India

The most damning evidence against Pakistan is the fact that the Taliban aren't trying to take responsibility. As the spokesman says, they would have been proud to take responsibility if they had done it.

(Begin quote) The Taliban has carried out a wave of suicide attacks across the country in the past seven years, but said it did not carry out the embassy attack.

Zabihullah Mujahed, a group spokesman, told the AFP news agency that the Taliban would have been proud to claim responsibility for the attack but they had not been involved.

... lives.

That's the first reaction I had to a piece a young friend of mine who lives and works in Hyderabad sent me. I have been wondering what I can say about recent events in that city, and just as when "my city" was burning, or when a sister city burnt across the sea, I was in pain, this young writer has had to deal with what he has always described as a stab to the heart of the place he loves dearly. And now, he has captured his feelings in a way that is too beautiful not to reproduce in full here; it is the same spirit that has led to great and noble things in that region of the world--from the Taj Mahal, to the deepest, most profound sufi poetry in the world. And it is uplifting to see it alive in those younger than oneself. Here is Manzoor's piece:

The Sultan’s Prayer
Hyderabad is a multi-religious and multi-cultural abode for millions of people, and this is not any recent phenomenon. Multiculturalism is the very foundation of this great city. It is said that some 400+ years back, Prince Quli Qutub Shah of the Qutub Shahi dynasty fell for the beautiful Bhagyamati and rebelled against his father, the King, to marry her. On becoming King himself, he bestowed upon his beloved Bhagyamati the title of ‘Hyder Mahal’. It was this romantic and chivalrous king who—like the emperor who created the more famous monument to love in Agra—built a whole city on the banks of river Musi, and named it after his beloved wife.

That is how Hyderabad happened.
...

Some very good news from a mainstream Muslim group in India:

A powerful Muslim group in India, home to the world's third-largest Islamic population, has launched a campaign to spread progressive values in the community and break stereotypes, its leaders said on Thursday.

Thousands of clerics and volunteers of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, the biggest body of Indian Muslims, are meeting fellow Muslims in towns and villages with the message that a right understanding of Islam would defeat perceptions that Muslims are "fundamentalist" and "militant".

About a year ago, I had started podcasting. I, we, rather, started two podcasts. One was in English and was, well, podcast, via the RSS feed for this blog while the other was in Urdu and podcast as "Azad Karachi Radio".

To which a lot of people go..."Say what?!" Are you talking about the political independence of Karachi, a la Singapore?

Well, let's explain.

Both of the members of the team working on the podcast count the city of Karachi as our emotional, intellectual and social wellspring. And thus the idea is to have an Azad--the word, say, Gandhi would have used, for "free"--voice that has a Karachi accent and speaks with the spirit of that brave city.

Oh no. Just read on the web that commuter trains have been bombed in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Everytime I hear something like this, the possibility that it's the work of yet more lunatic jihadis makes me feel sick. No one has claimed responsibility for this yet, but authorities are suspecting separatists from the Indian state of Kashmir, where a number of bombings occurred just hours earlier.

This is terrible. Must have been hell for all those people on the trains. I'm amazed the death toll wasn't far higher, considering the population density of Mumbai and the fact that they have far less capacity to deal with this sort of thing than London.