Quick notes: High-speed rail, Shia slaughter...

• Made-in-China: First high-speed line in U.S built by Chinese -- from LA to Las Vegas.



• Suicide bomber kills 22 Shia marchers: A day after 10 people were killed at a mosque in Balochistan province by another suicide bomber..
  
  As Rajeev Malhotra says, there is no need for Hindus to take sides. The sub-continent's ungrateful Shias are always a threat to Hindus.
  
  Another issue: the Sunni shade of the Baloch movement presents a dilemma for India's support to the Baloch liberation movement.



• SP Jain School of Global Management: ranked among the world’s top 100 MBA institutions.



• BJP's foolishness:

In war you cut supply lines of enemy. Here BJP provides oxygen cylinders to enemy on retreat. #RavishankarPrasad

— iMac_too (@iMac_too) October 22, 2015




• Genuflecting before the Chinese:

  I like this image of Britain as a nautch girl desperately gyrating her skinny hips, hoping the great man will notice https://t.co/DRBmluwap9

  — राजीवः श्रीनिवासः (@RajeevSrinivasa) October 23, 2015

Quick notes: UPA-3, Road runway...

• UPA-3: Govt retains UPA's decision to allow 51% FDI in multi-brand retail



• And worse: Govt's environment policy encourages deforestation leading to ecological imbalance



• Taking on greed: How tribal Indians beat big coal firms



• India's first: IAF to convert Agra-Lucknow Expressway into India's first road runway



• My Chevy Volt May Outlive Me: Chevy Volt will have a lifespan much longer than an ordinary gas car or even a hybrid. 



• 'American Football Is Like a Nuclear Explosion': Nine former NFL players have committed suicide since 2010. What they all have in common is that they were defeated by life post-football. I get aggressive, the way I was on the field. I could hurt someone very easily.
  
  You make a mistake, the head coach sees it and yells at the co-coach and he yells at you. Shit rolls downhill. So the next time you give it your all so the coach praises you. It's a brutal business. If you want to make it, you have to eat shit.



• Venkat Panchapakesan: YouTube Engineering Chief Dies Young



• Shia Slaughter:  Dozens killed in Karachi bus attack

Quick notes: Ungrateful Shias, Stolen idols...

• RoP ingratitude: For weeks, Kurdish fighters had joined an unusual alliance to free Amerli, a dusty highway town besieged by IS. Shiite militias, Iranian trainers and U.S. military pilots had all contributed, finally wresting the city from Sunni extremists and saving the 15,000 residents from starvation or brutal slayings.  But on Friday, as the Kurdish pesh merga fighters approached the city to greet the residents they helped save, they were treated less like liberators and more like intruders. “Pesh merga forces are not allowed to enter this city!” yelled a Shiite militiaman with Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi group. He waved his rifle at them and the pesh merga retreated.  “We fought for three months here, and now we have to fight these bastards,” said one of the pesh merga, who regard this area as part of their territory. “If this continues, we’ll have another war.”  “They are just like animals,” said a second pesh merga fighter. “They are mules.”



• Australia to return stolen Hindu idols to India... Dealer Subhash Kapoor is accused of looting statues and other antiquities worth millions.



• Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the "father of modern yoga", demonstrating the practices of yoga in 1938 at the age of 50... Hanuman Chalisa by Bhagavan Das in the background.

A Babri a day

At least four shrines to Sunni Arab or Sufi figures have been destroyed by the bulldozers. The structures had been built around graves of Muslim saints. Six Shiite mosques have also been destroyed using explosives (and many more in recent days).

RT: ISIS jihadists demolish mosques, shrines in northern Iraq

India should step forward, bring reconciliation between warring Sunnis and Shias and rejoin the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, opines Kuldip Nayar, a Nobel Laureate for pSecularism.

Quick notes: 14 year-old cracks IIT-JEE, Fire Phone...

• 14-year-old boy cracks IIT entrance exam: The boy had learnt by heart the Gita and other Hindu scriptures at the age of seven. His discourses were well attended.



• Send Azam Khan to Iraq: Despite appeals from the U.S to bring more Sunnis into the military, the Iraqi govt has instead been weeding them out. 



• Joe Biden was right: Muslims cannot live together peacefully.



• Electric motorcycles: Clean, quiet, efficient, fun, low maintenance



• Amazon launches a shopping machine, calls it a smartphone: Research shows that when people pay with plastic they can spend 20 to 30 percent more than when they use cash. Casinos use chips to also remove the regulating "pain of paying". "Developments like Amazon’s image-recognition tool are “great for capitalism. But capitalism and health have never been related in a positive way.”



• Jaitely's argument: 'UPA lacked the courage to implement its own decision’. UPA factored in fare hike in interim Railway Budget, but did not say so in Parliament.

Quick notes: Gas wars, Temple gold...

• Ambani ki Dukaan? Sucheta Dalal on policies dictated by oligarchs.



• Temple wealth in Psecularistan: Is Padmanabhaswamy temple gold getting pilfered?



• Sunni Republic of Pakistan: Militants threaten Shias to vacate Peshawar neighbourhood



• Olive oil cultivation in India shows promise.



• Indian smartphone makers don’t make smartphones: They stick their logo.



• Finding your center of mass with Bakasana:

Quick notes: Jobs number, Benchmark booster..

• 'Govt counted 40L jobs that weren't created': Against 1.39 crore that the Kaangress govt has claimed, only 93.5 lakh jobs were created.



• Samsung's Kaangress style slyness: AnandTech discovers hard-coded exceptions in Galaxy S4, intended to inflate benchmark figures.



• Bharat Ratna minus the award: Indian philanthropist, cardiac surgeon and founder of Narayana Hrudayalaya, Devi Prasad Shetty has cut the price of coronary bypass surgery to $1,583. The same procedure costs $106,385 at Cleveland Clinic.



• Small states - exactly what problem do they solve? The experience of the last state creation process under the NDA govt, which gave birth to Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh, has not been uniformly positive.



• Tulsi leaves for fluoride free drinking water: Fluoride has been linked to a number of negative health effects like bone fractures, thyroid disorders and impaired brain development and function.

Slaughter of the 'Rejectionists'

“This is your end, you dogs,” a man off camera said as he panned across what he said were the corpses of “pug-nosed” Shiites. “Here are the jihadists celebrating their storming of the rejectionists’ houses! The Shiite rejectionists!,” the fighter added.

Some extremist Sunnis refer to Shiites as rejectionists because the sect arose from a group that rejected the early successors of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. 

NYT: Dozens of Shiites Reported Killed in Raid by Syria Rebels

Shia, Ahmadi, Hindu?

What happened to Hindus and Christians is unsurprising. But it is the Shias and Ahmadis who are shocked. Shias, about 20 per cent of the population, have been picked out-Gestapo style. Last year, men in army uniforms stopped four buses bound from Rawalpindi to Gilgit, demanding that all 117 persons on board alight and show their national identification cards. Those with typical Shia names, like Abbas and Jafri, were separated. Minutes later 46 corpses lay on the ground.
But while Shias are numerous enough to put up at least the pretense of a defence, Ahmadis are not. Forbidden from calling themselves Muslims, Ahmadi children are expelled from school once their religion is discovered. Just a hint may be enough to destroy a career.

Pervez Hoodbhoy: Shia, Ahmadi, Hindu? Then Run for Your Life

Sunni death squads that hunt Shias

Hussain was headed for Australia, where thousands of his fellow ethnic Hazara Shias have sought refuge. He is part of a growing exodus of young Hazara men who are fleeing Pakistan as it has become apparent that their government and military cannot, or will not, protect them from violent extremists.

NYT: Fleeing Pakistan Violence, Hazaras Brave Uncertain Journey

502 Pak Shias Killed in Targeted Attacks in 2012

As per details, 136 were killed in Karachi alone, 119 in Quetta, 55 in Gilgit, 44 in Parachinar, 25 in Rawalpindi, 21 in Khanpur, 16 in Dera Ismail Khan, 12 in Orakzai Agency, 29 in Mastung, seven each in Lahore and Mach....

Daily Times: 502 Shias killed last year, says MWM report

Sunnification of Pakistan

A recent Pew Research Centre study showed that 50 per cent of Pakistanis do not accept Shias as Muslims. Pakistan’s Shias are so regularly killed in targeted attacks that counting the numbers who were thus killed in 2012 is an uphill task.

The Hindu: At the receiving end of fanaticism

Saudis Fearful of Shia Encirclement

The wave of pro-democracy protests in the Middle East, spilling beyond Tunisia and Egypt over into Sheikhdoms like Sunni minority-ruled Bahrain are making the Saudi govt nervous. Restlessness by Bahrain's Shia majority could well become the tipping point for a change in the balance of power between Shias and Sunnis in the Gulf.