That Bloke In The Big Smoke

(From Andy in Oman's blog)

Dad sent this picture from his recent trip to Kuala Lumpur. Lord Muruga is the most important Hindu God for Tamils, who make up a sizeable minority of the Malaysian population (roughly 1.4 million or 5% of the total). This statue of Lord Muruga was unveiled in January 2006 and took three years to construct. At 43m (140ft) high it is the world's tallest statue of Lord Muruga and is located outside Batu Caves, thirteen kilometres north of Kuala Lampur (the capital of Malaysia). According to Wiki, the statue "is made of 1550 cubic metres of concrete, 250 tonnes of steel bars and 300 litres of gold paint brought in from neighbouring Thailand." The Batu Caves temple complex consists of three main caves and a few smaller ones. The biggest, referred to as Cathedral Cave or Temple Cave, has a 100 m-high ceiling and features ornate Hindu shrines. To reach it visitors must climb a steep flight of 272 steps. The cave is the focal point of the Hindu festival of Thaipusam in Malaysia that is celebrated mainly by Tamils. The festival falls on the full moon in the Tamil month of Thai (January/February).

Muscat is currently hosting the 2nd Asian Beach Games but really, who cares? You can't take an event seriously with the name beach in it, especially not one in which you can win medals for tent pegging! It's a popular sport in these parts. Apparently the opening ceremony was flash. Not surprisingly, the crowds have been thin except for the beach soccer in which the hosts are defending champs. Coinciding with the Games but not related to it is the World Fireworks Championship also being hosted in Muscat as part of Oman's 40th National Day celebrations. Six teams from USA, France, Italy, Australia, UK and China are taking part. I've seen some of it but honestly, there's only so many displays you can watch till you get bored. Even if you add a soundtrack. Today beach and pyrotechnics, tomorrow the World Cup?

James Fergusson, author of A Million Bullets and Taliban, argues that British soldiers should not be dying for the rights of Afghan women:

"The west views gender equality as an absolute human right and so we should. But no country, certainly not Britain, has yet managed unequivocally to establish that right at home; and we tend to forget both how recent our progress towards it is, as well as how hard the struggle has been. Full women's suffrage was not granted in Britain until 1928. With such a track record, is it not presumptuous to insist that a proud, patriarchal society that has survived for 3,000 years should now instantly mirror us? That, in effect, is what well-meaning western experts did when they helped to draw up Afghanistan's 2003 constitution. The stipulation that at least 25% of MPs should be women is plain hypocritical. Even after the 2010 election in Britain – a parliamentary democracy that has had rather longer to mature than Afghanistan's – women MPs account for just 22% of the total." [READ MORE]

I agree with a lot of what he says and think attention should be paid to recognising the Taliban as part of the solution, whether we like it or not. Unfortunately our blinkered black-and-white view has largely prevented this from happening until now. And although some baby steps have been taken in this direction a lot remains to be done. Improving the rights of women is important but not essential to our intervention.

Dear Friend Hitler. That's the name of an upcoming Bollywood movie directed by Rakesh Ranjan Kumar. It's set in the last days of the Third Reich. But taking Herr Kumar to task over his assertion that the Führer had a "love for India", and his producer's statement that "if we should thank anybody for Indian freedom, it should be Hitler", is London-based historian Alex von Tunzelmann. In 2007 she authored her first book, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire. She's right, most Indians are ignorant about the Holocaust.

Meawhile, India's "censuswallahs" (or census people) have begun their task to determine if the country's population is actually 1.18 billion as estimated. The British introduced the census to the Raj in 1872 and it has been performed every decade since then without fail. This will be its biggest exercise yet. In 2001 the official population was 1,028,610,328. That means in the past decade we've probably added the equivalent of 4 Australias, 1.5 United Kingdoms, a Phillipines or 0.3 US of As. The population count involves 2.3 million "enumerators" travelling to more than 630,000 villages and over 5,000 cities. But it hasn't escaped criticism by some for its inclusion of controversial questions about caste for the first time since 1931. And there are also issues about the way in which India measures levels of poverty.

In case you missed it, the recently re-elected Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa concluded a recent visit to New Delhi by signing agreements on aid, infrastructure and loans. The deals are aimed at countering the growing influence and threat posed by China in the new "Great Game" with India for primacy in the Indian Ocean. A new Indian consulate will open in the southern city of Hambantota, where Chinese contractors are constructing a vast deep water port largely financed by their government's lending arm, the Export-Import bank. The Chinese are also financing and constructing ports in Burma and Pakistan, and have proposed to build one in Bangladesh, forming a chain of the so-called "string of pearls" encircling the Indian subcontinent. Beijing is also building a major road network north of Colombo and lending £140 million to build a second international airport in the south of the island. In March, the Sri Lankan government said China was "supplying more than half of all the construction and development loans it was receiving". And then there's the roads, oil and gas pipeline being built in Burma (to the aforementioned port), the multi-billion dollar infrastructural projects in Pakistan and recent infrastructural offers to Nepal. You can understand why India is worried and rattled, but to complicate matters further, Rajapaksa's visit triggered protests by a section of India's 60 million+ Tamil population. They blame Rajapaksa for the "high levels of civilian casualties" in the final days of the civil war against the Tamil Tiger separatists last year. The Indian government is stuck between a rock and a hard place in a game China will win.

And finally for the health conscious amongst us, a new Indian government body has been "tasked with protecting the country's rich heritage of medicinal and medical philosophy". It's a response to companies, organisations and people in the West claiming to invent "new" yoga practices from ones which the Indian government contend are in fact rehashed versions of centuries old practices. The campaign has already secured major victories that have forced European companies to reverse patents on the "use of extract of melon, ginger, cumin, turmeric and onions" for a range of health products. In each case Indian government officials were "able to comb the new digital library to submit carefully translated excerpts from texts ranging from 19th century medical text books to 5th century manuals of traditional ayurvedic medicine to support their claims". Only a matter of time then before we take matters to their logical conclusion and patent the number 0.

An interesting article from The Economic Times. Chinese demand for raw materials has collapsed, dramatically affecting global sea traffic.

Can the length of women's hair signal where the economy is going? The Nikkei, Japan's leading business daily, thinks so. [LINK]

What should the UNSC or individual governments be doing about the situation there?

No cartographical conspiracy here

"There is no surer way for The Economist’s Asia section to cause offence than to publish a map. Angered most often, to judge by its actions, is the government of India. Our maps that include the disputed territory of Kashmir show it carved up into Indian, Pakistani and Chinese areas of control. Every time we print one, every single issue of the magazine distributed in India is defaced with an official stamp. Some readers in India seem to suspect us of malice: perhaps we publish such maps purely to irk the authorities and add to the overtime earnings of the hard-pressed stampers. Farther east in Asia, a Japanese diplomat recently went so far as to accuse The Economist of condoning the use of force in international affairs. The truth is more benign..." -The Economist

According to Douglas-Westwood, India and China, the world's most populous countries, consume just over 10% of global oil production whereas the US and Europe together consume a hefty 51%! That's 5 times as much consumption with a population less than half of the two Asian powerhouses put together!

Obviously, the widespread poverty and non-industrialization of these sectors in both India and China are the main reasons why the numbers are skewed as such. One only wonders how and if the ecology will cope with inevitable future oil consumption surges in these two countries, while the rest discover viable renewable energies to replace our current dependence on oil.