Word: bihar
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...Indian district magistrate, who was named as one of Time's 20 Asia's Heroes in 2004; by officials probing alleged overcharging of $2 million, first reported by the Indian Express newspaper, for food and supplies sent to victims of last summer's floods in the eastern state of Bihar; in Patna, India. Last week, Bihar's top official, Chief Secretary K.A.H. Subramanian, announced he would be filing a First Information Report with the police based on his administration's internal inquiry into the affair, a move expected to trigger a criminal investigation of Goswami and others. The ex-magistrate...
...While the situation appears grim, there is still hope. First, there is no foreign country backing the insurgents. New Delhi, for example, is worried that the insurgency will embolden Indian revolutionaries in the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. Similarly, whenever the insurgents in Nepal are referred to as Maoists, Beijing is offended. Second, the international community is willing to help. In the latter half of the 1990s, because of human-rights violations by Nepal, the U.S. and Europe were reluctant to provide assistance. Today, the Maoists are on Washington's list of designated terrorist groups, and both...
...Step One of Mishra's effort to rehabilitate the Buddha for his homeland is to rediscover Prince Siddhartha?the man who became the most famous Indian of all time while meditating under a fig tree in Bihar. Going back to the earliest Buddhist documents, Mishra recreates the scene in eastern India in the 6th century B.C., when a young aristocrat who has abandoned his wife and fortune, stumbles through Bihar searching for a way to end misery in the world. Restless, curious, lonely and sometimes arrogant, Mishra's Buddha is an ordinary man confronting problems that face ordinary...
...What would the Buddha say to an unemployed young man in Bihar today? Almost nothing about God, heaven or the afterlife. As Mishra points out, the Buddha "either ignored or denied just about every piety?God, soul, eternity?that was current in his time and was to form the basis of many subsequent religions." His promise to his followers was not salvation in heaven but an end to suffering on earth, if they reined in their desires. At the heart of the Buddha's message is the idea that humans do not possess a steady, unchanging self; instead...
...tribute to Mishra's ability to link India's past to its present that he has turned a book on the Buddha into a social commentary of immense urgency about contemporary India?especially the parts of the country, like Bihar, which are far removed from the glamorous boomtowns like Bangalore. Ironically, it is not the solution Mishra offers (Buddhism) but the problem he identifies?the restlessness in India's heartland?that really lingers in the reader's mind. Mishra may well be right?Buddhism, with its emphasis on curbing desire, might be an answer to India's problems?but nothing...