WTF Glenn Beck, you racist a-hole! How dare you insult India this way! First off, you dumb ass, learn to pronounce a name correctly before you say it sounds like a disease. It’s the “Ganga”, not the “Gaanjees”. Oh, and quick geography lesson, you ignorant schmuck, India has way more than “that one big river”.

FOX News better get hell about this from my Indian brethren. I hope there’s a way we can completely take down anything to do with him. Maybe enough noise to his sponsors will hit him in the one place real to him – his pocketbook.

Living in Delhi, there was no way to avoid seeing the army of child beggars that roam the streets, trying to solicit money by playing on your pity. Growing up with this around you, you get conditioned to it, learning to avoid even looking at them, lest they take the look as a sign of interest and linger at your car window.

Conditions in Delhi seem to have improved quite a bit, and there are less beggars crowding your car at intersections (There are also less intersections to beg at, since Delhi is working hard to remove traffic lights and create flyovers and underpasses in an effort to keep traffic moving). Instead you get a lot of kids hawking wares, from balloons to paper mache idols of Ganesha and Durga. However, you still come across the occasional child begging for money. On a drive through Delhi, we had a young girl carrying a baby approach our car window. But instead of looking away as usual, something made me look more closely at them.

There’s a particularly powerful moment in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ during the episode when the kids are “employed” as beggars. The hero’s brother, having been made the muscle of the group, goes to organize the kids for their days work. As part of that task, he snatches a baby away from a kid, giving it to a girl deemed more marketable since carrying the baby around would help her earn double or triple her usual take.

That scene was fresh in my mind as I looked at the pair. I thought of the little girl, covered in dust and no more than 5 years old, having to carry this baby around in the Delhi sun all day. The infant couldn’t have beem more than 13 or 14 months old, malnourished as it was. As I looked into its eyes, I thought of Arav, approaching his 11th month. The infant had the same curious look in its eyes that Arav has, but there was a dull glaze that hung over it. As the girl moved from one car to another, the baby barely moved in her arms, deadened to the world whizzing past it.

I thought of the stories we heard as kids – how these street kids were kidnapped from their parents homes to be put to work. It was a scare tactic for the most part, an urban legend made up to try and keep kids safe, wary of strangers, dark alleys and wrong turns. Nonetheless, it had an impact, seared into our brains.

I thought of Arav, and the way that the world is a never-ending source of adventure, every thing he encounters something new to explore and understand. The bright look in his eyes as he moves through the world, always on the move and ready to play with anyone who wil give him time. And my heart cried. Once you have seen the innocence and life in the eyes of a baby, it is hard to watch it destroyed in anothers. I wanted to give them money, but couldn’t knowing that it would just go to their handler. I wanted to do something, but didn’t know what I could. A chink had opened up in that armor that had been so carefully crafted over my years in India. I blame Danny Boyle’s movie.

Hopefully the movie can galvanize people into taking some action that changes the lot of these kids. I know I’m going to be looking into organizations like CRY, the Mumbai Street Children Empowerment Network and Smile Foundation, and how I can help.

That is just one of many visceral emotions that I have been experiencing since yesterday, when I first heard of the attacks in Mumbai. It has been hard to watch Mumbai under siege from terrorists, victim of the kind of attack that brings back memories of a very bad day 7 years ago on this side of the world.

It isn’t that India hasn’t dealt with terrorist attacks before. Terror has been a part of life in India for decades. But these attacks, so well co-ordinated, at such a large scale and so brazen and directly confrontational, is the kind that escalates everything to a whole new level. The world we live in seems to be going straight to hell, and it is hard to maintain any kind of balance in one’s own thoughts in the face of such horror, which is the disconcerting part. Watching the images coming out of Mumbai, I find myself forming thoughts and positions that are alien to me, and that scares me.

Mumbai is in flames, and once again our world will change forever, not for the better. The election of Obama felt like a watershed moment for our world, but so does this day. It is a sad thing, to live without hope for the future. Lets pray we don’t get there.

10 years ago, nobody would have seen this coming. Today India’s Tata Motors Ltd announced their intention to buy Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor Co for about $2.3 billion.

This follows their arrival on the world scene with their ultra-cheap $2,500 Nano or “People’s Car,”. Adding the luxury brands to their arsenal of trucks, buses and cars gives them a unique (and somewhat weird) portfolio. It will be interesting to see how this deal turns out for Tata Motors, but one thing is sure: India cannot be ignored in any aspect of the world economy any more.