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Raj running amok Mission to Mars |
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Stop ragging
Karnataka music
Carless in Chandigarh
Mind vs market Ugly face of genocide in Sudan Inside Pakistan
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Raj running amok Like a bad penny, Raj Thackeray keeps bouncing back into circulation. And every time he does, he comes out more debased. After spewing venom at North Indian migrants, Biharis in particular, in Mumbai, he has now trained his guns on north Indian students coming to places like Pune. In his scheme of things, anyone who is not from Maharashtra has no business to put his feet onto the state, which he somehow perceives as his personal jagir. More than what he says, what matters is the tone in which he says, sowing seeds of hatred and disharmony with every syllable and gesture. The ragtag band of lumpen elements that he leads considers this absurdity to be the ultimate in bravery and cheers him loudly. Each such adulatory comment goads him to make a bigger fool of himself through his divisive agenda. Not for one second does he think of the consequences if other states have mindless leaders, protecting their own turfs in his style. Raj has been running wild all this while only because he has been given an extra-long rope. Even after he sparked violence against migrants in February, the Vilasrao Deshmukh government treated him with kid gloves. Apparently, that had a lot to do with the fact that the Congress and his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena were partners in many civic bodies. But the worst part is that the Chief Minister to hide his failures, too, targeted his guns at the migrants who had put unbearable burden on Mumbai’s civic amenities. With the government itself being on an appeasement drive, Raj Thackeray ran amok. One excuse that is being bandied about this time is that the wily nephew of Bal Thackeray had chosen his words very cleverly and legal action against him might not be easy. But the fact remains that he addressed the meeting defying a police ban. That is reason enough to haul him up. By allowing him to get away lightly after attempting to spread hatred, the government is only encouraging many others to emulate him. With citizens like him getting away, India as a nation can only suffer. |
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Mission to Mars Our fascination with Mars has spawned not just the “little green men” of science fiction but numerous scientific probes that have set out to explore the tantalising prospect that Mars may, or at least can, harbour life. It is not just Mars of course. Humankind’s yearning for signs of life outside earth has led us to cast our eye upon Gliese 581c, a planet around a red dwarf star 20 light years away, or to ram a “Deep impact” projecticle from a NASA space craft into a comet, in order to explore its icy core for secrets of the origins of life on earth. But considering its relative proximity to us, at 171 million miles, Mars has attracted many missions. The latest, the Phoenix Lander, is all set now to examine its icy undersurface. Travelling at 12,600 miles per hour, enduring 1,500 C temperature through the Martian atmosphere, Phoenix first deployed a braking parachute, shook off its protective casing, and then fired 12 small “retrorockets” that allowed it to land softly — the first successful soft landing in 32 years. Scientists say that the technology used may well be what will allow humans to make such a landing someday. The first images from its cameras, powered by solar arrays, of Mars’ northern pole showed the polygonal patterns visible from space, believed to be caused by movement of ice beneath the surface. If Phoenix does find something, Phoenix, launched last August, is named for having risen from the ashes of previous mission failures. Only five of the previous 11 international attempts to land probes on Mars have succeeded. Most life search missions “follow the water” — water is the basis of all life, and it is ice that Phoenix will dig out, with a robotic arm. If it is there, the frozen samples will be examined by on-board instruments which will then transmit the results back. Earlier Mars landings were in the planet’s equator, where it is believed there is no water. If Phoenix does find something, it will change the way we think about ourselves. |
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Stop ragging The University Grants Commission’s circular to all the universities to take steps to check ragging is timely. Ragging in any form is highly condemnable and it must be rooted out of educational institutions. The UGC has asked all colleges and universities to include in their brochures and prospectus the cases of ragging reported in their respective institutions last year, including the punitive action taken against the culprits. The brochures should also clearly spell out the punishment to be given to those found ragging - expulsion from the university and initiation of criminal proceedings against the offenders. The institutions are also required to display billboards and banners prominently, giving the names and phone numbers of the authorities to be contacted in case of ragging. The communication is a fall-out of the recent report of the R.K. Raghavan committee (appointed by the Supreme Court) which found that the number of ragging cases in 2007 had doubled compared to 2006. Worse, it is said that many institutions didn’t report minor cases of ragging, fearing “loss of reputation”. This is alarming because it implies that these institutions are either unable or unwilling to take firm steps in case of ragging. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that ragging and any form of abetment to ragging, causing injury or subjecting anyone to forceful confinement, physical and sexual assault, will be treated as a criminal offence. All the stakeholders — students, parents, guardians, faculty and administrators — need to understand the full implications of the law and the trauma it leaves on the mind of a fresher who needs warmth than a hostile reception on joining a place of learning. Over the years, some institutions have evolved a varied response to the problem — from imposing punitive fines on students to taking extreme steps of rusticating them. However, as the ragging menace continues unabated, the challenge today is to go beyond managing and arbitrating on the issue and enforce the ban on ragging in letter and spirit. The major challenge is not only to ensure that the law acts as a deterrent and prevents all excesses but also motivates the students to think of better ways of welcoming the
freshers. |
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What would life be like without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?
— Sydney Smith |
Karnataka music
The BJP has risen in a southern state. What remains is the abounding speculation of how this development will affect the state, the region, the Congress and the UPA at the Centre and political equations for the Lok Sabha elections in 2009. The result is replete with messages, as much for the BJP as the Congress party, and cautionary tales for regional parties. Truly has the lotus bloomed in the treacherous swamp that Karnataka politics was reduced to by the self-serving machinations of former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda and his Janata Dal (Secular). Few will mourn the punishing diminuition of Deve Gowda and his family-driven party, which has been whipped down to 28 seats from the 58 it had won in 2004. What will be rued though is the inglorious end of fragmented vestiges of the unique Janata Party experiment begun in 1977. The values and ideals of that movement — which transformed the polity, heralded the end of the Congress domination and sowed the seeds of coalitional politics — were shredded long years back. Within the leathery walls of cynicism that bound our politics, the Janata Party split and splintered, mutated and deformed and gave rise to monstrosities, too. Good men fell to or among bad causes, idealists turned supreme opportunists and not a few supped with the devil as it were, reducing themselves to tradeable items between other parties. It was left to Deve Gowda to take the last shred of the party to the pits, for this ignominous burial, undeserving of even a decent, printable epitaph. That done, the people of Karnataka — who alone among the southern states embraced the Janata ethic, though belatedly — are now left to contend with the BJP and the Congress. Regardless of the seats and the vote share in this election, the BJP has left the Congress far behind, and comfortably so. If this is the second successive defeat for the Congress – the first being in 2004 — in elections to the Karnataka assembly, it is also the second successive emergence of the BJP as the single largest party. Yet there is nothing spectacular about the BJP’s victory. The Congress polled a higher percentage of votes than the BJP. Nevertheless, the BJP’s way forward was eased by the splitting of the votes of the BJP’s rivals, mainly the Congress and the JD(S). The BJP owes its success to projecting itself as being ranged against all the others — letting a sort of anti-BJPism to prevail – with a view to capitalising on the divided opposition’s votes, like the Congress managed to do for long years The sharpening of this critical edge, combined with able management of intra-party rivalries, the calculated focus on a mix of local and national issues, the emphasis on “betrayal” by the JD(S), shrewd caste alliances, the stress on stability and development and the projection of a chief minister resulted in the BJP rising as an alternative to the Congress. Of particular significance is the fact that the BJP desisted conspicuously from playing the Hindutva card. With Narendra Modi very much visible on the campaign scene and the canvassing of the “Gujarat model of development”, striking the faintest Hindutva note could have been highly damaging to its electoral prospects. The state is still not polarised between the Congress and the BJP to make this ideological leap. More important, a Hindutva plank would have revived memories of the communalist violence over the Hubli Idgah Maidan, Urdu broadcasting and the Datta Peetha shrine in Chikmagalur district. It may be prudent, even if not necessarily satisfying to the Sangh Parivar, for the BJP to actualise its emphasis on governance and suppress its propensity for communal politics. The BJP can only gain by seeking to dilute the perception of being the parliamentary wing of the RSS. The Karnataka victory becoming a “gateway” to power in the other southern states appears to be premature, if not overblown. Deve Gowda’s JD(S) was regionalised which is not the same as being a “regional party” in the strict sense of the term. Therefore, to see the other regional parties in the south through the same prism as entities that can be easily pushed aside would be deceptive. The DMK and the AIADMK have deep roots in Tamil Nadu and, in the near future, all that the BJP can hope to accomplish is to strive for replacing the Congress as the preferred ally of the stronger Kazhagam. With both DMK and the AIADMK competing to be part of a ruling coalition at the Centre, this depends on which of them is better placed to negotiate at a particular juncture of electoral politics. In Kerala, the diverse constituencies have been conveniently carved up between the Left and the Congress. It is unlikely that the BJP can upset this virtually “permanent settlement’ in the next one or two elections. Andhra Pradesh holds more tantalising possibilities. The TDP, especially after N T Rama Rao and without a pivotal role at the Centre, has little to keep it intact except the hope of opposition to the Congress paying off in the elections. Having allied with the TDP in the past, the BJP can now ponder whether it needs to revive a partnership or strike out on its own for advancing its chances in the state. The Karnataka result could spell trouble, more for the TDP than the Congress, unless Chandrababu Naidu accepts the saffron agenda. The Congress, despite improving on its 2004 score, has the most to learn from this debacle. With the present leadership and its style, the party has been on a steady downhill course since the last general election. Karnataka is the 12th state the party has lost since 2004. The party has no one single national vote-getter to speak of. Nor can it count in its ranks state satraps who are a match to the regional forces it has to contend with. The Congress-led UPA has failed to turn its policies and programmes into issues for connecting with the people. With the secular-communal divide hardly operational in the prevalent opportunistic climate, realignment of political forces will be dictated solely by winnability. And, on present reckoning, the Congress does not appear a winnable proposition. Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir, where elections are due later this year, will show whether the Congress leadership and organisation have learnt any lesson from the serial reverses to get back into fighting shape. The good news for Congressmen and their allies is that they don’t have to worry about the next Lok Sabha elections being advanced. The bad news is that they will have to worry when the elections are held. Better for the party to worry now than repent at leisure after the general
election.
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Carless in Chandigarh
A
recent
news item reporting that a correlation exists between the percentage of divorce growth rate and car growth rate was trivialised by my friends, acquaintances, colleagues, seniors and juniors alike. Not only this, they also rubbished the warnings of Al Gore and Pachauri regarding global warming while arguing their case that a person without a car in Chandigarh is like a man without a soul — lost, without dignity, and uncomfortable. “What are you doing?” they say, “Go, get a car. We cannot imagine how you go about your daily jobs without a car in Chandigarh. You know, Chandigarh was in fact built with private transport in mind, what with its separate and far-removed markets for grains, vegetables, hardware, books, furniture, clothes, entertainment etc. unlike any other Indian bazaar where you get everything at a single place. Then, there are seasons to deal with. How will you brave the chilly winter winds and hot dry summers, not to speak of torrential rains? Do you think your skin will be as youthful and wrinkle free? “Then, a thought has to be given to the respect that you are always at a risk of losing while not riding a four wheeler. No person true to his salt will ever respect a person without a car, howsoever educated he/she may be. Actually your good qualities are not displayed on your forehead but everybody can see when you step out of a car. “Worried about finances? Car loan is not a problem at all. Rather, first go in for a second-hand car. But you are such a miser, just hoarding money. What is money for if not spent on luxuries! And a car is not a luxury, it is indispensable. To tell you the truth we personally feel bad and hurt by your not owning a four wheeler.” My defence is feeble. Though I try to draw strength from all the lessons I’ve learnt regarding simple life, high values and concern for the environment. But they seldom work. I want to tell them that it’s a beautiful green campus where I work and walking through it makes me feel blessed. That distance between my house and workplace is not much. That I am not that old not to find enjoyment in the changing seasons. That I love to feel nature’s hands touching me whether they are hot or cold or wet. That I do not need respect of those people who judge others by the material objects they own. That yes, public transport takes time, and is not suited to my convenience to the T, yet I prefer it over the hassles of maintenance, security, parking of a personal vehicle, with the added guilt of burdening the environment. That I am saving money on two accounts — on the personal vehicle and by not spending on ailments of sedentary life. But it is really hard to convince. You talk of peer pressure. It is not only the adolescents who buckle under it, adults are as prone to it, as you cannot sustain your arguments that appear lamer and queerer by the day. That you cannot remain indifferent as you turn into an oddity in your own circle — a family without a car in Chandigarh, though it can afford. I do not know how long I will be able to
hold. |
Mind vs market WASHINGTON
– Four months ago, I did something that in hindsight was astonishingly stupid. I clicked on a trading webpage and bought shares of Citigroup. The company, like most of the big Wall Street banks then staring down the subprime meltdown, was limping along. The headlines were bad. The chatter on CNBC was pessimistic. I saw a bargain. I saw a company whose credit card bills and offers show up in millions of mailboxes every day. Just as soon as the banks got their write-offs out of the way, optimism would return to the sector. There would be more buyers of the stock than sellers. I would profit. Now here I am today: My investment is down 22 percent. And I’m still holding on to the stock. Am I, as my wife and closest friends sometimes insist, the dumbest man walking the Earth? “You are human,” said Russell Fuller, chief investment officer of Fuller & Thaler Asset Management in San Mateo, Calif. His firm uses behavioral economic theories of Nobel Prize winners and university economists to profit from the mistakes made by everyday investors and the pros on Wall Street. Humans, no matter how hard we try, act in ways that cause us to make the wrong investment decisions almost all the time. We are absurdly overconfident about what we think we know. We are – as I am now – reluctant to part with our losers. We sell winners too soon, then we buy stocks that perform worse than the ones we sold. We get anchored on certain opinions about stocks and react too slowly to information that should change those beliefs. We believe things will happen based on how easily we can think of recent examples. The world of the behavioural economics, which melds psychology, finance and emotion, seeks to explain and sometimes exploit why we do what we do when it comes to investing. It is a field that has become more accepted lately, particularly since 2002, when Princeton University psychologist Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for, as the Swedes put it, integrating “insights from psychology into economics, thereby laying the foundation for a new field of research.” Kahneman is a director at Fuller & Thaler, a firm whose other namesake is Richard Thaler, a prominent University of Chicago behavioral economist and a frequent collaborator with Kahneman. Two of the funds the firm manages that use behavioral methods have beaten Russell benchmarks from their inception through the first quarter of this year. Not surprisingly, Fuller & Thaler is not the only firm using such techniques. Firms from J.P. Morgan to AllianceBernstein say they seek to capitalise on the faulty investor mind. For instance, Fuller & Thaler likes to pay close attention to analysts who may be anchored on a stock, not raising their earnings-per-share estimates enough even though positive information has come out about the company. Fuller & Thaler’s investment team pounces before the analysts realize they were wrong. As Kahneman said in an interview, “I think that betting on mistakes of people is a pretty safe bet.” I asked Kahneman what fools us most frequently. That was simple, he said: overconfidence. “It’s the idea that you know better than the market, which is a very strange idea,” he said. “Individual investors have no business at all thinking they can do better.” Why do we? “It’s because we have no way of thinking properly about what we don’t know,” Kahneman said. “What we do is we give weight to what we know and then we add a margin of uncertainty. You act on what you think will happen.” But Kahneman added, “In fact, in most situations what you don’t know is so overwhelmingly more important than what you do know that you have no business acting on what you know.” Oops. Barbara Warner, a financial planner with Warner Financial in Bethesda, Md., said she sees a lot of overconfidence among two groups of people: relatively new investors to the market (me), particularly recent business school graduates, and retirees. The latter group can be exceptionally frustrating. “Now they have entirely too much time on their hands to devote to CNBC and business magazines,” she said. “People suddenly think they are smarter than they used to be because they have more time to pay attention to it.” That’s a disastrous situation, Kahneman said: “The more closely you pay attention, the more you do things. And the more you do things, the worse off you will be.” For proof, he pointed to groundbreaking research done by one of his former students, Terrance Odean, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Odean has written that “overconfidence gives investors the courage of their misguided convictions.” It is particularly curious when investors hold on to losing stocks. This is a function of something called loss aversion, a discovery that helped Kahneman win the Nobel Prize. Thaler, Kahneman’s close colleague, put it this way: “Loss aversion refers to the fact that we’re wired in such a way that losing money hurts more than getting money feels good.” When it comes to trading, this helps explain why we would want to hold on to losers. Selling the loser, even though it gives us a tax write-off, causes us to admit we have lost. So we do something that makes us feel better: We sell the winners. This feeds our overconfidence. But as Odean’s research has shown, we often sell winners that still have some winning to do. That puts stocks with upward momentum on the market for less than they are really worth long-term, allowing savvier investors to snap them up. “What I believe is that individual investors probably as a group create the dynamics by which they lose money and institutions make money,” Odean said. “They create mispricings.” By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post |
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Ugly face of genocide in Sudan Abyei, in the heart of Sudan, was a town of more than 30,000 people. It had a school and a hospital, a marketplace and a bar.
It doesn’t exist any more. Almost everything has been burnt to the ground. What remains is devastation. Days after the fighting took place, plumes of smoke rise into the afternoon sky as fires still burn. The charred remains of metal bed frames surrounded by neat squares of black and grey ash indicate where a row of houses once stood. Clay pots lie broken in the dirt. Children’s clothes, some burnt, are scattered outside a still-smouldering mud hut. A putrid smell drifts through the air – burnt human remains, decaying in the afternoon sun. The Red Cross is trying to negotiate access to pick them up, but days have passed and the dead are still there. No one knows yet how many people were killed. A peace deal signed in 2005 brought an end to Sudan’s 20-year civil war – a conflict between the Khartoum government and rebels in the south, which claimed the lives of two million people. Regional analysts now fear that the razing of Abyei by – according to witnesses – forces allied to Sudan’s President, Omar al-Bashir, will cause the peace agreement to unravel. Analysts warn of a new civil war across Sudan that would destroy chances of peace in Darfur and suck in many of Sudan’s nine neighbours to the conflict. Abyei had been one of the most contested regions in the war, an area which both sides claimed as their own. In the past two years, the majority of Abyei’s population had returned. They lived under the protection of the United Nations. More than 300 troops are based here, with tanks, guns, and a mandate to monitor the peace deal between north and south. But President Bashir’s ruling party, with more than one eye on the large oil reserves in the region around Abyei, has refused to accept the decision of an independent commission giving the area’s residents the option of joining the south. The UN’s top official in Sudan, Ashraf Qazi, warned of an escalation of violence in other disputed regions across central Sudan. “This could easily spread to other areas and threaten the peace deal,” he said. “If the peace agreement falls apart all hopes for peace in Darfur go out the window,” said David Mozersky of the International Crisis Group. “There will be a much broader and more devastating civil war in Sudan with deadly consequences for the country and the region at large.” For those who ran from Abyei the immediate concern is survival. Upwards of 90,000 people from the town and its surrounding areas have fled in fear. A UN aid operation has been hampered by the Sudanese government. A few days ago, as food was being distributed to several thousand people, a government Antonov circled above six times sending terrified refugees running for cover. By arrangement with
The Independent |
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Inside Pakistan Hopes for the revival of democracy in Pakistan may wane if President Pervez Musharraf continues to remain the favourite of the US in the name of fighting terrorism. The cause of democracy demands that he is dumped in the dustbin of history, but will that ever happen? According to Dawn, "Of the changes sought (in the constitution) through the Eighteenth Amendment Bill, some are non-controversial. All parties want the President to become a titular head of state, and this means Article 58-2(b) must be repealed. Introduced by Ziaul Haq through a decree, later abolished by Nawaz Sharif in his second term as Prime Minister and revived by President Musharraf through the Seventeenth Amendment, this article has been responsible for a lot of political chaos in the country (Pakistan).” The honourable course for President Musharraf, therefore, is to look for an exit route. This is what the people want as emphasised by PPP leader Asif Zardari in an interview he gave to the PTI in which he described him as the "relic" of the past. But Musharraf is not the one to concede defeat so easily. As The News says, "The confrontation between democratic and anti-democratic forces is now clear; the lines have been drawn out and the divide is now obvious. The PPP, the PML-N and the ANP have once more joined ranks despite lingering irritants and made it clear that they stand as one against the presidency… “The PPP regards as very real the possibility of a presidential move to wrap up the National Assembly and supporters of democratic forces in bureaucratic corridors have leaked out documents to columnists that suggest an onslaught on the elected government is being readied. This would come in the form of an economic charge-sheet, stating that the country had, within months, been reduced to fiscal ruin." These are, indeed, critical times for Pakistan.
Emboldened Mush President Musharraf knows that no constitution amendment is possible by the present coalition because it does not have the required majority in the Senate. As Business Recorder points out, "The fact is that unless there are desertions from within the Musharrafites, the constitutional package is virtually a stillborn proposition: it can become the Eighteenth Amendment only if it is also passed by the Senate… But the government does not have even a simple majority in the Upper House and may have to wait for that till March next year when the Senate will go for elections to fill the seats vacated by the retiring senators…" The only way the amendment can become a reality is if the ruling coalition is able to secure the support of the disgruntled PML (Q) senators. They will, however, have to be ready to lose their seats because of the anti-defection law. There is another reason, too, why President Musharraf is feeling emboldened. The US clearly supports the Musharraf line on the issue of terrorism, which is contrary to the coalition’s policy of bringing the militants to the path of sanity through “peace” agreements. According to Daily Times, "The US and NATO officials have expressed concern that such deals are giving extremists space to plan and execute attacks on foreign forces in Afghanistan."
Dicey deals Despite the open opposition by the US and Afghanistan to striking deals with terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas, an agreement was reached on Monday between local militants and tribal elders ostensibly to maintain peace in Mohmand Agency. This is the second agreement of its kind signed after the most controversial one between the government and Baitullah Mehsud of the Tehrik-e-Taliban, Pakistan. The News says “the political administration released militants affiliated with regional Taliban commander Maulvi Abdul Wali, alias Omar Khalid. They were taken in custody by the authorities on charges of terrorism and attacks on security personnel in the tribal region.” Surprisingly, the government has gone ahead with the deal despite the Taliban insisting that it will not allow non-governmentt organisations (NGOs) to function in the tribal areas. The government is happy with the Taliban declaration that there will be no further attacks on security personnel and government installations and institutions. In the case of Mehsud, too, the government has ignored reports that a “suicide factory” was found in the camp he deserted some time ago, as Daily Times points out.
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