At Harvard, many students and faculty members are hostile to military and R.O.T.C. training because the military discriminates against gays. It's a fair point, and the discrimination is worth fighting. But it was the American military that deposed the Taliban, the most viciously anti-gay regime in the world, one that executed gays by knocking over walls on top of them. America's military does discriminate against gays and is a bastion of anti-gay attitudes, but it has also done more for gay rights ?albeit in Afghanistan ?then all the gay organizations in the Ivy League put together.

lol this guy is a joker... what he is basically saying is since homophobic US Military dropped a couple of daisy clusters on Taliban they are as good as saints even if they discriminate against gays at home. Wow! Because of jokers like this I get all my Comedy Central from NYT itself.

An interesting piece mainly because it is the first reference I have found of an IIT more particularly IIT Kharagpur, in fiction. Does this mean we have finally come of age?

Jai Krishna's graduation portrait from the second class of India's first law school (Calcutta University, 1859) displays the expected Victorian gravitas and none of the eager confidence of his classmates. He is a young man of twenty who looks forty; his thick, dark eyebrows form an unbroken bar, and his shadow of a mustache—an inversion of prevailing style that favored elaborately curled and wax-tipped mustaches—reveal a young man more eloquent with a disapproving frown than with his words.

For ten years I kept the graduation photo of Bishwapriya Chatterjee, my husband?lt;b>Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur</b>—on our nightstand. Last icon before falling asleep, first worshipful image of the morning. The countries, the apartments, the houses all changed, but the portrait remained. He had that eagerness, and a confident smile that promised substantial earnings. It lured my father into marriage negotiations, and it earned my not unenthusiastic acceptance of him as husband. A very predictable, very successful marriage negotiation. 

a very miraculous thing just happened: my beerbottle flipped over backwards and landed on its bottom on the floor, and I have set it upon the table to foam down, but the photos were not so lucky today and there is a small slit along the leather of my left shoe, but it's all very simple: we cannot acquire too much: there are laws we know nothing of, all manner of nudges set us to burning or freezing; what sets the blackbird in the cat's mouth is not for us to say, or why some men are jailed like pet squirrels while others nuzzle in enormous breasts through endless nights - this is the task and the terror, and we are not taught why. still, it's lucky the bottle landed straightside up, and although I have one of wine and one of whiskey, this foretells, somehow, a good night, and perhaps tomorrow my nose will be longer: new shoes, less rain, more poems.