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Yet Another Self-Important Blog.
Rohit Singh
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[Fri, 24 Sep 2004]
Hot Pics of Sonia Gandhi
It takes all types. I was looking through Sitemeter records-- most of the people who show up at this blog seem to be people who googled for something quite unrelated. "Boston scooters" and "toi mumbai edition" are among the more common search terms. But this one took the cake: some fellow had searched on Google for "hot pics of sonia gandhi". Ewww...
The more interesting aspect of this is that Google thought my blog was a "hit", ableit only the 23rd or so out of 44 matching hits. Apparently, notwithstanding the minor point that I mentioned "hot" and "sonia gandhi" and "pics" in totally unrelated posts, Google thinks I am among the top 25 people in the world with a strong apolitical interest in the Congress president.
Ah well, why be relegated to the 3rd page of search results! Hence this post. Now this blog is bound to land up on the first page the next time somebody searches for comely portrayals of Mrs. Gandhi. Just to be sure, I'll repeat the magic words once more: "hot pics of Sonia Gandhi."
Kashmir
DaDude's blog
had a post on a BBC Kashmir discussion. This led me to some other
interesting things about Kashmir on the BBC website. In particular, this
page listing various scenarios. 1 or 2 of the scenarios are rather
interesting.
I think India isn't going to give any significant chunk of Kashmir away-- just because we don't need to, as BBC and DaDude pointed out. So the final solution won't be very different from current situation. But the current status-quo isn't a solution-- there's no face saving measure for Pakistan to justify backing-off from the whole sponsoring-terrorism business. And I think India wants (or, should want) the Kashmir situation to be solved soon enough so we Indians (and others) can focus on other stuff, i.e., the econonomy and other puny things. So that means India'll need to seen as giving something. What should it give? A small chunk of land as an outright give-away? Like has been rumored recently. Or a larger chunk that gets full autonomy under India or, better for Pakistan, under the joint patronage of India and Pakistan. This is the intriguing scenario mentioned in the BBC webpage: mark out a relatively small region in the Kashmir valley and make it indepenedent in all but name.
I think giving Siachen off to Pakistan might be an interesting idea. Unless Siachen has security value for the rest of Kashmir Valley, it has little intrinsic value by itself. I doubt that the security value is too high-- controlling Siachen didn't do much for us in Kargil War. The benefit of giving off Siachen is that we're just losing a bunch of rock and ice which only excites crazy mountaineers. And Pakistan can feel happy that they actually got a chunk of land from India-- everybody knows that Siachen is dominated by the Indian army so it'll be a "real" giveaway (as opposed to giving away something that you don't really own, e.g., POK).