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Torn by terror Unhappy high |
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Unconstitutional
khaps
Time for a quality
check
The mystery of a
missing computer
Recording
Punjab’s darkest hours for posterity
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Unhappy high Since
2005-06, there has been a more than 60 per cent increase in liquor consumption in Punjab. This period includes the economic boom period of 2005 to 2008, and the later slowdown. The increase in quantity of liquor consumed in the past few years, however, has slowed down, just as the economy has. This is an unhealthy correlation, even if someone may find it the most natural course. Punjabis are known for their boisterous ways, but certain traits are nothing to be proud of — and drinking is one of those. The economic growth has been the least in the primary sector, i.e., agriculture, and the highest in the services sector, of which the most was from hotels and restaurants. A lot of this growth is apparently fuelled by remittances from abroad, or investment in real estate, which means people did not really have to work for that income. That should explain to some extent the high liquor consumption in Punjab. A large non-productive population that sees a steady rise in its income will ‘naturally’ look for some high-spirited fun. The trouble lies in the social cost of this behaviour. Families are ruined across all income classes. Youth are beginning to take to alcohol rather early in life, as the general culture they grow up in seems to accept drinking as the done thing. Sale of liquor means handsome revenue for the state government, and in the current fiscal it is expected to be a rather steep jump with increase in prices and a stop to smuggling from Chandigarh. This works as a disincentive for a government to try and reduce liquor consumption, which is one of the goals enshrined in our Constitution. This is akin to selling your soul to the devil for a momentary high; there is a price to pay at the end. There is a need to educate the public through mass media on the ill effects of liquor, just as it is done for tobacco. With a population of less than 3 crore consuming around 30 crore bottles a year, it is hard to retain sanity.
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Unconstitutional khaps Instead
of further oppressing the young by demanding amendment to the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, or, by banning mobile phones, jeans and DJs, khaps would do better if they worked for a more humane society. Someone should remind them, under the existing Hindu Marriage Act, inter-caste marriage as well as same-gotra marriage between two adults is not illegal. Therefore, the blood curdling barbaric act of killing Nisha and Dharmender, of Garnawathi village, allegedly by family members of the girl, was an act that was against the Constitution of the land. The murder was committed from the moral high ground of cold ruthlessness of tradition, which, the murderers knew, would have the sanction of the khaps. Instead of demanding severest punishment for such murderers, the demand of the Sarva Khap Mahapanchayat held at Rohtak to amend the Hindu Marriage Act is not only perverse but also offers the stamp of justification to such barbaric crimes. The legislative vacuum in countering honour killings, dictated by family, clan and khap panchayats, needs to be filled in Haryana. Unfortunately, hundreds of choice marriages are either forcibly annulled or end up in honour killings despite their legal status in the eyes of the law. This is because unconstitutional bodies like khaps are free to advocate their own law in the absence of a strong political will to silence their diktat. To protect the young against such crimes, an efficient administration must use all provisions, including the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, to protect the victims. Incidentally, in 2010, the Haryana Government had said it had put in place an action plan to combat honour killings, in affidavits filed by the state in response to a PIL by an NGO, which was seeking the apex court’s intervention to protect such couples. In the light of Garnawathi case, it has become evident that the state needs some kind of legislative protection for such young couples. Unofficial sources put the number of honour crimes at around a thousand, countrywide. Of which the maximum number of honour deaths are reported from Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and western UP. It is high time khaps were silenced to protect the young of the land.
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"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant."
— Robert Louis Stevenson
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Time for a quality check
India’s
higher education system is the third largest after China and US. India has around 34,000 institutions having about 220 lakh students. For making education a reliable engine of development, the quantitative expansion should be in tandem with quality. Empirical evidence suggests that in India the quality of education has got lip service only. Out of around 650 universities none occupies good ranking in various world university surveys. No Indian institution got listed in world’s top 200 universities in all the four surveys conducted by the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS); the Centre for World University Ranking; Shanghai University; and Thomson Reuters. The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore only found a place above 300 in the Shanghai University Ranking of 500 universities. Three institutes — IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bombay and IIT Roorkee earned ranks above 226 in 500 universities rated by Thomson Reuters. Only 11 Indian institutes have figured in the list of 800 world universities released by QS recently. IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay are the only ones which are amongst top 50 Asian universities. University of Bombay got 140th position within Asia, lower than two universities of Pakistan. Evidences from other sources also suggest that Indian institutions have to cover a long distance to achieve world standards. India’s global competitive edge is also constrained by the very low access to higher education. The Gross Enrolment Ratio in the country is only 18 per cent. In South Korea it is 100 per cent. The government has attempted to increase access to education especially by opening it to private sector. Unfortunately, a large number of private institutions have failed on quality and the bubble has burst because of sub-standard quality of education being provided in these institutes. For want of employability and quality around 50 per cent private engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh are on the brink of closure as enrolment ratios have been dismal. In Tamil Nadu private institutions have failed to fill even 50 per cent seats in MCA and MBA programmes. The situation is equally alarming in other states. The Supreme Court recently came down heavily on private institutions for compromising with quality. While dismissing a petition filed by a Bareilly-based medical college, the Court observed that mushrooming of technical institutions had “definitely affected the quality of education”. According to Nature, Ph.D theses in India grew at a rate of 8.5 per cent per annum between 1998-2006. In China the growth rate was five-times higher (40 per cent). India, however, was better positioned vis-a-vis Japan, UK, and USA. The Kakodkar Committee (2011) set up by the MHRD found that the IITs are producing about 1,000 Ph.D. scholars per year. In the US and China the respective figures are 8,000 to 9,000. The Committee suggested a target of 40,000 Ph.Ds over the next decade. All these statistics indicate the quantitative growth of Ph.D's. We, however, have never debated much the quality of our theses. In many cases, these are of mediocre quality. These neither deal with significant problems nor are undertaken in a scientific manner (though there are exceptions of some good quality theses). Our faculty has been publishing research papers at a phenomenal rate. Their quality varies across institutions and researchers. Best quality papers are published in high-impact journals. According to a study published in Current Science, Chinese researchers publish more in high-impact journals like Nature and Science than Indians. The Murthy Committee Report on ‘Corporate Participation in Higher Education’ (2012) opines that quality suffers due to many deficiencies like faculty shortage, deficient physical infrastructure, inadequate library facilities and non-accreditation of institutions. Around 50 per cent faculty positions are lying vacant. The teacher-taught ratio is much higher (1:26) against UGC norm of 1:15. In Harvard and Stanford, the ratio is 1:7 and 1:5, respectively. According to UGC around 73 per cent of 1471 colleges and 68 per cent of 111 universities have mediocre or low quality infrastructure. The average number of books per student in an institution's library in India is only 9. Less than 20 per cent institutions are accredited by National Accreditation and Assessment Council (NAAC) and National Board of Accreditation (NBA). Clearly, higher education in India has a truncated quality. We need to bring revolutionary changes in teaching, research, curricula, re-organisation of disciplines, accreditation, autonomy, employability and regulation for making our universities brand names like Cambridge, Oxford, MIT and Harvard. For improving the quality of teaching, besides lecture method, other modes of learning like problem solving, experiential learning, student seminars, and field based learning should be used. For making teaching relevant to contemporary issues, the bond between teaching and research should be strengthened. A practice of having adjunct faculty from industry should be encouraged. Student internships should be made mandatory. In developing curricula, all stakeholders specially potential employers should be involved. Curricula should be revised regularly, in tune with changing market and societal needs. These changes would certainly improve employability of students exponentially from existing level of 10 to 25 per cent. For enriching the quality of research, publications in high impact journals should be incentivised. For strengthening research credentials of universities, Research Professors should be appointed on the pattern of world-class universities. In most of the research schemes emphasis boils down to spending money excessively on infrastructure, including equipment which normally remains underutilised. It is suggested that funds should be linked with quality outcomes rather than infrastructure. Quality of Ph.D theses can be improved by preparing manuals covering the entire process. For gauging research aptitude of student, writing a 'Statement of Purpose' justifying research as a career should be a part of admission process. Mid-term review and a comprehensive pre-submission viva-voce should be introduced. Publication of at least two research papers should be made mandatory for submission of thesis. In order to curb plagiarism, each thesis should compulsorily be run through anti-plagiarism software. The present artificially regimented system of knowledge generation in the form of erecting impregnable disciplinary walls also needs to be replaced by introducing interdisciplinary integrated courses. The traditional departments should be organised around the school system comprising inter-related disciplines. The schools should offer integrated Ph.D programmes after under-graduation and preferably after Plus II examination with multiple exits and entries. Accreditation plays pivotal role in improving the quality of education. The NAAC and NBA follow different parameters for accreditation. It is recommended that both should revisit accreditation parameters in the light of parameters adopted for ranking universities. Also accreditation should be made compulsory by law. Government funds should be linked with accreditation. Highly accredited universities should be given autonomy in admission, courses, curricula, examination and faculty recruitment. In the post-privatisation era for improving quality of education, an independent regulatory commission outside the control of the government should be set up
urgently.
The writer is former Dean, Faculty of Arts, Panjab University, Chandigarh.
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The mystery of a missing computer He
entered the room, anxious, nervous and a bit confused. “Your first interview”, I asked. “Yes, Sir”, he replied apprehensively looking at my colleague, who was going through his three ACRs. “So, you are Mr Suresh from Rampur Branch, tell us why you are suited for this job,” 1 asked in order to make him feel comfortable. His reply, however, was a bit unusual as he said that he was not too hopeful of getting selected. His three ACR were in front of us. While two were outstanding in all parameters, the last one was “below average”. We could smell a rat. “Suresh, trust us, and tell us why your last ACR was below average”, I asked. “Sir, it is a strange story, and I don’t think you will believe me?”. My colleague got up from his chair, went around the table and comforted him. “We are here to help you. Please tell us everything”. On this our nervous candidate relaxed and narrated his “strange” story. He told us how one day two new computers were delivered at his office and he, being the IT in-charge, took possession of these. However, the next day he was surprised to find all three boxes of one computer missing. He informed his boss, the branch manager, who came rushing to his room, made some enquiries and told him that he would do the needful to trace the
missing computer. When nothing happened for several days, our man asked his boss if he had informed the Regional Office and whether an FIR had been lodged. But he was snubbed and told to mind his own business. That day after much deliberation Suresh informed the IT Manager at the Regional Office about the missing computer. Later, two officers from the Regional Office inspected his room, made discreet enquiries and left. His boss called him in the afternoon and said, “So you think reporting to Regional Office will bring back the computer?” After that the boss lost no opportunity to convey his displeasure towards him and it reflected in his ACR also. As we ended the interview, we decided verify his version although we all were convinced that the man was telling the truth. We called the Manager, IT, who confirmed the loss of computer in Rampur branch which was about 80 km from the Regional Office. The enquiry report had also been submitted to the Regional Manager. The Manager (IT) also added that Suresh was an excellent programmer and a dedicated worker. We decided to report the entire matter to the Regional Manager during lunch break and requested him to call Suresh’s boss and get his ACR changed so that he was not punished for doing the right thing. The same was done by the evening and “our friend” was relieved of bearing the burden of an adverse ACR. Suresh also made it to the list of successful candidates. Days later I received a “thank you” card from himas he joined as officer in-charge in his new assignment. However, the mystery of missing computer still remains
unresolved.
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Recording Punjab’s darkest hours for posterity
Oral histories are people’s histories — free of political hues. A unique public — funded project,1947 Partition Archive, is recording narratives of Punjabis, in their own words, of their memories of uprooting and the largest migration on earth
Even
though much has been written and theatrically retold about the Partition of 1947, talking to Partition eyewitnesses brings forth more recollections of what life was like in Punjab, before and after the Partition. I use the phrase "life in Punjab" because there is nothing but the wailing cries of an erstwhile Punjab that can be heard in the stories told. Many believe, there is little new wisdom or knowledge to be sought from stories of Punjab's past. After all, in the last few decades, its history has been seeped in divisiveness and controversy. After my experience of working with the survivors of the Partition, this belief couldn't be any further from truth.
With funding through the American India Foundation's (AIF) William J. Clinton Fellowship for Service in India, I spent the last one year living in Punjab and collecting oral narratives (on video) of the people who were an eyewitness to the Partition. Guru Nanak Dev University's Center for Studies on Sri Guru Granth Sahib, hosted me for my work of contributing recorded stories to the 1947 Partition Archive in Berkeley, California. Undivided Punjab spoke to me during this period like no book ever did. I touched its scars, heard its cries, smelt its burning flesh and tasted its tears as it painfully recalled through the memory of every living elder all that it had, and all that was lost in the mortal man's unending quest for more power. When one engages in a lengthy dialogue with the generation that was an eyewitness to the partition, one begins to realise the magnitude of change this generation has experienced in its lifetime. Most elders I interviewed were between the ages of 70 and 105 years, born anywhere between 1908 and 1942. If we broadly recall Punjab's history for a moment here, we realise, we are now engaging with a generation of people who lived through the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, Gurudwara Reform Movement of the 1920s, World Wars I and II, the Partition of 1947, Indo-Pak conflicts of 1965 and 1971, Punjab's division into Himachal Pradesh and Haryana in 1966, the Indian Emergency of the late 1970s, Operation Blue Star, Indira Gandhi's assassination and anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, the birth and evolution of the Khalistan movement, economic liberalisation of India in the 1990s and finally, the unprecedented rise in the Punjabi and Sikh diaspora in a now globalised, digitally accessible world. Few of us have the general cognizance of the spectrum any detailed dialogue with eyewitnesses about the life before, during and after the Partition actually entails.
End of composite culture
While interviewing elders from all walks of life, from ordinary citizens to highly distinguished Punjabis like Khushwant Singh, Dr. J.S Neki, Dr. Bhai Harbans Lal, Bhai Ashok Singh Bagrian, Shanno Khurana, Shiromani Ragi Bhai Balbir Singh and fellow Everest climbers Captain M.S Kohli and Major HPS Ahluwalia, to name a few, a picture of undivided Punjab began to reveal itself to me albeit very painstakingly slowly, almost as if it kept testing whether I was serious about bearing deeper knowledge of it. With the small bit of life still left inside its body, here is what that wounded Punjab tells us. Renowned kirtaniya Bhai Gurcharan Singh, 32, at the time of Partition, tells me about how he, his two brothers and father gathered all the Muslim families of their village Saidpur (in Kapurthala) in their haveli and gave them shelter for over a month to protect them from those who wanted to harm them, as they awaited their turn to travel to the west Punjab. When a few non-Muslim families threatened to kill any Muslims using their fields to answer nature's call, Bhai Gurcharan offered his family's fields to those Muslim families. The Partition became a cause for his father Bhai Jwala Singh's contemporaries, that included several rababis (Muslim exponents of gurbani sangeet) who were his colleagues as performers at Darbar Sahib, to leave for west Punjab. It is known that Bhai Jwala Singh's student, the legendary percussionist Bhai Arjan Singh Tarangar, said that after the rababis left, a sense of healthy competition - one that brings with it challenges meant to foster creativity among music legends, disappeared from the community of gurbani sangeet practitioners and thus, from Punjab. Partition brought an end to this beautiful gesture of cultural unity and harmony in an undivided Punjab.
Quest for a better life
In the Shivalik mountains I meet Mahanbir Singh Dhillon, 11- year- old, at the time of Partition and the only other male member of his family besides his father, who recounts for me the Sukhmani Sahib verses his father recited as he lay dying of cholera he had contracted near Multan in August, 1947. Mahanbir then describes to me his widowed mother and two elder sisters' difficult journey in quest of life their father had imagined for all of them — one with education, professional success and most of all, honor and dignity. With Partition, Mahanbir not only lost his father at such a young age, but also couldn't perform his father's last rites (his body was buried not cremated). Born in Nankana Sahib, Mahanbir lives with a sense of lost childhood due to the uprooting and destruction of Partition, now barely accessible to his progeny, both physically and emotionally. Eminent Sikh studies scholar, poet and psychiatrist, Dr. Jaswant Singh Neki, barely 22, in 1947, narrates his and his friend's escape from the medical college in Lahore, in a car. On the way to Amritsar, the car they came in broke down just as a mob was approaching them. With some lateral thinking and good fortune, the car started again just as the mob reached close enough to break the windshield. Dr. Neki and his friend drove off as shards of glass from the shattered windshield began quaking on the car's seats, just the way the earth shook in the 1935 Balochistan earthquake, when Dr. Neki was a 10- year-old boy, who remained buried under the kucchi roof of his house for six hours, breathlessly awaiting his rescue.
Last miles — the longest
Krishna Singh of Amritsar recalls the house she spent her childhood in on Abbott Road, on the outskirts of Lahore. She loved flying kites with her brother on their house's rooftop. During the early 1947, half-burnt pieces of paper and cloth, carried with the winds and brought to her house on Abbott Road signaled that danger was looming right around the corner. Krishna Singh and her siblings came to Hoshiarpur, few weeks before their widowed mother, who arrived from Lahore after August 15th 1947. Krishna said that she heard no news of her mother for 22 days and when she finally saw her mother again, it took her some time to recognise her. There was not a single strand of black hair on her head. Krishna believes it was as if her mother had grown older by 15 years in the 15 days it took her to journey the distance between Lahore and Hoshiarpur. Sangeet Natak Akademi Puruskar recipient Vilayat Khan, the grand old dhaadi (balladeer) of Goslan, near Malerkotla, describes his forced migration to Sargodha, at the time of Partition. After exhausting whatever little money he could bring with him and then finding no encouragement or patronage for his art form in Sargodha, Vilayat had to become a daily wage labourer to sustain himself and his family in Pakistan. When it became both spiritually and financially unfeasible to continue living on in Sargodha, Vilayat and his father arranged for their journey back to India, almost 10 years after the Partition. Vilayati, as he is lovingly called, says the music suppressed and suffocated inside him for those 10 years in Pakistan, experienced a rebirth when he returned to his native village of Goslan, on the Indian side of the border. At 92 years of age today, Vilayati sings in praise of his 'yaar' (God) and Guru Nanak, for it is they who he credits for all that he has been able to achieve for himself and his family.
The denouement
I stumbled upon episodes related to legendary pakhawaji Bhai Nasira from Amritsar during a meeting with Satguru Uday Singh of Namdhari Darbar at Sri Bhaini Sahib in Ludhiana. Satguru Uday Singh's father, Maharaj Bir Singh and his brother, the former guru of the Namdharis, Satguru Jagjit Singh, were students of Bhai Nasira. Soon after Partition, Satguru Pratap Singh sent a Namdhari Sikh to Lahore in search of Bhai Nasira in order to enquire about how he was doing. After searching for Bhai Nasira for many days, the messenger finally found him in a garden. As he was instructed to do, the messenger offered him two silver coins as nazar and enquired about his pakhawaj playing. Bhai Nasira showed him his hands, soiled and badly blistered, and told him that as his art form was heartlessly disregarded immediately after the Partition, he had to turn to gardening for a living, as a mali (gardener). The number of stories told is thousand times more than the small fraction I could share here. Our community elders are the last remaining bearers of the realities of an undivided Punjab, one, in which stronger values were cultivated and loyalties were earned, not preemptively appropriated on the basis of religious expressions. The gravity and multiple dimensions of Partition violence can be best understood only when one becomes well- acquainted with the Punjab that was before Partition and begin a dialogue about that Punjab with the elders. Perhaps, it is not the most effective way to do it. Talking to them is like getting a 'reality check' on what it was and how it has changed. Most of them are deeply saddened to witness such capitalisation on manipulated histories and wish to see Punjab undivided again.
Unity out of severance
It would be imprudent to believe that undivided Punjab was completely devoid of religious clashes (after all, is any part of the world like that today either?). But it is important to remember that those minor frictions occurred largely due to differences deliberately exacerbated again to rally support for political control. The result of this deleterious exercise has been that all generations of Punjabis born after 1947 have lost out on a spiritually and socially enriching life in Punjab. On this side of the border, we have forgotten that before the Partition, many who were the finest in several skills were not only Sikhs or Hindus, with alienation of an entire community in 1947, a large part of Punjab became alienated from itself. It is this alienation that we must undo as much as possible now. And there may not be a better place to begin the search for that unity than the original moment of severance
itself.
Manleen Sandhu is a US-based anthropologist and writer, currently working as a cultural research coordinator and fundraising manager for The Anad Foundation, New Delhi.
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