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2G takes its toll again
Making youth employable |
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Newest nation
Confusing political scenario
The linguist dogs
How to survive the age of distraction
The lost art of reading
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2G takes its toll again The resignation of Union Textiles Minister Dayanidhi Maran from the Union Cabinet was inevitable in the face of the CBI’s observation to the Supreme Court that there was “prima facie material to suggest that there was an element of coercion by him” in telecom company Aircel selling its shares to a Malaysian telecom firm, Maxis.
The manner in which mobile phone licences were handed out to Aircel at throwaway prices after it passed into the Maxis group’s hands was in apparent sharp contrast to how the erstwhile Aircel owner Sivasankaran was denied the licence for months. It would indeed be difficult for Dayanidhi Maran to stave off allegations of unfair arm-twisting as investigations continue. The bravado that he has been showing is, to say the least, misplaced. That the CBI is also investigating whether there was a quid pro quo in Maxis investing a substantial amount (about Rs 700 crore) in the direct-to-home and FM radio businesses of the Sun TV group could put Dayanidhi Maran and his brother Kalanidhi (the owner of Sun TV) in an even bigger soup. It is this that apparently prompted the DMK leadership to show Maran the door. All this also raises the question of why the Prime Minister succumbed to DMK pressure in the first instance to give the Telecom portfolio to Dayanidhi Maran when his family had substantial stake in the Telecom sector. This should prompt new thinking on how coalition partners should hold their horses, and how the Prime Minister must assert more in ministry-making. It is indeed odd of DMK supremo Karunanidhi to shift the blame for the adverse publicity for the 2G scam on the media. Maran’s is the second skeleton to tumble out of the cupboard after his successor as Telecom Minister, A. Raja, was forced to quit in the wake of strong evidence of his involvement in the scam. Karunanidhi’s daughter Kanimozhi too is cooling her heels in Tihar jail for possible involvement in the same scam. After the drubbing that the DMK received in the recent Assembly elections, Karunanidhi must introspect rather than finding fault with others. As for the UPA, the exit of Maran goes to show that its cup of woes is full to the brim.
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Making youth employable
The
Centre’s Rs 1,000-crore initiative to make educated youth from the troubled Jammu and Kashmir employable is a welcome step taken on the recommendation of an expert group headed by C. Rangarajan. The money will be used to fund corporate training of 40,000 youth in five years. Such training would have been unnecessary had regular educational institutions aligned teaching to the needs of business and industry. Years of militancy have left education, like much else in J & K, in disarray. The 2011 census shows the state’s literacy rate at 68.74 per cent has not grown adequately. The quality of education is not up to the mark, particularly outside main towns. The spending on education has suffered as limited resources have been diverted to fight militancy. Substandard education followed by prolonged unemployment can be frustrating and can drive youth to arms to fight injustices, real or propagated. There is no reliable estimate of the extent of unemployment. Officially, the state had 5.67 lakh youth registered with the employment centres on December 2009. Development has lagged due to paucity of public resources and private investment. With a population of 1.25 crore — 1.04 per cent of the country’s — and 6.76 per cent of India’s geographical area, J and K is among the laggard states. Violence has taken its toll on the economy, particularly tourism, which is the mainstay of most people. There is no healthy business climate. Industrial growth has been hit by lack of sound infrastructure. Agriculture and allied sectors have not grown to their potential, shrinking employment at the local level. This has triggered migration to cities in and outside the state, and even abroad. Those who stay back are in constant danger of drifting towards the wrong side of the law or landing in hardliners’ welcoming arms. In this context, the Centre’s gesture is well thought out. The Omar Abdullah government needs to do more at the local level.
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Newest nation The newest country of the world has joined the comity of nations today, amidst ecstatic but chaotic celebrations in the capital Juba. Citizens of South Sudan have every reason to be in raptures: their dream has come true after two decades of north-south civil war that left at least two million people dead.
Now that the culmination of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 is finally a reality, Africa’s country number 54 – which happens to be bigger than Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi combined – hopes to cash in on its immense natural wealth. It produces about 375,000 barrels of oil per day, a bounty which can generate billions a year, provided it can tap the resource in peace, which is at a premium. President Salva Kiir has got on his head a crown which comes equipped with thorns. Rebels are still fighting in nine of the 10 states. North Sudan is still smarting over the loss of this oil-rich region and is likely to do all in its powers to bleed it to the extent possible. The Muslim north has been in conflict with the majority Christian south for decades and the animosity is unlikely to end even with separation. The pipelines through which its oil goes to the Red Sea port of Port Sudan are located in the north. The lack of infrastructure in the riot-ravaged South Sudan is appalling. The whole country of eight million boasts of only 50 km of paved roads. A majority of its people live on less than a dollar a day. It will require a lot of international help to come to grips with these harsh realities. The US and China are stepping up their presence in a big way. Perhaps India, from whose Constitution South Sudan has borrowed some features, would also be following in their footsteps. India’s first Election Commissioner Sukumar Sen had conducted elections in undivided Sudan nearly 60 years ago. This time Mr Sandeep Shastri, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Bangalore’s Jain University, is one of the experts who helped draft the statute of the country.
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Don't be afraid to go after what you want to do, and what you want to be. But don't be afraid to be willing to pay the price. — Lane Frost
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Confusing political scenario The Manmohan Singh government has reached a plateau. Where it goes from here is the question being debated and fought over by the ruling and opposition parties at various levels.
At one level, Anna Hazare has staked his claim successfully to carve out his space as a citizen because his anti-corruption campaign through the institution of an effective Lokpal — the nature of the ombudsman’s powers and role have still to be determined — has caught popular imagination. Baba Ramdev falls in a different category because although the government proved to be embarrassingly deferential to him, the manner of his exit from Delhi and the seemingly political games he was playing left a mixed picture in the public mind. It has, of course, been a season of scams and, as the government has sought to field the cornucopia of troubles as defensively as it could, its strategy to go in for an all-party meeting on the Lokpal measure brought out the dilemmas of not merely the Congress but also the other major party, the BJP. The problem, of course, was that in the tempest of charges and counter-charges, it was difficult to reconcile the groundswell of popular anger at the prevailing levels of cooperation with the unalterable fact that politicians cannot go beyond the limitations of the Constitution, and any amendments must be carefully thought out and calmly debated. The rub is that a succession of Lok Sabhas for 40 years and more have been unable to pass a workable Lokpal Bill and some of the suggestions being made can please the proverbial aam admi but do not make sense. Second, while members of Parliament are not always paragons of virtue, it would negate the essence of parliamentary democracy if their conduct in the House were to be circumscribed by an outside authority, however noble that person might be. Rather, the solution to a better House would lie in framing more stringent regulations before a person could be allowed to contest a seat. Much rhetoric surrounds the question of bringing the Prime Minister and the higher judiciary into the Lokpal net. On the first question, the two main national parties, whatever their postures, know that were the country’s chief executive to be hemmed in by restrictions of a new order, he would lose the dignity and effectiveness of his office and lay himself open to being influenced by extraneous factors in discharging his onerous responsibilities. The Congress suggestion that the Prime Minister should be held accountable for his actions but only after he leaves office is a sound one — rather like the practice followed in France’s executive presidency — but has been caught up in partisan warfare. Second, by any criterion, bringing the higher judiciary in the Lokpal’s net would be disastrous because it would negate the basic laws of judicial independence. The answer lies in effective judicial oversight of senior judges by their peers. The BJP, it must be said, seems more interested in extracting the most political mileage out of these issues, rather than in helping surmount a difficult phase in the country’s life. Its leaders, including Mr L.K. Advani, have been striking poses on the Prime Minister’s accountability and the higher judiciary without any thought for the morrow. Either it believes that it can change its stance before any great harm is done to the country’s polity or it is happy to take all the potshots it can at the Congress without thinking of what is to follow. The tragedy, of course, is that unlike in past decades, there is scarcity of true leadership qualities in today’s political class. There is an obvious handicap as far as the Congress is concerned. Dr Manmohan Singh believes in understatement at the best of times and is hamstrung by the twin leadership arrangement in which public perception of real power residing outside the Prime Minister’s office hardly enhances his stature. His silences have been long and puzzling and the recent experiment of limiting an off-camera meeting with a few editors while releasing his answers later is a parody of the traditional free-wheeling press conferences Prime Ministers used to hold in the full glare of television cameras. Mrs Sonia Gandhi has acquired confidence and self-assurance over the years, but her “foreign origin” remains a political issue and it is almost universally taken for granted that her son Rahul is waiting in the wings to be shepherded into the Prime Minister’s office. There is much speculation over the inspiration for a prominent party general secretary, Mr Digvijay Singh, giving vent to his view that it was time for Mr Rahul Gandhi to take over. Whatever the reasons for springing this idea on an unsuspecting public, it hardly behoves a party functionary to denigrate his Prime Minister in quite this fashion, whatever his later explanations. Nor is the situation more promising in the case of the main opposition party, the BJP, eagerly awaiting its chance to return to power at the Centre in the next general election, whenever it is held. Mr Advani’s titular role as the senior leader is inhibiting the atmosphere in which Ms Sushma Swaraj is seemingly cancelled out by the other aspirant for the crown, Mr Arun Jaitley. The third leader in the field, Mr Narendra Modi, has ambition and has demonstrated his administrative abilities at the state level but remains tainted by the 2002 Gujarat carnage and retains a streak of intolerance that cannot gel with a multi-religious and multi-ethnic country. Perhaps the greatest flaw in the BJP is the lengthening shadow of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh over the party. The relationship between the two has always been a symbiotic one, but in the days of Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s leadership, the party was several notches higher than the RSS. All senior BJP leaders paid public obeisance to the RSS, but they exercised their mind in running the party and governing the country for a six-year stint. Today, it would appear to the outsider that the foisting of Mr Nitin Gadkari as the party president was a signal that it was in the power of the RSS to appoint whomsoever it wanted, despite the suitability or otherwise of the person concerned. The fact that Mr Hazare has encroached upon the space he has, whatever the merits of his specific proposals, speaks volumes for the health of the political party system. One would hope that out of this confused state of our polity the fog will lift in the not too distant future to show the country the way. Let us have an effective Lokpal by all means but let us not sacrifice the gains of the past 60 years and more — and there have been substantial gains — at the altar of political
opportunism. |
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The linguist dogs
Two
dogs — Miss Jimmy and Master Kaalu — have adopted us. They come to our front door in the morning, sit all day there and, with sunset, go to place not known to us. My wife, in the morning, gives them fresh baked rotis along with luxurious dollop of ghee or butter, which they relish. I do not know whether it has increased their triglyceride level or not because they are aam kuttas and like aam aadmi, they are least bothered about their cholesterol concentration. These aam kuttas, however, are anti — aam aadmi and fiercely bark on all bipeds barring elegantly dressed and uniformed school children. The result is that the newspaperman, postman and the LPG cylinderwala have given the notice of termination of their services to us as long as the growling vermin espouse us. I have, now, to foot a distance to avail of the facilities because Jimmy and Kaalu have decided not to budge despite lots of shoo-shooing on our part. When I started seeing small smelly pyramids formed on the road, I thought that the dogs had Egyptian influence so I checked on their curricula vitae and found that Master was the son of Miss but, today, they lived as man and wife. This type of incestuous tendency was also present in Egypt where real brothers and sisters married each other; Cleopatra was married to her brother Ptolemy. So, I raised the worth of these guttersnipes by announcing that they belonged to an Egyptian breed. Then I read that a recent research had disclosed that in Nazi Germany a mongrel had said, ‘Mein Fuherer’ when asked who Adolf Hitler was. I was excited with the notion that dogs could talk like humans otherwise all of us know that the dogs only bark and, sometimes, to the embarrassment of the owners. Madam Singh had, once, hid a puppy in her bosom that she wanted to smuggle to India. All went well in the channels of the airport till her bosom started barking and then she had to pass through an indescribable exploration by the custom staff. She would have saved herself from the ordeal if her puppy knew how to wail like a child. I wanted my mutts to know languages more than barking and talk like their German counterparts and so started tutoring their vocal cords to utter ‘run away’ to be addressed to the all-destroying monkeys but found the Miss and the Master in a friendly ‘chatter’ with the quadrupeds when they attacked and actually ransacked my kitchen garden. The aam kuttas had learnt the foreign language of the red-faced – a sign of progress towards a pedigreed existence away from the non-entity status in this country like that of aam aadmi dabbling in dear, dear mother
tongue. |
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How to survive the age of distraction
In
the 20th century, all the nightmare-novels of the future imagined that books would be burnt. In the 21st century, our dystopias imagine a world where books are forgotten. To pluck just one, Gary Steynghart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story describes a world where everybody is obsessed with their electronic Apparat — an even more omnivorous i-Phone with a flickering stream of shopping and reality shows and porn — and have somehow come to believe that the few remaining unread paper books let off a rank smell. The book on the book, it suggests, is closing. I have been thinking about this because I recently moved flat, which for me meant boxing and heaving several Everests of books, accumulated obsessively since I was a kid. Ask me to throw away a book, and I begin shaking like Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice and insist that I just couldn’t bear to part company with it, no matter how unlikely it is I will ever read (say) a 1,000-page biography of little-known Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar. As I stacked my books high, and watched my friends get buried in landslides of novels or avalanches of polemics, it struck me that this scene might be incomprehensible a generation from now. Yes, a few specialists still haul their vinyl collections from house to house, but the rest of us have migrated happily to MP3s, and regard such people as slightly odd. Does it matter? What was really lost? The book — the physical paper book — is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It’s hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books. Encroachment of the buzz In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading — Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating — but then, a few years ago, he “became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read”. He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. “What I’m struggling with,” he writes, “is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there’s something out there that merits my attention.” Need for mental silence I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That’s getting harder to find. No, don’t misunderstand me. I adore the web, and they will have to wrench my Twitter feed from my cold dead hands. This isn’t going to turn into an antediluvian rant against the glories of our wired world. But there’s a reason why that word — “wired” — means both “connected to the internet” and “high, frantic, unable to concentrate”. In the age of the internet, physical paper books are a technology we need more, not less. In the 1950s, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote: “The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority. We have not yet quite reached the point where young competitors, such as radio, cinema, etc, have taken over the functions from the book it can’t afford to lose.” Regaining the world We have now reached that point. And here’s the function that the book — the paper book that doesn’t beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once — does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: “Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.” A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent of data and laying down on an object that will still look the same a hundred years from now. The French writer Jean-Phillipe De Tonnac says “the true function of books is to safeguard the things that forgetfulness constantly threatens to destroy.” It’s precisely because it is not immediate — because it doesn’t know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen’s apartment — that the book matters. That’s why we need books, and why I believe they will survive. Because most humans have a desire to engage in deep thought and deep concentration. Those muscles are necessary for deep feeling and deep engagement. Most humans don’t just want mental snacks forever; they also want meals. Temptation
Kindled I’m not against e-books in principle — I’m tempted by the Kindle — but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words — offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person’s internal life — can sing. So how do we preserve the mental space for the book? We are the first generation to ever use the internet, and when I look at how we are reacting to it, I keep thinking of the Inuit communities I met in the Arctic, who were given alcohol and sugar for the first time a generation ago, and guzzled them so rapidly they were now sunk in obesity and alcoholism. Sugar, alcohol and the web are all amazing pleasures and joys — but we need to know how to handle them without letting them addle us. Keeping a digital diet The idea of keeping yourself on a digital diet will, I suspect, become mainstream soon. Just as I’ve learned not to stock my fridge with tempting carbs, I’ve learned to limit my exposure to the web — and to love it in the limited window I allow myself. I have installed the programme “Freedom” on my laptop: it will disconnect you from the web for however long you tell it to. It’s the Ritalin I need for my web-induced ADHD. I make sure I activate it so I can dive into the more permanent world of the printed page for at least two hours a day, or I find myself with a sense of endless online connection that leaves you oddly disconnected from yourself. TS Eliot called books “the still point of the turning world”. He was right. It turns out, in the age of super-speed broadband, we need dead trees to have fully living minds. — The Independent |
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The lost art of reading Such
a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time. Here we have my reading problem in a nutshell, for books insist we take the opposite position, that we immerse, slow down. “After September 11,” Mona Simpson wrote as part of a 2001 LA Weekly round-table on reading during wartime, “I didn’t read books for the news. Books, by their nature, are never new enough.” By this, Simpson doesn’t mean she stopped reading; instead, at a moment when it felt as if time was on fast forward, she relied on books to pull back from the onslaught, to distance herself from the present as a way of reconnecting with a more elemental sense of who we are. Of course, the source of my distraction is somewhat different: not an event of great significance but the usual ongoing trivialities. I am too susceptible, it turns out, to the tumult of the culture, the sound and fury signifying nothing. For many years, I have read, like E.I. Lonoff in Philip Roth’s “The Ghost Writer,” primarily at night -- a few hours every evening once my wife and kids have gone to bed. These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don’t. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I’m reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I’m struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age. Yet there is time, if we want it. Contemplation is not only possible but necessary, especially in light of all Excerpted from the article, The lost art of reading, published in the Los Angeles Times on August 9, 2008. The writer, a former book editor of the paper, later wrote a book based on this article.
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