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Left out of lurch Change at the helm |
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Sparser south
American “war on
terrorism”
Seduction of
solitude
Politics of food
set to heat up 2005 likely to be
the hottest year Pinter: a surprise
winner of Nobel
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Change at the helm NEW skipper, new team, new hope! Things are looking up in cricket. The anointing of Rahul Dravid has livened up the cricket-crazy nation which had been lamenting the Saurav
Ganguly flop show for far too long. The unanimous selection of the stylish batsman from Karnataka is a decision which will not evoke a discordant note anywhere in the country — except, perhaps, the dethroned skipper’s hometown Kolkata.
Ganguly has been the most successful captain but in this game nobody can rest on his oars. His exclusion should not be attributed either to his injured elbow or his spat with the coach. He was out of touch and was unable to lead the team from the front. The new man in has a formidable record as a player as well as a leader and will hopefully pull the team back into reckoning. A good omen is the return of Sachin Tendulkar. Despite his injuries and his recent loss of form he is one player who adds solidity to the side and will, hopefully, regain his magic touch soon enough. The team has been announced only for the first two matches of the one-day series against Sri Lanka.
Ganguly, suffering from a mild tennis elbow, is to be reassessed on October 17 and can be considered for selection as a player for the rest of the matches. Sachin proved himself in domestic cricket. So should Saurav. The only new face in the squad is Kerala speedster Sreesanth. Delhi opener Gautam Gambhir has found a berth in the one-day team for the first time but his slot is yet to be earmarked. The team seems to have been selected with an eye on the 2007 World Cup. That is why youngsters Suresh Raina,
R. P. Singh and Venugopala Rao, who impressed in the Challenger series, have been retained while VVS Laxman, Anil Kumble and an injured Mohammad
Kaif have been omitted for now. |
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Sparser south SMALL family, happy family” is the fount on which India’s family welfare nee planning campaign is based. As such, the findings of the “Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers, 2005”, conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation, that there is a
correlation between population and poverty may not merit much attention. However, the import of the survey is that it explodes the myth, prevalent among a section of the people, that more earning hands bring more income into the family kitty. Far from that, families with more expenditure have fewer members while those with less expenditure have more members. In other words, the quality of life of smaller families is better than that of larger families. The study also found that people who spend more money have better awareness about the need to limit their family size than those with little to spend. Kerala, which leads all other states in literacy, women’s education and public health, has recorded the highest monthly family spending of Rs 900, which is more than Punjab’s Rs 828 and Haryana’s Rs 471. This is primarily because the average family size in Kerala is 4.7 whereas it is 5.8 and 6 in Punjab and Haryana, respectively. Tamil Nadu, whose track record in family planning is exemplary, has the smallest family size of 4.4, though its expenditure is not as high as that of its neighbour. As was only to be expected, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have the largest family size and the lowest monthly spending of Rs 403 and Rs 474, respectively. The worst performer is Orissa, which has the lowest spending of Rs 341. The success of Kerala, which had the highest density of population until a few decades ago, proves that it is the spread of education and, consequently, better awareness that has transformed the state. The myth that more children provide better economic security to the family can be broken only if more people are educated, particularly in the “Bimaru” states in the north, which continue to be a drag on the nation. |
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Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth, but whose branches extend into heaven.
— Bertrand Russel |
American “war on terrorism” History
recreated mythology on October 1 as explosions rocked the deceptive idyll of Bali only three days before Balinese Hindus were due to celebrate an earlier clash of dharma and adharma. Perhaps some premonition of continuing strife prompts Bali to relive that epic battle every six months in the Galungan festival (observed on October 4) which rejoices at the defeat of the asura of adharma, Mayadenawa, descendant of daityas and son of Dewi Danu. Able to transform himself into any form or creature, he was not vanquished until the great god Mahadewa advised the beleaguered Balinese to seek help in — where else? — Jambu Dwipa or India. Such devotional efflorescence may seem a trifle redundant in a placid setting of benign Hindus and wind-worn stone temples washed by a tranquil sea, but everything acquires symbolic meaning in a Bali that is the battleground of war after war. Whether or not George W. Bush accepts the October 1 bombings as also the mischief of the Islamic Mayadenawa he is battling, they do highlight the stark truth that adharma is not divisible. If Bush’s war is global self-defence and demands wholehearted Asian participation, the US must also address outrages in Indonesia, the Philippines, Chechnya, Kashmir and elsewhere as seriously as the attacks on New York’s Twin Towers or the Pentagon. Nor can the champion of dharma expect support if adharma is perpetuated in hellholes like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and detention centres in Afghanistan. The latest blasts occurred in Raja’s restaurant and two seafood cafes 15 miles north of Kuta, playground of the eastern world but in the political grip of Javanese Muslims. The clientele are lusty young whites, mainly from Australia. This is where the Sari Club, opposite the equally notorious Paddy’s Bar, was bombed on October 24, 2002. Since 88 of the 202 victims were from Australia, Kim Beazley, then leader of the opposition in Canberra, denounced the massacre as an attack on Australia. The phrase “Australia’s Nine-Eleven” conveyed an affinity of interests between Australia and the US and suggested that the West as a whole was under siege. The number of fatalities this time round was more than 10 times lower. More to the point, only four Australians and two Americans were among the 19 (excluding the three suicide bombers) killed. The logic of numbers marks this, therefore, as an attack on Asia. Television pictures of Hindu funerals confirmed that Asians bore the brunt of the pain. Twelve of the dead were Indonesian and one was Japanese. Among the 104 injured were 68 Indonesians, eight South Koreans and four Japanese. It is possible that the change of target was accidental. A cynic claimed three years ago that the Sari Club blast had to be the handiwork of some Jewish or American agent provocateur because if Islamic terrorists had really wanted to hammer the US, they could easily have bombed a nightclub packed with Americans. Against that, it can be argued that if the target is the white, Christian West, Australia serves just as well as the US. If — as seems likely — the choice was deliberate, the terrorists were probably warning Asians of where their allegiance should lie. True, Abu Bakar Bashir, the lanky, bespectacled 66-year-old cleric whose origins go back to the same Hadramawt region of Yemen as Osama bin Laden’s, has regretted the murder of innocents, especially of “people whose religion is Islam.” But this is a tactical gesture to try and restrict the damage. Bashir is the spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah, an organisation suspected of being Al-Qaeda’s outfit for Southeast Asia, and is now in jail with 18 others for complicity in the 2002 explosion. He may have felt that it would not be good strategy to admit that Muslim fundamentalists attack fellow Asians who are either not Muslims or are not sufficiently diligent in propagating a Wahabi version of the faith. But it is Bashir’s exhortation to Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhyono, that deserves attention for its resonance extends beyond the archipelago of 17,000 islands. Clearly, the vision of an Islamic caliphate in the region has not been abandoned. Meanwhile, Bashir’s call to the government to move “closer to Allah by implementing his rules and laws” means he wants to convert Indonesia into another Shariat-bound land where thieves’ right hands are chopped off and adulterors stoned to death. The likes of Bashir always glorified suicide bombers as mujahideen and “holy warriors” engaged in defending Islam against Western abuses and excesses like drugs. This projection of the West as the common enemy might explain why religious and secular leaders - Bashir himself, Azhari bin Husin (a doctorate in Land Management from Britain’s Reading University who is known as “Demolition Man”), and Noordin Mohamed Top, called “Moneyman” — have not aroused much revulsion in Asia. The cloak of nationalism bestowed a semblance of respectability on fundamentalism as the choice of one target of attack after another — Jakarta’s Marriott Hotel and the Australian Embassy in the same city — reinforced the impression of an Asia-for-Asians platform. The promise to remedy decades of political, economic and social injustice acquired plausibility from petty prejudice such as the exclusion of locals from night spots like the Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar (owned by shrewd Indonesians) “where the world comes to play”, according to an Internet eulogy. An Indonesian brigadier-general, Sarwo Edhy, whom Australian newspapers called the “Butcher of Java”, said of Suharto’s 1965 liquidation of Sukarno’s supporters: “In Java we had to egg the people on to kill Communists. In Bali we had to restrain them.” Apparently, Partai Kommunis Indonesia (Indonesian Communist Party) members dressed in white were led to their death as in a puputan. “It was all very orderly and polite,” according to Edhy. The puputan was the mass suicide ritual whereby Balinese, kings, royal relatives and followers courted death by walking up to the Dutch forces on the field of battle. Gusti Ngurah Rai, after whom Denpasar airport is named, last performed it in 1946, when the Dutch tried to reimpose colonial rule. Death and heroism, dharma and adharma are thus woven into Bali’s heritage. But today’s defence against terrorism cannot be self-sacrificing like the puputan. It must be proactive like the frenzy that surprised Edhy. To be successful, it must also avoid all suspicion of a Western campaign against Islam or of a national American agenda in Iraq or Afghanistan. Legend tells us that the evil Mayadenawa was ultimately defeated by a divine coalition of gods, priests, kings and generals. A universal threat still demands such a universal
response.
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Seduction of solitude
Almost
everybody, rich or famous, the page 3 stuff or VIP or even otherwise, is a regular with brisk walks along the lake in all seasons. Come evening and everybody, dressed in their latest Adidas, Reebok or Nike track suits and sportswear, donning the ever comfortable walking shoes, is off to the only “loch” of our city beautiful, the Lake Sukhna. Old or young, kid or “grannies”, guys and gals, middle aged men or women, all are in the throes of a health mania, thanks to the thin and lean but curvaceous figures of our cine stars and models turned DJs and VJs. Going to the lake for a “health-walk” has come to acquire sort of a “status” symbol in the eyes of many. Even the parking slot can boast of many VIP cars, official or otherwise, making their presence felt. Besides these, the spacious slot is also filled with varied but expensive Scorpios and Esteems, Opal Astras, Octavias and Corsas, not to talk of the trendy open jeeps or the assembled assortments. The ordeal starts from here. Come a few furlongs further and the once “open” space has been utilised for providing better amenities in the shape of a “make-do” restaurant with the foul “frying” smell polluting the purity of environment. The once “calm” atmosphere reverberates with the shrill, whistling sound of the children’s train and the uninhibited laughter of tinytots much to the joy of their parents. A larger than life, huge, silicon jumping Mickey Mouse has been specially erected to cater to the whims and fancies of our young but hyper children. The adjacent benches are full of admiring tourists or visiting friends or relatives who keep busy holding their cameras to capture the beauty of the environment with their eyes and hearts. All this while you try to ignore the numerous “chaat-wallahs”, “balloon-wallahs”, “icecream-wallahs”, or “golgappa-wallahs” with their loud hankerings on the other side of the common parking, much to the chagrin of the genuine health freaks. Continue with your march and you enter the portals of the lake trying to keep pace with the people who are in competition with each other in walking brisk. You pass by the huge “peepal” tree, the girth of which has ensconced almost half of the narrow strip of road and you can spot newly-wed couples sitting underneath its dense branches oblivious of the flurry of activity around. For them, this time of bliss far exceeds in importance than any mundane activity. Go a few yards ahead and you come across a number of acquaintances, friends or colleagues, junior and senior, and you can’t help waving fervently with your hand either acknowledging or greeting them. You, also, occasionally have to stop to exchange a few pleasantries with them but end up chatting for about a major chunk of your “health walk”. All this, while you have also braved alongside a tightlipped fixed smile for those “passer-by” friends who pat you on your shoulder with a quick “how are we” refrain with Walkman glued to their ears. Their gait, I presume, dilly-dallies to the rhythm and tune of those pop songs that keep their minds engaged while their body sweats itself out unwarily. |
Politics of food
set to heat up
World
Food Day (October 15) is a time of the year to reflect on where our food comes from, on the abundance of food for some and the lack of access for so many others. It is a time to reflect on the history of food and the future of food. The importance of food for our survival and its central role in our economy mean that it is a highly politicised issue. Throughout history, civilisations have risen and fallen on their ability to feed their populations. Today it is estimated that 840 million people are severely undernourished, while in other countries obesity is reaching epidemic proportions. With the world population continuing to grow, the politics of food is set to heat up considerably over the coming decades. The world’s most important food crop is rice. It forms the staple diet of over three billion people around the world and for many cultures: Rice is Life. Not only does rice play a central role in culture, but culture plays a central role in rice production. Over thousands of years, subsistence farmers have developed tens of thousands of different varieties of rice, painstakingly adapting them according to local environmental and cultural conditions. And it is this diversity that forms the basis of our food security. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation’s World Food Day this year reflects this intersection of cultural and agricultural diversity through its theme: “Agriculture and intercultural dialogue - celebrating the contribution of different cultures to world agriculture”. However, many of the thousands of rice varieties that existed even 50 years ago have disappeared, replaced by the monoculture farming practices of the Green Revolution. And the sustainability and diversity of rice farming is now facing a new threat in the form of genetic engineering (GE). The two varieties of GE rice that are proposed for commercial release are Bt rice and BB rice. Bt rice is genetically engineered to express a pesticide known as Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), while BB rice is resistant to Bacterial Blight. Both carry the environmental risks inherent in GE technology, while significant health concerns have been raised over Bt rice in particular. China has been widely touted to be the first cab off the rank to give GE rice the green light, however, a recent shift in the State Agricultural Genetically Modified Crop Biosafety Committee indicates that China is taking a more cautious approach to approving GE crop commercialisation. The structure of the new committee reduces the influence of GE crop researchers and makes it more likely that decisions about commercialising GE crops will be based on ecological and food safety. The Chinese government is well aware that should it approve GE rice, it would be entering unknown territory and would be the first country to allow genetic engineering of its staple food crop. GE rice is being promoted on the basis of something that bears little or no relation to the actual characteristics of the GE varieties that are being so aggressively pushed for commercial release. The need to solve world hunger and overcome starvation is used as a crude form of moral blackmail to encourage acceptance of products that are largely un-needed and unwanted. Overcoming hunger and feeding people is very obviously a function of both producing food, and then distributing it to the people in need so that they have access to the food. In the real world, people don’t starve because there isn’t enough food produced, but because they are poor and are denied access to it. As a striking example, in 2001 the Indian government was sued after allowing grain to rot in government granaries while innumerable starvation deaths were reported throughout the country. Many countries in Europe pay their farmers not to grow food. While in other countries, produce is routinely destroyed due to market failures. Meanwhile, millions starve. On the production side, there is scant evidence to support the claim that GE crops will increase production in
any case. The opposite is probably closer to the truth. The experience of the world’s most widely grown GE crop, shows that despite claims of increased yield, roundup ready soy yields around 5 per cent less than conventional soy. The varieties of GE rice that are being developed are not supported by credible claims of increased yield either. Rather than addressing the actual causes of malnutrition and hunger, too much of our research funding is being spent inventing more far-fetched, high-tech solutions to reinforce and extend a food system that is fundamentally designed to make profits for agribusiness rather than to feed people. On World Food Day 2005 the absurd myth that genetically engineered rice has got anything at all to do with feeding the world should be buried at last in the dustbin of history. The writer is a genetic engineering campaigner of Greenpeace International
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2005 likely to be the hottest year New
international climate data show that 2005 is on track to be the hottest year on record, continuing a 25-year trend of rising global temperatures. Climatologists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies calculated the record-breaking global average temperature, which now surpasses 1998’s record by a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, from readings taken at 7,200 weather stations scattered around the world. The new analysis comes as government and independent scientists are reporting other dramatic signs of global warming, such as the record shrinkage of the Arctic sea ice cover and unprecedented high ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. Late last month, a team of University of Colorado and NASA scientists announced that the Arctic sea ice cap shrank this summer to 200 million square miles, 500,000 square miles less than its average area between 1979 and 2000. And a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determined that sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were higher in August than at any time since 1890, which may have contributed to the intense hurricanes that struck the region this year. “At this point, people shouldn’t be surprised this is happening,” said Goddard atmospheric scientist David Rind, noting that 2002, 2003 and 2004 were the second, third and fourth warmest years on record. Many climatologists, along with policymakers in a number of countries, believe the rapid temperature rise over the past 50 years is heavily driven by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities that have spewed carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere. A vocal minority of scientists, however, say the warming climate is the result of a natural cycle. Rind compared the warming trend to what happens when a major baseball team owner spends lavishly on players’ salaries. Pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, he said, produces the same kind of predictable results as boosting a team’s payroll. “When they get into the playoffs, should we be surprised?’’ he asked. ``We’re putting a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and we’re getting a lot higher temperatures.” Global temperatures this year are about 1.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.75 Celsius) above the average between 1950 and 1980, according to the Goddard analysis. Worldwide temperatures in 1998 were 1.28 degrees Fahrenheit (0.71 Celsius) above that 30-year average. The data show that Earth is warming more in the Northern Hemisphere, where the average 2005 temperature was two-tenths of a degree above the 1998 level. Climate experts say such seemingly small shifts are significant because they involve average readings based on measurements taken at thousands of sites. To put it in perspective, the planet’s temperature rose by just 1 to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century. Rind, who said it would probably take a major event such as a massive volcanic eruption to keep this year from setting a new record, said that scientists expect worldwide temperatures to rise another 1 degree Fahrenheit between 2000 and 2030, and an additional 2 to 4 degrees by 2100. — LA Times Washington Post |
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Pinter: a surprise winner of Nobel
Harold
Pinter, 75, the most distinguished living British playwright and a walking embodiment of the combative political conscience, has been awarded the highest honour available to any writer in the world. The announcement was a surprise for Nobel watchers. Pinter’s name has not featured in speculative discussions among the bookish chattering classes. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist currently failing a jail sentence, was spoken of as the hottest contender, followed by the American novelist Joyce Carol Oates, the Swedish writer Transtromer, and Bob Dylan, whose career has been spectacularly revived throughout 2005. Pinter is the first British author to have won the prize since the Trinidad-born novelist V.S. Naipaul in 2001. He has been garlanded with many previous honours, including the prestigious (pounds sterling) 30,000 David Cohen lifetime achievement award. He was offered a knighthood by John Major in 1996, but turned it down saying he was “unable to accept such an honour from a Conservative government.” Under a Labour administration, however, he accepted a Companionship of Honour. His lifetime achievement — as a playwright, poet, screenwriter, polemicist and all-round stirrer-up — was celebrated as recently as last week, when a glittering throng of actors, gathered in Dublin to toast his 75th birthday on 10 October. Eyebrows were raised that it should be Dublin, rather than London, where his anniversary should be celebrated. But then, the Irish capital is the birthplace of his friend and greatest influence, Samuel Beckett (who himself won the Nobel in 1969) and the place to which he fled as a struggling actor, the son of a Jewish tailor, from Hackney, when he couldn’t find work in England. Pinter’s career falls into three acts. Early plays, such as The Caretaker, The Birthday Party and The Homecoming, explore a world where characters move in an atmosphere of menace and threat, tremors of approaching violence ripple the surface of family relationships and everyday language is freighted with foreboding. It’s a theatre in which a vacuum cleaner on a darkened stage becomes an agent of terror, where two frightening interrogators bully an innocent man with nonsensical questions, and a young wife, brought home to meet her in-laws, is sent to work as a prostitute. The adjective “Pinteresque” derives from these days, as does the famous stage direction “Pause” which peppers his play-scripts like buckshot. The 1960s and 1970s were taken up with film screenplays, especially The Servant, The Go-Between and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but also produced his most popular play, Betrayal, based on the Pinter’s affair with the broadcaster Joan Bakewell. His later plays - One for the Road, The New World Order, Ashes to Ashes, Mountain Language, Party Time — evolved from the personal into the political, their subject matter state-sponsored violence, torture, the abuse of power, the crushing of the innocent. Pinter became increasingly vocal, public and declamatory — haranguing ministers, and complete strangers at dinner parties, about Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil - before turning the howitzer force of his wrath on America, and her interventions in Latin America, Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq. In the 2003 anti-war march in London, he fulminated against the Anglo-American alliance (“The United States is a monster out of control... The country is run by a bunch of criminal lunatics, with Blair as their hired Christian thug”), showing he had lost none of his old fire. A large, truculent man, invariably dressed in black, he radiates a hum of intensity, a rumble of hard, masculine energy. His posh-stentorian voice tends to slam down like a jackboot on certain words, his conversation is salted with obscenities, and he tends to inspect outsiders (and journalists) with suspicion. It’s sometimes seemed odd that this former conscientious objector and committed pacifist should himself be such a tough guy. — The Independent |
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From the pages of Anarkali hovels & Shish Mahals
It is ludicrously absurd to claim that the rate-payers of Lahore should practically mortgage their current income from municipal taxes to the extent of several thousands a year to provide the luxury of electric light and fans for the civil station and Anarkali, while certain parts in the city should, for want of proper drainage, continue to be veritable hotbeds of cholera, plague and malaria bacilli and regular breeding grounds of many a disease producing germ. It may be, to quote a Panjabi saying, that living in hovels they cannot dream of “shish mahals” (palaces of glass), much less of sitting-rooms, drawing-rooms and office-rooms in a blaze of light and cooled by electric fans. They may rue their misfortune. But they are certainly not unwise if they do not consent to fritter away their resources in schemes which may not, for long period, benefit the vast bulk of the rate-payers in the least….
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Accept life unconditionally... most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt, if you don’t set any condition. — Book of quotations on happiness To love with a pure heart, to love everybody, especially to love the poor, is a twenty-four-hour prayer. — Mother Teresa The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world’s dreadful injustice. — Book of quotations on success Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it. — Book of quotations on religion Looking at the millstones grinding the grains, I wept; one, who is caught between the two stones, never comes out safe. — Kabir Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined. — Leo Rosten The greatest of riches are happiness, tranquility, love and peace. Very few people on Earth have these. — The Buddha |
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