 |
Friday,
November 1, 2002, Chandigarh, India   |
Warning on
global warming Casinos
and development |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Petroleum
sector’s troubles
A matter
of sleep
Conversion
cause of much conflict The
misguided new romantics of death
|
Warning on global warming Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee on Wednesday spoke firmly against international pressure on developing economies to scale down the rate of greenhouse emissions. Speaking at the 8th UN Conference on Climate Change in Delhi, he put the issue of global warming in the right perspective. The developed countries are primarily responsible for the alarming increase in the rate of global warming over the past two decades. The USA is the biggest defaulter in the matter of following the global guidelines for reducing the use of substances that have caused damage to the fragile ecology of the globe. Mr Vajpayee did well to underline the need for strengthening the capacity of developing countries in coping with extreme weather events, which were increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change. Developing economies do not have enough resources to meet their basic human needs. If reducing the rate of emission of greenhouse gases will hurt the economic growth of developed countries, it is logical to presume that placing unjustified limits on developing countries will seriously hamper their efforts to achieve higher GDP growth rates for eradicating poverty. However, two wrongs do not make a right. The North does not have the moral right to dictate to the South the agenda for combating the menace of global warming. However, instead of taking a rigid position, the South would do well to learn from the mistakes of the North and encourage the reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases by using cost-effective alternative technologies for achieving the target of environment-friendly economic growth. The developing countries, instead of taking a confrontationist position, should set for themselves the goal of offering to the "superior world" a workable model of economic development without dependence on the environment-threatening substances that produce greenhouse gases. However, a realistic appraisal of the current global situation should leave no scope for doubt about the criminal indifference of the developed countries, led by the USA, to global initiatives to evolving a collective strategy for scaling down the emission of greenhouse gases without compromising economic development. The developed nations have the resources and the infrastructure for investing on finding environment-friendly technologies. At the 1992 Earth Summit the international community agreed upon the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Five years ago the Kyoto Protocol spelled out the first-ever legally binding commitments for developed countries on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Delhi Summit that will end today, hopefully after adopting a charter of future action based on appraisal of the Rio and Kyoto initiatives, is yet another effort to make the developed nations accept their role in containing global warming by simply ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. But are they serious about scaling down the level of CO2 emissions? The answer is a firm "no". The corporate-driven American foreign policy justifies the strategic positioning of its troops in Afghanistan and West Asia, for easy access to the gas and oil reserves in the region, in the name of fighting global terrorism. But it has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. The news from Russia is equally disturbing. It announced on October 26, on the fourth day of the Delhi conference on global warming, that it may take up to three months to a year for ratifying the Protocol that seeks to set a timetable for the international community in general, and the developed countries in particular, to drastically scale down the emission of greenhouse gases. Unless the rich nations decide to fall in line the Rio, Kyoto and Delhi initiatives will remain vain cries for help by the international community. |
|
Casinos and development Experts on Haryana have off and on criticised the successive state governments for not taking adequate advantage of its nearness to the national capital for faster economic development. Whatever little benefit has gone to Haryana is visible mostly in Gurgaon, considered virtually part of South Delhi. Some time ago when the Haryana Government talked of setting up an IIT-level information technology institute in Gurgaon, one thought the government would take the IT route to economic growth. But now it appears the economic advisers of the government think that the state can be brought to the high growth path through the casino culture. Hence the decision to allow setting up of casinos in different parts of Haryana. Initially, these legalised gambling dens will come up in Delhi’s neighbourhood—Gurgaon and Faridabad—with the government providing “world class” infrastructure for the purpose. The idea behind the Haryana Casino (Licensing and Control) Bill, 2002, apparently is to lure foreign tourists to Haryana to generate resources for economic development. Casinos will also be visited by locals flush with black money. Besides this, there will be an annual licence fee plus a gambling tax. That means a major revenue generation source for the state government. Going by the official explanation, coming up of casinos should lead to large-scale infrastructure development in Haryana. But will this really happen? It is difficult to buy the argument at least at this stage. There is also a significant social angle to the idea of
creating Western-style licensed gambling centres. Gambling is a major
social evil. Should the state try to curb it? Or should it work for
the spread of the disease on the pretext of generating resources for
development? If the government could not create an atmosphere for
keeping people away from such vices, it should have avoided giving
them legal sanctity. Instead, it is going to introduce into the
Haryana culture something which is part of a totally Western concept
of entertainment! One doubts if this will be welcomed by the people of
the state. Opposition parties have already expressed their disapproval
of economic development through casino culture. One can understand
that what the Opposition says is generally for the sake of opposition.
Yet the anti-casino voices deserve a serious thought. Gambling of any
kind promotes a tendency to become a “crorepati” overnight. The
very thinking of get-rich quick gives birth to problems like
kidnapping and waylaying. Are we not aware of it? |
Petroleum sector’s troubles In case, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is planning a Cabinet reshuffle in the near future, I have a suggestion — transfer Petroleum Minister Ram Naik to the Defence Ministry. Why? Because, over the past few months, Mr Naik has shown that he has tremendous tactical skills, surely something to be desired in a Defence Minister. His ministry continues to flouder, but by reshaping the entire debate into a pro-vs-anti-disinvestment one, or a pro-vs-anti-Shourie one, Mr Naik has successfully ensured that no one pays any attention to his performance. And that, to say the least, is really dismal. Take the issue of subsidies, for instance. The fact that the oil marketing companies have to look to Shastri Bhawan for advice on even raising their prices, shows that Mr Naik hasn’t really let go control of the oil sector, even though on the face of it he has dismantled the administered price mechanism. Ask any oil company official today, and he’ll tell you that his bosses still spend more time in the corridors of Shastri Bhawan as compared to their board rooms. But what’s even more interesting is how the wily Mr Naik has got Delhi’s media to stop focusing attention on this — I remember a time when you would get frequent news-pieces on how much the oil companies were losing due to the fact that the government would not allow them to hike prices in line with the hikes by OPEC members. What Mr Naik has done is to allow the IOC/HPCL/BPCL to hike prices of petrol and diesel with a fair degree of regularity, at least since the fear of a US invasion of Iraq gained ground. So, with the prices of these two items going up, and consumers paying “market prices”, the pink Press which champions reforms is satisfied. But guess what Mr Naik hasn’t allowed the oil firms to do? He has not allowed them to hike the prices of either LPG or kerosene. Just based on a rough calculation, the total subsidy on these items is today around Rs 12,000 crore — in the past few months alone, the hike on this account could well be a few thousand crore rupees. Given that the total profit of the three oil marketing companies was in the region of Rs 5,000 crore last year, this means their profit will be hit by at least 20 per cent. In fact, by focusing so closely on the issue of “private versus public” ownership, Mr Naik has cleverly obfuscated the real issue, that of benefit to the customers. How are customers to benefit? From more competition, surely, but for this we also need to have a strong regulatory regime. But even today, there’s no sign of the petroleum regulator who not only keeps a check on prices to ensure that there is no cartelisation and that customers get genuine good quality supplies of petroleum products. Estimates vary for the amount of adulteration (some say, half of ration shop kerosene supplies actually go into the adulteration of diesel, and huge amounts of naphtha routinely are mixed with petrol). But the surest sign on the benefits of adulteration is to be seen on our roads everyday. Just look at the lines of motorists queuing up to buy supplies from Bharat Petroleum’s Pure-for-Sure outlets, and you’ll see what I mean. BPCL is advertising these outlets as places where you get genuine petrol/diesel supplies (presumably it’s saying the other outlets are all adulterations!), and the public is running to these outlets. A recent newspaper article said that in the first quarter of the year, sales at these outlets grew eight times in relation to the growth in the non-pure outlets. Now that is a really telling statement of jut how bad things are, and, there is no sign that Mr Naik is doing anything about the rampant corruption. The figures haven’t come in as yet, but the sales of Speed and other new kinds of petrol have also grown dramatically for the same reason — customers feel these are really pure petrols. Look at the overall sales figures for diesel and petrol, and again the same picture of massive adulteration appears. Figures for diesel are actually negative. It is true, my days of active reporting are over, but from what I recall during my earlier days, and I don’t see how this could have changed, that during times of drought the demand for diesel goes up dramatically with farmers using their tubewells to pump water to their parched holdings. Given that we have had what the Agriculture Ministry says is India’s worst drought in the past twenty years, surely the demand for diesel should have gone up, not down. Mr Naik and his bureaucrats, most newspapers reported, went out as a baraat some weeks ago to attend the World Petroleum Congress session. And, from time to time, a similar baraat goes out on “roadshows”, to convince foreign exploration firms that India is a great destination. Well, guess which firms have paid attention to Mr Naik’s baraatis. Cairn Energy has invested around $125 million in India so far in exploration blocks and another $190 million in discovered fields. How big is this company which has invested the most in exploration activities? I do not have the figure, but it is certainly not one of the top 250 energy companies in the world. I am not saying that small companies are unwelcome, but surely you would expect some of the top majors to come in, especially when none less than the minister himself is constantly courting these companies. According to the data compiled by Crisil-Infac, in fact, in NELP’s first round, of the total of $250 million invested, under $70 million was by foreign firms. In NELP-II, less than 10 per cent of the total came from foreign firms — just $22 million out of the total of $287 million. Why talk of just foreign firms, even Indian private sector firms have not been too enthusiastic about investing in exploration. Under $50 million was invested by private Indian firms in NELP-II. Mr Naik, along with Defence Minister George Fernandes, may continue to talk of how we should not have gone in for privatisation because our “strategic reserves” are not large enough right now. First, all of us in this business know that this is nothing but humbug. Almost every Petroleum Minister, including Mr Naik, keeps talking of the need to build up strategic reserves, but no one has ever come up with a concrete plan of how this is to be funded. Since Mr Naik still has not come up with such a plan, clearly the talk of reserves is just another excuse to stall the privatisation of HPCL and BPCL. In any case, as Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie has pointed out from time to time, even if they are sold, the private owners of HPCL and BPCL can still be ordered to do the government’s bidding in times of national emergencies. So, why bring up the bogey of not having strategic reserves? Second, while it is all very well to talk of more strategic reserves, the point is that until you get companies to do serious exploration, where is the question of having enough reserves to keep us going? Yet, as we know, the production by ONGC has been falling consistently for several years running. I know there are several reasons for this, and I am not holding just ONGC responsible for this. As Minister in charge of Petroleum , it is Mr Naik’s job to ensure that more private players come in — may be by offering more lucrative contract terms, or getting higher taxation benefits for exploration activities. The basic point is that the purpose behind dismantling the administered price mechanism and freeing up the oil sector was to get in more players, to get in more money for exploration, to get better service for customers, to bring an end to adulteration, and so on. It is clear that this has not happened so far. And the reason is that Mr Naik has not really allowed the sector to be genuinely freed up. Normally, such colossal failure, at least in the private sector, is the surest invitation to trouble. But, through brilliant tactical diversion, Mr Naik has ensured his
survival. The writer is a veteran journalist. |
A matter of sleep “Sleep is such a waste of time”. This was what I used to think during my childhood and teenage years. It was then when I sacrificed my sleep and wrote volumes and volumes of poems and short stories, which I am publishing one after another these days. Nobody then told me the importance of getting adequate sleep, which I learnt by myself later on after turning into a chronic insomniac. While my hubby sleeps like a log his loud rhythmic snores thwart all my attempts at sleep. “Put a soft music and it will lull you to sleep,” said a friend recently, “or read a book to fall asleep!” These measures, however, seem to help me only up to the development of rapid eye movement, because very soon I am wide awake. I hear the sound of my daughter whispering loudly to her brother: “Mamma is falling asleep, please don’t make noise!” Their ensuing prattle is a sleep killer. “Why don’t you take a hot cup of milk or have a hot water bath before retiring to sleep?” suggests my husband helpfully. I do both instantly. I would do almost anything to fall asleep. I make my room pitch dark, because sleep steals in easily when dark. Soon I am about to get my beauty sleep. But no, it is not in my lot, for my husband decides to put on the light. “What’s that now?” I ask fretfully. “It is acidity,” he says and pops in a gelusil tablet. “Put of the light now, and please do not disturb me again,” I chide him hoping to put myself to sleep, though all in vain. Sleeping in peace is the best thing that can happen to any insomniac. I realised this too late in life. But when grapes are sour why not think about the good that happens to a non-sleeper. For the beauty of not getting sleep is that you are awake to many laughable incidents, which a tight sleeper may miss. Now that I have already lost my sleep over them, let me share some funny episodes of my life with you. It so happened one night after being so restless and watching my husband happily sleeping, I got up to drink water and came back to bed. Disturbed by my movement, hubby caught hold of me and beat me incessantly while shouting out: “Thief! Thief!” I gently awoke him and brought him to senses. He felt extremely embarrassed, laughed over it and next minute he was adrift in deep sleep again! Sleep is such a dear thing, I realised another day, when instead of going to the toilet, my seven-year-old son had gone to the full-length mirror, unzipped before it and whooshed... “What are you doing in front of the mirror?” I cautioned him into stopping midstream. Now this episode is a real damper whenever he prides over his light sleeper state. Thus sleep can be very embarrassing to some at times. Some sleepy incidences go back to my maiden days. Once when I was just preparing to come out of the toilet my younger sister who was about to enter it, on seeing me, in her half sleeping state ran away in fear, yelling: “Ghost! Ghost!” In the process she woke up the whole household! It was during the same years that in Mumbai, the Koyna earthquake occurred. People woke up from their sleep, ran helter skelter thinking thieves had attacked them! One more memorable incident is related to my college days when I would fall asleep listening to the lectures. As I was a good student our botany professor never directly called out to me to wake up, even though I used to sit on the first bench. Instead, he would call out to the backbenchers and say sternly: “I see some people in the back are falling asleep!” This would give me a jolt every time and I would be wide awake immediately! Reminiscising on these I try my eyes again at sleep. However, sleep eludes me whether I count the stars, count the sheep or count the mosquito bites on my body. If finally I do get my sleep, the barking dogs in the neighbourhood wake me up. It is seldom that I do get sleep and if I have had seen some good dreams I try to go back to sleep with the hope that the dream would continue. Recently my sleep was disturbed by a rat bite. I had oil massaged my feet before sleeping to make them soft by the morning. A rat, which had strayed into our house, sniffed my foot, thought me as its food and bit off my sole sending me off to the PGI emergency at the dead of night. In days gone by Dad used to say that kings, thieves and lovers are the ones who do not get sleep. A king because he worries about his subjects, a thief because he worries about his livelihood and lovers, of course, are mad people. But, me? Losing sleep just because I was never told that sleep is not a waste of time, but is required in plenty to replenish you for the tiresome day ahead. What a sleepshod I have been! Now this piece is enough to deprive you of your afternoon siesta. See nobody catches you napping! |
Conversion cause of much conflict The world is going through a moral and spiritual crisis. Religion is at the heart of it. Religion was meant to make men better and nobler (this was the claim), but it has made them — most of them — behave like beasts. The point is: if religions turn men into beasts (this needs no evidence today), the beasts must be prevented from usurping the power of the State, for they can inflict incalculable harm on humanity. What have we done to prevent the beasts from taking over power? Perhaps nothing. We were asleep to the dangers of religious fundamentalism. Which is why we have now to wage a war against terrorism. Religion and politics must be kept apart. This is an old shibboleth. But the priest and the magistrate depend on each other for their legitimacy. They are closely linked. Nehru made the mistake of thinking, like all leftists of his time, that religions would wither away with the development of society and the growth of a scientific tamper. The Left has authored many such errors. As an agnostic, Nehru had no interest in religion. He writes: "God has come to mean much that I do not believe in. I find myself incapable of thinking a deity..... in anthropomorphic term..... any idea of a personal god seems very odd to me." Pure and absurd pontification by an ignorant man. Nehru could not have been a guide to India on religion, for he saw no good in religion. Gandhiji was closer to truth. But he had no say in the shaping of India's destiny. Nehru had a monopoly on it. But let us examine Gandhiji's basic thoughts. Gandhiji's religiosity came with the mother's milk. To him, Ram was an exemplar, just as Mohammad was an exemplar and Jesus was an exemplar. Anything wrong with it? Gandhiji identified God with Truth. It is too abstract a definition. It is like Advaita — beyond the understanding of most men. Gandhiji was averse to popular Hinduism (also called "Puranic Hinduism") with its rituals and myriad gods and goddesses. He never went to temples. But it is this popular Hinduism which has given form to Hindu civilisation. Take away Puranic Hinduism, there will be little left of Hindu civilisation. But Puranic Hinduism is a lower order of Hinduism. It is characterised by bhakti and blind faith. What is more, it breeds fanatics. Having rejected popular Hinduism, what was it that constituted Gandhiji's religion? In one word: service to mankind is the greatest dharma. To the question whether there can be service without religion, Gandhiji once said: "Why, service, which has not the slightest touch of the self in it, is itself the highest religion:" Gandhiji called this service the "yuga dharma." He believed that each yuga had a particular religion. In our own yuga, he said, service to man is the true dharma. Suffering, as the Buddha said, is in the nature of the Kaliyuga. The antidote to suffering is service. Half an hour service to mankind daily is a surer way to salvation. Service to mankind could have been the universal religion. It is far superior to anything propagated by other religions. But then the men around Gandhiji were small men. They could not have converted his great mission into a new religion of mankind. Gandhiji was not bound by scriptural texts. He had said: "I cannot let the scriptural texts supercede reason." Reason was supreme to him. But how can one have faith in reason and not in scriptures? he was once asked. He replied: because scripture has come to us through the imperfect agency of men. In any case, he observed: "Amongst the many untruths that are propagated in the world, one of the foremost is theology." Naturally, he was repelled by the doctrinaire part of religions. What attracted him the most was their ethical teaching with a universal appeal. He did not consider any religion "superior". But each religion has something "supreme". Thus, in Christianity, the "Sermon on the Mount" is of universal appeal. Gandhiji identified himself with it. To that extent, he was a Christian. He was a Hindu by conviction. He recognised the earthly division of mankind into Hindus, Christians, Muslims and others. "I, therefore, prefer to retain the label of my forefathers," he says. Gandhiji was against conversion. The right to propagate one's religion did not impress him. He opposed denationalisation. On this, he writes: "Surely, a religion that compelled one to eat beef, drink liquor and change one's clothes did not deserve the name." Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, a deeply pious Christian lady, agreed with Gandhiji. Conversion is the cause of much conflict. Every conversion of a Hindu seems to proclaims that salvation is not possible through Hinduism. Once a Muslim friend asked Gandhiji to embrace Islam. This is what he told him: "I can pay full respects to the Prophet and the Quran, but why do you want me to reject the Vedas? They have helped me to be what I am. I find the greatest consolation from the Gita and Tulsidas Ramayan." Honest Western missionaries were opposed to mass conversions. Thus, when the media reported that Dr Ambedkar was ready to "hand over" 50,000 dalits for conversion (this turned out to be a false report) to Christianity, Dr John Mott, a well-known missionary, wrote to Gandhiji that he was opposed to Christian missionaries bidding with others for the souls of the Indian people. If effect, conversion, says Gandhiji, is "like an attempt to destroy a house, which though badly in want of repair, appeared to the dweller quite decent and habitable." He expected all Indians to live in this house in amity. It is an idle dream, he said, for Hindus to think of driving the Muslims out of India or for Muslims to think that they can convert India into a Darul-Islam. He is still our best guide in religious matters. But the last word is still with Nehru — and that word is "Secularism". Its true meaning is: separation of religion and politics. But India gave it a totally different interpretation. It made it into "sarva dharma samabhava" (equal respect for all religions). This opened the floodgates to communal politics. The blame should first go to Nehru and then to Mrs Gandhi. As religion became a major factor in the power game, religious stridency came to have a premium. Thus, fundamentalism gained respectability. Today the Indian State is stuck in the bog of religious fundamentalism. It cannot extricate itself. This is partly true of the world, too. More so, the Islamic world. Sections of the BJP call today for the marriage of fundamentalism and the State. Such a marriage of the Cross and the Sword led to the Dark Ages in Europe, lasting a thousand years. Do we want to plunge India into a Dark Age? |
|
The misguided new romantics of death The last 13 months will go down in history as the Year of Terror. Hijacked planes have fallen from the skies above the United States. A discotheque full of young Westerners is bombed in Bali and, most recently, Chechen terrorists grabbed hundreds of people in a Moscow theatre, their threat to execute them leading inevitably to last weekend’s violent denouement. Beneath those headlines, a steady threat has hummed: shootings, bombings, failed attacks, plots and arrests. Suddenly the world seems a very dangerous place, driving an urgent search for a theme to explain this Year of Terror. No effort has been more high profile than that of the Bush administration to corral the disparate elements that have emerged from each outrage into a single conspiracy, whether with Iraq or Al- Qaeda at its centre, on whom the war on terrorism can be declared. But with every new atrocity, new contradictions have emerged that challenge the attempts to squeeze the present phenomenon of devastating attacks into a single cause. Instead, what is emerging is a picture of a new kind of terrorism that is as difficult to pigeonhole as it is to fight — and is the more dangerous and frightening for it. If a single theme does link Chechnya to Afghanistan to Indonesia, it is not a sinister, single world conspiracy but rather the intoxicating allure in some sections of the Islamic world of the power of terrorism itself. For although it is clear that some of the recent attacks are clearly linked to the Al-Qaeda conspiracy, that is still not enough to explain the spate of terrorist spectaculars that have littered the last year and the motivations of those involved. Until the bombings of the US embassies in Africa, it had become a commonplace in Western security thinking to believe that terrorism was not only containable but, with the experience of Northern Ireland and the Middle East, to believe that terror could effectively be neutralised by political engagement. But 11 September changed all that. In an instant, it created an enduring image that President Bush’s war on terrorism cannot defeat and cannot undo; of the world’s most powerful state made vulnerable. It is a message that has been grasped by lone gunmen, by militant jihadists around the world, and by the Chechens holed up in Moscow theatre with their hostages as the defining narrative of their own ills. Viewed through their prism, that single image tells them that terrorism works. It is an idea that Western leaders are struggling to grasp. Seen from their vantage point, 11 September — for all the tragedy it delivered — was a disaster for the organisation that plotted it, bringing about the invasion of Afghanistan, Bin Laden’s almost certain death and the destruction of his terrorist centres. It is an outlook that misses the point about this kind of terror. The recent history of terrorism, with some exceptions, has been about ‘resistance struggles’. By its nature, it has been ethnic in motivation, politically doctrinaire and — following Marxist-Leninist ideas of discipline — well-organised in a hierarchical and pseudo-statist fashion. It has been driven, too, by conventional military considerations, with operations designed to cause the maximum impact short of the utter extermination of the organisation. It is a terrorism, too, that proposed a clearly political alternative, no matter how lacking in legitimacy that alternative might be. By being political in nature, it is about a form of violent negotiation. It is here that the new terrorism stands apart from what has gone before, making it exponentially more dangerous. In many cases — Chechnya, for instance — it may have come from a background of resistance struggle. But a defining element is a special kind of nihilistic destructiveness born of a psychological malaise widespread among many radicalised and often well-educated young Islamic men who believe that a world dominated by Western political ideals, culture and economics holds nothing for them. It has created an existential crisis characterised by a narcissistic cult of death and destruction, postmodern in its fascination with technology and the media of communication, that yet utterly rejects all aspects of Western culture. It is this that poses the greatest challenge to police and intelligence authorities. For the culture that fuels this kind of terrorism is diffuse and as widely attractive as any other youth movement. And what of Islam in all this? There are academics who argue that the present upsurge in this kind of terrorism presages a devastating clash of cultures and others who argue it is a cyclical phenomenon within Islam. History may, however, judge that its Islamic flavour is a only pretext for a misguidedly romanticised form of revolutionary violence that has seduced a generation of young Muslims in the same way that revolutionary socialism and violent anarchism seduced young Westerners into terrorism a generation before.
The Guardian |
The idea of freedom is the only true idea of salvation —freedom from everything, the senses, whether of pleasure or pain, from good as well as evil. More than this, we must be free from death; And to be free from death, we must be free from life. Life is but a dream of death. Where there is life, there will be death; so get away from life if you would be rid of death. We are ever free if we would only believe it, only have faith enough. You are the soul, free and eternal, ever free, ever blessed. Have faith enough and you will be free in a minute. Everything in time, space and causation is bound. The soul is beyond all time, space, all causation. That which is bound is nature, not the soul. Therefore, proclaim your freedom and be what you are — ever free, ever blessed. Time, space and causation, we call Maya. —
The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. VI “Notes of Class Talks and Lectures”
*** We gain freedom when we have paid the full price for our right to live. —
Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies
*** The door of liberation is narrow, narrower than one-tenth of the sesame seed. The mind is inflated like an elephant, how can then it pass through this door. —
Sri Guru Granth Sahib
*** Forgiving presupposes remembering. — Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now
*** Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors — The Bible, Matthew 6:12
*** Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. —
The Bible, Ephesians 4:32 |
 |
| Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & Kashmir | Himachal Pradesh | Regional Briefs | Nation | Editorial | | Business | Sport | World | Mailbag | In Spotlight | Chandigarh Tribune | Ludhiana Tribune 50 years of Independence | Tercentenary Celebrations | | 122 Years of Trust | Calendar | Weather | Archive | Subscribe | Suggestion | E-mail | |
