The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

The refinery at Bathinda
Delayed, but it is here finally

The Bathinda refinery, formally opened by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday, will raise India’s oil refining capacity to 4.3 million barrels a day. India meets 80 per cent of its energy needs by importing crude, which is refined to make products like gasoline, jet fuel and diesel. Since the production of refined petroleum products is higher than domestic consumption, export possibilities need to be further explored — a fact underlined by Dr Manmohan Singh. Since Bathinda is not far from Lahore, Pakistan is an obvious market. During the January trade talks Pakistan evinced interest in importing fuel from India. The problem is the fuel Pakistan uses is of lower specifications than what Bathinda will produce. Besides, pricing may be a hurdle as Pakistan gets cheap supplies from its allies in the Gulf.

It was in 1988 that the refinery’s foundation stone was laid by the then Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee. The inordinate delay has more than doubled its cost at Rs 21,500 crore. Originally proposed by the state-owned Hindustan Petroleum, the project ran frequently into trouble until steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal came on board to complete it. Though a Central PSU project, the Akali government touted it as its own achievement, something that irritated the next Amarinder Singh government so much that it reneged on terms and conditions. The project was revived after the Badal government took over in 2007. Two years ago Mittal started demanding more concessions from a sympathetic Akali-BJP government. The Captain opposed any more giveaways to the project. The Punjab government stuck to the 2005 pact under which it had agreed to extend interest-free annual loans of Rs 250 crore for five years.

The Bathinda refinery amply illustrates how difficult it is for a major project to come up in Punjab. Petty politics, an arbitrary approach to the grant and cancellation of incentives and the absence of a long-term industrial policy acceptable to the major political parties and offering incentives on a par with other states are among the reasons for Punjab’s industrial backwardness. Bathinda offers an example of how not to execute a project.

Black mark
Antelope deaths result of indifference

Nearly 30 blackbucks died at Bir Talab Deer Park in Bathinda, and no one seems to have a credible explanation for what happened. What’s more, the manner in which the carcasses were hurriedly said to have been cremated seems to suggest no one even wants to know what happened, or maybe there is an attempt at hiding facts. It could be anything from a dog attack to an attempt at stealing the endangered antelope that is the state animal of Punjab. Given the way the place was being run, this was only waiting to happen. Even after the incident, there was no person of any responsibility available at the ‘safari’.

Almost all wild animals in India are protected under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, and rightly so, as no species is flourishing. Any harm to blackbuck evokes particularly sharp reactions from environmentalists, given its place in folklore and the “near threatened” status given by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which means it is threatened with extinction in near future, although it does not currently qualify for the “threatened” status. If the state government cannot take due care of such animals, it has no business running zoos, which is a highly specialised field. There were only around 10 daily-wagers at the Deer Park spread over more than 100 acres, with no one to supervise them.

The blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra) — the only living species of the genus Antilope that once roamed the grasslands of India in herds of hundreds — was first brought down to critical numbers by hunting, and is now more a victim of mankind’s spread into its habitat, just as all other wild animals. Zoos play an important role in sensitising people, especially children, to the fact that the planet is home to life other than man too. Punjab, which does not have a very good record at preserving its forests, has just demonstrated nature does not count very high on its priorities.

Thought for the Day

There is nothing new in art other than talent. — Anton Chekhov

ARTICLE

India’s VIP diplomacy
Foreign policy missing real issues
by Harsh V. Pant

Even as a difficult endgame approaches in Afghanistan, the Indian government does not seem to have time to say or do anything even remotely of significance to make itself a relevant actor in the regional dynamic. And even as China’s rise continues to transform India’s strategic environment, the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi remains remarkably lackadaisical in its approach. But lo and behold! Shah Rukh Khan gets detained for some additional checks at an American airport, and the entire might of Indian foreign policy machinery comes like a ton of bricks on the US.

The External Affairs Minister thunders that detention and apology had become a habit with the US and could not be allowed to continue. The Minister of State for External Affairs lays down a red-line saying that more than an apology would have to take place. The US Deputy Chief of Mission is summoned to South Block. The Indian Ambassador to the US expressed not only the government’s concern but the concern of the whole nation “since Khan is an internationally renowned personality.”

What on earth is going on here? New Delhi is expending its diplomatic capital on a routine bureaucratic matter whereas issues much more vital to Indian national interests are routinely given a short shrift. It has become a habit with New Delhi to routinely express outrage whenever an Indian VIP is subjected to stringent airport checks in the US. Its outpourings of umbrage have become so routine that Washington must be keeping a standard apology ready on its shelves to respond whenever New Delhi acts petulant and flies off the handle.

There are several issues here that paint a rather depressing picture of Indian diplomacy and its priorities. First is India’s obsession with its VIPs. It must indeed be heartening to the multitude of ‘ordinary’ Indians to see the VIPs getting a treatment which is meted out to many of them when travelling to the US. Has the Indian government ever bothered to speak up when its ‘ordinary’ nationals are subjected to additional security checks? If they can face it with equanimity, so can Bollywood actors, former Presidents and bureaucrats. In fact, India, ever obsessed with its VIP culture, should learn how to treat everyone fairly. The fact that in India a famous actor or a politician need not even show his/her passport in person before leaving the country is no reason to cry wolf when other countries follow their standard operating procedures.

Then there is the issue of the present incumbent in the Ministry of External Affairs. S.M. Krishna is, perhaps, the most inconsequential foreign minister India has had in decades. The fault is not entirely his. Most of the important foreign policy priorities – the US, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, nuclear weapons – are handled by the Prime Minister’s Office. So, what is left for the minister is to make himself relevant over sundry immigration issues in Norway and airport screening in the US. It was Krishna’s knee-jerk reaction in the case of the Bhattacharya couple in Norway that ultimately made New Delhi look so ridiculous in its diplomatic engagement with Oslo when uncomfortable questions about the couple came out in the open. And again in the recent case of Shah Rukh Khan’s airport search, he could not resist the temptation of responding to the drumbeats of 24x7 television news.

Finally, the Indian government makes such a hue and cry when Indian VIPs are treated according to normal standards applicable to ‘ordinary’ individuals abroad. But when it comes to its own behaviour towards its own citizens, it’s another matter. An ordinary Indian national working abroad applies for a visa to visit a third country. To his horror, he is informed that a visa cannot be issued because his passport belongs to a range of passport numbers that were recalled by his own government on technical grounds three years back! This is when he has been travelling to India regularly and no one has even bothered to inform him about his passport. It takes a foreign government to provide this crucial information that his passport that he has been using as his primary source of identity has actually not been valid for the past three years. This is one story and I am sure there must be numerous others where the ‘ordinary’ nations are deemed not to be important enough by their very own government and treated callously.

So, when the Indian government has been so vociferous in demanding an apology from the US and which the US government has been gracious enough to provide, may I ask for an apology of my own from my own government for not even bothering to inform me and a number of other ‘ordinary’ citizens that their passports have been recalled? This is a sad state of affairs when a government is unable to manage the legitimate requirements of its own nationals.

If ‘ordinary’ Indian nationals do not make a hue and cry about the callous treatment they receive from their own government, then surely it’s not too much to ask the government to focus on real issues that matters and not waste time on trivialities. Indian diplomacy should be an instrument to serve ‘ordinary’ Indians, not the VIPs.

MIDDLE

Aligning the moral compass
by Maj Gen (retd) G G Dwivedi

IT took barely an hour by the army truck from Pune railway station to Kharkvasla. Driving through the Pashan Gate, the bird’s eye view of National Defence Academy (NDA) literally catapulted us to cloud nine. For most us in the mid-teens, NDA was not the first but only choice. It was dream come true and what a great start for the New Year -1968!

We were offloaded in front of the mess and allotted an Academy number. Under the hawk eye of a Cadet Sergeant, with boxes on the heads, we hot-footed to our Squadrons. Within an hour, the ‘green horns’ were adept at the skill of front-rolling, the only form of commuting for a fresher. After the mass crew cut, we were lined up in the community toilet for the maiden shave, only to end up as battle scared soldiers from the razor cuts.

The day invariably started with a morning prayer. One of the key sentence was “oh God, give us strength to choose harder right instead of easier wrong”. Thereafter, with cycles on our heads, we went through galore of activities. The classrooms were a replica of modern art; cadets in different poses, varying from head stand to push-up position, depending upon the subject: physics, military history or Burmese. Late night when back in the cabin, one could experience live the earth in its full rotation.

We were ever ready to do and die for our Squadrons. Be it the boxing ring, athletics stadium or obstacle course: the ultimate mission was to keep the Squadron flag flying high. The cheer leaders often went overboard and had to be pulled out from the field of play. Victory treats at the Café, with free flowing mango drinks and hotdogs were the most sought-after reward. While passing out of NDA, leaving our Squadron champion was the finest hour of the three years stint, far surpassing every individual achievement.

At the Indian Military Academy, Dehradun, for the final year of training, the initiation was with the welcome address in the Chetwode Hall. “The Safety, Honour and Welfare of Country always comes first ….., the Honour, Comfort and Welfare of the men comes next, your own ease, comfort and safety comes last …” was the gist of the eternal quote inscribed in golden letters on the centre wall. While taking the final step marking culmination of our training, one stood transformed, cast into mould, distinct from a civilian counterpart. At midnight, on the auspicious occasion of our commissioning, with one pip on the shoulder, we could sense the onus of responsibility that had been bestowed up on us by the nation. “This burden will increase, as you go up the ladder. However, only those will stand their ground whose moral compass always remained aligned to the ‘True North’,” quipped a distinguished soldier.

Recently, at a Veterans’ get-together, the discussion veered around the subject of propriety; and aberration wherein some of the top brass happen to be in the news for wrong reasons. Most of us were silent till someone wryly remarked, “Possibly, it is the consequence of aligning the moral compass with ‘Magnetic North’; transition from ‘rank and file’ to the lucrative mainstream!”

OPED — The Arts

Staging her world
Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

When women wore the mantle of a director to define their space on stage, did they use it to propagate feminist propaganda?

What does it mean to be a woman director? Does it indicate women in general – such as those who are acting their role within the conventional formulations - or does it suggest a group of women who are holding a certain political position within a performance, and their vision, and artistic choices? A woman director implies a certain amount of ghettoisation - the simple fact that one is talking about women in theatre shows that it is an issue. It suggests that in some way they are different. But women directors would like to be regarded as people and artists working in a certain period and not representative of a gender.

The range and breadth of work done in the last three decades by women directors has engendered fresh forms, structures and devices in an attempt to reconstitute new meanings and fresh ways of seeing. They have pushed the boundaries of a representational system, by critically interrogating and recreating its boundaries.

The prop of the eye candy

Up until the 70’s most of the representations of women on stage had been constructed and imagined through the eyes of men. These were male ideas of women which were based on their own concept of ‘the feminine’ (often these concepts were disavowed parts of the male ego). The intended audiences for these representations were indeed men, and thus confirmed their views about how women should be seen. Women were meant to be objects to-be-looked-at and sexually admired. Their presence on stage was one of mere artifice — artefacts whose only function was to capture the audience’s gaze. Even when women started representing themselves on stage, they could not free themselves from this perception of what constitutes an actress – a vacuous but beautiful bimbo.

The line of departure: A scene from Blood Wedding directed by Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

Whether women were being represented as goddesses, or middle-class housewives, their presence on the stage was formulated through imagined ideals of femininity. Whether in the role of Shakuntala or Vasantsena,( characters in Kalidasa’s plays) women enacted their roles, keeping in mind the ideals of classicism ‘the pursuit of beauty’. An erotic enactment of these archetypical roles was the only blueprint available to the director and actor— through the full- blooded voluptuous images of classical beauties as gathered from temple sculptures, as well as the kitschy version of the coy and demure ‘ideal woman’ through the popular calendar art, became the visual iconography that they had as references. Women playing these roles had their characters laminated upon them, and the passion and strength of legendary female characters were bleached into submission.

The word ‘director’ had a male resonance and seems to suggest male authority, and because of that, acting became the obvious career choice for women. In the past if you were poor but pretty, or came from a family of dancers, musician - or if you were hard-up with no useful skills, but had an attractive face, then theatre was a good alternative to penury. Even though some of the women left their mark on the professional stage, women never came into positions of power, restricted by the blatant prejudice of not allowing women any say — in the decision making process. Acting was associated with harlots and women of easy morality whose role on the stage was to give lascivious glances, and seductive pouts, that threatened the concept of the ideal Indian women. Yet actresses, despite being viewed as ‘home- wreckers’ and ‘seductress’ were completely disenfranchised in the hierarchy of the power structures in the theatre. Defined this way by the society that exploited their charm, but confined them to a marginalised status, women were robbed of their own representation throughout modern theatre history.

Privilege and derision

In ancient times, dance and music, was the repository of the Devadasi and the Nagarvadhu. These women were extremely accomplished and had mastered the art of dancing, acting and music. Despite the nature of their profession, these women were never equated with the common prostitute. It is also documented that most processions, religious, or social had the courtesan or the Nagarvadhus (‘bride of the city’) leading the procession in the village. Here we see a divide between ’public’ and ‘private’ space. Revered in public, but living on the fringe of society, the identity of a Nagarvadhu is historically positioned and was legitimised as a sacred fertility and sexual ritual.

The hissing of a kettle, the gurgle of children, the trails and tribulations of domestic life became significant objects to be scrutinised, examined and interrogated.

But the situation in urban theatre had the notion of the professional woman in theatre as being synonymous with that of a prostitute. Marked as ‘dancing girls’ a nomenclature evocative of the characteristics of the dual role of being both an entertainer and a courtesan, the dancing girls or actresses held the contradictory position of privilege and derision in the Indian society. But somewhere around the early turn of the twentieth century the reviled female performer was transformed into a ubiquitous emblem of Indian national culture. The dulcet voice of MS Subbalakshmi that mesmerized Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru - to the image of the ideal Indian woman through the iconic performance by film actor Nargis in Mother India, epitomized, concepts of virtue, justice and honor, making the performing woman artist respectable and hence acceptable. These representations carefully balanced glamour with propriety, and helped in changing attitudes and perceptions of the performing female artist. This was not a simple process of easy acceptance but a result of a complicated and tedious process of negotiation, wherein the performer's status and image had been reworked to include appropriate signs of respectability and Indianness.

The mundane as dramatic

The inclusion of women in the pantheon of this male dominated industry has been a slow and silent revolution which was long overdue. It was inevitable that very little notice was taken about the events that precipitated it. Today women in theatre have acquired visibility, the National School of Drama has twice had a woman director at the helm: Kirti Jain and presently Anuradha Kapur, along with Amal Allana( 2010) as the chairperson - yet numbers tell a fraction of the story. What does the slow yet obvious shift really signify? It just reflects a trend that sees women in many more positions then it did earlier, not only in the field of theatre but also as doctors, lawyers, pilots, corporate heads and others. This, to some extent became the by- product of the women’s movement, which encouraged more women to study direction, start their own companies and explore unknown terrains as they had no template before them.

The real change that many women director brought to their work was noticed in the choice of subjects, when suddenly large events and the spectacular were replaced by the quotidian. This shift in emphasis from an issue based theatre to the mystery of the everyday – to see the extraordinary in the ordinary became the leitmotif for women directors. They tried to represent ordinary life as poetic and relevant, and saw in the mundane - meaningful material for dramatic narratives. The hissing of a kettle, the gurgle of children, the trails and tribulations of domestic life became significant objects to be scrutinized, examined and interrogated. They saw in these little parts of life a meaning that equals those dramatic events that were usually associated with high drama. But most of all their creativity stems from their experience of being a woman. It is about the reality one had access to. What does a woman experience in her so called ‘private’ sphere? Daily life, with its subtle movements and multitasking – all of this, when it comes on stage, is taken from the reality that a woman is part of.

This radical departure from existing modes of expression, in women theatre may have happened due to a variety of reasons both conscious and subconscious. It also, to a great extent, had to do with the socio-political and economic changes that were happening in the world of women. These changes gave more independence, confidence and a sense of self-determination to women. I don’t think that women set out to be different, but it was the urge to tell their stories in their own particular way, from their own point of view, in their own voice, that created this genre known as women’s theatre. It is not to say that women were not telling their stories before that, but they seemed to be more on the fringe, creating a peripheral contribution, while men were clustered at the top of the echelon.

Divergent voices

I must also clarify that we cannot assume that all women’s theatre is the same, and neither can we make the error of saying that this is what it means to be a woman (caring, nurturing, loving) and this is what it means to be a male (aggressive, macho) a trap that needs to be avoided. What is significant is the idea of a women’s voice in theatre

One also realises that an analysis of this nature cannot be sociological or anthropological, but more to do with individual creativity and aesthetic affiliations. Being a woman may not reflect in your working style, but certainly gets reflected in the choices that you make. Actually as a reverse to this, posing gender issues to women directors in a way diminishes the larger issues, that are involved- the art that is created.

The writer is a well- known theatre director whose work has been acclaimed internationally.