E D I T O R I A L   P A G E

EDITORIALS

Some plain speaking by Russia
INDIA'S lonesome cries in the US-created wilderness about Pakistan’s promotion of terrorism elicited a long-awaited echo in the candour of the visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin. He not only called a spade a spade — which many other countries have been “diplomatically” avoiding to do — but also warned the world against the danger posed by the role played by India’s neighbour in nuclear proliferation. Perhaps this forthrightness will goad the USA to shed its “see no evil in a collaborator” policy.

On the path to development
ONCE the fastest growing state in the country, Punjab today ranks among the laggards in development. In the last decade the state’s annual growth rate at 4.7 per cent was slower than the national average of 6.9 per cent. This has naturally hurt the Punjabi pride and led some concerned planners and economists to undertake a serious study of what has gone wrong.

HARI JAISINGH
India, USA & Pak-blessed terrorism
Signs of dangerous fallout on domestic politics
THE spectre of terrorism continues to haunt, understandably, Indian leaders as is clear from a few stray remarks cited above. The problem here is not the lack of understanding of the nature and dimension of terrorism. The real problem is the failure to find appropriate answers to effectively deal with terrorism as it operates from across the border on the domestic turf.

MIDDLE

Geo-politics
S. Raghunath
THE campaign was mean and bitter, but thanks to my well-oiled political machine, the liberal use of money and muscle power and my vote-banks among the under-graduates, I got elected, albeit by a slender majority, as the President of my college’s Geology Association. During the course of the campaign, the museum housing priceless exhibits was attacked and ransacked by a rampaging student mob and the exhibits themselves expropriated for use as missiles and during a pitched melee, I was struck on the forehead by a rock which a visiting UGC professor later identified as belonging to the pre-Paleolozic age.

COMMENTARY

Understanding the Chinese mind
M. S. N. Menon
TO know the past is to know the present. If we want to know the present China, we must know its past. But we know so little. Inscrutable — that is still the word used by the world to describe the Chinese. They have not lived down their ignominy. The Chinese have little interest in religion or anything speculative or metaphysical. Strange? Yes, but true. “Not yet understanding life, how can you understand death?” asked Confucius. Here is pragmatism — the inspiration for Deng’s preference for the cat that caught the mice.

TRENDS & POINTERS

Refined foods cause acne
EATING too much refined bread and cereal, rather than chocolate and greasy foods, could be the cause of teenage acne and pimples. Loren Cordain and scientists at the Colorado State University in Fort Collins have published research showing that refined carbohydrates unleash a series of reactions in the body which increase the production of bacteria that cause acne.

• Wife charged with sperm smuggling

What they love & what they hate about America
IN the eyes of much of the world, this is America: an inconsiderate lone wolf that has really good entertainment but really bad values, that wants war with Iraq just to get oil but still should remain as the only super power on Earth. In a broad international survey released on Wednesday, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that the USA is falling out of favour in 19 of 27 countries where a trend could be identified.

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

EDITORIALS

Some plain speaking by Russia

INDIA'S lonesome cries in the US-created wilderness about Pakistan’s promotion of terrorism elicited a long-awaited echo in the candour of the visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin. He not only called a spade a spade — which many other countries have been “diplomatically” avoiding to do — but also warned the world against the danger posed by the role played by India’s neighbour in nuclear proliferation. Perhaps this forthrightness will goad the USA to shed its “see no evil in a collaborator” policy. Even if it is not America, at least some other nations can be expected to discard their inhibition finally. What has helped Russia in better appreciating India’s plight is the fact that it has had to face a similar onslaught itself. For that matter, the USA is also no longer a stranger to the horrors of terrorism. Yet, it has bought special kid-gloves for the sake of General Musharraf ever since he turned his country’s Afghanistan policy on its head and from a bad boy became the US pointsman in the region almost overnight. Now that India has found vocal support from Russia, which asked Pakistan to implement in full its obligation and promises to prevent the infiltration of terrorists across the LoC into Jammu and Kashmir and at other points across the border, as well as to eliminate the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Islamabad-Occupied territory as a prerequisite for the renewal of peaceful dialogue between the two countries, it will, hopefully, not be seen as a perpetual grumbler out to settle scores with Islamabad. Mr Putin has elaborated on the threat that stares the world in the eye in a forceful manner and reiterated that the danger of weapons of mass destruction stockpiled by Pakistan falling into the hands of renegades is very much real. In contrast, he has wholeheartedly supported India’s peaceful nuclear programme, so much so that there are indications that it might even supply additional civilian reactors to the platform already existing at Kudankulam.

The Delhi Declaration aims at strengthening the foundation of a strategic partnership by enhancing economic, scientific and technological cooperation. Significantly, no defence deal has been signed this time. Perhaps this was deliberately done so that no motives could be attached to the growing convergence between the two countries on various issues like fighting international terrorism. However, a major agreement in this regard is believed to be in the offing in the near future. The sharp focus on the abysmal level of bilateral trade (only $ 1.4 billion annually) indicates that correctives are likely to be applied soon. Although Indian officials have been trying to downplay the issue of an India-Russia-China axis emerging, the subject was under the main arc during the visit. Significant progress is reported to have been made. There are too many ifs and buts and it will be a long time before any concrete shape emerges.

On the path to development

ONCE the fastest growing state in the country, Punjab today ranks among the laggards in development. In the last decade the state’s annual growth rate at 4.7 per cent was slower than the national average of 6.9 per cent. This has naturally hurt the Punjabi pride and led some concerned planners and economists to undertake a serious study of what has gone wrong. On the initiative of the Planning Commission, the Chandigarh-based Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development has prepared a development report for Punjab from “a wider and holistic perspective”. It has recommended an integrated regional approach combining Punjab’s strategy in the Green Revolution, rural development and growth of small-scale industries with Haryana’s strengths in the white revolution and high-tech industrialisation and Himachal’s innovations in horticulture, power generation and tourism promotion. Going specifically into the factors responsible for the present precarious financial position of Punjab, the report lists the high wage bill, the mounting debt burden, highly subsidised social and economic services, slow growth of revenue and loss-making PSUs as the main culprits. These are the factors operating in other states also. Because of the financial constraints it is difficult to undertake development projects, and for want of such projects there is little progress. Lack of growth opportunities is driving talent out of the state and out of the country. There are less or non-skilled unemployable people joining the ever-increasing population of the unemployed every year. Incompetitive industry makes demands on the state for concessions. The agriculturist is stuck with expensive farm machinery, unable to pay back his loans as returns from his produce dwindle. A dynamic people are caught in the web of helplessness.

The all important question everyone asks is: what should be done to change the situation? Again an integrated approach is required in which every individual is a participant. First, the environment has to be protected and over-exploitation of natural resources stopped. The falling underground watertable has to be checked by undertaking water harvesting and afforestation measures. Industrial waste polluting the water sources has to be ruthlessly stopped. Industrial and agricultural productivity has to be improved by skill and technology upgradation. Good governance does not cost much money and corruption has no place in a system geared for development. Computerisation of government records and services can help. The wastage of limited resources needs to be stopped right from the individual to the state level. Education, health and infrastructure require large investments. The government can generate funds by stopping freebies, which currently cost some Rs 900 crore a year to the exchequer. User-charges for all public utilities have become unavoidable. The government has to pull out of business and sell off PSUs that bleed the exchequer. A new mindset requires to be cultivated. People have to learn to pay for the services availed and stop looking at the government for crutches. The government has to use every rupee of public money on public welfare only and realise that it does not exist for the employees and wasteful expenditure only. The government has to play an enlightened role in the new economic environment.

FRANKLY SPEAKING

India, USA & Pak-blessed terrorism
Signs of dangerous fallout on domestic politics
HARI JAISINGH

"PAKISTAN is not ready to change its policy on cross-border terrorism even after the change in political leadership there" — Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at Shimla.

***

Some ISI-sponsored Pakistani elements may be active here, but it will be a grave mistake to see Indian Muslims through a Pakistani prism. They have to be treated and respected as equal citizens while conducting the poll campaign neatly and honourably.

MIDDLE

Geo-politics
S. Raghunath

THE campaign was mean and bitter, but thanks to my well-oiled political machine, the liberal use of money and muscle power and my vote-banks among the under-graduates, I got elected, albeit by a slender majority, as the President of my college’s Geology Association.

During the course of the campaign, the museum housing priceless exhibits was attacked and ransacked by a rampaging student mob and the exhibits themselves expropriated for use as missiles and during a pitched melee, I was struck on the forehead by a rock which a visiting UGC professor later identified as belonging to the pre-Paleolozic age.

Immediately on ascending the high office of the Geology Association President, I saw as my first priority the healing of the wounds caused by the divisive campaign and I issued a stirring appeal to all the students asking them to sink their differences, pit the past behind them and stand unitedly behind me as never before in the face of the threat posed by the renegade Geo-Chemistry Association.

My appeal was heeded and under my Presidentship, a two-day colloquium on the Geo-Morphology of Igneous Rocks thrown by students on buses was organised and a field trip undertaken to collect rocks for use when the university syndicate and academic council were next in session.

But dissidence soon began to rear its ugly head and thru’ my trusted servitors whom I had planted in strategic positions throughout the association, I learned that a secret cabal from the “D” section of the evening college had managed to infiltrate the under-graduate ranks — my traditional vote-banks and was planning a breakaway move in cahoots with the turncoat Geo-Chemistry Association.

In a desperate bid to quell the rising tide of dissidence, I expanded the membership of the powerful Finance Sub-Committee, accommodating almost all the dissidents and rebels in it and I won over the uncommitted under-graduates, by promising them future membership of the Programme and Souvenir sub-committee. I was so busy containing the threat to my “gaddi” that I bunked the first term semester exams and acquired a martyr’s halo of sorts.

But the fragile facade of unity soon cracked and the Geology Association suffered a split with the rebels and dissidents breaking away from the parent body and entering into a pact with the traitorous Geo-Chemistry Association to fight the next college union elections on the basis of a common minimum programme. The once monolithic Geology Association suffered a further split with disgruntled elements launching a rival Geo. Palaeontology Association and Forum for the Study of Geo-Morphological Fossils.

I am now facing a bleak future on the hallowed precincts of learning, deserted by servitors and time-servers and presiding over a rump organisation. How have the mighty fallen!

I regret having to paint so dismal a picture of campus politics, but I am sure you will agree, facts have to be faced.

COMMENTARY

Understanding the Chinese mind
M. S. N. Menon

TO know the past is to know the present. If we want to know the present China, we must know its past. But we know so little.

Inscrutable — that is still the word used by the world to describe the Chinese. They have not lived down their ignominy.

The Chinese have little interest in religion or anything speculative or metaphysical. Strange? Yes, but true. “Not yet understanding life, how can you understand death?” asked Confucius. Here is pragmatism — the inspiration for Deng’s preference for the cat that caught the mice.

Confucius was no religious man. (Just as Mao was no Marxist.) Confucius had little interest in anything other than earthly things. But how can the questing spirit of man be chained to the earth?, you may ask. Surely, by linking it to an unbroken chain of ancestors in heaven. Did not the ancestors take birth in the same family over and over again? And, when in heaven, do they not speak for the family on earth?

Such was the Chinese belief. So Confucius preached filial piety as the principal virtue. (We preached service to humanity.) There is no place for a contemplative life in the philosophy of Confucius. His ideal was a virtuous and active citizen, engaged in devotion to his ancestors and the state. It is easy to mould them into a collective. (You can never do that with the individualist Indian)

Thus in the Chinese social order, there was not much dependence on law and government. The family was responsible for the conduct of its members. It rewarded and punished. In contrast, it was the caste system which regulated much of human behaviour in India.

Like the Buddha, Confucius did not elaborate on the concepts of God and soul. God is secondary in the Chinese scheme of things. No wonder, they behave differently. Having given up Heaven, they take more interest on earthly matters.

The objects of Chinese worship were heaven and earth, and the spirits of mountains and streams. And to the Chinese masses, the divine was anthropomorphic.

A Chinese told a Christian missionary that his troubles were enough with his body, and that he would not increase them by adding the concerns of his soul. In any case, he said, he had never seen his soul. Naturally, the Chinese have more time for themselves.

To the Chinese, man is a micro-cosm of the universe. He is the centre of Chinese thought and art. Not God.

There is thus a great correspondence between man and nature in Chinese thought. To be in harmony with nature is their final objective. (To dominate over nature is the objective of Semitic faiths.)

Chinese art copies nature, and the highest objective of an artist is to make an exact copy of nature. This is realism. Indian art is all imagination.

The Chinese emperors ruled with a mandate from Heaven. In India, they ruled by Dharma. It is the Indian model which prevailed in the rest of Asia, not the Chinese.

To China, it was the family bond which tied man to his clan. In India, it was the caste system. Both were strong.

In China, status and power resided with the emperor. He was the embodiment of virtues. Men copied him. And those who failed to do so were punished.

In India, the highest status was given to the Brahmin. But power was with the king. And since the king ruled by his Dharma, unlike China, India had elaborate laws.

The Chinese are not happy with things foreign. Dr Hu Shi, a Chinese philosopher, confessed in a talk at Harvard that Buddhism being an “alien” religion, it was a “national disaster” and a “humiliation” for the Celestial Empire. No wonder China does not permit religious conversions. It refused to accept a visit by the Pope.

The Chinese are given to extremism in both words and deeds. (China must thank the Jesuits for describing them as peaceful.) Violence has been endemic in Chinese history. During the Tai Ping rebellion, the rebels devastated 600 cities and towns. The Boxer rebellion was equally destructive. And we all know the fury and fanaticism of Mao’s cultural revolution.” It humiliated the tallest in the land, even Liu Shao Chi, the number two man in the Chinese hierarchy. There is something to ponder over here.

The Chinese treated their neighbours as barbarians and did everything to bring about enmity among them. “The unity of the barbarians is harmful to China. Stir up feuds to alienate them, and let them fight against each other,” says a Chinese authority of the 3rd c B.C. We are the unfortunate victims to this policy.

There are about 100 non-Han minorities in China. In all, they number no more than 60 or so millions. They can never threaten the dominance of the Han race. But China wants to efface their separate identity through a process of colonisation, miscegenation and removal of the visible symbols of their separate identity.

The Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongols are important minorities with a distinguished past. China’s minority policy reflects its imperial legacy. In contrast, its chauvinistic claims on behalf of the Chinese minorities overseas demonstrates its racialism — the sense of superiority.

China is untrustworthy, deceptive, self-centred. Nothing demonstrates this fact more poignantly than India’s experience. And yet Indian foreign policy, says Harvey Stockwin, a China expert, “has too often been characterised by visceral anti-Americanism and servile sinophilia. Pervasive Indian ignorance about China results too often in an unseemly deference, sometimes reminiscent of the attitude of a tributary state.”

The mandarins are the memory of China. They record the history of China. And they are supposed to be honest. Their job is to safeguard the interests of China. We had no history, no historians and none to safeguard our interests.

India’s long history of contact with China has been a one-way traffic. It was India which gave. Never the other way. Except for a few Chinese pilgrims who came to India, there is no evidence of Chinese interest in India.

It was Tagore who revived India’s interest in China after a long gap by setting up the China Bhavan at Shantiniketan. But we see no reciprocal act.

Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai was the popular symptoms of our doped existence. And acceptance of Mao as “our Chairman” by so-called Left intellectuals was the nadir of our intellectual servility.

China has a long memory for its ancient claims on others and of the injuries it has suffered, real or imagined, but a short one for facts and gratitude.

TRENDS & POINTERS

Refined foods cause acne

EATING too much refined bread and cereal, rather than chocolate and greasy foods, could be the cause of teenage acne and pimples. Loren Cordain and scientists at the Colorado State University in Fort Collins have published research showing that refined carbohydrates unleash a series of reactions in the body which increase the production of bacteria that cause acne.

“There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence,” Neil Mann, a nutrition researcher at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia told New Scientist magazine.

“Dermatologists will tell you they have put patients on low-carbohydrate diets and seen improvements. This will be the first controlled study,” he added.

Although acne makes teenagers in developed countries miserable, it is almost unknown in some societies such as the Kitava Islanders in Papua New Guinea where processed foods are at a minimum.

According to Cordain, the Inuit people in Alaska did not suffer from pimples until the arrival of the Western diet.

“Acne may not be the only problem caused by eating large quantities of highly refined starches. Such diets have also been blamed for causing short-sightedness and contributing to adult-onset diabetes,” New Scientist said. Reuters

Wife charged with sperm smuggling

When officials in a Pennsylvania prison saw mob hit-man Kenny Granato showing off his three-year-old daughter during a family visit, they were faced with a disturbing question.

Given that Granato (42) had been in prison since 1988 and was never eligible for conjugal visits, where exactly had the child come from?

Adultery was apparently ruled out on the grounds that the wives of jailed-hit men are unlikely to offer evidence of an extra-marital affair.

An investigation followed and resulted last week in Granato and his wife, Regina, being indicted on charges of criminal conspiracy for smuggling the mobster’s sperm out of Allenwood Federal Prison. AFP

What they love & what they hate about America

IN the eyes of much of the world, this is America: an inconsiderate lone wolf that has really good entertainment but really bad values, that wants war with Iraq just to get oil but still should remain as the only super power on Earth.

In a broad international survey released on Wednesday, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that the USA is falling out of favour in 19 of 27 countries where a trend could be identified.

The dislike was especially striking in Muslim countries. Seventy-five per cent of those surveyed in Jordan had an unfavourable opinion of America, as did 69 per cent of Egyptians and Pakistanis and 59 per cent of Lebanese. In Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Senegal, Turkey and Lebanon, the vast majority said they oppose the US-led war on terrorism.

But ill-will toward the USA was also found in supposedly friendly nations like Canada, Britain and Germany.

“The biggest headline is the slipping image of the United States, not simply that we’re not liked in the Muslim world,” said Andrew Kohut, Director of the Pew Research Centre. “But there is still a great reserve of good will toward the United States.”

The surveys in 44 countries were conducted by established survey organisations in each country between July and October, with polls done by phone in eight of the most developed countries and face-to-face in the others. The error margins ranged from plus or minus 2 percentage points to 4.5 points, depending on the sample size.

A generally favourable view of America is held in 35 of the 42 countries that took part in the survey. Among Russians, US popularity has surged 24 points, from 37 per cent two years ago to 61 per cent today. Similarly, 77 per cent of Nigerians and 85 per cent of Uzbeks had pro-US views, up 31 per cent and 29 per cent respectively.

The most common criticisms of the USA are that it acts by itself, it pushes policies that widen the gap between rich and poor nations, and it doesn’t do enough to solve the world’s problems.

Americans don’t necessarily agree. AP

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

Love. Ego plays a subtle role everywhere.

Not only in men but in mice also!

An arrogant elephant looked down contemptuously at a mouse and said: “You are just about the puniest little creature I have ever seen.”

“I am not always like this”, squeaked the mouse.

“I have been sick”.

— From - The Silent Music, 25

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The Guru is called the Almighty himself

The Guru is saint, the Guru is prophet.

He makes a home in every heart,

He fills to the brim all empty vessels.

The Guru does whatever he wills.

Bullah found in his home the Lord,

Who disguised himself in various forms.

He kept it secret from the world.

He firmly believes in the lesson of love.

The Guru does whatever he wills.

— Faqir Mohammad, Kulliyat

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Compiled by Satish K. Kapoor