Wednesday, September 9, 1998
Misreading Mandela
On the South Asian security seminar circuit, this apocryphal story has stood the test of time. A political science teacher asked a class consisting of students from several countries to use their imagination and write an essay on the elephant. The British student wrote about the elephant as a symbol of the Empire. The American talked about the elephant as a great business proposition. The French, predictably, held forth on the elephant and its peculiarly fascinating sex life. The Indian, obviously deeply under jholawala influence, wrote on the threat of the pachyderm's extinction. The Pakistani wrote about the elephant and the Kashmir problem.
Beware of the culture-cleansers
Culture often becomes a convenient weapon, a shield for incompetence. In a country where a million things are left undone or half done, it sometimes camouflages inefficiency. Behind the hallucinatory shades of nostalgia and myths the endless problems that haunt our lives can be hidden. Or so thinks the Sangh Parivar.
Chasing the K word
Keeping the K word off foreign lips is stretching Indian diplomacy to the full. September is a particularly demanding month. Much skill will be required to negotiate the diplomatic highway from Durban through Moscow to New York.
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