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Frittering goodwill away
RBI targets price rise |
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Holding Haryana to ransom
Will Telangana emerge?
Star vegetables
Roar of the Tigress
Batting for the ‘Pathetic Mother’
(Mis)reading the Cruella de Chua approach
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Frittering goodwill away
AT a time when there is widespread disenchantment with the Congress, the BJP as the principal opposition party had a golden opportunity to project itself before the people as a credible alternative. It is indeed a measure of BJP’s poor stewardship that despite public anger with the ruling UPA over the spate of corruption scandals and galloping prices, it is showing little signs of bouncing back. The boycott of an entire session of Parliament over the Government’s refusal to appoint a Joint Parliamentary Committee to go into corruption scandals could hardly have gone down well with people at large. Had the opposition attended the Parliament session and put the Government on the mat through extensive homework, it would have earned considerable public support. However, the path it chose — of persistently staying away from Parliament and taking to the streets has not endeared it to right-thinking people in general. To add to this, the manner in which the BJP leadership has been shielding Karnataka Chief Minister Yeddyurappa on serious corruption charges has also hit the party’s credibility hard. Had it shown the door to Yeddyurappa at the appropriate time, its campaign against UPA corruption would have acquired moral force. By letting that opportunity go by, it has failed to project itself as a party that stands for clean governance. The big fuss created by the BJP about wanting to hoist the national flag at Lal Chowk in Srinagar on Republic Day despite signs that it could give a handle to separatists to foment trouble in the sensitive Srinagar Valley is another retrograde step that shows the party in poor light. Evidently, the BJP has not been able to shake off the Advani line even after it passed the mantle on to a younger leadership. With the Lok Sabha elections over three years away, there is still time for the BJP to mend its ways and assume the role of a combative but responsible opposition. If it does so, it could still be seen by many as an alternative to the Congress. On the other hand, if it persists with its current line, it can hardly hope for a rosier future.
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RBI targets price rise EVERY quarter the RBI reviews its monetary policy. If the apex bank wants to control price rise, it raises the repo rate — the rate at which it lends money to banks — and the reverse repo — the rate at which it borrows from banks. It does the opposite to push growth. The rate hikes raise the cost of borrowing for banks, firms and individuals. On Tuesday the central bank hiked the repo and reverse repo rates. The aim is to cut money supply. As a result, interest rates go up. People get discouraged from taking loans to buy new homes, cars etc. As demand is suppressed, prices fall. The RBI considers inflation at 5.5 per cent acceptable. But its latest forecast says inflation will stay at 7 per cent by the end of this fiscal. The wholesale price-based inflation in December was 8.43 per cent. However, it is the steep rise in food prices that hurts the poor more and is politically damaging. Food prices cannot come down if money supply is reduced. For that agricultural productivity has to be raised. The production of other food items whose prices are climbing like eggs, meat, fish etc has to be increased. In the short term, food supply has to be improved and hoarding curbed. Profiteering middlemen have to be nailed. Besides, oil prices are moving up. The persistent price rise forces workers to press for a wage hike which, if done, pushes up the production cost and impacts profits and growth. This is happening in all emerging economies like China and India except Malaysia. Inflation and interest rates are rising in the developing countries. In the US and Europe interest rates have been kept low, close to zero, to perk up growth. Cheap money from the developed world moves to the developing countries, raising share and property prices. The RBI has raised the repo and reverse repo rates by just 25 basis points because it does not want to hurt growth, which got a setback in November. The RBI thinks India will still grow at 8.5 per cent this fiscal.
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Holding Haryana to ransom ONLY those who have to live through a siege know what life in a town cut off from the rest of the world is like. Residents of Jind and neighbouring areas have been facing the nightmare for 10 days now, thanks to the Jat agitation for shifting the Mirchpur trial from Delhi to Hisar and shifting of 98 accused from Tihar jail to a prison in Haryana. Trains and buses have not been allowed to ply. Essential items are in short supply. Even seriously ill people cannot get medical aid. Things are no better in Hisar and Bhiwani districts. The attempt is to brazenly armtwist the government into doing things the way the Sarvkhap Mahapanchayat wants them. The agitators seem least bothered that the matter is sub judice. It is the Supreme Court which had ordered that the trial should be transferred to a special court in Delhi because of the apprehension that the Dalits victimised by the Jats in Mirchpur violence in April, in which a differently abled girl Suman and her septuagenarian father Tara Chand were killed and many Dalit houses were burnt, would not get justice if the trial was held within Haryana. Subsequently, all the accused were also moved from Hisar jail to New Delhi’s Tihar prison at the direction of a Delhi court. So, in effect, the agitators are challenging court orders. Political parties instead of cooling tempers have been fanning the fire for narrow gains. Even otherwise, the khap panchayats enjoy a predominant position in the Jat-dominated areas and not many have dared to take them head-on. The agitators are now threatening to snap milk and water supply to Delhi. The agitation has moved from the hands of an 11-member moderate committee to a radical 41-member committee dominated by younger and inexperienced people. The previous committee had reached an agreement with a representative of the Haryana Government, PWD minister Randeep Singh Surjewala, that the government would move a petition in the court for seeking a fresh enquiry by the CBI. The new panel has rejected the offer and demanded a special investigation team (SIT) besides the shifting of the trial and the accused. Things would not have come to such a pass if the Mirchpur violence had been investigated properly and impartially right from the start.
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All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members. — Morris West
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Will Telangana emerge? IT has been reported that the Centre’s views on the Justice B.N. Srikrishna report, stating the various options in respect of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, are likely to be announced towards the end of January. The Telangana districts of the erstwhile Hyderabad state have had a troubled history from the days of Nizam’s rule. The kisan agitation against landlords, launched by the Communist underground movement, lasted till 1952 when it was directed to be called off by the dictates of Stalin himself. The agitation was led by gentlemen revolutionaries like Sundariah, Ravi Narayan Reddy and Maqdoom Hohiuddin, who was also a celebrated poet. Soon after the kisan agitation phase ended, the Telangana districts and Hyderabad city in particular witnessed a sustained agitation against the outsiders, including a large number of civil and police officers who were deputed to man the administration in the liberated Hyderabad state. The deputationists were from the erstwhile Madras Presidency and they treated the local officers and the people with scant respect. The agitation was known as the mulki agitation, which took a violent turn in many places. A mulki was the native of the erstwhile Nizam state, which meant the son of the soil. It led to the eventual repatriation of almost all the deputationists. Around the same time there was a strong agitation in the Telugu-speaking districts of the erstwhile Madras Presidency demanding Andhra state. A self-effacing Gandhian, Potti Sriramulu began a fast unto death in Vijayawada. Regrettably, no senior leader intervened in the matter. C. Rajagopalachari was the Chief Minister of Madras Presidency. Potti Sriramulu’s death led to widespread agitations all over the Telugu-speaking districts. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru announced the formation of an Andhra state consisting of the Telugu-speaking districts of Madras Presidency with Kurnool as its capital. This led to the demand for a Telangana state. The State Re-organisation Commission of 1955 led by Fazl Ali opined that the considerations in favour of a separate Telangana were such that these could not be lightly brushed aside. Since Telangana did not emerge in 1956 the agitation for a Telanga state began and it assumed serious proportions in the 1960s under the leadership of Dr. Channa Reddy and his young deputy, Mallikarjun, who were leading a newly formed party called the Telangana Praja Samiti. The Samiti won most of the Telangana seats in the 1971 general election. The Samiti joined the Congress later, but the demand for a Telangana state was never given up. The year 2009 saw a spurt in the Telangana agitation with K. Chandrasekhara Rao of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti leading the agitation. The students all over the Telangana region, particularly in Hyderabad, were largely behind him. The Centre reacted with a statement promising to consider Telangana. This was followed by the appointment of the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Committee, which has submitted a detailed report. Justice Srikrishna did a thorough job and proposed various options while examining the Telangana demand. The committee felt that the continuing demand for a separate Telangana had some merit and was not entirely unjustified. It went on to say that in case Telangana was conceded, the apprehensions of the people of Andhra regions who are settled in Hyderabad should be taken care of. Reports have come that the Telangana districts are again on the boil with the students in Hyderabad city leading the agitation. The lawyers of the various courts in Hyderabad have also joined them. For a change, they have resorted to a Gandhigiri agitation. Justice Srikrishna’s principal recommendation was that the status quo may be maintained with theTelangana region being given constitutional guarantee of a Regional Council. The lull in Telangana should not be misconstrued since violent agitations could break up any time. Voices in favour of Telangana have come from different quarters and for various reasons. The 17 MPs representing the Telangana districts are strongly in favour of Telangana and will get re-elected in the 2014 elections on this plank alone. The public sentiment in the Telangana region is so strong that the Congress MLAs are diffident on contesting elections on any platform other than Telangana. The BJP is fully supportive of Telangana. The Telugu Desam Party members from the Telangana region are also supporting the Telangana demand. In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections the dynamic Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy ensured 33 Congress MPs from the Andhra state. This is not likely to happen again. A cynical view is that if Telangana is conceded, at least17 seats from the Telangana region could be safe for the Congress. Reports have emerged recently that the Congress leadership is examining the question of appointing a Deputy Chief Minister from the Telangana region, hoping that it would assuage the feelings of the people of Telangana. Hyderabad city may have to be conceded to Telangana, even if it were made a Union Territory. Rayalaseema has considerable mineral wealth while the coastal Andhra Pradesh districts are also agriculturally and industrially advanced. They have the potential of developing into fully viable states with their own new capitals coming up within the respective states. Rayalaseema and the coastal Andhra state have a considerable scope for becoming economically successful states, comparable to any newly created state. In the event of the status quo in Andhra Pradesh not continuing and the Telangana state emerging, the people of the regions of Rayalaseema as well as the coastal area from Andhra Pradesh may prefer their own states. This is one of the options set out in the Justice Srikrishna report. These three new states, if they come into being, would be economically far more viable than the states of Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. The latest reports speak of a thinking on the part of the Centre that in the absence of any consensus on the options given by Justice B.N. Srikrishna, it will be advisable to go slow. However, a consensus is unlikely to emerge on its own unless someone in authority at the Centre takes the initiative. It has also been reported that since Andhra Pradesh remains divided and volatile, there is little possibility of a statehood Bill getting passed in the state assembly. But the question of moving a Bill in the assembly arises only when a decision is taken on conceding the Telangana demand. The logjam will have to be resolved if the Telangana agitation is not to erupt in all its fury all over again. The Home Minister is the right person to ascertain the views of the various stakeholders and come out with a solution acceptable to all
concerned. The writer is a former Governor of UP and West Bengal
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Star vegetables Spiralling
prices will soon elevate kitchen ‘maids’ (vegetables) into ‘delicate darlings’ on fancy leather embossed menu cards in top-notch restaurants, says a soothsayer whose prediction of ‘World will come to an end in 2012’ is gaining ground following the scarcity of edibles or their approaching ‘touch-me-not’ status. The initial hee-hawing, crass and naughty jokes will die and then will emerge the collective phoenix of ‘vegetable bounty’ rising with the sounds of rapturous joy, which to a human may sound as ‘wicked mirthful chuckle’ but in essence it would have the ultimate and absolute power over those who have their nasal track intact, and a tongue that retains its salivation and ‘hangs’ beyond the Lakshman rekha of the lips. The ‘Khans’, ‘Kapoors’, ‘Khannas’ and many Apollo gods like Hritiks, Akshays, Ajays, Neil Nitins of Bollywood would stomp their feet and even roundel up into broiler chickens to have their way with producers to include paeans and visuals of a delicate ‘Greeny’ bouquet in the movie, boomed the baba. Lissom lasses (having turned reed thin) will not be entirely replaced, but step down just a shade to give space to ‘Culinary delights’. ‘ The Ultimate Tease’ will mesmerise ‘starving millions’ taking them away from their worldly worries giving them luscious ‘taste’, ‘feel’, ‘oozing desire’, ‘lust’ and much more, say the wide-eyed actors with ‘dollar dreams’ to the film producers . And it will continue to bring taalis’ too, they clap vigorously to show their stamina. The marketing honchos will grab the idea and announce —‘Movie promos would be preceded by a top-of-green-rack PERFUME collection’. The top notch ones ‘Giggle Garlic’ ‘Onion Belch’ and ‘Radish Burp’ will share space with ‘Coriander Crush’ , ‘Tomato Orbs’, ‘Ginger Gargle’, ‘Mast Carrot’, ‘Royal Brinjal’, ‘Icy Pea’ and ‘Musk Mushroom’ in the first launch. A multi starrer song will have Hritik singing to ‘garlic’: Bas itni siiiiiii tum se guzarish hai ..ye jo barrish hai …issss mein apni bahon se tumko mit jane se bacha lu ..bus itni si guzarish hai …’ Aamir will step in wooing the ‘onion’:“Chand sifarish jo karta hamari, deta woh tumko bata, sharm-o-haya ke parde gira ke (onion peels) karni hain humko khata, zidd hai ab toh hain khud ko mitana, hona hai tujh mein fanaa. The baba’s cackle had now turned into a cacophony. I felt so bloated that I was ready to fly like a hot air balloon: “Stop it ! Stop it”, I shouted. ‘It is already 2012! Get your cremation pyre ready if you want to go to
heaven!”
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Strict vs lenient upbringing. The latest battleground of the ‘clash of civilisations’ is how mothers raise their children. Amy Chua is a Yale University professor whose memoir chronicles how she raised her two daughters. The book has ignited international interest and has provided fodder for the battle between Western and Oriental values. The book, and the debate around it, are of interest to all parents as they make choices that they hope will be the best ones for their children.
Roar of the Tigress
THE US already has its soccer moms, hockey moms, and even Sarah Palin’s merry band of Mamma Grizzlies. But a new brand of pushy parent is suddenly the talk of Middle America: the no-nonsense “Tiger Mother.” Amy Chua, a little-known law professor at Yale University, coined the phrase last Saturday, in a newspaper article outlining her extraordinarily robust attempts to raise high-achieving kids. Within hours, she had become a media sensation. Her new book, a parenting manual called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother shot to number six in the Amazon sales charts. Her article, headlined “Why Chinese Mother Are Superior,” is the week’s most read article in the Wall Street Journal. It has generated a quarter of a million “likes” and six thousand reader comments, most of them hostile. Chua has meanwhile been touring the US chat-show circuit, and radio news bulletins, and cropping up in newspaper editorials, having sparked a furious debate over the rights and wrongs of what she calls touchy-feely Western parenting. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Chua’s book outlines the hard-line philosophy towards child rearing. It lists “watching TV,” playing computer games, taking part in school plays, and “getting any grade less than an A,” among the many things children should never be allowed to get away with. Also forbidden in her household is “playing any instrument other than the piano or violin,” “not playing the piano or violin,” and failing to be “the number one student in every subject except gym and drama.” In a society which has slipped consistently down the world rankings for academic achievement in recent decades, at the same time as parenting standards have become ever more permissive, Chua’s book has struck a raw nerve. Some call her a borderline child abuser; others say that her “tough love” approach gets results and should be widely copied. Plenty of others say that it advances a dangerous stereotype, at a time when America is increasingly paranoid about the rise of China. Chua, 48, is happy to take the controversy on the chin, if only because it helps sell books. In one passage of her parenting manual she talks about shouting at her daughters Sophia, 18, and Louisa, 14, almost daily. They were dubbed “lazy” and “garbage” when they didn’t get full marks on homework. If they failed to complete 90 minutes of music practice each night, Chua would set fire to their teddy bears and threaten to donate their dolls houses to a charity store. With her husband, a fellow academic called Jeb Rubenfeld, she tells how she decided to bring the girls up in the Jewish faith, but force them to learn fluent Mandarin, a language that neither parent speaks (Chua’s native tongue is Hokkien Chinese), from a live-in coach. She talks with particular nostalgia about her efforts to teach Louisa a particularly tough piano solo. “I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn’t let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling.” Invited onto NBC’s Today programme this week, she said that her methods worked: both girls are “straight A students”. In a small concession, she has therefore allowed them to learn tennis. “I wish I hadn’t been so harsh with them at times, but if I had it to do all over again, I think I would basically do the same thing, with small adjustments,” she said. “I think there are many aspects of Western parenting that some Asian parents find horrifying.” Others aren’t so sure. High suicide rates among Indian and Chinese immigrant children have been blamed on pressure to succeed, and there has been dissent about “Tiger Parenting” from within the Chinese community. “My first reaction was, ‘Is this a joke?’ I kept waiting for the punch line,” Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, 44, a second-generation Chinese American mother of four from Michigan told the Associated Press. “Her methods are so crude. The humiliations and the shaming. The kids will hear that voice in their heads for the rest of their
lives.” — The Independent
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Batting for the ‘Pathetic Mother’
I
you ask me, it is time to hear it for The Pathetic Mother, who might not have realised how pathetic she was until reading about the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua, a Chinese-American mother who banned her children from sleepovers, play-dates, watching TV, owning pets, and not being the top student in any subject other than drama or gym. The Pathetic Mother knew she was a pathetic mother when she read this list and thought: “If only my child were good at gym, it would be something, no? But, alas, I can’t even get the dolt to put in extra time at the monkey bars.” The Pathetic Mother has many defining characteristics. The Pathetic Mother goes through the TV listings with her children at the start of every week, allowing them to pick a programme a day they truly want to watch, writes out a list, attaches it to the fridge, and then ignores it because the alternative might be having to play Ludo, which is so boring she always wishes she were dead. The Pathetic Mother pays for a full term of recorder lessons then allows her child to attend only the once because she can’t think of a decent enough response to the protest: “Mum, you promised me a world of musical delight, but it’s only a stick with a hole in it.” The Pathetic Mother caves in to her children’s demand for a pet, although at least has the good sense to direct them towards Sea Monkeys, which can be tipped down the toilet once the children realise that they grow into slimy flecks and not little pirates with cutlasses, as shown on the box. The Pathetic Mother recognises that sleepovers are evil but doesn’t have the heart to ban them on the grounds that, if the children return ashen-faced and good-for-nothing what are the chances they’ll insist on a game of Ludo or, worse, Monopoly, which goes on for five lifetimes and an eternity? Nil, she’d have thought. The Pathetic Mother loves her children but when she witnesses them falling off the monkey bars yet again can’t help but think: “Gifted? Probably not. Now, where’s that ambulance. Ideally, it would be nice to get back in time for Bargain Hunt.” And while Pathetic Mother is courteous to Tiger Mother — you are about to ferry them to extra, extra, extra maths, you say; interesting — she would quite like to lay her out all the same. If you have never felt similarly, do ask yourself this: “Am I pathetic enough?” We don’t just accept anybody, you know.
— The Independent
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(Mis)reading the Cruella de Chua approach LATE last year, I talked to the American legal academic and detective novelist Jed Rubenfeld. Calm and courteous, he told me about the pleasant view from his house in New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University. He mentioned his need to escape his desk in order to spend more time with his two fast-growing teenage children. Little did I know then that these innocent details of Ivy League domestic routine came from the heart of (if you credit a tribe of foam-flecked pundits) the most infamous household in the Western world. For Professor Rubenfeld, whose novels The Interpretation of Murder and The Death Instinct delightfully stir Sigmund Freud into the mix of period crime, is married to his colleague on the Yale law faculty, Professor Amy Chua. And Amy Chua has to many thousands of bloggers, columnists and assorted opinion-pushers suddenly emerged as a sinister, mythical mash-up of Dragon Empress, Wicked Witch, Snow Queen and — above all — Cruel Mother. Selective editing and skewed presentation have contrived to turn her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother into a child-abuse handbook that tells parents how to hothouse their little devils into class-topping, violin-wielding, race-winning prodigies of super-high achievement via a regime of overwork, insults, punishments and threats. Read the reactions and you will conclude that the Cruella de Chua approach makes Spartans look like cissies. Or so the story goes. Why not do something suitably nerdy and dutiful, and read the book? Because it’s a treat from first to last: ruefully funny, endlessly self-deprecating, riven with ironies, as Chua offloads her insecurities onto daughters Sophia and Lulu and then flays herself into paroxysms of guilt and stress for doing so. A heartless blueprint for breeding neurotic billionaires? Unlikely, as most of the family drama stems from Sophia’s progress on the piano and Lulu’s on the violin — a pretty quixotic obsession for any parent hung up on material success. Besides, any woman who thinks that practising fiendishly tough pieces by Bartok and Prokofiev with a succession of loopy musical gurus has more of a point than playdates and sleepovers will win many votes. The book’s climax arrives not with over-achieving success but farcical failure. Rebel Lulu erupts in a nuclear tantrum at a Moscow restaurant: “I hate the violin. I HATE my life.” As Chua reflects, “I’d made a career out of spurning the kind of Western parents who can’t control their kids. Now I had the most disrespectful, rude, violent, out-of-control kid of all.” Then a road to reconciliation opens. Now Chua even grants her smiling approval when Lulu wants to try her hand at “improv”. Improv? Ye gods! Dragon lady, where are you when your daughter really needs you? Do we simply want upbeat platitudes in accounts of family life, or else their mirror-image in fantasies of unmaternal sadism, and not the truth about love as anxious projection (Freud might have a lot to say) and conscience-shredding ambivalence? Maybe Chua’s major crime is not to advocate a “Chinese” model of high-pressure parenting — in reality, as she admits, one shared by plenty of migrant communities — but to sound more like a grouchy oriental Philip Larkin than our feel-good culture allows: “The truth is I’m not good at enjoying life. It’s not one of my strengths. I have a lot of to-do lists and hate massages and Caribbean vacations.” Chua’s Eyeore-ish voice is a
knock-out. —The Independent
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