On Tue October 17 2006 3:00 pm, Badri Natarajan wrote: > Why this sudden spate of posts on these topics from you? I've seen it on > and off on BR when I lurk there, but hardly on anything on silk for > years..
Badri - I don't intend to continue posting on the subject - as I have indicated to Kiran in another post. There was a time when these subjects never cropped up on silk. Maybe they were "innocent days". Terrorism appears on every list or board nowadays - but I intend to compartmentalise and not use stubborn rhetoric to see a point through. There is a lot of other great stuff to talk about. But, as you have indicated, I think it is important to say that I agree or disagree with a particular view when it refers to a subject that I read a lot about. Obviously there are no black and white answers - and a lot depends on what direction you are looking at the subject from. One "utility" of registering disagreement is to point out that other views exist and they are not necessarily any more cruel or uninformed when seen from a different perspective. There was a brief reference to POTA a couple of days ago on silk. I recall a statement about POTA from the Supreme Court which had ruled that just because a legislation can be misused does not make it unconstitutional. It was passed for a reason, and without looking at why a series of governments across the political spectrum have felt the need to have legislations like TADA, POTA and now WOTA (or woteva it is called) it is simplistic to argue for or against. If you look at the circumstances in some detail you find that there are strong points for AND against. Again there is no clear black and white differentiation. Every action that takes place - be it a murderous terrorist outrage, an "encounter death", a new law or a riot - it is invariably the result of a series of people who have had thoughts that they considered to be correct at the time they took part in the action. The details are important. The devil is in the detail. I have seen what appears to be superficial skimming of these issues on silk but that is not a crime - even the press in India and abroad are generally unable to come to grips with some issues which are intimidatingly large in the number of people, events and geographical area involved. The biggest pitfall seems to be that most observers/commentators tend to be idealistic and try and apply black and white rules to issues in which black and white are interchangeable depending on the perspective and scale. Figuring that out is the trick. shiv
