Two alone

The FT listed the things that could work for peace: this initiative is unfolding in winter when the likelihood of infiltrators crossing the LoC to sabotage the possibilities is lower. Musharraf shows greater understanding of the linkage between the jihadi groups that operate in Kashmir and his 8216;8216;growing domestic problem with Islamist violence 8212; not least the attempts on his life8217;8217;. The paper quoted Musharraf last week: 8216;8216;This menace of extremism is eating us like termites. All Muslims are facing a threat because of it.8217;8217;

In Sonia8217;s backyard

But the NEW YORK TIMES worries about the Congress party. The paper took the election defeats to be the signal of a deeper drift and decline. Diligently, it counted out the maladies. Loss of direction, intellectual crisis. Lack of clear ideology. A leader who is as much a liability as an asset. An organisation riven by factionalism, feudalism. No second rung leadership. Dynasty. Unwillingness to ally.

The problem is of determining what the party stands for today. And the 8216;8216;old-style8217;8217; party8217;s inability to converse in the new political idiom. Basically, said the NYT, Congress losses 8216;8216;tell a story of a country changing, and a party that has failed to change with it.8217;8217;

The NYT shone the light on another Indian old thing. But the English language is enjoying a 8216;8216;new heyday8217;8217;, thank you. The paper reported on the thriving business English coaching institutes are doing in erstwhile centres of Hindi nationalism. Ironically, 8216;8216;the acceleration of English has been presided over by a Hindu nationalist-led government8217;8217;.

Yes, it is still the language of an elite, larger and more elastic though the elite may be. It may also be the language of exclusion, as this elite coldly turns its back on the country8217;s native languages. But, the NYT quoted Krishna Kumar, professor of Education at Delhi University: 8216;8216;Hindi has political significance, English has economic significance, and status goes with economy8217;8217;.

Good for US!

It8217;s a win-win situation, urged the ECONOMIST. It was intervening in the alarmed, often alarmist, discussion raging in Britain, US and Australia. The subject is outsourcing. The ECONOMIST spelt out the fear: 8216;8216;India may do for services what China already does for manufacturing8217;8217;.

But the rules of free trade apply to services as well as goods. And, it8217;s good for America! The magazine quoted a recent report on offshoring from McKinsey which estimates that every dollar of costs the US moves offshore brings America a net benefit of 1.12 to 1.14. Some benefits flow in from organising work in more effective ways. As low value-added jobs go abroad, labour and investment can switch to jobs that generate more economic value.

Stunned by Saddam

But that was before. After Saddam8217;s capture, the American and British media talk of little else.

In the end, what does it mean for the future? Is this the finale of the insurgency in Iraq? Will Bush win the re-election? Which will be meted out to Saddam, by whom, Iraqi justice or the victor8217;s justice? The death penalty?

In the GUARDIAN, Jonathan Freedland confessed to the inability to move on, 8216;8216;I am still stuck on the pictures8217;8217;. Because the 8216;8216;transformation of all-powerful president to cornered wild man is the stuff of parables and will echo forever8217;8217;. Because 8216;8216;8230; they are almost mythic, redolent of legends and fables that are hard-wired into the human mind. With this twist, the Saddam story has become a blend of Bible parable, folk tale, Greek and Shakespearean tragedy8230;8217;8217;

8216;Where8217;s my beard?8217;

In and around West Asia, so many reactions. Lebanon8217;s THE DAILY STAR compiled and translated some. 8216;8216;Now that he is arrested, the fig leaf will fall,8217;8217; said AL-QUDS in Ramallah, 8216;8216;revealing the real reasons for the occupation of Iraq: its oil, its geographic location and the US desire to deprive it of its role in the Arab world8230;8217;8217; The AZAMAN in Baghdad wrote that 8216;8216;Saddam8217;s capture opens a window of hope in a new Iraq8230;8217;8217;

In MAARIV, Tel Aviv, columnist Ben Caspit couldn8217;t take his eyes off the screen: 8216;8216;One can assume that it was also shown in Assad8217;s presidential palace in Damascus, Gadhafi8217;s imperial tent in the Libyan desert and Arafat8217;s Muqataa compound in Ramallah. Bashar Assad must have touched his cheeks and wondered how he would look with a beard. Yasser Arafat must have touched his cheeks, he already has a beard and asked himself whether this was really happening8217;8217;.

Secularism gone mad

And in France, a long-running debate, now the size of a headscarf. President Jacques Chirac has called for a new law banning the wearing of head scarves for Muslim girls. Also, large crosses for Christians and skullcaps for Jewish boys in public schools.

But, the critics chorus, Chirac is making a large problem out of a small one. It8217;s 8216;8216;secularism gone mad8217;8217;, argued Madeliene Bunting in the GUARDIAN. The French secularist tradition was conceived in one set of historical circumstances, she said, and is now being applied in another very different set. It8217;s a crisis of the liberal imagination. At the heart of liberalism is a profound certainty of itself and its own superiority, she quoted political philosopher Bhikhu Parekh. 8216;8216;That kind of certainty cannot but lead to some closure of the imagination, a limit to its understanding of whatever is profoundly different from it 8212; such as Islam8217;8217;.