How many apologizes must be made? And how many wrongs redressed? The right answer I think is: All. 

    I have addressed myself to the British enslavement of India, and not, for example, to upper-caste atrocities against low-caste Hindus, or to anti-black discrimination in America, not because I consider these latter lesser causes that lie outside my orbit of concern, but merely because a chance encounter with a specimen of the master race in St. Louis, and Simon Winchester's article, and Queeny baby's Amritsar trip started me down a certain line of argument. 

    All wrongs must be redressed. And all apologies made. 

    All of us are guilty in some measure, as Mohoni said. That is absolutely true. You and I will perhaps some day be called upon to account for the murder and mayhem in Punjab and Kashmir, for example. And that is how it should be. Maunam sweekriti soochakam. Silence is assent. In so far as we, as individuals, fail to speak out against the criminal activities of our government, and fail to prevent them, we are accessories to those crimes, and should be held liable. Those crimes were committed in our name. They were fueled by our silence, and stoked by our lethargy. 

    Coming back to the question of British dues. Vickram Crishna, Deepak Mohoni, Bondo San, Ramesh Advani, Leonard Tauro, Tabby Balasubramanian, and Abha Varma. Let me line up these guys and girls before the shooting starts. 

    Bond writes that because we have been screwing ourselves up since before the British arrived, also since after they left, we have no reason to complain. This position was vigorously applauded by Ramesh and Leonard. The British are in fact to be commended, Bond wrote, for setting up the existing structures of administration and jurisprudence in India, and for welding India into a nation with a geographical extent that dwarfs the widest sprawl of any pre-British empire. Tabby thinks that Jallianwallah Bagh is best forgotten since none of us had a grand-uncle that kicked the bucket right there --- at least not on April 13, 1919. 

    If I carry Tabby's argument to its logical conclusion I shouldn't worry about the killing of the Ashkenazi by the Nazis because my kids aren't Jewish. I shouldn't worry about Kashmir since I didn't go there for my honeymoon. I needn't worry about the discrimination against blacks because my nani is brown. I am therefore in the very happy situation of having nothing whatsoever to worry about. 

    Deepak charges me with having impugned Queeny's character. That I did not do. In fact I don't even know if she has any. In fact the question that really interests me about her is whether she wears her socks to bed, and whether she keeps them on during frolic-time with Phil. Is he ever able to knock them off her? Or was his bayonet irreparably blunted during his naval engagements with Puppoo Dyer? Maybe it just hangs about now like an old historical curiosity, an antique dysfunctional wonder, a limp celebration of lost imperial glory. 

    Now we come to Bond's thesis: From Chandragupta Maurya to Aurangzeb, the main purpose of the kingdoms and governments in India was to squeeze out taxes from the people. (As if governments have had other purposes in different times and different places!) The British only continued that time-honored principal of extortion. Therefore the British are blameless. Since 1947, a brown government has outdone even the British. Ergo, the Indians deserve to be looted forever. No recompense is required. In fact, you other people in the world, please come and bugger us some more. We deserve it. We deserve it. Or so Bond would tell the world. 

    School-history books tell us, and the RSS-BJP-wallahs tell us, that once upon a time India had a Golden Age. This is alleged to have happened in the time of the Mauryas, Ashoka, and the Guptas (Vikramaditya), 5th century BC to 4th century AD. In point of fact, as Bond also points out, this Golden Age is fiction. Even during the times of the Mauryas, Ashoka, and Guptas, there were serious inequities in the distribution of wealth. And there was slavery. The historical record is unequivocal. This is just a minor glitch for the upper-caste right-wing Hindu extremists. Since the slaves were all lower-caste people (animals, savages, dirty, lazy, uncouth bastards), the RSS would surely have us overlook this point. 

    Then after a few ho-hum classes (Cholas down south, Prithviraj Chauhan up north, early Muslim invasions), the pulse of school-history picks up again with Afghan invasions, specifically with the Delhi sultanate. In 610 AD God personally dictated the Koran to Mohammed, a sura at a time, and the sword of Islam brought word of the event to India in early 700's with engagements between Hindu and Islamic armies in Siestan, along the Afghanistan-Iran border. For a thousand years following those first skirmishes Islamic armies thrust their way deeper and deeper into India, all the way from Kabul, Ghazni, Kandhar, Baluchistan, and Sindh, through the plains of the Gunga, into the Deccan, and to almost the very tip of the peninsula by the middle of the seventeenth century. The Hindu kings and chiefs gradually fell into a subsidiary and submissive role vis-à-vis Muslim invaders. The Rajput, the Maratha, and the Telugu chieftains came to be the allies and vassals of powerful Muslim rulers that governed in a highly centralized manner. 

    Islamic kingdoms gradually came to have an Indian character, certainly after 1580, following the initial period of Akbar's rule. The foreigners gradually forged stronger ties to their adopted land. Akbar accepted a number of wives from amongst the daughters of Rajput nobility, and in a reciprocal move opened up the highest ranks of mughal nobility (the amirs) to Rajputs and other non-muslims. 

    The Mogul empire lasted some three hundred years, from Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur's victory over Ibrahim Lodi, the Afghan Sultan of Delhi, in the first battle of Panipat, near Delhi, in 1526, all the way to the failed First War of Independence in 1857 when the British exiled Bahadur Shah Zafar to Rangoon, where within a short time he died. "Lagta nahi hai dil mera ujDe dayaar me. Kitna hai bud-naseeb Zafar dufn ke liye. Do guz zameen bhi mil na saki paaye-daar me."

    This is not quite connected, but it's interesting to learn that Babur came to Panipat equipped with field cannon and lines of matchlocksmen, which the Lodis did not have, and had indeed never before faced in battle. Babur prevailed rather easily over the Lodis. It must have felt like America's Iraq war! The very next year, in 1527, Babur played an encore against a force of 80,000 cavalry and 500 armored war elephants, that faced him at Kanua, under the command of the Rajput, Rana Sanga of Mewar. This army was also routed by gunpowder, and by the superior tactics of the Central Asian horsemen. Rana Sanga died on the battlefield. 

    Theorem: If you have something worth defending, you had better have weapons that match your adversary's. Test yourself constantly in small conflicts, even if contrived, to make sure that your hardware and tactics are up to snuff. End theorem.

    This is a strategy that no nation in the modern world has practiced more diligently than the US --- and in theaters very prudently remote from the home territories. There is a lesson here also for India's nuclear and ballistics programs, if indeed we wish to be a power of any reckoning in the next century. China seems to have learnt the lesson well. With a 9% rate of growth they will soon have the wealth; and with good nuclear and ballistics preparation they will have the means to protect that wealth. 

    The British domination of India really started way before Bahadur Shah Zafar. He was just an impotent puppet of the East India Company's officers at his court, till rebellious sepoys swarmed into the Red Fort at Delhi and pretty much forced him into the role of their titular leader. The Company had kept him comfortable with a nice fat pension, and he was very reluctant to be seen in any way to bite the hand that fed him. This was in the Delhi of the great poet Ghalib with whom Zafar was not unfamiliar. "Yun to duniya me hain sukhanvar bahut acche. Kahte hain ki Ghalib ka hai andaaz-e-bayaan aur." 

    The last hundred years of the Moguls had seen their power ebb rapidly, and shift in favor of the British. The beginning of the British domination of India should properly be dated to June 23, 1757, when Robert Clive defeated Siraj-ud-Daula at Plassey near Calcutta. On that day India came under the sway of "Company Bahadur" (the British East India Company). In 1769 James Watt invented the steam engine, and flagged off the Industrial Revolution in England, for which the revenue drained from India became a rich and captive source of capital. Also India became a captive consumer of British industrial produce. The balance of trade that had always been positive in India's favor for thousands of years before the British, quickly turned negative once Company Bahadur came in. However skewed its distribution may have been, the fabled wealth of India was very real. Foreign travelers repeatedly attested to the opulence of Indian cities, and to the wide choice and international variety of goods available in the bazaars of Agra and Lahore. With the coming of the British the people that enjoyed the fruits of Indian extortion came to be found not in Agra, Lahore, Ajmer, Ahmadabad, or Delhi, but in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. 

    Theorem: It is always preferable to be looted by a local yokel, than by international gangsters in London. End theorem.

    Proof: The local robber is bound to spend at least some of his gains at the local bazaar. End proof.

    Thomas Roe, the ambassador of King James I of England at Jahangir's court, lamented in his journal, sometime around 1610, that India appeared to have no need for British goods, except for pictures of buxom English women in bucolic surroundings and revealing attire, that Jahangir rather fancied. My feeling is that Jahangir's equipment, like Phil's, must surely have failed him by that time, perhaps due to his long addiction to wine and opium. And what qayamut must that have been to him, with a harem of hundreds of women! 

    Was it something like that that drove Jahangir to admire third-rate British paintings of uptight British ladies in their silly bustiers and bustles, when his gardens were teeming with 3D flesh longing for love. The sexual deprivation of mogul harems drove many women to extreme desperation. They were often willing to put up with extraordinary and life-threatening risks in their quest for some sort of sex. 

    Jahangir also went in for pictures of Mary and the Child Christ, for he also had a mother fixation. But the Portuguese were already bringing in plenty of those, and it must be said that that the Catholic pictures of Mary have an appeal that the fuddy-duddy Church of England could hardly have matched. Britain, on the other hand, had an insatiable appetite for Indian goods. Cotton, silk, woven cloth, spice, narcotics, gemstones, and indigo. Britain had to pay for everything with gold and silver, Roe noted. And that was the quickest way for India to get rich, and Britain poor, he wrote. He could not have known that Britain would one day solve the problem rathah nicely. 

    Bond would have us believe that the British set up an administrative and judicial structure in India where there had earlier been none. That is false. The East India Company adopted Mogul structures of tax assessment and collection. The same middle men stayed in place while power changed hands from the Mogul to the Limely. Where they had earlier handed the revenues to a vakil, an amir, or a sipahsalar, the middle-men now handed it to a Company general or colonel or agent. The big difference was that tax-assessments went up quickly because the British had much less stake in the long-term health of the economy, and even less in the welfare of the labor, than did the Moguls. The British were convinced that the brown people were animals, savages, dirty, lazy, uncouth bastards of the worst sort, and they could hardly bring themselves to worry about our welfare. Three-seventy-nine or two-seventy-nine, who cares how many brown bastards died on any given day! The British assessment system was not uniform as the Mogul's had been. The British extorted whatever they could, wherever they could. Where the peasants were more docile, there they squeezed more. Mogul methods compared to the British as careful cultivation compares to slash-and-burn. Poverty deepened. The lower castes lost their land, and were pushed further into the jaws of debt. The new slavery of begaar was born. It was these economic legacies of the British rule that Vinoba Bhave fought with his Bhoodan movement.

    A couple of weeks back I drove to UT with my friend PC to listen to a talk on symbolic hierarchical cache design by Professor Aravind of MIT, and we had an argument about Algeria on our way out, and then again on the way back. PC was born and grew up in French Algeria. He commented on the butchery that Algeria is now passing through, and he said (like Bond did about India) that Algeria was better off under French rule. "Why can't they fix this? Why do they let this happen?" he said. I said that in my opinion the Algerians are just the victims of circumstance. It is the French that are guilty. I think that PC's question is like the question of a man who takes a girl from a disturbed family deep into a desert and beats her and rapes and leaves her near death's door, and then as she drags herself back to town, he asks why she can't take care of herself and get a life. We in India and Algeria have to learn to govern ourselves. We have to set up the institutions that will serve and protect us. In the US Rostenkowski, a senator from Chicago, was caught and imprisoned when he embezzled $3,000. In India we got whiff of SR only after he had amassed $20 million, and he still walks the street if I'm not wrong. Its just a matter of scale. If Rostenkowski could have gotten away with a few million, he too would have done that. 

    Slavery to the British and the French deprived the colonies of the opportunity to build those institutions without which democracy cannot function, and without which law and order cannot be maintained. Things go wrong, and we have no way to figure out what went wrong, and what needs be done. PC talked of the infrastructure that the French built in Algeria just like Simon talked about railways in India. 

    The railways were built to siphon wealth from India, to carry British goods deep into the country, and to transport troops and ammunition. (The better to kill brown animals with, my dear.) The first railways crept inland from the great port cities. Their function and purpose can be read off their time-sequenced geography as clearly as if it were written concisely on paper. Why would the British sink good capital in dirty-brown-animal-country when they could carry the cash back home? 

    As with the British attitude in India, PC agreed that the French attitude towards the locals in Algeria was racist. When people are treated differently based on skin color, how can anyone claim any scrap of civilization? How can the colonizers ever claim to build infrastructure for the benefit of the animals? 

    I think India is going more or less in the right direction. We survived Indira Gandhi's attempt at the subversion of Indian democracy. That was a biggie. With the killing of Rajiv Gandhi India fortuitously broke the spell of dynastic rule. I think Sonia-bhen is political dead-meat. That is good. Now for the first time in many millennia, as Alaka Valanju wrote, we finally have the lower-castes wielding political power, at least in Uttar Pradesh. That can only do us good. 

    Coming back to Bond's comment about administrative infrastructure. The Mogul system of tax assessment had been uniform and uniformly-administered throughout the length and breadth of the empire. Even when the lands were managed by a client, like a Rajput thakur, the empire imposed a uniform system of currency, tax assessment and collection. The emperors regularly related to the minutiae of administration. The Moguls, Akbar in particular, had, in turn, adapted their methods from those instituted by the very able Sher Shah Suri, Sultan first of Bengal, then of Delhi. The 11th century saw the widespread use of paper in India. This was a boon for centralized administration, and the Moguls relied heavily on the regular flow of paper between Agra and the rest of the country. Historical records show Akbar making decisions regarding taxation and tax-exemption, academic grants, and so on. Jahangir, despite his wine and opium, ordered trees planted all the way along the road from Agra to Delhi, and decided where the serais would be. But much of his administration was handled by his very able favorite queen Nur Jahan. The correspondence of the British Governors and Viceroys, on the other hand, appears almost exclusively concerned with the maintenance of law and order and with other very-British concerns. That is a telling contrast. 

    The present system of jurisprudence in India certainly is a true legacy of British India, and was imposed on India when India became a crown colony in 1858. This was the British answer to Indian perception of British lawlessness in the Company Bahadur's time. But Britain failed to reform the taxation system even in 1858. That was their gravy train, and they wouldn't mess with it. 

    Even efficient extortion requires good structures of administration and jurisprudence. You need good administration in order to pump a good volume of money in an efficient way, away from where it is created towards where it is consumed. And you need good jurisprudence to at least project a quality mirage of law and order and stability, even as you lawfully beat the poor into submission. I do not know this for sure, since I haven't studied their history well, but I will be willing to bet that the Mauryas and Guptas, for example, had a fine system of administration. And I would be willing to draw this conclusion merely from a knowledge of the disposable wealth at the command of the highest classes. 

    All previous invaders ultimately came to belong to India. The British came merely to loot and cart away. And to sneer and disparage. These latter habits they continue to indulge in down to this day, and that is the thing that irritates me most about them. When I read the Brothers Grimm to my Tatuni, I take pains to read the witches and the other evil boogers in my best British hawhaw, even though it is not easy on my throat. (Or on my nerves, for that matter.) I want her, when she hears that wretched sort of effluence, to be on her guard. Cautious. Wary. Shoot first, and ask later. It is a gift of historical memory. That an ape must always beware of a serpent! Phylogenic defense is what I call it. 

    At this point I would like to take up SK, if I may. I had difficulty breathing for a few minutes when I read his piece of mail. And I had to go drink some water and take a ritual leak in order to shake myself back into the world. I hope to not tarnish the extraordinary delicacy of his argument, or disturb its metastable fragility, in this following paraphrase: Because I, SK, am racist, he wrote, it is OK for Europe to be racist. 

    There is perhaps something there, in between your logical folds, SK, that I just cannot see, but I sure am astounded by the boldness and audacity of your chain of reasoning. Also for a travel company person you sure are a nice one to hold up Uzbek Airlines as the only alternative to European carriers flying East. What I think is this: You are much too kind to your "many detractors". You hand them too much ammo. 

    There is nothing wrong with Indians that flee India for a rich land, however flimsy their excuses. And there is nothing Indian or brown or black in that. That is the universal and perennial practice of poor people trying to better their condition. From the fifteenth century onwards the Europeans did the same. They went everywhere, and went in hordes, invited themselves in, made themselves comfortable, stayed on and on, treated everything as baap ka maal. All those rowdies that riot in soccer stadiums went to India and became Sahibs for free. The only difference is that the European took a gun with him, and that was certainly very civilized of him. The Indian carries a passport in his stomach because he is such a poor bastard. What is that Indian "reform of attitude" that Kaushik Sen and Rajiv Grover propose, and Vibhakar Shroff seconds? That they think will put an end to the problem of Indians seeking immigration to Germany? I would like to know. I will not disagree with Bond in his assertion that from the 5th century BC to 18th century AD India was raped by a succession of brown governments. From this observation Bond deftly produces a very twisted, very Hindu, reincarnative, serves-you-right kind of conclusion: Saale tum iss janam me coackroach issi liye ho kyonki tumne pichhle janam me lafda kara tha. So clearly the Indians deserved to be buggered by the British, who during that corresponding period of time had devoted themselves to the pure pursuit of Civilization. 

    Here is the good news: The history of the white man in Europe 500 BC to 1600 AD, is no better than the history of the brown man in India. In fact, it is worse. Worse in every respect: slavery, war, plunder, and the inequitable distribution of wealth. Worse in poetry, philosophy, and the arts. In fact, it was precisely the superior savagery of the white man in Europe that gave him the military edge that enabled him to prevail over the brown man in India, the black man in Africa, the yellow man in China, the red man in America. In fact, while our very own dear Nuruddin Jahangir Padshah was sequentially rogering the 300 to 1,000 (variously estimated) women in his zenana in Agra in 1610 (and what could be more civilized than that? Hey Bond?) the Portuguese navy had been extorting protection fees from all shipping in the Arabian Sea for over a century. The Portuguese operated first out of Daman, then Goa, under direct control of Lisbon. Every year a fresh fleet sailed from Iberian peninsula to Goa around the Cape of Good Hope. Ships bristling with cannon and weighed low with ordnance. And then the last year's fleet sailed back from Goa to Lisbon. Only after the British victory over the Spanish armada did the British venture to challenge the Portuguese dominance of India coastal waters. The Mogul empire took great interest in the first English naval victories off Surat. They presaged the decline of Portuguese influence in the corridors of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, and the ascendancy of the English. Surat was the most important Mogul port. The Mogul were very attentive to the people that commanded the mouth of the Narmada. 

    So when did the British become "civilized"? I can tell you that. They became civilized when they were able to suck up enormous revenues from India and spend them lavishly on their piddly little island. It was Indian capital that financed the flowering of British science, their industrial revolution, and their pretensions to racial, moral, and cultural superiority. It is very easy to be civilized when you are rich. 

    When you are that fellow who lives in a shantytown in Bombay, that goes pooping on the railway tracks every day. The fellow who is perhaps not averse to slipping a knife into some political animal for the sake of a bottle of arrack. The fellow who is, more likely, just struggling through his days one at a time. This fellow is clearly uncivilized. On the other hand consider that other fellow in Austin who can calculate the devil out of a deep hole, who writes long essays that bore people to tears, and who has three potties at home that he may randomly choose to poop in. This second fellow is clearly civilized. 

    This Austin fellow paid a tuition of Rs. 38.50 per semester at IIT Kanpur. Someone must have paid the rest. And it is clear that the tuition of the civilized guy must have been paid somehow by the undervalued labor of the uncouth and the uncivilized. This is what Satyesh Chakrabarty would perhaps call the "norm of redistribution of wealth". And this is what gives Abha a serious case of guilt and debt. As it should. 

    The very same principle operates on a global scale. Find a fat and happy people who would rather jolly roger a zenana than build a navy. Go in and finish them off in a battle or two. Then drain the revenues from their country, finance your trade, science and technology, armament industry. Declare yourself Civilized, Democratic, vagera vagera, whatever you like, in your very best hawhaw, and you've arrived. That was the British method. 

    The American method was not much different. Here is a bunch of Europeans that arrive, armed with guns, in a country that nature has truly blessed. You just have to drive around and fly around to see how extraordinarily blessed a land this is. The fellows that were here from ever since they crossed over the Bering Straits were fat and happy. They had not invented the ball-musket and the flintlock, not because they were stupider than the white man, but just because they hadn't had need to. 

    What I would like to say is that Civilization is made possible by Wealth. That the acquisition of Wealth is a zero-sum game. One wins and another loses. The winner proclaims himself Civilized and whatever else he likes. He is capable of pumping in more money into his enterprise. He can keep a check on the price of oil or ore or whatever. In other words, he dictates the "norms of reciprocity" (I think Satyesh called them) such that the commodity he has to sell is priced higher that the uncivilized person's commodity, pound for pound. 

    With wealth people can buy leisure --- at least some people, within a certain class of people. That leisure allows those few so inclined to pursue their fancies. They do science, and build stuff, and write plays, and that is what we call civilization. Civilization is therefore a simple and automatic byproduct of wealth. That is what I believe. At the same time, that surplus must come from somewhere, and it comes from a subject people, subjugated by force, ridiculed, battered, whether inside or outside the country. That is my theory. If you have one better I'd like to hear it. 

    I think the way civilization should really be defined is through some measure of how well the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low among us are accorded the dignity that is due to them as human beings. But that is another matter. 

    "To him that hath shall be given. And from him that hath not shall be taken away even that that he hath," says the Bible. That is a truism. A Law of Nature. If the uncivilized makes much aawaz, he can always be bombed into oblivion. He must be deferential, obsequious. The Tsar of all Russia would come and humbly feed the horse of a visiting Mongol general with oats scooped up in his cap. This was when the Mongol Empire of Chengiz Khan straddled Asia and struck terror in the very heart of western Europe. 

    Theorem: Wealth must be protected by the force of arms. The norms of reciprocity are established and defended by the force of arms. Where major commodity classes are concerned, supply/demand analysis is for the birds. 

    What is the price that America and Europe are willing to pay for oil? What is the price that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are willing to ask? The military equation between the big buyers and the big sellers has everything to do with where the demand curve cuts the supply. 

    What I say is this. If India can sustain a 7% rate of growth, it could soon find itself in possession of some real wealth. It then becomes possible for us to press our claims on Britain. Politics is the art of the possible. If we can then add $180 trillion USD from Britain to the pot, why we can become extremely Civilized and Democratic overnight, and everyone will say so. Look at the Japanese. They were dirty yellow scoundrels till they turned rich, and now everyone admires their arts and science and technology. There is nothing they cannot do. Now China is well on her way to Civilization. And it has taken that extra precaution, as Ram Ramarao pointed out, to arm itself to the teeth, so that not even the dominant power of today is in a position to come in and dictate terms to China. China will soon be in a position to twirl the knobs on the international norms of exchange. She will be Civilized and Democratic and Admired. She will be The global power. The fountainhead of new science and technology and mathematics, culture and music. Pekinwood is where the movie industry will be. 

    In India, perhaps more so than elsewhere, we are often the impotent observers of the excesses of our government. The good people appear unable to influence events. The evil appear to be in complete control. We are too much caught up in an effort to survive from day to day in a society where there are no rules, no law, no order, and no predictability. I can see at least four reasons for this state of affairs: 

    (1) Since more than half the population is illiterate, we cannot exercise the right level of control on our government. I don't just mean direct-action kind of control, of the sort exercised (and effectively) in the US by petition drives. I mean also a broad and diffuse sort of control that comes about when a population universally understands the systems of checks and balances, and when the minds of a great majority of citizens have been prepared by poets and artists and scholars to accept nothing less than certain minimum standards of conduct and justice, explanation and evidence. 

    (2) The legal process is too slow. So slow that it can be said that we have effectively zero recourse to justice. The Bofors case, the Safdar Hashmi murder in Delhi, the organized murder of Sikhs in Delhi following the shooting of Indira Gandhi, the late and inadequate relief to the victims of the Bhopal gas disaster, to give just a few examples, these cases remain unresolved. To things like these there must be a closure. Not just a legal, but also an emotional closure. 

    (3) The general level of poverty in India prevents us from setting aside enough resources to construct and maintain the sort of bodies that we need to protect us from our own government, and to influence its cleansing and evolution. Especially, since the government retains so many of its ugly colonial habits. 

    (4) The traditional Indian ideals of restraint and acceptance and suffering and submission have not served us well. I think there is great merit to an armed response to oppression, whether it is due to an invading foreign power, against an unjust national government, or against police julum. I have begun to understand the American love for guns. It is better for both the good and the bad guys to have guns than for the bad alone. 

    Did they loot India? Yes or no? If they did, what was the amount? Let's figure out the amount, and they should pay it back. Did they kill people at Jallianwallah Bagh? Yes or no? Should you at the very least apologize when you kill people? Yes or no? Then let them apologize. It is that simple. 

    Why mix up twenty things and make everything difficult? Deepak Mohoni argues that because so many murderers go free, we should also free the ones we catch. Bad idea. Hang them high from the tallest tree, I say. Justice is both deterrent and retributive. 

    Self-reform as proposed by Deepak Mohoni and Bond, and much applauded by Leonard and Abha is very fine, and a jolly good thing I think. But this is not an issue that is bound up with the question of British reparations. Let us Indians reform ourselves, AND we can let the British apologize, AND pay us too. All in parallel. 

Till next time,
Arun Kumar