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Back to life Bliss of living in Badal |
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Gang rapes: ‘Incredible India’ indeed!
When the sun stops shining
The science behind solar, lunar calendars
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Back to life With
the Supreme Court's landmark judgment on Tuesday delay has become a ground for commuting a death sentence to life imprisonment. Delay as a ground was ruled out when a Division Bench of the apex court delivered its judgment in the case of Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar in April last year. The three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice P. Sathasivam has now overturned this ruling. Though Bhullar was not among the 15 petitioners who have got the relief, the verdict will have a bearing on his case. Tuesday’s ruling also states that a death sentence cannot be carried out if a convict suffers from mental illness or schizophrenia. The court directions will apply in all cases, including the convictions under the anti-terror law. The victims of heinous crimes or their families may object to the court's humane approach, but human rights activists and those opposed to death penalty will feel relieved. Keeping someone on death row for years is an act of cruelty on the victim as well his/her family members. A person on death row too has some rights. The Constitution Bench also ruled that in deciding on mercy petitions the President and the Governor do not exercise their prerogative but discharge their constitutional obligation. They cannot sit on such petitions indefinitely. There is a growing demand for the abolition of the death sentence worldwide. India has retained the extreme punishment but it is awarded in the rarest of rare cases. Quite often executions are not carried out since these evoke strong reactions. After a long gap there were two hangings in the last two years. Ajmal Kasab was executed in November 2012 in Pune. The mishandling of Afzal Guru's execution last year provoked protests in Kashmir. The case has prompted the Supreme Court directions that there has to be a gap of 14 days between the communication of the rejection of the mercy petition to the convict and his family members and the execution. Politics should not dictate executions nor judicial and executive procedures delay them inordinately. |
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Bliss of living in Badal There
are advantages of being a resident of the Chief Minister’s village. More so if the Chief Minister believes in the adage that charity begins at home. Badal village in Muktsar district has all that an ideal village should have — schools, colleges, banks, hospitals, sports facilities. And there is more than one of each. Parkash Singh Badal may have faced difficulties getting cooperation from the Centre in the development of the state, but he has been able to overcome all that for his village. Help has been available from any entity required — whether associated with the state, Centre or the private sector — to set up facilities, open offices or branches, even build a guest house. This is plain boost to the ego, not even vote bank politics. Badal village votes are assured for the family in any case. The inspiration for this behaviour springs from the same attitude as has convinced him ‘sangat darshans’ are a genuine way of helping people and an efficient tool of governance. A ruler has to have the satisfaction of handing out largesse to supplicants and being the cause of a smile on their face. Badal was quick to invite Kejriwal to learn how to hold such ‘darshans’ following the latter’s fiasco in Delhi. However, he forgets how agitating employees get the stick every time they try and raise a voice at his public appearances. A drive down the grand four-lane road to Badal village becomes all the more nauseous when one hits the potholes on the link roads to other villages in Punjab, most of which are beyond repair. Every public building in Badal has come up at the cost of another village, where it would have been better
utilised. Students from far-off places populate the facilities in
Badal. The government’s move last year to have at least 100 hospitals in the state provided for in every respect failed as it was unable to hire specialist doctors. If that is a reflection of the state’s resources, Badal residents ought to have trouble sleeping guilt free.
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If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us. —Stendhal
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WHENEVER Indian members in the Council ask for increased expenditure on education, sanitation, and industrial schemes, and at the same time demand the reduction of some heavy taxation, they are charged by Government officials and Anglo-Indian critics with being inconsistent in their attitude. It is presumed that when the popular representatives propose many schemes of utility involving higher expenditure they cannot possibly propose at the same time other schemes which will reduce the income of the State. This is a clear fallacy. Because the critics look at the question wholly from the stand point of the official body whose fiscal system, they take it for granted is perfect and free from extravagance or waste. We all know what excuse people who are used to large expenditure say when we propose not merely curtailment of their expense but also expenditure on objects of utility. But that is hardly convincing. For instance when Indians ask for reduction in land tax and raising the taxable minimum of income tax, they feel that these reductions are good and necessary because they afford relief to a most deserving class of wealth producers and this relief will on the whole add to the wealth of the country. Raids and dacoities
WHILE heartily congratulating the police on promptly and effectively seconding the efforts of His Honour the Lieutenant Governor to put down crime with a strong hand, we have to point out that the vigor of action and resourcefulness displayed by them in the western districts are not equal to the skill, daring and desperation of the Pathan gangs. We may leave alone the state of insecurity which still exists in Peshawar with the administration of which this province is not directly concerned. But it is difficult to say that all is tranquil in our own borders except for disturbances created by the hordes of incoming raiders. We are inclined to the opinion that a contingent, by no means, small of the turbulent element finds shelter in our own province, and finds protection even as the anarchist gang in another part of the country.
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Gang rapes: ‘Incredible India’ indeed! ON December 16, in New Delhi and many other cities and towns there were big and angry demonstrations to observe the anniversary of the barbaric gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old in a Delhi bus that had enraged the entire country. But ironically as well as tragically, a series of the same brutality was being inflicted on helpless women across the country at the same time. These were not stray incidents but part of a seemingly established pattern in a land that boasts of treating its women as symbols of goddess "Shakti" (power).
In the nation's capital a Danish woman, who had lost her way to her hotel, was gang-raped by a group of young men, including minors, who had promised to help her. The beasts also robbed her. In Kolkata, the parents of a 16-year-old girl, who was first gang-raped and then burnt to death, were appealing to the high court for help “because the police were doing nothing”. There is no dearth of backwoodsmen in this country who believe and preach that rapes take place because women have started wearing “provocative” western dresses. Some educational institutions have even banned jeans within their premises. As it happened, just after a legislator in UP had held forth that there were hardly any rapes in South India because women there “dressed fully”, came the news of a ghastly incident in Chennai. A poor woman who was lost and bewildered because she had been raped by some thugs was raped a second time by another gang of criminals. These instances are illustrative, not exhaustive. Their message is that the new strict laws that were enacted immediately after the December 2012 Delhi outrage are not being enforced because the police are indifferent and have not bothered to keep their promise to light up the dark spaces that are a blessing to rapists and to patrol the streets effectively. The luckless Danish woman, for instance, was raped close to New Delhi railway station, indeed near the State Entry Road used by British Viceroys to drive to their special train in an era when there was no air travel. There were four PVRs (police vans) in the vicinity. One of them was specifically duty-bound to visit the area where the monstrous crime was taking place but did not bother to do so. No wonder, retired Justice Usha Mehra, who prepared a report on what the police must do to prevent rapes and get the beastly rapists duly punished, regrets that not a single of her detailed instructions has been followed. The reason for this is not far to seek. A New Delhi magazine that interviewed the capital’s 30 senior police officers, reported that half of them said that most of the cases of alleged rape were, in fact, consensual. Many of these were cases of “prostitution” that turn into rape when the “money paid is inadequate”. Last year 754 men were arrested for rape in Delhi, apart from the accused persons in the worst case of December 2012. Of these only one has been convicted and sentenced so far. All other cases are pending for which the investigating agencies and subordinate judiciary must share the blame. Time was when it was thought that out of every 10 rapes, only one was reported. The proportion has certainly gone up since then. For, women are becoming more conscious of their rights and have the support of many activist groups and the saner sections of society. According to official statistics, there were 2, 487 reported rape cases in 1971. The number soared to 24, 206 in 2011, the latest year for which information is available, or roughly ten times. In that year 35, 565 women and girls were kidnapped, 42, 968 were molested, and 8,570 were sexually harassed. Shockingly, nearly a lakh of women -- 99,135, to be precise -- suffered cruelty at the hands of their husbands and other relatives, often leading to what are euphemistically called “dowry deaths” but are in reality cases of bride burning. The woman from Denmark, who left Delhi the morning after the traumatic evening, is not the only foreign woman to be gang-raped. There have been several more instances. In May 2003, a Swiss woman, on a cycling holiday, along with her husband in Madhya Pradesh, was gang-raped one evening and her husband was beaten up. In Agra an English woman injured herself by jumping from the balcony of her hotel room to escape a sexual assault by the hotel manager. A Polish young woman was drugged and subjected to rape after rape, and a foreign woman diplomat representing her country in India was raped in the parking lot of the Sri Fort auditorium after a cultural show. In the opinion of Vrinda Grover, a leading activist for women’s rights, foreign women are “particularly vulnerable” because they don't have the “heightened sense of alert” Indian women have developed to protect themselves in the country's “misogynist culture”. It is no surprise, therefore, that across the world India's name is mud. Listen to any of the prominent foreign TV networks — BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera - and witness the contempt with which they associate India only with rape. Some smart bureaucrat in the Tourism Ministry had coined the expression "Incredible India" to attract more and more foreign tourists. India has indeed become incredible but in a wrong way. Consequently, instead of hordes of tourists descending on this country, people in many foreign countries are reluctant to do so. Their governments are advising them, particularly the women, to avoid travelling to India. In the words of a foreign observer, everyone is wondering why half the population consisting of women in the world's largest democracy with powerful women leaders lives in “fear and restrictions that would cause no offence to a Taliban mullah in Kandahar”. Tragically, the Central and state governments are guilty of not doing their duty in this respect, despite their overblown rhetoric in this election year about their deep concern for women and children. And what a coincidence it is that as I write this article, there comes from Kolkata another wrenching news of a particularly cruel case of rape. It is time Mamata Banerjee realised that in the matter of unpunished and even unacknowledged rapes, her government's reputation is the worst.
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When the sun stops shining No
I did not know Sunanda Pushkar. But I admired the dignity and dexterity with which she handled the IPL fracas, and then the pictures of her wedding were just so beautiful. You just had to pause to look, because the fact that the two people were in love shone through every picture. Strong, sensible women usually fall harder. My father, who knows me better than anyone else, always tells me that I will become 'whole' only when I get over the man I love. Sad but true because 23 years on, I know that like the Carpenters song, the sun stops shining, when he and I are at odds. Why do I, a strong professional woman, allow myself to fall to pieces over a man? I have a professionally satisfying career, fabulous sons, great parents, supportive friends, creative skills, but the world is right only when he and I are right, and that sadly is the way the cookie crumbles. And so too did Sunanda crumble. Here was a woman who had pulled herself up from a small town in Jammu, travelled to Dubai and Canada, while continuing to support her family and trying to make a life for her son and herself. The world is not kind to attractive single women and I'm sure she did not have an easy time. But she did her best and she had succeeded. And then she fell in love and threw caution and the life she had built to the wind to follow the man she loved. When things went wrong, she crumbled, but there was more here. As a woman in love, I know that I would never hold back the man I love, if he wanted to move on, even if it killed me. And that is what one of Sunanda's tweets said. So this was not a woman scorned. This was a woman who was not loved enough — the way she wanted. And I believe that perhaps was what was destroying her. Perhaps she felt her trust had not been kept. That she had staked her reputation and goodwill and put herself out on a limb for the man she loved and who she thought loved her back. Disappointed, she once hit out at the man she loved. Before her death, the two had announced to the world that they were happily married. So let's just raise a toast to a strong, beautiful woman, who was a great mother, a great daughter, a great wife and someone who could have been more if only she had had the chance and not fallen in love with an unsuitable boy. R.I.P. Sunanda, and chin up Shiv — your fabulous mother will always be watching over you.
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The science behind solar, lunar calendars traditionally, Sikh festivals and commemorative days have been ascertained on the basis of the luni-solar Bikrami (or Vikrami) calendar which fixes Hindu festivals. In 1999, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) tried to introduce a new solar calendar, the Nanakshahi, but backed out following opposition from the Akal Takht.
The change-over finally materialised in 2003 but has remained controversial ever since. As a concession to tradition, three important festivals related to full moon (Hola Mohalla and Guru Nanak Jayanti) and amavasya (Diwali) continued to be celebrated according to the Bikrami calendar. In 2010, the Nanakshahi calendar was further diluted through amendments so that the days of birth and martyrdom of Guru Gobind Singh as well as some other days could be celebrated on lunar dates as before. It is for the Sikh community to decide how the days of religious significance are to be reckoned. My concern in the following is entirely with the scientific aspects of the calendar problem. While discussing cultural aspects of astronomy it is convenient to use geo-centric terminology, as in olden times. The sun’s (apparent) path around the Earth or the ecliptic is divided into 12 equal parts known as zodiacal signs or rashis. There are four important imaginary points on the ecliptic whose identification is older than the introduction of the zodiac — spring equinox (March 20-21), summer solstice (June 20-21), autumn equinox (September 22-23), and winter solstice (December 21-22). These dates are for the northern hemisphere. Spring equinox and winter solstice are the two most common starting points for tracking the sun’s apparent orbit. A lunation or lunar month (say from new moon to new moon) comprises 29-and-a-half days so that 12 lunations add up to 354 days, 11 less than a solar year of 365-and-a-quarter days. If the solar year had exactly coincided with a ‘lunar year’, we would have had a very simple universal calendar. The mismatch has been dealt with variously, resulting in different calendars. Solar calendars The most commonly used calendar in the world is the Gregorian, named after Pope Gregory XIII, who in 1582 revised the earlier Julian calendar. The year is purely solar, has an extremely accurate length, and consists of 365 or 366 days, grouped in months that are totally decoupled from the moon and can have 28-31 days. We can construct a solar calendar in another manner. The sun’s entry into a rashi is called Samkranti (Sangrand in Punjabi). The time taken by the sun to move from one Sangrand to the next is called a solar month or a sauramasa. The solar year would then comprise 12 solar months of different durations.
Sun & moon of it Luni-solar calculations The Bikrami calendar is a twin-track calendar which monitors Sangrand as well as lunations. The year consists of either 12 or 13 lunations, that is 354 or 383 days. Thus, an individual year would be either a few days shorter or longer than the solar year. The prescription for adding an extra month is quite complex and need not concern us here. Suffice it to note that in a period of 19 years, seven years will have 13 months, the rest 12. There are only 12-month names, so that when the year has 13 months, a name is repeated. The month name contains an interesting bit of information. It is named after the nakshatra that is near the full moon. Thus, in the month of Chaitra, the bright star Chitra will be seen near the full moon. A lunation is divided into two equal parts called pakshas. The period from amavasya to purnima is called shukla (bright) paksha because the moon becomes brighter night after night. The period from purnima to amavasya is called krishna (dark) paksha. Each paksha in turn is divided into 15 unequal parts called tithis. A lunar month thus consists in all of 30 tithis, numbered according to the paksha. Nanakshahi system This calendar could as well be called the modified Gregorian. The year in it is purely solar, comprising 365 or 366 days, with a leap year added according to the Gregorian prescription. However, the months are treated differently. The first five months have 31 days and the following seven, 30. In a leap year, an extra day is added to the last month. As a concession to tradition, Bikrami-month names are used, with the first month, Chet, beginning on March 14. The years are reckoned from the year of Guru Nanak’s birth; thus 1469 CE is Nanakshahi 1. By some method, traditional Bikrami dates have been translated into the Nanakshahi dates. Hence, Guru Gobind Singh’s birthday (Pausha shukla saptami = Poh sudi 7) is assigned the 23rd day of Poh. The Nanakshahi exercise is a via media for transforming Sikh religious and historical anniversaries into fixed Gregorian dates. Self-contained Bikrami Criticism of the Bikrami calendar, couched in scientific terms, is an essential part of the legitimisation of the Nanakshahi calendar. The criticism is only partly founded on solid grounds. It has been pointed out that Guru Gobind Singh’s birthday occurs twice in some Gregorian years and not at all in others. In the Bikrami calendar, the Guru’s birthday did not occur in 1999, even though it was the year of the 300th anniversary of the ordination of the Khalsa. This is a weak argument and underlines the Gregorian-centric mindset. The Bikrami calendar would be blamed if it failed to repeat an event every year in its own framework. The calendar is a self-contained entity. It cannot use another calendar to benchmark itself. Double occurrence of Guru Gobind Singh’s birthday in a Gregorian year would arise whenever two conditions are met — the birth tithi falls in the first 11 Gregorian days, and the following Bikrami year has only 354 days. Let us take a specific example. The Guru’s birthday occurred on January 11, 2011. Since the following Bikrami year was short, the next birthday came on December 31, 2011. The next Bikrami year comprised 383 days, so the whole of 2012 was passed over and the next event occurred on January 18, 2013. There is thus no problem when one views the phenomenon within the framework of the Bikrami calendar. The problem arises only when extraneous considerations such as another calendar are brought in. In a vital respect, the criticism of the Bikrami calendar is valid, even though the problem is more fundamental than envisaged by the protagonists of the Nanakshahi calendar. Baisakhi occurred on April 10 in 1763, April 13 in 1919, and now falls on April 14. Further back, the founding of the Khalsa on Baisakhi day in 1699 would have corresponded to April 9. It is, however, not quite right to assert that Baisakhi and Sangrand (s) will ‘always’ be moving to later and later dates. The oscillation of lunar festivals is an intrinsic feature of the Bikrami calendar. But the uni-directional progression of the Sangrand (s) arises because the year length used as an input parameter in the computations is excessive. Ancient astronomical texts, including the Surya Siddhanta on which the Bikrami calendar calculations are based, use a tropical year of 365.2587 days as against the correct value of 365.2422 days. This amounts to a substantial error of 0.165 days per year or a full day in 60 years. Since the error is cumulative, the year beginning has advanced by as many as 23 days in the last 1,500 years. The present dates of Lohri and Baisakhi have no astronomical significance. When people celebrate them, they do so in good faith, believing that they are celebrating winter solstice and spring equinox, respectively. In the Nanakshahi calendar, Baisakhi has been fixed on April 14, but the date is totally arbitrary. If this calendar had been introduced 100 or 200 years ago, nobody would have thought of it. The Bikrami calendar constitutes the cultural heritage of Hindus as well as Sikhs. What part of this cultural heritage is to be retained and what part is not to be, is for each community to decide. As an astronomer, I would like to draw attention to the distinction between the intrinsic features of the calendar like the addition of an extra month and the changeable parameters like the year length. Just as Pope Gregory corrected the year length in the Julian calendar, there is need to insert the correct tropical year length in the Bikrami calculations, and take Lohri and Baisakhi and other Sangrand (s) back by 23 days to their correct dates. —
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And that I can relate to, having had a taste of being irretrievably in love. Love is such a profound, uplifting, emotion but it can change a woman in indefinable ways breeding a dangerous dependence. 