salon specialists, and scores of students attend one of the city's several engineering or humanities colleges.

But many feel disconnected and marginalized from the local populations, as if on the fringes of Indian society. “Other Indians don't see us as Indians,” said Ms. Vashum. “They look down on us,” she added.

Northeasterners say they face prejudice primarily because of their facial features, which tend to have East Asian characteristics, and because they often don't speak Hindi or southern languages. They are often called “chinkis,” a derogatory term. “There is a deep-rooted alienation,” said Mr. Naulak, “which has fueled this atmosphere of insecurity.”

Ms. Loi, who is from Manipur, said, “We are ready to say we are from China or Korea if that will keep us safe. We are so scared to say we are from the northeast.”



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