O P I N I O N S

EDITORIALS

Communal violence
Why blame absence of law?
It is said legislation does not redress an injustice, but merely confirms its existence. The Communal Violence (Prevention, Control and Rehabilitation of Victims) Bill 2005, introduced in the Rajya Sabha on Monday, bears this out as much as several other laws in this country.

Spurned sanyasin
Travails of a traveller
THE expulsion of Ms Uma Bharti from the BJP would not have surprised anyone, least of all the sanyasin herself. If the day after her suspension she appeared a little apologetic, she was belligerence personified by the time she sent her reply to the show-cause notice the party had sent her. 

Reclaiming cities
Break the contractor-politician nexus
WITH the launch of the National Urban Renewal Mission, an important initiative is finally underway. With the possible exception of New Delhi, most of our cities are choking on their own growth. Metros, state capitals and big towns across the nation are haemorrhaging on clogged roads and heavy traffic, choking on their dirty air and sewage, and seething under repeated and prolonged power outages. 

• Thought for the day

ARTICLE

Khushboo: a larger question
Can one ‘cultural nationalism’ counter another?
by J. Sri Raman
AFTER Ms. Jayalalithaa, no actress of Tamil cinema has provoked so much political discussion as Khushboo has done. And, strangely, it is the lesser of the two stars, who raises a larger political question, though it has not figured so far in the furore over her observations in a media interview.

MIDDLE

The romance of a surprise
by G.S. Aujla
My friend in the Army had more than his fair share of postings at non-family stations while the remaining members of the family stayed on at Chandigarh. It had its sunny side too. His wife and children had got used to managing themselves admirably without his benign presence so much so that his unexpected visit home this Divali had a touch of the melodrama in it.

OPED

Forest cover falls in Himachal Pradesh
by Ambika Sharma
With merely five of the 12 districts in Himachal, including the two tribal districts of Lahaul Spiti and Chamba, registering an increase in the forest cover in the latest report of the Forest Survey of India (FSI), the foresters have a challenging task before them.

Why girls outshine boys
by Michael Gurian
Colleges and universities across the US are grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 per cent of students at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003 statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing unabated.

Values endure as traditions fade
by John Daniszewski
A normal family: four lives under one roof, intertwined, but each an individual. Immigrants from South Asia, Mohsin and Khawar have created a space for themselves and their children to develop and to find identities in a country and on a continent that are, and are not quite, their own.

From the pages of

 

REFLECTIONS

EDITORIALS

Communal violence
Why blame absence of law?

It is said legislation does not redress an injustice, but merely confirms its existence. The Communal Violence (Prevention, Control and Rehabilitation of Victims) Bill 2005, introduced in the Rajya Sabha on Monday, bears this out as much as several other laws in this country. Laudable as the motives behind the Bill may be, its objects and reasons actually underscore the failure of the state and its authorities and agencies to prevent and control communal violence.

Worse, they expose the government as being incapable of tackling the condition in any meaningful socio-political manner. If provisions — to prevent such violence, enable speedy investigation and trial and ensure relief without discrimination on grounds of caste, community, sex and religion — offer a solution, then they are available in the many laws already operational. The fact that communal violence has grown in spite of these provisions underscores not the inadequacy of the existing laws but their inefficacy as a deterrent in the prevalent political climate.

The climate for communal violence has been created, with honourable exceptions, by leading political parties. When these parties are elected to office they use the state to actually foment communal violence and hatred. The massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 was aided and abetted, if not actually sponsored, by those who wielded state power. More appalling was the victims being referred to as "refugees" when they were citizens. No less horrendous was the l984 genocidal killings of Sikhs in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination.

The recurrent communal violence in the country is a product of our politics and the political parties that thrive on it. Unless the parties collectively resolve to eschew divisive policies, hate politics and publicly name, shame and isolate communalist criminals, the violence and basis for conflict will not go away. Parliament must address the causes of communal violence and not reduce this threat to democracy, national integrity, security and secularism to another rite of passage.

Spurned sanyasin
Travails of a traveller

THE expulsion of Ms Uma Bharti from the BJP would not have surprised anyone, least of all the sanyasin herself. If the day after her suspension she appeared a little apologetic, she was belligerence personified by the time she sent her reply to the show-cause notice the party had sent her. What has transformed her in so short a time is the increasing turnout of people during her “Ram-Roti Yatra” to Ayodhya. By the time she reached Raisen, the constituency of Chief Minister S.S. Chauhan, she had been so carried away by the response that she asked for the dissolution of the BJP and the formation of a new party based on the ideals and ideology of the Jan Sangh founder, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. She was unsparing in her criticism of the “rootless wonders” — a reference to Mr Arun Jaitley and Mr Pramod Mahajan—and the cradle snatcher, an allusion to Mr Chauhan, who snatched the baby of Madhya Pradesh from her. After such a diatribe, she could not have hoped for a milder punishment.

There is little doubt that with her expulsion, the BJP has lost one of its top leaders in the state. It was under her leadership that the party won a record three-fourth majority in the state. Whatever the BJP may claim about its casteless ideology, the fact is that her emergence has endeared the party to a vast section of the backward castes to which she belongs. They are the ones who throng to her public meetings as she travels to Ayodhya. Those ideologically charged in the BJP, who feel that the party has not pursued the Ayodhya campaign to its logical culmination, though it got a full term at the Centre, would have some reason to empathise with her.

As for the sanyasin herself, there are limited options. For a rabble-rouser who speaks in the name of Ram, it would not be difficult to attract crowds, more so when she is perceived as a victim of a conspiracy. However, she does not have the wherewithal to form a new party and pose a serious challenge to the BJP. Now that she is out of the party, many of her MLAs would not like to associate with her. Few political parties would accept Ms Bharti given her role in the Babri Masjid demolition. In any case, elections in MP are three years away. All she can do is to create roadblocks for the BJP. In the end, she may not gain much but the party would lose a lot.

Reclaiming cities
Break the contractor-politician nexus

WITH the launch of the National Urban Renewal Mission, an important initiative is finally underway. With the possible exception of New Delhi, most of our cities are choking on their own growth. Metros, state capitals and big towns across the nation are haemorrhaging on clogged roads and heavy traffic, choking on their dirty air and sewage, and seething under repeated and prolonged power outages. Housing is inequitably distributed and a day’s heavy rain is a great leveller—even if one does not actually have to use a boat to go out and get some vegetables, as residents in some areas in Chennai are doing now.

Finding the funds for urban infrastructure has been a matter of some debate now and the Planning Commission has been looking at various models. The new mission will provide a grant-in-aid of Rs 50,000 crore for over seven years with the states raising an equal amount from the market. The grant has been pegged to reforms in the states, which is a good idea considering the way municipalities are run. Sixty-three cities with a population of above 10 lakh, and 23 cities of religious and tourist interest, are being covered. The Mission will even be looking at issues like rent control and stamp duty rationalisation. If resolved wisely, they will have a beneficial cascading effect.

If our old cities are truly to “regain their historical glory” and the new ones are to take their place in a globalising world, mindsets have to change, and vested interests defanged. Cities grow rapidly because they are centres of wealth creation. Inequitable distribution of this wealth should be addressed by reforms processes, not by vote bank politics and pitting the urban against the rural. Strategies for decongestion are also important – the simple expedient of providing top-notch access (roads and rail) to satellite areas will not only increase land supply but also enable such decongestion. A crucial test for the Mission is to see if it can break the contractor-politician nexus in most cities. Building a road that stays a road will be a great first step.

Thought for the day

Age is deformed, youth unkind./We scorn their bodies, they our mind.
—Thomas Bastard

ARTICLE

Khushboo: a larger question
Can one ‘cultural nationalism’ counter another?
by J. Sri Raman

AFTER Ms. Jayalalithaa, no actress of Tamil cinema has provoked so much political discussion as Khushboo has done. And, strangely, it is the lesser of the two stars, who raises a larger political question, though it has not figured so far in the furore over her observations in a media interview.

A whole range of issues, of course, have featured in the furious debates over the Khushboo-speak in newspaper columns and television channels, on political platforms and in less public places, in Tamil Nadu and at the national level. From pre-marital sex to popular AIDS awareness, from marriage and morals to culture and commodification, terms big enough for academic seminars have been bandied about in tirades following street slogans shouted to the waving of brooms and shoes. As the dust settles down, however, we have a near-consensus on the subject.

It appears to be agreed on all hands that the ugly and uncivilised attacks on Khushboo and her “Kollywood” colleague Suhasini Maniratnam constituted assaults on the freedom of expression, a fundamental value of any democratic and even decent society. Many critics of Khushboo’s views, as voiced in the ill-fated interview, have made it a point to disapprove of the demonstrations of intolerance staged in place of a peaceful protest or a decorous debate. So much so that even the political parties behind the unseemly protests have been at pains to disown them. The matter, however, does not, and should not, end here.

The end of this episode should mark the beginning of a debate in greater depth about what led to it anyway. From where did the cultural and moral police, associated with regions under the sway of outfits like the Shiv Sena and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, spring up suddenly in a state where the dominant politics of regionalism claims “rationalism” as its defining feature?

The simple answer is yes that this self-appointed special task force, stalking two women, instead of a Veerappan, did not spring up suddenly. The cultural and moral police is a natural corollary to a kind of politics, which had led earlier to alliances between parties with “rationalist” pretensions and the “Parivar” outfits. It is time to take a clearer look at this politics, erroneously perceived and projected so far only as either an arrangement of electoral convenience or a power-sharing ploy.

The arrangement itself raised an obvious, but largely unasked question. Not long ago, Tamil Nadu was one state where the advent of the “Parivar” was considered unthinkable. An impregnable ideological barrier was presumed to encounter the Hindutva brigade here. The supposedly deep roots struck by the Dravidian ideology in the Tamil territory, it was taken for granted, would not let the alien plant, even a grafted version, grow. The fond hope was to prove little more than a facile presumption.

The fact, which needs to be faced, is that no section of the Dravidian spectrum has ever resisted the temptation of a profitable tie-up with the BJP. None of them has found ideology an embarrassment while offering partnership to the Sangh Parivar. It was Ms. Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK that gave the BJP a toehold in Tamil Nadu. To the DMK, in the period of its power-sharing with the BJP at the Centre, went the dubious credit for further legitimisation of the far right in the state. When Mr M. Karunanidhi scoffed at the anti-BJP camp’s talk of “communalism” in the wake of the Gujarat carnage, he sounded quite the same as a Hindutva hardliner castigating “pseudo-secularism”. Similar was the stance of other Dravidian parties in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee coalition - Mr. V. Gopalasamy’s MDMK and, yes, the PMK.

The ideological commonality, which made this compact possible, consisted in the basis upon which both the Parivar and the Dravidian camp envisage popular mobilisation. The Hindutva camp seeks to mobilise its constituency on communal or majoritarian lines. Dravidianism aims to do so on caste lines. Neither of them is for mobilising the people on either a compositely national basis or on class lines, as either Indians or a socio-economic interest group.

The commonality goes far beyond this fundamental level. The more important point to be made in the current context is that the two ideologies wear a common veneer as well - that of “cultural nationalism”. It is well known by now that this pet phrase of the Parivar means a cult of intolerance. What the Khushboo episode illustrates is that the cultural sub-nationalism of the Dravidian kind, if it may be called that, has the same connotation and consequences.

An ethnic chauvinism, swearing by a “Tamil culture”, has ever been part of the Dravidian platform despite the early claim of the anti-Aryan camp to talk for all the four southern states. Like the “cultural nationalism” of the Parivar, its Tamil counterpart, too, was bound to produce its cultural-moral police and storm-troopers.

Talk of the moral superiority of the “Tamil culture” over its mortal Aryan adversary, in fact, became a defining feature of Dravidian propaganda even its early years. Dravidian ideologues espied, for example, outrageously obscene passages in Aryan epics, with their share of erotic poetry. The Ramayana, in particular, invited literary criticism from a loftily moral angle. Even the Kamba Ramayanam, considered a glory of Tamil literature, was trashed on grounds of a Tamil “morality”. The pristine eroticism of Sangam works, which included (as some have pointed out) poems on premarital affairs, was not seen as running counter to a re-invented “Tamil culture”.

This notion of moral superiority has found a particularly noxious expression now in the repeated assertion by the anti-Khushboo brigade that “Tamil brides are virgins”.

Like the “cultural nationalism” of the Parivar, the Dravidian version, too, was bound to turn against women, and to make them bear the brunt of its moralising missions. True, Tamil Nadu has thus far been spared Rajasthan-type attempts at revival of “Sati” and Shiv Sena-style acid attacks on “improperly” clad girls. But the macho-sounding boast about Tamil women’s chastity (“karpu” in equally chaste Tamil), combined with tolerance for bigamous males, shows that Dravidianism did not exactly banish the danger. The crusade against Khushboo shows how close the danger has always been.

The entire episode underlines the political lesson of the Parivar-Dravidian partnerships of the past decade, especially for the liberal-Left sections. More fully exposed now is the folly of the hope that the Dravidian ideology, which at best represented a false consciousness, can bar the road to the far Right in Tamil Nadu.

The danger illustrated by the episode is increased by the social description of the anti-Khushboo agitators. It is the “educated people” whom the actress has enlisted in her support, while the plebeian character of the protests against her is evident. This heightens the threat to democratic freedoms as much as the Dalit participation in the Hindutva pogrom in Gujarat did.

MIDDLE

The romance of a surprise
by G.S. Aujla

My friend in the Army had more than his fair share of postings at non-family stations while the remaining members of the family stayed on at Chandigarh. It had its sunny side too. His wife and children had got used to managing themselves admirably without his benign presence so much so that his unexpected visit home this Divali had a touch of the melodrama in it.

Like a truly devoted husband and a good father he took same casual leave to visit his family on the Divali day when they were least expecting him. He wanted to pack all the romance into turning up home unexpected on the auspicious festival day.

He left his location a day before Divali to catch a superfast train to Delhi so as to hit Chandigarh before nightfall forgetting to switch off his faithful mobile phone. Finding his landline phones unresponsive his wife started dialling him on the mobile to wish him a happy Divali and for a lovey-dovey chitchat but all in vain.

After a series of abortive attempts at getting him on the mobile phone she finally got through while his train may have stopped at a wayside station only to catch the wails of a child in the background. Imagining a worst-case scenario she suspected her husband to be travelling in unexplained female company. The hubby trying not to break the spell of his surprise tried unsuccessfully to explain the sounds as coming from a TV but with every attempt at an explanation her suspicious grew deeper as she kept crossexamining him till the train moved on and the signals got lost again. It was too dismal a scenario for the devoted wife to accept as a Divali gift not knowing in which direction the hubby was headed and in such a dubious company.

A few hours later the bell rang at their Chandigarh residence. The wife was stunned to see her husband standing outside exclaiming “Happy Divali.” Ruing that the romance of his surprise visit was ruined by the perfidious behaviour of his tell-tale mobile and the inquisitiveness of his overanxious wife the couple decided to bury the hatchet instantly and be united for the remaining hours of the Divali evening.

OPED

Forest cover falls in Himachal Pradesh
by Ambika Sharma

With merely five of the 12 districts in Himachal, including the two tribal districts of Lahaul Spiti and Chamba, registering an increase in the forest cover in the latest report of the Forest Survey of India (FSI), the foresters have a challenging task before them.

The report, published in June 2005, has put to rest the tall claims of the state government about an increase in the forest cover which were made on the basis of this very report.

A perusal of the State of Forest Report 2003, which is the latest biennial compilation, clearly proves the point that the state has indeed lost an area of 1,453 sq km of dense forest cover from 2001 to 2003.

The dense forest has given way to 1,446 sq km of open forest and 184 sq km of non-forest areas. While the very dense forest cover has a canopy cover of 70 per cent and above, it lies between 10 and 40 per cent in the open forests.

This in itself is an indication of how the best forests have degraded in the state. So alarming is the amount of forest deprivation that even the 177 sq km of scrub forests, comprising small and stunted trees with a canopy density of less than 10 per cent, have been reduced.

The state government has been taking pride in presenting inflated figures during public meetings. This not only misleads the masses but also creates misgivings about afforestation measures. A declining forest cover is indicative of a corresponding loss of the state’s flora and fauna.

The National Forest Policy, 1988 , envisages to bring a minimum of one-third of its area under forests and tree cover. This was further enhanced to two-third of the total geographic area in the hill and mountainous regions.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests aims to achieve this target by the year 2012. It stresses on suitable interventions to achieve the target. This poses an added challenge before foresters in Himachal.

The Forest Survey of India assesses the forest cover of the country on a biennial basis using remote satellite sensing technology. This is the ninth report of the FSI.

The report has, for the first time, estimated the tree cover in addition to the usual forest cover using field survey and inventory.

It is also the first time that the very dense forest cover has been assessed. Earlier, the forest cover was classified into dense forest and open forest only.

Out of the total 12 districts in Himachal only five districts — Bilaspur, Chamba, Lahaul Spiti, Sirmaur and Solan — have recorded an increase in the forest cover of 57, 71, 26, 267 and 136 sq km, respectively.

Interestingly, two of the three tribal districts have also recorded an increase of 0.24 per cent in the forest cover during this period. A forest cover of 34 sq km has been lost in the tribal district of Kinnaur.

Even the neighbouring strife-torn Jammu and Kashmir has increased its forest cover by 30 sq km while Uttaranchal has added 527 sq km to its existing forest cover. The situation in the North-East is also comparatively better with Sikkim and Meghalaya augmenting their forest cover by 69 sq km and 1,255 sq kms, respectively.

The foresters can take some respite from the fact that the Forest Survey of India has now included the tree cover in the total area under forest cover. What has actually increased in Himachal is this tree cover which has all perennial woody vegetations, including apple orchards, tea estates, neem, mango, peepal etc. plantations.

With a 20.64 per cent forest cover and 3.04 per cent tree cover, the area under forests now constitutes 23.68 per cent of the total geographic area.

There has also been an increase of 0.67 per cent in the cultivable non-forest area, which consists of plantations and woodlots in more than one hectare in the area.

With 90.2 per cent of the state’s population living in the rural areas, pressure on the forests is immense.

Timber distribution rights, salvage removals and illicit felling, especially in the interior forests, are accounted as major reasons for the loss in the forest cover by senior forest officials.

Despite several attempts, no official was ready to comment why the state government had projected wrong figures of an increased forest cover.

Though they agreed that the latest FSI report had confirmed that the forest cover had in fact decreased, they avoided comment. They, however, added that measures like large-scale plantations were being regularly undertaken throughout the state to achieve the earmarked target.

Officials also opined that the mandate of bringing two-third of the geographical area under the forest cover was far-fetched in Himachal. They pleaded that with the rising pressure of an increasing population, tribal areas and snow-capped mountains, barely 50 per cent of the land was available in the state.

A section of the officials also blamed the large-scale illicit felling of trees as a major reason for the declining forest cover.

Forests play a crucial role in maintaining ecological balance and environmental stability. The increasing demand of goods and services on the forests has posed a tremendous biotic pressure on them.

Only a harmonious balance of environment and development can lead to a sustainable ecological development. What is of prime importance in the present scenario is to first accept that the forest cover has indeed decreased in Himachal and then devise suitable interventions to cover up for the loss or else the forest cover in Himachal would go the tiger way and it would be too late to wake up once the loss becomes irreversible.

Why girls outshine boys
by Michael Gurian

Colleges and universities across the US are grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 per cent of students at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003 statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing unabated. If we don’t reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.

Of course, not every male has to go to college to succeed, to be a good husband, to be a good and productive man. But a dismal future lies ahead for large numbers of boys in this generation who will not go to college.

Statistics show that a young man who doesn’t finish school or go to college in 2005 will likely earn less than half what a college graduate earns. He’ll be three times more likely to be unemployed and more likely to be homeless.

He’ll be more likely to get divorced, more likely to engage in violence against women and more likely to engage in crime. He’ll be more likely to develop substance abuse problems and to be a greater burden on the economy, statistically, since men who don’t attend college pay less in Social Security and other taxes, depend more on government welfare, are more likely to father children out of wedlock and are more likely not to pay child support.

We’re seeing what’s wrong with the system for millions of boys. Beginning in very early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don’t-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes classroom is a worse fit for more boys than it is for most girls. This was always the case, but we couldn’t see it 100 years ago. We didn’t have the comparative element of girls at par in classrooms. We taught a lot of our boys and girls separately. We educated children with greater emphasis on certain basic educational principles that kept a lot of boys ``in line’’ – competitive learning was one. And our families were deeply involved in a child’s education.

Yet every decade the industrial classroom becomes more and more protective of the female learning style and harsher on the male, yielding statistics such as these:

— The majority of National Merit scholarships, as well as college academic scholarships, go to girls and young women.

— Boys and men constitute the majority of high school dropouts, as high as 80 percent in many cities.

— Boys and young men are 1 1/2 years behind girls and young women in reading ability (this gap does not even out in high school, as some have argued; a male reading/writing gap continues into college and the workplace).

Grasping the mismatch between the minds of boys and the industrial classroom is only the first step in understanding the needs of our sons. Lack of fathering and male role models take a heavy toll on boys, as does lack of attachment to many family members (whether grandparents, extended families, moms or dads).

Our sons are becoming very lonely. And even more politically difficult to deal with: The boys-are-privileged-but-the-girls-are-shortchanged emphasis of the last 20 years (an emphasis that I, as a father of two daughters and an advocate of girls, have seen firsthand), has muddied the water for child development in general, pitting funding for girls against funding for boys.

— LA Times-Washington Post

Values endure as traditions fade
by John Daniszewski

A normal family: four lives under one roof, intertwined, but each an individual. Immigrants from South Asia, Mohsin and Khawar have created a space for themselves and their children to develop and to find identities in a country and on a continent that are, and are not quite, their own.

Their secret: No matter what goes on outside their front door, respect, love and trust are what they give to, and expect of, one another.

Like other members of Britain’s growing Muslim community, the Indian-born Mohsin left his home — in Pakistan’s teeming, chaotic city of Karachi — to seek a better life in the green folds and murky weather of England.

He came to get a doctorate in Nottingham and ended up staying, first in Manchester, now in Leeds, where he is a manager in the city’s school system.

“If not for my dad,’’ Raza Ali says, “we would be a typical Asian family.’’ The 22-year-old leans back in an armchair in the sitting room, decorated with bric-a-brac showing the family’s wide-ranging interests: decorated wooden spoons from Russia, framed pieces of Egyptian papyrus, a small bust of Vladimir Lenin and a painting of a 19th century ancestor who served as a provincial governor in India.

“My dad came for education. He came as a student. But a lot of people were from very poor, uneducated background, so when they came here they went straight into jobs ... straight to the mills,’’ Raza Ali says. “For these people, integration, they did not have a lot of it, and their children, my generation, cannot integrate with people from other cultures as well as me and my sister.’’

After 34 years here, Mohsin, a few weeks short of his 58th birthday, has done well. He drives a BMW. He lives a comfortable suburban life in the affluent Roundhay section of Leeds. And he is a respected activist, professionally and voluntarily, constantly at meetings against racism and poverty and working in behalf of minorities, no matter their ethnicity or religion.

Mohsin, who loves the freedom-inspiring music of Bob Marley, says he is passionate about education, for all children, black or white. But his experiences show that it is a hard road up for non-English in British society.

“To break into middle-class jobs was a hell of a problem,’’ he says over takeout Indian food in the family’s small kitchen. ``You really had to prove that you were better than some of your colleagues. ... As an Asian, you have to have put more hard work into your job.’’

But while Mohsin has been waging his war to break through the invisible barriers of British society, he has also been alarmed by the rise of religious fundamentalism in his own community. Three of the four suicide bombers responsible for this summer’s London train bombings lived a short distance away in Leeds.

As a counsellor at a mental health centre, Khawar says she sees the strain that the children of Asian immigrants go through.

“Obviously, the parents still have the old beliefs and they put restrictions on the children,’’ she says. “They don’t have the freedom my children have, so there is always conflict within the family.’’

In her own family, Khawar uses a light touch. There were never any attempts to keep Munizeh shut in at home, as many other Asian families do with their daughters. Nor did the family raise any objections when Raza Ali became seriously involved with non-Asian girlfriends. (Mohsin says he imposed only one rule: that Raza Ali had to be sincere and not take advantage of the girls.)

— LA Times-Washington Post

From the pages of

June 20, 1917

Letter from T.B. Sapru

It is not always true that speech is silver and silence gold. There are occasions when speech is golden and silence worse than silver. I think the present is one of those occasions. If I had to fortify myself by precedents, I should unhesitatingly refer to the example set to us in our own country by distinguished pro-consuls in the various provinces of India who have broken the somewhat unusual spell of silence and spoken what they and their admires, official and non-official, consider to the words of wisdom and true sympathy with India. Holding the convictions that I do and to which I have never failed to give expression in public, I think a public man who failed to express his views on the situation as it has been gradually unfolding itself before our eyes would forfeit all claim to sincerity and earnestness and loyalty to his ideals, if he thought such silence was discretion. 

REFLECTIONS

True is God, True is His court. All are judged there by their deeds.
— Guru Nanak

Adham (inferior) are they who in spite of receiving and understanding instructions, refuse to act.
—The Upanishads

Do your duty as a service to the Lord and see alone in everything in a spiritual frame of mind.
— The Mahabharata

There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread, but there are many more dying for a little love.
— Mother Teresa 

No Yogi knows date, the season and the month. Only God knows when he created the world. How shall I address thee, O God! How shall I praise Thee? 
— Guru Nanak

Maya is nothing but "woman and gold". A man living in its midst gradually loses his spiritual alertness.
— Ramakrishna