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Horrifying stampede Destination Punjab |
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Ailing airports
Reading the Muslim mind
Blessed uncle
Karnataka heads for mid-term poll Overpopulation ‘is main threat to planet’ What to do when you can’t sleep
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Horrifying stampede WHAT makes Thursday’s Haj stampede, that claimed more than 350 lives, all the more tragic is the fact that such accidents have been taking place during the pilgrimage way too often. Similar stampedes near Jamarat Bridge in Mina, where pilgrims throw pebbles at a pillar representing the devil, claimed 119 lives in 1998, 35 in 2001, 14 in 2003 and 251 in 2004. The toll in Thursday’s tragedy has overshadowed all these with casualties, including 28 Indians, still mounting. The worst was the stampede in a tunnel at Mecca in 1990 which resulted in the death of as many as 1,426 pilgrims. Stung by these embarrassing accidents, the Saudi Arabian Government has been throwing an unprecedented security blanket over the annual pilgrimage, with some 60,000 security men pressed into service, but apparently that is not good enough. In some respects, a lot more needs to be done. Reports suggest that none of the major improvements and extra bridges that the Saudi authorities had promised after the 2003 stampede is in place yet. With better travel facilities, the number of pilgrims has been increasing year after year. The Haj pilgrimage, which used to be a once-in-a-lifetime event, is now undertaken by some almost every year. One can find many who have been there 10 times. The attempts to regulate them are not very serious. Most of the victims this year were Saudi nationals who were not authorised to participate in the pilgrimage. The Saudi authorities will have to do a lot of soul-searching. In a way, crowds are also responsible for the mayhem that is witnessed there. In their religious fervour they give a go-by to various do’s and don’ts they must follow for their own sake. Perhaps the countries of their origin, too, should also be far more strict in instructing them in this regard. The Haj pilgrimage today faces a serious threat from terrorists also. The overall situation demands far better crowd management and security umbrella than are currently in existence.
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Destination Punjab Normally, investment flows in a state should not make news. Driven by profit, private investment expects automatic routes with a clear-cut policy framework in place. But ruling politicians and bureaucrats first create hurdles, then clear them and subsequently flaunt the projects thus approved as “achievements”. The Punjab government has cleared 16 projects involving an investment of Rs 15,981 crore. This deserves to be commended for the simple reason that private investment had for long eluded the state — mostly because of administrative bottlenecks, rampant corruption and inadequate infrastructure. Now things appear to be changing. A few days ago the government had set up four special purpose vehicles to push diversification in citrus and fruit juices, horticulture, viticulture and organic farming. Reliance, ITC and the Bharti group are entering agri-business in Punjab. When the Punjab Chief Minister boasted on Thursday that by the end of the current fiscal year the state would have Rs 1 lakh crore investment, his counterpart in the neighbouring state, Mr Bhupinder Singh Hooda, reminded him that Haryana, now ahead of Punjab in per capita income, would target Rs 2 lakh crore investment in the next five years. The spirit of competition and their efforts for a joint platform for the region are certainly welcome. Clearing the projects is one thing, their smooth execution quite another. The Punjab government needs to be aggressive in building infrastructure. The power sector is groping in the dark with the supply far short of the demand. The condition of roads is deplorable. The way the Mohali IT Park has lingered, the delay in starting the special economic zone at Amritsar, the emergence of a liquor cartel in the state and the Chief Minister’s personal interest in the Dubai firm’s investment in real estate do not augur well for the projects to come. The administration should not only be transparent and unbiased, but also appear to be so.
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Ailing airports THE Sreedharan Committee report recommending downgrading of the Reliance bid for modernisation and restructuring of Delhi and Mumbai airports as it did not meet the stipulated benchmark of 80 per cent based on a set of technical criterion is only by way of a course correction. It should not become an excuse for delaying the whole process which has been hanging fire for quite some time. What should not be lost sight of is the fact that the report by the Delhi Metro man specifically mentions that there is no need to take up the technical evaluation afresh or to scrap the whole tender process and invite fresh bids. Even the Prime Minister has said that bids should be finalised by January 31 positively. The need for doing so cannot be overstressed. Indian airports continue to be way behind the international standards and lead to many missed opportunities as a whole. Anyone who has experienced the utter lack of even basic facilities there is not bothered who undertakes the modernisation as long as this is done efficiently and promptly. What has given an added sense of urgency to the task is the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Ironically, the Left parties have been repeatedly putting spokes in the wheel. They have been focussed so much on counting the trees that they end up missing the wood. It is high time they realised that their fears about loss of jobs are unfounded. On the contrary, better airports run in a better way will generate many new jobs. With the premier Delhi and Mumbai airports themselves being in poor shape, the condition of the rest of them can only be imagined. Many of them like Amritsar are international only in name and are only slightly better than a mofussil bus stand. Somehow, the old mindset that air travel is a luxury is yet to be shed. The open skies policy will become meaningful only when the passengers will not have to spend as much time sitting in the aircraft waiting for it to land or be airborne, as is spent in actual flying. Unfortunately, that is a daily occurrence today because of the grossly inadequate infrastructure at almost all airports.
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You have to take the good with the bad, smile with the sad, love what you’ve got, remember what you had, learn from your mistakes, but never regret, people change, things go wrong, but remember, life goes on! — Anonymous
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Reading the Muslim mind THERE is a widespread view in this country among leading political parties that Muslims tend to subordinate their loyalty to the country to loyalty to the religion. Therefore, it is argued that our Muslim voters resent the Indian decision to vote in support of the resolution in the International Atomic Energy Agency about Iran’s clandestine nuclear proliferation activity. Similarly it is urged that Muslim voters will resent any improvement in Indo-US relations since they consider US as having hurt the interests and security of various West Asian Muslim countries. Not being a scholar in Islamic studies and not being acquainted with Muslim masses, I cannot claim to be acquainted with Hindu masses either. I am not in a position to validate or refute the above perceptions. However, as a student of international relations the above perceptions trigger off a number of questions in my mind. Gandhiji joined hands with the Khilafat movement looking upon it as a great cause to which Muslim masses were committed. As it turned out, Muslim masses did not care about the Caliphate. The country incurred some costs on account of Mahatma’s misperception. Even today Turkey is reforming many of its laws to make them conform to the European laws and the Turkish Army, as the guardian of Ataturk’s secularism enforces it with fierce loyalty. These developments do not seem to evoke any great reaction in the rest of the Islamic world. Muslims in hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in Indonesia after the Gestapu coup in 1965, in Bangladesh in 1971, during Iran-Iraq war. 1981-87, and in Algeria in the nineties. Saddam Hussein used poison gas against Iranians and Kurds - both Muslim populations. There was no popular resentment among the Muslim masses all over the world on account of these events. Nor any Shia resentment got generated when Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh was overthrown by a US-supported coup. Nor when General Zia-ul-Haq assisted King Hussein of Jordan in carrying out “Black September’’ massacre of the Palestinians. Nor when PLO was thrown out of Syria. The Camp David agreement between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, presided over by President Carter did not result in any mass upsurge of resentment though Sadat himself was assassinated in Egypt by an extremist, belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood. Today Pakistan has been brought under US legislation in terms of implementation of 9/11 Commission recommendations. The Act requires that US should provide assistance to encourage and enable Pakistan: 1. to continue and improve upon its commitment to combating extremists. 2. to continue to make efforts to fully control its territory and borders. 3. to progress towards becoming a more effective and participatory democracy. 4. to take all necessary steps to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction. 5. to continue to reform its education system. 6. to, in other ways, implement a general strategy of moderation. It also requires US President to transmit to Congress a detailed proposed strategy for the future long-term engagement of the US with Pakistan within 180 days. The first report has been sent by the President in July 2005. The US is keeping air bases and troops in Pakistan. NATO is taking over greater responsibility in Southern Afghanistan to enable the US forces to concentrate on Pakistan-Afghanistan area. The US intelligence agencies have been permitted to operate in Pakistan. In other words, Pakistan is treated as a ward by the US. Though it may be argued that all these developments do not have the support of Pakistani people and if the Pakistani people have the same freedom to exercise their franchise as the Indian voter has they would have expressed their resentment. While that may be true yet the situation in Pakistan in terms of mass upsurge has not gone beyond management capability of the Administration. Till the rise of Al-Qaeda and Jehadism the Muslim masses did not allow their national loyalties to supercede their religious loyalties. The Shias of Iraq did not desert to Iran but fought loyally for Saddam Hussein during the long Iraq-Iran war. The Arabs in Iran fought loyally for Iran. This happened in the longest war between two Muslim countries. One of them was dominated by religious clergy and if religion was such a strong factor in the Muslim mindset then sectarian loyalty should have had very strong influence on Iraqi Shias. If it had, Saddam Hussein could not have continued the war for so many years. Though it is believed there are Al-Qaeda cells in 62 countries (but not in India) the Muslim populations in none of the countries have risen up in mass- revolt. The only country where there was a massive insurgency, Algeria, the Army has been able to put it down with significant popular support. Even in Afghanistan where Taliban ruled, the religion-inspired insurgency has been reduced to fragmented hit-and-run incidents. People in Iraq or Afghanistan did not boycott voting because elections were introduced by the Americans. They voted in large
numbers, in spite of boycott calls by the obscurantist elements. Of course, there is bound to be resentment on American excesses like the Al-Gharib prison torture, use of white phosphorous ammunition or prolonged detention in Guantanamo Bay camps. Such resentment is not necessarily religion inspired. A large number of Hindus and Christians (including Europeans and Americans) share it. Therefore, one wonders whether charging that Muslim population is more loyal to religion than to the country is not a form of communalist prejudice. There may be many reasons why the minority Muslim population in UP, Bihar, West Bengal and Kerala votes for particular parties. But is there any proof that Muslim resentment of US and of further possible improvement in Indo-US relations will influence their voting pattern? Or is this a case of self-fulfilling prophesy? Will such a projection have a backlash effect in voting of other sections of the electorate? Vote bank managers have different vested interests. Inducing various kinds of fears in respect of voting and use them for parochial advantages is an integral part of vote bank, money-making efforts. How wrong people can be in such projections has been proved in various elections which produced unexpected
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Blessed uncle
HIS name was Sadhu Ram and he embodied the qualities of both a sadhu and Ram. When he died of cancer recently, I lost not just my uncle but our saviour who came to our rescue when we needed it most. It happened in 1993 when Patiala was flooded. As our house was close to the rivulet that wreaked havoc, ours was one of the first to be inundated. We were forced to shift to the first floor of the marooned house as it was impossible to move to a safer place. We never realised how long a day and night could be until we remained stranded there for that long. It seemed that nobody could come to our rescue. As we remained perched on the terrace, we could hear the cries of people whose houses were giving away. The surging water carried away many of such houses. It was difficult to restrain my younger sister, who could not control her fear that we all would be washed away by the floodwater. Though I tried to put up a brave front, my own mental condition was not dissimilar. To pep her up, I narrated the story of Robinson Crusoe, who survived for several years on an isolated island. Every now and then my father would record the level of water by putting a mark on the wall. And to keep us in good humour, he would announce that the water level was going down. As we were grappling with the situation and praying that the house may not crumble, we heard somebody knocking on our main gate. “Don’t go to the gate. The sound must have been made by the gushing water lashing at the gate”, advised my father. But we could not resist the temptation of answering the knock. We somehow managed to open the gate and we saw to our pleasant surprise our uncle wading his way into the compound. With the help of a long stick, he negotiated his way and reached us. On his back rested a big sack and he unloaded it in our room. He had brought many eatables — milk powder, flour, pulses, water bottles and mangoes. They were sufficient to see us through for the next three-four days by when water fully receded from the compound. My happiness over the “manna” disappeared the moment I saw blood oozing from the wounds on his leg. Thorns and branches floating in the water had wounded him. That he had suffered a heart attack a few months ago did not deter him from venturing out to feed us. Helping others was second nature to my uncle. At his death, I felt I had been orphaned. After all, who else would risk his life to save mine? But I was not alone in sorrow. At his funeral, I met some elderly widows whom he had given shelter in an old age home set up by him. They cried inconsolably. “We have been orphaned. There is nobody to look after us now’’, they chanted as they sobbed. For once I wished he could defy death. Not for me but for those destitute women and deserted men, who had nobody they could call their own after Sadhu Ram’s
death!
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Karnataka heads for mid-term poll Chief Minister N. Dharam Singh willingly resigned himself to such an arrangement as he had no choice. It was Mr Deve Gowda, who had enthroned him in the first place. Nothing seemed able to stop Mr Gowda’s hauteur in 2005. Not even a mini revolt in his own party. Rather than sorting out issues with senior leader and then Finance Minister Siddaramaiah, who had questioned his style of functioning, he chose to throw him out of the party. Similarly, he humiliated Infosys Chairman N R Narayana Murthy when the latter talked about improving the infrastructure in Bangalore through public-private participation. Mr Murthy was accused of land grabbing and delaying the Bangalore international airport project, of which he was the Chairman. He also went against public opinion by saying a metro system was not suited for the city and delayed the taking off of the project considerably. Mr Gowda seemed completely in command till December this year. In January he was humbled. The zila panchayats have floored the JD (Secular) and its leader. That it is the masses and not the classes who have humbled the “humble farmer” speaks volumes of the manner in which his style of functioning has been rejected by people across the state. In the process the experiment, which the ruling Congress put into effect, has come a cropper. Though the Congress could not form a formal alliance with Mr Gowda’s friend-turned foe Siddaramaiah, who has formed his separate party, it did have a tacit understanding with the party in some areas. As a result Mr Siddaramaiah’s candidates have humbled JD (U) nominees in the party’s stronghold of Mysore. The Congress is set to wrest a majority of the zila panchayats and has given the green signal for a tie-up with Mr Siddaramaiah’s outfit in some districts. With the urban areas already out of his grasp after a vigorous “pro-poor” campaign, Mr Gowda has been put in a do-or-die situation. He cannot allow the Congress to tie up with Mr Siddaramaiah at the grassroots level as it would only result in a breakdown of his party, which would be out of power in most of the zila panchayats. Mr Siddaramaiah’s stature is also likely to grow further and there is a possibility of a Congress — Siddaramaiah alliance in any future assembly election. Seemingly left with no alternative, Mr Gowda has clearly indicated that he will quit the coalition in case the Congress ties up with Mr Siddaramaiah in the panchayats. Meanwhile, he is keeping his options open to pressurise the Congress. He met Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Delhi recently even as his son, Kumaraswamy, has been hobnobbing with state BJP leaders and trying to effect a split in the state BJP. The latter is important as Mr Gowda does not want to be seen joining hands with the BJP. These behind-the-scenes activities will decide Mr Gowda’s answer to Congress President Sonia Gandhi whom, he has announced he will meet on February 9 following a meeting of the JD(S) the preceding day. A mid-term poll seems imminent in the state in case the BJP does not split or in case the Congress goes ahead with its tie-up with Mr Siddaramaiah as announced by it. In the Congress, surprisingly, it is the Chief Minister alone who is most keen to ensure the coalition continues. Mr Dharam Singh knows the end of the coalition means the end of the road for him and he is making desperate attempts to appease the JD(S) even at this juncture. The party rank and file, however, want mid-term elections as they are fed up with the JD(S) leader’s constant nitpicking. State Congress party leaders, including state President Mallikarjun Kharge, are keen to do a Nitish and put Gowda in Lalu’s shoes and want the Centre to jettison Mr Gowda immediately.
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Overpopulation ‘is main threat to planet’ Climate change and global pollution cannot be adequately tackled without addressing the neglected issue of the world’s booming population, according to two leading scientists. Professor Chris Rapley, Director of the British Antarctic Survey, and Professor John Guillebaud, vented their frustration yesterday at the fact that overpopulation had fallen off the agenda of the many organisations dedicated to saving the planet. The scientists said dealing with the burgeoning human population of the planet was vital if real progress was to be made on the other enormous problems facing the world. “It is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about” Professor Guillebaud said. “Unless we reduce the human population humanely through family planning, nature will do it for us through violence, epidemics or starvation.” Professor Guillebaud said he decided to study the field of human reproduction more than 40 years ago specifically because of the problems he envisaged through overpopulation. His concerns were echoed by Professor Rapley, an expert on the effects of climate change on the Antarctic, who pointed out that this year an extra 76 million people would be added to the 6.5 billion already living on Earth, which is twice as many as in 1960. By the middle of the century, the United Nations estimates that the world population is likely to increase to more than nine billion, which is equivalent to an extra 200,000 people each day. Professor Rapley said the extra resources needed to sustain this growth in population would put immense strains on the planet’s life-support system even if pollution emissions per head could be dramatically reduced. “Although reducing human emissions to the atmosphere is undoubtedly of critical importance, as are any and all measures to reduce the human environmental ‘footprint’, the truth is that the contribution of each individual cannot be reduced to zero. Only the lack of the individual can bring it down to nothing,” Professor Rapley says in an article for the BBC website. “So if we believe that the size of the human ‘footprint’ is a serious problem — and there is much evidence for this — then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed.” Professor Rapley says the explosive growth in the human population and the concomitant effects on the environment have been largely ignored by many of those concerned with climate change. “It is a bombshell of a topic, with profound and emotive issues of ethics, morality, equity and practicability,” he says. “So controversial is the subject that it has become the Cinderella of the great sustainability debate — rarely visible in public, or even in private. “In interdisciplinary meetings addressing how the planet functions as an integrated whole, demographers and population specialists are usually notable by their absence.’’ Professor Guillebaud, who co-chairs the Optimum Population Trust, said it became politically incorrect about 25 years ago to bring up family planning in discussing the environmental problems of the developing world. The world population needed to be reduced by nearly two-thirds if climate change was to be prevented and everyone on the planet was to enjoy a lifestyle similar to that of Europeans, Professor Guillebaud said. An environmental assessment by the conservation charity WWF and the Worldwatch Institute in Washington found that humans were now exploiting about 20 per cent more renewable resources than can be replaced each year. Professor Guillebaud said this meant it would require the natural resources equivalent to four more Planet Earths to sustain the projected 2050 population of nine billion people. “The figures demonstrate the folly of concentrating exclusively on lifestyles and technology and ignoring human numbers in our attempts to combat global warming,” he said. “We need to think about climate changers - human beings and their numbers - as well as climate change.” Some environmentalists have argued that is not human numbers that are important, but the relative use of natural resources and production of waste such as carbon dioxide emissions. They have suggested that the planet can sustain a population of nine billion people or even more provided that everyone adopts a less energy-intensive lifestyle based on renewable sources of energy rather than fossil fuels. But Professor Guillebaud said: “We urgently need to stabilise and reduce human numbers. There is no way that a population of nine billion — the UN’s medium forecast for 2050 — can meet its energy needs without unacceptable damage to the planet and a great deal of human misery.” Crowded Earth * The human population stands at 6.5 billion and is projected to rise to more than 9 billion by 2050. * In less than 50 years the human population has more than doubled from its 1960 level of 3 billion. * China is the most populous country with more than 1.3 billion people. India is second with more than 1.1 billion. * By about 2030 India is expected to exceed China with nearly 1.5 billion people. * About one in every three people alive today is under the age of 20, which means that the population will continue to grow as more children reach sexual maturity. * Britain’s population of 60 million is forecast to grow by 7 million over the next 25 years and by at least 10 million over the next 60 years, mainly through immigration. * This is equivalent to an extra 57 towns the size of Luton (pop 184,000) * By the time you have finished reading this column, an estimated 100 babies have been born in the world. — The Independent
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What to do when you can’t sleep Sleep, it turns out, is a lot like weight loss and heart health. There are pills that can help, but like diet and exercise, learning to get a better night’s sleep requires lifestyle changes, hard work and practice. Insomnia is defined as the inability to fall asleep or stay asleep. It is different from physiological problems such as sleep apnea and restless-leg syndrome, which also interfere with sleep but can be best treated medically. Of an estimated 70 million people in the United States who have sleep problems, about 30 million struggle with insomnia. Most of the time insomnia is caused by anxiety or other mood disorders. Sometimes it is just the routine stresses of the day that keep people up at night — the sales meeting in the morning, the checkbook badly out of balance, the kids’ demands for help with homework, the vacation that must be planned and paid for. Sometimes, a couple of sleepless nights can snowball into a nightmare of its own, so that the very sight of the bed sets off a lather of anxiety. Sleep specialists say that pills are no more than a Band-Aid. They might work for a night or two, but after several weeks, patients report taking more and more pills and never sleeping better. While the newer prescription sleeping pills can help with short-term sleep problems, such as jet lag, the National Institutes of Health in June recommended that talk therapy —including relaxation training and counseling targeted at anxiety and erroneous beliefs about sleep and sleep loss — should be the first line of treatment for insomnia. The first step for many insomniacs is to forget the notion that everybody needs eight hours of sleep, experts say. Some people function well with seven hours of sleep, others need 10. But one of the worst ways to ensure enough shut-eye is to get into bed before you are drowsy, even though the alarm is set to ring eight hours later. If you’ve been in bed for 20 minutes and are still awake, get up, Rubman and Dixon both advise. Tossing and turning only reinforces the idea that bed is a hateful place where you try and try but are unable to rest. Leave the room, find a comfortable spot with low light and perform some kind of restful activity, perhaps knitting or light reading, experts suggest. Do not return to bed until you are sleepy, but do not allow yourself to fall asleep anywhere but in bed. Ensure that the activity you choose is not so stimulating and enjoyable that you are rewarding yourself for waking up during the night. For patients whose looping anxieties keep their heads spinning on the pillow, Dixon at Gaylord suggests an exercise: Take a pile of index cards and label one with the name of every problem that keeps you awake at night. One card could perhaps be labeled “Finances”; another, “I hate my job”; another, “What am I going to cook for dinner tomorrow?” On each card write out a plan for how you plan to approach the problem today, tomorrow and next week. Keep the index cards next to the bed. When one of the worries disrupts your sleep, check the card, assure yourself that you have a plan, then put it in the drawer and go to sleep. Patients who seek help for insomnia at a sleep session can expect to participate in weekly counseling sessions, either individually or in groups, for about five or six weeks. Insurance usually pays for sleep therapy, but not always. Patients learn relaxation techniques and other strategies for getting a better night’s sleep. But as with diet and exercise, there is no such thing as an overnight miracle. It takes work and practice for people to change their sleep habits. — LA Times-Washington
Post
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From the pages of From Gaya to Nagpur TO pass from the Congress at Gaya to the National Liberal Federation at Nagpur is to pass from the din and turmoil of the great battle to a life of pure routine and convention. It is with the greatest regret one has to say this, because few who have given any thought to the subject will deny that Liberalism, with its characteristic note of caution, prudence and moderation, is a necessary complement to Nationalism with its emphasis on courage, enthusiasm, resoluteness and a spirit of sacrifice in India’s struggle for political emancipation. But a perusal of the Presidential address of the Right Hon. V.S. Srinivasa Sastri at the annual meeting of the Federation on Wednesday can leave no other impression on the mind of one who has just risen from a perusal of Mr Das’s address delivered the day before. In the whole of Mr Sastri’s address there is not a word of proper emphasis on the actual political condition of India, the intense discontent and dissatisfaction of the people generally and politically minded Indians in particular with things as they are.
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The spirit is neither born nor does it die at any time. It does not come into being, or cease to exist. It is unborn, eternal and permanent. —Bhagavadgita It (Raga-Bhakti) is like the cow’s fondness for fodder mixed with oil-cake. The cow gobbles it down greedily. —Ramakrishna
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THE year 2005 saw former Prime Minister and Janata Dal (Secular) President H.D. Deve Gowda ruling the roost in Karnataka. He called the shots in the Congress — J D (S) coalition government by keeping the Congress on a tight leash, besides taking on anyone who dared question him.