Daddy always cautioned me
how many rupees it took to get
a dollar; and when I bought my first
Chanel lipstick, it was as if
I might have bought a cow in India.
It was always like that - what I
could have had were we in Delhi.
So that on holiday at Reno Road
he´d hint that Washington was not
like home. That´s why he didn´t want
me window-shopping downtown.
Reetika Vazirani

The lines struck me as unusually sensitive. Unfortunately, I haven't read any of her works, or heard of her for that matter, until she died. Just learnt a lot more about her when my uncle who's now based out of Thrissur in Kerala wrote a tribute to her -- Living in America, Dying In America

Newt Gingrich, former speaker at the US House of Representatives wrote a searing piece in Foreign Policy on why Anti-American sentiment is rising unabated around the globe. Te U.S. State Department, he argues, has abdicated values and principles in favor of accommodation and passivity. Only a top-to-bottom reform and culture shock will enable the State Department to effectively spread U.S. values and carry out President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. Read on

How do countries like India integrate seamlessly into the global economy on the one hand? On the other hand, how does India manage fundamentalist forces gnawing at every muscle in her body -- whether it is militant Hindu, rabid Islam or prostelyzing Christianity? What a dichotomy! What makes it scarier still, there are precedents that haven't exactly turned in good news. Yugoslavia trying its damndest best to join the New Europe even as it exploded into fragments. The Soviet Union experimenting with Glasnost before it disappeared overnight.

Argues Benjamin R Barber in a seminal 1992 essay first published in The Atlantic Online -- "The forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without. They have one thing in common: neither offers much hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern themselves democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad's centrifugal whirlwind against McWorld's centripetal black hole, the outcome is unlikely to be democratic."

Powerful argument. Read on