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Raining destruction
Demographic challenge
Cultural confluence |
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The endgame in Afghanistan
Of Alex and Hazel
The age of the retro traveller
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Raining destruction THE extensive death and destruction wreaked by the heavy rain, cloudbursts, flash floods and landslides in the hills of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand foremost serve to remind man how small he is compared to the power of nature. The initial figures of death may yet go up drastically, as the immediate rescue and relief operations move into the next phase of surveying the damage and digging into buried structures. Some villages and habitations have been entirely inundated by floods and silt. In Uttarakhand — owing to its geographical features — destruction during the monsoon is not something entirely unexpected, but each time the damage done seems worse than before, and the rains ‘unprecedented’. We, however, do not seem to learn. There is no stopping flood or landslide when it comes, but it is common sense to stay out of its way as far as possible, providing for a little margin too. As buildings and houses collapsed like a pack of cards, with ground underneath them washed away in a flash, it was clear many of them were too close to the rivers by any safety standards. According to immediate reports, among the 73 structures that went down along the Alaknanda river in Rudraprayag district 40 were hotels. These were obviously built to meet a growing demand from pilgrims, increasing pressure on land, and consequently getting dangerously close to the river. Local wisdom would give the rivers respect, and due space to swell, but commercial interest drowns all sense. For this, the state governments have to take the blame too. The need for preventive measures and being ready with extensive disaster management plans down to the village level in Uttarakhand cannot be highlighted more than this. From meteorological alerts to village-level feedback on water levels and rain, and processing of the information to make it actionable, there has to be a clear protocol in place before every monsoon. It is in the state’s interest to ensure the safety of tourists, who are in a new environment and away from support. The biggest offence committed by mankind, of course, is the environmental destruction, which is responsible to a great extent for flash floods and landslides. Arguably, it is also blamed for freak changes in the weather patterns.
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Demographic challenge ONCE again what has been known all along finds yet another affirmation. That India will overtake China and become the most populous country of the world has been predicted often enough. What has changed over the years is merely the dateline as to when that would happen. Now the latest UN report projects that by 2028, India with a staggering population of 1.45 billion will not only equal that of China but thereafter continue to grow while China’s will decrease. Indeed, it’s about time the policy makers paid heed to the urgent need for stabilising India’s population growth rate. While the world’s population tripled during 1901-2000, India’s nearly quintupled from 23.8 crore to 100 crore. Between 2001 and 2011 India added 18.1 crore people to the world. Yet for too long India has not only ignored its growing numbers but also taken comfort in its much touted demographic dividend. Indeed, by 2020 India will be the youngest nation in the world. But what kind of young India would it be needs to be analysed. In a country where 68 million people live without basic facilities, where a sizeable chunk lives in slums in urban India, clearly merely gloating over the presence of a productive working age population will not be enough to ensure a quality life for its citizens. It should not be forgotten that much of India’s population increase has taken place among the poor. High infant mortality rate and maternal mortality rate, malnutrition among children and women and skewed sex ratio are some of the demographic issues that come along with humongous numbers and demand social investment. Population growth has to be curbed and fast if endeavours like ensuring food security have to be realised. Besides concerns about meeting the food, energy and water needs of one and a half billion plus people, the pressure of growing population on the environment, soil and water table can’t be overlooked. With 2.4 per cent of the world’s land mass and 17 per cent of the world’s population, India can’t afford to be complacent and must step up efforts to achieve its national population policy goals.
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Cultural confluence TWO neighbours, both ancient civilisations, are taking tentative steps to improve cultural interaction. Some Indian films have been successful with Chinese audiences and this is the basis of more cooperation between the two nations. While “3 Idiots” and “My Name is Khan” have paved the way for screening more Indian films in China, the Indian invitation to China to screen more films at the International Film Festival in India will certainly give more exposure to Chinese films. India and China are two ancient civilisations, and as neighbours, have a long tradition of exploring and learning from each other. Scholars trace such influences to Vedic times, much before Buddhism went from India to China. Along with it, an enormous amount of literature was translated into prevalent languages. The Silk Route had a major role in allowing both trade and cultural exchanges to take place between India and China, but it was not the only such link. There is ample evidence of maritime links between the two nations that date back to the early 15th century. Indian exposure to Chinese films is limited. Much of it comes through American dubbing of Chinese productions, which has a limited audience in India. Yes, many Chinese actors are familiar to Indian audiences, again more because of their Hollywood connection than anything else. India and China have, over the years, successfully built a nuanced relationship that takes into account the increasing trade ties between the two nations. However, trade is but one aspect of the overall comprehensive relationship that the two countries can have, indeed, should have. It is important for both nations to develop strong cultural ties. China should be more open about allowing Indian television companies rights to broadcast their programmes there. India and China need to work together so that peoples of both nations get familiar with each other’s cultural currents. Such familiarity would breed friendship, and understanding.
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An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous. — Henry Ford
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The endgame in Afghanistan ON February 17, 2009, President Obama announced that in order to “stabilise the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan” he was authorising the deployment of an additional 17,000 US troops there. He added: “The problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban and the spread of extremism in that region cannot be solved solely by military means”. Shortly thereafter, he announced the deployment of an additional 4,000 troops. At the London conference in 2010, the US announced that responsibilities for security would be transferred to the Afghan forces so that the US-ISAF forces could begin the withdrawal by July 2011. On June 22, 2011, Obama announced that the US intended to end all combat operations in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, while transferring responsibility for security to the Afghan forces. This process is in place and the bulk of security operations even now are undertaken by the Afghan forces with American logistical backing. The American strategy also involves a process of “reconciliation” through talks in Qatar between the Taliban on the one hand and the Afghan High Peace Council on the other. The US and the Karzai government aver that this process will be based on “respect for the Afghan Constitution, rule of law and democratic values”. While the nucleus of a Taliban office has been set up in Qatar, even the most optimistic are skeptical that the Taliban and its ISI backers will settle for anything short of a getting substantial control, in initial years, of the bulk of southern Afghanistan. The US is expected to retain a residual military presence of around 8,000 troops in Afghanistan, together with control of around half a dozen military airports, while focusing on training and counter-terrorism operations. It will be financing, training, equipping and providing logistical support to the 350,000-strong Afghan National Security Forces. There is skepticism about the will of the US to stay the course on its commitment in its Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghanistan to “combat al-Qaeda and its affiliates and enhance the ability of Afghanistan to deter threats against its sovereignty, security and territorial integrity”. Virtually every Afghan will aver that his country faces these threats only from Pakistan and its proxies. Interestingly, like Obama, Mikhail Gorbachev suddenly announced his decision to withdraw Soviet forces in Afghanistan and commenced the withdrawal in 1988. Gorbachev’s entire strategy was based on the naïve belief that Pakistan would cease arming the Peshawar-based Afghan Mujahedeen in accordance with its commitments in the Geneva Accords. (In the preceding years, the CIA funded and provided the ISI with weapons, enabling them to arm and equip an estimated 80,000 fighters to challenge the writ of the regime of President Mohammed Najibullah). Pakistan’s President, Gen Zia-ul-Haq, however, made it clear that he had no intention of abiding by the Geneva Accords and he would deny the Soviet accusations of the ISI arming the Afghan Mujahedeen, telling President Reagan: “We will deny any arms aid is going through our territory. After all, that is what we have been saying for the past eight years”. Like President Obama is now looking for “reconciliation” with the Taliban, Gorbachev made an ill-advised and desperate attempt to negotiate with the Peshawar-based, ISI-backed Seven Party Alliance of Fundamentalist Afghan Parties. The Mujahedeen just stalled for time as they obtained ever more direct Pakistani military assistance to oust the Najibullah government, which, interestingly, offered fierce resistance, till the Soviet Union collapsed in December 2011 and arms supplies dried up. Pakistan’s long-term objectives in Afghanistan were clearly spelt out earlier by President Zia, who stated: “We have earned the right to have a friendly regime in Afghanistan. We took risks as a frontline State, and won’t permit it to be like it was before, with Indian and Soviet influence there and claims on our territory. It will be a real Islamic State, part of a pan-Islamic revival that will one day win over the Muslims of the Gorbachev’s naiveté and Pakistani duplicity and territorial ambitions led to the instability, violence and international terrorism that tore apart the body politic of Afghanistan and brought misery and suffering to its people. Is Obama’s “endgame” in Afghanistan and his faith in “reconciliation” with the Taliban set to prolong the agony of the Afghans? Afghanistan is and will likely remain an international basket case, for at least a decade. It will need at least $4.1 billion annually to maintain its armed forces. The economy can become self-sustaining only if the country’s mineral wealth can be put to use, which will require at least a decade of conditions conducive to economic development. The only redeeming feature is that the US, unlike the Soviet Union, will not collapse. Moreover, there is some recognition in the international community that a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan will lead to the Afpak Region remaining the epicentre of global terrorism. Much is going to depend on how domestic developments within Afghanistan play out and on the credibility of its government. It is crucial to ensure that the forthcoming Presidential elections in 2014 are transparent, fair and credible. It would of course be ideal if India can work with others to try and see that the leading Presidential candidate enjoys genuine domestic and international credibility and respect. Given his experience and role as an Afghan patriot, President Karzai could then assume the role of an elder statesman. Given the ideological inclinations of the Zia era officers, who now run the Pakistan army, it is going to be a difficult task to persuade and pressure the military establishment to discard Zia’s grandiose notions of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan and the Islamic world. The Pakistan army would claim that it is essential to keep on the right side of Mullah Omar and Sirajuddin Haqqani, given its ongoing operations against the Pakistani Taliban in the Khyber and Kurram tribal agencies. But New Delhi will be making a serious mistake if it allows misplaced concerns about Pakistani “sensitivities” to inhibit its political and economic partnership, or its defence relationship, including arms supplies, with the dispensation in Kabul. India has already eroded its credibility and compromised its interests by the extent to which it has sought to appease Chinese “sensitivities” in the conduct of its relations with the US, Japan, Vietnam and other ASEAN members. Such undue concern for Pakistani “sensitivities” in Afghanistan will have serious security implications, which India can ill
afford.
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Of Alex and Hazel ON a boring flight I was privy to an interesting conversation. Aglobe-trotting gentleman sitting on my left, with all the passion at his command, was complaining about troublesome Alex. It seems Alex, in a maniac frenzy, had torn through an important report he was to submit. The gentleman wondered aloud if Alex had anger management issues or was simply feeling traumatised by the separation from Manan. Listening to his pained litany, a lady with foreign leanings, sitting on my right, nodded in sympathy. Attempting to reassure him, the lady talked about how Hazel had reacted to the separation from Mitali by refusing to eat her favourite food. Listening to the conversation, I visualised Alex as a spoilt, tantrum throwing boy of indeterminate age and Hazel as an introvert teenager. For want of anything better to do, I nodded sagely and advised my co-passengers to find a good therapist for Alex and Hazel. They both looked at me strangely and then blurted out “dog therapists?” I had made a serious faux pas. Alex was a Labrador and Hazel was a cocker spaniel. Feeling suitably chastened, I refrained from commenting on the English names of the pet dogs and attributed such a penchant to the globe-trotting sensibilities of my co-passengers. Back on terra firma, I realised that globe-trotting had nothing to do with giving the four-legged canines English names. Several of my neighbours, who have never been overseas, have pet dogs variously named Bozo and Pogo. This name-game also transcends professional barriers. So, my corporate friends as well as friends in sedate government jobs have pet dogs named Rover, Sam, et al. My friends with academic leanings have also been bitten by this bug. A professor of mine fondly named his old and shaggy Alsatian Maggie as she was the ‘Iron Lady’ of the house. Not for him the home-grown ‘Iron Ladies’ of the ruling dynasty. An acquaintance, living in the backwaters of Kerela, refused to call her Pug by any other name but TS Eliot. She insisted that Eliot was her favourite poet and naming her Pug after him was an expression of her adoration. Try as I might, I have not been able to find any pet dogs with Hindi names. Bollywood celebrities have variously named their pooches Champagne, Rambo, Dash and, would you believe it, Myson. In old Bollywood films one came across the odd Sheru or Moti, but today we have Rocket or Tiger vying for attention. Even our garbage collector whistles for his dog Rocky. Should we hold our colonial hangover as a culprit or blame "a foreign hand"? Maybe we should celebrate our transworld outlook. For, after all, "what is in a name?"
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The age of the retro traveller
WE sell
dreams. We travel writers, film makers and novelists, are dream merchants so we have to know what the public desires. One way of finding out what our potential travellers want, is to see the movies they like and read the novels they prefer. There is a novel about a voyage that spread like wildfire around the world, and then became a blockbuster movie: The Life of Pi. In a refreshing contrast to his predecessors, Tourism Minister Dr K. Chiranjeevi, reacted swiftly to the opening of a new horizon when he gave a special National Tourism Award to this amazing tale. Moreover, this unbelievable story has inflamed the imagination of the world and brought rich rewards to its creator. Why? Because Information Technology has programmed us into becoming sorters of bits and bytes. After hours of sitting before a small screen, assessing facts and figures, we ache to step back and forget reality. We want to fly into our imagination, into make-believe. We yearn for the freedom of fantasy. That is where we Indians score. We have an unlimited reservoir of fable. We have been building our castles of fantasy for more than three thousand years. We learn fantasy from our mothers and grandmothers. We are marinated in the epic tales of supermen and women, of flying chariots and monstrous weapons of mass destruction, and talking birds and animals, and giants, hobgoblins and titanic, fearsome, demons. There's a great difference between our folklore and those of the so-called, 'developed nations'. Their civilisations teach them to spurn such imaginative tales, their children are conditioned to grow out of believing in Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk and the jolly old gentlemen who comes Ho! Ho! Ho-ing down the chimney every Christmas Eve. We, however, never grow out of our legends even though we may become Argumentative Indians in the Amartya Sen mode or quantum physicists, who specialise in knowing more and more about less and less till they seek to know everything about almost nothing. That's literally true: the Higgs Boson is the ultimate expression of something that is so small that it is almost nothing. Yet there are Indian scientists working on those great particle accelerators, searching for the transient streaks that might, just might, indicate the presence of the miscalled "God Particle". Many of those brilliant, and intensely logical, people will emerge from those deep underground vaults, into the comfort of their homes, put aside the quarks and quirks of their whirling devices, and worship the stolid, traditional, Indian icons they believe in. That is the secret of the resilience of our civilisation. Our brains are divided into two lobes: the left and the right. The left seems to be the source of logic and reasoning, the right is apparently the intuitive and emotional half. Western civilisation, it has been argued, has developed the left half. Eastern cultures have tended to draw on the right. If there is any truth in this, then Indian civilisation has grown at the confluence of these two streams drawing on both, aided by the miracle of Sanskrit. Because Sanskrit is the most phonetic and finely structured of all languages, much of our ancient lore was transmitted verbally. It was almost as if our savants, working in what Einstein called 'The Laboratories of the Mind", felt that written knowledge could easily fall into the hands of those who would misuse it. Today, if you have the right password, you could download instructions to make the most fiendish devises from terrorist web-sites. To prevent this from happening, our far-seeing mentors wrapped their discoveries in folklore, easily remembered and passed down verbally through the generations, waiting to be re-discovered when mankind had reached the maturity to decipher them. Einstein's E= mc(squared) describes the process that converts matter into energy at the heart of a nuclear explosion, but it makes no sense to the casual reader. Similarly, if we have enough knowledge to look beyond our folklore we find amazing insights into scientific truths. This is the stardust we must sprinkle to lure the modern, aware and questing, traveller; the sort of person who has some idea of the epochal book, The Origin of Species by biologist-traveller Charles Darwin. Darwin made a huge splash in the 19th century with his Theory of Evolution. It contended that man had evolved from fish which become reptiles which, in turn, gave birth to mammals, proto-humans and so on. That was just two hundred years ago. Now consider our Dus Avataras, a concept which is immeasurably older than Darwin's Theory. After Matsya, the fish incarnation, comes Kuruma, the tortoise, followed by Varaha, the mammalian boar, Narasimha, the fearsome pre-human, Vamana, the diminutive proto-human resembling Ramapithecus whose remains have been found in the Shiwaliks. The successive incarnations then go on to describe the social and mental evolution of mankind through our hunting, farming, urban and global stages. Kalki, the avatar to come, could well be a prescient vision of the Bionic man: humans and machines blended into a virtually indestructible prosthetic unity. Darwin was pre-empted by our thinkers. This is just one example of the fascinating decoding of our folkloric heritage. Every temple, vihara, church, mosque and gurdwara has its rich heritage of iconic folklore; so does every one of our 4,635 distinct communities identified by the Anthropological Survey of India. Demagogues may try to build walls between people for their own, self-serving, agenda but our traditional beliefs often become cross-cultural bridges binding seemingly disparate traditions. In Maharashtra the world's only high-velocity meteoric crater in basaltic rock, the lake of Lonar, has a legend that is eerily similar to the Biblical tale of the fall of Lucifer. In fact, the flaming Lucifer, plunging to the earth, is curiously similar to that of the defeated Lonasura and even their names could be mispronunciations of each other. In our 40 years of travel through our land we have glimpsed an array of such hidden gems. The Nataraj is a brilliant icon of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. The Descent of the Ganga caught in Siva's locks is a powerful ecological parable. The dance of Shakti around Siva, creating the illusion of Maya, could be emblematic of orbiting electrons creating the illusion of solidity. Today, it is often socially correct to dismiss these beliefs as the compulsions of tradition. As a Bollywood star expressed it, "I do my little puja thing!" as if she would really be above such primitive practices. Clearly, she did not realise that the icons in her puja room had a far deeper significance than she was capable of appreciating. People like her are also unaware of the fact that the traditional wisdom of India extends far beyond our shrines. It permeates every aspect of our lives, every kilometre of our highways. Our roads are the most fascinating in the world and one of us always stays awake when we are driven from destination to destination. When we spot something unusual we stop, and probe and photograph. Cow-dung towers speak of our ancient ecological consciousness. Stepwells in Gujarat combined water-harvesting, sculptural art and heat-escaping, public pavilions. In Tamil Nadu, we spotted burly handlers manoeuvring fractious bulls to the jallikattu arena. Bull sports dot the migration route of the Tremilai-Dravidian people from the maiden bull-jumpers of Crete, through bull-fighters of the Iberian peninsula and the speculated bull-ring in Gujarat's Dhola Vira, to the endangered jallikattu. Then, in the thatched, moist shade of a roadside Pan Borrage in West Bengal we learnt that a yam plant is worshipped as the goddess of the borrage. It is, in fact, a bio-indicator. If the yam plant thrives, so will the delicate, green, pan creepers. If it begins to wilt then something is going wrong in the borrage. These are just some of the rewarding insights we have received in our probing travels. The customary questions asked by tourists were “Where?” and “Who?” These are, increasingly giving way to "Why? and How?" As the IT penetration increases, raw information about costs and connections will no longer be the travel writer's stock in trade. Modern, aware, travellers will demand a lingering, savouring, immersion in a nation's heritage. That is what we write about. That is what Marco Polo and Hieun Tsang did That is also why we call our genre Heritage Travelling Writing. — The authors are veteran travel writers. They have written 26 books. The couple received the National Tourism Award for 2011-12 for their travel books. The Life of Pi He has captured the complexity of our society, with its social interactions with an assured and yet naïve charm. In particular, when Yann Martel describes his experience in a lifeboat with four wild animals it often soars to the metaphysical levels of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Critics have raved about it calling it an adventure story, a meditation on God and an outrageous fable. You never know if an Indian boy with the unlikely name of Pi Patel was ever adrift in a lifeboat with an orang utan, a zebra, a hyena and a tiger. Was he ever marooned on an island with flesh-eating plants? Or was it all in his mind? And Pi's encounter with the Japanese is hilarious. Clearly, this is a classic which deserves a very special place of its
own.
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It 's a strange tale written by Canadian author Yann Martel. He spent some time in Bombay, Matheran, Madras and Pondicherry. He assumes the identity of Pi Patel with great sensitivity and though a purist might fault some of names given to the characters in this book, these are, at worst, tiny ripples in the compelling stream of his narrative.