Word: mahal
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...tomb of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the populist Pakistani President who was overthrown in a military coup and executed in 1979, looms over the poverty-stricken salt marshes of rural Sind province. From a distance, the hulking mausoleum resembles a plasticine model of the Taj Mahal squeezed onto too small a foundation. Before Bhutto--who founded the Pakistan People's Party--was hanged, he had requested nothing more than a humble marble slab to mark his grave. But in Pakistani politics, image is everything. It's a lesson Benazir Bhutto learned at her father's knee. Hence her decision a dozen...
...military coup in 1977 and executed the following year, looms like an hallucinatory apparition over the poverty-stricken salt marshes of central Sindh Province. Meant to evoke the soaring grandeur of Mughal monuments, from a distance the concrete monstrosity rather resembles a Play-Doh model of the Taj Mahal pinched to fit on a foundation substantially trimmed by the high price of land in the family's ancestral seat of Larkana...
...Anbar, formerly the most dangerous province in the country, an area famously described as "lost" to the terrorists in a Marine intelligence report leaked to the press in 2006. "Actually, the first tentative steps in Anbar were taken in 2005," Petraeus told me over dinner one evening. "The Abu Mahal tribe out by the Syrian border turned against al-Qaeda and fought hard - but pretty soon there were five or six dead sheiks." Not just dead, apparently - beheaded and left in the street. "Over time, the word began to get around among the other tribes that al-Qaeda...
...blog last week complaining about the presence of the Starbucks inside the hallowed walls of the Forbidden City. The presence of the coffee chain there was ?eroding Chinese culture,? Rui wrote. It would be like having a Starbucks in the Louvre or at the Pyramids or the Taj Mahal, he later told a reporter. (There is a Starbucks next to the Louvre, though not actually inside the museum. And the reasons there aren't any Starbucks in Egypt or India are pretty obvious: no one can afford to buy the coffee...
...seem strange in the land of the Taj Mahal - one of the greatest-ever public displays of affection, built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his late wife - that an increase in public displays of affection is so notable, but this increase is a departure for a culture that has long kept hidden its romantic emotions. In the recent past, unmarried couples would not hold hands in public, let alone kiss or cuddle. Affairs were hushed up, as Gandhi's was for more than eight decades...