The Bhutanese royalty has the New Delhi media eating out of its hand. Verily. King Jigme (50) and his son, the soon-tohe King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk (25) should probably advise India's burgeoning image-consultancy firms on ways to keep the clients' image shipshape. Chhetria Peirakar had thought that only the father had what it takes, but it seems that the dapper, apparently soft-spoken, prince has it too. He told the gushing Isha Singh Sawhnev of The Hindustan 'Time's, that the Bhutanese people love all things Indian. He added, "We love Hollywood – Preitv Zinta, Shah Rukh Khan and the Bachchans." Now there's a way to get into the warmest section of the throbbing Indian heart. Meantime, The Times of India carried the news of promised abdication as frontpage headline. Every other country in the neighbourhood would have felt envious about the Druk royalty's inside track to the New Delhi editorial offices.
Hmmm. See that The Hindu has brought a revolution of sorts. In a recent article by its national security specialist, Praveen Swam', the reference is to Pakistan Administered Kashmir rather than Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. It is vet another proof that the thaw in India-Pakistan relations is irreversible. We now await the rest of the Indian media to follow suit, and also for the Pakistani media to start referring to "India Administered Kashmir". The violence of 'occupation' needs to he replaced with the neutrality of 'administration'. Give me PAK and IAK over POK and IOK, any day!
The most popular picture to mark the first anniversary of the tsunami seems to have been the photograph of a leggy Swede woman with a full bust, walking barefoot with a child along the Khuk Khak beach in Thailand. This picture was widely printed in the papers on 27 December.
Best-selling novelist Orhan Pamuk went on trial in Turkey on 15 December, accused by the state of the crime of mentioning that "a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds" had been sent to their mass deaths by the Turkish state after the First World War. As author Pankaj Mishra wrote in The International Herald Tribune, "The Armenian massacres are a widely documented tact. But it is an officially taboo subject in Turkev… Like all nation-states, Turkey has its own sacred nationalist myths and will protect them as fiercely as any society claiming the sanction of religion. This state-sponsored nationalism attracts a wide range of Turks, including many members of the educated elites." What CP would like to add, as we see Orhan Pamuk hounded and pelted on his way to court in Istanbul, is that all national educated intelligentsias of Southasia need to introspect. Who amongst us in mainstream media or mainstream academia has the courage of an Orhan Pamuk, to speak the truth about sacrosanct national subjects, be it Kashmir or Balochistan or the Jaffna peninsula or the Chittagong Hill Tracts? May we all learn from Orhan Pamuk, and wish well in his day in court.