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Strongman
of Odisha |
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More heads, please Major shake-up in Punjab needed to check drugs The Lok Sabha elections have established more than the obvious fact that the SAD’s votes in Punjab have dropped by more than 20 per cent since the Assembly elections. It is now also clear that one of the leading reasons for people’s anger against the state government — rampant drug trade — is not unfounded. The availability of drugs in the state went down so drastically while the poll code was in force that addicts in the state's prisons started falling sick for want of their dose. After the elections, according to one jail superintendent, the prisoners have regained their ‘health’, as drugs are once more available. This proves drug supply can be stopped in the state within two months if the government and the police want to.
Sharp
caste cleavage in Haryana
Using
right sounds for past tense marker
CINEMA: NEW
Releases
Not such
a roaring start Clumsy
misadventure Clawless
& clueless
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More heads, please The
Lok Sabha elections have established more than the obvious fact that the SAD’s votes in Punjab have dropped by more than 20 per cent since the Assembly elections. It is now also clear that one of the leading reasons for people’s anger against the state government — rampant drug trade — is not unfounded. The availability of drugs in the state went down so drastically while the poll code was in force that addicts in the state's prisons started falling sick for want of their dose. After the elections, according to one jail superintendent, the prisoners have regained their ‘health’, as drugs are once more available. This proves drug supply can be stopped in the state within two months if the government and the police want to. What makes the irony worse is that the state police’s own ‘anti-drug drive’ was suspended during the poll period, and has been
resumed subsequently! Punjab Jails Minister Sarwan Singh Phillaur has resigned because of the summons for questioning sent to his son by the ED in the Bhola drug racket. This should have happened long ago. Even now the suspect seems to be in no mood to cooperate. The father has said they are waiting for the ED to send the third summons for the youth to show up. In case the charges turn out to be true, this could even be called a case of conflict of interest. After all, the Jails Minister is also responsible for the running of the prisons, where one-third of the inmates are addicts who are getting their regular supply. The removal of one minister, however, is going to affect neither the drug trade nor people’s perception of the government. Names of other members of the SAD have figured in the ongoing investigations earlier. There are obviously a large number of people in the police as well as the political hierarchy that are gaining directly or indirectly from the drug trade. This superstructure has to be brought down. Many more heads will have to roll before people's confidence is restored.
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Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you. —Thomas Jefferson
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History teaching and the Punjab University
PROFESSOR Ramsay Muir's report on the teaching of history in the affiliated College of the Punjab University has not generally commended itself to the Special Committee which was appointed to consider the recommendations. This Committee of course recognise the "force" of many of the learned Professor's criticisms and the advantage of having an ideal set before the University. But they are inclined to think that "he has insufficiently realised the limitation of the University work in the country and that his note pre supposes a standard which for the present is impossible of attainment, e.g., in the matter of research being more incumbent on every teacher of history." Copies of the report have been sent to the Colleges for expression of opinion by the staff of each College.
The whiteman as a plantation coolie
INDIANS are greatly concerned to hear that the British Consul General in Buenos Ayres is investigating a report that a Canadian is being held in slavery in a tea plantation on the borders of Paraguay and Brazil and he, the victim, twice escaped but was captured and flogged on both occasions. We await the receipt of this investigation with interest in order to compare the conditions of labour which the whiteman when applied to himself considers as slavery with those which he prescribes for Indians and complaints against which he dismisses as frivolous and sentimental. Two years ago, a debate was raised on the question in the Governor-General's Legislative Council. Indian members explained that the system of indenture was not far removed from slavery and that its continuance was largely responsible for the insults and indignities heaped upon Indians by the white races.
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Sharp caste cleavage in Haryana
The
recently concluded general election in India is a watershed in the Indian polity. The Congress faced its worst-ever defeat while its rival, the BJP, got a majority on its own. Rahul Gandhi, the chief campaigner of the Congress, proved to be a poor communicator. His speech writers were worse. In October 2013 he said that Dalits needed “escape velocity of Jupiter” to achieve success -- a formulation no Dalit could comprehend. In one of his election rallies he warned that if Modi won, 22,000 people would be killed in India. How did he hit at this mysterious figure? Why 22,000? Why not 21,000 or 23,000? Rahul’s rival, Modi, proved to be an effective demagogue. He got himself projected as India's messiah with a magic wand by waving which he could solve all of India's complex problems if the electorate gave him 60 months against the Congress’s rule of 60 years in the country. There was a spectacle of Modi spinning development dreams of the “Gujarat Model” imprinted in the electorate’s psyche through a high-tech publicity blitzkrieg. Such euphoria was built around Modi’s persona that even some leading academics were swept off their feet. Jagdish Bhagwati, a well-known economist and Professor of Economics and Law in Columbia University, hailed Modi’s victory as a “Second Revolution” after the “First Revolution” of 1991 reforms. Arvind Panagariya, Professor of Indian political economy in the same university, exclaimed: “Modi has energy, imagination, patience unmatched by another living politician not just in India but perhaps anywhere in the world.” However, the comment of Vinod Mehta, a well-known Indian journalist, sounds more relevant: “Scepticism, not cynicism, is the need of the hour. Our guard must be up. After a brief honeymoon period — 100 days — we must submit the Prime Minister to strictest scrutiny.” The BJP’s landslide victory is in due proportion to people's revulsion to Congress rule marked by massive scams, rising prices, misgovernance and a host of other failings. The Congress party with a rich legacy nurtured by a galaxy of illustrious leaders now seems to have been reduced, with honourable exceptions apart, to a cabal of wheeler-dealers, fixers, climbers, money grabbers, having greed with a bottomless pit, lackeys and flunkeys. The BJP, the only alternative at the national level, was the natural beneficiary of the Congress mess. Haryana, like most other states, could not escape Modi’s tidal wave. The BJP in Haryana has never been a mass party. Its influence has been confined to some urban pockets in the state. Still it won seven of the ten seats and the ruling party was left with one seat only. Two went to the kitty of the Indian National Lok Dal(INLD). The BJP was in alliance with Kuldeep Bishnoi's Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC) which lost both the seats in its quota to the INLD. Bishnoi's undoing was the polarisation between the Jats and non-Jats assiduously created by himself in the campaign. This infuriated the Jats who gave such a massive lead in the Jat-dominated assembly constituencies to the INLD candidates that it could not be neutralised by the slender lead of the HJC in the segments of its influence. The BJP leaders claim their victory to be pan-Indian transcending the barriers of caste, community, ethnicity and region. The reality is quite the other way round. The barriers have remained intact. There has been a shift in the alliance of caste groups. Mayawati in U.P. had a base in Jatavas along with several other SC castes and Brahmins. Her social engineering came a cropper as the Jatavs called the shots during her rule which alienated others who shifted to the BJP in this election. Similarly, Mulayam Singh Yadav had a base in the Yadavs along with a myriad of other backward castes. The Yadavs have dominated during SP rule, pushing others to the BJP fold. The SP had the backing of Muslims in UP and they were confused after the SP government's role in the Muzaffarnagar riots. Their loyalty got divided among parties other than the BJP. Examples can be multiplied from other states. The BJP’s claim of all inclusiveness in its approach does not sound convincing as the minorities — Muslims and the Christians — overwhelmingly voted against the BJP. The BJP fielded hardly any Muslim candidate in the elections and does not have a single Muslim MP among its 282 MPs. In Haryana a sharp caste cleavage was seen during the elections not only in the seats contested by the HJC but also in the state as a whole. The desperate attempt of the Congress to woo the Jats by giving them a share in the Central and state services proved counter-productive. It angered the high castes and alienated the OBCs as they feared a cut in their quota by the resourceful Jat community. This led to a total eclipse of the Congress in western UP, Delhi Dehat and Haryana with the merciful exception of one seat in Haryana. The warriors in the electoral battle will have to start the fight anew soon as assembly elections are due in October. The BJP is almost certain to dump the HJC after its miserable performance in the elections. It has two options before it — an alliance with the INLD or to make a bid to come to power on its own. After winning in 53 assembly segments out of 90, there is a growing pressure from its rank and file to go solo in the assembly polls. Secondly, the local BJP leadership is wary of the INLD after the bitter experience of facing humiliation while sharing power with it in the past. When the Jats of western UP and Rajasthan have embraced the BJP, why should their counterparts in Haryana treat it as untouchable? There will be multi-cornered contests among the BJP, the Congress and the INLD. The Left would give a symbolic fight. Arvind Kejriwal's AAP made a promising beginning but met with a dismal end. If it succeeds in building somewhat effective organisational structure in the state and relate its concept of Swaraj to the ground reality in Haryana, empowering the Gram Sabhas to have an effective say in setting up liquor vends and running public utility institutions like government schools and basic health centres etc, it can also join the fray. Much would depend on the performance of Modi's government at the Centre as it would have a direct effect on the neighbouring Haryana. Leaving aside Modi's plethora of pious platitudes and seductive rhetoric, if he fails to tackle corruption, rising prices, insufficient job opportunities, security of women and such other problems, anti-incumbency is likely to set in against the BJP which would help the Opposition in Haryana The writer is a retired academic from Delhi University
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Using right sounds for past tense marker
In Shaw's Pygmalion, once Prof Higgins takes up the challenge of changing the flower girl Eliza into a duchess, he begins her lessons by asking her to say a cup of tea, which she repeatedly articulates as a capputu-uu. Clear understanding of spoken words is an area of concern in English since there is little one to one correspondence between sounds and letters. One letter can give us more than one sound, as in the past tense marker "-d" or "-ed", pronounced in three different ways, ie /-t/, /-d/ and /-id/, as discussed below: 1. Dennis lacked the skills and therefore lagged behind the rest of the group. In the pair of verbs "lacked, lagged", the verb "lack" ends with the sound /k/, therefore it takes the past tense marker /-t/ and its ending is heard as /kt/. The verb "lag" ends with /g/, therefore it takes the marker /-d/ and its ending is heard as /gd/. The tense marker -d or -ed is pronounced as /-t/ if the verb ends in any of the last sound (not letter) indicated in the words: pick, sip, stuff, miss, push and pitch. Without this distinction, pairs of words such as the one discussed above may be heard as the same. The spellings, of course, stay the same. 2. The storm robbed the roses of their beauty. The tense marker -ed in "robbed" and in the same capacity -d in words like "raved" take the sound /-d/ as their tense marker, the endings heard as /bd/ in "robbed" and /vd/ in "raved". The verbs ending with any of the last sound indicated in the words: rob, bug, pave, barrage, bathe, budge, quiz, till, beam, can and ring will take the sound /-d/ as their past tense marker. Once again, the spellings stay unaffected. 3. Little Bunny pelted a stone on the loaded cart. The last sound /t/ of the verb "pelt" and the last sound /d/ of the verb "load" take the past tense marker /-id/, heard as /tid/ in "pelted" and as /did/ in "loaded". They are the only two sounds in English to take this marker. The spellings remain unchanged. 4. Once allowed in, the audience enjoyed every moment of the musical performance. Verbs ending with a vowel sound, as in "allow" and "enjoy", take /-d/ as the ending. The letters "w" and "y" get absorbed as vowels by the preceding vowel "o" in the two words and help lengthen the vowel sounds produced. The spellings, as earlier, stay undisturbed. The category of the past tense marker, "-d" or "-ed", is one of the few instances of rules of grammar influencing rules of pronunciation. Using the right past tense marker helps to differentiate the words and understand them better.
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CINEMA: NEW Releases
Not such a roaring start The hero falls in
love at first sight and the heroine reciprocates after he saves her
honour. And you bet she is the daughter of the man with whom our hero,
who wears his self-proclaimed heropanti up his sleeve, is on a
war path. So what's new? Well, it is framed in the backdrop of Jatland
Haryana where the spectre of "honour" killings looms large.
But lest you are mistaken, this is no hard-hitting statement on the
grave social issue . Curiously the film that makes the violent
streaks of an influential Jat family known in the very first frame is
singularly devoid of violence. Rather you only hear of their violent
ways as boasts in dialogues alone. Dialogues actually even those given
to Tiger to beef up his herogiri too are passé. And worse
still are repeated ad nauseam. But, of course there is action galore.
After all, Tiger, Babloo in the film, didn't build up his abs for
nothing. And let's give it to him, the new kid on the block, does
execute action stunts with ease. But that is something we knew even
before watching the film. Haven't we been hearing all this while…
how Tiger has performed many of his stunts. The question that arises
now is—can he act? Suffice it is to say that he has potential and in
a role tailor made for his personality, he would (and could) have made
an impact. The lovely lady Kirti Sanon too is promising. As for their
chemistry, well the film allows them limited opportunity to set the
screen ablaze. For it is less a love story and more an attempt at
being an emotional drama. Alas, in this endeavour too it doesn't
succeed. Indeed, as it tries to offset the viewpoint of a father
with that of the eloping couple it does try to rationalize both.
Rather at certain points it seems as if the father is the main
protagonist and the film has been structured from his persepctive.
Prakash Raj as the villainous loving father does a fine job in a role
that is otherwise ill-defined and at best befuddling. The film of
course is as predictable as confusing. And it's not just heroine's
waist baring lehanga choli that doesn't match her character,
there is much more you can gape at with astonishment. The only
redeeming parts are a couple of scenes between the father and the
lover boy. But that too you have seen before… remember the classic DDLJ.
So what's there to see here? Frankly very little… unless you want to
check out Tiger's well toned and sinewy body. Our advice, wait for his
next.
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Clumsy misadventure This film hit the screens in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, several other Indian languages including Marathi, Punjabi and Bhojpuri, and also in English and Japanese. This is an ambitious venture in that it hopes to capture an all-India audience with a heifer thrown in at the Japanese and world markets also. The film tries hard to cash in on the superstar's aggrandized persona and even lends him an almost mythic omnipotence but the craft and technique, though reasonably well sorted for the traditional audience, doesn't really match up to current international standards. The story-telling is mainly at fault here- especially when it takes short cuts through unnecessary and essentially off-putting, lavishly mounted song and dance interludes which does not fit in well with the legend it aims to propitiate. A R Rahman gives the music and songs his best shot but the nature of the telling still feels a little too grounded in artifice to be captivating. After a brief explanation about the motion capture technique, the narrative gets down to the business of developing the legend. Scriptwriter K S Ravi Kumar lends his voice to tell us the origin of the fight between the two kingdoms: Kallingapuram and Kothapatanam. Rana(Rajnikanth) is the chief of the Kallingapuram army sent to vanquish the Kothapatanam army. He succeeds handsomely and goes on to capture several nearby kingdoms. After the entry of the heroines and several more villains, the fight gets murkier. The flashback of the father's story contributes to some major confusion thereafter. For the mainstream Indian audience, prancing about like peacocks and in the next breath doing battle with the enemy may make for acceptable fare. But this film, created not just for the Indian audience but also with an international audience in mind, has little for the discerning viewer. The over-abundant reliance on music and dance, lack of a consistent narrative structure and uneven craft dims the excitement. There is very little balance achieved in the telling and for people unfamiliar with the culture and rituals of the bygone era, everything on view may appear far-out and fanciful. In terms of technology being used, this is a first, no doubt, but it doesn't come out as exciting or completely entertaining. A little more effort in character definition, a lesser dependence on music and a much more consistent technique could have made this effort quite impressive. But that was not to be!
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Clawless & clueless This one is set in 2023 when sentient robots known as sentinels are exterminating mutants. They also oppose the human population as regular humans harbor the genes that can lead to a mutant offspring. It's all a merry mix but also a tad confusing. If H.G. Welles set the ball rolling with his "Time Machine," Hollywood has gone hammer and tongs on the subject to almost knock it out of recognition. The X-Men hiding in a monastery in China hatch a plot to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to thwart Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from murdering the midget Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), a sinister individual in the upper crust of power. Also in the picture is President Nixon, not the "Dirty Dick" of those distant Watergate Tapes days but a more benevolent one. Besides, these majors there are other cameos like Storm (Halle Berry), always in skintight suit sand hardly recognisable, who can muddle clients. Mystique is a shape-shifter and shuttles from continent to continent. Director Bryan Singer is more occupied with the various cameos and their specialties to concentrate on the flow of the narrative. Also his star cast is more or less wasted. Hugh Jackman is more enthusiastic in "I'm the juggler now" ad than his entire work in the lead role and James McAvoy is not much better. Jennifer Lawrence could have been given more footage. So, after 131 minutes of dubious fare the viewer is quite relieved to see the curtain come down. But not before the Hollywood producers, not surprisingly, make known how many people found jobs in the film.
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TV movies Saturday May 24 ZEE CINEMA 8:43AM Kasam Paida Karne Wale Kii ZEE STUDIO 7:00AM The Lincoln Lawyer SAHARA ONE 12:00PM Kanoon Apna Apna ZEE ACTION 7:00AM Shaktiman INDIA TALKIES 9:30AM Baadshah STAR MOVIES ACTION 7:00AM Surrogates
Sunday May 25 ZEE CINEMA 9:19AM Diler: The Daring MOVIES OK 9:35AM Jajantaram Mamantaram ZEE ACTION 7:00AM Insaaf Ki Awaaz ZEE STUDIO 7:00AM Mother of Tears INDIA TALKIES 9:30AM Partner STAR MOVIES ACTION 8:30AM Judge Dredd
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"... whether
pipe or harp, except they give a distinction in the sounds, how shall
it be known what is piped or harped? ... So likewise ye, except ye
utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known
what is spoken?" —St. Paul
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X
1:00Pm INDIA TALKIES
6:00Pm STAR movies ACTION