Imagine there’s no country, It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too.

It’s depressing to see how much media attention Pastor Terry Jones has gotten. I condemn religious nitwits of all denominations and call for consumers to boycott media trying to cash in on this story.

Here’s a much more important story, a more important man:

… Last week, we celebrated the wedding of my daughter, Pallavi. A brilliant student, she had won scholarships to Oxford University and the London School of Economics. In London, she met Julio, a young man from Spain. The two decided to take up jobs in Beijing, China. Last week, they came over from Beijing to Delhi to get married. The wedding guests included 70 friends from North America, Europe and China.

That may sound totally global, but arguably my elder son Shekhar has gone further. He too won a scholarship to Oxford University, and then taught for a year at a school in Colombo. Next he went to Toronto, Canada, for higher studies. There he met a German girl, Franziska.

They both got jobs with the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, USA. This meant that they constantly travelled on IMF business to disparate countries. Shekhar advised and went on missions to Sierra Leone, Seychelles, Kyrgyzstan and Laos. Franziska went to Rwanda, Tajikistan, and Russia. They interrupted these perambulations to get married in late 2003.

My younger son, Rustam, is only 15. Presumably he will study in Australia, marry a Nigerian girl, and settle in Peru.

Readers might think that my family was born and bred in a jet plane. The truth is more prosaic. Our ancestral home is Kargudi, a humble, obscure village in Tanjore district, Tamil Nadu. My earliest memories of it are as a house with no toilets, running water, or pukka road. …

read more – Times of India – My family and other globalisers

… Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar is a research fellow at the Cato Institute with a special focus on India and Asia. His research interests include economic change in developing countries, human rights and civil strife, political economy, energy, trade and industry. He is a prolific columnist and TV commentator in India, well-known for a popular weekly column titled “Swaminomics” in the Times of India. …

On the one hand we have incredible globalization, a mixing of religions, cultures and ethnicities. On the other, a few backward isolationists: Mennonites in Canada who have religious objections to all photos (including driver’s licenses) due to the Second Commandment prohibition against Graven images, for example.

I truly hope Mr. Aiyar and his family are the future, not followers of Terry Jones.

Thanks Peter and Warren Long.

P.S.

… We should respect the Mennonites freedom of religion. But they shouldn’t get driver’s licenses.