Permanent links
Daily links
Journal sitefeed
Movies sitefeed
del.icio.us sitefeed
RSS
28 September 2004
Hitler's secret Indian army and BBC's sweet-tooth for India
The BBC World page goes through a lot of updates every hour of the day and considering the gigantic spread of the organisation and the inflow of a number of amusing and eye-catching articles contributed from its expatriate journalists worldwide, I find it intriguing that BBC does manage to have without fail at least one special interest cover story concerning India. There are a number of plausible reasons why the BBC covets its Indian coverage so much -- perhaps it is the large South Asian (predominantly of Indian origins) immigrant community in Britain or perhaps there is a certain lingering of colonial affinities -- but notwithstanding this fact, it pleases me immensely that amidst the ugly gloss of the Times of India, the sensationalism of the Indian Express, and the "tart one-liner headline" philosophy of Rediff at least there is someone else that manages to net the oddities. BBC's latest feature on the declassification of a number of documents dating back to the years centering around the end of the second World War dealing with Bose's misinterpretations of the Hitler's expression of solidarity for "Indian independence from the British" and his subsequent delusion with the latter is an excellent case in point. (On a related note, I also found talk of a recent paper that seems to dispute the Aryan Invasion theory and claims that it was the other way round -- it was instead the Indian race that significantly influenced the evolution of the Caucasian and Eurasian lineage.) The BBC article makes for riveting reading and is a testament to how misguided and dangerous Bose's patriotic zeal could have been. It more than makes up for their frivolity and mockery when they talk of the spread of Bhangra as an aerobics workout style in New York or acclaim Nisha Sharma as a textbook star.* * * * *
The advent of American spelling
On one of the Jeopardy rounds the other day, it was revealed to me that Noah Webster was chiefly responsible for popularising the norm of American spelling doing away with the 'u's in colour, neighbour and odour, jazzing up the 's's in optimise, localise and utilise and twiddling with the 'r's and 'e's in centre and metre. I had never till then understood what motivated this departure though I half-suspected the Americans' need to distinguish their language from that of their former colonial overlords. Not surprisingly Canada never shied away from the British form of spelling. The BBC of course would like to think that this dichotomy runs deeper than just language and is inherent in the British and American "ways of lives" as evidenced by their article on the British and American investigations on the failure of intelligence in detecting the much sought after weapons in Iraq pitting American "openness" against British "tact" when it came to wording. What tickled me most however was this particular snippet (emphasis added):The Senate Committee went straight at it: "Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), "Iraq's Continuing programs for Weapons of Mass destruction", either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting."
It went on: "The failure of the Intelligence Community to accurately analyse and describe the intelligence in the NIE was the result of a combination of systemic weaknesses, primarily in analytic trade craft, compounded by a lack of information sharing, poor management and inadequate intelligence collection."
There is no such overall conclusion in the Butler report.
It is written in the cautious style of the British official document (with never a split infinitive, of course).
To compare: The Senate Committee, when criticising the CIA assessment that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons", says that the statement "overstated... what was known... Intelligence analysts did not have enough information to state with certainty that Iraq 'has' these weapons".
The British report, addressing the same problem, makes an excuse for the Joint Intelligence Committee before coming to a softer conclusion: "Partly because of inherent difficulties in assessing chemical and biological programmes, JIC assessments on Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programmes were less assured."
