The Lanka Guardian, still as good as ever. But why have they gone and put a new masthead on it? I still like the font on ´Guardian´, which speaks for the sober and consistent questioning that the paper has done over the two decades of its existence. But what of ´Lanka´? Looks, to me, like blocks of cheddar cheese gnawed through by Lankan rodents. So, Asiaweek has gone ahead and done the exercise for the rest of us, judged the Best Cities in Asia, choosing 40 "most-livable" places. South Asia does not make the top ten, but ranked 14th is Islamabad, city of 350,000 with no nightlife and a strait-laced bureaucratic-diplomatic elite. Next you have Bangalore at 19th, although its quality of life is dipping by the hour. Then comes Kathmandu, ranked 23rd, which is hard to believe, especially during the monsoon months of garbage pileup and winters of temperature inversion. Bombay, Colombo and Dhaka are all ranked 26th, Delhi and Karachi 29th, and Chittagong 31st. All I can say is, those Asiaweek pollsters must know what they are doing, but something does not sound right when dull and dreary desert that is Islamabad is the best in South Asia and the cultural haven of Calcutta does not make the grade.
In these columns the last time around, I had referred to Hinduism Today, a journal brought out from an ashram in Hawaii. The 29 November issue of Frontline paints a very unflattering picture of the magazine´s publisher, a 69-year-old US-born convert to Hinduism named Sivaya Subramuniya-swami. The article, written by the Madras-based magazine´s editor N. Ram, is about how the swamy, head of the Saiva Siddhanta Church, much given to spouting "New Age Hindu mumbo jumbo", conspired to acquire a treasure trove of M.K.Gandhi´s personal papers and have them illegally auctioned in London. The profit was to have gone to building a massive temple, built completely of white granite, in Hawaii.
The Far Eastern Economic Review, too, has gone for a drastic revamp of its cover, although thankfully the insides do not depart too much from the earlier format. Call me a status-quoist, a pushover for tradition, but I do not like this new cover either. The message I read in it is the editors deciding to join the Americanesque (low, of sacrificing depth lor more user friendliness. And whoever gave them the idea that people say "Review" when they mean F-E-E-R? There was always the thrill in these fast-paced times of forcing people at the newsstand to ask for title in lull, or to say, "1 read it in the Far Eastern Economic Review.". In fact, it was a real mark of success that the feer was never reduced to a one-word cypher, but now the editors themselves have fallen for it. They want to go to the mass, so why am I complaining?
In 1994, journalist/environmentalist Anil Agarwal was stricken with cancer which quickly hit his eyes and nervous system.