Response to terror strikes

One very familiar Indian response we have seen in past for all those terror attacks – immediately issue statements either alluding to or directly placing the blame on Pakistan for the various militant training camps. Well, the world understands that it is a fact that militants are trained in different regions of Pakistan. So shouldn’t India do something about it instead of waiting months or weeks until the next strike and point the finger again. This time, it was an apparent failure of Indian intelligence, given the history of attacks on Bombay and elsewhere. It is time that India stopped pointing fingers and really did something about it. The recent attacks in Bombay calls for swift action. If India thinks that the attack on Bombay was India’s 9/11 then the response should not be any different from the US’s, post 9/11 – India should not retreat from facing those thugs and assassins either.

It is a well known fact that Pakistani Intelligence agency supports and sponsors terrorism. It is also known to the world that it is the militants of LeT and others and not the Pakistani Army that is involved in active fighting with India in the Kashmir Valley. India should take advantage of the fact that the civilian government of Pakistan, however weak it may be, is ready to offer its full support to India in the war on terrorism.

However, we should also realize that it is easier said than done for India, given the political ramifications of concentrating India’s war efforts out of Kashmir. Kashmir is a long standing issue, which is the direct reason for many of the terror strikes in India. But India might be better off dealing the Kashmir issue as a separate entity than deal simultaneously with the ‘response to terrorist attacks’ even though the cause is the same – terrorism and infiltration. We have seen in the past that we cannot fight terrorism in Kashmir alone. The root is elsewhere. The US has been concentrating its efforts on the western tribal areas of Pakistan lately and India should join the efforts given the promise of co-operation of Pakistani civilian government. Pakistani army should not be involved in this region given the deals they have struck with the militants in the past (during Musharraf’s rule).

Both India and Pakistan have United States to bank on for resources necessary to fight terrorism in their region, whether it is on the Afghan border of Pakistan or the western tribal areas of Pakistan or elsewhere. The US is aware of the mistakes that happened during the invasion on Taliban in 2001 which allowed Bin Laden and his group  to escape in the rugged terrains to tora-bora. And hopefully the new administration will guide the war on terrorism in the right direction.

11/27 Bombay terrorist attacks

Update:

I think the event merited the amount of coverage that it got nevertheless – it was one of the deadliest terror attacks. Also, Indian media did a phenomenal job of covering the terror strikes. CNN and MSNBC almost borrowed the entire coverage from CNN-IBN (CNN’s sister network) and NDTV

One of AC-360’s guests on tonight’s program mentioned that India tonight joined the league of nations that were victims of indigenous terrorist attacks or something to that extent. Apparently he is a fellow at John Hopkins school of International Studies. I was shocked to hear what he said.

While most of the attacks including the ‘93 Bombay blasts have had more to do with the communal tensions,  India has long been a victim of “indigenous” terrorist attacks. I think “indigenous” is just a veil, a franchise of what rest of the world refers to as Al Qaeda. Indian Parliament was attacked in the same year as 9/11. Ever since there have been so many attacks in so many different places in India.

As I was watching the coverage of tonights attacks, my initial reaction was, why was this event was being given such a huge coverage in the US. Well that’s what CNN does best. It is all great. But why this event in particular when there were other attacks with equal or greater casualties before didn’t merit this intense coverage (2006 train bombings in Bombay, Akshardham massacre etc). Then I realized that obviously, the specific targets of the attacks – British and American nationals.

I was concerned when there were discussions about India eventually becoming a nation that loses control over the terrorist activities in the country. And being talked about in the league of nations such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh in terms of terrorist activities and harboring terrorists without control over the happenings is particularly alarming and saddening.

And by the way, the guy from John Hopkins also mentioned that India has the largest muslim population than any other country in the world. It is actually Indonesia, followed by Pakistan and India.

Custom ringtones for iPhone without paying Apple a dime

Update: One of my friends introduced me to http://audioko.net. Its amazing. Check it out if you are a ringtone enthusiast.

Until today, I’d been using those default ringtones on my iPhone. A few days back, a friend of mine told me how he changed the file extension of an mp4 file to m4r and moved it on to his iPhone to get a new ringtone. I thought I’ll give it a try today and it worked like a charm. Here’s what I did.

• On iTunes, I converted an mp3 to aac format.
• Downloaded a nice mp4 splitter from here. (It can split files of duration upto 2 mins. for free – more than what we are going to need!)
• Opened the converted file in the splitter and split it by choosing the starting and ending interval. Try to keep the length of split <= 30 secs. (best part is you could specify the interval in milliseconds).
• I chose to save the split file with the extension m4r. You could also change the extension after it is created.
• Drop the split file back on iTunes and it will show up in the ‘Ringtones’ section.
• Sync’d up my iPhone and voila! there it was… (in case the ringtone does not show up on iPhone sync window, try reducing the split file interval)