diaspora
13 Jun 2009
Indian students in Australia have vowed to fight back against a series of callous attacks they have blamed on racists.
Furious demonstrators have rallied in Sydney and Melbourne, where dozens of assaults have been reported in the past year.
"People got stabbed in their houses, on train stations, on the street and there were petrol bombs thrown on people's cars," said Gautam Gupta, the founder of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia. He accused the authorities of being "too slow" to respond to the violence.
I. I saw a programme today on the tele which interviewed young people about what they thought of a school programme that allows them to pay for their food with their fingerprint. The fingerprint is hashed into a number, which is then stored in a fairly unsecure room on a server, according to a school official. The school official said that it would be impossible to reconvert the number back into a fingerprint, which the show later pointed out has already been done by a team in Japan.
18 Jan 2009
Remittances to Pakistan rose by 24.0% year-on-year in July-November 2007, demonstrating the importance of the emigrant community. Remittances in fiscal year 2006/07 reached 4.3% of GDP. This has helped Pakistan's economy to remain relatively resilient to political turbulence. Since a growing amount of remittances come from the Middle East rather than the USA, this should provide some insulation in the event of a slowdown in the US economy.
14 Feb 2009
EPW article on diasporic Hindutva
In our haste to reject the “soldiers of saffron” who live and work outside India, there is a risk that we may be engaging in a politics of personal destruction with tremendous pain for the individuals concerned. There is a fine line between rejection of hate and exploitation of youthful ignorance and folly. If we cross that line we will become
vulnerable to charges of McCarthyism.
