Crow's Nest...

I never wanted to write about benazir bhutto on my blog once after she was dead and dusted.  I am not a very big fan of her being and also not a very big fan of her not being.  I really don't care if she lived or if she is dead.  It is interesting both ways.  Therefore this post is not to contemplate her course of action if she were to live and neither is it to lament the loss, which for me is no more than the loss of every other person that died that day and in the violence that ensued after her death. I must say that she was very lucky in that even her death turned her into something more and bigger than she really was.  She was a tactful politician and maybe this time around she was a changed politician.  But who cares she is dead and we have a nemesis to deal with that she left behind in the form of Zardari and her son and daughters. I mean to write this post to infuse some sanity in this benazir hysteria that seems to have over run our nation that ...

According to the BBC News, CIA is using erectile dysfunction drug Viagra to lure Afghan warlords into submission.  According to the news report they are meeting success with this tactic.  Afghan war lords seem to have insatiable sex drive that is only hindered by their inability to perform.

Monday was a high alert day for Pakistani air force and the airports.  For a while it looked like, from the media reports that we were on the verge of war with our neighbor.  There were all sorts of reports about PAF flights in various sectors around the border and in the cities.  Airports were put on red alert and flights were delayed.  But all this continued for a very short while and then things went back to high alert state. I personally think it is something blown a hundred times over by the media to sensationalize the situation.  PAF is battle ready all the time and most likely were conducting a quick response rehearsal.  During war time commercial airspace is also used for tactical and flying purposes.  Our war planes do not use these routes in times of peace.  It seems that what PAF did on Monday was to provide a short course to its planes on the less traveled routes in preparation for any adventurism from across the border and it was bl...

I was reading this interesting news item on wired today.  Scientists at UCLA have hacked simple camera cell phones to enable these to count blood cells.  If refined further this idea has great implications.  These cell phones can help replace in part the expensive laboratory setups required to do simple blood analysis.  Given the low cost and extreme portability of the instruments we can take disease detection to the very remote villages of the world.  This is amazing.  This is coming.  Read it here .

Soldiers have an inevitable and unavoidable relationship with their guns.  Mostly because these very guns are their bread and butter.  These are the instruments of stability in their lives in some way.  Without a gun a soldier is not a soldier just as without a wing a plane is not a plane.  A bullet is a direct and sometimes a very violent consequence of having a gun around.  But no one will argue with the fact that bullet is the only significant consequence of a gun so it should be assumed that a soldier has a same relationship with a bullet as the one he has with his gun.  Guns and bullets are synonymous.  Neither is useful without the other.  So it should be interesting to know what would a soldier feel like without a gun while facing a bullet.  Apart from the horror of death that is incumbent upon almost all of us there should be other feelings that come across a soldier who has to face enemy's bullet but has no gun of his own.  How...

According to the news reports coming out of Stratfor international community believes that Indian military operations against targets in Pakistan have in fact been prepared and await the signal to go forward. You can read the news item here .  It is a very interesting piece of news.  I think for two reasons.  One, both countries have done strategic planning of their own modes of strikes and they keep on revising them so this news is probably nothing else but a pressurizing tactic.  Second, if India does strike it will be really interesting to watch Pakistani response.  Given the successful Indian and Afghan support to the Balochistan separatist movement I think India doesn't need to do more than it is already doing.  But you never know!

Media reports point us towards a new twist to the Mumbai story.  Ajmal Kassab the sole surviving Mumbai gunman was arrested by the Indian Secret Agencies from Nepal in March of 2006.  It is being reported that the case of his illegal abduction is pending in the Nepalese Supreme Court. Now if Ajmal was in Indian custody ever since how on earth could he have been part of the gang of attackers?  Quite obviously he is being used as a dummy to strengthen a very weak case. Here is the link to the story, here and here and here .

In these times of uncertainty the question remains, 'Shall there be war?'  The answer might not be that simple.  There might be but there will not be war.  One might infer that it is my desire and denial to disagree with all things apparent that drives me to make this statement.  But the case is otherwise.  There is an implicit understanding between the two neighbors that there can be no war for the better of the two and the best of one. I was reading the news article posted in Dawn about the recent incursion of Indian fighter/reconnaissance planes into our air space in two separate sectors in one day.  Our planes had to chase them out.  It was claimed by our information minister that it was a un-intended mistake by the Indian side.  I know all too well.  But i am not impressed.  The thing is very simple.  It is Pakistani government's necessity to diffuse tensions.  We simply can not afford a war on our eastern front when we ...

This post is mainly for all the Toyota owners out there.  I recently got an oil change for my car.  I didn't go to my Toyota dealer mainly because he didn't offer synthetic oil for my car.  Seems like kind of strange but yes he told me that he doesn't have synthetic base motor oil and if I wanted one I had to provide it for him.  So I ditched him and opted for Vroom instead.  They cost me less and almost did or claim to do all those things that my Maplewood Toyota Dealer would have done.  There was one exception though.  Since my car is a 2009 model the dealer at Vroom hadn't seen very many of these and didn't have the make and model in the system.  they didn't reset my odometer.  As I had gotten my oil change at about 4000 miles the maintenance required indicator that reminds us of oil changes started blinking two days ago when my car completed 4500 miles.  That kind of pissed me off.  So I went to my Vroom people and asked them ...

Rediff readers ask very important questions in wake of the Mumbai attacks and I echo them here in a bid to help find answers, How many terrorists were there? Did they number 20 as Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh told a press conference on Thursday? Or did they number many more? If two or three terrorists attacked the CST, how many terrorists were present at the Taj and Trident? Did the CST terrorists drop a grenade/explosive device at Dockyard Road on the way to the station? Or was someone else responsible for that act of terror which claimed three lives? The terrorists are said to have set up control rooms at the Taj and Trident hotels, a Cabinet minister told PTI on Thursday. When were these bookings made? A detailed investigation into the bookings made at both hotels in the months, weeks and days before the attacks may reveal the names of suspicious guests who registered there. Military sources tell rediff.com that there was no way the terrorists could h...