A Letter to the British People from a daughter of Iraq

Note: - This is a forward I got, that I think makes sense infact it is really touching. I am very much against what USA and UK are doing in iraq, it is against humanity and is going to take iraq 25-50 years behind the rest of the world in development. A cruel act of barbarianism,strengthened by headweight and misuse of power. Now read on....
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I'm sending this letter to the British people and in particular to the residents of London. For a period of hours, you have lived through moments of desperate anxiety and horror. In those hours you lost a member of your family or a friend, and we wish to tell you in total honesty that we too grieve when human lives pass away. I cannot tell you how much we hurt when we see desperation and pain on the face of another person. For we have lived through this situation – and continue to live through it every day – since your country and the United States formed an alliance and laid plans to attack Iraq.

The Prime Minister of your country, Tony Blair, said that those who carried out the explosions did so in the name of Islam. The Secretary of State of the United States, Condaleezza Rice, described the bombings as an act of barbarism. The United Nations Security Council met and unanimously condemned the event.

I would like to ask you, the free British people, to allow me to inquire: in whose name was our country blockaded for 12 years? In whose name were our cities bombed using internationally prohibited weapons? In whose name did the British army kill Iraqis and torture them? Was that in your name? Or in the name of
religion? Or humanity? Or freedom? Or democracy?

What do you call the killing of more than two million children? What do you call the pollution of the soil and the water with depleted uranium and other lethal substances?

What do you call what happened in the prisons in Iraq – in Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and the many other prison camps? What do you call the torture of men, women, and children? What do you call tying bombs to the bodies of prisoners and blowing them apart? What do you call the refinement of methods of torture for use on Iraqi prisoners – such as pulling off limbs, gouging out eyes, putting out cigarettes on their skin, and using cigarette lighters to set fire to the hair on their heads? Does the word "barbaric" adequately describe the behavior of your troops in Iraq?

May we ask why the Security Council did not condemn the massacre in al-Amiriyah and what happened in al-Fallujah, Tal'afar, Sadr City, and an-Najaf? Why does the world watch as our people are killed and tortured and not condemn the crimes being committed against us? Are you human beings and we something less? Do you think that only you can feel pain and we can't? In fact it is we who are most aware of how intense is the pain of the mother who has lost her child, or the father who has lost his family. We know very well how painful it is to lose those you love.

You don't know our martyrs, but we know them. You don't remember them, but we remember them. You don't cry over them, but we cry over them.

Have you heard the name of the little girl Hannan Salih Matrud? Or of the boy Ahmad Jabir Karim? Or Sa'id Shabram?

Yes, our dead have names too. They have faces and stories and memories. There was a time when they were among us, laughing and playing. They had dreams, just as you have. They had a tomorrow awaiting them. But today they sleep among us with no tomorrow on which to wake.

We don't hate the British people or the peoples of the world. This war was imposed upon us, but we are now fighting it in defense of our selves. Because we want to live in our homeland – the free land of Iraq – and to live as we want to live, not as your government or the American government wish.

Let the families of those killed know that responsibility for the Thursday morning London bombings lies with Tony Blair and his policies. Stop your war against our people! Stop the daily killing that your troops commit! End your occupation of our homeland!

Iman al-Saadun, Friday, 8 July 2005

Blogger corrects posts bug in Dashboard

For a long long time folks at blogger, it seems knowingly ignored the "posts bug", the number of posts in your blog and the last update date were displayed wrongly in the dashboard. I login to blogger today and see that they have fixed.

blogger team, good you woke up.

cheers,
Badrinath.V.S :-)

Jorn Barger - Father of weblogs - Goes broke

More details here http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/posts.html?pg=6?tw=wn_tophead_7

Moral : -Inventing something doesn't help you have to improvise on it.

Badrinath.V.S :-(
P.S :- I feel sorry for him.

Her!!!

The first time I met her there were no thunder storms, no butterflies flying in the stomach and nor were there any cupids arrows flying around. It was just a chanced happening.

One of my friends had called her to his place to discuss something and since I was there with him at that time I got the chance to meet her. She is no Aishwarya Rai and neither is she that fair complexioned, skinny, sleeveless T-Shirt, jeans pants wearing kind, so one look at her and my eyes cheated by the non existence of the substance they were looking for rejected her as not "my material" but the heart somehow changed pace -- maybe it received signals that someone was going to gain everlasting presence in it.

The next time I got to get real close to her was at a restaurant. Her ear rings reflecting the spot lights, her face beaming with smile, her thick black hair that could make a raven jealous, flowing in the light wind ---- for moments I lost touch with the world, all that my eyes could see and heart could perceive was her.

Soon after that we started running into each other quite frequently. Although in all these meeting of ours we spoke no words, neither through eyes nor through the mouth my respect and admiration for her kept growing.

Whenever I got to speak in her presence, I would unfold my bag of wise cracks, if she giggled I would continue with more, her smile was worth many million applause. At the end of all this laughing I felt I had gotten close to her but what she really thought of me I could never decipher for her eyes and lips adhered to her dress code and revealed almost nothing.

Suddenly here was a gal who I would die to listen to, someone I could keep watching for hours but yet not get bored or distracted, whom I dint check out but truly admired, a gal whose only two body parts I intently watched were her face and legs. The former gleefully when she approached me, the latter painfully when she was leaving.

Her sweet non teeth revealing smile kept rolling in my mind like some musical number. The twinkle of her eyes from behind her disproportionate spectacles made me forget the many "sunrises near the horizon" that I had seen. Slowly but steadily she was crushing my ability to admire other gals, may be that’s why they call they way I felt a crush.

Finally I decided to break the ice. I selected a D-day and started rehearsing the opening lines of the conversation we would have. Then suddenly this vulture in me took control of my senses from the love bird.

“Stop it for heavens sake” It yelled within “it’s just a crush. Gals will come and gals will go but you have bigger dreams to pursue, don’t digress from thy motive in life.”

"But but .... " The love bird within squealed frightened by the vulture's intimidating voice."No buts, dont get stupid, there is one life and many important missions and there are many many more important things to do than pursue this crush,waste time admiring someone, involve less in your other passions, digress from your chief motives in life and repent later.... I take control from now on" the vulture commanded.

So saying it devoured the love bird in me. Now and may be forever converting her into just a sweet river of memory flowing serenely in the dense jungles of my thoughts.

Cheers,
Badrinath.V.S :-)