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Syria at
Security Council Misgivings
about job scheme |
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Socialising,
the cyber way
Right to
recall legislators
When
poets’ work is ‘unphotogenic’
The
evil protagonist
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Misgivings about job scheme
Launched
six years ago, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has been reasonably successful, criticism of its poor implementation in certain states notwithstanding. According to data available up to 2010-11, about 5.5 crore families were provided 250 crore person-days of work in the first five years. A sum of Rs 1,40,000 crore was spent to create productive assets in rural India. Under the scheme at least one member of a family holding the job card has a right to demand work for at least 100 days in a year. This is the only scheme under which man-woman wages are almost the same and 33 per cent of the work undertaken is reserved for women. The success rate varies from state to state. Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal have done exceedingly well. Uttar Pradesh, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh have remained laggards. Jammu and Kashmir has completed 60 per cent of the work undertaken in the first five years. Punjab and Haryana have not taken full advantage of the Centrally funded scheme for reasons such as official indifference, low wages, shortage of labour and lack of awareness at the grassroots level. The general perception that migrant labour has stopped coming to Punjab because of employment provided under the scheme in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar is unfounded. Official surveys suggest these states account for only 2 per cent of the total person-days created for casual workers. A lot of misinformation is spread by vested interests to discredit the scheme so as to keep workers’ wages low. The rising inflation is also blamed on the increased demand for eatables in rural India. There is, however, need to revisit this important social security scheme to plug loopholes and eliminate malpractices. The Planning Commission has proposed an autonomous society to supervise the scheme and link wages with the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labour. A social audit of all welfare plans is also on the cards. The views of states should be considered too as ultimately it is their responsibility to make the scheme a success.
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Socialising, the cyber way
It
is hard to imagine a world in which there were no Facebook friends, where you did not have a social network that constantly updated you on their status, but it was there less than a decade ago. Facebook, which turned eight on Monday, is the most used social networking service worldwide. Though there are many other such sites, the two that preceded Facebook — Friendster and Myspace — still have a respectable number of users. Other challengers include Orkut and Google Plus, but Facebook is the king of the social networking world that enables millions of people to transcend their geographical limitations and connect with the world of their friends. And yes, these friends are real persons, even if you don’t know some of them physically. With a valuation of over $1 billion, Facebook is the hottest Internet property right now, even though the company admits that it has not quite mastered a way to make money out of over 845 million users worldwide, a majority of them women. An extension of the real world, flaws and biases included, Facebook faces many challenges as it navigates the interface of its transcontinental cyber world with the rules and demands of nation states and their people. As it celebrates its eighth birthday, Facebook has shown maturity in dealing with the pet peeves of its detractors, offensive content, addiction and privacy concerns. Human interaction has been transformed by social networking sites. Their world is real for their users. People all over the world express themselves through them, sometimes offensively, far too often in a positive manner. Sometimes they misuse the sites for nefarious activities. This is to be expected. Human interaction will remain what it is, even as the way people communicate with each other changes with technology. Facebook and its sister sites have had a massive impact on our world, and even as we move from PC to mobile access, they are showing how necessary it is to remain connected with those who we care about, even if we can’t write to them or call them.
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God grant me the courage to change the things I can, the patience to accept the things I can’t and the wisdom to know the difference. — The Serenity Prayer
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Right to recall legislators
Sections
of civil society have raised the demand for the right to recall the legislators who do not perform. This idea of a right to recall has not attracted much media attention perhaps because it is, on the face of it, impractical and unworkable in a country like India. Recently, the Chief Election Commissioner termed the idea as impractical in the Indian context. Nevertheless, it is a safe guess that this idea will continue to come up as we go along with our experiments in democracy. The idea of right to recall did not arise in a vacuum. India has been practising parliamentary democracy for the past six decades. The success of this experiment depends, to a large extent, on the performance of the representatives of the people who are sent to Parliament and the state legislatures. Have our legislators performed or have they been found wanting? It is not very safe to do a value judgement on it. Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that there is a widespread feeling that in general our legislators’ performance leaves much to be desired. But it must be said at once that over a period of time the work of an average legislator has increased manifold in terms of volume and complexity. The demands from the constituents are so diverse and complex that it leaves the hapless legislator gasping for breath. The demands include jobs, school admissions, hospital admissions, intervention in police cases, settlement of disputes among individuals and developmental work in the constituency for the redressal of individual grievances. He has also to travel extensively in his constituency attending public meetings, weddings, funerals, etc. If an analysis is done of the time spent on these issues by an average legislator, be he an MLA or MP, it will be found that much of his time is spent on these and he is left with practically no time to perform in the legislature. The condition of an elected MP from this point of view is unenviable. He has to look after the needs of at least seven Assembly constituencies which fall in his parliamentary constituency. A Member of Parliament has to handle even local issues which should really be the concern of either the member of the panchayat or the corporation concerned or, at best, the local MLA. So, while sitting in the chamber of the Lok Sabha his mind is occupied by the thoughts of, may be, the wedding of someone’s daughter he could not attend or the funeral of an influential person in his constituency he missed or a local problem he could not fix. Not attending a wedding or funeral or not being able to fix a local problem means loss of votes. Naturally, for a member of Parliament or a state legislator, these become issues of prime concern and not speeches in the legislature. The result of this non-parliamentary pre-occupation is that they are often unable to concentrate on Bills which come up for discussion or debate on important issues. It has often been found that MPs do not get any time to study the voluminous materials sent to them by the secretariats of the parliamentary committees, and many of them attend the meetings without being able to even browse through them. Needless to say that ultimately it is going to severely affect the quality of the work done in these important bodies. So, when civil society demands the right to recall, they should not lose sight of the pressure the present day MPs and MLAs face, and almost impossible demands their constituents make on them. This is a serious systemic problem which needs the attention of society. An MP is elected to perform in Parliament and he should be free to do that without having to worry constantly about a possible loss of votes if he fails to turn up in a wedding or a funeral. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the public at large nurses a feeling that our legislatures are not functioning because they are often disrupted by the members. In the past one year Parliament has not been functioning normally. Whatever be the reasons, if Parliament does not function due to constant disruptions, the public is justified in seeking unconventional or untried remedies. At a more fundamental level, there is a growing public distrust of the political class which includes the elected representatives of the people. The psychological distance between the voters and the voted is growing, resulting in increasing strains in their relationship. Unfulfilled aspirations of the new generation, inadequate opportunities for personal advancement, all-pervading corruption in the system, the general apathy towards problems displayed by the administrative set-up and the status-quoist political functionaries — all these and more have bred a certain amount of cynicism in society. The growing disconnect between the people and the system signifies our failure in exploiting the potential of representative democracy in full. But is recall a proper remedy? Of course, the right to recall in some form exists in certain countries like Switzerland, the British Columbia province of Canada, the Philippines and Venezuala and some of the states in the US. But in India, which has 800 million voters and a multiplicity of political parties and sharp polarisation of society on political grounds, it is unthinkable that a recall exercise could be carried out effectively. Recall will most certainly destabilise the whole legislative institutions. It can be expected that almost all legislators will constantly face the threat of recall. The principle underlying the right to recall is ensuring accountability of the elected representatives. Accountability is the essence of democracy. Democracy loses its meaning and relevance when there is no system to ensure accountability. It is being increasingly felt that the accountability of the elected representatives to the electors should be ensured to make democracy meaningful. It is a fact that at present there is no system of organised dialogue between the public and their representatives on issues of public importance or on their performance in the legislatures. The voters have a right to know what their representatives have done in the legislature and question them on their performance. An institutionalised dialogue process between the citizens and their elected representatives may be an answer. In this context the following suggestion is given: A formal platform for such a dialogue should be created in each Assembly segment in the case of a parliamentary constituency in the form of a Citizens’ Committee. That committee can be set up in each Assembly segment consisting of people drawn from different sections such as farmers, traders, workers, students, teachers, lawyers, doctors, etc., which can have a systematic dialogue with their MP and MLA specifically on his/her performance in Parliament or in the Assembly. Such a dialogue can be held after each session of Parliament or the Assembly. Such dialogue sessions should be televised for the benefit of people. These interactions will enable the public to make an assessment of the performance of their MPs and MLAs. Such an interaction with the citizens by the elected representatives will bring them close to the people. This will foster greater understanding between them and re-establish people’s confidence in the viability of the democratic system. The elected representatives will be able to use this opportunity to explain to the people their contribution in the legislature and their views on various issues. When the elected representatives and the people come closer and closer through this dialogue process, the public distrust of politicians will slowly melt away and ultimately the democratic system will regain its vibrancy and sense of purpose. Democracy survives as a viable political system only when institutional integrity is preserved. Constant dialogue between citizens and their representatives not only helps preserve the institutional integrity but also to ensure that eternal vigilance is
maintained. The writer is a former Secretary-General, Lok Sabha.
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When poets’ work is ‘unphotogenic’ While poets are working overtime to ‘produce’ love poetry in view of the market demands of the Valentine season, it is not politically correct to recall a poet whose best poem ( in my opinion) has a very unusual take on love. Titled ‘Thanks’, the poem celebrates a sense of ‘relief’ that one feels for not being in "love"! Polish Nobel Laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska expressed the see-saw perspective on everything she touched. "Thanks" goes like this, "I owe much/to those I do not love/Relief, accepting/that they are dearer to someone else.Joy, thatI am not/the wolf of their sheep./I have peace with them/and freedom with them/and this, love neither can give/nor take./I do not wait for them,/pacing from window to door./Patient,/ almost like a sun-dial/I understand what love does not understand,/forgive what love would never forgive…" Szymborska passed away as quietly from this world on February 2 as she had inhabited it for 88 years, without a fuss. To the extent that when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, her friends called it the "Nobel tragedy", for the poet intensely guarded her privacy. It took her a few years before she could write another poem, after the Nobel happening. The award had "kind of paralysed her", said Clare Cavanagh, who translated her works into English. This shy poet stunned her readers with her unusual perspective on situations and emotions she chose to touch with her poetry. In an eulogy, written on the death of some close to her, she looked at death from the point of view of the person’s cat in "Cat in an Empty Apartment" — "Die — You can’t do that to a cat./Since what can a cat do/in an empty apartment?/Climb the walls?/Rub up against the furniture?/Noting seems different here,/but nothing is the same…." For a Nobel Laureate she had a rather small body of work. When she received the award, she had just about 200 of her poems published in periodicals and thin volumes. She lived a very modest life, away from the limelight and the so-called literati. "In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself," she offers this insight, "If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean./A jackal doesn’t understand remorse./Lions and lice don’t waver in their course./ Why should they, when they know they’re right?" In her Nobel lecture, she joked about the tribe of poets, "Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic," she said. "Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens." Like her take on love, in her poem, "A Few Words on Soul", she dismisses the soul fixation professed by poets: "We have a soul at times./No one’s got it non-stop,/for keeps./Day after day,/year after year/may pass without it…" May her soul find a vantage point to rest!
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The evil protagonist The great Amrish Puri had a way with words, making even the most pedestrian- comic- book- movie dialogue sound like Shakespeare. More than a cheap threat, the much celebrated line " Mogambo khush hua" sums up Mogambo’s belief in the ‘bad’s superiority over ‘good’. When Mogambo is on screen, everyone else is extinct. Such is the power of
villain. Could anyone be more in love with the sound of his own voice?
The right lines uttered by him can mean the difference between an
average film and a great film. Remember, "kitne aadmi the?"
the most popular dialogue of Hindi cinema was not uttered by a hero!
"Bula tere bhagwan ko– dekhta hoon kaun ata hai?" This all-powerful man seldom believes in God. If he does, its like an obligation. Be it Anna of Parinda or AmrishPuri in Nageena, or Shakaal. The villain is supreme. His terror is omnipresent. And everyone is his victim. That’s when one of the victims rises and challenges him. We call him the ‘Hero.’ And the story begins. A hero becomes a hero only when he demolishes every bit of the villain’s terror. Ebert’s famous law of film states that "…a film is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about". And it’s the villain who dictates the ‘how’ part of a film, it is him who sets the rules of the game. The first lesson I learnt in script writing was to make your villain as big, as strong and as mean as you can imagine. For, only the largeness of the villain will determine the heroism of the hero. If Ram had fought and defeated someone who looked like one of us then Ram wouldn’t have been such a hero. He had to defeat a villain with 10 heads. The fulcrum of any
good story is its villain. There have been research and studies on the
heroes (from villager Dilip Kumar to angry young man Amitabh Bachchan
to the lover boy of 2000 SRK) and how he has changed with changing
socio-political realities of the society. On the surface, this
argument is right. But if you truly want to understand the
socio-economic and political evolution of a society, you must analyse
the villain of our films.
Do beegha zameen In the early 40’s and almost until the time we got independence, the villain used to be the landlord. Zameendaar or Jaagirdaar. Most of the country lived in villages. The village was his universe. The landlord, therefore, was the most powerful person who could dictate his personal laws. He was the one who would pick up a young virgin girl and rape her. The system and law wasn’t sensitive to women and due to social prestige and honour, no woman would approach the police or courts. He would charge tax (lagaan) as per his whims and fancies. Every young boy detested him for exploiting his father, uncles and brothers, for eyeing or molesting or raping his sister, mother or neighbour’s daughter. This young boy grew up with angst. And it was this angst that made this villain larger than life. He was filled with joy when a farmer put his pagdi, the symbolic izzat at his feet. He could get away with murder because he was the owner of the land. And that’s the only commodity that God doesn’t make any more. He owned God’s most in-demand and rare creation. He was God. Then he also owned almost all the gold of these farmers in mortgage. If you understand this man you will know why we Indians have such fascination for land and gold. In no other country people invest such huge savings in land and gold as we do. We are willing to stop eating fruits, buying new clothes and even look for a cheaper doctor in order to save for that ‘do beegha zameen’. This real life villain impacted Indian psyche the most. The factory owner Then India got independence. Two things happened simultaneously. A free India needed manufacturing more than farming. The same zameendar now moved to cities. He owned factories and mills. On the other hand Nehru brought in a socialist vision. The intermediate beneficiaries were these new factory owners who became hand in glove with corrupt officers and manoeuvered tenders in their favour. The foundations of unprecedented corruption, that we see today, were laid in this school of economics. While the majority of new, free India was struggling to survive the aftermath of partition, rest were now trying to become self-reliant by going for higher education and starting new businesses. The only hurdle to his growth was the middle class, idealistic and socialist youth who was seeking social justice. In movies of 50’s, no wonder, we saw this unique capitalist who was hated by the entire middle class and was perceived as hindrance to Indian socialist goals. The black marketer In the 60’s impetus was given to urbanisation, we also saw a large scale migration from villages to cities. As a result, the demand for essential consumer goods increased manifold whereas supplies were scarce, more so due to government’s quota and rationing. Tired with struggle for social justice the bigger problems were unemployment, hoarding, black market and corruption. So a typical young man found himself in a situation where his honest father is dying and he has no money for surgery and he finds that the chemist wants to sell him drugs at a premium. This gave birth to a new breed of villain. He was the hoarder, the black marketer. Indian middle class in the late 60’s and early 70’s was producing intellectuals, artists, actors, writers, reformers, leaders and journalists. Middle class in the 70’s was the builder and torchbearer of the Indian society. In 70’s the poor had no say, will or existence. The rich were seen as exploiters and corrupt. Middle class meant values, culture, art and above all honesty. The rich were ‘ bhrasht’, the villains of the 60’s and early 70’s. Then came the smuggler In the middle of 70’s emergency was declared. This was the time when new phenomenon took place. The big-city-crime-lord gradually moved on to become a smuggler, gangster and mafia leader. These were symptoms of disparity and rapid urbanisation. He had such strong political clout that even ministers and police commissioners were scared of him. Second, children born in a free India became adults. With their own set of ambitions and rebellions. It was license-raj. This new generation aspired to be rich. And his direct competition was with the gangster, the gangster who illegally annexed properties, collected haftas and would kill for a price. He was in every city, through his network. This was also the period when we saw lots of ‘bade baap ke bete’, which is why this hero had to face not one but two villains, the gangster and the gangster’s son. While this crime-lord was ruling cities his counterpart lived in villages and was called daaku – the dacoit. Indian Robinhood. He became a system by himself. Gabbar Singh wasn’t just a work of fiction. He was real. When two thugs pinned him down, millions cheered with joy. The all powerful zamindar, the Thakur of the 40s didn’t even have hands, which were taken away by this daaku Gabbar. This metaphor wasn’t just a coincidence. Soon, this daaku would reform as a politician of the 80s. The badass street fighter In 80’s a very unique thing happened. Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, made a public announcement that only 10% of the government funding reached the poor. Rest was siphoned off by the nexus of government officers and politicians, this became the new villain. We saw advent of a new middle class that had learnt that honesty wouldn’t bear fruits. Bofors and numerous other scams and law’s inability to deal with them gave phenomenal rise to corruption. Talent and merit had no value. It was a period of liberalisation. Money started speaking. People started travelling. Hundreds of channels started beaming. There was exposure. ‘Ghayal’ and ‘Tezaab’ are the best examples of how the deserving youth had to fight the corrupt for justice. It was meritocracy versus mediocrity. Judicial processes were in shambles. It gave birth to a new villain, who was a gang lord, kidnapper, and he wasn’t the prototype villain. No white shoes, no furs and no underground camps for him. He was downright street stuff with local goons and badass street fights. And law couldn’t touch him. He was your Lotiya Pathan, Kancha Cheena, Bakhtawar and others. This gave birth to an unparalleled formula in the history of cinema – of personal justice. Mr. Bachchan told me once that the reason he connected with the audience in that period was because almost everyone wanted to kill politician-police combine and he, as the hero, did exactly that. That’s exactly what Sunny Deol did later. Early 90’s witnessed advent of regional and caste/ religion based politics. Babri Masjid and Bombay bomb blasts happened. The villain for some short period was the instigator of communal riots. Death of a villain But he didn’t last long. The beneficiaries of an IT revolution began emerging everywhere. These were the young whose parents had ensured that their children, if nothing, at least became computer literate. Y2K changed the fortunes of Indians, and killed the typical villain of the Indian society. The new emerging villain of the late 90’s and early 2000 wasn’t someone from outside. He was either the hero himself or the girl’s father or the old Indian values. He was the psychopath of Baazigar or a stalker of Darr. Then, in an era represented by SRK, Yash Raj and redefined by Karan Johar and FarhanAkhtar, the hero of this era roamed freely without any social responsibilities. He wasn’t a common man born in Indian reality. He was an NRI, who had a macroscopic idea about India. Cut off from real India, he could fly anywhere to sing a song without the opposition of a villain. There was no Mogambo, Gabbar, Dang, Rai Bahadur or Anna, to stop him. They were dead. Because the new ‘Shining India’ aspiring to be the next superpower, flooded with consumer comforts didn’t want any villain. We became global. If you are a global citizen you can’t have local villains. The only villain India could spot on the globe was Pakistan. Few films tried to develop Pakistan as the villain of the late 90’s and 2000 but Pakistan, as a villain, couldn’t survive for more than a dozen films. Society accepted the corrupt and corruption. Money and success became supreme. We remained superficial, on the circumference. Hence, there was no conflict. Without conflict there aren’t any villains. And, there aren’t any heroes! The writer has directed ‘Chocolate’, ‘Goal’, and the forthcoming film ‘Buddha in a Traffic Jam.
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