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Tribute to Manjunath Shameful exit Leave the martyrs alone |
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Politics and economics of MSP
World is a Cup
Net information is not knowledge The crushing fear that stalks America Chatterati
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Tribute to Manjunath IT is indeed gratifying that the S. Manjunath murder case is coming to an end with Lakhimpur District and Sessions Judge S.M.A. Abidi slated to announce today the quantum of punishment for the eight accused, who have been found guilty. The court, the police and the prosecution have reason to be elated over the relatively quick manner in which the case was dealt with. Civil society organisations, particularly the media, played a great role in focusing public attention on the murder of the Indian Oil Corporation official, who could not look the other way when he found rampant adulteration of petrol and diesel going on right under his nose. The young official, who should have been feted for fighting corruption and given all the necessary institutional support was, instead, left to fend for himself. The racketeers, who thrived on mixing petrol with kerosene and other adulterants, made full use of his vulnerability in a distant place and bumped him off. Even after the murder, they tried to browbeat the criminal justice system by putting pressure on the witnesses, some of whom even turned hostile. It was perseverance of the prosecution and determination of the judge that finally sealed the fate of the accused. However, the issues that the murder raised have not yet been addressed. Manjunath had found to his horror that some IOC officials were hand in glove with the petrol station owners in cheating the consumers. No step seems to have been taken to end this nexus and assure the consumers supply of fuel in both quantity and quality. The hope that the murder would expedite the Central government’s decision to bring forward a comprehensive legislation to give protection to whistleblowers, too, has been belied. As Manjunath’s brother said, the family was no longer in a position to feel happy about the verdict, however welcome it was. All those who felt sorrow at the murder of the young man would have felt happier if the murder had prompted the nation to do something about the problem of corruption that ultimately snuffed the life out of the young official. That would have been a real tribute to Manjunath, far better than the encomiums paid to him for his bravery and honesty. |
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Shameful exit WHILE you would expect teams to rise to an occasion, this Indian cricket team had clearly saved its worst for the ICC World Cup 2007. It is this lack of heart and the failure to lift their game when it mattered most that has seen Dravid’s men facing the prospect of ignominiously crashing out in the preliminary stage itself. In fact, this team never really got started, what with the debacle against Bangladesh, which has proved a portent of things to come. Barring their fancy score against non-entities Bermuda, the Indians really have nothing to take away. Robin Uthappa’s introduction to the big stage failed to come off, and Rahul Dravid’s persistence with Virendra Sehwag has not paid the kind of dividends it should have. And while Saurav Ganguly indeed had a string of good scores, one failure in a crucial tie put paid to all the hard work. And with another Tendulkar failure in an all-important match, India had no chance at all. And what was the point of taking Dinesh Karthik all the way to the Caribbean if he was not going to get a single game? In any case, there is a clear sense that the team has gone soft. Too much ad money in the BCCI’s pot and in cricketers’ bank accounts may indeed be queering the pitch. Enough people have attested to the fact that the players’ commercial commitments are indeed interfering with their training and temperament. The BCCI may well have to consider some regulation during the playing seasons, if not an outright ban. If players can’t talk to the media, they should not be pulling funny faces on TV, either. Of course, both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka played good cricket against India. But the tournament is all set to turn out like the Champions Trophy, with all the sub-continental teams failing to make a mark. This debacle may be just what is required to shake off the team’s deadwood, induct fresh blood, and simultaneously focus on building solid bench strength, a serious lacuna today in Indian cricket. |
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Leave the martyrs alone IT is customary to pay tributes to heroes who gave up their lives during the struggle against the British for Independence. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru figure very high on the list, admired as they are by one and all. The memory of their great deeds has motivated several generations of Indians. Even today there are countless people for whom their sacrifice is sacred. All such genuine admirers must have been saddened no end at the unsavoury happenings on their 76th martyrdom day on Friday. If the state-level function at Bhagat Singh’s native village Khatkarkalan was used by leaders to make political speeches and trade charges, two groups of Congressmen engaged in a verbal duel at a function in Amritsar. A similar sordid story of feuding was played out at Gurdaspur as well. Taking a cue from the leaders, common people visiting the annual function at Hussainiwala treated it as a common fair meant for having fun and listening to songs played by artistes on the stage set up by the Punjab Government. The selfless martyrs must have been aghast at the political games being played in their name by lesser mortals. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru and other such idols who willingly laid down their lives so that we can be a free nation never had any political ambitions for themselves. Yet, puny politicians who have no respect for principles have appropriated their sacred memory. Recalling what the great martyrs did should shame the unscrupulous leaders who prefer their own interests to those of the nation. No price is too high for independence but is this the kind of independence for which they fought and gave up their lives? What a shame that freedom has come to mean a licence for some people to loot and befool the country! |
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall. —
Alan Bennett |
Politics and economics of MSP THE Central government has enhanced the minimum support price (MSP) of wheat by Rs 100 as bonus. It is no doubt a decision that is consistent with the world price environment. Normally, it is better to reward domestic producers rather than pay higher prices in the world market. In fact, the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), while recommending the minimum support prices, should have taken cognizance of the world market situation along with considering the domestic environment in respect of supply and demand projections and the stock position. In a situation when world prices are ruling high and the domestic demand exceeds the projected supplies, it is essential for the government to enter the domestic market at competitive prices for procuring targeted quantities of foodgrains if private trade is not Old tactics like putting limits on the holding of stocks by private players, restrictions on food credit, denying railway wagons, restricting the movements of grains, etc, have no place in the reforms aimed at free trade that is being promoted in the country. With the environment of scarcity for a year created through the mismanagement of the food economy has panicked the policy makers into actions like banning exports and forward trading. It is all ad hoc actions at their worst. After the mid-eighties, we have been squeezing our farmers end to end. Before that we were paying domestic producers higher prices than those prevailing in the world market at a level that would meet their average cost of production plus reasonable profit. World market prices being highly volatile, these did not figure much in determining the minimum support prices. The situation was such that there was no difference in the minimum support prices and procurement prices. The minimum support prices became de facto procurement prices in spite of the world prices remaining lower than domestic prices. The domestic needs could be met out of domestic procurement. In fact, we had to export foodgrains at huge losses and many often at a price even below the BPL prices. In the situation that we created through excessive exports of more than 35 million tonnes of foodgrains in five years from 2000-01 to 2005-06 at huge losses and opening the market to private trade, exports and forward trading at one go landed us as buyers in the bullish world market. When India enters the world market as a buyer or a seller or even shows such intentions, it affects international prices to its disadvantage. In the creation of our own actions, it is no fault of the domestic producers and there is no reason why they should be paid less than the world market prices. In fact, if the domestic procurement prices are lower than the world market prices and food stocks are at low ebb, bigger farmers hold back their produce from the market and private trade starts hoarding, adding further to the scarcity sentiments. This situation can be tackled effectively by separating the procurement prices from the minimum support prices. The minimum support price is the statutory guaranteed price at which the government is obliged to lift all the supplies in the market. This price is a kind of minimum assurance to the producers from the government as a buyer of last resort, which guides them in making their decisions on the planting of areas under different crops and intensities of input use. The procurement price is, however, supply and demand driven that enables the government to procure the required/targeted quantities of the produce. The CACP should recommend and, based on its recommendation, the government should announce the minimum support price for all the listed commodities at least two months before the sowing/planting time, and the procurement price should be recommended and announced at least two weeks before the produce starts coming to the market. Determinants of the two prices are absolutely different. The first set of determinants emerges out of the socio-economic concern to keep the producer in business in case the price slumps or the market crashes. The second set of determinants emerges out of the concern to replenish or build up stocks and to meet the current requirements of the public distribution system. There should always be an economic base for these decisions. Unfortunately, of late, particularly during the last one decade, political decisions are being made under the influence of pressure groups, without any economic rationale and the CACP has been rendered almost irrelevant. One wonders if there is any justification for the CACP to exist under such a populist political decision-making environment. In the present scenario, if the state-level political decisions are juxtaposed on the Central government’s decisions on the minimum support prices, Punjab is a clear loser. Punjab supplies free electricity and water to the farmers, incidence of which ultimately falls on the honest taxpayers. No political decision-maker pays it from his own pocket. Unfortunately, this outgo from the pockets of the taxpayers nowhere figures in the cost of production of the farmers in the calculations of the CACP. If the farmers do not pay the power and water costs, they are also not paid the minimum support prices that account for these costs. Farmers, thus, do not gain and the taxpayer of Punjab ends up supporting the consumers of mainly the deficit states through lower issue prices based on lower minimum support prices. Now that through a political decision the minimum support price of wheat for all the farmers of the country have been raised by Rs 100 per quintal, where is the compensation for the costs incurred by the taxpayers of Punjab? This has been draining the resources of the state year after year and no political party in power has tried to comprehend that de facto they are subsidising the consumers of the deficit state, not the farmers of Punjab. This is a classical case of disastrous political decisions devoid of any sound economic base. Assuming that the government now will not be able to retrace its steps on the free supply of power and irrigation water to the farmers of the state, the question that begs answer is how to retrieve the social costs incurred through the state exchequer, benefits of which flow unintentionally to the consumers instead of the farmers of the state. The only way open appears to be to charge power and water cess from the buyers equivalent to the cost of power and irrigation water used per quintal of foodgrains. This will reimburse the costs to the state exchequer, which otherwise go unaccounted for in the agricultural pricing system. Short of such a cess, any increase in the prices will benefit the farmers only and in no way will the taxpayer of the state on whose cost free power and irrigation water are supplied to the farmers get compensated. Even this approach will compensate only the financial costs that the state incurs and will not help non-financial costs suffered by the residents of Punjab and also will not avoid the disastrous depletion of the water-table in the state, for the remedy of which a separate policy stance has to be put in place. Yet, it requires differentiating vision and political will to analyse and pursue this course of action dispassionately. The previous government proved itself to be absolutely immune to such rationale. Let us hope that the new government and its think-tank will seriously apply themselves to this unenviable situation in which the state is
today.
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World is a Cup THIS World Cup one cannot help but feel sad for newspapers here. Due to this technical difficulty of being published from an altogether different time zone, they really don’t have much to do except write epitaphs on what happened 24 hours back in the Caribbean. By that time TV channels, Siddhu ji, Ajay Jadeja ji, Mandira Bedi ji, et al have said it all, shown it all, over and over and over again. So, here are a couple of free, well-meaning advices to newspapers on how to deal with situation and emerge a winner. But before that, here’s one for Mandira ji. Well, Mandira ji, we sat up till late night and saw you raising points on the first match between the West Indies and Pakistan on March 13 and were shocked. What on the earth was that monstrosity that you were wearing? Now we all admire and share your enthusiasm for your newly acquired, though fumbling, cricket gyan. But believe me, more than that we love you for your truly amazing spaghetti and noodle straps. Whatever happened to them? Where have you keep them? According to an independent survey conducted the very next morning, it was found that males among homosapiens, the specie that anthropologists believe to be the only ones interested in cricket, lost considerable interest in the game. So for God’s and advertiser’s sake, please let the experts talk. As it is there are far too many of them. You do what you have always excel at, look good. For the newspapers, here goes: 1. Change the time of your editions till the time the World Cup is on. This is the least you can do for your cricket-crazy nation. The point is if you bring out the first edition at 10.00 am, your reporters will get plenty of time to write a ball-to-ball account. 2. Take the advise of Harry Potter or one of his friends at Hogwarts and learn how to bring out a newspaper on the lines of Daily Prophet in which stories and pictures keep changing with time. 3. Employ a couple of tarrot card readers and people from similar professions, who can help write reports well in advance. 4. And this is the simplest one. Just leave some empty space on your Page I or wherever you want. Here your readers, who stayed up the night can painstakingly write their own report once the match gets over. That way your newspaper will be absolutely current and you can also take the credit of introducing more people to your profession. P.S. Mandira ji, please don’t take it to heart but you must listen to this one. Qs. What is a silly point? Ans. The point that Mandira raises in her
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Net information is not knowledge COMPUTERS
and the Internet have given us access to information at a scale and speed never before encountered by mankind. We have billions of bits of information at our fingertips and massive search engines to help us navigate this cyber world. All too often, we hear people mouth a “fact” with the sole authority that it has been accessed through the Internet. How wrong can they be! Sometimes, the Internet is seen as a library of information, stored electronically, and easily accessed. There is no doubt that the Internet allows everyone to access information at a blazing speed, but it has no way of ensuring that the information that is carried on it is accurate. The Internet is a medium and information given through it can be correct or malicious. It is also wrong to compare the Internet to a library. Normally, books in a library go through a process of selection, by the publishers, and the librarians, and thus, often those that are below a particular standard will not find place on library shelves. On the other hand, anyone can publish on the Net and this leads to a profusion of factoids, bits of information that masquerade as facts. How then do you find knowledge that you can trust? In the same way always- by checking the validity of the facts, the credibility of the source of information. If something has been published by say Encyclopaedia Britannica, you can be sure about the information given therein. Similarly, major newspapers and magazines have their websites online. These online editions have the same credibility as the print editions. At the other end of the spectrum are blogs, user-generated websites where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. Some are more personal online diaries. Blogs are normally full of opinion on anything and everything. You can find a blog about almost everything under the sun, but again, credibility is an issue. While blogs are great for spreading information and discussing it, their very profusion makes it difficult to sift the facts from rumours and misinformation. Sometimes, reactions pour in about something that never happened. Imagine how silly it feels later when you find out that the statement that you were reacting to is not true at all. One such example is an e-mail chain letter, accusing a New York designer, Tommy Hilfiger, of making racist comments on the Oprah Winfrey show on TV. It asks the recipients to boycott his products. The message ends with: “Please send this message to anyone you know.” Angry reactions to this statement abound on the Net. However, Oprah's website states: “For the record, the rumoured event that has circulated on the Internet and by word-of-mouth never happened. Mr Hilfiger has never appeared on the show. In fact, Oprah has never even met him.” So prevalent are such urban legends that there are websites devoted to busting them and stating facts. A brave new experiment started on the Internet has now run into trouble. Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia that is based on the premise that “openness leads to critical thinking and ‘collaborative knowledge’ encourages critical thinking”. Wikipedia calls itself “the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit”. A great idea, and a productive one too, since at the time of writing this article, it had 16,99,298 articles in English. It stresses on the principle of “an adherence to a neutral point of view”, as articulated by its leading light, Jimmy Wales. The pitfalls of allowing “anyone” to edit articles were highlighted when Sindbad, a popular American comedian, was declared dead, not once, but twice, while he was still alive. John Seigenthaler Sr, an eminent journalist and founder of The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, USA, who had served as an assistant to attorney general Robert Kennedy in the early 1960s, was accused in a Wikipedia entry of having been involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Seigenthaler is right when he calls it an “Internet character assassination”. Who did it? No one knows because anonymity is granted on the Net to protect those with unpopular positions from ridicule. However, the same anonymity also makes it difficult for the reader to judge the credentials of the contributor of information. If you don’t know the credentials of a source, how do you judge the value of information? To be valuable, information must be credible. For it to be credible, you must know the sources and trust them. “Garbage in, garbage out,” often abbreviated as GIGO, is a computer axiom which asserts that if invalid data is entered into a system, the resulting output will also be invalid. It has spawned a new expression, “Garbage In, Gospel Out,” a wry comment on our tendency to unquestioningly accept the results from computers. We must always remember that no matter how quick and all-pervasive the Internet has become, it is still a medium of conveying information, pictures, music et all, good or bad, correct or incorrect. The Internet makes it so easy to dig information and disseminate it. However, the ease of operation also places responsibility on your shoulders to ensure that what you take as facts are indeed facts. Information is never knowledge, and the reader has to use his discretion and wisdom to be able to spot the difference. |
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The crushing fear that stalks America THERE is a lot of difference between Cairo University and the campus of Valdosta in the Deep South of the United States. I visited both this week and I feel like I’ve been travelling on a gloomy spaceship – or maybe a time machine – with just two distant constellations to guide my journey. One is clearly named Iraq; the other is Fear. They have a lot in common. The politics department at Cairo’s vast campus is run by Dr Mona El-Baradei - yes, she is indeed the sister of the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency – and her students, most of them young women, almost all scarved, duly wrote out their questions at the end of the turgid Fisk lecture on the failings of journalism in the Middle East. “Why did you invade Iraq?” was one. I didn’t like the “you” bit, but the answer was “oil”. “What do you think of the Egyptian government?” At this, I looked at my watch. I reckon, I told the students, that I just had time to reach Cairo airport for my flight before Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence lads heard of my reply. Much nervous laughter. Well, I said, new constitutional amendments to enshrine emergency legislation into common law and the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood supporters was not a path to democracy. And I ran through the US State Department’s list of Egyptian arbitrary detentions, routine torture and unfair trials. I didn’t see how the local constabulary could do much about condemnation from Mubarak’s American friends. But it was purely a symbolic moment. These cheerful, intelligent students wanted to see if they would hear the truth or get palmed off with another bromide about Egypt’s steady march to democracy, its stability - versus the disaster of Iraq – and its supposedly roaring success. No one doubts that Mubarak’s boys keep a close eye on his country’s students. But the questions I was asked after class told it all. Why didn’t “we” leave Iraq? Are “we” going to attack Iran? Did “we” really believe in democracy in the Middle East? In fact “our” shadow clearly hung over these young people. Thirty hours later, I flicked on the television in my Valdosta, Georgia, hotel room and there was a bejewelled lady on Fox TV telling American viewers that if “we” left Iraq, the “jihadists” would come after us. “They want a Caliphate that will take over the world,” she shrieked about a report that two children had deliberately been placed in an Iraqi car bomb which then exploded. She ranted on about how Muslim “jihadists” had been doing this “since the 1970s in Lebanon”. It was tosh, of course. Children were never locked into car bombs in Beirut - and there weren’t any “jihadists” around in the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. But fear had been sown. Now that the House of Representatives is talking about the US withdrawal by August 2008, fear seems to drip off the trees in America. Dr Michael Noll’s students at Valdosta are as smart and bright-eyed as Dr El-Baradei’s in Cairo. They packed into the same lecture I had given in Egypt and seemed to share a lot of the same fears about Iraq. But a sullen seminar that same morning was a miserable affair in which a young woman seemed to break down in anger. If “we” left Iraq, she said in a quavering voice, the jihadists, the “terrorists”, could come here to America. They would attack us right here. I sighed with frustration. I was listening to her voice but it was also the voice of the woman on Fox TV, the repeated, hopeless fantasy of Bush and Blair: that if we fail in Iraq, “they”, the monstrous enemy, will arrive on our shores. Every day in the American papers now, I read the same “fear” transformed into irrationality. Luke Boggs – God, how I’d love that byline – announces in his local paper: “I say let the terrorists rot in Guantanamo. And let the Europeans ... howl. We are a serious nation, engaged in the serious business of trying to kill or capture the bad guys before they can do us more harm.” He calls Guantanamo’s inmates “hardcore jihadists”. And I realise that the girl in Dr Noll’s seminar isn’t spouting this stuff about “jihadists” travelling from Iraq to America because she supports Bush. She is just frightened. She is genuinely afraid of all the “terror” warnings, the supposed “jihadists” threats, the red “terror” alerts and the purple alerts and all the other colour-coded instruments of fear. She believes her president, and her president has done Osama bin Laden’s job for him: he has crushed this young woman’s spirit and courage. But America is not at war. There are no electricity cuts on Valdosta’s warm green campus, with its Spanish style department blocks and its narrow, beautiful church. There is no food rationing. There are no air-raid shelters or bombs or “jihadists” stalking these God-fearing folk. It is the US military that is at war, engaged in an Iraqi conflict that is doing damage of a far more subtle kind to America’s social fabric. By arrangement with
The Independent |
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Chatterati
THE Eighth Rajiv Gandhi Memorial Lecture held in the auditorium of the RGF is always an intellectually stellar affair. This year, with Noble laureate Professor Wangari Muta Maathai it was an eagerly awaited event. Maathai was expected to have come two years ago but elections in her own country Kenya had changed her plans then. Well, before the appointed hour the hall filled up with Congress party faithful eager to show their enthusiasm and loyalty. One minister, the whispers said, had arrived to occupy his place almost an hour before the speech began. But diplomats, senior party officials, and those enthused by issues to do with the environment all had a treat in store. Sonia Gandhi’s welcome address exuded warmth towards the woman who had won the noble peace prize and also reflected her commitment to environmental issues. Maathai’s speech was delivered with both humour and directness. Her main argument was that trees protected scarce natural resources, which were often the basis for war, which in turn meant that trees equaled peace. The message was simple and resounding. Maathai also pointed out that her global target of planting a billion trees could easily be achieved if every Indian planted one. Maathai ended her speech with a brilliant story. She recounted how a little humming bird had tried to quell a forest fire by making a hundred trips with one drop of water in its beak each time. When laughed at by other animals who could have done much more the humming bird replied that she was doing the best she could. The story in its simplicity and stark message drew instant applause from the entire audience. Maathai had won the hearts of her audience because of her transparent enthusiasm and dedication to an issue that India tends to ignore at her own peril. Secretary General Mohi Malhotra’s vote of thanks was both erudite and affectionate. Fashion and music, for a cause As usual the fashion week in Delhi started with chaos with the same top designers getting their celebrity friends into the first row. Familiar buyers from abroad of course were being given VIP treatment. Fashion shows like this are supposed to cater to the young middleclass. The other thing in this fashion show is that young artists like Aman and Ayan Ali launched a music album for which fashion designer Gangwani has collaborated with them. In between all this the czars of style have a new muse. A newfound social consciousness has got the organisers and Sunil Sethi of Design Alliance to decry child labour. The designers have made a music video for the cause. There is no doubt that the fashion scene is big today with the stars walking the ramp, celebrities adding to the glamour, with two ramps instead of one and 87 designers. How we have risen! Today we do see hardheaded international buyers. |
He, the Giver, continues giving, though it is the recipients who grow weary of receiving. You will not enter paradise until you have faith, and you will not complete your faith till you love all those who believe in
Ishwara. A joyful heart is... a heart burning with love. It is the gift of the Spirit, a share in the joy of Jesus living the soul. The soul rises on the horizon of my intellect. |
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