Creation of Hindu ’madrasas’

are You, like ME ; confused by THE sTYle of cer-
TAIN interactors? IS. THERE A sp-
ecial courSE in paKisTAN ,FOR wRitinG in this maRVELOUS wAY?

PLEASE iNFORM! My DEVIOus hinDU self is; DyinGTO K NOW,

rsridhar #103
``any nation`s minorities are safe only as long as they have the good wishes of its majority community``

rsridhar, a nations majority cannot hold itself above the Constitution wrt guaranteeing life and property of citizens, and if these survive, then equal rights. This is the time for right thinking people to stress this point, and not its opposite.

stuka #105
What I meant was the sense of leadership in Indians themselves. It seems almost an insult to say so in light of Gujarats 2002 though, and when we are likely headed for a long detour :(.

arjun-m,
Forget hobbyty...what do you have to say about this?
http://63.194.130.82/cgi-bin/show_article.cgi?aid=00001695&channel=gulberg&start=50&end=59&page=6&chapter=1#114

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Home > Business





People queuing up to sell gold as prices soar



Eeb & Reuters




Mumbai, December 30: The new-found buoyancy in gold prices has led to a new situation. More and more people in the country, home to the world’s biggest gold stocks, are queuing up to sell their jewellery as prices soar to five-year peaks.

Traders said on Monday they estimate the supply of scrap metal has jumped four-fold to 50 kgs a day in the Mumbai market, the main consuming centre. That has squeezed imports and traders say the trend is likely to continue for the next two weeks if global prices remain high as domestic demand was dull due to an inauspicious period for weddings. Rajiv Popley, a director of jewellery trading firm Popley Gold, said the volume of new ornaments sold in exchange for old gold at his showrooms had almost doubled in the past one month.



“Inflow of recycled gold has shot up as high prices have attracted many consumers to dispose of their old jewellery,” said Prithvi Raj Kothari, a gold importer. Standard mint gold was available for Rs 4,570 per 10 gram on December 20, 2001. However, by December 20, 2002, prices shot by 21.66 per cent to Rs 5,560. “With tension remaining in the Gulf, gold prices will remain firm in 2003. If a war breaks out between the US and Iraq, gold may go through the roof.... and even touch Rs 6,000 or Rs 7,000 levels,” he said.

Traders buy the metal from consumers at slightly lower than market prices and sell the recycled gold at below import costs to jewellers. “The import business is very poor at the moment,” said Narendra Singh Rathore, a gold trader based in the northwestern city of Jaipur, a leading gold importing centre. “Traders are waiting for some stability in the prices before resuming imports.”

Spot gold was quoted at $349/350 an ounce at 0720 GMT in Asia, up from late New York $348.90/349.50 on Friday. It was traded at about $319 a month ago and at $279 a year earlier.

Local prices track global trends as India imports 70 per cent of its annual gold requirements of 750 to 800 tonnes. World gold prices have soared on weakness in the US dollar and political tensions over Iraq and North Korea. Prices of the safe-haven metal tend to rise when the dollar weakens as bullion becomes cheaper to non-US investors. Traders said imports could rise after two week.Jewellery accounts for about 85 per cent of India’s annual demand for gold.


////I always believed that this is the dawn of modern india.

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re: RSS run schools

Most people (especially Pakis) in this forum are talking about RSS run ``Hindu madrassas`` without researching into what these schools really are. What are these schools really upto? Are they really spreading anti-muslim bias? I looked into their web-site and i do not see anything wrong with their agenda. Go to the url: www.vidhyabharati.org and see for yourself. Here is their agenda:

a. Evolution of an alternative model of school education which is more in tune with Indian culture and ethos.
b. Provision of additional educational facilities partly in backward/rural and tribal areas.
c. Providing quality education at moderate rates to the children of middle class.
d. Propagation of Indian Culture & Tradition.
e. Developing a sense of national pride and self confidence among the new generation.
f. Generating a sense of patriotism and love for the country among the youths of the country.
g. Promotion of Sanskrit, Music,Yoga and Physical Education at school level.
h. Proper emphasis on development of moral and spiritual values among students.
i. Creation of a cadre of competent and dedicated teachers to serve the society.
j. Stemming the rising tide of western influence on Indian youths in the name of modernization
I went to a ``Tamil`` school in Delhi, where i learnt everything but my culture. I was not taught yoga, i did not learn anything about our great sages and saints, not even about people like Vivekananda or SriAurobindo. I can say that education imparted to Indians today does not leave them proud of what they are. Pride in oneself is very important for national development. I mean an ``all-encompassing`` pride not the narrow minded variety that Taliban espoused.
Christian misssionaries have wrought havoc in the North-Eastern states, so much so that the tribals there do not even have a script of their own and rely upon a Roman script! RSS is educating the youth and tribals there. This will go a long way in national integration.
Muslims in India have traversed a seperate path so much so that anything that a hindu does today sounds anti-muslim to them, even singing ``vande mataram``.
RSS has its own agenda just like christian missionary schools and muslim ``madrassas`` (Is there another kind?) have their`s. Nobody said that christian missionary schools have been spreading hatred against hindus. Infact, if you have attended anyone of these schools, you would know that in more than subtle ways, they denigrade hindu culture. Muslim madrassas, needless to say, are in a different world. They teach Qoran (nothing wrong with that), some Arabic, may be some maths and little else. They do not impart computer education, education in science to their children. I think the muslims in India ought to embrace the larger hindu culture and be proud that they are in a multi-ethnic society that guarantees so much freedom to minorities. As M.J. Akbar says: India is the only country in the developing world where muslims have enjoyed more than 50 years of uninterrupted democracy.
It is also worth remembering what Sardar Patel said many decades ago (he was a die-hard secularist, unlike many Gujjus today): any nation`s minorities are safe only as long as they have the good wishes of its majority community. Let us never forget that.
Sridhar

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Sadna:

``Want to add that I look forward to the day when the Pope is an Indian and the most respected centre of learning in Islam in the world is in India``

That`ll never happen. For all the talk of Islamic Solidarity and support for Palestine etc etc. I have yet to meet an Arab who looks upon subcontinental Muslims as equals and yet to meet a Pakistani/Indian Muslim who has genuine fondness for Arabs.

Even an Ummah true believer like UrsTruly would have to stifle his gag reflex when he hangs out with his Arab buddies and they kiss him on both cheeks and shower his face with spittle when they talk.

On a more seriuous note, the Deobandi and Barelvi schools of thought are from India, and are indeed well respected in the sub-continent. However, due to lack of patronage they are no longer respected centres of learning. I think Al Azhar Univ in Cairo holds pride of place.

Mr Talib
Want to add that I look forward to the day when the Pope is an Indian and the most respected centre of learning in Islam in the world is in India.

re: 12-head

...not all muslims are namak haram like you ...get over it...

#97 by arjun_m

If you read about the recent fatwa in Canada on not greeting kafirs on their holidays, it was a group of muslims who was first outraged by it and forced the issuing mosque to retract it (the mosque lied by saying it had really not issued the fatwa).

Too bad you miss such details. If at all you can help yourself out of the gutter the view will improve...

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There you go! The grass-eating Hanuman brigade to our south has nothing better than to imitate Pakistan.

We all have been learning from a long time that Pakistan was created on the day Muhammad bin Qasim set his victorious foot upon the soil of Sindh. Thereby, we produce confused retards who as govt. servants take three leisurely breaks a day for namaaz. Sabb karobaar Thapp!

And now you murli parshads are trying to beat us at our own game??

Outrage!!


[From today`s NYT]

Hijacking India`s History
By KAI FRIESE


EW DELHI
While some of us lament the repetition of history, the men who run India are busy rewriting it. Their efforts, regrettably, will only be bolstered by the landslide victory earlier this month of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Western India state of Gujarat.

The B.J.P. has led this country`s coalition government since 1999. But India`s Hindu nationalists have long had a quarrel with history. They are unhappy with the notion that the most ancient texts of Hinduism are associated with the arrival of the Vedic ``Aryan`` peoples from the Northwest. They don`t like the dates of 1500 to 1000 B.C. ascribed by historians to the advent of the Vedic peoples, the forebears of Hinduism, or the idea that the Indus Valley civilization predates Vedic civilization. And they certainly can`t stand the implication that Hinduism, like the other religious traditions of India, evolved through a mingling of cultures and peoples from different lands.

Last month the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the central government body that sets the national curriculum and oversees education for students up to the 12th grade, released the first of its new school textbooks for social sciences and history. Teachers and academics protested loudly. The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts, like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948.

The authors of the textbook have promised to make revisions to the chapter about Gandhi. But what is more remarkable is how they have added several novel chapters to Indian history.

Thus we have a new civilization, the ``Indus-Saraswati civilization`` in place of the well-known Indus Valley civilization, which is generally agreed to have appeared around 4600 B.C. and to have lasted for about 2,000 years. (The all-important addition of ``Saraswati,`` an ancient river central to Hindu myth, is meant to show that Indus Valley civilization was actually part of Vedic civilization.) We have a chapter on ``Vedic civilization`` — the earliest recognizable ``Hindu culture`` in India and generally acknowledged not to have appeared before about 1700 B.C. — that appears without a single date.

The council has also promised to test the ``S.Q.,`` or ``Spiritual Quotient,`` of gifted students in addition to their I.Q. Details of this plan are not elaborated upon; the council`s National Curriculum Framework for School Education says only that ``a suitable mechanism for locating the talented and the gifted will have to be devised.``

More recent history, of course, is not covered in school textbooks. So we will have to wait to see how such books might treat this month`s elections in Gujarat. They were held in the wake of the brutal pogrom of last February and March, in which more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered and at least 100,000 more lost their homes and property. The chief minister of Gujarat, who is among the leading lights of the B.J.P., justified this atrocity as a ``natural reaction`` to an act of arson on a train in the Gujarati town of Godhra, in which 59 Hindu pilgrims lost their lives.

The ruling party`s subsequent election campaign was conducted against the rather literal backdrop of the Godhra incident: painted billboards of the burning railway carriage. The murdered Muslims were not accorded the same tragic status, although their pleas for justice created a backlash that played neatly into the campaign theme of Hindu Pride. It was, of course, a great success.

The carefully nurtured sense of Hindu grievance has been nursed rather than sated by acts of mob violence: the destruction of the 15th-century mosque in Ayodhya, for instance, or the persecution of Christians in earlier pogroms in Gujarat`s Dangs district. The B.J.P., along with its Hindu-supremacist cohorts, the R.S.S. (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the V.H.P. (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), has a seemingly irresistible will to power. (The R.S.S. and the V.H.P. are not political parties but ``social service organizations`` that have served as springboards to power for B.J.P. leaders like Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat.)

In vanguard states like Gujarat, thousands of students follow the uncompromisingly chauvinistic R.S.S. textbooks. They will learn that ``Aryan culture is the nucleus of Indian culture, and the Aryans were an indigenous race . . . and creators of the Vedas`` and that ``India itself was the original home of the Aryans.`` They will learn that Indian Christians and Muslims are ``foreigners.``

But they still have much to learn. I once visited the bookshop at the R.S.S. headquarters in Nagpur. On sale were books that show humankind originated in the upper reaches of that mythical Indian river, the Saraswati, and pamphlets that explain the mysterious Indus Valley seals, with their indecipherable Harrapan script: they are of Vedic origin.

After I visited the bookshop I stopped to talk to a group of young boys who live together in an R.S.S. hostel. They were a sweet bunch of kids, between 8 and 11 years old. They all wanted to grow up to be either doctors or pilots. Very good, I said. And what did they learn in school? Did they learn about religion? About Hinduism, Christianity?

They were silent for a few seconds — until their teacher nodded. A bespectacled kid spoke up. ``Christians burst into houses and make converts of Hindus by bribing them or beating them.``

He said it without malice, just a breathless eagerness, as if it were something he had learned in social science class. Perhaps it was.


Kai Friese is a journalist and magazine editor in New Delhi.

Arjunji,

re:
What is NYC? A collection of old white men sitting in smoke filled rooms making policy for you....or the government you elect?

Actually neither so much as a system of you scratch my back I`ll scratch yours of payoffs and under the table handshakes..its been the way things have been done since Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed. Right now, if you are a New Yorker, youre thinking what a pissy lack of vision Mayor Bloomberg is and wondering if Giuliani will relinquish the last vestiges of control over 9/11 relief funds-and let me remind you, he may have lived up to the expectations of being a mayor after the WTC attack, but I doubt the Senate will appreciate El Duche`s old tricks of stacking art censorship panels with his divorce lawyers, trashing NYC teachers, or setting NYC firemen and policemen in situations of conflict during negotiations...but all these profs. are for working stiffs, right, so why give a ?

As for your other remarks about buying union products, this holiday we bought work made by artisans from Ireland. But I am forced to agree, it is very difficult to find products not made in China or other non unionised countries. We still try.

Customer support centres



Many American and British companies have set up customer support call centres in Bangalore and India is expected to earn $25 billion annually in the next five years - three times more than what the software industry in the country earns today.

Just two years ago, virtually no such call centres existed in India, but now multinational organizations like General Electric, British Airways and Dell Computers have set up shops in Bangalore. By doing so, these MNCs have cut down their customer support expenses by 40 per cent.

It does not take much in terms of technology or finances to establish a customer support call centre. The key components of a call centre are leased international telephone links, which are connected to toll-free telephone numbers of foreign MNCs, computer networks and local workers who are good at the English language.

In urban centres all over Pakistan, there is a large number of people who can communicate effectively in English. This segment of the country`s population, with better communication skills through training, can be transformed into an efficient workforce, each earning between $200 and $300 a month, thus making millions of dollars available at the national level.

The Pakistan government, too, should offer incentives to local and foreign companies to establish customer support call centres in the country.

T. N. KHAN

Lombard, USA

/////Khan sitting in the US is unaware that call centers do exist in pakistan, they are the jihadic call centers to coordinate jihadic activities. All of the Osama tapes come through pakistan, the yemeni chap, the top al-quida man was arrested, not in the border areas with afgh, but in the heart of karachi. Khan, you must be happy to know that the call eneters are busy, they are prviding a lot of income to the people.

You should also know that ones a jihadi turns into a shaheed on his departure to heaven, the charitable organisations of pakistan provide so much of help to the shaheed family. Pl send your donations to www.jihadic-charity.isi.pk.