the Dalai Lama's Temple

The marketplace with its two main streets and a temple in the
centre is the lifeline of the place, shops displaying
merchandise in geometric patterns, beckoning the visitor.
Hand-knit woollens, shoes, prayer bells, backpacks, pickles
and chutneys, jewellery, car rentals and trekking gear at
competitive prices - it's a backpacker's dream-come-true.
Tsuglag Khang or the Dalai Lama's Temple (close to his
residence) is visible from a distance with its white awning
and tent designed to shelter devotees who congregate here
daily. A woman is circumambulating the main enclosure with a
sick dog in her arms, praying for recovery. Others prostrate
themselves repeatedly, chanting prayers. Still others simply
sit there, soaking in the calm and quiet.

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"You must try the vegetarian food at the Namgyal Cafe in the
temple precincts," a friend had suggested and my daughter
Maya I complied. We had to share the tofusprouts-veggie salad
and cheese-spinach pizza, such was their generous size, and
both were absolutely scrumptious. Even more interesting was
the manager with his long, plaited hair and collection of
international currencies displayed on the wall behind him.
The Norbulingka Institute, 8 km away in Sidhpur is a
different world - designed after the Dalai Lama's summer
palace in Lhasa, its aesthetically designed gardens and
waterways, fountains and stone walls please the senses. The
Institute nurtures Tibetan arts and crafts, language and
culture. We bought some of the products there and even toured
the Losel Dolls Museum that tells the story of Tibetan
tradition and culture.

shall be prohibited from eating

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Asked about the latest breakthrough, the Haryana chief

minister said in view of the rising gender crimes, chowmein

will be banned in Haryana for a fortnight to see if it

reduces gender crimes. "Now that we have identified the root

cause of gender crimes, we will apply the trial-and-error

method to find out what works and what doesn't. To start

with, we will ban chowmein, and the following fortnight we'll

lift the ban on it and shift the ban on burgers. Other kinds

of fast food like pizzas and French fries would also be

banned in turn. While banning each of these foods in turn and

thereby noting the crime stats, we shall conclude which food

needs to be banned in the state to curb the rate of gender

crimes. Women, of course, shall be prohibited from eating any

or all of these fast foods irrespective of any bans on any

kind of food, and it will be easier for us to shift the blame

of gender crimes on women if they are caught cooking chowmein

on the sly," he saidBANGALORE: US private equity firm

Blackstone has inked India's biggest commercial real estate

acquisition deal, which will give it 50% stake in a Bangalore

builder-owned portfolio of three business parks for $200

million (over Rs 1,000 crore).

The deal beats Citigroup's acquisition of a Mumbai office

building earlier this year for Rs 985 crore, which was bigger

than Maple Tree's Rs 800-crore buyout of 2 million sq ft from

Assetz Global Technology Park and Baring PE Partners' Rs 500

-crore investment in RMZ Corp for 6 million sq ft space.

A person familiar with the matter told ET that Blackstone,

which invests in realty firms, has bought stake in an SPV

comprising three commercial properties totalling over 10

million sq ft — Embassy Golf link and Manyata Embassy

Business Park in Bangalore and Embassy Tech Zone in Pune.

it is about the Uighurs of Xinjiang province

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This is certainly true when it comes to the unavoidable military aspects of a fight against radical Islamic terrorism. Europeans have been and will continue to be less than enthusiastic about what they emphatically do not call "the war on terror." As for Russia and China, it will be tempting for them to enjoy the spectacle of the United States bogged down in a fight with Al Qaeda and other violent Islamist groups in the Middle East and South Asia, just as it is tempting to let American power in that region be checked by a nuclear-armed Iran. The willingness of the autocrats in Moscow and Beijing to protect their fellow autocrats in Pyongyang, Tehran, and Khartoum increases the chances that the connection between terrorists and nuclear weapons will eventually be made.

Indeed, one of the problems with making the struggle against Islamic terrorism the sole focus of American foreign policy is that it produces illusions about alliance and cooperation with other great powers with whom genuine alliance is becoming impossible. The idea of genuine strategic cooperation between the United States and Russia or the United States and China in the war on terror is mostly a fiction. For Russia, the war on terror is about Chechnya. For China, it is about the Uighurs of Xinjiang province. But when it comes to Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, Russia and China tend to see not terrorists but useful partners in the great power struggle.



The great fallacy of our era has been the belief that a liberal international order rests on the triumph of ideas alone, or on the natural unfolding of human progress. It is an immensely attractive notion, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment worldview of which all of us in the liberal world are the product. Our political scientists posit theories of modernization, with sequential stages of political and economic development that lead upward toward liberalism. Our political philosophers imagine a grand historical dialectic, in which the battle of worldviews over the centuries produces, in the end, the correct liberal democratic answer. Naturally, many are inclined to believe that the Cold War ended the way it did simply because the better worldview triumphed, and that the international order that exists today is but the next stage forward in humanity's march from strife and aggression toward a peaceful and prosperous co-existence.