E D I T O R I A L   P A G E

EDITORIALS

A global peace initiative
THE conscience of the world community has at last forced it to take up the Palestinian-Israeli dispute afresh with the seriousness it deserves. The issue of a Palestinian state is going to be discussed threadbare at an international conference somewhere in Europe in the coming few weeks. This has been agreed upon between the USA, the European Union and Russia with the United Nations playing its due role.

TDP's calculated "no"
THE Telugu Desam Party has greatly increased the worry lines on the forehead of the Bharatiya Janata Party by rejecting the offer of the Lok Sabha Speaker's post made by the Atal Behari Vajpayee government. The TDP was a tough customer even earlier. It made the BJP dance to its tune in return for the support of its 28 MPs. Its invisible hand was noticeable behind many puppet moves of the government in the past which benefited the TDP directly or indirectly in several ways.

OPINION

A socio-cultural study of Gujarat
Is there a way to change people's mindset?
C. P. Bhambhri
Gujarati society seems to be completely brutalised because the killings of innocent men, women and children for nearly two months have not brought millions of "people with conscience" on the roads to launch a strong satyagraha to stop this unparallelled tragedy in recent times.

The day starts at midnight
Jyotirmoy Dutta
It was around 10.30 at night when I reached Kalka by the Himalayan Queen. The journey from Shimla was boring, if not exhausting, because as night falls one is forced to do nothing but shut the windows and look at strange faces in the dim light.

POINT OF LAW

Sidhu’s case: High Court gags crusade against corruption
Anupam Gupta
IT is one of the most extraordinary ex parte interim orders ever passed in judicial history, an order which throws up a big question mark over the nature and direction of the judicial process in this part of the country.

X-rays: how much is too much?
Thousands of patients undergo X-ray examinations every day. Are all these x-rays necessary? Do the doctors justify each and every medical X-ray? Does the patient have the right to know what benefit the X-ray is going to do?

• Unique cell prevents diabetes

EDITORIALS

A global peace initiative

THE conscience of the world community has at last forced it to take up the Palestinian-Israeli dispute afresh with the seriousness it deserves. The issue of a Palestinian state is going to be discussed threadbare at an international conference somewhere in Europe in the coming few weeks. This has been agreed upon between the USA, the European Union and Russia with the United Nations playing its due role. This is a heartening development not only for the troubled people of West Asia but also for all those watching the disturbing goings-on with great concern living anywhere in the world. The initial reaction of the parties directly involved—the Palestinians and the Israelis— is on positive lines. But both have adopted a very cautious approach, normally expected under such circumstances. Since the deliberations will be held initially at the level of Foreign Ministers, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat may not be there personally. This may facilitate Israeli participation, as the Ariel Sharon regime just cannot tolerate the presence of a leader it believes, though unjustifiably, has been abetting suicide bombings. Mr Sharon may, however, change his rigid attitude once there is a clear signal from Washington that the super power cannot stand by Tel Aviv if the Jewish state is uncooperative vis-a-vis the latest move to speed up the process of setting up an independent Palestinian homeland. The time has come for the USA to take such a categorical stand in the interest of peace. An American reaction on these lines will nullify the arguments of extremists and their sympathisers in West Asia and strengthen the belief that the USA is still working honestly and resolutely on the noble mission of destroying the international scourge of terrorism root and branch.

In any case, the warring groups in the volatile region should be made to realise that there is no credible alternative to negotiations to ensure stability and peace. It should also be emphasised that discussions bear fruit only when conducted in a spirit of give and take. There has been much bloodshed since the Oslo process was abandoned during the last days of the Bill Clinton presidency. The Israelis, who have never hesitated to use their military might, mostly in a crude manner, in the face a provocative Palestinian act, should have by now realised that the West Asian knot cannot be untied with this method. The Palestinians too, including the extremists involved in suicide bombings, must not forget that violence will only weaken their otherwise genuine case. The solution lies in a land-for-peace formula which formed the bedrock of the 1993 Oslo Accord. The latest Saudi formula is, in fact, an improved version of the old one. It offers all that the two parties broadly want. The difficult questions relate to the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank area, the status of East Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees who left their homes in the wake of the1967 war. These issues will put the diplomatic skill of the world leaders on test. 

TDP's calculated "no"

THE Telugu Desam Party has greatly increased the worry lines on the forehead of the Bharatiya Janata Party by rejecting the offer of the Lok Sabha Speaker's post made by the Atal Behari Vajpayee government. The TDP was a tough customer even earlier. It made the BJP dance to its tune in return for the support of its 28 MPs. Its invisible hand was noticeable behind many puppet moves of the government in the past which benefited the TDP directly or indirectly in several ways. The compulsion will be even more pressing for the BJP to make it continue to extend its "issue-based support" from outside. The refusal is quite a rebuff to Mr Vajpayee himself who had spoken to Mr N. Chandrababu Naidu recently to accept the offer. The ostensible reason for this hardening of attitude is the BJP's refusal to sack Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. But there is more to it than is revealed. The offer of the Speaker's post was not weighty enough for the crucial support. One can look forward to the mellowing of the BJP in several domains in the days to come. In any case, agreeing to have the Speaker from the TDP at this stage could have given the impression that the party had made up with the BJP. This is one message which the TDP does not want to send to the Muslim voters in Andhra Pradesh at all.

Tactical that the distancing is, it also denotes an inevitable parting of the ways between the two parties. Unless a dramatic change in the basic BJP policies takes place - which is unlikely because that would hurt it all the more at the national level -- the divorce may come sooner than expected. The TDP appears to have come to the conclusion that to give the thumbs-down to the BJP government at this stage would be self-defeating, because that would only give a boost to the Congress. So, it is ideal to keep it in a grievously wounded state for as long as possible and in the meanwhile enjoy all the privileges of a kingmaker. It remains to be seen how long this tenuous arrangement lasts. BJP crisis managers must be working overtime to find some way out of the messy situation. As an immediate measure, it has decided to look among its own ranks for a candidate for Speakership. Among the frontrunners are Mr V.K.Malhotra, Mr Jagmohan and Mr Ram Naik. Whoever it is going to be, he will occupy the hot seat at a particularly turbulent time. And a gleeful Congress is duty-bound to continue its guerrilla raids during the run-up to the elections.

OPINION

A socio-cultural study of Gujarat
Is there a way to change people's mindset?
C. P. Bhambhri

Gujarati society seems to be completely brutalised because the killings of innocent men, women and children for nearly two months have not brought millions of "people with conscience" on the roads to launch a strong satyagraha to stop this unparallelled tragedy in recent times. Has Gandhi left any positive impact on Gujarati society? A few well-known facts may be mentioned to substantiate the argument that the happenings of Gujarat are not comparable even to the post-Partition tragic events of 1947-48.

First, Gujarat has a fully constituted and organised state apparatus, which is expected to deal firmly with any law and order problem, including inter-community conflicts and disputes. On the eve of Partition, neither Pakistan nor India had the time and opportunity to put their house in order. But the Gujarat of 2002 is not India or Pakistan of 1947-48. Second, the "presence" of the Army in Gujarat did not make any difference to the killers, who seemed to have had a free hand for more than two months.

A Ministry of Home Affairs report released by Mr L.K. Advani mentions that "in order to cope with the situation and maintain law and order”, the Government of Gujarat "immediately deployed 66 companies of the reserve police, 18 columns of the Army and 28 companies of paramilitary forces". And in spite of this, the Home Ministry itself tells us that 824 people died, 2,082 were injured, and 10,200 houses, 12,200 shops and 3002 vehicles were destroyed.

Third, the visit of the Prime Minister made no difference to the state government and its law and order machinery in dealing with the riots. Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee was projected as a leader in the Nehruvian mould, but now one feels that such a comparison was the greatest humiliation for Nehru. The first Prime Minister’s conduct during the post-Partition riots stands in sharp contrast to Mr Vajpayee's rationalisation of the Gujarat tragedy at the Panaji (Goa) session of the BJP on April 12. Nehru did not play tricks or petty games when the country was burning in 1947-48. As against this, Mr Vajpayee attempted to dilute the tragedy of Gujarat.

Fourth, the National Human Rights Commission, the National Minorities Commission and the National Women's Commission have unanimously blamed the Narendra Modi government for serious acts of omission and deliberate commission while dealing with Hindus and Muslims in a discriminatory manner.

Fifth, the print and the audio-visual media completely exposed the biases and prejudices of the Modi government in the discharge of its constitutional obligations during the riots. It is for the first time in the history of independent India that a state government has been accused of indulging in "genocide" of its own citizens.

While the above narration is limited to the events from March to April, 2002, the discussion needs to be expanded to understand the reality of Gujarati society which has lived from violence to violence and riot to riot during the past 55 years. An enquiry into the social dynamics of the state is essential to find an answer to the question: why has Gujarat experienced violence with regular intervals? Why has Mr Modi been lionised as “Chhote Sardar", i.e. after great Sardar Patel? Why did Sabarmati Ashram established by Gandhi attract derisive and abusive epitaph from communalists? Why is the memory of the destruction of the Somnath Temple by a Muslim invader is still kept alive? Why is it that the communalists of Gujarat are not able to forget the "destruction of the Somnath Temple" after destroying hundreds of mosques and dargahs during these two months of rioting and killings?

It deserves to be mentioned here that aggressive, militant and violent struggles have been the order of the day in Gujarat. The major Hindu-Muslim riot of 1969 had completely shaken the late Frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who was then on a visit to India. After witnessing the gory events he simply "wept". Similarly, Morarji Desai launched an aggressive anti-Congress government campaign in 1974. The Navnirman Samiti spearheading the movement for the dismissal of the then corrupt Congress government in the state had indulged in law-breaking activities. Incidentally, the Samiti in 1974 had ample representation of RSS workers. During the 1990s these RSS workers emerged as leaders of the BJP in Gujarat.

Similarly, a very powerful anti-reservation movement launched by high-caste middle class Hindus in 1984 ended up in communal violence. It was not without reason that Mr L.K. Advani started his Ram Janmabhoomi Rathyatra from Somnath. It led to communal violence, now a regular feature of Gujarat.

What is the explanation for the continuing communal divide in Gujarat? First, Gujarati society is torn between the memory of Mehmood Ghaznavi and that of Mahatma Gandhi. The Gujarati middle class still talks of Prithviraj Chauhan's defeat at the hands of Mehmood. The Gujarati Hindu is highly religious and ritualistic, and in this cultural setting, the manipulation of the historical reality at the hands of Muslims becomes a readymade fodder for the aggressive forces of Hindutva.

Second, the first major controversy in public life after Independence was the reconstruction of the Somnath Temple under the close supervision of Sardar Patel himself. The Nehru-Rajendra Prasad controversy over the President's participation in the religious ceremonies regarding the Somnath Temple is well known, but it is not brought to public notice that the Gujarat Congress had extended an enthusiastic support for the renovation of the destroyed temple. Further, it is also not known that Nehru's influence on the thinking of the Congressmen in Gujarat was minimal, nearly non-existent, because Sardar Patel had controlled the organisation with an "iron hand" from 1926 to 1947.

Indulal Yajnik, a mild socialist, became the Gujarat Congress President for one year only, and Patel saw to it that such a thing was never repeated. Thus, politically, Gujarat is polarised between full-blooded Hindutva and a soft-pedalling "Hindu" Congress. Indira Gandhi tried to change the social caste-class composition of the Congress, and Madhavsinh Solanki, as a symbol of her new social engineering, was ousted by the powerful Patels of Gujarat.

Third, during the national movement, Bombay witnessed powerful communist and socialist trade union struggles in the 1930s. The Gandhi-controlled trade unions in Gujarat were always made to compromise with the Gujarati capitalists like Jamnalal Bajaj. Not only this. Gujarat did not witness any militant peasant movement on the pattern of that in West Bengal or in Telengana in the erstwhile Hyderabad State.

Militancy for social and secular causes was conspicuous by its absence in Gujarat. An important impact owing to the absence of militant trade union and peasant struggles in Gujarat was felt on the social order because the strong control of the high castes over Gujarati society was never completely shaken. Every social, cultural and political mobilisation in Gujarat — whether the anti-Congress struggle of 1974, the anti-reservation movement of 1984 or the Ram Janmabhooi Rathyatra of 1990 and the subsequent events — has had one common factor, i.e. the domination of high caste middle class Hindus.

The Hindu ethos of Gujarati society remains unquestioned because no movement either of peasants or workers or students has stepped out of the existing normative structure of that society. Even the Gujarati diaspora remains linked with the inherited Hindu ethos of its place of birth. It is not incidental that the Gujaratis abroad were highly active in supporting the victims of the earthquake, and just a year later they have nothing to offer to the victims of the worst riots. While sitting in foreign countries, they have Hindu-versus-Muslim feelings. It is not without reason that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad is a recipient of great financial generosity of Hindu Gujaratis and Maharashtrians settled in foreign countries.

This, however, does not mean that secular Indians have to give up Gujarat and hand it over to the fanatic manipulators. The moral of the above description is that weak or soft secularism in the grab of Hinduism will not serve the purpose of confronting communalism in Gujarat. It is necessary to target those responsible for creating communal cleavages, but this alone is not enough to deal with the religious hatred prevailing there. It is the responsibility of the country as a whole to protect the life and property of every citizen without any distinction of caste, colour, creed or religion.

The real message from Gujarat is that the socio-cultural roots of Hindu communalism have not been either identified or targeted even by the secular parties and autonomous secular institutions of civil society. Gujarat has paid a very heavy price because secularists have always made tactical compromises. The Congress party in Gujarat has to accept the responsibility for its failure to confront openly and aggressively communal social and political tendencies in the state. The conscience-keepers of Gujarati society owe an explanation to the larger Indian society for passively tolerating the growth of communalism. Riots are a consequence of the deep-seated social and historical causes, and Gujarat has once again proved it. However, the state can be pulled out of its fanatic mindset by the intellectual class, which can project an alternative secular worldview to the people there.

The writer is a former Dean and Professor, School of Social Sciences, JNU, New Delhi.

MIDDLE

The day starts at midnight
Jyotirmoy Dutta

It was around 10.30 at night when I reached Kalka by the Himalayan Queen. The journey from Shimla was boring, if not exhausting, because as night falls one is forced to do nothing but shut the windows and look at strange faces in the dim light.

It was 23rd of September and I had to board the connecting Kalka Mail train at 11.50 p.m. I got down from the Himalayan Queen and lugging my baggage searched for my coach. Against my wishes, I got the middle berth so I thought I’d first have my dinner of Aloo-ki-subzi and pooris before arranging my bed . Meanwhile, I also analysed my co-passengers, a Bengali couple with two kids, one Sikh gentleman with his daughter and two executive kind of persons whose background I could not decipher. When I finished eating, it was well past midnight.

Hazy neon lights outside and the retarding train implied that we were reaching Chandigarh. As the train came to a halt and I was pulling out a bedsheet from my bag a whole army of three middle-aged men, two women and a young boy rushed in looking for their seats. Without any consideration and crossing all limits of etiquette they started banging their luggage on the upper and middle berths yelling, “Yehi hai, aa jaao” at the top of their voices.

I was surprised to see this. They had placed a large blue suitcase on my berth. I asked them as politely as I could about what was going on. One of the persons said: “These five seats are ours. Let’s arrange the luggage properly. My fellow passengers and I tried to tell them that those were our reserved berths and that we had occupied them at Kalka. But that did not help. They appeared to be so sure that we started having doubts about the validity of our seats. Somehow, I collected some courage and approached the boy who was there to see off the group and requested him to show us their tickets.

I was shocked to see the same coach and seat number that were allotted to me, on their tickets. How could something like this happen in a computerised ticketing system, I thought. Then something suddenly caught my eye. The crux of the problem was that the train had started on 23rd September from Kalka but had reached Chandigarh on the 24th, after a half-hour run. The poor fellows had the ticket for the Kalka Mail that had already left on the 22nd and reached Chandigarh on the wee hours (0.30 a.m.) on 23rd. They were late by full 24 hours. I told this to the Sardarji who got the point and tried to make them understand. But they kept on insisting that they had the ticket for the 23rd night. They started arguing and things turned worse and ugly. Time was running out and ultimately I explained the mistake to the young boy and also told him that they would be fined if they travelled that night on tickets that had already expired. The boy understood this and started taking the luggage outside.

The train started moving and the team got panicky. We helped them get their enormous luggage off. All of us really felt bad about them and wondered what could have happened had they not got off. The Bengali gentleman went to the extent of calling it “the blunder of a lifetime” and asked me that how on earth could so many persons together make such a mistake because everybody knows that the day starts at midnight.

I pulled the bedsheet over my head and the paradox lulled me to sleep.

POINT OF LAW

Sidhu’s case: High Court gags crusade against corruption
Anupam Gupta

IT is one of the most extraordinary ex parte interim orders ever passed in judicial history, an order which throws up a big question mark over the nature and direction of the judicial process in this part of the country.

Stepping midway into the unravelling of independent India’s biggest corruption scandal — a scandal that has seen crores tumble out of bank lockers and heard one “tout” after the other relate the sordid saga of sale of public offices — a Judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court accomplished single-handed on May 3 what even the Supreme Court of India in its most activist phase has never sought to do.

Gag the Press and slap the lid on an investigation that can flower only in the glare of sunlight, forcing it into a gunny-bag of darkness.

An investigation in the progress and outcome of which thousands of citizens — nay, every single citizen, is, by definition, interested.

If this investigation is driven underground, if this investigation is brought under pressure, if this investigation fails, the people’s faith in the Constitution and in every single institution of the Constitution, from the executive to the judiciary, will be lost for ever.

As the Chairman of the Punjab Public Service Commission, journalist turned racketeer Ravinder Pal Singh Sidhu alias Ravi Sidhu not only betrayed the trust reposed by the founding fathers in that august institution but destroyed the institution from within with a venality unparalleled in the annals of power.

Exposing such venality, as much as and even more than pursuing those who aided him or benefited from it, is no ordinary task.

It is a constitutional obligation of the highest order, an obligation to restore the sanctity of constitutional processes and put the Constitution back in place.

Those who have taken it upon themselves to discharge this obligation, putting their entire career at stake — for the corrupt have a long arm, longer sometimes than the law itself — must be supported by the judiciary, not shackled by it.

Let us not forget, after all, that Ravi Sidhu made his pile not only from selections to posts in the executive but from posts in the PCS Judicial Branch as well.

However thick-skinned we might have become towards corruption in the executive, how can the judiciary reconcile to a situation where judicial offices are sold to the highest bidder?

Is the sale of judicial offices a matter only of a “case diary” under the Criminal Procedure Code and nothing more?

“(I)t is in the interest of a fair and impartial investigation and trial,” ordered the High Court on May 3, in Ravi Sidhu’s case, “that the respondents are completely prohibited from disclosing the contents of statements of witnesses recorded under Section 161 of the Code of Criminal Procedure or the contents of statements/confessions, if any, recorded of the accused in the case diaries and the contents of the case diaries themselves recorded under Section 172 of the Code.”

Couched in legalese, that is a prohibition that stretches across the entire range of investigation into l’ affaire Ravi Sidhu.

Leaving nothing to chance, however, the learned Judge fixes a terminus ad quem as well.

“This prohibition shall remain in force,” continued Justice K.S. Garewal, “until the Investigating Officer files the final report under Section 173 of the Code.”

That — the filing of the final report — could well take some time, even if only the more “lucrative” selections (PCS Executive and Judicial, DSPs, BDPOs, etc) on which Ravi Sidhu appears to have concentrated, and not all the over 3000 recommendations made since he took over as PPSC chief, were to be probed.

Till that time, then, all the information or evidence collected of Ravi Sidhu’s misdeeds will, by judicial order, be swept under the carpet.

Or be stacked neatly there, to be more accurate, in a sealed cover, as it were, a cover that can be opened only by the trial court after the challan is filed.

And after the public, force-fed on silence, has lost all interest in the case.

“Furthermore,” ruled Justice Garewal on May 3, adding teeth to an order for which there is, to the best of my knowledge, no precedent in the law books, “the Area Magistrate, Kharar, shall ensure that this order is strictly complied with and no selective and controlled leakage of information takes place either to the Press or to the public.”

With great respect to Justice Garewal, which “selective” and “controlled” leakage of information is he referring to?

There is obviously much more to these words, the concluding words of an order which imposes a “complete prohibition” on all disclosure.

For a reference to “selective” leaks is otherwise wholly out of place in an order which speaks of “complete” prohibition. Or redundant, to say the least.

Tracing the whole sequence of developments in the Ravi Sidhu case, it is difficult to dismiss the thought that the reference — and, indeed, the order as a whole — is a reaction, a panicky institutional reaction, to the disclosure in the media of the involvement of certain High Court Judges, sitting and retired, in the case.

“In the first two decades of our Republic,” wrote Nani Palkhivala in 1990, republished in 1994, “it was the compulsion of veracity, not the fear of the law relating to contempt of court, which was responsible for the fact that no charges of corruption were levelled against the judiciary.”

“Now the compulsion of veracity,” he added, in words that can only be his, “dictates such charges, in defiance of the Contempt of Courts Act.”

Inspiring though these words are, and quite apart from the May 3 order, disclosure of the names of High Court Judges in the Ravi Sidhu case involves no risk of contempt.

For, to be fair to the High Court as an institution, the involvement or alleged involvement of such Judges in the PPSC corruption scandal has no connection with any exercise of judicial power on their part.

“If we accept this slant on judicialisation as a functional limitation on the contempt jurisdiction,” ruled Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer in 1974, speaking concurrently in Baradakanta Mishra’s case, “we must exclude from its ambit interference with purely administrative acts of courts and non-judicial functions of judges. This dichotomy is implicit in the decided cases although the twilight of the law blurs the dividing line now and then.”

To treat, he said, as the High Court had done (in the case before him), “the image and personality of the High Court as an integrated one” and to hold that every shadow that darkens it is contempt, is to forget life, reason and political progress.

For, he added, clinching the issue as only Krishna Iyer can, “if a judge has an integrated personality and his wife openly accuses him of neglect or worse, she would certainly reduce the confidence of the public in him as a judge! Will her accusation be personalised contempt?”

All the more unfortunate, therefore, that the High Court at Chandigarh should, by its May 3 order in Ravi Sidhu’s case, not only convert non-contempt into contempt but expand the scope of such contempt beyond all known frontiers of the law by banning disclosure of all statements covered under Sections 161 (or 162), 164 and 172 of the CrPC.

There is nothing, I submit, in all humility but with all the emphasis at my command, in any of these provisions that even remotely touches the question of public disclosure or non-disclosure of the progress of the investigation at the instance of the investigation itself.

The bar imposed by Sections 162 and 172, neither of which imposes a complete bar, relates only to the admissibility of statements or case diaries at the trial, after completion of investigation.

To extend the bar backwards to the stage of investigation, and to extend it so as to contrive and slap a duty of silence on the investigating agency, even when it would like to go public on its own in the interest of transparency, as the High Court has done — that too by an ex parte interim order, leaving nothing to be finally decided — is a self-indulgence in judicial creativity that would require the highest moral sanction to justify itself.

With profuse apologies to the High Court, the interests of a man called Ravi Sidhu can hardly provide such a sanction.

TRENDS & POINTERS

X-rays: how much is too much?

Thousands of patients undergo X-ray examinations every day. Are all these x-rays necessary? Do the doctors justify each and every medical X-ray? Does the patient have the right to know what benefit the X-ray is going to do?

In the absence of any licencing policy for setting up such units, anyone and everyone is setting up x-ray machines,” says Dr S.S. Doda, Secretary General, Indian Radiological and Imaging Association. PTI

Unique cell prevents diabetes

A unique type of cell prevents the development of diabetes in mice and a genetically manipulated version of the cell might do the same in humans, researchers have reported.

“If we can put the same types of cells into humans, we might be able to prevent diabetes,” John J. Fung, a surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, told UPI.

Working with mice, Fung and his colleagues identified a type of cell called a dendritic cell that has the ability to turn off components of the immune system. When researchers injected dendritic cells into mice prone to developing a form of diabetes very similar to type 1 human diabetes, none of the animals developed the condition within the first several months. Half remained disease-free at one year. UPI

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

Where God hath a temple, the devil will have a chapel.

— Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

*  *  *

Righteousness

Hurrah, hurrah, three cheers for all,

Who make righteousness their creed in life.

Speak the Truth and shame the devil,

Strong is the citadel of righteousness.

Light shines on the Path of Righteousness;

Darkness girdles the path of sin.

— Yogi M.K. Spencer, How I Found God.

*  *  *

— A popular Sanskrit quote