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<i>Singapooru Machchan</i> - The Singapore Romeo!
Dear Readers, While comments on the columns or articles are greatly appreciated, we will not condone personal attacks of any nature on the author or fellow members. A recent discussion thread involving multiple posts here had to be deleted because it was going nowhere. It certainly wasn't the column that was the subject of discussion. It wouldn't have made sense to delete only some of the comments, leaving the others online -- however harmless they might have been. I would request our members to take this in the right spirit, and carry on with the discussion of the column. To be fair, I informed the comments' posters before I deleted the comments. Let's all try and keep this space clean. Thank you. Lata Sundar
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Ten Reasons Why Anyone Who Cares About Hinduism Should be Grateful to Wendy Doniger
Sulekha has always allowed its regular columnists to include essays by guest writers. So Patrick Hogan's essay in Lalita Pandit's regular column is not without precedent. Also, not everybody is online 24 hrs a day. Please allow the author sufficient time to respond, if he/chooses to. And, please restrict your comments to the issues without crossing the line to personal abuse. Thanks and regards.
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CNN's Pakistan Bias
Friday, February 1, 2002 For Immediate Release Sulekha.com column triggers global groundswell of protest against CNN's 'pro-Pakistan bias' 55,000 Indians from 30 countries sign petition; CNN's top executives meet with petition representatives AUSTIN, US, February 1, 2002: Do you think CNN has a pro-Pakistan bias? Do you feel CNN's coverage leaves an impression that Pakistan is a country fighting terrorism instead of supporting and harboring terrorists? Nearly 55,000 Indians from over 30 countries around the world who signed a petition against CNN think so. This groundswell of global opinion in response to an article by Rajiv Malhotra, a Princeton entrepreneur, on the popular Indian community website Sulekha.com, and a petition created by Kris Chandrasekar, a Bay Area banker, has directly led to a meeting with top CNN executives in their Atlanta headquarters. Narsi Narasimhan, an Atlanta-based management consultant, who arranged the meeting of a group of representatives to discuss the charges in the article and the petition, said, "We had a productive and useful meeting where Rajiv Malhotra's Sulekha.com article was presented and discussed. We found a receptive audience in CNN's executives. CNN promised that they will take note of various points raised by the team and take actions, where necessary. CNN welcomed continuous dialogue to exchange views and ideas and to educate each other." Nigel Pritchard, CNN's Vice-President of Public Relations, responded, "We continuously welcome and respect the viewpoints of our audience and have thoroughly reviewed the points raised by the petitioners and in the Sulekha article by Mr. Rajiv Malhotra. Our objective at CNN remains clear: to provide our viewers with the best possible coverage that is fair, accurate and unbiased. We listen to all sides of a news story and report on all angles." The global campaign petitioning CNN for fairer representation started when Rajiv Malhotra, president of Infinity Foundation, presented numerous examples in his latest Sulekha.com column alleging CNN's continued bias in favor of Pakistan. His charges include CNN reports granting legitimacy of an elected 'president' to Pervez Musharraf when he is a military dictator who has usurped power from a democratically elected government, using the relatively benign term 'militants' in Kashmir while using the term 'terrorists' elsewhere, lack of coverage of ethnic cleansing in Pakistan that has reduced non-Muslim population from 10% to 2%. Says Malhotra, "The ignorant and prejudiced coverage of India by organizations such as CNN is glaring and unforgivable. We are using the Indian weapon of satyagraha to peacefully and patiently train the spotlight on this biased coverage and rally global opinion against this. India is a liberal, secular democracy with a rich diversity of culture and achievements. This fact should be highlighted. Sulekha should be commended for providing a popular and effective forum to get the word out." Taking the cue from the article, Kris Chandrasekar created an online petition that quickly attracted a massive audience as it quickly got circulated on email lists and posted on numerous websites. In less than 10 days, nearly 55,000 people signed the petition. Chandrasekar commented, "I have received 100s of personal emails from around the world on this issue. The support has been just overwhelming; this goes to prove that the Sulekha article by Rajiv has struck a highly resonant chord in Indians worldwide. It is the responsibility of the global Indian community to stand up to biased media coverage and correct the misperceptions about India and Indians such coverage engenders. I thank CNN for listening to the charges of bias; we now look forward to more balanced and fairer coverage of India on CNN." Satya Prabhakar, President and CEO of Sulekha.com, said, "Sulekha is proud to be the forum that galvanizes global Indian opinion around issues of interest. The Internet is uniquely capable of enabling effective distributed coordination. We are glad that Sulekha.com's twin rallying cries of expression and interaction are helping build the social capital of the global Indian community." Narsi Narasimhan added, "It is gratifying to see that the global Indian community is using latest technologies to dynamically create distributed research/action teams to address specific issues. Moving forward, I am convinced that the Internet will play a major role in constantly providing input to CNN and other media companies, ensuring that they do their job of fair reporting." The action group is exploring ways to more systematically study biased Indian coverage in American media. About Sulekha.com Sulekha.com is the flagship service of Smart Information Worldwide, Inc., a leading Internet media and services company with operations in US and India. Sustained by the creative contributions of tens of thousands of Indians from over 50 countries, Sulekha has become the biggest online community for Indians, winning the unexampled loyalty of hundreds of thousands of visitors and acclaim from the media ("One of the finest Indian websites" – Times of India). In addition, Sulekha is also the leading provider of ticketing, membership and fundraising services to Indian organizations and is today the biggest online ticketer for Indian events and movies in North America. Penguin has recently published Sulekha's first print publication Black, White and Various Shades of Brown: Best of Sulekha.com in the Indian subcontinent and Singapore. Web address: http://www.sulekha.com Sulekha Article: "CNN's Pro-Pakistan Bias" by Rajiv Malhotra http://www.sulekha.com/column.asp?cid=163061 Contacts Satya Prabhakar, Sulekha.com, (512) 762-7317, satya@sulekha.net Kris Chandrasekar, 408-494-4586 Rajiv Malhotra, 609-683-8161
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Woman on Top
In response to all the comments wondering why Sulekha is publishing movie reviews as articles... First, sorry for the delay in responding...too much going on and too little time. Surely, you know how it is. We have been putting up movie reviews since the beginning of Sulekha. But the spate of comments on this article made us caucus and think whether we should continue doing so. And here is what we have decided to do. After we have fulfilled existing commitments to publish such articles, we will, in the future, publish only articles that deal with films or film-making in general at a higher level of abstraction. Or review specific articles that review movie(s) in the context of a larger theme (e.g. reviewing Sholay as part of a higher level review of Indian Westerns or Hum Aapke Hain Koun as part of an analysis of why Indians fall for syrupy romances with cute gals and many songs ;-). We may even publish article containing an erudite analysis of a particular movie's script (e.g. Pulp Fiction). In other words, we won't be putting up straight reviews or single movies under articles. Hope that makes sense. Please let us know. Satya for Sulekha
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The Lahore Renaissance
We have had to delete some comments to this article since they crossed the line. In the process Viraj's latest comment also got deleted accidentally. Viraj, we apologize for that. We request you to please post it again. Please write to us at editor@sulekha.com if we can help you in any way. Thank you for your understanding. Sangeeta
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Home Is Where the Mind Is
Sorry about the oversight. Our email has been down for a while... will fix it soon.
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RSS and its Early Days
Kris: It does seem to be a subject that many here are passionate about and hence my earler suggestion that Sulekha consider a point- counterpoint format as a regular feature on matters like this.
Kris, thanks for the suggestion; will try to organize this as a trial to see how it works.
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Teenager Versus Parent
Padmini N. wonders below if Doc dot Ro is not making up these cases to forward her theories.
Please take our word for it that these questions are coming in from different sources (different physical locations on the Internet) and we forward them to Doc dot Ro for addressing in her column.
We hasten to add that one can never tell if it is a genuine person with a genuine problem writing to this column; this is because creating a fake identity on the Internet is a trivial exercise. Much the same way one cannot tell if those writing to "Dear Abby" are real people with real problems or, as you might probably wonder, if Ms. Abby is not sitting there making these things up all by herself.
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Reservations in Tamil Nadu Now Add Up to 106%
Sulekhan laments: "it's unfortunate that the Indus inquirer has turned out to be "Cauvery Inquirer"... Instead of dealing with the Clowns all over India, sulekha has started doing what all the north indians love doing... fuel the hatred against the Tamils. 50 yrs from now, when the Indian govt is fighting a pitched battle against separatists from south, you'd wonder what went wrong... well, this kind of pointless belittling of one group of people, in the name of making fun is what goes wrong.
grow up sulekha.... find something useful and don't add fuel to the enormous hatred we Indians, have for each other."
Not to worry. There is stuff in the pipeline for everybody.
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