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| Wednesday,
August 8, 2001, Chandigarh, India    |
Cash glut, rate cut Madness in asylum Trauma in school |
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The tragedy of Phoolan Devi
Sum(m)it,
semantically
PAU: how the story of politicisation began
Selling beauty myth to men
Have condoms, weave a saree
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Cash glut, rate cut IT
is a kind of distress sale in the banking sector. The SBI started it late last week by reducing interest rate on short-term loans by 0.5 per cent. To compensate the resultant loss, it lowered the interest on deposits by the same percentage. Analysts are sure that all other banks will follow suit. The rate cut, particularly on long-term fixed deposits, comes at a time when senior citizens and the small man find all secure and profitable savings routes closed or disappearing. Gold and real estate, two traditional parking slots of what one had kept for the rainy day, have lost their lustre. Gold has lost value in the past decade. Real estate is stagnating in value after hitting speculative heights. Small savings flourished as the safest scheme offering total security and very good returns. Retired individuals and salaried persons wanting to save on income tax routinely resorted to this for investing their savings. The Centre has cut the rate of returns from 14 per cent at one time to less than 10 per cent now. The UTI has collapsed, at least the US-64 leg of it, and with the threat of a new system of redemption price, only the incurably optimistic will look at it again. Squeezed on all sides, people plumped for fixed deposits in banks to get a reasonable yield. And banks have dealt or are about to deal a severe blow to their search. Now people with some savings and some family commitments have to keep the money under the pillow, allowing inflation to erode the real value. Is this part of the much-hyped economic reforms? It will be harsh to blame the banks. They are sitting on a mountain of funds; one estimate puts it at over Rs 1,00,000 crore. That is a lot of money and some of it has been used to buy government bonds to meet the cash reserve ratio (CRR) obligation. As Union Finance Minister Sinha disclosed in the Lok Sabha, a small part of it (about Rs 2000 crore) was used to buy US-64 which was sold back days before the freeze and the crash in prices. Banks are also known to be busy in the bond market where the “coupon rate” (interest) hovers around 10 per cent. Banks suffer from two ills. One, the cost of raising funds is high, about 3 per cent in the case of big ones and even 9 per cent for small ones. The other is sluggish credit outflow – that is, there are no big borrowers. All this besides the bad debt of over Rs 60,000 crore. This is the FCI syndrome. Plenty of foodgrains but not many buyers. In the FCI case it is the middle class and the poor who benefit. In the case of interest rate cut, it is the middle class which will suffer. |
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Madness in asylum THE
National Human Rights Commission has taken suo motu notice of the tragic incident in the Erwadi Dargah near Ramanathapuram which claimed the lives of at least 30 mentally challenged patients. The patients died not because of the fire which broke out in the Dargah-cum-asylum, but because they were chained to wooden posts of the thatched hutments which served as their living quarters. The NHRC has asked the Tamil Nadu Chief Secretary for a report within a week on the ghastly episode. But why wait for the report for understanding why the fire in the so-called asylum for the mentally challenged claimed such a heavy toll of human lives? All-round negligence and indifference to the plight of the patients was responsible for most of them being roasted alive, shackled to wooden posts. The report will predictably point in different directions instead of squarely blaming the Tamil Nadu administration for a tragedy which should not have taken place. In the global village a dargah or any other religious place, like the Baba Barbag Singh shrine for the mentally challenged in Una district of Himachal Pradesh, should not be allowed to keep patients who have virtually no control over their actions. The Tamil Nadu tragedy will reignite the debate on the squalid and inhuman conditions in which such patients are kept in private and state-run asylums across the country. Thereafter the debate will peter out until the next tragedy involving mentally challenged takes places for precisely the same reasons which the Tamil Nadu administration has been asked to explain. In the present case the dargah-keeper and his associates have been arrested and will be tried for the death of the patients placed in their care by ignorant and superstitious villagers. Two years ago NIMHANS had prepared a comprehensive report for the NHRC after studying the conditions of private and state-run mental-care institutions. The report said that in most institutions they were kept in conditions almost similar to the one under which the luckless patients were living at the dargah. However, not all the blame for the pitiable state of most mental-care institutions should be placed at the door of the administration. In remote areas people are not willing to give up their age-old belief in equating mental illness with black magic and evil spirits. They have more faith in the powers of the witch doctor than in institutions run on modern lines by teams of medically qualified experts. This Bronze Age mindset can only be corrected through a concerted effort by social reformers backed to the hilt in their mission by the political leadership. |
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Trauma in school THE
list of cruelties children are forced to put up with in the name of maintaining discipline in school keeps growing. The latest addition comes from a prominent school of Chandigarh which has closed its doors on a student because he had got his long hair
cut. The Principal of Shivalik Public School, Sector 41, has justified the action on two grounds. One, he says a clause in the school diary prohibits Sikh boys from trimming their hair and non-Sikh boys from sporting long hair. Two, the erring boy’s violation of the school code of conduct can set a bad example for other students. The boy’s father, a Head Constable, supports his son’s action, saying that it was done on medical advice. The boy, Charanjit Singh, had developed an eye infection two years ago and started wearing glasses, but this did not stop his severe headaches. After consulting a doctor, the father chose to trim his son’s hair. When Charanjit went to school the next day, his trauma began. Instead of first going into the facts of the case, the Principal told the boy to either leave the school or join the school’s branch in Mohali. For about one week now the student has been forced to stay away from his class since joining the Mohali branch of the school is an inconvenient option for the family as his sister is also in the same school. All this has caused a lot of avoidable tension to the family. On the face of it, the whole issue appears too trivial to deserve such notice. A reasonable Principal could have easily tackled this case just by sympathetically listening to the boy or his parents. Instead of blindly going by the rule book, the Principal could have gone into the boy’s performance and settled the issue. A fairly well-behaved, intelligent student with few complaints against him from either the teachers or fellow students, Charanjit could have been spared this traumatic experience. In a similar case, a Sector 19 school allowed a student from a Namdhari family to sport the dress of his faith instead of wearing the school uniform without causing any rumpus. The incident at Shivalik Public School has serious dimensions. It throws up a question: should a school head allow his/her students the freedom to practise their religion the way they choose it or should he or she take upon himself or herself the job of ensuring that the students stick to their chosen faith and act the way a granthi, a pujari or a mullah does? Matters of religion are too sensitive and should be best left to the families. Schools can do without trifling with them. No one in his right mind will quarrel with the need to enforce discipline or inculcate it among the students, but it should be done in a humane way. At this impressionable age and with this kind of provocation, a student can take any extreme step. Each student has self-respect and dignity. Why hurt him or her over such a trivial issue? Already the students are under tremendous pressure due to unweildy syllabuses and irrational expectations of their parents. |
The tragedy of Phoolan Devi IT has happened before. Women of exceptional qualities and promise whose life has been nipped in the bud have become larger than life. They become myths and myths overtake reality. We have seen it happen three times in our generation: Eva Peron of Argentina, the Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. They were all of them exceptional women. Eva came from humble beginnings and virtually ruled Argentina – for the better or worse is another matter. She had convinced the majority that she was for the poor and brought to her job as the President’s wife an élan and glamour that is still remembered wistfully, at least in its highly successful musical variation. She died young, felled by cancer. Marilyn was what every modern girl presumably wants to be: attractive, a sex siren and an embodiment of the glamour of the Hollywood industry. She was sought after by the rich and the powerful, including President Kennedy and his brother Robert. Indeed, Marilyn was a modern-day Cleopatra and could command a thousand ships and men. Yet beneath all the fame and glamour, she was an insecure person and took her own life. Princess Diana blazed her path across the somewhat stuffy corridors of British royalty, opened doors and windows a crack, was apparently unsuited to the Crown Prince, Prince Charles, and sought to make her mark by high living and doing good. She doled out empathy in buckets, and her untimely death in the company of Dodi Al Fayed, son of the Egyptian owner of Harrods London store, in a car crash in Paris provided the setting for a truly remarkable outpouring of grief by British society. Where does Phoolan Devi fit into this legacy? More than with any of the three remarkable women above, her life was the stuff of high drama. Belonging to a low caste and raped at a young age, she decided to avenge the upper castes’ cruelty by becoming an active participant in a dacoit gang. Whether she actually gunned down the 22 Thakurs in a village in 1981 or not, she served an 11-year jail sentence after a surrender negotiated on her own terms. Once freed, she was signed on by the Samajwadi Party and was twice elected to the Lok Sabha – until gunned down outside her sprawling MP’s bungalow in New Delhi. There are suggestions that she had lived by the gun and died by the gun. But that is a cruel assessment. Phoolan Devi’s glory days ended with her release from jail. The impression Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party gave was that it had bagged a vote gatherer. In unfamiliar parliamentary territory, she did not shine in parliamentary debates and made no conspicuous contribution to the betterment of the backward classes and the poor through legislation. And her marital affairs became a disturbing punctuation mark. The tragedy of Phoolan Devi is that she is being denied the dignity that is hers for the courage with which she faced her ordeals by demonstrating that a poor backward woman can take up the cudgels to right a wrong society is too timid to undertake. But instead of the myth supplanting reality, Phoolan is being dragged through the mud by family squabbles over her property (whose very size is raising questions). Her tear-prone husband Umed Singh appears on television chat shows to vow to keep her memory and cause alive, her sister accuses him of wife beating, and the sordid drama plays on. Even police investigations are inclined to take bizarre overtones almost every day. One wonders what will become of the legendary tales in print and celluloid of the great Phoolan Devi battling the odds to seek justice for herself and the downtrodden. Will they now become a curiosity, with political parties fighting the feared elections to the UP State Assembly pressing the panic buttons? Surely, the classic statement in the aftermath of Phoolan Devi’s murder was made by Mulayam Singh Yadav, who declared that, contrary to the wishes of her mother, she would be cremated in Mirzapur because “we are the family”. So, Phoolan’s body was put on show in Varanasi before being taken to Mirzapur for cremation. The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Mr Rajnath Singh, has set the cat among the pigeons by further dividing the backward castes to try to take votes away from the opposition parties, and his sudden interest in holding meetings in villages to listen to people’s problems seems hardly a disinterested act. Phoolan Devi seems to have lost out in death as she had, for the most part, lost out in life. No, she cannot lay claim to the status of Eva or Marilyn or Diana who have secure places in modern mythology. Phoolan’s is a more disturbing legacy. It is a legacy of a woman who suffered, one who was brave, but could not make the transition from the ravines of Chambal or jail to the unfamiliar political terrain which proved to be more treacherous. Perhaps it is just as well that Phoolan will not become a myth in the sense of her gifted predecessors. She was earthy with a simple belief in what is right and what is wrong. She remained a village girl to the end. Yet her sad end has some lessons for Uttar Pradesh and the country as politicians and parties are hell-bent on stirring the caste pot for partisan profit. Deeply held prejudices take time to eradicate but a phenomenon such as Phoolan’s brings the day of reckoning for the prejudiced closer. We should leave the epitaph on Phoolan to her. She said in 1995, “I don’t consider myself to be someone good, but I’m not bad either. I made men suffer what they had made me suffer”. |
Sum(m)it,
semantically OUR daft, sorry, deft diplomats bent over backwards to make the world believe that the much hyped Agra summit was not all about pits. It was rather a mixed kit of titbits of wits, which finally forced both sides to call it quits. Forget the script which they failed to fit. It was a veritable war of words, shorn of swords. Both ruled out military means. While the doves talked to each other, the hawks fluttered the dovecotes by talking at one another. Ergo, the talk did not walk. Blame game ensued. Because success has many fathers, failure has none. To our mandarins and ministers, I would recommend reading of Edward de Bono’s “Six thinking hats”. Bono is a celebrated lateral thinker whose ideas have influenced governments and corporates the world over. How one wishes his theory of six thinking hats could help us find a way out of the blind alley called Kashmir. The colour of each hat has been prescribed to give it a flavour. If white is neutral and objective, black covers exclusively the negative aspects — why something cannot be done. Yellow promotes hope, optimism and positive thinking whereas red will suggest rage, anger and emotions. Green is all about new creative ideas. But blue is cool and calculated, to control the thinking process running amok. It gives a detached view so as to enable one to sort out from a whole range of possible solutions generated through various hats. So over to Bono as a facilitator. Let the negotiators on either side switch in and out of hats. Then they would think and say things which their egos do not permit them to do normally. Wearing the clown costume gives you full permission to play the clown.
Amen. Sample this: White hat: Perpetual hostility has diverted resources from development to armaments culminating in nuclearisation. Lack of socio-economic cooperation has impoverished the subcontinent. Black hat: It is a dialogue of the deaf. The love of the past is predicated on the hatred of the present and fear of future. Red hat: Kashmir is the core issue and everything else can follow Vs Kashmir is an integral part of India. No concessions on this score. Yellow hat: Military solution is ruled out. Let’s share Kashmir like we share history and heritage. Convert LoC into international border. Let’s learn from the Chinese who have normalised relations with their neighbours, border disputes notwithstanding. Green hat: Greater autonomy to PoK and Indian J&K. Let the two come together in near future on their own. Plebiscite under UN supervision. Blue hat: Let’s imagine Bono wearing the blue hat. He will think about the thinking needed to explore the solutions and design a software for thinking. In fact anyone can make a blue hat statement during the thinking session. Who knows we may hit the jackpot. Or else, we may continue to vacillate between pits and summits. Sure enough, there is no way to peace. Peace is the way. May their talk walk. |
PAU: how the story of politicisation began PUNJAB Agricultural University (PAU) came into being in December, 1962, to serve the rural people and ameliorate their economic conditions. The late Pratap Singh Kairon was a great visionary. He
choose Dr P.N. Thapar, an able, experienced and intelligent I.C.S. officer, as its first Vice-Chancellor and gave him full financial as well as administrative support without any interference in its affairs to build this premier institution. Dr Thapar, with his vast experience, particularly in agricultural development at the Centre, ensured that all appointments to the teaching, research, extension and administrative posts were made strictly on merit by open competition on an all-India basis. He saw to it that the selection committees, in their composition and working, remained impartial. Regional and sectarian considerations did not prevail and merit was the sole basis of selections. He thus built a strong team of dedicated, committed scientists of high calibre who under his able leadership, worked hard and are credited with ushering in the Green Revolution in the state and solving the country’s food problem. In a short period of five or six years, the name of PAU spread all over the country and it acquired recognition at the international level. But alas, Dr Thapar had a paralytic stroke and had to resign. In his place in 1968 Dr M.S. Randhawa, an equally capable officer, was appointed as the second Vice-Chancellor of the university. In the meantime due to the reorganisation of the state, PAU was bifurcated in February, 1970, into Punjab Agricultural University and Haryana Agricultural University. During the bifurcation, most of the faculty from outside the state migrated to Hisar and of Punjab origin came to Ludhiana. It gave birth to regionalism. Dr Randhawa was a more humanistic gentleman and liberal in his working. During his first term, he continued the legacy of Dr Thapar. But during his second term, some people around him exploited his humanistic approach and started getting undue benefits. Those officers who opposed these policies were sidelined. It was the beginning of the decline in the working of PAU. In fact, politicisation of PAU had begun in 1976. After Dr Randhawa, Dr Sukhdev Singh was appointed Vice-Chancellor. But he was forced to resign within a month of taking over under political pressure and in his place Dr A.S. Cheema was appointed Vice-Chancellor. At that time the state was under President’s Rule and at the Centre the Congress was the ruling party. Dr Cheema was more a politician than an academician. He indulged in nepotism and favoritism. He appointed about 100 associates on a fixed salary against vacant posts of Assistant Professor and equivalent. Similarly, all ministerial/technical posts lying vacant were filled on an ad hoc basis. The services of all these persons were regularised later on by relaxing the qualifications and the recruitment procedure. It reduced the university merely to an employment agency. Rules and regulations were violated with impunity to favour individuals. There are two glaring examples of politicisation. In 1982 the selection to the post of Director Research was held in Delhi under the chairmanship of Dr H.R. Jain, the then Director, I.A.R.I, with a
galaxy of agriculture experts of national repute such as Dr M.S. Randhawa, Dr B.S. Minhas, Dr D.R. Bhoomla and Dr Joshi, both retired VCs. The committee recommended the name of Dr S.S. Prihar, a decorated soil scientist, for this post. But ignoring the recommendations of the high-powered committee, Dr Khem Singh was appointed to this post under political pressure. At that time the Akalis were ruling the state. In December, 1994, the Board of Management of the university at the time of taking up the appointment of Vice-Chancellor observed that the members were of the opinion that if a Vice-Chancellor was to be appointed from within the university there was no better choice than Dr Khem Singh. If not, an IAS officer be appointed the Vice-Chancellor. But what happened at the end, Dr Khehra was appointed Vice-Chancellor, ignoring the opinion of the highest administrative body of the university. At that time the Congress was ruling in the state. Further, there is a strong faculty of about 1,400 — highest in any university in India out of which more than 500 are of Professor rank. Most of them belong to the state having rural background and thus also political clouts. All of them aspire and scramble for academic and administrative positions. So in this situation it is natural that political pulls & pressures are brought in to grab such plum positions. The malady has gone to the bottom. Even transfers and postings are made on political recommendations. Most of the selections are made on extraneous considerations and merit is given a goby. Recently, the selection to the post of Comptroller was held. Once a section of the politicians got the selection of a particular candidate steered, the other side got it nullified. Hence, mediocrity rules the roost everywhere. It has affected the teaching, research and administration of the university which ultimately affect farmers who have high hopes from this one time premier institution of the country. In this milieu all are equal partners. It is difficult to say who is right and who is wrong. |
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Selling beauty myth to men THIS is a man talking: “I’m always on a diet; I can’t eat sweets or alcohol; I’m at the gym four times a week. It requires a lot of discipline and sacrifice, but it’s a matter of priorities and what’s important to you.” This is another man: “I constantly think I’m overweight, and go into cycles of hardly eating and madly exercising.” These men aren’t exceptional; this is how men are talking. What is unusual is that this used to be the talk of women. Technically, that’s not such a big deal. As we strive for gender equality, men should be able to do the things that women do. But this isn’t an equality that anybody wanted or fought for; it’s the right to feel the heat of body scrutiny and the tyranny of objectification. Men, in other words, are being sold the beauty myth. The male beauty myth isn’t thin, however - it’s big. That’s big as in beefcake, not beer belly: big chest, big, V-shaped back, big biceps and a mandatory six-pack of carefully carved abdominal muscles. He has moved from beer to brawn; from pub to gym; from lager lout to lean muscleman. Muscleman isn’t confined to the pages of a few publications aimed at the health-conscious, either. He is everywhere. He’s a movie star, action toy, model, pop star, TV presenter. He’s staring at us from the sides of buses and buildings. He’s on Top Of The Pops. He’s a regular in women’s glossy magazines; even lad mags have sections or entire offshoot magazines dedicated to him. Sociocultural commentators argue that men, undermined by the struggle to find a new, useful role in a radically altered social landscape, are readily attracted to the prospect of building bigger bodies. Susan Faludi, unravelling the roots of a male crisis in Stiffed: The Betrayal Of The American Man, writes that this replicates the female model of social adaptation. “The 50s housewife, stripped of her connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with shopping and the ornamental display of her ultrafemininity, could be said to have morphed into the 90s man, stripped of his connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with consumption and a gym-bred display of his ultramasculinity.” By this analysis, muscleman is a commercial creation. Having squeezed the female market to saturation point, the beauty industry has turned to the male sector. But who is driving the body commodity machine? According to men, it’s women, although they cite some odd evidence to support the theory. Other men point out that the muscle message is prevalent in women’s magazines and narrated by women in adverts, which, they say, reflect female requirements of the male physique. But real women aren’t saying this. Research shows that men’s perception of the ideal body is typically around 6.8kg more muscular than the stated female preference. If women do have a role in all this, it is, argues The Adonis Complex, in the context of ``threatened masculinity’’. Stripped of other means by which to establish maleness, men are drawn to the gym as a final frontier, as an arena in which women will never be able to exceed or even match male accomplishments. Muscularity, in this context, is important because it is so intimately tied to cultural views of masculinity, because it represents an assertion of discipline and command at a time when those qualities are no longer exclusive to men. Muscleman isn’t just confident, sexually appealing and generally a big hit; muscleman is, above all, in control. Pursuit of this socially restricted body ideal is presented as a guarantee of empowerment. The trouble is that men who fall for the beauty myth aren’t gaining a sense of control. Just like women, they are losing it.
The Guardian |
THE Akali Dal has asked the people to celebrate the 8th August as Shahidi Day in memory of Sardar Teja Singh. the celebration will take the form of public meetings after Bhog, or completion of a reading of the holy scripture, after which special prayers for the deceased will be offered. Another resolution expressed regret at the death of Sardar Thakar Singh, member of its working committee. |
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Have condoms, weave a saree DOCTORS in Varanasi have finally discovered the reason for a surge in the popularity of the free condoms they have been dishing out for family planning. Weavers in the holy Hindu city, also known for its silk industry, have been using government-distributed condoms to help in producing hand-woven silk sarees. Weavers rub the condoms on bobbins to speed up the weaving and stop yarn from snapping while making their world-famous brocade sarees. It takes 14 condoms to produce one Benarasi saree. There are more than 1,00,000 weavers in the city.
Reuters
The brain is behind stammering Stammering, long thought to be caused by emotional factors, has been linked to physical abnormalities in the brain for the first time, it has been disclosed. Scientists in the US found that adults with persistent stammering had irregularities in areas of the brain that control language and speech. The study provides the first evidence that anatomical abnormalities in the brain put people at risk of stammering. A brain scan technique called magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine 16 individuals with “persistent developmental stuttering” (PDS) and the same number of people with no speech defects. The scientists at Tulane University in New Orleans found that the right and left temporal lobes were significantly larger in adults with PDS. Abnormalities in the shape of the brain were much more prevalent among the
stammerers. DPA |
The light of the body is the eye: Therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness. If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light. — The Gospel According to St.
Luke ***** The next time you are in a state of wordliness — jealous, angry, or feeling sorry for yourself — sit down and seek for the light. If you cannot find it visualise a light bulb within your head or a flashlight at the top of your head shining down into it. Flash the light on and off mentally and when the flashlight does not go off, even if you have mentally turned off the switch, then you know that you have the inner light. ***** The light around the memories is the inner light. If it was not there you could not see your memories. Take away the mental pictures and the light alone is before you. ***** In your constant striving to control that mind, your soul comes into action as a manifestation of will, and you quiet more and more of that mind and enter into a deeper state of contemplation where you see a scintillating light more radiant than the sun, and as it bursts within you, you begin to know that you are the cause of that light which you apparently see. Satguru Sivaya
Subramuniyaswamy, Merging with Shiva ***** Your fear of death is but the trebling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour. — Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet ***** Colours speak all languages. — Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 416 |
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