It can be a traumatic experience for any teenager to live without a mother snatched away in a brutal manner. A year after Pakistan’s charismatic leader Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, her 18-year-old daughter Bakhtawar has expressed her anguish through a moving song that is being broadcast on the State-run television.

“Like any child who has lost a parent, it was only natural that Benazir Bhutto’s eldest daughter would wish to express her grief for her murdered mother. Less obvious, perhaps, was that the tribute would come in the form of a mournful rap song,” reports The Independent as quoted in the Huffington Post.

” ‘You have beauty and intelligence, everything you did have relevance,’ sings Bakhtawar, with a borrowed Brooklyn accent, over looping beats. ‘Shot in the back of your ear, so young in 54th year, murdered with three kids left behind, a hopeless nation without you, you are in all their hearts.’

“The teenager, a student at Edinburgh University, then repeats a chorus line, from which the song takes it name: ‘I would take the pain away.’

“The song, which has also been posted on YouTube, features a five-minute video of photographs and clips of the murdered former premier, including footage from the election rally at the Liaquat Bagh park in Rawalpindi which she had addressed just moments before an assassin launched a lethal gun and bomb attack on 27 December, 2007.” More here…

Pakistan’s Information Minister Ms Sherry Rehman, for years an aide to Bhutto, said Bakhtawar, a student at Britain’s Edinburgh University, wrote the lyrics and music. “It’s a tribute of a grieving daughter to her iconic and loving mother,” Rehman told Reuters on Monday. More here…

In these prosaic times, Barack Obama seems to have decided to add a bit of flight of fancy. “This is only the fourth time in our history that a President has featured a poet at his inaugural. I hope that this portends well for the future of the arts in our everyday and civic life,” says Elizabeth Alexander, the Yale professor who has ben invited to deliver her poem after president-elect Barack Obama’s inaugural address on January 20.

Elizabeth, who was born in 1962 in Harlem, New York, and grew up in Washington, D.C., writes in her website: “I understand that as a country we stand poised to make tremendous choices about our collective future. Poetry is not meant to cheer; rather, poetry challenges, and moves us towards transformation. Language distilled and artfully arranged shifts our experience of the words – and the worldviews – we live in.”

The Guardian wrote: “Obama had been spotted carrying what appeared to be a book of the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s poetry last month, but it is Alexander, a professor of African American studies at Yale University, who will compose a poem to be read at his swearing in as president. She will perform alongside Aretha Franklin, Itzak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma. The participants were chosen based on requests from Obama and from vice-president-elect Joe Biden.

“Alexander, who has published four collections of poems, most recently the 2005 Pulitzer prize finalist American Sublime, will be only the fourth poet to have read at a presidential inauguration. A tradition eschewed by current incumbent George W Bush, Bill Clinton invited poets to both of his inaugurations, with Miller Williams reading in 1997, and Maya Angelou in 1993. The only other poet to have read at an inauguration was Robert Frost, who recited The Gift Outright for John F Kennedy in 1961.

“American Sublime includes the poem Ars Poetica #100: I Believe, in which she writes that:

Poetry is what you find

in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God

in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.

Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,

and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)

is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales’s gambit has paid off. He made a direct appeal to the users of this free online encyclopaedia to help him raise $6m (£4.1m) to cover its running costs for 2009 or be prepared to see advertisements splashed all over this pioneering, innovative and valuable referral website. And, boy, what a response Wikipedia got from its viewers/wellwishers!

This story would have delighted Mahatma Gandhi who most of his life propagated that newspapers should be ad-free. Even in the newspapers he edited in South Africa and India for decades he kept the advertisers away. He strongly believed that Press freedom can only be achieved if the readers contributed towards the running of their newspapers. (See here…)

“In his letter, which was posted online on 23 December, Mr Wales wrote: ‘Wikipedia is different. It’s the largest encyclopaedia in history, written by volunteers. Like a national park or a school, we don’t believe advertising should have a place in Wikipedia. We want to keep it free and strong, but we need the support of thousands of people like you. I invite you to join us: Your donation will help keep Wikipedia free for the whole world’,” reports The Independent.

“And his tactic worked. In the following 24 hours the site received 8,186 donations, compared to just 800 the previous day. Before his appeal the site, which attracts about 254 million visitors a month, was receiving about $30,000 a day, but that rose to more than $215,000 after the letter was published.

“And, on 1 January, the total crept past the crucial $6m mark. Many of the donations came from individual users and were from as little as $5. The largest was an annual pledge of $1m for three years, and an anonymous donation of $250,000 was also received.

“Arcadia, a grant-making group based in London, gave $100,000. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for Wikipedia, said: ‘We’re really thrilled that people have come out in force and made a clear statement that they care about this cause and they care about Wikipedia, even though we were kind of nervous after the economic news became really clear’.

“Wikipedia was founded by Mr Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001 with a format that allows pages on topics to be created and edited by the public. It has an editing team of 150,000 volunteers, but just 23 members of staff. In eight years the site has grown to 12 million pages.” More here…

Photo above of Jimmy Wales courtesy The Independent/Getty.

Gaza crisis has been described as a recurring Middle Eastern nightmare. I can understand why US president-elect has decided to keep quiet. He has inherited a tragedy/madness whose history dates back to almost 100 years of political skulduggery of the powerful Western nations in that part of the world dividing the Jews and Arabs who once lived there peacefully.

But Obama will have to break his silence when he wears the “crown” later this month. Meanwhile Ehud Barak, the Defence Minister and architect of the assault on Gaza, said that the operation would be “expanded and intensified” as much necessary. “War is not a picnic,” he said. More here…

The Guardian observes: “After the debacle of its 2006 invasion of Lebanon - not only a military disaster for Israel, but also a political and diplomatic one - the government in Tel Aviv spent months laying the groundwork at home and abroad for the assault on Gaza.” More here…

Sandy Tolan, the author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East and a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, has an interesting take on this subject.

“Early signs suggest the Obama team is inclined to continue the Middle East status quo. But Obama is nothing if not practical and shrewd. He surely recognizes that in the aftermath of the carnage in Gaza, he will have the opportunity to make visionary change in the long-term interest of all parties.

“And he knows that the bleak alternatives – a new Palestinian intifada, diplomatic rifts across the Arab world, more wars without end – would undermine his desperately needed efforts to remake the image of America in the world.

“An Obama administration that recognizes the inherently equal value of Palestinian aspirations will promote a new ethic and a new pragmatism. For talks to succeed, the US must tell hard truths to old friends and make a clean break with the tired road maps of the past.

“Future negotiations will also be fraught with thousands of new facts on the ground. In 1993, when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin famously shook hands, the Jewish settler population in the West Bank was 109,000; now, after 15 years of the “peace process,” it’s up to 275,000.

“East Jerusalem, the supposed future Palestinian capital, is now ringed with Jewish settlements. The hard reality of any new negotiation is that because of Israel’s Judaization of the West Bank, the two state solution, long considered the only path to peace, is on life support.” More here…

Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, and the author, most recently, of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, says: “In nearly 25 years of involvement with Gaza and Palestinians, I have not had to confront the horrific image of burned children – until today.

“Our rejection of ‘the other’ will undo us. We must incorporate Palestinians and other Arab peoples into the Jewish understanding of history, because they are a part of that history. We must question our own narrative and the one we have given others, rather than continue to cherish beliefs and sentiments that betray the Jewish ethical tradition.

“Jewish intellectuals oppose racism, repression, and injustice almost everywhere in the world and yet it is still unacceptable – indeed, for some, it’s an act of heresy – to oppose it when Israel is the oppressor. This double standard must end.

“As Jews in a post-Holocaust world empowered by a Jewish state, how do we as a people emerge from atrocity and abjection, empowered and also humane? How do we move beyond fear to envision something different, even if uncertain? The answers will determine who we are and what, in the end, we become.” More here…

Meanwhile, the Gaza ground offensives will put Israeli soldiers, Gaza militants and civilians in much closer quarters. Israeli military correspondent Alex Fishman wrote in the daily Yediot Ahronoth. “We’ll pay the international price later for the collateral damage and the anticipated civilian casualties,” Fishman said. More here…

What is common between Barack Obama and all these guys and gal…Monica Lewinsky, Napoleon Bonaparte, Oscar Peterson, Russell Baker, Dustin Hoffman, Louis Armstrong, Menachem Begin and Robert Redford? In Chinese astrology, as interpreted by my favourite Suzanne White, all of them are “Ox & Leo”. (In my earlier posts I had mentioned about Suzanne’s apt/fun descriptions about G.W. Bush and General David Petraeus.)

In a horoscope for 2009 especially prepared for president-elect Barack Obama (August 04, 1961), Suzanne White states: “What we have here is a very nature-oriented, earth-bound, power-mad megalomaniac whose nose for locating flies in life’s various ointments is practically infallible.

“This is not to say we didn’t need such a stringent ruler to come along in 2009. We did. All of us are suffering. Some of us have too much and are stumbling over excess and wading through our own glut. Many more of us have nothing.

“The world financial market, such as we knew it, is over. Change and upheaval are in the very air we breathe. Religious fanaticism seems to have more power among certain young people than either rock music or computer games could ever have inspired.

“Well, a more self-possessed type of Ox doesn’t exist. The Earth Ox is autonomous and ruthless. The Earth Ox may occasionally appear to cower in the face of something overwhelming. And, deep down, he may really be afraid. But he won’t display fear. He will display audacity instead.

“So these Earth Oxen are brave. And bold. Temerity is their middle name. Think about it - Earth and Ox together? A bulldozer…Even the most successful Earth Ox is a bit of a klutz, an awkward peasant in bourgeois clothing. They may wish they had never become so visible as to be obliged to hobnob with all the splendid people who only make them feel more like a hick.

“What Earth Oxen wanted to do when they set out to take over the world was to lead the people. But they never dreamed that they might also have to learn to drink champagne, make small talk, wear evening clothes or take ballroom dance lessons.” More here…

And here…

Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, whose 801st birth anniversary was celebrated last month, has for many years now remained the most popular poet in America. The translations of this 13th-century mystical Muslim scholar’s - better known as Rumi - verse are hugely popular and have been used by Western pop stars such as Madonna. More here…

A 13th-century Persian poet, Sunni Islamic jurist, and theologian, Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh in present-day Afghanistan. “Increasing Mongol incursions when he was around the age of eleven forced his family to leave Afghanistan, who travelled to Baghdad, Mecca, Damascus and finally settled in Konya in Turkey. Rumi lived here for most of his life.

“Rumi was the son of a renowned Sufi scholar, and it is more than likely that he was introduced to Sufism from a young age. Sufism is a branch of Islam primarily concerned with developing the spirituality, or more precisely the inner character, of a Muslim.

“Rumi spent his early years, like many Muslims of the time, learning and studying Arabic, law, ahadith (the body of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), history, the Qur’an, theology, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy… and took over his father’s position as one of the highest scholars in the country at the young age of 24.

“It is believed that Rumi would turn round and round while reciting his poetry, and it is this dance which formed the basis for the Mevlevi Order, or Whirling Dervishes, after his death. Dervish means doorway, and the dance is believed to be a mystical portal between the earthly and cosmic worlds.” More here…

Here’s a website devoted to Rumi… A few of Rumi’s poems here…

Sydney’s Bondy Beach is among a few designated beaches in Australia where top-less bathers are permitted to enjoy the sun, sand and the sea. In fact such beaches are a major draw for tourists too!!! But as Australians begin their long summer holidays this year, a campaign is on to tighten nudity laws.

A Christian fundamentalist politician, the Rev Fred Nile, is calling for topless sunbathing to be outlawed, and he has received backing from several mainstream MPs, reports The Independent.

“While nudity is illegal in Australia except on designated beaches, local councils consider toplessness acceptable. Mr Nile wants the legislation to be tightened. ‘The law should be clear,’ he said. ‘It must say: ”Exposure of women’s breasts on beaches will be prohibited”.

“In the 1940s, a legendary beach inspector, Aub Laidlaw, patrolled the golden sands, ruler in hand, ensuring that men’s and women’s bathing costumes conformed to bylaws governing public decency.

“The fanatical Mr Laidlaw retired in 1969, eight years after the bikini was legalised, but now his ghost is once again stalking Sydney’s beaches.” More here…

Shawn Goldsmith, a Long Island teenager, has earned a place of pride in the history of Scouting. The Associated Press reports that the young lad has earned all 121 merit badges offered by the Boy Scouts of America. “It’s an accomplishment the local arm of the organization calls ‘an almost unheard-of feat’.”

Being an avid follower of the Scout movement worldwide and an old Scout myself, I feel happy that the movement is as popular as it was when I was in my teens. The Oceanside resident Shawn Goldsmith far surpassed the 21 badges required to achieve the elite rank of Eagle Scout.
More here from Fox News…

People like these are also American heroes who the president-elect Barack Obama should honour when he graces the White House next month.

In 2007, Scouting and Guiding together had over 38 million members in 216 countries. That year also marked the centenary of Scouting world wide, with member organizations planning events all over the world in order to celebrate the event.

“The movement employs the Scout method, a program of informal education with an emphasis on practical outdoor activities, including camping, woodcraft, aquatics, hiking, backpacking, and sports.

“Another widely recognized movement characteristic is the Scout uniform, by intent hiding all differences of social standing in a country and making for equality, with neckerchief and campaign hat or comparable head wear. Distinctive uniform insignia include the fleur-de-lis and the trefoil, as well as merit badges and other patches.” More here…

South Asia, especially India, has reasons to celebrate the return of secular and democratic government in Bangladesh. Former Prime Minister Ms Sheikh Hasina’s (photo above) Awami League has won a landslide victory in Bangladesh’s election, reports the BBC.

It is heartening that democracy has also returned to India’s immediate neighbourhood, including Nepal, Bhutan and Pakistan. Myanmar or Burma remains a sad exception.

“Election officials say the Awami League alliance has won more than 250 of the 300 seats in parliament. More than 70% of Bangladesh’s 81 million voters are thought to have cast their ballots in a poll intended to return the country to democracy after two years of rule by a military-backed government.” More here…

And here is the profile of Ms Sheikh Hasina…

The New York Times reports: “After two years of army-backed emergency rule, democracy returned to Bangladesh as the secular Awami League party secured an overwhelming victory in election results announced on Tuesday.

“It was unknown whether the army would fully give up power and return to the barracks. Ms. Hasina has promised to quash Islamist extremist groups in Bangladesh, a largely Muslim country.

“She has been a target of the extremists’ ire already, having been wounded by a grenade at a 2004 rally in an attack linked to Islamist radicals that killed 23 people.” More here…

AFP reports: “The US government congratulated Bangladesh for Monday’s successful and peaceful election, saying the high turnout reflected a ‘desire to see democracy restored’ in the south Asian nation.” More here…

The Economist writes: “Asked what they wanted from a new government, most voters—of whom some 45% live on less than a dollar a day—had a simple answer: cheaper food. In this one respect, the government may be in luck. A good rice harvest and lower international prices for fuel and other commodities have already dented inflation.” More here…

What is common between the legendary Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi and the creator of the iconic cartoon character Popeye the Sailor? All the copyright material related to them would end on January 1, 2009 when these fall into the public domain.

The statutory law restricts the rights of authors to 60/70 years after their death. The copyright expiry means that, from Thursday, anyone can print and sell Gandhi or Popeye posters, T-shirts and even create new comic strips, books without the need for authorisation or to make royalty payments.

The Times of London reports: “Elzie Segar, the Illinois artist who created Popeye, his love interest Olive Oyl and nemesis Bluto, died in 1938. The Popeye industry stretches from books, toys and action figures to computer games, a fast-food chain and the inevitable canned spinach.” More here…

The Times of India reports: “Unfazed by the likelihood of publishers picking up Gandhiji’s works for a profit, Managing Trustee of the Navajivan Trust, the custodian of Gandhiji’s writings, Jitendra Desai reasons: ‘Even in profiteering, they would propagate Gandhian thought’.

“Mahatma Gandhi died on January 30, 1948. Since 1919 the Navajivan Trust has published over 300 volumes of Gandhi’s articles, letters, speeches and translations of his autobiography.” More here…

Not many know that Mahatma Gandhi was a prolific writer and a journalist for decades. See here…

A large majority of voters in the Indian-part of Kashmir have sent a clear message to the world that they want democracy and will not bow to the diktats of militants/separatists.

London’s Financial Times reports: “Separatists who want an independent state. or a merger with Pakistan, had urged Kashmiris to boycott the election (to the State assembly). Yet the turnout was about 60 per cent and voting was largely peaceful.

“The Indian government on Sunday proclaimed the result of elections in Jammu and Kashmir as a lesson for Pakistan, its adversary in two wars over the disputed territory, and other countries in the region.

“India has blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani militant group that fights against Indian control of Kashmir, for the devastating strike on its financial centre. The final stages of the ballot in the Himalayan region were held as tension escalated between India and Pakistan following the Mumbai terrorist attacks at the end of November, which killed 179 people.” More here…

The young 38-year-old politician, Omar Abdullah, the president of the National Conference party in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir has emerged as the favourite to become the new chief minister, reports the BBC.

The Reuters says: “Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the high voter turnout a ‘vote for democracy’ and Congress President Sonia Gandhi has said this should be a message for ‘our neighbours’ (about what the people of Kashmir want).

“Fed up of living under the constant shadow of violence in a state divided under religious lines, Kashmiri voters surprised seasoned political pundits by turning up in large numbers to cast their ballots.” More here…

The Indian Express reports: “And for a change, nobody was tuning in to the few Pakistani channels which are aired in the Valley, as none of them covered the Kashmir poll results.” More here…

The Times of India reports that “J&K poll result leaves Pakistan media cold.” More here…

News reports indicate that CIA has discovered a lethal weapon to subdue ageing Afghan tribals — Viagra. However, just a little warning to the over-enthusiastic CIA guys distributing blue pills in the remote areas.

The Afghan tribal lords have a known weakness for the fair young men too, apart from performing the ritual with their spouses.

So after distributing the Viagra pills, the CIA guys (as a precautionary measure) should avoid turning their posteriors towards the tribals!!! …Just in case the blue pills act faster on an Afghan’s anatomy!!!

Here is The Telegraph story on the subject…

And here some comments by the readers in The Washington Post: “…the immorality of this is so obvious. I’m surprised the CIA isn’t capturing 10 years olds from America to ‘give’ to these Afghan chiefs. We have to pay for our little blue pills… maybe if I turn over some neighbor as a terrorist i can get a batch of Viagra. At any rate I’m sure that the pedophilia and spousal abuse will be wholesale now.”

Another reader says: “By the way, is giving pills to someone without a prescription ‘legal’? Didn’t think it was, but ‘legal’ and CIA is an oxymoron. Obama, please clear up this mess.”