Rice and CNN

Evidently, US National Security Advisor Condoleezza had switched on CNN to hear the General that Saturday — but only for a few minutes. Turned out that it was CNN Domestic, the all-American version of the cable network, and after a few minutes of broadcasting Musharraf’s speech, they cut away to what they thought was other more interesting news. All hell is said to have subsequently broken out in Rice’s office. The lady wanted to hear all of Musharraf and switching channels didn’t help. Within hours, CNN International had been added to the menu of channels on her TV.

Chandrika’s offer

Chandrika Kumaratunga, before she lost the elections to Ranil Wickremesinghe, was said to have offered massive concessions to break the stalemate with the LTTE. Such as: a veritable free run for the LTTE in an interim commission to comprise the north and east of Sri Lanka (Jaffna, Trincomalee etc) for ten years, and significantly, the right to carry arms over that period. Decommissioning would only take place afterwards, she said. But there’s been no response from either LTTE or the new government.

Ideas of India

Some of the themes of the India Today conclave held in New Delhi this week left the mind in a swirl. ‘How can India break out of the Third World,’ ‘How will India and China stack up’... Was the intellectual class really beginning to look at new ways to get Mother India out of what’s locally called the ‘Trishanku’ paradigm: caught in a nether world, unable to let go of earth, unable to reach heaven?

Poster boy of the US conservative establishment Fareed Zakaria provided one answer: seize the day, shake hands with the West. The man-who-could-have-been President, Al Gore may have provided another, except he undemocratically demanded that everybody except registered delegates — reporters, for example — be kept out of his keynote speech. Nevertheless, he found time to visit Gandhi Smriti yesterday — coincidentally, it was Martin Luther King day in the US.

Spanish sojourn

Disinvestment minister Arun Shourie has been holding up the Indian flag at the Afghan reconstruction conference in Tokyo these days since External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh could not find time to go in the middle of receiving Colin Powell and handling Pakistan. So he’s off, therefore, to Spain in the second week of February on an official visit. He will be accompanied by a Manganiyaar folk troupe and wants to look for thoroughbred horses, preferably of Moorish ancestry. Perhaps the Spanish Crown Prince will do what his Saudi Arabian counterpart did to Singh a year ago : present him with a colt and a filly.

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