Sunday Posts

Madhusree Mukherjee has written an important book. Churchill's Secret War chronicles the story of the Great Bengal Famine, a famine almost deliberately engineered by the British War Administration, under the excuse of supply to British troops, but also with a deeper agenda of crushing the Indian Independence Movement beyond repair. The 1943 famine in Bengal killed three million people. The famine affected a generation and accentuated the city/village divide which persists even today. Economists, particularly Amartya Sen, has made efforts to prove that this devastating famine did not happen due to shortage of food. Ms Mukherjee argues that this had happened to a deliberate policy of the British War Administration of diverting food supplies from Bengal to Ceylon and then onto the British troops in Burma and elsewhere. Professor Sen has talked about the 'entitlement problem' and Ms Mukherjee also points to the practice of British Administration of buying grains at an in...

The news that overshadows any announcements made in the G20 this week is that Obama 'snubbed' Gordon Brown. The British media went on an overdrive on the leak that while Downing Street wanted an one-on-one with the President on the sidelines of the UN meet or the G20, no such meeting could be organized. Gordon Brown had to be satisfied with a walk and talk discussion with President Obama in the kitchen of the UN, though he had a 'substantial discussion', following the Downing Street communique. The British media obviously did not like this: President Obama failed to call Gordon Brown immediately after taking office, he landed up in London a few months later and gifted the Prime Minister a set of DVDs which did not run because of the wrong region coding and finally this! President Obama does not seem to have any time for the 'special relationship' that the British assume that they enjoy, and he is making it way too obvious for the British tastes. What is going o...