WHY did India escalate its dispute with Pakistan over the Kashmir issue to the point that a nuclear war between the two countries for a while seemed a distinct possibility? And, having taken South Asia to the edge of a nuclear holocaust why did India agree to de-escalate a bit and provide Pakistan with some breathing room? The conventional answers to these two questions are by now familiar. They have been given in the countless newspaper commentaries that have appeared over the last several months in the western, Pakistani and Indian newspapers and news magazines.

But there are also some new and, therefore, non-conventional answers. I have hinted at them in some earlier articles. Some were also given in a Wall Street Journal editorial I cited in my article two weeks ago. More interestingly, they were included in an interesting newspaper article by Henry Kissinger published recently by Dawn. I will deal with the non-conventional wisdom in some detail in the article next week. In the present one, I will cover the conventional view.

The conventional view begins with the assumption that the insurgency in the part of Kashmir occupied by India has inflicted a heavy economic damage on that country. It also assumes that India could overcome this insurgency if it could somehow discourage Pakistanis from aiding the militants in Kashmir. How could this be done? India had no clear answer to this question before September 11. After September 11, President George W. Bush opened an opportunity that India was quick to grasp. It had to act since the troubles in Kashmir had begun to cost a great deal.

India has maintained half a million troops in the state, killed some 35,000 to 40,000 Kashmiris, caused some damage to its own economy and hurt the economy of the state of Kashmir a great deal more. Today the Indian economy is doing less well than a few years ago. The rate of GDP growth has slowed down as has the rate of increase in exports. Combined budgetary deficits of the central and state governments have reached to unsustainable levels. A number of foreigners have fled, slowing down the flow of foreign direct investment. The economic cost for India of maintaining a large military pressure had begun to take a heavy toll.

The situation for India began to get worse once the jihadis picked up the cause of Kashmir adding it to the several other causes they were pursuing in other parts of the world. However, as the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo settled down and as it became extremely costly to continue to challenge Russia in Chechnya, the jihadis turned even more of their attention to Kashmir. The Indian casualties began to mount. It was in this situation, growing difficult by the day, that America created a unique opportunity for India. The terrorists struck America on September 11 and President George W. Bush proclaimed what came to be called the Bush doctrine.

The Bush doctrine labelled all attacks on non-military targets and assets as terrorism. The American president invited all countries of the world to join America against the war on what he described as a global scourge. This scourge had to be eliminated no matter how much time and power was needed. His famous call to arms — “either you are with us or you are against us” — came at a very convenient time for the Indians fighting the Kashmiris in Kashmir and for the Israelis fighting the Palestinians in Palestine.

At that point India was looking for an explicit opportunity to apply the Bush doctrine to Pakistan’s support of Kashmir. That came in December. Two months after America began to bomb Afghanistan, a group of terrorists struck at the Indian parliament in New Delhi. More than a dozen people were killed in that assault and India blamed Pakistan for having supported the group that had carried it out. The Indian leadership began an extraordinary mobilization of its armed forces all along the Pakistani border. Put under an enormous amount of pressure by the Indian action that had the seeming support of the international community, President Pervez Musharraf declared his own war against the jihadi groups in Pakistan.

In a remarkable speech delivered on January 12 that was listened to with great interest not only in Pakistan but by the entire world, the Pakistani president announced that his government would actively pursue the Islamic groups that were working in the country outside the law. He also declared that Pakistan would not allow terrorist attacks to be launched from its soil. There was a clear implication that this principle would be applied to the organizations that were active in Kashmir but were maintaining training camps in Pakistan. A number of them were banned and a couple of thousand of known jihadis were arrested and put in jail.

That General Musharraf’s action would draw a negative response from the Islamic groups was to be expected. It came in the form of four attacks launched inside Pakistan against foreigners and one exceptionally brutal attack in Kashmir. The four attacks in Pakistan involved the abduction and murder of an American journalist in Karachi, the bombing of a church in Islamabad which killed three Americans, the bombing of a bus outside a hotel in Karachi that killed a dozen French technicians, and now the explosion of a car bomb, Beirut style, outside the American consulate in Karachi.

The responsibility for the latest attack in Karachi was taken by a group that called itself al-Qanoon. It issued a chilling warning to the government of President Pervez Musharraf after announcing its involvement in the attack. “America and its allies and its slaves Pakistani rulers should prepare for more attacks. [This] attack is just a beginning of al-Qanoon’s Jihad operation in Pakistan,” it said in the fractured English that has become the hallmark of the statements issuing by the Jihadi groups.

The attack in Kashmir killed more than a score of women and children belonging to the families of the Indian soldiers stationed in Kashmir. In keeping with the Bush doctrine, India increased its pressure on Pakistan. It now threatened to launch attacks on the Pakistani territory if Islamabad did not completely seal the Line of Control separating the two parts of Kashmir, one occupied by India and the other governed by Pakistan.

At one point an attack by India on Pakistan appeared imminent and Pakistan made it clear that it would react with all its might to such an action by India. The use of nuclear weapons was not initially discounted. The Americans, in order to bring some rationality into the actions and counteractions of the South Asian leaders, presented a scenario of what a nuclear exchange between the two countries would entail. Many large cities will be vapourized, said the American study, 12 to 20 million people will be killed, a hundred million more will be injured, and many parts of the subcontinent would be thrown back to the Stone Age. Economic recovery from such devastation would take many decades.

It was in this environment that an alarmed world descended on Islamabad and New Delhi, sending in senior emissaries to hold discussions with the leaders of the two governments. Pakistan came under enormous pressure from the West and Russia to accede to the Indian demand to stop the movement of jihadis into Indian occupied Kashmir. The Indians wanted not a slowing down of such a movement but a complete stop to it for all times to come. General Musharraf once again appeared on national television to address the Pakistani people and send another message to the world at large.

This time he promised to stop the crossing of the Line of Control separating the two Kashmiris for all time to come. On the basis of that promise, India began to make some minor gestures of normalization to Pakistan. It said that it would send back its ambassador to Islamabad and open its airspace to overflights by Pakistan. It also began the process of withdrawing its warships from the waters close to Karachi, Pakistan’s only port. But the Indians indicated that they will not pull back their troops from their border with Pakistan until October. Why October? In October India plans to hold elections in Kashmir which it promises will be free and fair, unlike the elections held more than a decade ago when the heavy hand of India installed a government in Kashmir that was sympathetic to its stance.

India expects that if General Musharraf holds to his promise, New Delhi will be able to reduce the level of violence in Kashmir to the point where some of the less radical groups may be able to work with it. With the participation of these groups in the October elections, India will be able to provide a sense of legitimacy to the government that will take office in Srinagar, the state’s capital.

In other words, the extension of the Bush doctrine to Kashmir would have helped solve what at one point seemed an intractable problem.

This then is a summary of the conventional reading of the latest “near-war” between Pakistan and India. Before going on to detail the non-conventional interpretation — from my perspective a more accurate reading of India’s intentions towards Pakistan — let me make one additional point by answering the following questions. Was it ever in Pakistan’s interest to obtain the accession of Kashmir by encouraging the victory of jihadi groups over the Indian forces occupying Kashmir? What would have happened to Pakistan if the Islamic groups battling the Indian forces succeeded the way the Mujahideen had triumphed against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the eighties? How would Pakistan have accommodated a ‘talibanized’ Kashmir into its body and into its own political structure?

There is the same answer to these three questions. Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan, secured as a result of a military victory by Islamic militants, would complicate enormously Pakistan’s own situation. At this point President Musharraf is engaged in a difficult project — to rescue Pakistan from the grip of the obscurantist elements in society who want the country to be thrown back into the dark ages.

He wants Pakistan to join the rest of the world by modernizing its economy, its society, and its political structure. Such a project would suffer a great set back if the jihadis were to succeed in Kashmir and bring it into the fold of Pakistan.

AMERICAN media outlets roused themselves from outright denial in early June, spurred by belated warnings from top U.S. officials that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan would kill millions of people.

The tone of news coverage shifted toward alarm. Meanwhile, atomic history remained largely sanitized. “Even one military move by either of these nuclear-armed neighbours,” USA Today’s front page reported in big type, “could set off an unstoppable chain reaction that could lead to the holocaust the world has feared since the atomic bomb was developed.” The June 10 edition of Newsweek includes a George Will column with a chilling present-day reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis: “The world may be closer to a nuclear war than it was at any time during the cold war — even October 1962.”

Yet when it comes to nuclear weapons, the mainstream American press has scant emotional range or professional zeal to scrutinize the progression of atomic perils. From the start of the nuclear era, each man in the Oval Office has carefully attended to public relations, with major media rarely questioning the proclaimed humanitarian goals.

Making an announcement on Aug. 6, 1945, President Harry Truman did his best to engage in deception. “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base,” he said. “That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”

But civilians populated the city of Hiroshima — as well as Nagasaki, where an A-bomb struck three days later. Hundreds of thousands died as a result of the atomic bombings. American military strategists were eager “to use the bomb first where its effects would be not only politically effective but technically measurable,” Manhattan Project physicist David H. Frisch recalled.

For U.S. media, the atomic bombings of the two Japanese cities have been pretty much sacrosanct. So, in 1994, a national uproar broke out when the Smithsonian Institution made plans for an exhibit marking the 50th anniversary.

Much of the punditocracy was fit to be tied. “In the context of the time ... the bombing made a great deal of sense,” Cokie Roberts said on network television — and, she added, raising critical questions a half-century later “makes no sense at all.” On the same ABC telecast, George Will sputtered: “It’s just ghastly when an institution such as the Smithsonian casts doubt on the great leadership we were blessed with in the Second World War.”

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, denouncing “the forces of political correctness,” wrote that the factual display on the museum’s drawing board “promises to be an embarrassing amalgam of revisionist hand-wringing and guilt.”

Such intense media salvos caused the Smithsonian to cave in rather than proceed with a forthright historical exhibition. Even five decades later, a clear look at the atomic bombings was unacceptable.

This summer, as the leaders of Pakistan and India pondered the nuclear-weapons option, they could echo the punditry. After all, “in the context of the time,” they might conclude, an atomic bombing makes “a great deal of sense,” without need to question their “great leadership” or engage in “hand-wringing and guilt.”

Back in 1983, a statement by U.S. Catholic Bishops perceptively called for a “climate of opinion which will make it possible for our country to express profound sorrow over the atomic bombing in 1945. Without that sorrow, there is no possibility of finding a way to repudiate future use of nuclear weapons.”

But American officials and leading journalists continue to be highly selective with their repudiations. In medialand, a red-white-and-blue nuclear warhead is not really a “weapon of mass destruction.”

Three months ago, the U.S. government’s new Nuclear Posture Review caused a nearly incredulous response from Pervez Hoodbhoy, a peace advocate who is a professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad: “Why should every country of the world not develop nuclear weapons now that America may nuke anyone at any time? The Bush administration has announced that it views nuclear weapons as instruments for fighting wars, not merely as the weapons of last resort. Resurgent American militarism is destroying every arms control measure everywhere. Those of us in Pakistan and India who have long fought against nuclearization of the subcontinent have been temporarily rendered speechless.”

What goes around has a tendency to come around. Washington’s policymakers keep fortifying the U.S. nuclear arsenal with abandon while brandishing it against many other countries — declaring, in effect, “do as we say, not as we do.” But sooner or later, such declarations are not very convincing.—Courtesy: Z-Net

The writer is co-author of “Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation”.

THERE is first of all the bomb blast at the US Consulate and we appear to be none the wiser about who was responsible, who the perpetrators were who killed many Pakistanis and severely injured many more.

The only thing we are certain of is that the terrorists were no friends of Pakistan. The investigation into the bomb blast should begin with this central fact. The target of the bomb blast, the venue, may have been the US Consulate but as the terrorists would have surely known, the victims would be Pakistanis. The terrorists also seemed to know that they can strike at will. Karachi is no stranger to bomb blasts. So far, past and present terrorists, have been able to get away with murder, literally. As citizens, there are really no precautions we can take and so life must go on.

It would seem that the threat of war has receded but the prospects of peace between Pakistan and India are, where they have always been, in limbo. This is a time to show statesmanship. A time to calm the nerves of the people of both countries. Alas, it is not to be. The interview given by Atal Behari Vajpayee to a reporter from the Dainik Jagran newspaper is a clear indication that the BJP government intends to extract as much mileage as it can, for domestic political reasons, from this brinkmanship.

In this interview Vajpayee claimed that India was prepared even for a nuclear conflict. This is a claim that falls in the realm of pure moonshine, so absurd that it is an insult to the intelligence of the Indian people, the beater of war drums may not see it that way, the wisers ones will. How does a country prepare for a nuclear war? Tell the people of New Delhi, for example, that they are about to be vapourised and incinerated or just blown away?

Clearly, Vajpayee and his war-mongers have not the slightest idea of what nuclear war means, perhaps, Vajpayee could ask Dr Abdul Kalam, before he moves into the Rashtrapati Bhavan, to brief him about the horrific consequences of a nuclear holocaust. To tell the Indian people that the BJP government was prepared for a nuclear war was both dumb and irresponsible. Not even the USA and the Soviet Union, had at the height of the cold war, would have been foolish enough to say that they were prepared for a nuclear war. The simple fact is that there is no preparation for it. There would be no time for even one, final prayer. And, as if, the world did not have troubles enough, The Washington Post, a newspaper that does not generally go half-cock has reported that George Bush early this year had signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to conduct covert operation to oust Saddam Hussain. The covert programme included authorisation to use lethal force to capture Saddam Hussain.

The Washington Post said that the presidential order directed the possible use of CIA and US Special Forces teams, similar to those that have been successfully deployed in Afghanistan since September 11. Such forces would be authorised to kill the Iraqi president, if they were acting in self-defence. The Washington Post story, if true, is deeply disturbing. It indicates, among other things, that Saddam Hussain has become a personal obsession and eliminating him, literally, would bring stability to the Middle East.

The same kind of logic had been applied in respect of Fidel Castro. There have been several attempts to assassinate Castro starting with the Eisenhower administration but the most famous, of course was the Bay of Pigs. Before that invasion took place, it was assumed that Castro would be killed, the job having being assigned to mobster Sam Giancana and two of his fellow mobsters, Johnny Rosseli and Santos Trafficante.

The Mafia’s interest in getting rid of Castro was not inspired by such lofty goals as stopping the spread of communism. It was simply to go back into gambling business in Havana. One of the methods to be used was to slip a poisoned pill into one of Castro’s drinks. Seymour Hersh, in his book The Dark Side Of Camelot, provides much documentation of Sam Giancana’s team of mobsters working in tandem with the CIA and John Kennedy and his brother Robert’s deep involvement in the plot.

The Bay of Pigs turned out to be a fiasco, Seymour Hersh writes: “The Bay of Pigs was the first political defeat of John Kennedy’s life and he sought revenge — but not on the advisers and government agencies that, so he told, everyone had misled him. His target was Fidel Castro, and he spent his remaining days in office determined to make Castro pay — with his life preferably — for staining the Kennedy honour.” The supreme irony is that John Kennedy was assassinated, so too Robert Kennedy. But Fidel Castro still lives.

Political assassinations, apart from being highly immoral are an unreliable way of conducting foreign policy. Invariably, it means throwing out the baby with the bathwater and there are no examples, that I know of, when the operation has been successful. After Allende, Chile got Pionchet and who want to be Pionchet? Reviled and hounded and a murderer in the bargain?

THE president’s plan to restructure the government is one of the main subjects of conversation in the capital. The good news is that it will create a lot of new jobs for Washington. The bad news is that it will create a lot of new jobs for Washington.

One of the biggest concerns of putting so many of the agencies into a new Department of Homeland Security is that there will be turf wars between them. I take you now to the newly rented President George Bush building on Pennsylvania Avenue, which holds 179,000 employees.

An Immigration and Naturalization director comes into Gov. Ridge’s office. He says, “Sir, I want to know why I didn’t get the number one parking space in the building.”

Ridge says, “That spot has already been reserved for the Coast Guard. They claim they are first to be prepared to fight the terrorists.”

As the Immigration officer is making his case, an expert in biological weapons comes into the office. He is furious and says, “Someone parked in my spot, A-12. I had to park in number 17. How do you expect us to protect everyone from an anthrax attack when I am in a corner of the garage?”

Gov. Ridge says to his aide, “Who is in the biological weapons space now?”

“The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.”

“Well, move them down to D-42 and tell them if they don’t park there they are going to be towed away.”

The aide says, “The Customs people would like to be upgraded to A-2. They say the real threat to the country is smuggled weapons and they are the only ones who can find them.”

Ridge says, “I promised A-2 to the FBI, but they said they won’t come over here unless Mueller gets A-1.”

The aide says, “The Secret Service also wants A-1 because they say they have to be ready to get out as soon as the president leaves the White House.”

The governor says, “Let me look at the chart. Why don’t we put FEMA in the basement at C-20? We can push them around. Let’s put the Customs Department in C-21. And we’ll put Nuclear Response in D-14.”

“Do you think the CIA will want to park their cars in our garage?” “They can’t until they tell us what they are up to.”

The aide says, “Paramount Pictures just called and said they’re doing a movie on Homeland Security with Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman. They said they are going to need 20 parking spaces for their equipment trucks and trailers for the stars.”

“Why didn’t you say that before? As soon as they arrive put all the security cars into the street. We need the film to show the country that we’re doing a heckuva job.” —Dawn\Tribune Media Services

THERE is one non-negotiable requirement for any Turkish belly dancer. You have to have a belly.

A belly must not be confused with a stomach. All of us have stomachs. Some of us go the extra mile and have two. The fashionable young people of today prefer to have none at all. Young women spend hours at the gymnasium to flatten the space between breast and crotch into a skating rink with the navel, preferably ringed, as its epicentre.

They wear jeans or pants that skirt the lower hip instead of a boring waist in order to advertize the attractions of this skating rink. Fashion has taken jeans to where the hipster sari used to be a few years ago, which brings to mind a question - where has the hipster sari disappeared?

Young men, on the other hand, seem convinced that the human being has only one asset, and let’s not confuse that with the mind. This is the age of muscle worship. I would not be surprised if their brains had become a mass of squirming muscles, each wanting to be photographed in a T-shirt. If Salman Khan is your role model your toes are bound to be more intelligent than your brains, in any case. Young men are now taut instead of taught.

The essence of the belly is tremor. There must be just enough flesh around the bones to form the basis of soft curves instead of strangled straight lines. We are not talking fat here. A dancer needs as much discipline as an Olympics athlete and it is far more difficult to keep curves in artistic order than straight lines. The belly dancer has more eroticism in her hint than a nude disco dancer might have in the sweaty obvious. This is not dancing only with your feet. This is dancing with your whole body and your mind.

The reach of the wiggle and the rhythmic lift of the soft waist and rounded hip has spread into the whole of the region through what was once the Ottoman empire and regular dancing has all the charm of its influence. To music that understands inflexion better than the beat. Dance your way through Turkey if you want, but don’t leave your belly behind.

At 9.30 on Tuesday morning Turkey shut down. I was in Izmir, once called Smyrna and known as the Paris of the Levant. At a little after 9.42 Turkey erupted in a single voice through a single word - Goll! Goll!!! Goll!!!!!! The roar must have reached Japan. A bad Japanese miskick had created the opportunity, and a Red Indian haircut head had scored. Then silence fell on two nations on either side of Asia, interrupted by cries of anguish or howls of expectation. A final whistle. And Turkey exploded, again in a single voice but with a different word. Turkiya! Turkiya! Turkiya! The bright red flag with the historic crescent and star waved out of every car window (and some wipers as well), draped whole buildings and rippled like a ship on waves of young men and women flowing deliriously through the streets.

Car horns filled the air with delight. A fire engine raced by and I could have sworn that the firemen were not heading towards a fire or a disaster but simply blaring their siren with undisguised joy, happy to be children for a day. Young people went out in bands to search for CNN and BBC cameras. Television has changed not only the game but also the audience.

There was only one sad face in Izmir, the same waiter who had been sad the previous evening as he served us dinner. I went back to him. His natural long face still wore its veil of woe. See, he mourned, now Senegal... The thought of tomorrow’s pain had already burdened his today. I write this just before the Turkey-Senegal match on Saturday but there is no doubt about which team I shall support as I watch with my hosts in a small bistro called Crazy Pub. Turkiya!

By the way where does FIFA pick up its referees? The one in the Turkey-Japan match looked like Cesare Borgia about to administer poison to an unruly guest. He was still better than the chap at the Italy-South Korea match, who could have walked into the tango scene of any B-grade Hollywood movie and seemed to have both pockets open. Television has changed referees as well.

Sorry, Greece. Even Homer was a Turk. After he lived most of his life in Smyrna, or Izmir, circa 700 BC, rather than Athens or Sparta. To understand modern Turkish nationalism you must understand Izmir more than Istanbul.

The records take this port city on shining sea surrounded immediately by glittering hills back to the tenth century before Christ. Its “modern” period started with Alexander and it flourished under the Romans, with Marcus Aurelius paying particular attention to its charms.

Across our hotel which in turn is next to a cement-wrapped American consulate, is the Church of St. Polycarp. This city was home to one of the seven original churches named in the Revelations. St. Polycarp was its first bishop. He was martyred when the Roman proconsul Quadratus ordered him burned at the stake because he would not forsake Christ.

In 1402 Taimur added Smyrna to the list of cities he destroyed but its fortunes swung up when in 1535 Suleyman the Magnificent gave foreign merchants the right to live here. Ever since his cosmopolitan style has made other Turks call it infidel Izmir. Izmir took the charge in its stride and prospered. A merchant had to be fluent in Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Italian, English and French to do business here while Russian was useful. Four hundred years of peace came to a terrible end in 1922 when the Greek armies arrived to occupy Turkey and take revenge against Muslims.

The equestrian statue of Netaji in Calcutta has him pointing towards British Delhi for that was his goal. The equestrian statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on the edge of the Aegean Sea in Izmir has him pointing towards a quasi-British Greece. Quasi-British because it was Britain’s ruthless ambition that encouraged the Greeks to invade Turkey.

From London Lloyd George and Winston Churchill wanted to punish the Turks (who had hammered them at Gallipoli in the First World War but lost the war along with their ally Germany) by their invidious means of partition. They wanted to divide Turkey, keep Istanbul and European Turkey for themselves and hand over the rest to Greece. They had bought and intimidated the last Sultan Mehmed VI, a prisoner in his palace just as the last Mughal was their retainer and prisoner in Delhi between 1803 and 1857. But the Turks were not ready to be defeated.

The nationalists under Attaturk rallied at Ankara. In 1920 the Greeks, with arms from the allies and support from British, French and Russian troops who had occupied Istanbul and Gallipoli, invaded Turkey. Over the next two years they ravaged their way through Izmir, Manisa and Bursa till they reached the gates of Ankara. In July 1922 they sought to enter Istanbul. Thank God, they were stopped by their allies or Istanbul would have suffered like Manisa: only 500 of Manisa’s 18,000 historic buildings survived the rape and devastation of Greek troops.

On August 26, 1922 Ataturk gave his famous battle order: “Soldier! Your goal is the Aegean!” Then followed one of the more astonishing reversals of military history. The Turks ripped up and routed the Greek army. Half were taken prisoner. The other half fled. Izmir was destroyed by fire as the Greeks rushed home in ships from this port. Their commander Trikoupi, a descendant of the Mavrocordato family that had served Sultans for centuries, was captured. Attaturk entered Izmir on September 9. It is still celebrated as independence day. There was only one chant heard in Turkey:

Yasha, yasha, bin yasha!

Mustafa Kemal Pasha!

A thousand years of life to Mustafa Kemal Pasha.

On September 23 Attaturk’s soldiers took on the Great Powers, British troops who had been ordered to stop them at Chanak on the Asian side of the Dardanelles. But the Great Powers no longer had the nerve to fight Turk nationalism. On October 19 Refet Pasha, one of the leading nationalist generals, entered Istanbul. The people wept, sacrificed sheep and offered prayers at the mosque of Mehmet Fatih, the Ottoman who had conquered Istanbul in 1453. On October 20 Lloyd George resigned, defeated by the Turks, never to return to public life again. His successor recognized that Britain could no longer be the policeman of the world.

Attaturk did not live for a thousand years. He died when only 57 in the palace of Dolmabahce. Every clock in the palace has been stopped at five minutes past nine, the moment when he died. But Attaturk may have saved Turkey for the next thousand years.

The Dolmabahce palace and Rashtrapati Bhavan have one thing in common. The moment they were completed their builders, or their empire-builders, went into decline. Since the Ottoman was far more durable than the British, its decline lasted longer. Most of our group touring the palace was American. Evidence?

Floating conversation. “After this I’ve got to deal with that Texan in breeches...” Another voice, a sympathetic lady as we headed towards the harem: “I don’t think the poor dears had any choice. They were called and had to do it. But they were all right. They had to do it once or twice then they lived in luxury...” My heart went out to the American men as our guide, a young lady barely out of college, stopped by the Blue Bed over whose canopy rested a huge golden crown.

This was the circumcision room, she said, in the harem. Well, she explained, this was not quite where the snipping was done. That was somewhere else. This was where the boy came to rest and heal, and where he wore a crown during the celebrations for the event.

The write is chief editor of Asia News, New Delhi.