Imaginings: South Asia in 2020
By SouthAsian

‘Imaginings’ constitutes our most ambitious initiative to date. With this initiative we invite our readers to participate in imagining our national and regional futures ten years from now. What do we think our country, a neighboring country in the region, or the region as a whole would be like in 2020? And why?

Readers can submit as many essays as they wish but each essay should deal with one country only (any country in South Asia, not necessarily the writer’s own) or with South Asia as a region. The essay could cover any or all of a number of dimensions – politics, economics, culture, etc.

At the heart of the essay would be the identification of the major forces and trends that would yield the future that the writer chooses to describe. What gave rise to these trends, why would they dominate, and what might cause to change their direction or intensity? The credibility of the prediction would rest on the depth of this analysis.

We have chosen a fairly short end point (2020) both to keep us from being too speculative and to provide the opportunity to track how our predictions begin to bear out within a short time horizon. We hope to repeat the exercise in 2015 in order to reflect back on the developments to date and assess where we were right and wrong and to update our predictions in the light of our findings. Hopefully, there will be a lot of learning involved in this exercise of retrospective evaluation.

Depending on the response, we hope to publish the most relevant and perceptive essays in the form of an edited book. We are deliberately targeting this as the work of students and concerned citizens and not of established scholars because the voice of citizens rarely finds an outlet conducive to dialogue and debate.

We look forward to your contributions. Any suggestions to shape the initiative further would be very welcome.

Contributions should be emailed to the southasianidea@gmail.com.

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What surprises me is the eerie silence of the Muslim ulema in the subcontinent (particularly in India) in their condemnation of this cowardly act of appalling brutality. Where are those who leave no opportunity to condemn what is inconvenient to them, no matter how comfortable it might be to Islam in general and Muslims in particular? What happens to all those voices which grow louder at times of trivial issues which they think place Islam in danger? What more danger can await a religion than accusation of the kind which we see after such heinous atrocities? When can the Islamic ulemas realize that acts such as these are the ones which actually put Islam in danger.

The rest at Dr. Khan’s blog.

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CATCHING the once-a-week flight from Delhi to Karachi last Monday, I overheard a riveting exchange between the immigration officer who was handling my Indian passport and a worried man who rushed to speak to him in a hurry, I suspect, after seeing my bearded profile from a distance.

In my banterish way I engaged both of them in a conversation about their source of worry. Upon close inquiry the man who had rushed to the passport desk with doubts about my bona fides turned out to be a religious Muslim from Uttar Pradesh who hadn’t watched TV for decades. His job was to alert the officers about any Kashmiris going to Pakistan, or perhaps anywhere at all.

What or who they were looking for was their business and I didn’t ask beyond a point, but I did glean from the chat that the government of India hires semi-literate and obscurantist Muslims who don’t watch TV for religious reasons, to keep an eye on their fellow brethren who may have given up watching TV because Indian channels usually misrepresent the reality as distinct from what they know it to be.

The incident also gave me useful insights into at least some of the reasons for the poor intelligence and security that haunts the country as it claims its seat in the colosseum where the duel with terror is perennially on.

link

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We also have a blog: http://onesouthasia.wordpress.com/

Please do link to it if you can and let me know if you have linked up and I will add a link to your site on the One South Asia blog.

If you would like to join the google group drop me a line at girlmumbai at gmail dot com, or leave a comment and your email address in the email address bar.
You will need a gmail address.

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