How should a tiny South Asian state look upon a giant neighbour? Well, in the newly globalised world, as a marketing opportunity. King Jigme Singye Wangchuk said so. Already, Drukyul exports jam, jelly, squash, lotteries, plyboard and electricity to India. Said the king to The Indian Express, "We don´t look upon India´s size with any suspicion. We look upon the 900 million population of India as an advantage. It is a big market for anything we produce." Listen in, Adam Smith.
M. Krishnan, naturalist, photographer, and writer of the fortnightly "Country Notebook" in The Statesman since 1950, died on 18 February at 83. The dour Mr Krishnan, as one obituarist noted, was "an old-style naturalist rather than a new-style ecologist" who did not go with the scientific fashions and never sought patronage. Rather than write eloquent photo-spreads in glossy journals about exotic creatures such as the snow leopard, he stuck resolutely to the everyday offerings of peninsular India. His signatures were the black and white images with which he always began his Statesman columns, followed by use of spare language on subjects such as the common crow, the neighbourhood jackal, or the rhesus monkey. A man and a column to be missed.
The North West Frontier Province cabinet has decided to do away with both whipping and keeping prisoners in fetters, reports Dawn, and we are glad. But there is a distance between the cup and the mouth, in Pakistan as elsewhere. A month ago, at Lahore´s incredibly swanky Press Club, Chhetria Patrakar came across a photograph on exhibition, where the flash reveals a naked man bound hand and foot and hung from a pole with three policemen standing by. Human degradation continues despite laws, it seems,´ and there are courageous news photographers in Pakistan.
The Express Magazine has exposed the shameful victimisation of two Maldivian women by Indian security agencies under what is known as the "ISRO spy scandal". The report reveals that Mariam Rasheeda and Fauzia Hassan were falsely implicated in a case of espionage, used as "honey traps" set by Pakistani, Dutch and Korean interests to lure scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation. The CBI, which took over the case after it was sensationalised by the Kerala police and the Intelligence Bureau, says there was no story. The sister agencies had goofed up. Mariam Rasheeda told the magazine, "The Indian newspapers have written all sorts of bad things about me. But in Male we do not have a single, not a single prostitute." For all the hoopla when the story first broke, there is not much coverage in the press once the fiasco was laid bare.