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Fleeced by builders
New civic bodies
Jiah Decides to Die |
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Turkey faces uncertain future
When the sparrows protested!
london latitude Sikh heritage items on display
‘Thanksgiving’ by NRIs from Uganda
Hospital in Syria named after NRI doctor
Mittal now fourth richest in UK
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Fleeced by builders PUT up first before the Union Cabinet in October last year, the real estate regulation Bill has been finally cleared, albeit with modifications, and will be introduced in Parliament's monsoon session. An important provision requiring a builder to deposit 70 per cent of the money raised for a housing project in a separate account and use it specifically for that project has been modified to make it "70% or such lesser percentage as notified by the appropriate government". Though still unhappy with the Bill, the builders have got away with major relief. That they have a mutually beneficial relationship with politicians is well known. Politicians and officials are known to hold up or grant clearances at will. The policy of allowing change of land use has been misused to the hilt. This area of darkness is still intact. Real estate is a sector that is beset with so many malpractices that one wonders why it has taken the government so long to think of having regulators in states. This is one sector that attracts and generates maximum black money, leading to an astronomical rise in land and housing prices in urban India. Thanks to high inflation, the RBI was forced to raise interest rates and curb the flow of excessive capital into the sector, which cooled demand and nipped well in time a housing bubble in the making. The importance of the regulatory Bill cannot be underestimated. It will usher in transparency in the construction industry, ensure fair practices and accountability of builders and fast-track dispute resolution. Builders as well as property dealers will have to be registered. They will be able to launch projects only after getting all clearances. Misleading advertisements or delays in construction can invite a jail term or penalty. Houses and flats will not be sold on the basis of "super area". Whether the government is able to push the Bill through Parliament, given the frequent BJP-led disruptions, is anybody's guess. If passed, it would definitely help the UPA charm the middle class ahead of the general election.
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New civic bodies THE anti-incumbency factor — considered the single most important in Indian politics — after all, did not work in the Haryana municipal elections. The ruling Congress, which let its members contest the civic polls as Independents, is expected to have mayors aligned to it in six of the seven towns that went to the polls. It is usually expected that the party in power in the state wins the civic polls — as people hope to get more funds that way — but the case in Haryana was different to the extent that Lok Sabha as well as Assembly elections are not far. Keeping that in mind — even if one does not look at the civic poll results as a precursor to the bigger elections ahead — it definitely was a testing of the waters and alliances for the opposition BJP, HJC and INLD. The kind of campaigning that preceded the elections was worrying. Free liquor was on offer to woo voters, something one would not expect in civic elections, considering people are voting for candidates virtually known to them personally, and over issues associated with their daily lives. Many parties offered populist measures like waiving off the property tax. Such competitive politics often ends up triggering regressive announcements from all parties, thereby nixing scope for development. There can be little to do for the councillors if there is no revenue. The 73rd Constitution Amendment, 1992, added purpose to the existence of civic and panchayat bodies, but these still remain impeded by a lack of funds for any work more than maintenance. The state of towns in Haryana is pitiful. While power and water supply remain the permanent woes, civic bodies can do little to address these. Even road and sewerage development are expenditures municipal corporations cannot afford, and have to wait for grants from the state government. Sanitation is one aspect where these bodies can play a role, but often fail to deliver. One reason is the ever shifting alliances of the councillors, most of who are technically Independent. It is hoped the new set of councillors will place the cities before politics.
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Jiah Decides to Die EACH suicide is baffling and hurting. It leaves behind many unanswered questions. The person who decides to reject immense possibilities of life, must find very compelling reasons to do so. Jiah Khan, 25, a promising actor trained at the prestigious Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, New York, gifted with amazing charm and beauty, who embarked upon an exciting film career a few years back, decided to die late Monday night by hanging herself. Not before she completed her twentieth birthday, she had mesmerised film lovers by her intense portrayal of an emotionally vulnerable girl from a broken family, who rebels against social norms and love both for her debut role in “Nishabd”, a film that was rejected by Hindi film audience, fed on simplistic portrayals of life. In this memorable reel role, wrongly compared by film critics with Nabokov’s “Lolita”, she finds a way out of her emotional mess, to survive with buoyancy and grace. In her real life, she could not accept the fact that life is not a perpetual high tide. It waxes and wanes. It requires resilience and patience to surf the low tides. In glamour world particularly, where she was aspiring to find a footing, everything is made to appear larger than life, including relationships. Expectations too grow larger than life, therefore failure or the fear of failure, as in Jiah’s case, appear to be grave in proportion. Only Jiah would know the reasons that became so overwhelming to compel her to choose death over life. In the famous book that was later turned into a film, “Veronika Decides to Die”, the protagonist decides to commit suicide so that the ignorant world, that didn’t care to know where Slovenia, her place of birth, was, would learn what Slovenia was all about. The film industry that now pours love, adulation and praise over Jiah, could not recognise so in her days of low tides. If they could do so, perhaps Jiah would not choose death. She would wait for life to knock at her door once again.
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The imagination is man's power over nature. — Wallace Stevens
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Turkey faces uncertain future AFTER three successive wins in elections, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing his most serious challenge in more than a decade. It is not so much a crisis of legitimacy as days of rioting spread from Istanbul to the capital and dozens of other towns but one of shaping the kind of country it should be. What started as a protect against converting an iconic square into a shopping mall has blown into a mass protest of urban middle class people against Mr Erdogan’s concept of Turkey. There is more than a tinge of irony in the sudden reversal of Mr Erdogan’s fortunes. He has led his Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) to repeated election victories and reshaped his traditionally military-dominated state into a civilian-controlled dispensation, placing scores of senior military men and journalists in prison on conspiracy charges. He has also scored significant economic development and was on the way to placing his country in the big league. The chink in his armour has been the nature of his constituency, mainly of conservative observing business men and women in the Anatolian heartland who have prospered thanks to economic reforms and moved into metropolitan centres in Istanbul and Ankara. Mr Erdogan’s reforms have, therefore, come with a shading of religious tendencies in a country made famously secular by Ataturk. In the process, the AKP has dispossessed the rather larger urban secular and liberal middle class that has grown with Ataturk’s secularism, albeit with military dominance. And it is easy to see how the park issue in Istanbul ballooned into an uprising, with rioters battling an overbearing police and Mr Erdogan chastising them as looters and extremists. Resentments among the seemingly disenfranchised middle class had been building up for some time, wth new restrictions on alcohol purchase and demonstrating affection in public acting as spurs. Misfortunes, it is said, ever come singly. In Mr Erdogan’s case, his much-prized opening to the world as a major player received a setback recently when scores of Turks were killed in bomb blasts in a Turkish border town with Syria. And the majority of the town’s people blamed the AKP for dragging the country into the Syrian civil war. Turkey’s muscular role in seeking the banishment of Syrian President Bashar Assad is well known. Among Ankara’s suggestions were the carving out of a portion of Syrian territory as a safe haven for refugees and enforcing a no-fly zone. Neither the US nor the other Western powers were agreeable to either measure when it was proposed. Mr Erdogan has threatened to bring out millions of his conservative supporters to pit against the thousands or hundreds of thousands of protestors. Indeed, he and his party have the numbers, but taking such a belligerent position is no answer to the crisis represented by thousands prepared to face tear gas and water cannons and rough police handling to come out to voice their dissent. It is at the very least unwise to throw numbers at significant sections of the population who feel dispossessed and alienated by a party that is willing to ignore them to proceed with its agenda. There seems to be some disquiet within the AKP over Mr Erdogan’s stance over the unprecedented spate of rioting, with President Abdullah Gul adopting a softer line. But the Prime Minister remains a dominant figure in the party and the country, and has the numbers to carry out his Islamisation agenda. However, the double setback he has received in his domestic and foreign policies must give him a pause. Many in Turkey and the outside world have commented on the authoritarian streak of Mr Erdogan. He has intimidated the Turkish media and censored the coverage of the riots at home. Such censorship has had limited effect because of the social media and the widespread coverage given by international channels led by Al-Jazira, the last winning a rebuke from Ankara. The Turkish trade unions have joined in a two-day strike in support of the protestors, but trade unions have traditionally played a limited role in the country’s affairs. The problem nevertheless is serious for the AKP and its Prime Minister, who has the ambition of changing the constitution in favour of an executive presidency he could assume to surmount the limitations of his term as Prime Minister. The truth is that in a democratic polity, the ruling party cannot ignore significant sections of the population in taking the
country forward. Indeed, Mr Erdogan’s options are shortening if he wants to continue his Islamisation of the country. Istanbul’s park became a flashpoint because it symbolised the AKP’s disregard of the history and traditions of one of the world’s richest cities in history and architecture. A historic cinema hall was demolished over protests and, apart from safeguarding mosques, Mr Erdogan has shown scant respect for the nature of the city in building skyscrapers and other incongruous structures to the disregard of aesthetic considerations. Many Turkish intellectuals and historians have been dismayed at Mr Erdogan’s vandalism; what is more important is that this dismay is shared by growing numbers of urban citizens and has added to the discomfort level of people who feel they are losing control over their own lives, with an officious and religiously-minded administration bent on imposing its own ideas on how Turks should live. The future for Turkey remains uncertain unless Mr Erdogan and his party listen to wiser advice and change course by making a gesture to the non-observant liberal and secular constituencies. They are entitled to live their lives as they wish as much as the observant followers of the AKP. Some Turkish observers suggest that confrontation is the rule, rather than the exception, in Turkish politics. That may indeed be so, but some rules need to be broken to surmount a major crisis in the country’s affairs. It would be a tragedy if Turkey’s promise of a brighter future were to be sacrificed at the altar of obstinacy of one
politician.
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When the sparrows protested! OUR house being adjacent to the dense oak and deodar forest attracts many winged visitors of various hues. The cuckoo, the parrot, the humming bird, the blue bird, the wood-pecker, the brownies, the long-tailed bird and the crowned ones whom we call the kalgi-wala, apart from the sparrows, crows and pigeons, etc. But it is the sparrows which have made their permanent abode in the thick rose creeper we had planted by the side of the house and which had made its way up to the third floor of the building. The rose creeper was no doubt the sparrows’ delight! The thick overgrown rose creeper was a multi-complex for the sparrows for their daily and special twitter meetings which were held in the arched branches of the creeper and also for the gossip sessions and for the fights over the branch ownership and for mates. The forked branches were the sturdy pillars for the sparrows to build their cosy nests out of the reach of the prowling cat. The eating (branch) joint was always houseful as non-vegetarian food was plenty, sometimes with juicy fat caterpillars gleefully gobbled up by the sparrows while the tiny insects and flies were the sparrows' special delicacies. With the moths and the spiders, it was a fight to the finish with many a wrestlers’ tactics in play in the deadly match in which the sparrows always won. This was in addition to the liberal scatter of grains by my husband and the bowlful of water which the sparrows used also as a bath tub. Placing the water in the big flowerpot was an obligatory duty or else the shrill twitter of the sparrows would remind us of our duty. One could not be negligent with one's duty towards the sparrows. The wooing and cooing, the preening and pruning, painstaking building of the nest, the feeding of the ever hungry hatchlings, the flutter and the fights in the bushy rose climber, the morning and evening twitter sessions, the shrill twittering away of the winged intruders from the rose climber --- the domain over which only the sparrows had the sovereign rights had become part and parcel of our lives too. And when thousands of roses blossomed on the rose climber, the twitter and the chirp of the sparrows also got louder as if show-casing their flowery homes and inviting the passers-by to their flower decked parlours. Over the years, the climber became dense and thick, obstructing sunlight and
air and the windows were virtually blacked out. Hence, we decided to cut and trim the climber. When the young ones had flown away and the nests were empty we started the "clearance operation". Cutting away the thorny branches of the climber was met with the shrill angry twitter with the birds flying all around us, furiously protesting. But what could the tiny birds do like the ordinary common man of the country before the powerful. It took us a few hours in completing our "clearance operation" and in our enthusiasm we cleared away nearly 80 per cent of the climber, letting the sunlight and air flow into the room through the door and the windows. The portion of the building now looked as if emancipated and freed from the clutches of the wicked witches. But the sparrows protested! In the evening and morning they held their "railing meetings" since that was now the only perching place left and no sooner we stepped out of the door, we were greeted with sharp twittering protests. The sparrows' unity was drastically and dangerously visible and in full play, making us feel extremely guilty of committing the heinous crime of rendering the birds homeless. Since we could not roll back what we had done, we promised the sparrows to grow back the rose climber to its pristine glory. The winged birds did send this message loud and clear that howsoever tiny and weak one may be, one must protest if wronged and fight for ones' rights. After all, this is a democratic
country!
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london latitude
Summer
is the time of all kinds of exhibitions and auctions in London and this summer is no exception, despite the freezing temperatures in the British capital. For Indian visitors interested in art next week is of particular significance because of the forthcoming auction of South Asian modern and contemporary art on the premises of Christie’s, the world famous auction house that deals with the sale of fine and decorative arts, jewellery, photographs, collectibles, wine and much more. This coming week, building on the success of Indian art sales in New York, Chritie’s London sale features works of art by cutting-edge artists, including M.F. Husain, Vasudeo Gaitonde and Francis Newton Souza. Husain’s 1971 Ganga Jamuna from the Bhownagaray family collection is described as a fitting tribute to the anniversary of his birth in 1913. Jehangir ‘Jean’ Bhownagary was the Indian government’s film adviser and producer of Husain’s epic, award-winning film, ‘Through the Eyes of a Painter.’ The Bhownagaray family’s sale of Ganga Jamuna is expected to fetch between £400,000 and £600,000. Also on sale is Gaitonde’s ‘Untitled’, the largest canvas by the artist ever to be offered at auction. It dates from the mid 1960s – recognised as the artist’s prime period, and is being sold from an anonymous private collection. Its sale value is estimated at between £500,000 and £700,000. No less important, although comparatively cheap, is Souza’s ‘Rome’, acquired from Gallery One, the dealership that first represented the artists in London in the early 1950s. Its value is estimated at between £40,000 and £60,000. From New York NRI artists Chitra Ganesh is selling 21 pop art images based on the ‘Amar Chitra Katha’ that are expected to fetch between £8000 and £12,000. Additional contemporary works by internationally acclaimed artists include Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Ravinder Reddy and Rina
Bannerjee.
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Sikh heritage items on display The sword was donated to the museum by the family of Major William Hodson, who came to India in 1845, six years after Ranjit Singh’s death, and it is understood that he personally used to wear the sword on ceremonial occasions. The museum authorities are intrigued by the faded gold inscritption and gold engraving on the sword, which they hope to translate in the coming weeks for the benefit of interested visitors. Other items on display include digitalised versions of the earliest known photographs of Sikhs, prints and manuscript letters from the Anglo-Sikh wars, a fortress turban (dastar boonga), along with miniature kirpans and quoits, as well as photographs of Sikh soldiers in the First World War. ‘War and Sikhs’ is described as a community project -- launched in collaboration with the Anglo-Sikh Heritage Trail -- created to raise awareness about the vital contribution of Sikh soldiers to the British Army and to give British Sikhs ‘ownership’ of how their history and artefacts are understood and described. Museum spokesman Michael Ball told The Tribune, “We started the project months ago to look at the influence of the Sikhs, initially as enemies and then as allies.” For the next few months the museum is running a series of interactive workshops where volunteers get exclusive access to some of the museum’s most rare items relating to Sikhs. Some workshops have been held in London, but more are planned for Hounslow, Southampton and Birmingham.
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‘Thanksgiving’ by NRIs from Uganda
NRIs who were kicked out of Uganda in 1972 during the murderous regime of Idi Amin will have a chance to commemorate their safe arrival in the UK at a Thanksgiving Service to be held at Leicester Cathedral on June 11. The Bishop of Leicester, the Right reverend Tim Stevens, and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles, are among the hundreds expected to attend the service that will celebrate the friendships and achievements of the NRI community in the UK. The Indian Overseas Trust chaired by Praful Patel, the only Asian on the original Resettlement Committee, has organised a year of celebratory events, including parliamentary debates, exhibitions and faith celebrations. Back in 1972 some 28,500 Ugandan Asians – mostly NRls but some Pakistanis as well -- were forced to leave Uganda on 90 days notice and no more than £50 and one suitcase of personal belongings. About 25 per cent, numbering 7,000, chose to settle in Leicester. Amin claimed he had a dream in which God asked him to conduct the ethnic cleansing because NRIs were sabotaging the Ugandan economy by hoarding wealth and goods. After Amin was overthrown in 1979 by the combined forces of the Tanzanian army and forces of the Uganda National Liberation front, Asians were invited to return to the country, but few bothered to take up the invitation, preferring instead the stability of the UK. Last year Lord Popat of Harrow observed, “Today in Britain, Ugandan Asians play a sizeable role in the national economy. While exact figures are not easily available for the impact of this one community, Britons with South Asian roots today make up 2.5 per cent of the population but account for 10 per cent of our national output.” Bishop Stevens commented, “It is a great pleasure that Leicester Cathedral has been chosen as the venue to give thanks for the contribution of the Ugandan Asian community. I hope that this special service, with a theme of neighbourliness, will recognise the importance of friendship and generosity, as shown by those who came to our city 40 years ago under such desperate circumstances, and those who welcomed them to this strange land and opened their homes and hearts in the best tradition of the faiths of this city.
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Hospital in Syria named after NRI doctor Newly married Dr Isa Abdur Rahman, who trained at Imperial College and the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, London, was a volunteer doctor for a charity called ‘Hand in Hand for Syria’ and died after a shell hit his makeshift clinic in Idlib province. Some £40,000 raised in his name will be used to fund a new field hospital in Syria’s western city of Homs. Rahman’s mother, who does not want her name disclosed, told the British media, “I am immeasurably proud of him. He knew the risks he was taking. If anyone goes into a war zone there is a risk, but it was a calculated risk. He was just one of those people who wanted to care for others, but with that responsibility comes serious challenges, and he took them on. He always wanted to be a doctor.” Charity founder Faddy Sahloul commented, “He was one of the bravest and most dedicated people I have met. He learnt Arabic in four months. He was very popular with the Syrians and people warmed up to him very quickly…He just wanted to help other humans – it is that simple.. A lot of foreign doctors go to Syria to help, but usually they have some connection with the country, some background which makes it important to them. Isa was different because he wasn’t connected with the country. He was purely there to help.”
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Mittal now fourth richest in UK Born in Rajgarh, Rajasthan, and graduating with a B.Com degree from St Xavier’s College, Calcutta, Mittal is the CEO of ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaking company. In 2007 Time magazine included him in its list of ‘100 most influential people in the world.’ In 2008 Mittal’s £10 billion fortune helped him secure an exclusive 14,736 sq ft, 12-bedroom house in Kensington Palace Gardens, the upmarket London enclave where the Indian High Commissioner and some of the British royals have their homes. Mittal is said to have paid £117 million for the house which was bought at the time for his 37-year-old son Aditya and featured a special storage room for art, a silver room and a flower room. Despite the massive price paid for the property, none of the Mittals ever lived there and it is now back on the market for £110 billion, reflecting both the global and British property slump. If the house does achieve its asking price – which dealers say is unlikely – Mittal will have lost a massive £7 million. This represents small pickings for Mittal who is still worth several billion pounds, which means he is still the fourth richest man in the UK. He also owns at least two other properties in London, which are each valued in excess of £50 million.
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Maharaja
A
field hospital in Syria is to be named after the first NRI victim of the two-year-old Syrian conflict who was killed by a bomb as he was treating wounded civilians.
WHO said money only breeds more money? Certainly not when it comes to the assets of NRI steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, who no longer holds the prime position of the richest individual in the UK.