E D I T O R I A L   P A G E

EDITORIALS

A bunch of pious hopes 
IN promising everything to everyone, the UN Millennium Summit has weakened its commitment to fight some of the obscene imbalances in the world. Problems find a ringing mention but solutions are platitudes with no timeframe.

Forgotten martyrs
HOW one wishes the sordid story of the hapless daughter of a Kargil martyr highlighted by The Tribune on Sunday was an isolated case! Unfortunately, it is not and is, in fact, typical of the hardship faced by many more brave families. Capt Suresh Jatav of Maharashtra laid down his life on those formidable heights while fighting Pakistani intruders. 

OPINION

MORE STATES THE MERRIER?
We need radical devolution
by Praful Bidwai
BEFORE the year ends, India’s map will start looking different. Behind the new cartographic reality lie larger social changes with many long-term implications. Thus, backward Bihar will no longer be India’s second most populous state. That rank will go to Maharashtra, India’s most industrialised state.

ON THE SPOT

Will reservation for women benefit us?
by Tavleen singh
THIS week I write from the village of Daryapur, a small Muslim village that lies somewhere between Delhi and Bulandshahr. It is a typical, featureless Uttar Pradesh village. There is not a building in it of any beauty, not a tree-lined street, not a park for children to play in or villagers to take the air, just the cluttered jumble of windowless hovels that pass for homes in rural parts of northern India.

Promoting tourism — Kerala style
by Humra Quraishi
FOREMOST, armed with a sleek presentation, Secretary, Kerala Tourism, Mr Amitabh Kant, launched the news of the Kerala Tourist Mart 2000, set to be held in Cochin, from October 4 to 7. In fact, after months one saw and heard a no-fuss presentation. I suppose this could be because this bureaucrat had the sheer confidence to lay out the details of the upswing witnessed by tourism in the state.

A bunch of pious hopes 

IN promising everything to everyone, the UN Millennium Summit has weakened its commitment to fight some of the obscene imbalances in the world. Problems find a ringing mention but solutions are platitudes with no timeframe. The only exception is the pledge to halve abject poverty by 2015. Nearly a fourth of the global population lives on less than a dollar a day and this miserable lot has to live that way for another 15 years for some relief without knowing how and from where it will come. For the rest there is the usual talk of disarmament and control on weapons of mass destruction, a fashionable jargon for nuclear bombs, fight against terrorism, containing the adverse impact of globalisation, strengthening peace and the whole works. No country, out of the 150-odd which sent their top leaders to make speeches at the biggest conclave of its kind, made a binding statement. The industrialised and rich group continues to sit on a huge arsenal with cold war-size armed forces; it has no enemy on its radar screen but has no will to pare down the defence budget. A decade or so earlier there was much talk of a peace dividend and transfer of increased funds to the poorest of the poor nations. Not anymore. A small part of the mounting expenditure on the military and weapons-related research is enough to write off the $ 100 billion which the least developed countries owe the western countries and multilateral lending agencies. It should not take more than a minute to decide on this and give the new millennium a historic start. The summit referred to the “special needs of Africa”, which are actually a greater flow of funds. Ironically the periodic bloodshed in that continent is partly sparked by ancient tribal feuds but more than that by grinding poverty and gross inequality. Instead, Africa gets shapeless promises. It is a small mercy that the summit recognised the likely ill-effects of excessive globalisation on the economies of one-commodity countries. The rich countries should remember the unanimous call to mute them when they assemble next year to finalise the WTO charter.

For Indians intense interest lay in two other developments. One, how well this country coped with the provocative stand of Pakistan and, two, how well Prime Minister Vajpayee copes with his knee problem. On the first, India seems to have formally closed the door on talks by linking it with an end to cross-border terrorism, or the neighbour’s open support to rootless insurgents. Mr Vajpayee did not mention Pakistan by name but hit out at General Musharraf’s offer of talks and simultaneous offer of money and weapons to the jehadis. External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, who has started wearing a headgear, did not have a similar inhibition. He bluntly said no to a resumption of talks, conditioning it to a sincere return to the spirit of the Simla Pact and the Lahore Declaration. Read alongside the military ruler’s speech, it is compelling to conclude that the deadlock in the bilateral ties is set to continue for years. The knee question should hopefully turn out to be a no question what with the Prime Minister displaying more grit in the USA than he showed at Nagpur. There was one moment of speculation when he got down from the plane at New York, unseen by reporters and unphotographed. Did he use a lift? The real test will come in three days when he goes to Washington. By then top doctors would have completed their own tests on his knees. A satisfactory start to a state visit.

Forgotten martyrs

HOW one wishes the sordid story of the hapless daughter of a Kargil martyr highlighted by The Tribune on Sunday was an isolated case! Unfortunately, it is not and is, in fact, typical of the hardship faced by many more brave families. Capt Suresh Jatav of Maharashtra laid down his life on those formidable heights while fighting Pakistani intruders. If that was not misfortune enough for his family, worse followed. His wife died of shock a little while later, leaving his son and a 25-year-old handicapped daughter to fend for themselves. The ex-gratia grant that the government gave them was grabbed by unscrupulous relatives. The son died under mysterious circumstances. The daughter, Roopali, says he was done to death. She herself was treated as a domestic servant by the relatives and was made to work from day to night without being even given enough food. She ran away from home and landed at Chandigarh, only because his father was posted here many years ago. She should call herself lucky that the strangers who met her on the way and here were not as heartless as her family members. She was taken to Manav Kendra near the Mansa Devi Temple in Mani Majra, where she can at least look forward to some security. Otherwise, a lonely girl without a home has to fend off many wolves in sheep’s clothing. Will the relatives who treated her so badly be suitably punished? One cannot be too sure. Similar incidents take place with an unerring regularity. There are many reports from Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh where martyrs’ aged parents and their kins are not treating their widows well.

According to Army rules, the mother is the next of kin of a bachelor soldier and his wife is the next of kin after marriage. The family members show some consideration towards the widows as long the compensation money is with them. But once they are deprived of the money —- which ranges from Rs 20 lakh to Rs 28 lakh —- love, care and attention that they require dry up. In one such case in Uttar Pradesh, the man who got his daughter-in-law allegedly killed was an ex-serviceman himself. Thus the pension and the compensation have become a bone of contention. Some soldiers’ parents have urged the Army to give them half the compensation on the plea that it is they who had raised the soldier all through his life and it was unfair that after marriage, a girl whom the soldier just about knew should walk away with the entire compensation. The Army has rightly rejected the demand. After all, if a young widow cannot be treated like a daughter in her in-laws’ place despite being the owner of the compensation, her fate will be even worse if she were to be without this money. Keeping in view the social realities, the Army Wives’ Welfare Association and other organisations will have to play a more active role to ensure that justice is done. It is not only a question of division of compensation money. There are many cases where such payments have been greatly delayed on one bureaucratic excuse or another. Every Roopali on the road negates all the patriotic lessons which the government seeks to teach to every citizen. 

MORE STATES THE MERRIER?
We need radical devolution
by Praful Bidwai

BEFORE the year ends, India’s map will start looking different. Behind the new cartographic reality lie larger social changes with many long-term implications. Thus, backward Bihar will no longer be India’s second most populous state. That rank will go to Maharashtra, India’s most industrialised state. Uttar Pradesh, far and away India’s largest state, will have become further “Mandalised” with the separation of Uttaranchal, which is 97 per cent “upper caste” in composition. And with Chhatisgarh’s severance, Madhya Pradesh will cease being the country’s single largest repository of tropical forests and minerals.

These are without doubt significant changes. And more are yet to come. Many new regions are already demanding statehood: from Kutch and Saurashtra in the West, to Bodoland and North Bengal in the East, from Bundelkhand and Harit Pradesh (Western UP) in the North, through Malwa and Vidarbha in the centre, to Telengana and Coorg (Kodagu) in the South. Where should the process stop? How many states can we have before India’s unity is jeopardised? Where do the proper limits to decentralisation and devolution of power lie?

This article argues that we must generally welcome new states as a necessary component of democratisation and far-reaching devolution. However, the real issue is not how many more states we create, but how much we decentralise decision-making within them, devolving to the district, tehsil and village levels, and how inclusively we do so. Regrettably, the National Democratic Alliance government has gone about the job in a half-hearted and yet hasty way, and ignored this vital aspect of downward percolation of decision-making power.

Lack of thoughtfulness and seriousness is writ large on the manner the Centre-state relationship issue has been recently played out within the National Democratic Alliance. Part of the reason for this is that its fulcrum, the BJP, is uneasy with the very premises of federalism and decentralisation. Historically, the Sangh has always been devoted to the “One Nation, One People“ idea or to extreme forms of centralism.

For instance, the Sangh opposed the 1956 States Reorganisation Commission recommendations for linguistic states. It contended that the creation of more states would unleash “fissiparous” tendencies and eventually lead to the disintegration of India. The Sangh and the BJP have since made many “adjustments” and “accommodations” to popular demands for new states, but without reforming their core-ideology. Hence the BJP’s awkwardness with more states.

Secondly, the Vajpayee government does not seem to have made a half-way sober calculation of the economic costs of creating new states before rushing into doing so. The new states want to be “compensated” and given assistance to build their new capitals, with their own secretariats, administrative cadres, and fleets of vehicles and other paraphernalia of statehood. The “parent” states too have demanded compensation for the consequent revenue loss.

For instance, Jharkhand accounts for two-thirds of Bihar’s internal resources, and the bulk of its natural wealth as well as electricity generation. Bihar’s ruling Rashtriya Janata Dal has asked for a loan waiver of Rs 30,000 crore and “special assistance” of Rs 1,79,000 crore to prevent Bihar from falling prey to what the RJD president, Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav, calls a future of “Baadh, balu aur bhookh” (flood, sand and hunger). Similarly, Chhatisgarh contributes more than two-thirds of Madhya Pradesh’s revenue and has been the state’s mining and industrial heartland as well as its rice-bowl (besides growing 70 per cent of India’s entire production of tendu leaves, used in beedi-making).

This “compensation” money will have to come from the Centre, whose collection of national tax revenue has fallen — thanks to its deplorable failure to tax the rich — to less than 10 per cent of the GDP over the years. How will the Centre find the money? Already, high tension has built up over the recommendations of the Eleventh Finance Commission (EFC), which will proportionately give a slightly higher share of total Central tax revenue to the more backward states.

The losers here — quite fairly — are more industrialised states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Punjab, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh. Their governments are planning to take the EFC to court against this “unfair” treatment. This move runs counter to the spirit of “caring and sharing”, and helping the weak to overcome their development backlog.

However, the cultural-political rationale for new states, viz federalism and decentralisation, remains unassailable. For instance, people in the three new states-in-the-making feel culturally alienated from the ”parent” states, because their languages/dialects, traditions and customs are undervalued or overwhelmed, and prevented from flourishing, by the preponderant linguistic-ethnic majorities of those states. Internally, each of the three shares identities based upon ecological, agro-climatic and historical-cultural factors, or ethnic similarities and numerous forms of commonness, whether in food habits or in day-to-day practices. All of them are rich in natural resources, but feel they haven’t been receiving their due share of the economic cake from the state to which they belonged so far.

It is hard to argue that huge states such as UP are administratively, culturally or politically desirable. It should be clear that the very size of UP — the sixth largest state in the world in terms of population — has made it unwieldy and particularly hard to govern. Even worse, the imposition of homogenous structures of governance and cultural uniformity on a giant state means that millions of people, for instance, Bhojpuri-speakers (perhaps 20 million), or Bundelkhandis (only a little less numerous), are forced to give up their language and learn “standard” Hindi, itself a new, contemporary language.

This is not to argue against a single language of administration, but against the smothering of vernacular languages, some of which (e.g. Braj-bhasha) have a rich literature going back several centuries. In our system, small entities, ethnic groups and cultures tend to get sidelined and subordinated to large, unitary entities. Thus, when Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Maithili or Chhattisgarhi is overpowered and replaced by Hindi, this Hindi is typically highly Sanskritised, upper caste-oriented, text-bookish, and hence “standard”. It is intolerant of idiomatic differences, “local” accents and inflexions, or colourful subaltern expressions that don’t fit a sanitised Bhadralog lexicon.

This runs counter to the spirit of democracy and pluralism. Democracy demands political decentralisation. The numbers we are dealing with here are huge by world standards: 25 million Maithils, 10 million Chhattisgarhis or five million Uttarakhandis, compared to 8.6 million Swedes, 49 million Israelis, 7.3 Bolivians or 5.7 million Burundians. The forced integration of such disparate groups risks wiping out their diversity and retarding the development of distinct cultures, with all their variety of material life.

We have to make a decisive break with the unitarist structures and practices imposed by the British colonial regime for administrative convenience, and later embodied in the Government of India Act of 1935. There is no reason why we shouldn’t have many more states — 40, 50, even more. This is perfectly in keeping with the spirit and content of Indianness. A large country like India must have a rich federalism, and must accommodate plural, multiple types of federal arrangements.

However, decentralisation does not mean merely devolving power from Lucknow to Nainital, from Bhopal to Raipur, or from Patna to Ranchi, and then leaving it there in the hands of the regional or local elites, which merely replaces the former state elite. Surely, we don’t need the transfer of power from the bureaucrats and commercial interests of Bhopal to the patronage-based “political families” of Raipur (e.g. the Shuklas) working in league with the tainted industrialists of Bhilai and Durg who got Shankar Guha Niyogi murdered.

Devolution means going beyond and below those elites and devolving power to the broad masses of people with the widest participation conceivable of diverse and plural groups. The principle is: every cook shall govern. Here, more states are no magic wand. By themselves, they cannot bring about healthy development: they are a necessary, not a sufficient, condition. For instance, many people in the UP hills believe that Uttaranchal is the poorest or most backward region of the state today. In many ways, it is not.

For instance, Garhwal and Kumaon have a smaller proportion (39 per cent) of people living below the poverty line, compared to (supposedly prosperous) Western UP’s 42 per cent and Bundelkhand’s 62 per cent. The State Planning Department’s list of the 15 most backward districts of UP — in terms of per capita income, literacy, roads etc— does not include any of Uttaranchal’s eight hill districts. But Uttaranchal is certainly an instance of maldevelopment, violent disruption of ecology and imposition of large and medium dam projects where mini-and-micro-hydel barrages are needed.

This holds a larger lesson. To be relevant to people, development schemes have to start from below and address people’s real needs. Only then will the true, authentic rationale of democratic decentralisation unfold. Ultimately, it is democratic, people-oriented, decentralisation alone which can empower the wretched of the Indian earth. Only thus can every cook, every impoverished Adivasi, every industrial labourer, every home-based female worker, govern. Are our rulers ready for this?

AIDS: humanity’s greatest enemy
by V.S. Dharma Kumar

EPIDEMICS and infectious diseases have been striking human beings from time immemorial and killing infants, the young and the old alike. They have killed million (plague killed more than 25 million and fly about 20 million) of people in the past. Malaria and tuberculosis keep killing almost 3 million people each a year even today. But none of those diseases have mainly targeted the most productive age group of the population as the new scourge called AIDS caused by the deadliest virus infected through the affectionate act. Mating, the strongest driving force behind evolution, can become an act of loving one to death! God is merciful; the disease is not transmissible as easily as other diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and flu.

It seeks the energetic, vibrant and fearless youth in prime of health. Its favourite age group is 15-45 years. Families’ and nations’ existence depends upon them. When they are struck down, the greatest socio-economic problem is created for the families and nations affected. The disease has no cure. But it can be prevented. If it can be prevented, waging a war against this disease would seem easy. But that is the toughest thing. Like in all battles the armies fight, young men in uniform die. But in this battle the elusive enemy kills not only the young but their young women too. Weird is the ways of transmission of this killer disease.

Adolescents and young people all over the world are oblivious about safety or even their own mortality. It is hard to sell safety to this segment of population. Prevention of AIDS is possible only if sexually active people indulge in safe sex. About 95 per cent of the victims of HIV infection contract it through sexual acts. According to UNICEF, about 30 per cent of the world’s 34 million infected people are in the age group of 15-24. The hardest hit is sub-Saharan Africa where there are 7.9 m HIV-infected youths. Girls bear the brunt of it because older men infect them at an earlier age than boys.

In South Africa, a quarter of young women are infected. In Botswana, a third carry the virus. The young have no idea of how to protect themselves. Sexually active teenagers always consider themselves to be above risk. Medical science one day may find a way for mating without breeding or genetically remove the desire for sex from humans. That will solve all our problems due to over-population and AIDS to a great extent. The problem is that the race too will disappear. The sequencing of the human genome will make what is impossible today possible tomorrow.

The pressure on a male to find a mate is constant, and the pleasure of mating is so intense. Males of almost all species tends to go for unwilling partners and harass them. Man is exception; he only shows sophistication. A woman is raped every 26 seconds in South Africa. Why that far? A woman is raped every six hours in Bihar. Imagine the magnitude of the problem! Today, five young people contract HIV/AIDS somewhere in the world every minute.

Is it possible to change the way people act during their most private moments? Under the best of circumstances, that is the toughest thing. The only way of stopping the spread of the disease is through prevention, and not abstinence. But people cannot be prevented from indulging in sex lest human race will disappear from the face of earth. People can be educated to behave sensible. Some urgent steps are to be taken by the government. The first is to stop getting upset about sex when the subject is discussed. When sexually transmitted AIDS epidemic has catastrophic possibility, it will be suicidal to be squeamish about it. We cannot live in the 21st century with a mindset of 100 years back.

“Break the silence” was the apt slogan given at the recently concluded AIDS conference at Durban. Let every family talk about AIDS freely with their children. Let the government use all the media in a big way to warn the people about HIV. Let every school start imparting information about AIDS. A lesson about AIDS should be included in the syllabus of secondary school upward. Educate women to say no to unprotected sex, which is suicidal or homicidal. This, of course, is difficult because the structure of relationship between man and woman in this land of Rama continues to reinforce the idea that the man should be dominant in action and the woman should passively accept his leadership and even on bed. Ensuring safe blood, safe sex and safe motherhood can prevent 95 per cent of HIV infection. We did nothing for six long years after we discovered that AIDS had arrived here.

The Health Ministry admits, in a worst case scenario, that there could be 10 million HIV positive Indians in the next 10 years. A terrifying prospect, indeed! But one commentator quoting some estimates says there could be 30 million HIV-positive Indians by the year 2010. AIDS is not just another infection for anyone to ignore. It can be ignored only at our peril. Globally, it is believed to have killed 19 million people. Another 34 million remain in the infected group, waiting for their death. When they die, as most will in the near future, the toll will be equivalent to those killed in World War II. Fifty million lives were lost in World War II. It is estimated that over 5 million people a year are being infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Considering the frightening scenario of AIDS epidemic, no country can afford to say that financial constraints are reasons for an ineffective campaign against AIDS. A war against AIDS should be on top of any government’s agenda no matter how poor they are. In fact, every government should give equal attention to AIDS campaigns; rather more than given to defence preparedness. A human enemy kills only soldiers, but a human immunodeficiency virus kills mostly the adolescents and the young of both sexes, and it does not recognise national or international boundaries. The greatest threat of humanity is from the virus. To be complacent about AIDS can be catastrophic.

Will reservation for women benefit us?
by Tavleen singh

THIS week I write from the village of Daryapur, a small Muslim village that lies somewhere between Delhi and Bulandshahr. It is a typical, featureless Uttar Pradesh village. There is not a building in it of any beauty, not a tree-lined street, not a park for children to play in or villagers to take the air, just the cluttered jumble of windowless hovels that pass for homes in rural parts of northern India. The narrow alleys that take me to the home of the village Pradhan are lined with open drains that give off the stench of rotting garbage and human faeces. The young boy who acts as my guide is barefoot and seems oblivious to the caked dung he walks over or to the filth of his surroundings.

Elections to the post of Pradhan have just been held and on the occasional whitewashed wall we pass I notice an appeal for Fatir Bhai to be elected. After walking for a few minutes through a maze of bylanes we arrive at a house that is imposing by the standards of Daryapur. A young girl with a long plait opens the door and tells me that her brother is not in but that she will wake Bhabijan who will be able to talk to me about the women’s reservation Bill which is what I am here to discuss.

Bhabijan lies asleep in a room that opens on to the courtyard. A small baby lies beside her and a little girl of about two plays on the floor. The courtyard quickly fills with other women and many more children as a string bed is pulled out for me to sit on. And, then on this hot, airless afternoon in this courtyard filled with flies and the noise of children we discuss the law that could change the lives of these women.

Bhabijan introduces herself as Nazneen and tells me that she would like to get a job teaching Urdu. She is qualified for this she tells me but since the BJP Government came to power in Uttar Pradesh they have not announced any openings for Urdu teachers. “In the time of other governments” she says “there used to be vacancies announced regularly”. So, are Muslims being discriminated against by the Government? No, she says, there is nothing like that happening and nor are there any Hindu-Muslim tensions but it would be good if there would be some jobs for Urdu teachers.

She tells me that the main problem in the village is that there is no electricity. Drinking water is available, she adds, pointing to a handpump in the courtyard and they even have a telephone that works but electricity is erratic and almost completely absent on most days. This causes terrible problems at this time of year because of the mosquitoes and flies, children get sick all the time because they have to sleep upstairs on the roof since the fan never works. I discover from Nazneen that the village has a population of about 1700, mostly Muslim, that there is a school that goes up to the tenth class and that unemployment is a big problem because the factories that have come up on the main road rarely employ anyone from the village.

I tell her that I am really here to find out what rural women think of the women’s reservation Bill. Did she think it would be a good thing for 33 per cent of seats in the Lok Sabha and in state legislatures to be reserved for women? She starts off by saying coyly that in their village women did not think the Bill was necessary because men were doing a good enough job representing them. I tell her that the women MPs who are demanding the reservation give the success of reservations at the village panchayat level as the main reason for their demand. Has it worked in the villages?

Nazneen, an attractive woman in her late twenties, pulls her dupatta more firmly over her head while the other women stare at her silently. She thinks carefully before saying: “Well, women should be given more rights, more freedom and yes I think it would be a good thing for seats to be reserved for women in the Lok Sabha.” When I asked if she would stand, given the chance, she said she would be the first person to contest in the village. She was educated, she said, and came from a family that believed in educating girls so she understood the importance of women being given rights. “Left to the men”, she added with a laugh, “we would still be told kaam karo, khana khao and ghar mein baitho, its time all this changed”. It was with this in mind that she had made sure that her older daughter was going to school.

I asked her what she thought of the fact that the village was so dirty and that children played in streets so filthy that they remained in constant danger of sickness and disease. She said that she hated the dirt and now that her husband had become the village headman he was going to ensure that there was a massive cleaning up campaign. He had only been in the job two months, she said, and had so far not received any money from the government but as soon as he got some he intended to begin by cleaning up the village.

Another village I visited on my tour of rural Uttar Pradesh was Dhoomanikpur. This village had already been governed by a woman Pradhan by the name of Rajbala but now the system of reservations had ordained that the job would be reserved for Scheduled Castes and a man called Srichand Balmiki had won. I was directed to his home through alleys, narrower and filthier than almost any I have seen, I dodged mounds of human excrement as I walked and the stench from the drains was so nauseating it was hard to believe nobody else noticed it.

Srichand Pradhan, a dark-skinned rotund man, sat in his windowless living room amid a large group of men and when I mentioned the filth of the village streets they said it was because he had only just taken the job. Rajbala did nothing, they added, and in any case there was no point in her having the job because it was her husband who had been the real village headman. He had the job before it got reserved for women and got her elected when he could no longer keep it. Simple.

So, reservations for women were a bad idea? Very bad, they all said, because most women were illiterate and knew nothing about administration or governance. Rajbala was not in the village that day so I was unable to get her views on the subject but other women I spoke to in Dhoomanikpur stared silently when I sought their views. Finally, a man answered on their behalf explaining that women in the villages were not used to speaking in front of strangers.

In the end then did I come back convinced that reservations for women would benefit us? No. On the other hand, though, the villages of Uttar Pradesh are such cesspools of disease, filth and sub-human living conditions that its hard to think women headmen could make things worse.

Promoting tourism — Kerala style
by Humra Quraishi

FOREMOST, armed with a sleek presentation, Secretary, Kerala Tourism, Mr Amitabh Kant, launched the news of the Kerala Tourist Mart 2000, set to be held in Cochin, from October 4 to 7. In fact, after months one saw and heard a no-fuss presentation. I suppose this could be because this bureaucrat had the sheer confidence to lay out the details of the upswing witnessed by tourism in the state. So much so that the National Geographic Traveler in its millennium issue has called Kerala — ‘‘an exotic paradise .... among the 50 ‘must see’ places of a lifetime.’’

Indeed, Kerala has a lot to boast about — right from the rejuvenation centres (read ayurveda therapy centres) to tourist resorts to those get-away backwaters. In fact, the trump card at this mart will be the display of traditional houseboats — ‘‘kettuvalloms’’ — at the special marina constructed near the mart’s convention centre itself.

Congratulations — Iraq

UNESCO’s announcements on World Literacy Day (September 8) held out many surprises. The two King Sejong Literacy prizes (created in 1989 for a value of $ 15,000 each) have been awarded to Iraq’s Juvenile Education programme ‘‘for continuing its work in favour of education for all, despite the past and current difficulties resulting from the country’s conflict situation.’’ And though this newsletter does not detail out those difficulties but the continuing embargo has reduced even the basics to such pathetic lows that a great majority of the Iraqi school children have no pencils or paper and most of the school labs lie vacant. Whilst on literacy just a little shift to focus on the news that Urdu writer K.L. Zakir has been very recently appointed chairman of Literacy Material Promotion Committee (Ministry of HRD, GOI). I don’t know what the role demands but here I do wish to stress that maybe we are becoming literate vis-a-vis the alphabet grasp but few of us are taught of how to go about dealing with emotional pain, turmoils, upheavals, relationship shifts, loneliness. None of our textbooks even touch these aspects and the scriptures are too long and complex. For me Khalil Gibran’s words in ‘The Prophet’ are a guiding force to face upheavals.

Kamleshwar — straight from the heart

One of the few people who seem to speak from their heart is the noted Hindi writer Kamleshwar (Kamleshwar Prasad Saksena). Last week Sahitya Akademi invited him to speak at the IIC and once again the man spoke in that honest way — a rarity in the times we are destined to live in. None of those high flown words, no complex instances of love or heartbreaks or reunions. In fact, he had the courage to say that what affected him greatly was the stillness around him: ‘‘Whenever I visited my ‘kasba’ Mainpuri I’d realized that nothing seemed changed — the same garbage dumps, the same congested lanes, the same clothesline in our courtyard, the same broken tap...but, then, in the midst of this stillness the people were ageing and decaying. In fact, once I even suggested to my mother that we pull out the old, dried up mango tree growing in our courtyard but she rebuked me, saying `even dried trees have roots and if you pull it out it’ll shake the very foundation of this house.’’

He spoke for over 50 minutes and it would impossible for me to harness all those details but I do wish to stress that it is important that such people are heard for even simple sentences from him left an impact — ‘‘Bidi peekar ishq nahin kar sakte,’’ ....‘‘Ravan kewal Ramayana mein marta hai, Ramlila mein nahin’’ ....‘‘You don’t have to get heartbroken to start writing. I never went through any emotional chaos to write, it is just the everyday realities that affected me.’’

In fact he even criticised our nuclear programme, and just a sentence from him was enough to hit: ‘‘Jab aap janam nahin de sakte ho to maut mat do’’. (when you cannot give birth then don’t bring about death and destruction).

N-disarmament convention

This brings me to write that a national convention for nuclear disarmament and peace is scheduled to take place here, in New Delhi from November 11 to 13. Organised by the Delhi Science Forum, I was surprised to see the large number of sponsoring organisations, as though half the country does not favour our going nuclear. Anyway it is a little too premature to comment on the convention details. Let’s wait for November.

Cinema festival

Though I am critical of New Delhi and the lifestyle it offers but one aspect is noteworthy. It is a happening city — you can never be left alone for when one event is over the next takes over. Upcoming is this 10-day long cinema festival. Films are to be screened from September 10 to 17 at the Habitat Centre and also at the French Cultural Centre.

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

When the Godhead is thought of as creating, preserving and destroying. it is known as the Personal God, Saguna Brahman, or the Primal Energy, Adyasakti. Again, when it is thought of as beyond the three gunas, then it is called the Attributeless Reality; Nirguna Brahman, beyond speech and thought; this is the Supreme Brahman.

— Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic
Sense of Life