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Saturday,
May 26, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
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Explosive
neglect Enron gets
its comeuppance Trading with
Pakistan |
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For whom
the bell tolls
The
Filmy Chakkar
Hepatitis
C — the slow killer
A
showcase of urban poverty
‘PTV
emulating Indian TV channels’
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Explosive neglect AS if explosions in Badowal and Mamun ammunition depots were not enough for this year, the Birdhwal (Suratgarh) depot has also gone up in flames. Losses cannot be measured in financial terms alone. Such repeated fires deplete the fighting strength of the army. Most of the ammunition destroyed was imported. Above all, there was the loss of life and the resultant panic. After every such incident, it is customary to say that sabotage or foreign mischief is not ruled out. However, this time, the authorities have sheepishly admitted that the fire might have been caused by spontaneous combustion. That makes the matter all the more serious. Obviously, no correctives have been applied, despite the fact that at least seven such major fires have taken place in the past 13 years in which ammunition worth hundreds of crores of rupees has been destroyed. Insiders reveal a sordid tale of carelessness and neglect. Regulations are ignored with impunity. Excess quantity of ammunition is stored in almost all of the nearly 24 major base/advance ammunition depots. The result is that nearly 60 per cent of ammunition is lying in the open. There are no proper fire lanes. In the excessive summer heat, these can catch fire on their own. Because of overstocking and restricted space, the fire spreads quickly. Nor are there any adequate contingency plans. Fire equipment is in short supply. Whatever little is available is obsolete. Staff is not properly trained. High-tension wires pass close to the perimeter. It is a miracle that accidents do not take place more often. Even if there is not a fire, the storage in the open reduces the life of the ammunition, rendering nearly 6 to 8 per cent of the stocks unserviceable every year. To make matters worse, civilian constructions have been allowed to come up dangerously close to the depots. Nobody seems to realise that the chalta hai attitude prevalent in the civilian administration just cannot do in the army matters, but that is already a grim reality. The Punjab and Haryana High Court recently ordered that all illegal structures within one mile of the Badowal depot should be removed. The Punjab Chief Minister lobbied with the Defence Minister to shift the depot itself! There is need for a change in approach. The authorities should have a close look at the entire functioning of ammunition depots. The risk involved in having civilians living close by and allowing civilian staff and labour to even work inside the sensitive areas is an open invitation to sabotage attempts. Many more Birdhwals may be waiting to happen. |
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Enron gets its comeuppance IT is a wild axe that the MSEB (Maharashtra State Electricity Board) has wielded against the Enron-promoted Dabhol Power Company. On Wednesday it formally terminated the power purchase agreement (PPA), which underpins its relation with the DPC. It accused the company of “misrepresenting material facts” (in plain language, telling lies and making bogus claims) in the PPA and this fact was valid enough to render the agreement void. Legal pundits would endlessly argue on the sustainability of this charge and the action flowing from it. But the notice has seriously damaged the image of DPC and projected it as a god with feet of clay. For, DPC’s claim to fame and also its clout to insert several clauses in its favour and against the MSEB lay in one sentence. It stated in the agreement that it would introduce “dynamic characteristics and operations” in DPC and this would enable it to generate the maximum electricity in three hours. That too from a cold start, meaning from the moment the plant is “flamed”. The MSEB says that on three occasions DPC failed to live up to this tall claim and has accepted its inability in a letter in January. For good measure, it adds that there could have been more occasions when DPC was found wanting in its self-proclaimed capacity to produce power within 180 minutes. The termination notice puts paid to the arbitration process sought by DPC and renegotiation of the PPA by the Madhav Godbole-led team. The latest notice as indeed the preliminary termination notice by DPC have vitiated the atmosphere so much that an amicable settlement has become nearly impossible. It is obvious that both sides are toughening their stand not only to intimidate the other but also to win popular support. This is particularly so with the MSEB and the state government. That is why the state Cabinet went out of its way to authorise the MSEB to initiate whatever action it decided. Any backtracking now will look like a climbdown and no elected government can court this. This then is the public face of the confrontation. What is actually happening behind the doors is unknown but a stage has come when the dispute, serious as it is, ends in a mutually acceptable solution. But that seems a distant dream. The MSEB has cancelled similar PPAs with Reliance and Mittals indicating that it has no use for additional power. Enron has appointed two evaluators to assess the worth of its plant and machinery and the real estate. It is a clear indication of its desire to pull out. The MSEB notice will only add momentum to this process. |
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Trading with Pakistan A delegation of 35 Indian businessmen visited Pakistan recently under the FICCI umbrella to push bilateral trade which currently stands at measly $ 200 million. The Indo-Pakistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry President, Mr Chirayu R. Amin, who led the delegation, sees a possibility of trade touching $ 5 billion to $ 10 billion if, and that is a big if, barriers are removed. Given the past experience and less-than-cordial relations between the two countries, one cannot be too optimistic about the normalisation of trade relations. At best, the visit was an expression of the Indian industrialists' intention to do business with their counterparts in Islamabad, which has so far confined the imports from India to some 650 items. That this has encouraged smuggling and mutual trade through a third country, causing huge revenue loss to the two hostile neighbours, does not seem to matter. While obstacles to bilateral trade relating to taxes, infrastructure and travel, identified by the Indian team, are not insurmountable, it is politics shielding vested business interests in Pakistan that prevents the flow of mutual trade benefits. If trade with Pakistan failed to flourish under Mr Nawaz Sharief, a businessman-turned-Prime Minister with all his clout and popular appeal, it is unlikely to grow under the present military regime. Apart from the military ruler's compulsions to keep aflame anti-India sentiment and not letting Pakistanis touch anything made in India, there are other bottlenecks to trade. Indian industry is more vibrant and can produce and sell cheaper goods in Pakistan. Businessmen in
Pakistan realise this and have a vested interest in keeping out Indian products. Instead of being competitive and outward-looking, industry in Pakistan insists on having protectionist walls around its domestic market. Just as Indian industry fears "dumping" of cheaper Chinese goods, Pakistan industry too nurses similar fears with regard to Indian goods. That may explain why Islamabad shies away from granting the most favoured nation (MFN) status to India permissible under the WTO rules. The biggest bottleneck, however, is that politics rules over economics in both countries. Unless trade is divorced from politics, it cannot grow, least of all under a military regime. Informed public opinion must build up in both countries so that political confrontation over Kashmir does not cast its shadow on trade. |
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For whom the bell tolls PROVERBIALLY
public memory may be short but it is not as short as blundering or bumbling or defaulting governments would like to believe. It is even less so if the blundering and bumbling happens again and again. Then public memory turns into resentment and that, in turn, finds ready expression in the only way it can in an electoral democracy. People don’t vote for such a government, or rather they vote against it even if that means voting for someone they don’t particularly care for. More often than not this is what happens in elections. This is precisely what has happened in the just concluded state polls. The results have rebuffed much of the conventional punditry on why people vote the way they do. The anti-incumbency factor, by which many an editorialist and psephologist lay so much store, cannot explain the sixth successive triumph of the Left Front in Bengal after a quarter-century of less than good governance. Nor can relatively good governance (by such standards as we have) by the DMK in Tamil Nadu explain its resounding rout. Nor, again, can ideology explain why the Marxists won so handsomely in Bengal and lost so decisively in Kerala — or explain the diametrically opposite performance of the Congress in these two states. An honest analysis of the results must take into account many factors, but the one factor which has gone unnoticed and which I believe played a principal role in these elections is the performance of the BJP-led conglomerate at the Centre. The fact that the BJP as the dominant ruling party fared poorly everywhere tells the tale. That it had no great presence in the states concerned is no excuse. After all, not too long ago it had all of two MPs in the Lok Sabha in one election and 88 in the next, and then emerged as the single largest party in the last election. That people vote differently in national and state elections is another of those experientially unsubstantiated theories. The fact is that the people in these elections made it a point not only not to vote for the BJP but equally not to vote for those associated with it in the national government. Hence AGP’s poor showing in Assam and Mamata Banerjee’s damp squib in Bengal. But the most pressing demonstration of my thesis is the DMK’s rout — even if it meant re-electing a party that was almost obliterated in the last election and which continues to be headed by the lady of a thousand fancy sandals and half-a-dozen corruption scandals, for one of which she already stands convicted by a court of law! Those without the blinkers of personal loyalty (otherwise called sychophancy) or those who don’t hug the shield of party discipline (which usually covers ideological infirmity or myopia or cowardice) will have no difficulty in recognising the wrongs of the NDA government. Disillusionment, distress and disgust describe the popular feelings towards the BJP-led government in three broad areas. People are disillusioned that “the party with a difference” has proved no different at all: The same pomp and ceremony and style, same pathological preoccupation with machtpolitik, same proneness to moral malfeasance (as exposed by Tehelka), same disregard for the real problems of the mass of the people — in short, the same every little and every big thing. This is the general perception. As for the BJP’s committed supporters, the so-called Hindutva elements, they feel let down by the somersault the party has made on its core socio-political philosophy. In fact, one such stalwart recently attacked the government’s policies in terms that no opposition party has — among other things, calling the Finance Minister “a criminal minister”. And that brings us to the second area of popular discontent — the government’s economic policies. There is, on the one hand, the belief that emancipation of the country lies in MNCpation of the economy; hence the surrender to West-designed instrumentalities of international exploitation — WTO, IMF and the World Bank. On the other hand, there is open pandering to privileged sections of our grossly chasmic economic order through the agency of the Union Budget and assorted policy decisions at the micro-level. Together these postures and policies have caused distress to the vast majority of the people, including the middle and lower rungs of the middle class. Even as foreign cars and cosmetics and liquor and, yes, apples flood upmarket India, hundreds of millions continue to suffer hunger and malnutrition, so much so that the Supreme Court has asked the Centre and six states to explain starvation deaths when the buffer stocks of foodgrains are three times the required volume! While the economic policies have been a matter of vested deliberation and class interests, the bumbling and blundering have been on issues of national concern and national honour. It is in dealing with such issues that this government has delivered the greatest blow to the people, including this writer, who had expected it to be definitely different at least on this score. After all, the BJP had all along projected itself as uncompromisingly nationalistic, a party which would restore and preserve India’s swabhiman. But look at how this government handled a series of grave events: From Kargil to Kandahar to Kashmir to the Bangladesh barbarism on the border, what we see are profiles in pusillanmity. There has been a common pattern to our response to these situations: initial paralysis, then prevarication, then pretence, and finally a timid reaction — and this in the face of grave provocation, indeed injury to national interest and self-respect, as well as loss of Indian lives. In Kargil, Nawaz Sharif was instantly sought to be exonerated, as was Sheikh Hasina in the Bangladesh episode. What Indian purpose did this apologia serve? The Sharif-is-innocent stand in the Kargil perfidy was obviously aimed at preserving the myth of “high success” of Prime Minister Vajpayee’s Wagah excursion; in the case of Bangladesh, the idea was not to hurt “friendly” Sheikh Hasina’s election prospects. If what happened on the Bangladesh border is friendliness, what is enmity? Enmity plus barbarity! It will be a long time before the people of this country will forget the picture of a BSF jawan tortured, murdered and then strung with his hands and feet on a pole like a dead animal. And yet our Foreign Minister talked of the peaceful exchange of some villages, after, the BDR had committed the barbarity, as “a testimony to the close and warm relations” between the two countries! This brought to mind Mr Jaswant Singh hugging his Taliban counterpart at Kandahar, then on return praising the “cooperation” of the Taliban government when it was clear to the whole world that the Taliban were active collaborators in the hijacking. But to tell his countrymen that there is a tough nut inside this generous shell, Mr Jaswant Singh promised that the hijackers “will be retributed”, and that the torture and murder of BSF soldiers “would not be glossed over”. Words, words, words — signifying nothing. Far from being punished, the hijackers and their terror organisations are going from strength to strength, killing our people in Kashmir. As for the brutality by the Bangladesh Rifles, it has indeed been “glossed over” for all practical purposes. Contrast this with how other countries avenge the killing of the countrymen — from big powers like the USA to small nations like Israel, and not just on their borders but in the offending countries, be they far or near. Dealing timidly with bloody mischief by smaller and weaker nations is one side of this government’s spineless foreign policy. The other is the embarrassing subalternism it shows vis-a-vis rich and powerful nations. It took our Foreign Ministry two days to react to BDR’s bestiality — and 20 minutes to hail the dubious National Missile Defence (NMD) announcement by President Bush. It is difficult to understand what purpose this obscene alacrity served except to confirm our subservience to the USA — and not only in Kashmir where this government has accepted every piece of “advice” from Washington, contrary to our national interest and with disastrous results. Does all this add up to swabhiman? If the Vajpayee government thinks that the people accept these policies and postures, it has another think coming. The next parliamentary elections may seem far off today, but these will come. If the ruling combine does not want to come a cropper at the hustings, it will have to steer itself on a different path, one which ensures people’s welfare and national self-respect. It would be foolish of the BJP and company to bank on the bankruptcy of the Opposition. They must ask themselves if Mr Karunanidhi could have imagined that a discredited, indeed convicted, rival would oust him from his chair! |
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The Filmy Chakkar IT was hardly two months since I returned to Bhubaneswar after my last, long and lazy trip in the Garhwal Himalayas. I was sipping my Sunday morning cup of extra strong coffee when the travel bug bit me again. I made up my mind to move out again, this time to visit Rameshwaram and Conoor. Some necessary planning and a couple of days later I was in a slow train from Tambram, Chennai to Rameshwaram. It was early in the morning that the train reached Rameshwaram. I come out of the rather small railway station and stared at various options of reaching the Guest House of Tamil Nadu Tourism Development Corporation. The choice was very limited-rather strange looking and definitely slow moving, horse driven “tonga” in which one is required to sit or rather squat like in a bullock cart, and swifter three-wheeled scooter. The decision was in favour of the speedy scooter and I was soon in the guest house. But ever since then I have been repenting for having made, yet another wrong decision in life, in not taking the tonga and enjoying a different experience. From Rameshwaram to Coimbatore by train and then to Conoor by bus was uneventful. I was so tired that most of the time I was dozing. I found Conoor to be very cute and rather well spread out town. Next day I took the lovely little train that shuttles between Conoor and Ooty. The Conoor railway station, which is in the heart of the town, was remarkably clean. At the appointed time, the engine whistled twice and the slow movement of the train started. The first station was Wellington. After a brief halt the train moved again. A number of railway stations with names like Ketty, and Lovedale followed. And soon we reached Ooty. I came out of the station and found a tour operator’s office just across the road. I asked the young person at the counter about the conducted tours to places of interest being organised by them. He told me that their tours had already departed and that I had very little choice as only “The Filmy Chakkar” tour was still to leave. I tamely gave in thinking that the fancy name given to the tour was the booking clerk’s idea of making me feel relaxed. He charged me one hundred rupees and gave me a receipt on which was printed “Filmy Chakkar Tour”. So it is the official nomenclature of the tour, I said to myself, somewhat amazed and somewhat amused. Soon I was in the bus. In no time the bus was full and it started punctually at the designated time. It was a small 15 seater bus which had obviously done a lot of smart running around in her younger days. Now it moved with a kind of mature steadiness, which comes with age and refused to get provoked into reliving the “Fast Lady” experiences of her heydays. A few minutes later we reached the famous Botanical Garden of Ooty. Before we could get out, the driver started explaining about the place in Tamil. He was a very handsome, slim and tall young man with remarkable self-confidence. I smiled, I thought at the right places and nodded when according to me, that was due and widened my eyes to show complete attention and interest to what he was saying in Tamil. He ended and everyone seemed pleased at his introduction. And when I was changing those expressions of my face, I was startled by the driver’s invocation in Hindi so chaste and flawless that it would make any of us from the North feel embarrassed, “Sooniye Bhai Sahib’, he started and then explained the riddle. The tour was called “The Filmy Chakkar” as it covered various places where shooting of well-known films had taken place. He mentioned the names of the Tamil films shot in the Botanical Garden. This revelation was greeted by affirmative nods from those knowing that wonderful language. A little later, and en route to Conoor, we stopped at a place called “Ketty Valley View”. It was indeed a lovely view with the track of the small train visible. Much to our delight at that point of time the train happened to be on its way down from Ooty to Conoor. Our driver-cum-guide informed that this was the place where
A. R. Rahman’s famous song and dance “Thaiya, Thaiya” was picturised on the roof of the slow moving train. A couple of kilometres later, we found our road moving in the midst of lush green tea gardens. The helpful driver stopped and we all got out of the bus to take photographs. And then he disclosed the “filmy” side of it. This is “Singhara Estate”, he informed. It belongs to Mayur Madhwani, the husband of one time popular actress Mumtaz. The name did not appear to have registered on the younger travellers. But some of us, mostly the older lot, who remembered what Mumtaz meant in our times, did click at the tea bushes from various angles quite a few times in her honour. Just before reaching Conoor we crossed Wellington. Our expert informed us that the famous Madras Regimental Centre is located there. We crossed the town and were really impressed by the neat and orderly ambience with lovely blue-green mountains in the background. The driver stopped the bus at one place and informed us that the films “Roza”, “Karma” and “Pukar” were shot there. There were some “oohs” and “aahs” from some of the tourists. Soon we recommenced our journey and within minutes reached the calm and cool Conoor. Since I was staying at Conoor and the tour was to go back to its starting point, Ooty, I dropped out after thanking the driver-cum-guide profusely for his excellent commentary and complimenting him for his exceptional command over Hindi. Having barely come back to beautiful Bhubaneswar, I am already planning my next “chakkar” to the hills.... |
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Hepatitis C — the slow killer HEPATITIS C is one of 40 new infectious diseases discovered since 1970, but has been around for decades, if not centuries. Before 1989, it was known as ‘non-A, non-B hepatitis’. There is a minute risk of catching the disease from implements that can carry blood (razors, tattoo pens, toothbrushes, etc). It is also possible for mothers to pass it on to an unborn baby, and while it is generally agreed that the risk of infection through sex is low, experts won’t say that it is non-existent. Treatment isn’t always successful and depends on the virus’s ‘geno type’ or ‘strain’, but across the board 60 per cent of patients will be cured when pegylated interferon is available. Some patients have found both symptoms of the virus and side effects of the treatment to be greatly reduced by the use of Chiness herbs. One of the symptoms of Hepatitis C is debilitating tiredness which has lead to it being mistakenly diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
The Observer Newborns to get immediate e-mail First you get spanked, then you get spammed. Under a new programme being sponsored by a Silicon Valley hospital, some northern California newborns will get an e-mail address within minutes of being born. Sequoia Hospital has teamed up with Namezero.com Inc. to offer “tech-savvy” parents the option of launching their infants online long before they take their first steps, giving them e-mail and a personalized domain name shortly after they take their first gulps of air. The service will provide “access to free email and URL forwarding, as well as online tips and resources for child care and parenting,” Nemezero said in a statement. By registering a child’s name at birth, parents are ensuring that the child will have it throughout their lifetime.
Reuters US family wins billions for pollution ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, has been ordered to pay $ 1.06 billion to a US family for contaminating its land with radiation. A jury in New Orleans found on Thursday that ExxonMobil had polluted the 1.5-hectare tract in the state of Louisiana during a three-decade operation to clean used oil-field pipe. It awarded former judge Joseph Grefer and his family, who filed their lawsuit in 1997, $ 56 million to clean up their land, $ 145,000 in lost property value and $ 1 billion in punitive damages.
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A showcase of urban poverty IT really is hard to be cheerful about the future of Bharat Mata if you have just returned, as I have, from a foreign land. It looks so bad compared to almost anywhere else in the world that a terrible sense of gloom and despair grips you the moment you arrive at Mumbai airport. To tell you the whole truth gloomy thoughts began for me this time even while I was still in the sky in an All Nippon Airlines Boeing 777 because the first thing that caught my eye as I gazed down at our most modern metropolis were the slums. Acres and acres of windowless, shapeless boxes all piled onto each other without order, elegance or the slightest semblance of urban beauty. Even from up there you can see that these hovels made of waste metal and plastic should be considered unfit for human habitation (and are in almost every other country), yet in our own Mumbai they seem to grow and spread. It’s as if they are closing in on the airport and will one day spill on to the runway, like weeds, so that poverty wins the battle against even this feeble attempt at progress and modernity. There are ways to remove them, humane ways, but they remain untried because Mumbai’s politicians could not care less. India’s best airport looks no better than those slums when you compare it with even a small, provincial airport in Thailand or Indonesia. And, by the sounds of it, we will not have to wait long before Vietnam and Burma build brand new airports and roads while we slip slowly backwards into degradation and despair. Unsurprisingly, since sanitation is considered a luxury, the first scent of India that greets you is the smell of public toilets and untreated sewage. The city of Mumbai just chucks it all into the sea through old fashioned drains that go not much further than the shoreline — and in such vast quantities these days — that the smell of dead fish and human waste has become the smell of the city. Then there is the dreary trudge down an escalator so creaky and outdated it could be a relic, the needless wait in an immigration queue since returning citizens should not need to have their passport stamps, the tense conversation with a customs officer who seems to think the orchids I bring conceal contraband. They go twice through the x-ray machine and are then subjected to another check by a suspicious officer who seems unable to believe that they could be only flowers. Then, it is out into the steamy Mumbai evening and a long slum-darshan. Naked, underfed children squatting by the main highway into the city, skinny, unwashed women desperately pumping water out of an ancient hand-pump, chaotic traffic and people pouring out of filthy, narrow streets in an endless stream. On my first day home I spent much time at Mumbai airport. A few hours after I arrived I returned to receive someone coming from the West. It was a midnight flight and the airline lost his bags so I spent two hours waiting with a jostling, sweaty crowd of other visitors on the pavement outside the airport. The arrival lounge was closed to us for what are mysteriously called ‘security reasons’. It is a mistake because the frustration of waiting outside in that crowd may one day lead someone to throw a bomb through the glass windows whereas waiting in an air-conditioned lounge — even if it smells like a public toilet — may reduce tensions. Since my friend took so long to emerge I had to find out if he was on the flight but was informed rudely by a policeman, who sat in air-conditioned splendour in the banned arrivals lounge, that I should go find the Airport Manager. This turned out to be a saga in itself. I found myself climbing many flights of filthy staircases that led me through a labyrinth of filthy corridors which — at this time of night — were completely deserted. The policeman had misled me, someone said, and what I should do is go back to the gate I waited at and use the intercom. It was a futile exercise because there was no answer from any of the officers on duty and if my friend had not appeared of his own accord I may have had to wait all night in the seething, sweaty crowd through which every arriving passenger has to battle his way. Welcome to India. On my second day home memories of ordered gardens filled with orchids and frangipani and ordered streets to clean you could eat off them and ordered shops faded after one walk down Marine Drive. The contrast between there and here was so sharp they could not have survived. For two years now Mumbai’s municipal authorities have been attempting to shore up Marine Drive — which is slowly sinking back into the sea — by dumping tetrapods along it. |
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‘PTV emulating Indian TV channels’ PAKISTAN'A Urdu press devotes considerable space to politics and favours hate Indian campaigns but has a good deal of humour hidden in small bits of news that emanate from villages and towns. This indeed offers a glimpse into the social and political vibrations at the grassroots. Here are some nuggets from some leading newspapers like Daily Pakistan, Insaf, Khabrain and Jang. The Punjabi conference has provided much food for politicians either to support or oppose it. Some have laced it with humour. According to Daily Pakistan, Indian actor Raj Babbar’s father was a goldsmith in Jalalpur Jattan. After attending the Punjabi conference in Lahore when he went to Jalalpur Jattan, he told the citizens there (who showered upon him a tonne of rose petals) that had partition not taken place, India would have been a super power. MQM leader Afaq Ahmad told the Press in Karachi that Raj Babbar should marry one of his fans in Pakistan, thus creating a real rishta (relationship) between the two Punjabs. The clergy condemned the Punjabi conference whereupon writer Fakhr Zaman said that mullahs who showered namak-harami (treachery) on Punjab should leave it. According to Khabrain, the mullahs countered by deciding that they would not lead the janaza prayers of all participants in the Punjabi conference. According to daily Jang, the Federal Ministry for religious affairs headed by Mr Mahmud Ghazi had sent a recommendation to the Ministry of Information that all songs and dances shown on PTV be banned. The ministry’s letter said that PTV was involved in emulating Indian TV channels and was showing women shaking their bodies. Editor Ausaf in his column informed that a senior Sindhi politician Khalid Mehmood Soomro said in an interview that he was opposed to the presence of jehadi organisations in Pakistan and the reason he gave for this was that these organisations were waging war under the tutelage of the intelligence agencies. According to Khabrain, a Christian pir in Chak Misran has revealed that the tornado that visited the village was, in fact, a fight between two groups of Jinns. The non-Muslim jinns were opposed to Muslim jinns and were living a life of tension. The crisis broke out when a non-Muslim jinn fell in love with a Muslim female jinn. The girl jinn was very obstinate and did not listen to the buzurg Muslim jinns and was about to marry the non-Muslim jinn when all hell broke loose and the village was destroyed. Muslim jinns which came from the neighbouring villages were rescued. Chak Misran was now completely in control of Muslim jinns and their children attended tilawat of Quran. According to Khabrain young boys were employed for sexual pleasure in Pakistan and offered to guests as hospitality. It happened in the homes of the feudal lords of Punjab and Sindh. In Punjab, Pir Vadhai and Dhaban Malkan were known for this. In most jails younger prisoners were used sexually by older prisoners and the jail staff who were mostly sodomites. In a forum of daily Din, women appealed to the government to repeal the hudood law relating to rape. They said it was a distortion of Islam to demand that a raped woman bring four Muslims of perfect character before the rapist could be convicted, failing which the raped woman may be punished or even be stoned to death. A columnist in daily Pakistan expressed himself greatly impressed with the leader of “greatest revolution of Islam in the world”, Mulla Umar. He slept on a rough bed and ate among his friends, picking up and eating bits of bread thrown away by others because of their burnt edges. According to daily Pakistan, the Punjabi conference was condemned because it talked of greater Punjab “and breaking down the walls” and the Deoband conference was condemned because it did not raise the issue of Kashmir. Daily Insaf also attacked the Punjabi conference convened in Lahore by Punjabi writer and PPP leader Fakhar Zaman saying that most of the speakers at the meeting were “brown sahibs” more interested in English. The son of Fakhr Zaman spoke of English movies. Organiser Hameed Akhtar had always worked in English newspapers and did not know how to write Punjabi. Tahira Mazhar Ali, the daughter of Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, had two sons living abroad and a daughter recently employed in an English newspaper. The wife of Indian actor Raj Babbar, Nadira, was the daughter of late Indian Communist leader, Sajjad Zaheer. And Prof Mehdi Hassan had not done anything for the promotion of Punjabi. According to Khabrain, a group of Islamic dacoits raided a mosque in Sahok near Lahore and demanded that those present in the mosque recite the kalimas. Many namazis were found deficient because one dacoit was hafiz (new by heart) of Quran. The namazis who belonged to Tablighi Jamaat were asked to recite Qunoot prayer, the four Kalimas and to raise slogans of Ya Ali. After that the dacoits took all the cash and decamped. According to Khabrain, a Chunian family was shocked when a pir acting as exorcist for the saya (jinn) of their son seduced their daughter and took her in a secret marriage. Again Khabrain reported Abbaji Mian Sharif started dividing his secret property between his sons Nawaz and Shehbaz Sharif in Saudi Arabia, but Shehbaz Sharif few into a rage and threw a dish full of food at his brother when he asked for some secret asset as his property. |
Education Minister’s visit ON the 12th instant the Honourable Ch. Chhotu Ram, Minister of Education, with L. Atma Ram, M.A., the Divisional Inspector and Sh. Allah Rakha, the Deputy Inspector, paid a visit to the Local Mission High School. The Revd. B.T. Schelyur, Principal, and Mr N.C. Ghose, Headmaster of the school, received him at the school gate. The Headmaster garlanded them. Then followed a most interesting but a short programme. Maulvi Walidad, a veteran of the school, read an informal address, the boys sang beautiful songs in accompaniment with harmonium and tablas. |
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SPIRITUAL NUGGETS With the birth of true understanding comes right contemplation of God. The inner light flames up and subdues the mind, And by God’s grace samadhi is attained. **** The true vairagi without desire, concentrated on the self within, content with the food of God’s Name Drinks immortal nectar. **** In the contemplation of the Lord, the lotus turns up. The stream of immortality flows from the tenth door. God’s name pervades all the three worlds. **** Having killed longing and desire, rising above the three gunas, beyond the slings of disappointment, Relying on saintly company, the follower of the True Guru finds the Fourth state. Six shrines of the body, the mind full of renunciation and concentrated on the Word. Then the eternal music absorbs the mind. Through the Guru’s Word True Name is realised.
**** Rising in splendour of beauty. Out of kindness He gracefully enters His own home. Then rains the immortal nectar. The Supreme Word purifying and producing rapture. If one understands the nature of this One, himself becomes One with the Creator. — Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Sarang M 1, Sorath M. 1, Gauri M.1, Asa M 1, Ramkali M1, Dakhni Omkar. **** Truth alone succeeds not untruth; Through Truth lies the path of liberation. — Mundaka Upanishad, 3.1.6 **** The Truth shall make you free. —
The Holy Bible: The Gospel According to St. John 8:32 |
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