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Showing posts from November, 2009

From Pokharan To Private Ryan

A Day In New York Remembered By M L Raina My New York is not the city Thomas Pynchon’s V explored through its sewers, nor the city that Garcia Lorca thought diabolic as well as inviting. My New York is a city on whose symmetrical streets and avenues I have walked miles and capped milestones of memory and remembrance. One such memory is of a day more than ten years ago, a memory that is evoked as I rediscover those streets on a day’s walk. I arrive in New York a few days after India blasted its way into the nuclear club. Suitably puffed up with patriotic fervour I recall the words of the actor George Scott, playing World War II’s prima donnish general Patton in the Hollywood movie of that name: “No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other bastard die for his country”. So, on arrival, my first impulse is to see how the other bastards, Pakistanis, were coping with our new-found pride and self-respect. What right, I ask, has the American Preside