Random Thoughts - Pattabhi Sitaraman

The tribal state in a small area of modern day Turkey was expanded by the King Osman-i to one of the widespread kingdoms which started in Asia minor and spread to many parts of modern day Europe. This came to be known as the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turk revolution and the collapsing of the government of Enver Pasha paved the way for the dissolution of Ottoman empire. Though the armistice brought the fighting between allies and the Ottoman armies to a halt, it could not bring stability;  hence to avoid a re-run of fighting with Britain, a caliphate of Ottoman was set up with Istanbul as the center.  But with the end of world war I, many areas of the empire were liberated to form separate countries.  However, the caliphate continued its hold on many areas. w ithin Turkey.  A pro western secular nationalist movement arose within Turkey.  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk lead the Turkish revolutionaries to fight for independence.  A treaty at Lausanne was signed and t...

There is a statement made by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mr  Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, on the proposed action of the Government of India in the problem of Rohingya Muslims taking refuge in the country.  These comments were directed at the proposed deportation of the Rohingyas to the place from where they came. There is an explosion in the social media, finding fault with the OHCHR and commenting on the plight of HIndus in many neighbouring countries and the Kashmiri Pandits who had been made refugees in their own country.  Let us look at the problem of these refugees and why this has become a problem for India. The Budhdhists though claiming to be very peaceful and co-existing with other religionists, the history in other countries had been different.  The ethnic clash between Tamils and Budhdhists in Srilanka is not far back in history for anyone to have forgotten the atrocities committed on the Tamils owing to which a section of the Tamils le...

I was a young boy then studying in the local panchyat school in the village when I first encountered floods in the river Kaveri; this was 1962 and the village I grew up was surrounded on all sides by water and the village became an island.  After a month and a half some normalcy returned with a dirt road connecting the village to the other parts of the district.  There were huge deposit of sand in a large tracts of fertile lands making them not fit for cultivation. Similar floods were not seen since then but the nature's fury had been such that it wrecked havoc in large parts of coastal areas in subsequent years.   In the years since and even before, there had been frequent floods in many parts of North India especially in Bihar, eastern UP Assam and Bengal flooding many areas and the number of casualties increasing with passing years.  The tributaries to the Ganga which originate in Nepal and meeting the river in the state of Bihar had been rendering the lives o...

There was a news item that a doctor in his mid forties, had been de-listed by the MCI as he did not have the requisite qualification to practice medicine.  The reason for that drastic action was that the doctor obtained his medical degree from one of the universities in Russia where a pass in the school final exam (+2 in India) is not mandatory for pursuing the course leading to a degree in medicine; incidentally he did not pass the +2 examination in India which is mandatory for any under-graduate study in India.  This was widely reported in the media  This news and t he large number of students of class 12 pass and fail going abroad to some dubious universities to get a medical qualification made the Supreme Court sit up and take note of the same.  The MCI which is the governing body of the medical education in India had submitted that such qualifications are not recognised by them and hence people with qualifications from such universities cannot practice medicin...

Gauri Lankesh, a not very well known journalist and an editor of a tabloid was shot at point blank range to death. It is highly abominable and condemn-able  that a journalist and that too a woman had been murdered.  Before this murder took place and became a national obsession, let us look back and ask ourselves, how many of us have heard or read about this journalist. The people in the very close circles and in the secondary rings within the state might have heard about this woman.  But not many outside the state of Karnataka.  But today there is not one in the country, who has access to a TV set and a news channel in any language, who has not heard about who this woman was and had not come to a conclusion as to who her killers are. The media, just as the news of her killing came out, started delivering judgement that the right wing outfits are responsible for her murder.  The media had been highly biased. There are many reasons to believe that the media ...

The country had been through many upheavals in the past with many ups and downs in the social and political spheres. Some deaths and assassinations had caused nationwide protests and also killings of genocidal proportions.  But there had been a few suicides that shook the nation's conscience because of the relentless media coverage for days on end on these suicides and the political and social agitations.  There had been suicide of students who were pursuing their studies in the nation's premier institutes as they could not cope up with the peer pressure for performance.  The suicide of Rohith Vemula a PhD scholar from the central university in Hyderabad created a storm in political and social circles.  The media, in their eagerness to be the first among equals, tried to portray the suicide as a political game and paint the scholar as a candidate from a reserved category.  The political parties opposed to the ruling party in the center jumped into the bandwago...