Recent Bomb Blasts in India
Interesting article in the WSJ, saying that the Government of India needs to get its act together to handle terrorism, while the Muslim community needs to be forward-looking….
Will the community be forward-looking, eager to seize new economic opportunities, and at peace with a rapidly changing world? Or will it forsake the future for an idealized past, foster a culture of grievance that condones violence, and view globalization as a mortal threat? Depending on the answer, the Bangalore and Ahmedabad bombings are either a passing event or a dark harbinger of things to come.
The more immediate challenge (IMHO), and the biggest fear at this point is retaliation and hence out break of large scale communal violence.
New Reading Habits — Online
I had posted earlier about Internet overdose. Here is an interesting article in the NY Times about how the younger generation of kids is spending a lort of time online but not reading books. Some argue that this is also a form of reading. Interesting pros and cons. The jury is still out on this issue.
“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough , the Pulitzer Prize -winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”
Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”
Pakora Korner 