Daily Times India

Guwahati, Nov 1 (IANS) Assam saw a spate of abductions over the weekend. While a civil engineer was kidnapped by suspected militants of the outlawed National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), another abducted engineer was rescued and security forces foiled an attempt to kidnap a third engineer.

Two kidnapped forest guards were also released after they were severely beaten up.

A police spokesperson said Anchal Modi, a 25-year-old civil engineer working for construction firm Bharatiya Associates, was kidnapped by suspected NDFB militants from near Pasighat in the adjoining state of Arunachal Pradesh.

Bharatiya Associates was engaged in construction work of the Bogibeel Bridge over Brahmaputra River in Dhemaji district in eastern Assam where Modi was a project manager.

“Modi had gone for sightseeing to Pasighat Saturday when about seven to eight NDFB militants kidnapped him. We suspect the militants trailed Modi from the construction site to Pasighat,” a police official said.

Although no details were available, police suspect the engineer was kidnapped for ransom.

Security forces, however, managed to foil a separate attempt by NDFB militants to abduct railway chief engineer R. Ram from near Koithalkuchi in Nalbari district Saturday.

“The chief engineer was inspecting railway tracks in the area when we got information that there was an attempt planned to kidnap him. We managed to foil the kidnap bid before the NDFB militants could reach the spot,” the official said.

In a separate incident, two forest guards of the Sonai Rupai Wildlife Sanctuary in Sonitpur district were kidnapped by NDFB militants Saturday although both were released a few hours later.

“The militants, however, took away their service rifles and radio sets before severely assaulting the two and leaving them by the roadside,” the official said.

In yet another incident Saturday, an Assam government engineer was kidnapped by suspected militants of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) from Tangla in Udalguri district in north Assam.

Nur Mohammed, an engineer with the irrigation department, was kidnapped at gunpoint as he was returning after inspecting a project site.

“The ULFA militants demanded money from Mohammed and when he refused to pay he was kidnapped,” the official said.

Based on specific intelligence, security forces managed to rescue Mohammed in the evening from a nearby village.

“The ULFA militants fled on seeing a security team which arrived in the village based on specific information. We rescued Mohammed although the abductors took away his mobile phone and other things,” the official said.

Meanwhile, the whereabouts of Andhra Pradesh engineer P. Krishna Rao, project manager of Gayatri Construction Company, who was kidnapped by NDFB militants three weeks back, was still not known. He was abducted from near the National Highway construction site in Kokrajhar district.

New Delhi, Nov 1 (IANS) Five people of Indian origin are on a journey to India to visit the villages that their ancestors left over a hundred years ago to work on sugar plantations in Caribbean colonies.

Budhan Devi, an insurance consultant from New York, said: “It has always been a burning desire to find out about our grandfather; he was estranged from his family. We did not know how to locate the ancestral village, but my cousin managed to obtain some information from the archives. Now we have finally got in touch with some distant relations in Rudhouli.”

Devi is thrilled to be travelling with her mother, Radha, to Rudhouli village in Basti district in Uttar Pradesh.

The group of five are people who have themselves migrated from Guyana to Canada or America. Having been displaced from their moorings in Guyana, they were keen to discover their Indian roots. But locating an ancestral village is not easy, even if the name and address is available.

It was the International Foundation for Vedic Studies, a not-for-profit organisation based in Canada that undertook the ancestor search programme for 10 search requests. The foundation contacted the Uttar Pradesh-based NGO, Sri Ramanand Saraswati Pustakalya (SRSP), which sent out its researchers into the countryside to locate the villages.

An ebullient Evelyn Swamy discovered the ancestral village of Jamuni from where her maternal grandfather’s mother had made the journey to Guyana. Part of the family has moved out of the village and one distant cousin lives in Panipat, Haryana.

“It has been a long-time dream of mine to go to my ancestors’ home and maybe meet some relatives. I never thought it would be possible after such a long time, but the ancestral search programme located the village.” Evelyn spoke to her relatives and they were anxious to meet her, she said.

There was a slight problem as Evelyn speaks “very little Hindi”. Finally, she got a call from the cousin in Panipat who could speak a smattering of English. There was great excitement and the family decided that one of the younger relatives in the village would go through a crash course in the English language so that they could communicate with each other. And Evelyn said, “It doesn’t matter. They speak a little English and I speak a little Hindi and we will manage; after all we are kin.”

The others in the group include Ashwini Kumar Rajpal of the International Foundation for Vedic Studies who located his ancestor Gangaiah’s village in Doriaghat while his wife Sita found her great grandfather Chutkan’s village, Gohna, in Basti district. Govind Prasad Sukhram’s ancestor came from Azamgarh.

The process of locating ancestral villages was a not a simple search on the map; it entailed a good deal of field work. Village addresses are usually obtained from the indenture documents of migrants. Many villages have grown larger over the years and been bifurcated, others have had their names changed and even the districts have changed. To make the task even more difficult, the old documents used archaic spellings that bear little resemblance to present-day names.

The SRSP is based in Jokehara village of Azamgarh district and is involved in gender empowerment and imparting vocational training to youth and women of the area. Its workers were familiar with the region and they visited small towns, looked at land records and spoke to the elderly men and women in the villages to identify the places from where people had migrated many decades ago.

Sita’s ancestor Chutkun’s village was listed as Gohna, but there were two villages with similar names, Gohna Deeh and Gohna Tal, in the district. Fortunately, the SRSP researchers could identify the village as Gohna Deeh when they met an old woman who recalled her mother-in-law saying someone from their family had left for ‘demra dweep’ (Demerara was a region in British Guiana).

Evelyn now plans to initiate a search for her grandmother’s relatives somewhere in West Bengal. Unfortunately, there are no records available about their antecedents, but he has not lost hope. The desire to revive bonds of kinship and belonging are even greater now.

(Shubha Singh is a writer on the Indian diaspora and international affairs. She can be reached at shubhasingh101@gmail.com)

Imphal, Nov 1 (IANS) Seven separatists were killed in a pre-dawn encounter with security forces Sunday in the northeastern state of Manipur, police said.

A police spokesperson said the encounter took place between a group of heavily armed militants and a column of the paramilitary Assam Rifles near village Sanapat in Imphal East district, about 30 km southeast of Manipur’s capital Imphal.

“Based on hard intelligence, an Assam Rifles column went to the area for an anti-insurgency operation when they came under attack from the militants with automatic weapons,” the police officer said.

The Assam Rifles troopers retaliated and the encounter lasted for close to an hour in which seven militants were killed.

“Maybe, a few of them might have escaped under the cover of darkness,” the officer said.

A huge cache of explosives and weapons, including rifles, carbines, and small arms, was recovered from the dead militants.

The identity of the militants was not established as yet.

“The process of identification is on although we are not sure as to which group they belong to,” the officer said.

There are some 20 militant groups active in Manipur, a state of 2.4 million people bordering Myanmar, with demands ranging from secession to greater autonomy.

More than 10,000 people have lost their lives to insurgency in Manipur during the past two decades.

Vladivostok, Nov 1 (RIA Novosti) A Russian interior ministry plane with 11 crewmembers on board crashed several minutes after taking off in Yakutia, authorities said Sunday.

“All 11 people died in the air crash,” a spokesman for the ministry’s regional centre said.

The spokesman said the plane, an Il-76 Candid strategic airlifter, bound for the city of Irkutsk, fell and caught fire about three kilometres from Mirny airport.

Seven crew as well as four members from a replacement crew were on board.

New Delhi, Nov 1 (IANS) India’s exports of services, which declined in the first two quarters of 2009, will return to growth by the year-end, according to a report by the the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).

The overall services exports declined by seven percent during January-March this year and by three percent in the subsequent quarter as compared to a positive growth of 14 percent and 22 percent respectively in the first two quarters of 2008.

“All the major segments of services exports except insurance and financial services witnessed contraction since January 2009,” the chamber said in the report.

Added FICCI president Harshpati Singhania: “This has resulted in a subdued growth of 12.4 percent in India’s total services exports in 2008-09 as compared with over 22 percent increase in 2007-08.”

The report said India’s exports of software services declined by 14 percent in the first half of 2009.

Earnings from travel fell by 26 percent during the January-March quarter and by nine percent in the subsequent quarter, signifying the effect of the slowdown on tourist arrivals.

Tourist arrivals were down by 9.5 percent in the second half of 2008-09 and by 1.8 percent in first quarter of the current fiscal, the FICCI report said.

Receipts from trade-related services dipped sharply by 56 percent and 27 percent respectively in the first and second quarters of 2009, it added.

Among other major segments, communication and business camp, professional services including management consultancy, architectural, engineering, technical and other business services also registered negative growth ranging from four percent to 53 percent.

In recent years India has made rapid stride in services exports and improved its share in worldwide exports from 1.2 percent in 2000 to 2.7 percent in 2008.

India’s rank among leading services exporters in the world moved up from 22 to nine, with the value of commercial services exports from India rising from $17.6 billion to over $102 billion in the same period.

Services exports to the gross domestic product (GDP) ratio currently stands at around nine percent.

According to FICCI, the negative growth in the last two quarters is “a temporary phenomenon and our services exports have the resilience to make a quick recovery”.

Said Singhania: “India has the capability to double its share in the global services exports in the next four-five years.”

But for that, he said, the developed world should offer “effective market access” for the service providers and professionals from India and other developing countries.

Mumbai, Nov 1 (IANS) Karan Johar’s upcoming “Kurbaan” is being likened to films on terror like “New York” and “Fanaa” but the filmmaker is no longer giving the straight-jacketed ‘It’s truly different’ reply. He has instead left it to the audiences to find out if there are any similarities between the movies.

“That’s because this isn’t the first time that it’s happening to a film coming from Dharma Productions. When ‘Wake Up Sid’ was being made, people asked whether it had any similarities to ‘Lakshya’. Now when the movie has released and is finding so much appreciation, the same people are coming back and telling me that ‘Oh, this one was so different’,” Karan told IANS.

He has quite a few other examples — “Kal Ho Naa Ho” was said to be a remake of “Anand” while “Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna” appeared to have its germ in “Silsila”.

“And didn’t all these ‘germs’ just disappear when the films released and talked their own language? See, the fact is that originality has always been the strength of Dharma Productions. We don’t like to emulate other films.

“This is why I would rather talk about ‘Kurbaan’ and its so-called similarities after it is out in theatres. That’s because by that time audiences would have seen the film and realised that ‘Kurbaan’ is a film about its own world,” Karan said.

Directed by Rensil D’Silva, ‘Kurbaan’ stars Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor.

Asked about the film, Karan said: “There is very little that you can compare this film with any other Hindi films that you name. It’s just that the protagonists are in a zone where terror is on the forefront.

“At ‘Kurbaan’, we are scratching the surface a little harder when it comes to global terrorism. We are dealing with an absolutely different tone and syntax.”

He rues that audiences as well as filmmakers have started looking at every product suspiciously.

“The sad part is that whenever a new film comes, whether from my company or any other, we start believing that people are not really offering anything original. We start looking for inspirations and immediately draw a connect. This has happened time and again. It’s so unfortunate that we have lost faith in originality,” said Karan.

He is however happy that first time director Rensil D’Silva has brought in a different point of view in the film.

” ‘Kurbaan’ is written by me but has taken a great dimension due to the virtue of Rensil’s own point of view. This is something that comes across quite strongly in the film.

“Since he comes with a global thought process, it has penetrated into the narrative of the film as well. There is an intellectual look at the situation without any bias in the narrative. I can proudly declare that ‘Kurbaan’ isn’t anything like what has been seen on celluloid before.”

Also starring Vivek Oberoi, Om Puri, Kirron Kher and Dia Mirza in key roles, “Kurbaan” is set for a Nov 20 release.

Washington, Nov 1 (DPA) Six Chinese Uighurs who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp were released to the Pacific island nation of Palau, the US Justice Department said.

The Chinese Muslims have been held at Guantanamo for years even though the Pentagon has declared they are not enemy combatants and are eligible for release.

The Obama administration has been seeking out third countries who can resettle the detainees as it tries to close the controversial prison on the remote US naval base in Cuba by the end of January.

“As we near the completion of our review of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, we will continue to work closely with the Department of State to implement transfer decisions, and we are grateful to the Republic of Palau for its assistance in the resettlement of these individuals,” Matthew Olsen, executive director of the Guantanamo review task force, said in a statement Saturday.

The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear appeals by the Uighurs still held at the remote military base in Cuba.

A federal judge in October 2008 ordered the government to release the Uighurs into the United States if other countries cannot be found, but that decision was later overturned by a higher court.

The United States transferred four of the detainees to Bermuda in June. Washington refuses to send the Uighurs back to China over concerns they will be abused.

More than 550 detainees have been transferred from Guantanamo to other countries.

By Ruchika Kher

New Delhi, Nov 1 (IANS) Bollywood’s latest heartthrob Ranbir Kapoor can go on and on about his “Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani” co-star Katrina Kaif. He finds her drive and passion for work inspiring and says she is “the nicest person in the industry”.

“The drive that Katrina has is inspiring. She is there and she just doesn’t stop. She has come a long way from where she started and where she is today,” Ranbir told IANS in an interview here.

“She is India’s biggest actress and there is a lot of hard work, sacrifice and passion she has put behind that and I totally respect that. And the best part is that she doesn’t take that for granted,” the 28-year-old actor said.

Ranbir, who will be seen again with Katrina in Prakash Jha’s political thriller “Rajneeti”, describes Katrina as the “nicest person in the industry”.

“There is an amazing positive energy about her. She is hardworking and everything she does is for the betterment of the movie. She is fun loving, passionate about cinema and passionate about her work. I share a great rapport with her,” he said.

His “Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani” is slated for release Nov 6 and shows the story of a happy-go-lucky boy, who falls in love with a girl. But the girl is in love with someone else. The film also has a special appearance by Salman Khan.

Asked about his on-screen chemistry with Katrina, Ranbir said: “As far as chemistry is concerned, I always believe that chemistry never happens between two actors, it happens between two characters in the movie. It depends how the characters are written in the script and the moments and the scenes between them. That’s when chemistry happens.

“Katrina and I are working for the first time, so people are finding this pairing new and fresh, but unless the film releases and unless it becomes a hit, you never know whether the chemistry has worked out or not,” he said.

Ranbir, son of actors Rishi and Neetu Kapoor, made his acting debut in 2007 with Sanjay Leela’s Bhansali’s “Saawariya” opposite newcomer Sonam Kapoor. The film failed at the box office, but it didn’t deter his growth as he received positive reviews for his performance and got good offers.

Siddharth Anand’s romantic comedy “Bachna Ae Haseeno” was his second film and it hit the jackpot at the box office. And now everyone – from critics to audiences – are going ga ga over his performance in “Wake Up Sid”, in which he was paired opposite Konkana Sen Sharma.

After “Ajab Prem…”, Ranbir will be seen in Shimit Amin’s “Rocket Singh: Salesman of The Year”, “Rajneeti” and Siddharth Anand’s “Anjaana Anjaani”.

Havana, Nov 1 (EFE) Cuban leader Fidel Castro has said that tourists from countries like Canada and Spain brought the AH1N1 flu virus to his country, and that US President Barack Obama influenced it by easing restrictions on Cuban-Americans’ visits to the island.

In a new article released by the Cuban news media Saturday, Castro recalls that “the initial symptoms of AH1N1 arose in Mexico in the first quarter of this year, and almost simultaneously spread to the US and Canada,” and from there “it reached Spain”.

“When the current US president raised restrictions on Cuban-Americans traveling to Cuba, the epidemic had already reached a great number of states in that nation. Thus it happened that the four countries generating the most tourism and travel for other reasons to our country were those that, to a high degree, were suffering from the epidemic,” he said.

In April, US President Barack Obama eliminated limits on Cuban-Americans’ travel and remittances to the island, and gave the green light to the possibility that telecommunications firms could offer cell phone services in Cuba.

According to Castro, “the first carriers of the virus (in Cuba) were travellers,” initially the number of people infected on the island “were relatively few”, and for months there were no deaths.

“But to the degree that the virus spread to all provinces, chiefly those with the greatest number of family members living in the United States, it became necessary to acquire new analysis equipment,” the article said.

“So we have the strange case that the US on the one hand authorized travel for a greater number of carriers of the virus, and on the other, bans the acquisition of equipment and medicines to combat the epidemic,” Castro said.

The Cuban ex-president further said that he does think “that this was the intention of the United States government, but it is the real result of the absurd and shameful blockade imposed on our people.”

Nicosia, Nov 1 (IANS) Cyprus has expressed its support for a permanent seat for India in an expanded UN Security Council.

Cyprus President Demetris Christofias while speaking Saturday at a state banquet in honour of visiting Indian President Pratibha Patil said his country considers India a very important country at the regional and international level, Xinhua reported.

“Should a decision on the reform of the UN Security Council be made, India would deserve a permanent seat in such a body which would have enhanced authority and would enjoy the highest possible approval,” he said.

The Indian President thanked Cyprus for “deep understanding” of India’s national aspirations.

“India values the consistent support that Cyprus has extended on issues of vital concern,” she added.

India and Cyprus have enjoyed traditional friendship. Indian leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had personal friendship with Archbishop Makarios, Cyprus’ first president after independence.

Patil arrived in Cyprus Thursday evening following a state visit to Britain. She is the first Indian President to visit the island state in the last 20 years. Cyprus’ late President Tassos Papadopoulos visited India in 2006.