The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Bus and lives
When drivers play music and people die

Fortyfive persons met with untimely death on Tuesday merely because a bus driver cared two hoots for speed limits even while driving on a tricky hill road near Kufri in Himachal Pradesh and chose to change the CD with the remote control. That is what most of the survivors have alleged. There is no reason to disbelieve them, because one comes across such irresponsible conduct on the roads every day. Ironically, the driver was himself also among those who paid for this lapse. Such drivers make Indian roads one of the most dangerous in the world. As it is, roads here are not in the best of condition. Overloading and bad condition of vehicles compound the problem. Instead of showing extra care, drivers tend to be casual to the extent of being callous and indifferent to the risks to the lives of passengers.

If they are that irresponsible, it is the duty of the traffic police to make them fall in line. But even they give them a long rope, either due to sheer apathy or due to other considerations. Either way, it is the poor passengers who have to hang. That is why the reports of serious accidents are almost a daily occurrence in Himachal Pradesh. The state government has to give top priority to proper training of drivers and strict enforcement of the law governing the issue of licences.

Once the magisterial inquiry fixes responsibility for the Kufri accident, it is imperative that the owners of the buses are also made to fall in line. To cut down costs, they at times hire drivers whose training is rudimentary at best. Persons who have just graduated from being cleaners are put behind the wheels. For them, driving is some kind of a joyride. Little do they realise that it can be a death ride. Anybody who hands over the steering to such unfit persons is a potential murderer and must be stopped in his tracks. The time has come to examine whether the bus companies, private or public, should be made to pay compensation to next of kin.

Bharat Ratna
Bhimsen Joshi’s singing made him a maestro

A Bharat Ratna for Bhimsen Joshi should gladden the hearts of not only Indian classical music aficionados but all Indians. Bhimsen Joshi, one of India’s most celebrated and indomitable classical vocalists, has been chosen for the nation’s highest honour for giving classical vocal singing a new verve and range. The leading exponent of the Kirana gharana, Pandit Joshi’s distinctive style incorporating the best of other gharanas has and will influence generations of Indian classical vocalists. The Bharat Ratna is only an affirmation of his enormous talent, a befitting salute to his tapasya spanning decades and his incredibly malleable voice that achieves new heights and subtlety. His musical journey that began in 1936 when he started rigorous training under stalwart Sawai Gandharva is the stuff musical history is made of. No one will grudge him the highest award.

The conferring of the highest civilian awards on artists is most heartening. The other recipients from the realm of art and culture have been filmmaker Satyajit Ray, carnatic vocalist M.S. Subbulakshmi, sitarist Pandit Ravi Shankar, playback singer Lata Mangeshkar and shehnai maestro Ustaad Bismillah Khan. Whatever the popularity of music emanating from Bollywood, classical musicians have done a service to the nation. They have put Indian classical music and hence India on the international map. Pandit Joshi, epitomising the best of Hindustani classical music, has influenced the collective Indian musical consciousness. The raga maestro with imaginative aesthetic sense possesses the singular ability to make ragas come alive, carrying the connoisseurs and the uninitiated along. Apart from the rendition of ragas, his bhajans in Hindi and Marathi are by now as legendary as the singer himself.

His acceptance of the honour — “I accept the honour on behalf of all Hindustani vocalists who have dedicated their life to classical music” — is in his characteristic modest style. The Bharat Ratna award cannot elevate his music any further but can inspire others to pursue excellence with the kind of dedication he is known for. The award has come to him in his later years. Hopefully, he will live for several years with it, singing more for the benefit of the people whose lives he has enriched.

Thought for the Day

History is fiction with the truth left out. — American proverb

ARTICLE

Speaker with a difference
He has raised level of debates in Parliament
by Kuldip Nayar

INDIAN Parliament made history a few days ago when Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee staged a walkout from the House. The Speaker could have sent out of the house the members casting aspersions on his rulings. But he wanted to see if a Yogi-like behaviour could move the commissars to reason. Exasperated and helpless, Mr Chatterjee used the Gandhian method of expressing protest in the hope that his withdrawal from the House would appeal to the conscience of the erring members. It made no difference to them.

That such a situation was in the making was clear when Mr Chatterjee said a day earlier that his current stint in Parliament was “the worst period of his life”. He was agonized by frequent interruptions and disruptions in the House. But the last straw was the accusation by the CPM, the party to which he belonged from the day he joined politics, that his ruling smacked of discrimination. The party was referring to his action in suspending its member, Abdullakutty, for a day for flaunting papers that amounted to showing disrespect to the Chair. The Left was, in fact, unhappy over the Speaker’s rejection of a motion that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had lied to the House in respect of the Indo-US nuclear deal.

I have watched Parliament proceedings practically from the day when it began its sittings in 1952. There have been some great Speakers like G.V. Mavalankar, the first one, M.A. Ayyangar and P.A. Sangma, who have left their mark. Although they belonged to the Congress party, their rulings were never challenged, nor looked down upon. Historians and political analysts quote them even today. The annals of parliamentary democracy have become richer because of their rulings.

After a long time came Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, who was nurtured in the ideology of communism, but gave rulings that evoked respect even in the right-wing BJP. He gave a popular touch to the office and came to represent a viewpoint which was neither black nor white. It was only grey, the consensus. He spoke from his heart when he challenged the members to show him any proof if he had ever prevented an issue from being raised. He did not mind being targeted but he did not want the malice which some members of his own party showed in their attitude. This hurt him the most because he saw that in their effort to bring him down they brought down the esteem of the Chair.

Strange, the CPM first forced him to take up the Speakership and then turned against him when all he did was to carry out the onerous responsibility cast on his shoulders. He preferred the call of duty to the party’s directive to resign. I do not think that the session relating to the vote of confidence in the Prime Minister could have been conducted as objectively and sensitively as Mr Chatterjee did. He annoyed the party, not used to disobedience of its directive. But he saved the parliamentary system because he alone could have staved off the dangers facing the nation if the vote of confidence had not been taken to its logical conclusion.

Mr Chatterjee does not forget even for a day that he rose to prominence in politics because of the CPM. He still considers himself a member of the party and does not stop saying so. But then the party wants a bonded slave, not a person who upholds independence of office when challenged.

Fortunately, the Lok Sabha has only a few months to go before its tenure ends in April. I wish Mr Chatterjee would come back to Parliament. But he is determined to retire. He has already built a small house at Kolkata where he wants to spend the rest of his life. The loss is that of the nation which will be deprived of Mr Chatterjee’s services. He still has many years of active life left in him.

The Speaker has many a time said that the judiciary should be sensitive to the power of Parliament and the legislatures because they represent the aspirations of people. Some Supreme Court judges like Justice Katju have pointed out that the judges have taken up the work that belongs to the executive. But this has not stopped the judiciary from poking its nose where it should not.

The media, an important wing, is dominated by the corporate sector, which is on a spree to sell, not realising that consumerism and commercialism, which it has brought in the process, are harming the country. Mr Chatterjee’s remark that P3 has become P1 has the ring of truth because the best of speeches in Parliament are ignored while some wishy-washy account appears. People are bound to infer that nothing worthwhile takes place in Parliament.

The demand that meetings of parliamentary committees should be opened to the media is worth considering. But the problem will be what is newsworthy. When it comes to Parliament, the media has to bear in mind that the dignity and importance of the two Houses should not be trifled with. Without the awareness of what is right, and a desire to act according to what is right, there may be no realisation of what is wrong.

When he steps down, an era of independent and sensitive people would have come to an end. There are not many left. But Mr Chatterjee can go with the satisfaction that what he did to raise the standard of Parliament debates and its decisions changed the House from being a talking shop to a reflective and thinking institution.

In the rumble and tumble of politics and in the atmosphere where the violation of rule of law is paraded as victory, Mr Chatterjee’s effort to raise the stature of parliamentary democracy has not been given its due. But the day will come when Parliament attains the respect and pre-eminence it should have in a system where people elect the representatives without fear or favour. Services of Speaker Somnath Chatterjee will then be recalled endlessly. At that time, even the CPM may come around to take the credit that after all Mr Chatterjee was its member.

MIDDLE

A tale of four toothbrushes
by Mohanmeet Khosla

THE house was a tumbler. First there was just one toothbrush lording over all that space, swiveling at will, nonchalant about being put to use or not at all. And then she came along, demanding her share of the space even though she was just medium soft.

Soon, the little ones landed up too, all baby soft and fuzzy. And all they wanted was a cuddle. To say that it got a bit cramped in there would be the understatement of the year. To say that it began to feel like home. Well, that would be a different matter altogether.

And so time went on. The babies grew up and learnt to make their own choices. They took on their distinct identities and specific colours — pink for the girl and green for the boy. They couldn’t be an orange though. That was the lady’s colour. The gentleman was never really given a say. He was happy with whatever colour was given to him. As he said, to whoever would listen, “you can’t have racism in everything!” But then he is a great one to talk — considering he mangles a toothbrush a week. Left to him, there would soon be no race, period.

That, of course, was the girl’s toothbrush talking. He was the most well travelled of the lot, having roughed it in a tennis kit bag around the world. He’d brushed chattering teeth in cold Bulgaria, scrubbed the kebabs out in Turkey, been tempted to switch ownership in Thailand, feared ouster by an electronic gizmo in Singapore, felt at home in Pakistan... the homebodies listened, having notched up barely a couple of countries on their handles.

And so life continued to spin out its tale in the tumbler. There were days when one of the toothbrushes wouldn’t be used. It’s tough brushing your teeth when you are burning up with fever or when you are a teenager out to make your mark even though it is just with your breath! And there were weeks when one or more of the toothbrushes would disappear off on a trip or a tournament, leaving the others all mournful and lonesome.

There were also days when one of them would stalk off to the other bathroom, threatening death and vengeance, until the lure of a chocolate would draw it back to the fold.

Today, I want to reach out and hush the clock. I want to go back to the time when I bought a baby toothbrush for the first time. I want to recapture the joy of replacing it with a bigger toothbrush and then a still bigger one without the thought that one day it would outgrow the tumbler.

My daughter’s leaving home for college. She will be back, but only for the holidays. And then there will be a job, a marriage, a family. And soon, my son’s going to fly the nest too. So, back we will go to the time when there were just the two of us. And yes, with the passage of time and destiny, there will come a day when there will be just one toothbrush in that tumbler. Quite selfishly, I hope it won’t be mine.

OPED

Owners vanish as Chinese factories fold up
by Don Lee

SHAOXING, China: First, Tao Shoulong burned his company’s financial books. Then he sold his golf memberships and disposed of his Mercedes S-600 sedan.

Then he was gone.

Just like that, China’s biggest textile dye operation-with four factories, a campus the size of 31 football fields, 4,000 workers and debts amounting to at least $200 million-was history.

“We’re pretty much dead now,” said Mao Youming, one of 300 suppliers stiffed in October by Tao’s company, Jianglong Group. Lighting a cigarette in a coffee shop here, the 38-year-old spoke calmly about the bleak future for his industrial gas business. Tao owed him $850,000, Mao said, about 60 percent of his annual revenue. “We cannot pay our workers’ salaries. We are about to be bankrupt, too.”

Government statistics show that 67,000 factories were shuttered in China in the first half of the year, said Cao Jianhai, an industrial economics researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. By year’s end, he said, more than 100,000 plants will have closed.

As more factories in China shut down, stories of bosses running away have become familiar, multiplying the damage of China’s worst manufacturing decline in at least a decade.

Even before the global financial crisis, factory owners in China were straining under soaring labour and raw-materials costs, an appreciating Chinese currency and tougher legal, tax and environmental requirements. When the credit crunch took hold — prompting Western businesses to slash orders for Chinese goods and bankers to curtail loans to factories — many operations were pushed over the edge.

China’s industrial decline is a main factor in the sharp economic slowdown. The nation’s gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 9 per cent in the third quarter, the lowest in five years and worse than what analysts had forecast. China’s GDP expanded 11.9 percent last year. Now economists worry that the one big remaining engine of global growth is losing steam rapidly.

Chinese leaders are trying to maintain stable but fast growth to control rising joblessness and the risk of political and social turmoil. Last month, Beijing increased tax rebates for many exported goods and pledged to take other steps to spur development, including prodding banks to boost lending to small companies. But many businesses and analysts are not optimistic.

“Honestly, I think whatever measures government would take at the current stage would not turn around this trend,” said Ye Hang, an economics professor at Zhejiang University. “The government can only try its best to put out a fire here and there.”

In Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, Ye counted at least six major bankruptcies, including Jianglong; Feiyue Group, China’s biggest sewing-machine maker; and Zhejiang Yixin Pharmaceutical Co., among the largest in its industry.

“Of these six, one (owner) committed suicide, one was detained by police, and the remaining four all escaped,” he said. “I can imagine that, in the future, there would be more such cases as a result of the chain reaction.”

By the official numbers, Chinese exports remained brisk through September, except for a few categories such as apparel, which fell 3 per cent in September from the same month in 2007. But many exporters aren’t making a profit, and others are seeing orders shrink or are starving for cash.

“Don’t even mention the U.S. market,” said Zhong Shijun, general manager of Foshan City Golden Furniture Co. “Even our EU market is dropping seriously in the last two months, because the euro is depreciating.”

Migrant workers generally don’t qualify for unemployment benefits, and although China’s bankruptcy laws give unpaid workers priority, that’s of little value if owners run away and there are few corporate assets.

Yang Shenggang, 33, had been at a Shenzhen shoe factory for seven years, working his way up from the assembly line, making $50 a month, to become a supervisor earning six times that amount. This spring, he said, the Hong Kong owner fell behind in paying wages.

One morning in September, the plant closed.

“The boss was just gone,” Yang said. “I have to get my five months’ salary back. My family needs money to eat and live.”

Stanley Lau, deputy chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, a trade group with 3,000 members, said he didn’t know how many owners in Hong Kong had run away.

“I think it’s wrong,” Lau said. But he added: If a factory operator went by the book, it could take two years to close a shop because of regulations and red tape.

Lau’s trade group has estimated that 15 percent of the 70,000 factories run by Hong Kong businesspeople in the mainland will close this year. He says many more are likely to shut after Chinese New Year in February, when millions of migrant labourers will return home for several days.

“Once workers go home, they can close down the factory quietly,” he said in an interview in Hong Kong.

— By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post

UK closes door on asylum-seekers
by Nigel Morris

ALMOST 80,000 asylum-seekers from countries described by the Foreign Office as dangerous and unstable have been refused refuge in Britain in the past The Government was last night accused of double standards for registering alarm about 21 “major countries of concern” at the same time as refusing sanctuary to 77,000 of their citizens who fled persecution and bloodshed.

Refugees from turbulent nations such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and Sudan are being turned down at the rate of nearly 40 a day, The Independent has learnt.

Since 2003, more than 5,000 refugees from Democratic Republic of Congo, which is facing humanitarian disaster, have been told by the immigration authorities to return home.

The Foreign Office’s most recent human rights report listed 21 “major countries of concern” whose citizens suffered persecution and discrimination. Fifteen of them still have the death penalty.

The report warned of “widespread sectarian violence, lawlessness and violent insurgency” in Iraq, yet 13,131 Iraqi nationals have had applications for asylum in the UK turned down, including 1,090 last year and 520 in the first six months of this year. Enforced removals of rejected asylum-seekers have begun to the Kurdish-controlled north of the country.

A total of 10,060 Afghans — much of whose homeland is run by the Taliban and local warlords — have been refused asylum, as have 7,525 Zimbabweans.

Although no Zimbabweans have been forcibly sent back since 2006, the Government is fighting legal action to allow forcible deportations to resume to the country.

A spokesman for the UK Border Agency said: “Britain has a proud tradition of offering refugee to those in genuine fear of persecution. However, when an independent judge decides a person does not need asylum, we expect them to return home. If they do not, we will enforce their removal. Last year we removed a person every eight minutes.

Not everyone from countries where there is internal conflict needs our protection. Each case is judged on its individual merits.” But the Refugee Council’s chief executive, Donna Covey, said: “These figures show just how tough our asylum system is. People claiming asylum struggle to get a fair hearing, despite coming from countries where human rights abuse is well-documented.

“This results in a growing number of people who are unable to return home as it is too dangerous, but who have no rights in the United Kingdom, so are left destitute, with an uncertain future, and unable to work and support themselves. This situation is unacceptable. The Government needs to take a more enlightened approach and offer people some sort of stability in the UK until it is safe for them to return.”

— By arrangement with The Independent

Empty airwaves for Internet access
by Jim Puzzanghera

US Federal regulators on Tuesday approved the largest ever expansion of wireless Internet access, unanimously backing a controversial plan to allow a new generation of devices to use the empty airwaves between television channels to go online.

Dubbed “Wi-Fi on steroids” by its supporters in the high-tech industry, the plan promises to offer wireless Internet service across America — most likely for free — and spur new systems for transmitting video and other data between devices in homes.

It overcame staunch opposition from the entertainment industry, which is worried that the Web-surfing devices will interfere with TV broadcasts and wireless microphones.

Though expected to be slower and possibly less secure than commercial broadband services from cable and telephone companies, the new Internet connections will ride on the highest-quality broadcast airwaves, which are able to carry signals long distances and easily penetrate trees and walls.

For decades, those government-owned airwaves have been reserved for TV stations. But, the Federal Communications Commission, in a 5-0 vote intended to increase the reach of high-speed Internet access, approved a plan advocated by public interest groups and technology companies, including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., to allow the use of the spectrum by new laptops, mobile phones and other gadgets with built-in equipment that are expected to hit the market in about two years.

“Consumers across the country will have access to devices and services they may have only dreamed about before,” FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin said.

The high-tech companies say the “white spaces” of the airwaves that lie in between the broadcast TV channels have the potential to provide revolutionary new wireless services that people could use for free-unlike the spectrum leased by the government to cell phone companies, which then charge customers to access it.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates personally lobbied FCC commissioners to open up access to the vacant channels, which range from about one-third of the TV airwaves in major cities such as Los Angeles to three-quarters of the airwaves in rural areas.

These companies will have to build the infrastructure to connect the airwaves to the Internet, such as installing transmitters on existing cellular towers. Although they could charge users for those connections-much as some coffee shops charge for access to their Wi-Fi hot spots-Google and others are expected to offer them for free, recouping the cost through sales of white-space-enabled devices and online advertising.

“This is a clear victory for Internet users and anyone who wants good wireless communications,” said Google co-founder Larry Page, who pushed hard for the plan.

Broadcasters fiercely fought it, warning that the new devices could cause some viewers to lose their TV signals because of interference.

The issue is of particular concern because broadcasters must switch to all-digital signals in February 2009. With traditional analog TV stations, interference causes static or fuzziness. But broadcasters say digital pictures can freeze or be lost entirely if another signal is broadcast on or near the same channel.

“The commission chose a path that imperils America’s television reception in order to satisfy the ‘free’ spectrum demands of Google and Microsoft,” said David Donovan, president of the Association for Maximum Service Television, an engineering trade group of TV broadcasters.

Representatives of sports leagues, musicians and large churches have also complained about potential interference from the new Internet devices and lobbied against the changes. They worry, for example, that one of these devices in a concertgoer’s pocket would interfere with the performer’s wireless microphone.

The FCC’s field tests of early prototypes provided by Microsoft and other companies produced mixed results, with some of the devices failing to sense and avoid broadcast signals. Broadcasters said those results show the technology isn’t ready.

But FCC officials said the tests showed that it was possible for devices to use the airwaves without interference.

The devices will operate at low power and be able to use only Channels 21 to 51, where there are fewer TV stations. The FCC will give preference to devices that use technology to determine a user’s location and then avoid TV channels operating there based on a special data base, rather than devices that try to constantly sense and avoid TV signals. Devices that use sensing technology will have to go through more rigorous field testing before being certified.

And the FCC will create a “safe haven” around large sporting and performance venues, such as Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and New York’s Broadway theater district. The new mobile devices in those areas won’t be able to access channels used by wireless microphones.

— By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post