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Unwarranted US comment
A backward step |
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Murky scene in Gujarat
Military losing its shine
Lost relations
When some parts of a story are left to imagination, a few readers take it literally. From wondering ‘what if’ Harry Potter’s
parents had lived to imagining Mr Darcy’s illegitimate son, a reader’s imagination in fanfiction knows no boundaries…
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Unwarranted US comment
The US is finding it difficult to shed its old habit of poking its nose in the internal affairs of other countries. It is time the fading super power realised that the US has ceased to be an example for other democracies to emulate in the post-9/11 era. Its conduct has shown that the US has the least regard for human rights and democratic freedoms when it comes to safeguarding its own interests. It has a history of promoting dictators when this served the larger global interests of the US. Most Pakistani military dictators and tyrants in West Asia and other parts of the world enjoyed US backing. Fighting for the cause of democracy has never been the top priority for Washington DC. It is,therefore, surprising how the US has chosen to pontificate India that New Delhi should exercise “appropriate democratic restraint” while dealing with peaceful protests like the one being held by social activist Anna Hazare on the issue of corruption. The uninformed and outlandish comment was made by US State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland when, during a media briefing she was confronted with a question on Anna Hazare’s hunger strike, set to begin on August 16. This was on the lines of the remarks made on Kashmir by Ms Robin Raphel when she was appointed US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs. US leaders should remember that India knows how to handle protests on any issue by its citizens. Moreover, Anna Hazare’s drive against corruption is a purely internal matter of India. Where is, therefore, the need for the US to lecture India on how to handle a situation that may arise in the course of constitutionally allowed agitations by its citizens. It is a different matter that the fast to be undertaken by Anna Hazare in protest against the Lokpal Bill, being studied by a parliamentary committee, is unjustifiable, as Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram has said. No one can question Parliament’s right to enact laws. One can only press for the inclusion of any particular viewpoint in the Bill. In any case, this is India’s internal problem and the US has no business to make any unwarranted comment in this regard. |
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A backward step
The government’s decision to place Air India under the supervision of a joint secretary belonging to the Indian Administrative Service marks the airline’s return to the old system of complete government control and bureaucratization. The country’s flagship carrier with its characteristic Maharaja will now be run by one of the several mid-to-senior ranking bureaucrats of the generalist IAS posted in the Union Ministry of Civil Aviation. The airline which, for many years, has been a beleaguered national symbol, presents a microcosm of poor governance that typifies the government-run service sector. For long now Air India has been suffering from mounting losses, huge debt, strikes caused by disgruntled employees and mediocrity that have combined to adversely affect the airline’s prestige and image. Successive governments have struggled to find ways to take this airline out of the red. But all efforts have been in vain. In 1993, the government even appointed Russi Mody as Chairman, who after a year of effort, quit in disgust saying that this was an organization sans punishment, reward and participation with a horse and a mule being treated alike. In 2001, the government had briefly even contemplated taking the radical step of selling the airline. So severe has been government interference in the functioning of the national carrier that several chairman-cum-managing directors have in the recent past fallen out of favour with the Union Aviation Minister. The national airline needs to be taken seriously and it is hoped that appointing a bureaucrat from a generalist service is only an interim arrangement and not intended to be the long term solution for this airline which in the early 1960s became the world’s first airline to completely convert to jet aircraft. The airline needs considerable capitalization and re-organisation, fresh talent and a highly motivated team along with a credible turnaround plan. More than that, the government needs to be prompt to the needs and requirements of the airline and to minimize interference if it is serious about restoring the airline to its earlier days of glory |
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Murky scene in Gujarat
The search for truth behind the post-Godhra riots of 2002 is becoming more Kafkaesque. The Gujarat High Court rejected IPS officer Rahul Sharma’s petition seeking details of the grounds on which he was served a show-cause notice in February this year. The government had earlier suspended Sanjeev Bhatt, an IG-rank police officer on Monday. Bhatt was charged of unauthorised absence from duty and for misusing official vehicle. The flimsiness of charges in this case is evidence enough of the charades being played in Gujarat. Sharma had submitted a CD containing phone call records of police officials and political leaders to various probe panels inquiring into the 2002 post-Godhra riots, including the Special Investigation Team and the Nanavati Commission. The notice charges Sharma of violating protocol — he did not take permission from the government before submitting the CDs to the commission. The series of charges and counter-charges in probing in post-Godhra riots go round in circles, rattling a sound, perceptive mind. After suspension Bhatt said, “They ( the government) can do anything they want.” In between the whistle-blower officers like Bhatt, Sharma and Ranjit Rai and the government-scores of legal reports, agencies, committees and power blocks whose vested interests crisscross, add more shades of grey to the already elusive truth. No wonder, after alleging that SIT had little interest in probing his allegations, Bhatt said that it was upto an appropriate agency to get the information out of him. This is a serious charge, a dismissal of all that has been done so far to uncover truth behind the communal riots of Gujarat. Coming from a person who knows how the wheels of the system move, it is more damning. On Thursday, Home Minister P. Chidambaram suggested that if need be the centre can take ‘certain decisions at certain stage’ if the concerned officers invoked the rules. This has triggered a verbal duel between the BJP and the Congress, further politicising the search for truth. If the state government is serious about probing the truth, it should listen to its own officers. Or, should drop the charade. |
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There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. — Albert Einstein |
Military losing its shine
In a developing economy, well on the road to prosperity, preference for government jobs tends to decline. This has not happened in India so far due to a number of reasons. One, government jobs offer unmatched security of employment. Two, seniority overrides merit. Three, mediocrity prospers, promotions are plentiful and finally, there is much rent to be collected with minimum risk. Government employees have still not shed the colonial era hang-ups of being masters and not public servants: ego and false notions of status persist. Within the ambit of government jobs, the military has lost much of its shine because hardly any of the pluses of government jobs apply to this service. Economically well-placed democracies offer many incentives and perks to make military service attractive and somewhat competitive with other job avenues so as to draw on the right material. As opposed to this, in India, sustained attempts have been made to make this service more and more unattractive, by disadvantaging it in every possible way. Even after spending huge funds on T V advertisements and lowering of intake standards (in recently held promotion tests, 80 per cent of the officers failed in Part B and D examinations) the military has not been able to fill its huge deficiencies in the officer cadre (approximately 24 per cent) As the country’s economy further improves, less suitable candidates will come forward to join the military but, instead, will be attracted to lucrative jobs from a wide range of other options, where the intelligent and the more ambitious can realise their full potential. This relegation of the military as a profession, which bears on the quality of intake into the officer cadre, will eventually impact our ability to face future security challenges: internal and external. Merely modernising and upgrading equipment and weapon systems, building defence infrastructure, etc, will be of little avail if those who have to strategise and exploit their potential to the optimum and lead troops into a battle do not measure up to future demands of national security. Much before World War II the American government wanted to reduce its defence expenditure by cutting down the strength of the officer cadre by 12000. Speaking before the Senate, General Douglas MacArthur, the greatest general in American history, said, “If you want to cut everything out of the National Defence Act, the least element should be the Officer Corps. If you have to discharge every soldier, if you have to do away with everything else, I would still professionally advise you to keep those 12000 officers. They are the main spring of the whole mechanism; each one of them would be worth a thousand men at the beginning of a war.” Incidentally, the Indian Army is short of 12000 or so officers. Persistently downgrading of the military by the government and taking pot shots at it by all and sundry is considered fair game. If the Army Chief talks of good governance, some MPs want him sacked. If the Service Chiefs stands up for their officers and troops against the vagaries of the Pay Commission and Committee of Secretaries, an editor of a national newspaper wants them sacked. Yes, sacked and no less! For these liberals, the civilian control of the military only means, “not to reason why, ---!” When asked whether the Indian Army can do a “Jeronimo” (elimination of Osama bin Laden), the Army Chief says “yes” (without naming the target/country ) and the media and a whole lot of others are at his throat. Raising the issue of his date of birth in public, leaking to the media that government has overruled his visit to attend the biennial conference of the Pacific Armies Chiefs does deliver grievous blows to the institution of the Chief. This periodic targeting the Chief greatly irks the serving and veterans. When the Home Secretary makes a statement, almost sabotaging the Foreign Minister’s visit to Pakistan, there is not a whisper in the media or the government! We do have some strange notions of an Army Chief’s functioning in Indian democracy. Due to periodic transfers in the armed forces, children’s education suffers immensely. To overcome this drawback, the military started to run its own schools and a number of professional colleges. Now the Supreme Court has ruled that admission into the military's professional colleges should be opened to civilian children too. Why then should the military run such colleges? It is surely not the military’s job to run educational institutions for others. The Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) has objected to military having golf courses in the cantonments on its own land (class A land) and that golf is not a recognised game! Surely, the military can use its vacant land in the manner it feels best and also the games its officers can and need to play. It is the military authorities’ concern and responsibility to ensure that their officers remain physically fit and mentally alert. There is a golf course in the President’s Estate in New Delhi. One wonders if, according to the CAG, golf is an authorised game for the President! The Ministry of Defence (MoD) wants to gain control over units’ and formations’ private funds. The government created a department in the MoD for the welfare of ex-servicemen with no one from the defence services on its staff. The attitude of the staff in this department towards veterans is completely negative, bordering on hostility. At another level, their Supreme Commander is in total denial of the painful experience of veterans returning their medals. These are few cases out of the numerous where the military faces pinpricking and neglect. This constant and needless needling and driving the military against the wall will greatly demotivate the serving and further dissuade those who may want to joint the military’s officer cadre. The most negative image of the military as a career is reflected in the condition and the manner of treatment of veterans by the government. Unless this picture is drastically recast, all efforts at TV advertisements at great expense will be a sheer waste of money. The authorities continue to remain divorced from the reality. Such treatment, the inherent drawbacks and travails of military life bear heavily in selecting the military as a career in India. Add to this the risk to life and limbs. With very few promotions which come rather late in service and no provision for “non-functional pay”, which is available to all class 1 central services, few suitable candidates want to opt for the military. However, here we are concerned with making the best of a bad situation and work out means and methods to redraw the contours of the officer cadre so as to attract whatever could be termed as suitable material with the lowest possible acceptable standard. There is the need to recast the officer cadre with much larger Short Service Commission (SSC) officers. This will not only somewhat improve the career prospects of the regular cadre officers, but will also, in the long run, be economical to the state. The Army’s cutting edge will remain young and vibrant. The right material can only be drawn if this cadre is made really attractive. It is through offering incentives that the US is able to keep the deficiency in its officer cadre in the military down to around 3 per cent and draw on the right material. These young officers, with their military background and training, when absorbed into various fields such as civil services/CPOs/ business/ industry, etc, will be able to bring about a change for the better in their new pastures. n The writer is a former Deputy Chief of the Army Staff. |
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Lost relations
A
family wedding is an occasion to meet all your relatives, their offshoots, the new entrants, the oldies and the younger ones, but this is becoming a myth and a thing of the past. Do we really make an effort to attend to such occasions and interact with our relatives? At the most one representative of a family somehow manages to attend the ceremony and leaves as early as possible. The result is, we fail to meet or see our close relations, and only for information sake, we tell our children that we have a relation in this city or that city and never make an effort to meet them and spend some time with them. We know some friends, who have family get together at least once a year, at some new place, which all the brothers, sisters, cousins etc. along with their families have to attend and a fine is imposed on those who are absentees. This practice is, however, not very common. How many of us meet often, or try to know about our present generation family members or the next generation? The mobile revolution no doubt ensures good connectivity, and we boast also that we are just a phone call away, but days, months and years pass by, and we don’t even connect with our relatives, like Chacha, Mama, Bua, cousins, their children. We don’t talk to them, don’t interact, don’t meet, don’t see each other. So much so, even if we are in the same city, we won’t even recognize them. We can make several useless calls, send SMSs, but do we ever bother to call each of our relatives, and ask them about their well being, about their children, exchange family photographs, tell our children about our relations as to who they are, or encourage them to maintain contact with them. As a result, the rishtas are dying their own death. Small and nuclear families have taken over, so you have to find and complete the rishtedari within that nuclear family itself. In big cities, at times we are really busy with our own hectic schedule, but at times we pretend as if we are the busiest creature on earth though actually we are not. Last month we met an elderly couple, staying alone, and managing their daily chores. Of course, another young couple was staying with them throughout and looking after them. The elderly couple seemed to be very devoted to each other. We asked them about their other relatives and they said with a deep sigh: “Ajkal Jo Sath Chale, wahi Rishtedar Hai”.
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When some parts of a story are left to imagination, a few readers take it literally. From wondering ‘what if’ Harry Potter’s
parents had lived to imagining Mr Darcy’s illegitimate son, a reader’s imagination in fanfiction knows no boundaries…
It
is no longer a secret that J K Rowling left middle aged Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger to drop off their children at the Hogwarts express in the epilogue of the seven part series, Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy walked off together in the sunset in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ while Amir and Hassan never get to reconcile on the pages of Khaled Hosseini’s ‘The Kite Runner’. These novels and many others from a variety of genre are obsessively loved by their fans. However, many readers are often left perplexed when their beloved characters do not meet the end they had anticipated. Some of them take matters in their own hands to give different direction to the characters while for some, writing fanfiction is simply a way of reliving their favourite literary moments. Fanfiction isn’t clearly defined yet, though the name itself seems self-explanatory enough. It often seems to be the basis for popular spin-offs, sequels and even parodies. What qualifies to be a spin-off and what remains mere fanfiction is a matter of many debates. The issues concerning plagiarism too hover around the published fanfiction frequently. However, the popularity and creation of fanfiction aided by easy publishing over the Internet has made this form of writing far more noticeable. Technically, fanfiction remains to be the work of an admirer inspired from an original literary source. There is no financial gain involved in fanfiction unless the source literature is in the public domain and the spin-off is published professionally. A variety of spin-offs originating from Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll and many other masters have gone on to be successful in their own rights. Imitation is flattery Imitating the style of an established writer is not a new phenomenon in the literary world. However, professional writers only admit to the influence. John Dryden recreated Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ right in the 17th Century in his own play ‘All for Love’. Similarly, Lady Macbeth has found several takers for fanfiction and spin-offs through the ages. Jane Austen is another author who is still capturing imagination of the fans amidst many published parodies and fanfiction novels that include titles like ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ to ‘Mr Darcy Takes a Wife’. These works of fans mainly aim to pay tribute to their favourite books and authors. The novels, plays and short stories that have been around for centuries have a huge number of fans who willingly look forward to reading the variations in the well accepted stories apart from enjoying them in their original form. Earlier, fanfiction writing was limited to pulp literature or old classics, but it has gradually spilled over to the main stream now. This could partly have happened due to fanfiction’s use as a brush up skill for future writers. Many creative writing courses and workshops are making Aristotle proud as their exercises include imitating the style of well-known writers. In this spirit, classroom exercise leads creative writing students like Tamara O’Neil to recreate Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story ‘A Temporary Matter’ in her own vision as ‘The Things They Now Knew’. Whose copyright is it anyway? As long as the writer doesn’t make money out of the fanfiction, copyrighted material is open to fans to spin their yarns around and publish it online in an open forum. If the original writer or publisher has any objection to the content, the websites that follow a proper policy are bound to take it off. Several professional writers also end up in tight corners while publishing a book that has roots in an earlier published work. J D Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ recently gained legal victory over a Swedish writer Fredrik Colting for coming up with a sequel titled ‘Coming through the Rye’ to Salinger’s 1951 classic revolving around teenage angst. However, several unofficial fanfiction pieces and sequels describing Holden Caulfield’s future are floating around the net, attempting to pay homage to Salinger by imitating him in the virtual world without breaking the copyright law. While Colting’s book was banned in many parts of the world, several other works like Ellen Feldman’s novel ‘The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank’, despite similar legal grey areas, has survived. Anne Frank is another favourite fanfiction subject as her short life presents a scope for imagining a hopeful future for her in millions of ways. Feldman’s novel doesn’t meddle with Anne’s life but tells a fictional story of the imaginary future of Peter van Pels, another captive who lived with Anne in the Amsterdam annexe. On the other hand in the public domain there are several fanfiction writers who introduce Anne Frank to aliens who help her lead a peaceful life in the outer space. Logic and normal rules of fantasy take a back seat in such fanfiction but the number of such improbable stories, reader’s response and their interaction makes one contemplate the cathartic nature of this subculture that helps young writers deal with such issues through their own imagination. Net gain The concept of being a part of a fandom online has changed the way readers appreciate a book. Fanfiction did exist in some form or the other since centuries but the Internet turned out to be a vital platform for its free online publication and popularity. There is also a dark side to it that leads genuine fans to obscene fanfiction. However, this isn’t limited to mere fanfiction, anyone who has a considerable experience of being online learns to sift through such nuisance. Due to interactive nature of the Internet, fans don’t like to be left out anymore. Interaction is a big driving force in reading or writing fanfiction online. A big number of writers of the fanfiction are teenagers who adapt to it as a creative hobby. Many websites guide the enthusiasts through the experience and prompt them to contribute their own stories. There are fanfiction awards to aspire the writers to gain literary merit as well. The sense of community amidst readers and fanfiction writers also comes from the sense of loss they experience at the end of a series. However, they deal with it more innovatively and keep the stories going on literally. Harry Potter - Immortalised There is one story that the loyal online fan base is unwilling to let go off, the story of the boy who lived, Harry Potter. His story isn’t only breaking worldwide box-office records at the moment; it also inspires the highest number of fanfiction stories. J K Rowling has been encouraging fans to indulge in this creative hobby and was reported to have found it ‘flattering’ to have thousands of fanfiction stories based on her world of Wizards. In fact she herself has floated a website called ‘Pottermore’ that will help the fans share their stories and interact with her and among each other. Indian fans are not far behind in this fray as one often stumbles upon a story set in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry where an Indian emperor pays a visit to scout wizard students for a scholarship where they visit India to learn unique Indian magic. It is said that Rowling’s books brought back a generation of children to the books. Looking at the number of fanfiction stories, she also inspired them to write. Harry Potter doesn’t have a rival in the fanfiction world for now as fans are willing to stretch the story as far as their imaginations will allow. Such an impact indeed marks the scale of a literary work’s success. These days the number of fanfiction write ups springing from a published book is gradually becoming the benchmark of its popularity. From Anne Frank to ‘Star Wars’ to ‘Twilight’, the subject range of fanficiton writing is wide. Modern day readers seem to enjoy an endless story as after investing their time and emotions in a book and its characters, they continue to ponder over the imaginary possibilities. Naturally, many also believe that the stories should be enjoyed just the way they are. However, the literary subculture of fanfiction is definitely ready to make every story in the world an open-ended one. Pratiksha Thanki is an author, researcher and blogger. She divides her time between India and Germany
Re-spin a yarn Officially publishing a fanfiction book about Harry Potter or any book under copyright doesn’t seem like a possibility in near future but fanfiction from all genres is available for free in the open forums online. |
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Ellen Feldman’s The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank:
60 Years Later, Coming through the Rye:
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:
Harry, a history: