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Cyber cautions
Return of the native |
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Locking property!
The slowdown in manufacturing
With love to sparrows!
CINEMA: NEW Releases
This one is expendable
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Cyber cautions
The Internet or, more accurately, various websites on it have been under attack for their role in fanning the exodus of people belonging to the North-East from many cities in the country. About over 250 websites were banned following orders from the Government of India. Unlike other companies like Facebook and Google, Twitter resisted the government’s orders to remove offending content, but now even it has acceded to a number of government requests, including blocking of the six fake accounts in the name of the Prime Minister’s Office. Even as it dealt with what it considered as objectionable content, the government has also belatedly realised the power of the social media demonstrated, albeit negatively, in recent days. It has also come to terms with the fact that there are four crore Facebook users and 1.6 crore people who tweet in India. Social media is a source of expression for the powerful middle class and thus it has more importance that than what the number of users suggests. The speed with which information spreads on it is incredible, and thus it has a tremendous role in opinion moulding. The government has done well to issue guidelines for its officials on using social media networks. Government officials, political leaders, opinion-makers and others have all to learn how to engage with the social media. As more and more officials use the medium, they will realise that they have to fight by countering misinformation with facts and thus they may well learn not to kill the messenger, even as they keep an eye on malicious propaganda and other ways in which this medium is misused. This is where the Cyber Security Cell of the Department of IT has a role to play. Now the government has also issued instructions to its own departments and ministries to ensure that whatever they put on the Net is verified. This is an eminently sensible directive, since government websites are seen as credible cyber sources of information, and, in any case, anything that is not a verifiable fact should not be on them.
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Return of the native
An
‘increase’ in the number of sambhars, boars and other wild animals has been reported in the Kandi area of Punjab, and farmers there are not happy as their crops are destroyed by them. If we step back a little in time and space, we’ll see how it is not an increase in the numbers but a small recovery in the massive loss that the animal kingdom has seen since industrialisation. Wild animals once roamed the plains — and forests — of Hoshiarpur, Ropar and Patiala far deeper than what is called the Kandi area, which is merely the foothills. People tilling land in this area have very small holdings, and little education or money. But they have historically also not been farming, which became possible only with the advent of tractors to level the undulating land and tubewells to irrigate the arid terrain — mostly in violation of forest laws. The man-animal clash tipped in favour of the former for good the day he discovered how to load a bit of metal in a device called gun and fire it with an explosive power. From the mid-19th century to the mid-20th, it turned into a virtual carnage. Mass production and transport turned vast swathes of wild areas into ‘reclamations’. The result is today India struggles to maintain a mere one-third of its land area as forests. Animals like cheetah have disappeared altogether. In Punjab, only 6 per cent of the land is under forest on paper; actually, it is about 3 per cent. It is this 3 per cent in which man is now trying to grow his food. But the poor ‘farmers’ native to the forest areas have a genuine grievance too. That is where wildlife activists have a role to play. Save the humans to save the animals. If the governments want, they have enough resources to arrange alternative sources of income for the relatively few affected families. Activists need to campaign for that. Give those people education so they may find jobs. But don’t resort to populist measures like allowing ‘selective’ culling. There is just too little of wildlife left to kill — for any reason.
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Locking property!
They
use cell phones, ride metros, take advantage of the latest gizmos and get back to the cave age, to the same old patriarchal mindset when it comes to dealing with women. So, if men are the owners of land and property, by the same logic they also own women, at least their body. Stretching the same logic, the body can be locked like they lock a property. This is what a man in Madhya Pradesh continued to do for five long years to his wife; his fear was that someone else may use his property — his wife’s body — in his absence. The unremorseful husband who committed this crime had his justification for doing so. Three of his sisters had eloped with men of their choice, so he had to do something preventive to avoid such shame. What complicates this case is a layered reality of sexism, misogyny and callousness, which is uniquely Indian. For the man, his wife did not exist beyond her body, that he could lock, and she produced five children for him despite this torture. The woman whose private parts were virtually locked went to a hospital, the very next day, but seeing a male gynaecologist, she returned and suffered this ignominy for five long years. The man also attempted to molest his own 12- year- old daughter, but she could not even protest. Last month when the story was broken by the media, it could not shake up the system beyond its sensational value. As usual, the National Commission for Women (NCW) recommended some financial help for the victim to get away without doing anything substantial for the cause of women. The offer of financial help becomes tangible, pushing the real issues again under the tattered rug of our callous systems. Why is it so easy for men to walk away after heaping unthinkable humiliation on women? While institutions like the NCW have such powers to demand amendments in the law? They need to ponder and use their powers.
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If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes. — Charles Lindbergh
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The slowdown in manufacturing Certain
disturbing trends are visible on the horizon today and the impending drought situation may further aggravate the problem of economic slowdown. Though the rain in August has been good, according to the Meteorology Department, the overall rainfall deficit remains abnormal. Drought would not only affect the quantity and quality of crops produced but also will shrink rural demand which is very important for industrial growth. Industrial growth is the main component of GDP growth, and taking note of the flagging industrial rise recently, investment rating agency Moody’s has revised downward the GDP growth forecast to 5.5 per cent for 2012-13. One of the currently prevailing trends is the slowdown in manufacturing growth which contracted by 1.8 per cent in June 2012. The decline has been going on for the last three months. If this trend continues, a large number of people could be without jobs. According to
Assocham, there has been a dip of 20 per cent in the total job generation in 2011-2012 fiscal in all major tier I, II and III cities. According to another report, new orders are still coming in the manufacturing sector but orders have decelerated faster than inventory accumulation. In exports, orders fell for the first time in June since October 2011. In July 2012, the HSBC’s manufacturing purchasing managers’ index declined to 52.0 from 55 in June. If it is below 50 it will indicate a contraction. It is based on data collected from a survey of business activity of over 500 manufacturing companies. The survey did not take into account the huge power outage at the end of July. India, however, is not alone in facing a slowdown in manufacturing. It seems a global trend. In China, factories in its biggest export zones have been laying off workers. Manufacturing output has fallen in nearly all major economies of the euro zone except Germany in which it grew by 2 per cent in the first quarter of 2012. In Europe the fall in output has resulted in reduction in household demand, a decline in production and a rise in joblessness. Brazil’s manufacturing growth has witnessed negative growth during the last two consecutive quarters due to pressures of the falling demand and rising inflation. Yet certain sectors, according to a latest UNIDO report, like motor vehicles manufacturing has topped the list of high growth performers in both developed and developing countries mainly due to the strong recovery of the automotive industry in the US. The output of motor vehicles on an average grew by 12 per cent in industrial countries and at 17.6 per cent in the US. The ongoing recovery in US and Japan is going to help in raising the manufacturing growth of countries like India and Brazil in the future. The demand for capital goods in industrialised countries is also rising. But in India’s case the automobile sector is facing a slack demand because of the steep petrol price hike and general inflation. Car sales have been flagging, specially in the case of
Maruti. And as compared to the rest of South Asia, India has a huge young population of around 250 million and many are fresh job-seekers. Service sector jobs, especially in the IT sector, are not growing fast enough to accommodate all the job-seekers. Besides, IT jobs and other service sector jobs often require secondary education and knowledge of English. The manufacturing sector still remains the only sector which can absorb the maximum semi-skilled labour force of India. As has been well recognised even by the latest Economic Survey, organised sector jobs ( both public and private) increased only by 1.9 per cent in 2010. Increasingly, there has been overutilisation of capital as compared to utilisation of
labour. There are many reasons for this and the one most commonly cited reason is that the old labour laws and the labour skill availability situation in India favours capital-intensive techniques rather than
labour-intensive ones. The recent data also show that there is a decline in the capital goods sector which indicates that manufacturing growth will slowdown in the future as the production capacity is not likely to grow fast. What is causing manufacturing growth to fall so rapidly? First, it is because the domestic demand for manufactured goods is not increasing fast enough and companies are holding back on their expansion plans. Inflation is also a big problem. Most people are reluctant to spend on consumer goods, durables and non-durables if they fear inflation and there is also growing job insecurity. When the demand is slack, then inventories do not get depleted fast enough and fresh investments are not made. Secondly, the persistent high interest rates also act as a deterrent to undertaking new investments. The RBI has been dithering about lowering interest rates any further and even in the last quarterly review of the monetary policy it hesitated once again. It has not let the key policy rate or repo rate fall below 8 per cent for fear of inflation which is supposed to remain high this year — around 7 per cent. Consumer price index is still high at 9.5 per cent in July. Thirdly, the stumbling blocks for the growth of the entire manufacturing sector are: access to credit, lack of skilled labour and regular supply of power and water. These have to be addressed to revive the sector. The emphasis should continue to be on skills training and solving the power deficit and improving transportation — the aviation sector — for faster export growth. With the slow growth of jobs in the organised manufacturing sector, job-seekers will have to find jobs in the informal or unorganised sector which is characterised by low incomes, low productivity and low job security. Usually young people desist from taking up small-time retail and vending jobs as aspirations have gone high due to the increase in mobile connectivity, media penetration and access to TV and Internet. All aspire for high-paying corporate jobs or white collared jobs but this dream is unlikely to be fulfilled in the short term. The Small and Medium Enterprises (
SMEs) which employ labour-intensive techniques are suited for the recruitment of young school-leavers but the sector is facing the same problems of easy access to credit, slack demand and increasing input costs that threaten their viability. Manufacturing contributes only 15 per cent of the GDP in India and by increasing the share of manufacturing to 25 per cent by 2025, as envisaged in the National Manufacturing Policy, more employment can be generated. All efforts should thus go towards increasing the share of manufacturing in the GDP and this can happen only if the quality of manufactured goods improves, and these are also price
competitive.
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With love to sparrows! It
has become almost a ritual for us to visit our maternal parents during our summer vacations. This time too it was no different and we left Chandigarh to spend a good part of our holidays in Shimla! But an off-the-cuff remark by my maternal grandmother made me think how different the two cities were. Her passing remark came when my mother told her mother to sell off her old house in Shimla and live close to us in Chandigarh. My grandmother said that for years she had been feeding rice, bread and the leftover of kitchen food to sparrows, but in Chandigarh these birds have become almost extinct. She lamented that though the city has grown big and skyscrapers are coming up in its periphery, small creatures of nature seem to have taken a break. She said that you could see more cockroaches, rats, dogs and other stray animals in your city than beautiful petite sparrows. Her anecdotes about feeding the sparrows made me go down memory lane when every morning during our long stay in Shimla at our “nani’s” house as a child I used to listen to the chirping of sparrows. These birds took a bath at the trench in the backyard of the Shimla house. I used to spend most of my time watching these little cute creatures as my mom, a tea lover, used to sip her morning tea sitting in the lawn surrounded by pine trees. I often made pencil sketches of sparrows that used to come in large numbers to feed on grains and kitchen leftovers. We eagerly waited for them to lay their eggs which we counted and then waited for the eggs to hatch. For my cousins and me they were a part of our daily lives. Seeing my predicament, the grandmother turned philosophical and said that you watch them on YouTube and Google, but we see them live as a part of us. In her opinion, the excessive use of pesticides, an increase in the number of cell phone towers and pollution have led to an almost extinction of this beauty. Her wisdom left me speechless and I could only say, “God bless the sparrows.” We all need to pray for their survival and their ability to multiply so that these creatures return from the brink of extinction. As I stood with my granny, I spotted a horde of sparrows entering the kitchen from the window and my grandmother duly obliged them with the leftovers. What a sight! On my way back to the City Beautiful, I wondered if celebrating World Sparrow Day as a day of the ubiquitous sparrow would suffice. Sparrow lovers and nature supporters need to come on a common platform to kick off a conservation movement to save the common flora and fauna. Let us take a cue from nature lovers in some cities who have introduced wooden boxes on trees for sparrows for use as nests. I pondered why not chirp for the sparrow by spreading the word to save the damsel in distress and by sharing our thoughts on everyday communication devices, mobile phones, emails, telephones as well as social networking sites? Lines from ‘Goraiya’, a short story by celebrated writer Mahadevi Verma — “Kisse apni baat kahegi, ab ye chidiya kahan rahegi” — are flashing before my eyes. Maybe, we all can spare a thought to find out where the sparrows will
live!
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CINEMA: NEW Releases
It's fun to be knotty at forty! Bela's unconventional protagonists, a 40-something meek but earnest lingerie salesman (Boman) and a forthright, feisty spinster (Farah) don't exactly fit into the typical Bollywood 'romance' realm. Yet she narrates her love tale in a light, breezy and convincing manner. A typical Parsi household and their idiosyncratic world lends a beautiful setting. Boman plays Farhad Pastakia, a dutiful son, to his rather overbearing yet lovablemother Nargis Pastakia (Daisy Irani). His search for the perfect partner hasn't been very successful, but that changes when he meets Shirin Fuggawala. It's love at first sight for both our characters, as diligent Farhad tries to convince Shirin to go for a 36B rather than a 38D that she asks for. The mother obviously cannot tolerate
the new entry and changing world of 'her prince'. Blame it on some misunderstanding, the lovers get separated in
the second half, only to be reunited a few reels later…. Farah Khan's acting debut recaptures our typical Bollywood romance in a refreshingly new way. Only, the girl in question is not our regular, pretty, petite frame, and boy no chocolaty hero. It's a Boman's film all the way. One's heart goes for the poor-little-old boy who cannot understand how can his job that he does with an utmost honesty be a hurdle in him being accepted as husband material. 'Who is here without a panty or bra', he questions more than once, only get affirmative from all present but still not ready to accept his profession. A Parsi, all his life, well, who can do it better but Boman, the finest actors of the industry today (as Dr JC Asthana in Munnabhai MBBS or the forgetful principal in Main Hoon Na and plenty more). And boy, he looks as
convincing in track pants as in a suit as well as guitar-playing-much-in-love guy a la Shah Rukh mode. Farah — she looks resplendent in
smart skirts, beautiful saris, perfectly done hair, nails and make-up.
She definitely looks better than she acts. There might be a few characters in this film, but each lives their part on the screen well — be it the archetypical to-be mother-in-law or granny who supports her grandson through much of trials
and tribulations. Music: To begin with one wonders when Bela has chosen an unconventional cast why try doing a Pehla nasha on Boman. But third song down the line and you are totally into Ishq mein tere bina and Kaafir andhere. Farah and Boman step into the act with natural ease. One cannot deny there are clichés — the typical late night coffee invite, an old sick father in coma, the lonely, special bench, the proposal with ring in the cherry (so what if our cute, elderly hero forgets to put it only) — but they only come across as admirable. An almost believable escape into the Bollywoody love, that climaxes in 'happily everafter' moment, this short, sweet movie (about two hours) makes for a pleasant watch. Bela, good job, though we wonder if we should credit her doting brother Sanjay Leela Bhansali with
the oft-told story.
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This one is expendable When four one-man armies-Sly Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis and Arni Schwarzenegger-get together what does one expect but a slam-bang-alagazam action flick called The Expendables 2 with friends falling off and on-again and targets changing and if these four are not enough there's Chuck Norris and Jason Statham as near one-man armies. But it is the pauses, cute lines and a few bars of Ennio Morricone's music from Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns that are sure to warm the cockles of some golden oldie
hearts. But his band of faithfuls includes Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Gunnar Jensen (Dolf Lungren), Booker (Chuck Norris), Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and a cute Chinese martial arts expert named Yin Yang (Jet Li). With this plethora of action heroes director Simon West goes to town with FX specialist working overtime and ace cinematographer Shelly Johnson making her presence felt. Director Simon West has no problem setting the action going. Also, when young Billy the Kid (Liam Hemsworth) meets his untimely death it is excuse enough for vengeance. Thankfully the drama is only 103 minutes long and between this, that and the other one just breezes through The Expendables 2 with little acting talent and not much of taxing one's grey matter. It may not literally end in a whimper, but it could, figuratively.
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Saturday
August 25
Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai is a 2010 Indian period gangster film directed by Milan Luthria and produced by Ekta Kapoor.The film stars Ajay Devgan, Emraan Hashmi, Prachi Desai, Kangna Ranaut and Randeep Hooda. It's about a smuggler who rises to power in 1970s in Mumbai. A younger gangster seeks to overthrow him, and a police officer is caught in the middle. FILMY STAR GOLD HBO ZEE CINEMA B4U MOVIES MOVIES OK Sunday August 26
Anjaana Anjaani is the story of Kiara (Priyanka Chopra), and Aakash (Ranbir Kapoor). Kiara is based in San Francisco, while Aakash is a New York City boy. Aakash has to clear a huge loan of $12 million, which he is unable to and even the stock market crash. Unable to find any means, suicide seems the only option. Kiara too hassled by life tries to commit suicide. But they fall in love in the end. FILMY ZEE CINEMA STAR GOLD SAHARA ONE B4U MOVIES ZEE STUDIO MOVIES OK
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Ervell E. Menezes
Fab
The pot of uranium at the end of the rainbow (read the mountains of Albania) is what they are all after, that is a bunch of mercenaries after the eternal enemy Russia has it stacked there during the Cold War in the 1980s. Barney Ross (Sylvester Stsllone) decides to take a team of his to this distant target with Mr Church (Bruce Willis) moving in an out of the game as he pleases.
Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai