Flying False Economy

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About the only time members of our cabinet and the Congress party queue up, it seems is in line to proclaim their "austerity". Reminiscent of the Ella Fitzgerald number, Birds do it, Bees do it, even some educated fleas do it, In Spain the upper sets do it, the Lithuanians and the Letts do it Let's do it, they're all singing, Let's fall in line with the austerity drive! Like kids at camp roughing it out, they're pointing to their khadi kurtas and their government cars, showing off their economy class boarding cards and telling us how much they are slumming it. "I'll go by economy class," say Anand Sharma, Azad and Praful Patel "I'll go by train," chime Jitin Prasad and Jairam Ramesh "And I will go by cargo," says Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari. And no more five star hotels for....

A Rough Cut Of Pakistan's History

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Seeds of Terror: The Taliban, the ISI and the Opium Wars - Gretchen Peters, Published by Hachette India The Al Qaeda Connection: The Taliban and Terror in Pakistan's Tribal Areas - Imtiaz Gul, Published by Penguin/Viking Musharraf: The Years in Power - Murtaza Razvi, Published by Harper Collins To Live or Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan - Nicholas Schmidle, Published by Random House India It's popular to call journalism a first draft, a rough cut of history, but all drafts, all journalism has its 'oh no' moments, the bit where you say 'why didn't I see it coming' - when you say in hindsight we should have known that Osama would one day carry out 9/11 or we should have seen that the men we released in Kandahar during the hijack would one day come back and bomb Parliament, or even that the intelligence....