World is Abstract

Arrival at Hotel Courtyard Marriot, by Media Bus at Hua Hin,famous beach resort, 200km from Bangkok(23/10/09) View from hotel room...overlooking the ocean Morning sky..view from hotel speeding across-Hua Hin Night Bazar..Hua Hin Night Bazar..Hua Hin PM's interaction with media at Hilton Hote, Hua Hin (25/10/09) Media Centre(Marriot) Photo exhibition. Dusit Thani hotel, venue for 15th ASEAN Summit, Hua Hin Me and Nirmal Pathak..waiting for Godot..Hua Hin Media Marquee, Dusit Thani Venue-15th ASEAN Summit, Hua Hin, Thailand

Ten days I spent with them. The dreaded soldiers in the green. For the security forces, they are trained to kill. The merciless assassins, who stalk the jungles of Chhattisgarh. Their ideology, if you ask me, is somewhat warped. The call for annihilation of the "class enemies" has actually lost its meaning. Yet they carry the guns to bring about a revolution, which, even they know would remain a distant dream. While spending days and nights... I discovered the other side of these killing machines..They laugh, they want to live and they are often shy and of course they were the women, who carried our luggages, when we failed to carry them....and the jungle calls...which haunt us...even today

Me and Hemendra Sharma of CNN-IBN crossing a stream with the help of the PLGA soldiers inside the Chhatisgarh jungle (Pix by Ranjan Basu, photo editor, The Sunday Indian) Maoist rebels begin urban push By Sanjay Basak New Delhi June 10: Maoist rebels, who are now observing "Jan Pituri Saptah (revolutionary week)" in Chhattisgarh, have blown up power lines and disrupted communication links, targeting industries and power stations in the Abhujmar and Bastar regions and plunging much of the state into darkness. A senior state police officer, in a telephonic conversation with this newspaper, said that the Maoists, who had declared a "parallel government" some time back, were now trying to move from the jungles to urban areas. The blast at Durg on June 8, in which three CRPF jawans were killed, and the attack on the Bishrampur police station "are clear signals that they are pushing towards urban areas," he said. Comrade Sonu, a top Maoist central committee memb...

Sanjay Basak interviewing the second-in-command in the Central Committee of the Maoists, Comrade Sonu....(top) Maoists...our guides in the jungles of Chhattisgarh Training camp..somewhere in Chhattisgarh (Pix by Ranjan Basu, photo editor, The Sunday Indian) Inside the Maoist World (The Sunday Indian) As the weak rays of the red sun struggled to break through the dense mist on a frosty wintermorning, we saw her for the first time. Clad in a green uniform, with a .303 rifle firmly gripped in her left hand, she was leaning against the door post. The comrade, a soldier in the band of dreaded Maoists, was supervising the preparation of our breakfast, “Poha” (a mixture of beaten rice and peanuts).” The day before, travelling in a Bolero, on that isolated stretch of Pakhanjur Road, notorious for the IED blasts carried out by the Maoists at regular intervals, we were heading for a village in the Kanker district of Chhattisgarh. Around 9 pm, after driving for nearly seven hours, racin...