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ThE title sounds plaintive. The poet asserts that she has tried to tackle the theme of betrayal – something that has been done for ages, of course. Remember Matthew Arnold’s The Forsaken Merman? Or, Robert Browning’s lines from The Lost Leader, "Just for a handful of silver he left us,/Just for a riband to stick in his coat"? This collection by Prerna, a teenager, deserves more than a cursory glance. Her poem, Human, gets bitter at the perfidious and the cruel, viz., "...you grin so tenderly whilst you kill/Take the girl from the womb grown cold/and soil with gore a form two minutes old..." There is a sombre tenor to her insightful musings, viz., "Throw into me, remnants of vanity/shards of lost hope, indifference..." (Lady of the Deep). However, sometimes, in order to sound profound, she confuses us by using expressions with conflicting meanings as in these lines from Submerged Horizons, "Your breathing still provokes me,/ yet all I need is your happiness./They say love is a specter/ a selfless, parasitic ghost." Prerna has got the talent; time and experience can hone it. Sellotape Legacy The Delhi Commonwealth Games have come and gone, leaving several posers and scandals in their wake. What was the purpose of the Games? To raise the standard of sports in India? To project India’s economic might? Or, perhaps, to register a riposte to the Beijing Olympics? There is a nagging feeling that all those medals won by us do not reflect the actual situation on the ground. At the grassroots level, sports infrastructure is almost nil. There is no institutional support and no viable process in place to spot and nurture talent in the country. The structural approach has been replaced with ad-hocism, whether it is governance in general or sports-administration in particular. Our rulers do not believe in allowing institutions to grow and function in a systematic manner. Procedures and processes are routinely short-circuited in order to sub-serve the vested interests. Add to this corruption, lethargy at the helm, tepid public opinion and lack of self-esteem and you get the gist of this book’s theme. The authors go deep into the scenario that existed in the run-up to the CWG. Most of their findings/conclusions have proved prophetic. Typology of
Counter-Terrorism Strategies Terrorism is as old as history or, at least, first century CE, as Priyedarshi avers. However, terrorism in its modern form received great impetus in the late 18th and 19th centuries, with the propagation of secular ideologies and nationalism. It has been resorted to by private groups to trigger off revolutions against extant rulers; in turn state terrorism, too, has not been unknown – various communist and fascist regimes have done it. In the southern United States, the Ku Klux Klan was set up after the defeat of the Confederacy in the American Civil War (1861-1865), to terrorise former slaves and representatives of reconstruction administrations. The Russian revolutionary movement before World War I had a strong terrorist element. This book, however, studies the methods adopted by governments to counter terrorism, with special reference to Israel and India. It is quite obvious that there is no cut and dried formula nor has any particular mode of counter-terrorism provided a lasting solution to the problem. Even tackling the root causes like social, ethnic and economic inequities has proved problematic. Obviously, a comprehensive approach comprising incentives and punishments holds out some hope – but the right mix has yet to be concocted. A very thought provoking and enlightening book.
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