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Iranian knot Stellar role |
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A nightmare Make examinations easier for students LONG, long after many failed students committed suicides and many more were scared out of schools, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has finally stepped in to make board examinations less taxing.
Storm over KGB funding
Who would boil my milk?
Female foeticide goes on unchecked in Punjab Brain scan may reveal
a lie Delhi Durbar
From the pages of
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Iranian knot INDIA’S plea for a diplomatic resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue has been getting encouraging response. China and Russia, besides many other not so influential members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors, have supported the Indian stand. This is gratifying for India, which has been consistently arguing that diplomacy can ultimately lead to a happy end as in the case of North Korea. This approach found mention during the Manmohan Singh-George W. Bush dialogue in Washington last week. It was highlighted again when External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met on Tuesday. The problem, however, is that the US does not attach much significance to the consensual approach or giving diplomacy more chance than it has already got. The US has on its side, besides Japan, the European Union, which made some diplomatic efforts, at Washington’s behest, but without much success. The reason, perhaps, was that the EU— represented by Britain, France and Germany — anyhow wanted to get the Iranian nuclear energy programme capped irrespective of Teheran’s explanation that it was meant for peaceful purposes. Iran’s readiness to fulfil its obligations under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty did not satisfy the US and the EU-Three. Now the US and the EU are doing everything possible to take the matter to the UN Security Council, arguing that this is the only course left to deal with a country which has violated the NPT by “secretly” pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. On the other hand, Iran has alleged that the US-EU move amounts to pursuing a policy of nuclear apartheid. Things are taking a turn for the worse with Russia and China, two of the veto-wielding members of the Security Council, expressing their opposition to the US-EU plan. They will, however, work along with India for giving diplomacy a chance. There is no reason why this approach cannot succeed in the case of Iran if it has brought satisfactory results in the Korean peninsula.
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Stellar role THE success of India in developing her own satellites and launch vehicles on “shoe-string” budgets have been acknowledged the world over. ISRO’s announcement that it aims to launch about 10 satellites over the next four years, at a cost of about Rs 3,600 crore, is thus a credible goal. Many of these satellites are already under construction. Some are further additions to our worthy INSAT series of communication satellites, while others will augment our remote sensing and weather mapping capabilities. INSAT 4A is already at Kourou awaiting a launch by an Ariane rocket. Playing a different role will be the unmanned moon mission, Chandrayaan, slated for a 2008 launch. Over the years, ISRO has been seen as one of the organisations where the return on investment is high. There is a high level of confidence that if money is provided for its programmes, something concrete is bound to emerge. While high technology is sometimes removed from the concerns of the common man, particularly the rural community, it is also to ISRO’s credit that it has put satellites to good use in education, agriculture, and medicine. These programmes should be implemented on a large scale so that its benefits reach an optimum number of people. Augmentation of launch capability is a key component of ISRO’s success. The PSLV launchers have become a workhorse, and the GSLV launcher for heavier satellites, which would be placed in geo-synchronous orbit, are also doing well. Success with the mark II and mark III versions of the GSLV will be crucial – both to capture the international launch market and reduce our dependence on foreign launchers like the Ariane. The ongoing programmes on developing various technologies that would go into a reusable launch vehicle, including air-breathing engines, need to be accelerated. More indigenous work also needs to be done on sensors, lasers and other systems, to reduce import dependence. There should be no complacency and ISRO should continue to show the way in high technology.
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A nightmare LONG, long after many failed students committed suicides and many more were scared out of schools, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has finally stepped in to make board examinations less taxing. The changes, which will come into effect by the year 2007, will hopefully lessen the strain on the young minds and, instead, catalyse creative thinking. Just as the load of schoolbags in junior classes was excessive till a few years ago, the syllabus that those appearing for Class X and XII examinations had to tackle was insurmountable. The stress was on learning by rote and the creativity of the students was sacrificed. This caused enormous mental torture to the students. Children never got to enjoy their childhood. The quest for high marks came at the cost of multidimensional personality development. The new plan seeks to reduce this burden on the students. Equally significant is the decision to do away with the percentage system. It was an anachronism, which did not make any sense. Except for subjects like mathematics, there was no scientific method by which it could be decided who would get, say, 83 marks and who will get 84. The standard of marking would vary from examiner to examiner. In future, there will be a nine-point grading scale. There will be no mention of pass or fail in the grading system, either. The greater focus on practicals and classroom performance, rather than theory, is a step in the right direction. It will now be for the schools to ensure that this switchover is not
misutilised for favouring the select few for ulterior reasons. That problem is far more rampant than is generally acknowledged. Now that the CBSE is at it, it should also strive to make the syllabus more interactive and relevant to today’s situation. For a teenager to grasp a subject, it is essential that it interests him and stimulates his grey cells. That component is, unfortunately, conspicuous by its absence in most textbooks.
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Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever. — William Shakespeare
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Storm over KGB funding REACTIONS to the revelations about the activities in this country of the KGB, the notorious spy agency of the late Soviet Union, have been entirely true to type. The Congress and the Communist Party of India (CPI), the two political parties that are supposed to have been financed by the Soviet department of dirty tricks during Indira Gandhi’s reign, have flatly and angrily denied the charge. On the other hand, the BJP, the main opposition party, fortuitously meeting in the throes of a grave crisis within its own ranks, seized on the disclosures as a god-sent opportunity to divert attention from its woes and target the Congress-led UPA, especially the Congress and the CPI. Its most strident spokesperson, Mr. Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, lost no time to declare that the “country was not safe” in the hands of the present ruling coalition. There is a clear and urgent need to look at the whole affair dispassionately, not with partisan motivations that have vitiated the entire political discourse in the country. The first thing to remember is that the source of all the juicy information is a book just released in Britain. It is based — as its title, “The Mitrokhin Archive II, KGB and the World,” underscores — on the classified documents that Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB defector, now deceased, brought with him to London in 1992. Secondly, it was the MI6, Britain’s external intelligence outfit, that persuaded and perhaps commissioned Professor Christopher Andrews, Cambridge historian and expert on espionage, to collaborate with the defector. The third and most important point is that there is nothing startlingly new about what are being bandied about as “sensational disclosures”. Moscow’s financing of the CPI (undivided until the early sixties) is old hat. That the KGB also funded Krishna Menon’s election in 1962 in the hope that he might succeed Nehru is also not surprising. Ironically, Menon fell only a few months later because of the border war with China. The subsequent extension of the KGB’s election subsidy and bribes to Congress MPs and even ministers would also appear logical, given the peculiar permissiveness of Indian democracy and the galloping greed of the entire Indian political class. However, full allowance must be made for the habitual weakness of all intelligence agencies wildly to exaggerate their accomplishments, a point Professor Andrews handsomely concedes. A telling instance in point is the KGB’s boast about PROKHOR, a mole in the Indian Foreign Service the Soviet agency had “recruited” in Moscow in the fifties through what the spy trade charmingly calls a “honey trap”. (Money and “honey” have indeed been the most potent weapons of spies since Samson and Delilah.) PROKHOR later rose to very high positions because he had kept his bosses informed of his “relationship” with the Soviet spies. The climax of this story was that it became a subject of a US Congressional inquiry in the seventies. The investigating committee complimented PROKHOR highly for “getting the better of the KGB”! Remarkably, Prof. Andrews has taken care to stress that Indira Gandhi wasn’t perhaps aware of what some of her ministers, Lalit Narayan Mishra in particular, were up to. But this hasn’t prevented the RSS spokesman, Mr. Ram Madhav, from making intemperate remarks about the “Gandhi family”. Mr Naqvi of the BJP has added that the ministers who were in the KGB’s pay then are “ministers now also”. For their part, the Congress spokespersons — Mr Abhishek Singhvi, Ms Jayanti Natrajan, Mr. Priya Rajan Das Munshi and so on — haven’t served their cause by making statements that are banal, if not inane. They also seem totally uninformed of the situation prevailing in the seventies. One wonders whether they know that the mastermind of the KGB operations in New Delhi during the relevant period is currently Russia’s Ambassador here. Compared with the Congress party, the CPI would find the task of defending itself more difficult. This is so because half a century before the publication of the present book, Jawaharlal Nehru had taken up with the visiting Soviet leaders, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, the impropriety of the CPI acting under the “instructions” of the Soviet Union. He had then spoken to B & K, not once but twice, about the CPI also getting “considerable sums of money from outside”. Khrushchev blandly denied this, of course. “Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series”, Volume 31, pp. 333-339.) The nexus between the rupee trade and import-export firms set up by those in the CPI’s orbit in later years would not bear too close a scrutiny. On top of it, a newspaper has published extracts from the diary of
I. A. Benediktov, Soviet Ambassador to India for two separate terms, that should be mortifying for the friends of both Bhupesh Gupta (CPI) and
E. M. S. Namboodiripad (CPM). All this having been said, one must hasten to add that the KGB is not alone in the business of buying or blackmailing politicians and others in this country or elsewhere. In this respect, the over-active CIA, the German BND, the British MI6, Israeli Mossad, Pakistan’s ISI and so on are not washed tulsi leaves or lilywhite innocents. It was left to the CPM patriarch, Mr Jyoti Basu, to draw attention to the claim by a former US Ambassador to India, Mr Daniel Moynihan, that the US had financed the Congress to defeat the Communists in Kerala and West Bengal. Indira Gandhi had tersely denied this. What Mr Moynihan talked about the CIA money is only the tip not of an iceberg but of a glacier larger than Siachen. Nor has the Congress been the sole beneficiary of the CIA’s largesse. The prestigious anti-Communist magazine Encounter with which Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) was associated was fully financed by the CIA. What else might come to light in future God alone knows. Let there be no confusion about the rude reality that espionage, bribery, blackmail, subversion, sabotage and worse constitute the game which all nations play and of which all of them are liable to be victims. The notion that the end of the Cold War has brought down the shenanigans of competing spy outfits is utterly absurd. No two countries are so close as the US and Israel. Yet, Mossad and the CIA are relentlessly spying on each other. In our own case, the CIA spirited away a suspected traitor in RAW even while the air was thick with the talk of India and the US being “strategic partners” and “natural
allies”.
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Who would boil my milk? MY post-retirement, one-man establishment is run by the two part-time domestic helps I employ. Urmila is the safaiwali and Parvati the kitchenwali. Between them they handle all chores, jharu-pocha, dusting, cooking, cleaning, washing et al, and steer the ship of my household with tolerable efficiency and a modicum of dignity. There is one little chore, however, that is a sort of bone of contention in reverse between the two sprightly ladies — who should boil the milk? Safaiwali Urmila comes early in the morning when I have left for my golf. The milk packets are delivered at that time and she dumps them in the fridge, which cool themselves till kitchenwali Parvati reports for work. In the meanwhile I come back from golf and have to content myself drinking kutcha, cold milk, a la Europeans. Parvati blames Urmila for this deplorable state of affairs, but Urmila says it’s none of her business, it being a cooking related activity. I see her point. As I could not possibly engage a dudhwali help for this task, I decided one day to boil the milk myself, and presto! I poured it in a pan and put it on slow fire on the gas. “So, simple! why didn’t I think of it earlier?” I told myself. The newspapers were lying on the sofa table, and I glanced at the main headlines in business as usual. Snafu! I reminded myself I shouldn’t get too immersed in news, as my milk was boiling, and I didn’t want it to be fouled up. I made a sortie to the kitchen, the milk seemed unruffled. I returned to the sofa, saw a fascinating picture of a couple of rickshaw-pullers sleeping on their mounts in the shade of a peepal tree, “reviving their sagging spirits”. Then my attention was attracted by a Reuters photo of Pakistani children, barely 5-6 years old, used as camel jockeys by the sheikhs in Gulf countries. But dutifully I again disengaged myself and had another peep in the kitchen. I saw no wrinkles on milk surface, and returned reassured. I was reading another human interest story, when it hit my nostrils — the stench of something burning. I rushed into the kitchen. The milk had become a stinking pink-yellow paste. I thought my dog, Winston, would love it. He sniffed it, and turned away.
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Female foeticide goes on unchecked in Punjab THE sorry saga of female foeticide always takes me back to the summer of 1996 when I encountered it in a big way while doing a study on the issue in Punjab. What I saw not only angered me, but also caused depression at what appeared to be a massive crime with little to no possibility of redressal. Let’s forget the laws, the problem can’t be solved till basic primitive societal attitudes do not change. The problem for 99.9 per cent girls in Punjab really begins at birth, when widely prevalent primitive patriarchal attitudes lead to their being given a third-rate status in the home by the family, relatives and society. This is evident in the very blatant preferential treatment being meted out to their male siblings, lack of choices for their future, little to no encouragement on their becoming professionals and the huge importance that is placed on getting them married as early as possible so that the “bojh” or “burden” is off. There is no question of the female inheriting property even today. In Punjab the number of girls working, especially married women, is low. When society is at this stage of evolution in Punjab and Haryana, it is not surprising that using sex-determination technologies, families prefer to abort the female foetus rather than let a girl get born. As they see it, it’s the more practical thing to do, murder the daughter and bring up the often ‘spoilt’ son who turns into a colossal pain. But that’s nature’s way of meting out justice! How critical the situation has become today is aptly brought out by the census conducted in 2001 which showed that India’s sex ratio has declined drastically since the last census and the states that have avidly contributed to this decline are Punjab and Haryana. The magnitude of the decline in Punjab is possibly the highest by 82 points and Haryana follows next with 59 points. Earlier in 1991, all districts of Punjab barring Nawanshahar recorded a child sex ratio of under 900 girls per 1000 boys. Socio-historic circumstances peculiar to the North-West are responsible for the subordination of the Punjabi female. Practices like “purdah”, child marriage, dowry and illiteracy were rampant in the past and have contributed to the secondary status of women in society. Sons were both needed by society and welcomed. This psyche has become a major undercurrent of Punjabi culture today. The birth of a male child is regarded with jubilance and that of a daughter as a mark of misfortune. Family pressure and unsupportive spouses are a major factor behind the spread of female foeticide. With the introduction of new technologies facilitating sex-determination tests, many Punjabi women are harassed into numerous sex tests and multiple abortions. The immensity of this family pressure was brought home to me while interviewing nurses around Ludhiana on this issue. They felt that the majority of these abortions were performed due to family pressure and after sex tests. Moreover, at least, 98 per cent of the aborted foetuses were female. This phenomenon is relatively more popular among the middle classes in the urban areas, especially among Jat and Bania families. Side by side, major contributors to the crime are gynaecologists and radiologists as well as an amorphous but large tribe of doctors sponging upon society. A nexus of sorts exists between gynaecologists and radiologists on this front, as they together rake in considerable profit from the MTP business. Prospective patients are shared between them. Nothing is mentioned on paper, the tests are shown as performed on medical grounds and the abortions as MTP. A large number of clinics have mushroomed all over Punjab run by homoeopathy or ayurvedic practitioners lab assistants, nurses, dai’s, or PHC compounders. I encountered numerous clinics of this variety in Ludhiana, Khanna, Malerkotla and Malaud. These are very unhygienic, dingy, one-room clinics where the hack or the dai performs the abortion at great risk to the woman. Alongside, there are a large number of scan centres without any trained radiologist on the job. The government and activist bodies mobilised opinion to take steps to counter female foeticide. Consequently, the Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Control and Regulation Act got passed in Parliament during the monsoon session of 1994. The state assemblies have passed the law in Maharashtra,
Guajrat, Punjab and Haryana. This Act was introduced to stop the misuse of technology to further exploit women. However, passing the law by itself does not seem to be sufficient. Strict implementation is needed and awareness has to be generated. This Act leaves much to be desired and there are many loopholes in it. Preferably, the test should be restricted to government-run institutions and should be performed on the recommendation of two or more doctors. So far much noise has been made about the act but there has been minimal action. In the few cases that were taken up, the victim has been harassed and fined. This is perhaps the last irony that on this issue, the law attacks the victims of the crime. |
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Brain scan may reveal
a lie LYING is harder than telling the truth, and that may be the key to a better lie-detection test. That’s what scientists at the University of Pennsylvania discovered when they watched ongoing brain scans of volunteers as they gave honest answers or told lies. The brain’s frontal lobe, the region that regulates thinking, puts out a lot more effort to devise a lie than to tell the truth, and brain scans document that activity. The finding, in the journal Human Brain Mapping and discussed in an article in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, advances the science of detecting deception. Brain imaging offers the possibility of a more exact way to tell whether an individual is telling the truth. The standard today is the polygraph, which measures cardiovascular and sweat gland activity. In many states, polygraph results are not admissible in court. A more accurate device might change those laws. Dr. Daniel Langleben, an assistant professor of psychiatry, found that a functional MRI scan could discriminate between a lie and a truth, and scientists can actually see where the signal is coming from in the brain. “It’s the most advanced way of correlating brain activity to behavior,” Langleben said. Testing an act of deception is tricky, he added. His first study involved instructing participants to lie. But he realized that wasn’t really lying. He needed to create a test that added secrecy to the mix. “Otherwise it’s more like theater than deception,” he explained. In his latest study, volunteers were given two playing cards and Langleben told them to pick one card and deny having it once inside the scanner. He offered them money to carry out his request. Moments later, in another room, the scientist hooking them up to the scanner told them to tell the truth. Then, the volunteer, independently choosing between two conflicting instructions, answered questions about the two cards while brain activity was recorded. Other studies using brain mapping have made a strong case for its potential usefulness in criminal investigations, but the brain differences were gathered using group data. The Penn researchers devised a study documenting changes in the individual brain. This brings the technology that much closer to the courtroom door. “It’s an important study,” said Dr. Monte Buchsbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan. “But whether it will be of practical significance is still unproven. Considering what to say when lying is a complicated mental process. There may be other things going on that we just don’t know about.” The frontal lobe changes are indicative not of lying, per se, but a person’s mental activity when thinking about and telling a lie. The frontal lobe is not as metabolically challenged when telling the truth. Some scanning applications have already excited intelligence agencies, Buchsbaum said. MRI scans have been used to study truth-telling among spies trying to fool investigators into believing that English is their native language. Brain areas activated by speaking one’s native language are different from those seen when speaking a second language.
— LA Times-Washington Post
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Delhi Durbar WITH BJP President L.K. Advani declaring that he will relinquish his post this year-end, the coming months will witness a race for the top slot in the main opposition party. While those in contention have already initiated moves in this direction, they are reluctant to come out in the open, preferring to confine their efforts to backroom parleys. But at least one party worker from Haryana has decided to be more upfront about his intentions. He walked straight to the BJP’s Office Secretary Shyam Jaju and declared his intention to apply for the vacant post. A puzzled Office Secretary thought it best to direct him to party Vice-President M A Naqvi.
Quick-footed diplomacy The September 14 New York meeting between Dr Manmohan Singh and President Pervez Musharraf was not without its share of drama. When Musharraf arrived for dinner hosted by the Indian PM shortly after his
addresses to the UN General Assembly, he did not realise that he had a long evening ahead. Barely had he settled in, when Dr Singh wanted to know what had prompted the General to deliver such a hawkish speech in which he chose to bracket Kashmir with Palestine. Musharraf, however, went on the offensive and wondered why India was so upset over this reference as his last year’s address was on the same lines. It was at this point that External Affairs Minister K Natwar Singh stepped in to tell Musharraf that this was incorrect. When the General insisted he was right, Natwar Singh promptly produced a copy of the speech he had delivered last year and asked him to point out the reference to Kashmir. Musharraf was speechless.
Pilots issue a warning State-owned Alliance Air pilots have shot off a letter to the management wanting to train on the new A-319s planes, which are to be inducted into the Indian Airlines/Alliance Air fleet in the coming months. The pilots have warned that they will be compelled to leave if their demand is not met. They contend that since Alliance Air pilots have been flying the old 737-200 aircraft, they have no experience on the Airbus aircraft. And they can only do so by seeking an entry into Indian Airlines since it has a fleet of Airbus planes. While the management is still grappling with this problem, things may take a turn for the worse as demands by pilots for a pay hike are also becoming increasingly strident. Is this is an indication of a change at the top.
Imports from Pak on the rise At a recent meeting at FICCI the Pakistan Commerce Minister complained how India was discouraging imports from Pakistan through non-trade barriers. Commerce Minister Kamal Nath, pointed out that there had been a 150 per cent increase in imports from Pakistan while exports from India had increased by mere 8 per cent. What he failed to mention was while imports from Pakistan had registered only a marginal increase from $11 million to $29 million, the sale of goods from India had jumped from $143 million to $155 million.
***** Contributed by S. Satyanarayanan, Rajeev Sharma, Girja Shankar Kaura and Manoj Kumar
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From the pages of LAND ALIENATION BILL The curious product of legislative anxiety to pat the Zamindar on the back at the expense of everybody else was bound to attract general attention. Indeed the new Land Alienation Bill is the talk of the whole Province. Wherever educated men congregate, in private houses, in clubs, in courts and in streets, the new measure is the one topic that absorbs public attention. It is looked upon with grave apprehensions as the unfailing index of a growing desire to introduce into the Legislature itself the policy that it is believed with much truth is reigning supreme in the public Departments, where the sons of the soil, especially those belonging to the Hindu community, are being sent to the wall to make room for the non-Indian and the privileged classes.
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Let my words be honeyed to all who hear. — The
Upanishadas Every effect must have a cause. Most of these causes can be traced back to a human emotion. An outraged sensibility can cause a quarrel. A quarrel can lead to a dispute and a dispute to a war. — The Mahabharata Assuredly, all nature informs us that man is born for happiness. — Book of quotations on
happiness Success in a mediocre world, is sometimes a cause of worry. — Book of quotations on
success
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