My friend opines on stuff

Thursday was all about me. I spent time with a few of my oldest friends, people I've known since 1993. It was a great reunion. Of the five of us (who formed a group) three are married(JBR, Arun and Chandu), one of those has a kid (Arun), another was getting engaged on Thursday (that was Satish's enagement where the reunion happened) and I, being the youngest, am currently the only single one. Rarely do the five of us get to meet, probably happened just once, but four of us is rare too. We reminisced about common friends, teachers, updated each other on our work etc.

After the engagement I got together with my friend JBR and went to his apt. JBR is an ultra-Right wing conservative. He makes my American conservative friends seem like radicals by comparison. (Only Arun is arguably more conservative) When JBR and I start talking, time just flies. He had to push me out of his apt in the end, and even that was because he is now a married man. Or else God knows we'd still be talking about stuff.

A few things I learned -

• Maybe it's just him but his primary complaint to me about Obama was "How in the world are you guys electing a Muslim candidate?" I had to explain to him that Obama was in fact Christian, his Muslim-sounding middle name not withstanding. And then explain to him that the bigger deal in this election was that a Black man was going to get elected President of the US, which is a big deal since the US had segregation as recently as a few decades ago.
  
• On a related note, there is a good chance the country might have its first lower caste Prime Minister - Mayawati - after this election.
  
• There is no true Right-Left division in India. The BJP is Right on social issues, but Congress is more Right on Economic issues. However Congress on social issues blows whichever way the wind blows. The Left in India - the communist parties - ironically have a lot of deals with some Right wing parties like TDP. In West Bengal, it's the Trinamool Congress that opposing the deal to give land (purchased from the farmers) to Tata for the Nano plant. The CM, who is from a Communist party supports the land deal. 
• Whenever Pakistan supports the "oppressed" Muslims in Kashmir, it's not the people they care for. It's the land. So here's his deal - we will provide safe passage to all the Muslims in Kashmir (who feel oppressed) to Pakistan, in turn, shut the hell up and stop killing Indians in India. Sounds like a fair deal to me. 
• (This point my dad brought up independently.) The formation of a separate Telangana state from AP is not a bad thing - as long as Hyderbad is not part of the new state. The Telangana movement is nothing but a political move by politicians who fancy themselves leaders and want to steal the crown jewel of the state for themselves. So let Hyderabad be a centrally-governed province and let's split up the rest. Of course, the Telangana folk will cry bloody murder at this because other than Hyderabad, the rest of Telangana is just barren land.