Hope is a Rope, which rescues peoples!

How to foil the identity thieves

2006-05-16T05:11:00.000-07:00

Buying a shredder isn't enough in the battle against laptop criminals

"TECHNOLOGY BREEDS crime. Crime is getting easier, faster and harder to detect. There are no conmen anymore dressed in debonair suits with a briefcase and salesman's patter. Now anyone with a laptop can take your money. It's impersonal and easy to do," says Frank Abagnale.

And he should know. Between the ages of 16 and 21 Abagnale cashed $2.5 million worth of fraudulent cheques in every U.S. State and 26 other countries, successfully posing as an airline pilot, a lawyer, a college professor, and a paediatrician before being tracked down by the French authorities and incarcerated in various international prison systems.

These days he is a respected consultant and lecturer on fraud and embezzlement, continuing to work with the FBI.

A recent visit to London could not have been more timely. Financial fraudsters have hit the headlines again after card number readers in 600 Shell service stations were tampered with, resulting in the theft of more than £1 million.

"What I did 40 years ago is 4,000 times easier to do today," says Mr. Abagnale. "For me to have replicated a cheque 40 years ago I needed a $1 million printing press. Now I can do it on my laptop in minutes."

"Consumers have to take a position of being proactive. You can't rely on the government, the police or your bank."

Monitor your credit records regularly with credit reference agencies. By far the cheapest way to keep up to date with your credit records is to apply for them regularly by post.

You might have heard the one about buying a paper shredder a few times before. Mr. Abagnale has a word of warning: "If you use a straight shredder I can put back together the strips, and read word for word, a front page of the FT. This is what thieves can do to your documents. The way to prevent this is to use a cross-cut shredder, which is the same price as a straight one. Unfortunately everybody goes out and buys the straight ones without knowing any different."
Close any unused accounts.

Don't waste money on expensive identity theft insurance policies. These don't stop you becoming a victim; nor do they prevent you from having to do some work to help sort out the mess if you do fall prey to the fraudsters.

Even after you have deleted files on your PC or laptop, they can still be found and used. Cifas, the U.K.'s fraud prevention service, recommends that you obtain a clean-up tool to overwrite deleted files.

Microsoft's problem bringing Vista online

2006-05-15T00:31:00.000-07:00

IT WILL not have escaped your attention that Microsoft is labouring to finish the next version of its Windows operating system, Vista. A version aimed at the corporate market is supposed to be ready for Christmas, with the consumer edition following some time later (missing the Christmas market, which has irritated computer manufacturers and retailers more than somewhat). This month, Gartner, a leading IT consultancy, predicted that Microsoft would miss those shipping dates.

"Microsoft's track record is clear: it consistently misses target dates for major operating system releases," the firm wrote. "We don't expect broad availability of Windows Vista until at least the second quarter of 2007, which is nine to 12 months after Beta 2." Microsoft challenged this. A company spokesman told CNET News: "We remain on track to deliver the final product to volume-licence customers in November 2006 and to other businesses and consumers in January 2007."

So there! The significant thing about Vista, however, is not the shipping date but the fact that it has been an unconscionable time in the making. And while all this has been going on, Apple has released several major upgrades of its OS X operating system, and the programmers behind Open Source Linux have significant upgrades over the same period.

The difference between Microsoft and Apple can be largely explained by two factors. One is structural: Apple's OS X is based on Unix, which has a different architecture from Windows, and may be inherently easier to upgrade. The other is that Microsoft is a victim of its past monopolistic success: any new version of Windows has to be "backwards compatible" with the thousands of programmes and hardware devices built to work on earlier versions of the operating system. Apple has much less of a "legacy" problem in this sense.

The really interesting comparison is with Linux, a product of comparable complexity developed by an independent, dispersed community of programmers who communicate mainly over the net.

How come they can outperform a stupendously rich company that can afford to employ very smart people and give them all the resources they need?
Here is a possible answer: complexity.

Microsoft's problems with Windows may be an indicator that operating systems are getting beyond the capacity of any single organisation to handle them.

Therein may lie the real significance of Open Source. Open Source is not a piece of software, and it is not unique to a group of hackers. It is a way of building complex things.

Microsoft's struggles with Vista suggest it may be the only way to do operating systems in future.

Homemade helicopter for Rs. one lakh

2006-05-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

A vegetable seller in an Uttar Pradesh village has developed a two-seater "Homemade Helicopter"

A vegetable seller in an Uttar Pradesh village has developed a two-seater "homemade helicopter", which if approved will be made available for just Rs.100,000, claims an association of innovators here.

According to the National Innovation Foundation (NIF), 24-year-old Mustaqeem Ali from Ratool village in Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh, has made the helicopter with help from friends and other vegetable sellers.

The 3.5 metre craft, which weighs 200 kg, was made using parts from a tractor, scooter and auto rickshaw at a cost of Rs.100,000, Anil Gupta, an NIF official, told.

After a hard day's work, Mustaqeem would spend the evenings working on his model. He developed it after more than a thousand nights of labour, said Gupta.

However, on May 2 when he was about to test the copter, Mustaqeem was arrested by Uttar Pradesh police for not having taken permission.

"He was made to sit in the police station for four hours and allowed to go only after the villagers requested that he be released. Police also wanted to seize his helicopter but the villagers didn't let them do so. They have kept the model safe," said Gupta.

The Ahmedabad-based NIF learnt about the innovation from local news reports and sent a team to visit Mustaqeem. It inspected the helicopter on Sunday.

Mustaqeem, after completing his school studies, went to New Delhi and did a short-term Cabin Crew Course and a computer course. He got inspired to make a helicopter when he visited a trade fair in New Delhi's Pragati Maidan a few years ago, said Gupta.

He didn't get a job and began selling vegetables for a living. NIF plans to approach the National Aerospace Laboratories in Bangalore for expert opinion on whether the helicopter is actually airworthy.

"The helicopter is made with crude technology," said Gupta. Mustaqeem and his friend Arif cannot fly the helicopter as they don't have a pilot's licence, said Gupta.

The NIF plans to call professional pilots only after the Bangalore-based laboratory verifies the machine. A letter has already been dashed off to the laboratory, said Gupta.

2006-05-03T23:19:00.000-07:00

"The Pen is mightier than the Sword"

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Babur's prowess as a General is well known. His felicity with words, however, is a refreshing discovery.

He was also an outstanding man of letters, equally at home with prose and poetry in both Turkish, his mother tongue, and Persian.

THE pen is mightier than the sword". The saying has been with us for ages, and remains by and large unchallenged in most civilised societies. It is based on the either/ or premise. It assumes that the person who is adept at wielding a sword is hopeless when it comes to handling words.

But, as always, there are exceptions. History provides us with personalities who were equally at ease with words and lethal weapons. Such is the case with Zahir Uddin Muhammad Babur.

Wide variety of subjects

Like those familiar with Indian history, I was aware of Babur as an outstanding general and the founder of the Mughal dynasty. But it was only when I read his monumental journal, the Babur Nama, that I realised that he was also an outstanding man of letters, equally at home with prose and poetry — in both Turkish, his mother tongue, and Persian.

Babur deploys his writing skill to a wide variety of subjects — astronomy, battles, biographies and family chronicles, flora and fauna, geography, hand-to-hand fights, historical monuments, literary criticism, pen portraits, poetry, royal decrees, and social gatherings. Each time his performance is impeccable because he activates different aspects of his complex personality. Quite uniquely, he was endowed with boundless curiosity, an acute eye for detail, self-knowledge, logical thinking, and candour that is both disarming and moving.

Equally varied is his style, which ranges from the Pinteresque to the Bollywood script. Little wonder that some parts of his memoirs read like a novel, others a history, and still others an action-packed drama.

In every instance, he performs flawlessly. Almost invariably, he is economical with words. His sinewy and lucid prose is on a par with the best writing of Ernest Hemingway or Scott F. Fitzgerald. He writes simply and logically, and every so often he peppers his prose with a telling idiom redolent of the agrarian society in which he was born and raised. "Banana is another [Indian fruit]," he writes in the Babur Nama. "Its tree is not very tall. Indeed it is not tall enough to be called a tree. Its leaf is a little like that of the aman qara, (peace under shade), but grows about two yards long and one yard broad. Out of the middle of its leaves rises, heart-like, a bud which resembles a sheep's heart."

The logic with which he proceeds in the above paragraph is very much at work in his description of the Domain of Fergana, now in Uzbekistan, where he started his career as a ruler. "The Domain of Fergana has seven towns, five on the south and two on the north of Syr River," he notes. "Of those on the south, one is Andijan. It has a central position and is the capital of the Fergana Domain. It produces much grain, abundant fruits and melons."

Now compare that sort of prose with the wording of the royal decree Emperor Babur issued late in his life renouncing wine. Following a quotation from the Quran, it reads, "On the mirrors of the glorious congregation, to wit, the Masters of Wisdom who are treasure houses of the pearls of purity and who bear the impress of the sparkling jewels of this purport."

Babur is equally at ease with the descriptions of his personal experiences, which are remarkable as much for their lack of exaggeration or self-aggrandisement as they are for their vividness and precision. "A man took aim at Ibrahim Beg," Babur writes. "But then Ibrahim Beg yelled, `Hai! Hai!'; and he let him pass, and by mistake shot me in an armpit from as near as a man on guard at the Gate stands from another. Two plates of my armour cracked. I shot at a man running away along the ramparts, adjusting his cap against the battlements. He abandoned his cap, nailed to the wall and went off, gathering his turban sash together in his hand."

Expression of love

No feeling can be more intimate or moving than being in love. "Until then I had no inclination of love and desire for anyone, by hearsay or experience," Babur wrote when he was 17. "At that time I composed Persian couplets, one or two at a time. This is one of them:

May none be as I, humbled and wretched and lovelorn;/Not beloved as you are to me, you cruel being, full of scorn.

In that maelstrom of desire and passion, and under the stress of youthful folly, I used to wander, bareheaded and barefoot, through streets and lanes, orchards and vineyards... Sometimes, like mad men I used to wander alone over hill and plain; sometimes I wandered in gardens and suburbs, lane after lane. My roaming was not of my choice; nor could I decide whether to go or stay.

Nor power to stay was mine, nor strength to part;/I became what you made of me, oh thief of my heart."

Anybody who has been in love would identify with the prose and poetry of Babur. That in short is the greatness of Babur, an accomplished wielder of both pen and sword.

Aftab Ahmad
Aftab@airtelbroadband.in

2006-05-03T23:12:00.000-07:00

2006-02-19T21:08:00.000-08:00

Unreal paradigm

What was being put to the test in the cartoon affair was the willingness of a minority group to conform to majority assumptions.

It is impossible not to be dismayed by the spiral of events. A witless racist cartoon is elevated into a totem of Western democracy and holocaust denial becomes a symbol of resistance to imperialism.

The message contained in the Danish cartoon was blunt: it drew an equation between Muslims and terrorists, between Islam and murderous violence. It was devoid of humour, irony, artistic or social merit, yet editors across Europe took it upon themselves to publish it. They did so, they claimed, as a "test" of free speech. Now, more often than not, the Western media is cautious about testing free speech, especially when it comes to exposing government secrets or embarrassing rich people who enjoy recourse to libel lawyers. There are a wide range of offensive images — racist, pornographic — that they routinely refuse to publish. But when it came to the Danish cartoon, the usual inhibitions were cast aside. What's apparent from statements made by the editors and their supporters is that what they were eager to put to the "test" was not an abstract principle but the willingness of a minority group to conform to majority assumptions.

Selective memory
Listening to Western commentators exercise themselves over whether "we" have made too many concessions to "cultural differences" and to what extent "cultural diversity" is compatible with "our democratic values", I wonder what history books these people have read. Did they miss the 100-odd years during which non-Western peoples fought for elementary democratic rights against Western colonial powers? Did they miss "our" slave trade, "our" genocides, "our" use of weapons of mass destruction? Have they missed the "culture wars" that have ravaged the United States for two decades, in the course of which a well-funded right-wing religious movement has mounted successful attacks on science and personal freedom? The current relative openness of Western society has had to be extracted from recalcitrant elites inch by inch, and is today threatened first and foremost by its own governments.

Coming from British commentators, members of a notoriously mono-lingual majority whose knowledge of other cultures is often limited to the menu at an "Indian" restaurant (usually run by a Bangladeshi or Pakistani), the complaint that Muslims have cut themselves off from the wider world is rich. Not as rich, of course, as lectures on democracy and tolerance coming from those who breach international law, inflict violence on civilian populations and abuse human rights. The mythology crudely expressed in the cartoon acquires a daily deadly impact in Iraq, Palestine, Guantanamo and on the streets of Europe, where innocent Muslims are treated and punished as "terrorists".

Many of those who proclaim the right to offend seem shocked and outraged when offence is duly taken. Surely, the same principle that protects the cartoonist protects the idiot dressed as a suicide bomber. But while the Muslim response to the cartoon is presented as pathological, the Western mentality that begat the cartoon escapes scrutiny.
The affair has been driven in part by media sensationalism. Ethnic polarisation — real or imagined — provides drama, stirs emotions. Crucially, across Europe, the market the media aim to capture is overwhelmingly white and non-Muslim. In this market, coverage of jihadi extremism takes on a prurient tinge. It's exotic, it's threatening and it makes the white European feel smug and superior. Producers and editors are reluctant to admit it, even to themselves, but the ingrained assumptions and festering resentments of white supremacy make the story resonant for readers and viewers and shape the way it is constructed.

The debate about whether, where and when it might be acceptable to restrict freedom of speech is both difficult and necessary. But that's not the terrain that's being explored or "tested" here. Instead, discussion has been imprisoned in two related paradigms, both of them unreal and distorting. One counterposes "multi-culturalism" to "integration" and the other sets "Islam" against "the West". The first does not remotely reflect the way people live, the multiplicity and fluidity of actual social relations. The choices it offers are unreal. The second offers a clash of incommensurable abstractions, in which so much is left out, not least the authoritarian and hierarchical strands in Western thinking and the humanist and egalitarian strands in Islamic thinking.

Tragic irony
The grim perversity of the paradigm has been highlighted by the tit-for-tat commissioning of holocaust cartoons by an Iranian newspaper, following President Ahmadinejad's public embrace of holocaust denial. That Jews should come to be so widely perceived as a proxy for the West is a fact brimming with tragic ironies. Holocaust denial is not only a denial of common humanity and an assault on human memory, it also lets Europe off the hook for a crime that makes a mockery of its claims to civilisational superiority. The preachers of anti-Semitism in Muslim societies are importing a very European ideology, one that was always inseparable from the broader discourse of Western colonialism and racial superiority. Indeed, anti-Semitism provides a template for Islamophobia. The Danish cartoon, as has been widely noted, eerily recalls the Nazi cartoons that demonised Jews (as well as English cartoons depicting bomb-throwing Irishmen).

For those many Muslims and indeed non-Muslims who reject the false paradigms, recent weeks have been painfully frustrating. The realities of social injustice, economic inequality and U.S.-British militarism that lie behind the spectacle of the culture clash seem to have been obscured, for the moment, by its media-mesmerising flash and thunder.

Aftab Ahmad

The Hindu

Caricature of Muhammad (SAW)

2006-02-07T23:22:00.000-08:00

Uncivilized Act of So Called Civilized Peoples

“We have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance.”

Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (quoted in the London Telegraph)

When the ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan were criminally destroyed by the Talibaan, the Europeans screamed murder the loudest. What was that protest for? So destruction of history is blasphemous but the attempted destruction of a people's faith and deeply treasured symbols is not?

If the freedom of expression is so sacred how many European papers have dared to support what the Iranian president said about questioning the reality of the holocaust?

Leaving the politics of it aside, the issue is a fairly straight forward one. It is simply about values. The Danes who published the cartoons ridiculing the Prophet of my faith, degrading and attacking my religion also claim they merely exercised their right of expression-of freedom of speech. Then there were others in Europe who rose to the defense of the Danish act of insulting the prophet. They did so by also publishing the blasphemous cartoons of the prophet. As far as I can see they undermined a fundamental value of humanity; the value that calls for sensitivity towards another, the value to not hurt another person.

There is no battle to be fought with those who indulged in the ugly act of deliberately insulting my Prophet. I am numbed with outrage over this uncivilized act they have committed. I would simply say to them yours are no civilized ways. Whatever your claims to the contrary, they actually betray a people with a reactionary mindset.

Those who become possessed by anger when confronted with difficult and challenging situations. Anger halts our ability to probe and to reflect. Instead, depending on our location in life, if we are advantageously placed, we self-righteously give ourselves the license to pronounce verdict and take action to right a wrong. As many European publications have done. This is their crass response to the growing post 9/11 anti-Islamic sentiment. And for people in the business of opinion-making to indulge in such reactive acts, is extremely dangerous. It is highly irresponsible. These are people who must play the role of promoting greater understanding-pulling people away from extremist thought and action. Not join the vanguard of anger-prompted extremism .

Policy-makers and opinion-making community in the West has opted to conduct the discourse on terrorism using a terminology that has unwittingly but dangerously indicted the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Terms like Muslim terrorists , Islamic terrorists and Islamic terrorism has led to the demonization of the Muslims and of Islam. Whatever the European papers may claim they are upholding by ridiculing the Holy Prophet they would have not contemplated doing so in a pre-9/11 environment.

Social tensions may have existed in pre-9/11 Europe but in post 9/11 the tensions have vastly augmented. Muslims make for easy targets. So does their faith. This is how a section of the Europeans have opted to express their resentment against the terrorist attacks; as is evident from the contents of the cartoon itself.

This is a season of acute polarization. For example if the on-line responses of the public are any guide, this act of insulting the prophet has unfortunately received widespread public support in many European countries. The thrust mostly is that there is no reason to compromise on our value of freedom of expression, that if Muslims can’t deal with this they must leave, that Muslims are hypocrites because they show no tolerance towards minorities but expect to be shown tolerance. In some cases individuals have argued that such cartoons should often be printed to get the Muslims to ultimately be more accepting of freedom of expression! They say this is what we do to our own. Sadly so, we would say. But everyone to their own- but please do not drag our revered ones, those who we believe was the Messenger of God, in your messy notion of the freedom of speech. You have evolved into a culture of which licenses unlimited permissiveness. In spite of our own mistakes, our many shortcomings, our morally and intellectually anemic leadership, there are some touch-stones of our civilization. It includes the respect of religion and our faith in God Almighty.

Deliberately defiling the Prophet is a highly irresponsible act. It is bound to have negative social and political fall-out. It exacerbates the existing social tensions among the locals and the Muslim population. Within the Muslims it is bound to create more alienation and resentment towards the westerners who, have chosen to be completely indifferent towards the faith and feelings of the Muslims across the world. It is the arrogance of these westerners they will resent. Like millions of westerners who have opted to not view terrorists as a fringe phenomenon within the Muslims and instead referred to terrorism as Islamic terrorism, many Muslims too will wrongly implicate the westerners across the board for this blasphemous act against the Prophet.

At the popular level we require a roll-back of the school that promotes the dangerous talk of clash of civilizations. For now the cartoon incident will merely serve to reinforce the worst of what many Muslims may believe of a growing intolerant Europe.

The framing and the discussion of the issue of terrorism has created a permissive environment which is responsible for this caricaturing of the Prophet; of hurting the feelings and ridicule the faith of a huge section of the entire human race. They paid no head to the protests. Instead they resented and condemned the nature of the protests. True the protests should have been calmer. Frenzied outrage was unnecessary and as were threats to kill. But nothing justified the reprinting of those insulting cartoons across many European countries including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Switzerland.

The leadership in most of these countries has not been willing to contest the wisdom of publishing cartoons which is highly disrespectful to another peoples’ faith. In fact the degree if insensitivity of the Danish Prime Minster can be gauged from the fact that when after the September publication the Muslims in Denmark sent repeated requests to meet with the Prime Minister. He repeatedly ignored their request. Essentially conveying ‘I really don’t give a damn. The Muslim leaders then went to the Middle East and other Muslim countries and showed them what the Danish papers had done. Subsequently the reaction acquired these proportions.

In Denmark the anti-Muslim sentiment has been growing at a rapid pace. The Fogh Rasmussen government has actively sought to dispel and block Muslim residents from Denmark. The cartoon is just the tip of the iceberg.

However that the notion of freedom of expression cannot be translated into unlimited freedom to abuse another’s faith is basic common sense. But also the way many Europeans have selectively applied the principle of freedom of expression is intriguing. When the ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan were criminally destroyed by the Talibaan, the Europeans screamed murder the loudest. We all did too in the Muslim world.

What was that protest for? So destruction of history is blasphemous but the attempted destruction of a people's faith and deeply treasured symbols is not? This is the perversity of post-modernism which seeks the right to destroy and deconstruct selectively-and give that right a sacred status. Also if the freedom of expression is so sacred how many European papers have dared to support what the Iranian president said about questioning the reality of the holocaust?

Clearly the principle of freedom has to be practiced within some rationale and egalitarian framework. It cannot be an elitest concept which a special color or creed will have more right to excercise. Why does this right not respect another’s right to chose what is sacred to them-since that what is sacred is not at the cost of undermining another’s interests. Islam abhors suicide bombings and terrorism. Increasingly Muslim leaders are condemning this openly.

Why are the Europeans so generous in applying their concept of freedom of expression at the cost of causing great pain and injury to Muslim world? Is it because their bohemianism has a method to it? The method is to attack and disrespect those who, are generally viewed as the politically, scientifically and economically the down-trodden of the human race-the weak and the lambasted-the violated and the angry-the reactive and seething?

These are not the ways of a civilized people. These are ways pushing for a grand and mad conflict of civilizations. Will the European media see wisdom is stepping back and reviewing their dangerous notion of freedom of expression? For now the limited apologies that have come were perhaps prompted by the widespread anger and protests emanating from the Muslim world. But wisdom and true civilized behavior demands that we internalize the limits of our own freedoms where it begins to undermine the freedom of another.

Otherwise a free-for-all world would best be described by William Butler Yeat’s perennially poignant poem “The Second Coming”;

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all convictions, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.
(http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/780/)

Clearly if it moves ahead unchecked, this unguided or self-righteous “passionate intensity” will ultimately become the undoing of the human race. We need to reflect on our ways of being especially those preaching wildly damaging forms of freedom of expression.

Aftab Ahmad

aftab@airtelbroadband.in

Democracy, modernity, and the Indian child

2005-12-27T00:53:00.000-08:00

At present, our schools act like factories, forcing children into a fixed, preconceived mould. They stifle natural curiosity and creativity. The fruits of democracy and modernity will remain elusive if education is not structurally adjusted to the needs of the rural poor.

ROSA PARKS, who died at 92 a few weeks ago, belonged to a tradition that runs through modern history but is seldom celebrated as an aspect of modernism. In India, we associate it with Gandhi whose refusal to swallow humiliation in a South African train shaped the history of the British Empire.

In a remarkably similar event, Rosa Parks gave the civil rights movement in the United States a sharpened edge when she defied an Alabama bus driver who asked her to vacate her seat because she was black. That happened on the evening of December 1, 1955, in a town called Montgomery. The driver threatened her with arrest, and she asked him to go ahead with his plans. Four days later, after her arrest, a young preacher called Martin Luther King said at a gathering of thousands of black people that Rosa was "one of the finest citizens of Montgomery." The bus boycott ensuing from that assembly lasted 381 days. It led to 100 arrests and a Supreme Court judgment a year later outlawing segregation in buses.

Parks, King, and Gandhi had a common intellectual ancestor in the American philosopher and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau. His 1859 essay, Civil Disobedience, presents a political theory justifying his refusal to pay tax in order to protest America's war against Mexico. Thoreau's essay inspired Gandhi to invent and apply Satyagraha: a non-violent weapon against institutionalised subjugation. The same essay elicited Martin Luther's King famous remark that "non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good."

Gandhi's legacy, both as a mass leader and as a political thinker, continues to challenge our analytical abilities and imagination. It is obviously convenient to enclose Gandhi in a colonial context and leave him there. The lifeless listing of his salient traits and achievements given in school texts transforms Gandhi into an exam byte. The question of what Gandhi means for citizenship today is simply not attempted. To the mill of cramming and regurgitation, marks and merit lists, Gandhi supplies indistinct fodder. In a system of education that ignores the child's part in the construction of knowledge, Gandhi loses meaning. But then, Gandhi is no exception. The concept of curriculum entrenched in our system overlooks the child's role in constructing knowledge; hence, no topic transcends the status of information. Certain topics and questions acquire importance for the final examination, but nothing gains significance or inspirational value. Tools of analysis, such as classification of ideas and information, and the steps involved in judging evidence are ignored. Syllabus and textbook designers assume that it is the teacher's job to impart interactive life to the long, continuous narratives given in the text.

Why shouldn't the text writer share this responsibility? This question is one of those we seldom ask in curricular deliberations. Any discussion of the numerous ills of our system of education inevitably slips into a versatile blame game. Teachers say the syllabus is too long to cover with progressive pedagogic methods, that the textbooks are too fat and dull, and that the examination system is too rigid. Syllabus designers and textbook writers blame the teacher for not working hard. Principals blame the parents for arousing unrealistic expectations in children, and parents blame the government for not paying sufficient attention to education. Social activists blame the state for succumbing to commercial forces and globalisation. And finally, the media awaken everyone to blame whoever can be found to blame before sunset.

The education of Rosa Parks led her to becoming a seamstress. She was married to a barber. In India, such details about a great life surprise us, accustomed as we are to dissociating manual work and dexterity from school and college education. Linking education and work, especially manual work, was Gandhi's favourite idea.

The National Curriculum Framework (NCF), which was approved by the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) in September, shows renewed interest in this linkage. The recommended strategies given in the NCF are spelt out in the report of the National Focus Group on this subject. Its report treats work as a nucleus of creative engagement with knowledge, social values, and personal fulfilment. As you read the report, you realise that the idea of enlightened citizenship is incompatible with bookish education, howsoever great a success it may bring to someone individually. Work implies an activity that fulfils a genuine need. It also implies the development of an attitude capable of sustaining self-reliance, initiative, and a questioning spirit.

Opportunities to infuse work into routine school life constantly arise but are seldom utilised in our sedentary system. Many private schools, for instance, prevent children from looking after plants by assigning this task exclusively to salaried gardeners. That is why their lawns look so beautiful, signalling the school's status and high fees. How easy it is to mistake modernity with convenience became apparent to me at a recent discussion on a mathematics text. We were debating the merits of perforating a page with stickers that children might use to learn about different shapes. The logistics involved in perforation suddenly reminded us that it would mean a lot more activity if children were asked to cut the page with scissors or trace the shapes given on it, and then cut and paste them on cardboard. This kind of work covers a wide range of skills and desirable behaviours, including pleasant readiness to help with cleaning up the room after the lesson is over. Such training would form the right ethos to imbibe the qualities of citizenship Gandhi might have approved. It would also enable children to produce knowledge out of experience rather than simply receive it as information.

Teaching as relational activity
The legacy of pedagogic modernism symbolised by Gandhi and Tagore implies the cultivation of a questioning spirit and tolerance for differences. Neither goal can be achieved without viewing teaching as a relational, rather than a transmission, activity. It is only when the teacher engages with the child with love and patience, and the textbook encourages interaction, that values like originality, self-reliance, and tolerance take shape. The idea that the teacher should build on the knowledge that the child brings to school, enabling the child to critically examine this knowledge wherever necessary, poses a significant challenge to entrenched pedagogic concepts and practices. A similar challenge comes from the idea that the curriculum should address children's concerns and anxieties about the world they live in, rather than bypass them in the name of academic distance.

Children, who are otherwise inarticulate at school, open up when they are asked to talk about things they know. Village girls start talking and taking an active interest in the curriculum if the textbook and the teacher touch upon their everyday life issues. True, many such issues offer no immediate or clear answers, but that hardly matters. The role of education is to make the child reflective and articulate, and to achieve this goal education does not have to start from scratch. Children are endowed to think: our job is to build on their innate capacity by giving it an opportunity to flourish. This view continues to invite criticism in our society where negative assumptions about the child's nature are still popular and any plea for children being given the opportunity to think for themselves is perceived with suspicion.

At the inauguration of Delhi University's Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, Salman Akhtar cited the acceptance of uncertainty as one of the key symptoms of mental health. Other symptoms are the realisation that the world is a complex place in which a number of decisions are made without the predictability of outcomes. Dr. Akhtar said the appeal of fundamentalism comes from its promise of certainty. His speech indicates the role of education in strengthening a rational and liberal outlook that implies acceptance of differences.

To realise any such vision of society, we must give children's education a high priority and regard no expenditure as being excessive for enriching the school. Not only must every child go to school, but the school too should have the capacity to receive every child, irrespective of background, gender or ability.

At present, our schools act like factories, forcing children into a fixed, preconceived mould. Drastic reforms are needed to provide room for creativity and independent thought. Present-day schooling stifles the natural curiosity and creativity children possess.

The system is especially cruel to rural children. Village children belonging to the lower socio-economic strata fall prey to the system's predisposition favouring the upwardly mobile sections of urban India. Our democratic order urgently needs the support of a universally accessible and sensibly organised system of education. The fruits of democracy and modernity will remain elusive if education is not structurally adjusted to the needs of the rural poor.

Aftab Ahmad

aftab@touchtelindia.net

Rape : what is the ultimate solution?

2005-09-16T00:31:00.000-07:00

Two rapes in two days: One girl was raped in moving train in Jharkhand by TTE and his friends another was raped in Safdar Jung Hospital in New Delhi in broad day light!!!

What is the solution?

Solution: Hang them (rapist) or death by stoning. PUBLICLY!

A news report in today’s newspaper tells about a rape, a gang rape. Rapes are not very important news for anyone be it media or we the readers. We hardly care for the news story about rapes in the inner pages of the paper. Most of us try to avoid these news, considering that it is a day to day phenomenon. A few read these news items for some kind of excitement. (I am talking about the beasts in human skin.) Only time when these rapes make great news is when there is a series of them or the victim is from well to do family or something extraordinary.

The rape news I am talking about has managed to get place on the first page, a dimension of one column and ten centimeters. That’s all that it could manage—a mere acknowledgement.

The victim is a 19 year old girl and the half a dozen rapists include the TTE and other barbaric people who were on the same train the victim was traveling. Many people are biased towards the poor or the less modern people. They think that all (or at least most of them) criminals belong to the section of poor and dirty looking people. But to their surprise this time the victim girl was traveling in first class of the train.

How can a human be so beastly? Actually beastly is not the right word to use. Even the beasts do not behave as these humans have done. What makes these humans behave in such brutal way? Is satisfaction of lust their prime concern? I don’t think so. Sex is about physical pleasure. How can one be pleased in frightful situation of committing a crime? A person is sure to feel frightened while committing any kind of crime. A rape can’t be excluded from it. So I may conclude that rape has nothing to do with sexual pleasure.

What is the purpose behind rape? As far as I can guess it the rapists are the men who have distorted personality. They seek refuge and pleasure in others pain. They do want to be pleased but not sexually. Had sexual pleasure been their prime concern, they could have visited any women of the street or any other means. Why commit a heinous crime for something that can be have easily without serious consequences? Why risk yourself in danger?

The rapist needs adventure, thrill and a sense of offending the law. Their victim is a mere scapegoat (most of the time but not when the victim is raped with intention of penalizing).

What can be done of these rapists?
Do you say—“They should be punished severely.”

But there are stringent laws punishing rape. This is not really working. Incidences of rapes are not willing to decline. They are soaring high. I can’t think of any effective solution to this problem of rapes. But am very much sure that rapists should be punished more severely and that the sentence for rapes should be increased to minimum of life imprisonment, after all they make hell out of their victim. The poor female has to bear havoc in her life and gets tarnished for something that she had nothing to do with. The rapists suffer far far less than his victim in our society.

Our society has been responsible for promoting cruelty against women to large extent. Our society has been cruel to females from very past and continues to be so. They are subjected to cruelty even before they are born—female feticide, or just after their birth by killing the infant—infanticide. If they are able to survive till birth they are subjected to other cruelties viz gender discrimination. When they grow up as adolescents, they are subjected to molestation and sexual harassment both indoors and outdoors.

Rape is the most common form of sexual abuse females are subjected to. This does hurt her physically but the emotional and social aspect of rape are even more traumatizing than the rape in actual. Rapist is not responsible for this trauma of her victim but the society which demeans her social status and looks at her as unchaste. The social stigma attached to rape frightens the girl too such an extent that only very daring girls come forward to seek justice and punishment for the criminal. We need to change this social stigma related to rapes. This is one way we can help rape victims apart from protecting them from rapes itself. This would also help in bringing the crime rate down.

Acid burn is other physical cruelty they suffer very commonly. Girls who are subjected to acid burns are traumatized every single day for rest of their life after the cruel day. Their defaced face wont let them forget the horrifying experience they have had in past.

Cruelty to females should be checked more strictly in our day to day life. This is way various crimes against females can be checked and controlled. Brainwashing of our society is other way.

Hope the crimes against females stop quickly. (Though it is too much to ask this but we can at least hope that the crime rate falls flat on floor.)

Aftab Ahmad

aftab@touchtelindia.net

A Deadly Virus Spreads in India, Despite Vaccines Within Reach!

2005-09-11T22:09:00.000-07:00

Over the last two months, hospitals in the Uttar Pradesh have been overwhelmed by Japanese encephalitis, a viral infection that has sickened more than 2,000 children and killed nearly 600, making it one of the deadliest outbreaks of the disease on record in India.

GORAKHPUR, Uttar Pradesh, Kiran Kumari had been sick for more than a week. Now, lying on her back in a sweltering, overcrowded hospital ward, the skinny 11-year-old with the copper-streaked hair had lapsed into unconsciousness and could no longer breathe on her own. So her father was breathing for her.

Sitting on the edge of her thin mattress, his face a taut mask of exhaustion, the destitute farm worker rhythmically squeezed a football-sized plastic ventilator with his callused hands, forcing air into her lungs with every pump.

Such life-saving duties are normally left to professionals, but in this case, there were not enough to go around. Over the last two months, hospitals in the Uttar Pradesh have been overwhelmed by Japanese encephalitis, a viral infection that has sickened more than 2,000 children and killed nearly 600, making it one of the deadliest outbreaks of the disease on record in India.

In this city at the heart of the epidemic, the main government hospital resembles a war zone, with desperately ill children crowded two or even three to a bed, family members camped in filthy corridors, and weary medical staff struggling to keep pace with about 30 new cases a day. Japanese encephalitis kills nearly 30 percent of its victims, mostly children younger than 15, and leaves many of the rest with permanent neurological damage.

The toll is all the more heartbreaking because the disease can be prevented by several vaccines, including one made in India and another, more effective version developed in the 1970s in China, where mass vaccinations have largely contained the virus.

In that regard, the latest outbreak shows how bureaucratic inertia, skewed priorities and what some health experts say is a nationalistic aversion to importing medicines are undercutting efforts to improve India's shaky public health system, to the detriment of its poorest citizens.

Last week in its annual human development report, the United Nations faulted India for falling behind on key public health goals, noting that its infant mortality rate is now higher than that of Bangladesh. One in 11 Indian children dies before the age of 5.

"It's a lot of politics in vaccine," complained Komal Prasad Kushwaha, a senior pediatrician at the hospital who has watched in frustration as the death toll from Japanese encephalitis in India has climbed steadily over the last two decades. "We have been crying for vaccine since very long. If vaccine is available for all children in the community, Japanese encephalitis will certainly be controlled."

Health officials in Uttar Pradesh have said they are trying to contain the epidemic by spraying against mosquitoes, which typically acquire the virus from pigs before passing it on to humans. Over the longer term, they are trying to shift pig farms, which can act as reservoirs for the disease, away from crowded villages.

The union health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, has said he wants to remove barriers to the import of Japanese encephalitis vaccines in time to begin mass vaccinations in high-risk areas by April, before the disease makes its seasonal reappearance.

Japanese encephalitis occurs across wide areas in Asia, where about 50,000 cases -- and 15,000 deaths -- are reported annually, according to the World Health Organization, although the number of cases is thought to be vastly underreported. In India, the virus is concentrated in eastern Uttar Pradesh, the country's most populous state and one of its poorest, as well as the states of Andhra Pradesh and Assam.

In some respects, India should be well-equipped to contain the threat. Its cutting-edge pharmaceutical industry supplies life-saving medicines -- including measles vaccine and anti-retroviral drugs used to fight AIDS -- to much of the developing world; a government research institute has made a Japanese encephalitis vaccine for years.

But the Indian vaccine is expensive, time-consuming to produce and relatively short-lived in its effectiveness. Because the government has resisted importing better versions from China and elsewhere, or licensing their production at home, India has adopted what Julie Jacobson, a virologist, calls a "firefighting approach" to Japanese encephalitis, ramping up domestic vaccine production in response to each outbreak, by which time it is often too late.

The human costs of the latest outbreak are all too evident in Gorakhpur, a city of about 300,000. Since late July, the epidemic has been raging in the poor farming villages that surround the city, where the public BRD Medical College hospital has treated the majority of the underage victims.

Because there is no cure for the disease, medical staff members can try only to ease its symptoms, providing drugs to treat fevers and convulsions or inserting feeding tubes when children become unconscious. A grimy four-story structure whose grounds are covered in weeds and trash, the hospital is treating about 230 encephalitis patients in three wards with a bed capacity of 180, according to Kushwaha, the senior pediatrician.

Children at the hospital are dying at the rate of about one every two hours, and doctors and nurses are in such short supply that in many cases parents are the only ones keeping their unconscious children alive, using foot-operated suction pumps, for example, to clear airways of mucus and saliva. But the mostly illiterate villagers are not always up to the task. More than half of the deaths in the encephalitis wards are caused by aspiration choking, which occurs when the internal airway is blocked, according to Bhupendra Sharma, a senior resident physician.

The sickest patients are in Ward 6. On Wednesday night, mothers in colorful saris and fathers in simple work clothes clustered around their mostly inert children, sometimes sponging their feverish bodies with damp cloths. A few dozed on straw mats unrolled beneath iron-framed beds. Some children breathed through oxygen masks.

Kiran Kumari, the 11-year-old, lived with her parents and six siblings in a mud-and-straw hut about 40 miles from Gorakhpur. After she began having seizures, her parents and teenage sister brought her to the hospital last Sunday in a motorized rickshaw. A few days later, when the girl became unconscious, medical staff members inserted a plastic tube in her airway and showed her family how to use the hand-operated ventilator, as the mechanical ones were all taken.

"For four days, we haven't been able to eat or cook any food," said Kiran's mother, Gulaicha Devi, 40, a slight, careworn woman with a prominent gold nose stud and glass bangles on both wrists. "We're so tired. We didn't bring anything with us. Not a glass of water to drink from. Not a change of clothes."

Despite their exhaustion, Kiran's parents and sister kept substituting for each other on the ventilator, refusing to give up hope. It was no use. On Thursday morning, they and their daughter were nowhere to be found, and another sick child had taken her bed.

A doctor said the girl had died at 5:15 a.m.

Aftab Ahmad

aftab@touchtelindia.net

America's shame: the aftermath of Katrina

2005-09-07T21:25:00.000-07:00

A tale of systematic neglect, administrative incompetence, market-driven environmental destruction, and desperate poverty is unfolding in Louisiana.

"AMERICA'S DIRTY secret." That is what a British TV news reporter, speaking live from Louisiana, called the underclass of America's poor. A tale of systematic neglect, administrative incompetence, market-driven environmental destruction, and desperate poverty is unfolding in Louisiana. It is exposing squalor that would shame a third-world country, as well as racial and political divisions reminiscent of apartheid South Africa.

The facts themselves are grim enough. As if the rain brought by Hurricane Katrina did not do enough, the dykes and levees built to keep the sea out of the city of New Orleans collapsed for lengths of hundreds of metres. The resultant flooding caused what may well amount to thousands of deaths, untold billions of dollars worth of damage, and rendered the city uninhabitable for what is now estimated to be another two years.

Minimal aid, in the form of basic food and water, is finally reaching those who have survived. It is simply not known how many are still stranded in the upper floors of their homes and apartment blocks, nor how many have perished. Some experts have said the forensic task of identifying the dead will be far harder than that which followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as the bodies in Louisiana are decomposing very quickly in temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius. State officials say there is no system for collecting and storing the bodies.

What is most shocking about this disaster is that it has occurred in the world's richest and most powerful country. Yet the questions, no less than they are in poor countries, are political, and this time the survivors are asking them.

To start with, the hurricane warnings predicted an even stronger storm than Katrina turned out to be. Although the effects of such a storm and of a breach in the levees were modelled by officials a year or two ago, the federal government said there was no money to implement a practice response to such an emergency. Further, in 2004 the federal government in Washington stopped funding for maintenance and fortification work on the levees, which were therefore neglected for the first time in nearly 40 years. Environment protection is an easy target for the budget cuts central to neoliberal economics and politics.

In addition, wetlands around New Orleans — which provide vital protection against flooding and tidal surges — have been drained and built upon, and the federal government has tied all environmental funding to the promotion of inter-State commerce. (A similar problem has occurred in southern England, where in some areas planning regulations were abolished for ideological reasons, despite municipal engineers' warnings; building contractors made huge profits on the deregulated floodplains, and the new residents were inevitably the victims of severe winter flooding. Now the owners of the houses cannot get insurance for their properties and cannot find buyers when they seek to sell.)

Secondly, officials at all levels were very slow to see the scale of the disaster, and President George W. Bush and his immediate circle are being openly accused of neglect or even indifference. It took the President two days to curtail his holiday and make a flight over New Orleans in his official jet, and when he did make a ground visit he kept well away from the worst-hit areas. In his public statements, he has shown none of the spontaneity he showed when he — again after some days — appeared at the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001. He has struggled to express any shred of emotion about the Louisiana disaster. Not for President Bush the ordinary compassion shown by Senator Edward Kennedy, who in 1971 tramped knee-deep in mud through the refugee camps on the Indian side of the India-Bangladesh border. Further, having said in purported justification of the invasion of Iraq that "the American way of life is not negotiable," he has been shown on TV pleading with those in Louisiana who could drive not to use too much petrol.

As to other senior federal officials, Vice-President Dick Cheney is still on holiday in Wyoming, and as the disaster took place Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was publicly seen in Manhattan shopping for shoes at $7,000 a pair.

Meanwhile worldwide television was showing, for example, dead bodies of victims in wheelchairs abandoned in sports stadia and convention centres, pushed against walls and left. Other TV news reports showed outbreaks of violence, with gangs looting every shop they could, and at one point relief helicopters turned back because they were being shot at. Even the initial relief effort, slow as it was, was hampered by the fact that some 10,000 of the Louisiana State Guard are in Iraq, pursuing a war which very large numbers of Americans are now questioning very deeply.

The U.S. political system is also showing the characteristic reactions of rich countries when faced with refugees. Politicians in the State of Texas, to which about 100,000 refugees have fled from Louisiana, are saying they cannot take any more and that they need federal government help from Washington DC. They openly cite the fact that Texas, one of the most extreme Republican States, has no public services worth the name. Texas is most of the size of Europe, is soaking rich with oil money, and has a population of 22 million. It is not known if the Texan exchequer has offered any aid, but Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a socialist, has offered $1 million as aid via the Red Cross, and Cuban President Fidel Castro, a communist, has offered 1100 doctors and 26 tonnes of medicines.

Dealing with refugees

Bit by bit too, the potential long-term costs of the disaster are starting to emerge. The economy of Louisiana itself has suffered incalculable damage. The neighbouring State of Mississippi, which has some of the worst poverty in the United States, is faced with the collapse of the tourist business on which it depends. Other southern States are faced with the costs of housing hundreds of thousands of refugees for two years or more; the refugees are just that, with nothing left but the clothes they stand in. Maintaining the levees of New Orleans would have cost a few tens of millions of dollars, loose change for a country that has already spent $170 billion on its war in Iraq and is subsidising private agribusiness corporations to the tune of $180 billion.

Among the most significant of the political issues is the very status of the victims themselves. The overwhelming bulk of them are poor and black. For centuries they have had next to no voice in the politics of the U.S., and it has even been said that, since the start of the Reagan presidency in 1980, significant Supreme Court rulings and federal tax cuts (such as the impending abolition of death duties on estates) have been intended to harm them and to favour the rich, who are overwhelmingly white.

Even African-Americans' access to the most formal elements of the political system has been severely restricted. Byzantine voter-registration procedures, many of which in the southern States were designed to make it as hard as possible for black voters to register, mean that African-Americans are hugely underrepresented on the States' electoral rolls. They are people whom, it seems, America does not want to think about. They are the single poorest group in the U.S., large proportions of them are not on the voting lists, and even if they are and even if they vote, they certainly do not vote Republican. Indeed it is not even clear if President Bush and his Republican cohorts regard them as Americans at all.

The flood waters of Louisiana may now be a gigantic open sewer, riddled with disease and with sharks, alligators, and snakes swimming through city streets, but the political secrets now being washed up may be even dirtier.

Aftab Ahmad

aftab@touchtelindia.net

The Hindu, September 7, 2005.

Urdu Ghazal : An introduction

2005-09-07T05:33:00.000-07:00

Ghazal originated in Iran in the 10th century A.D. It grew from the Persian qasida, which verse form had come to Iran from Arabia. The qasida was a panegyric written in praise of the emperor or his noblemen. The part of the qasida called tashbib got detached and developed in due course of time into the ghazal. Whereas the qasida sometimes ran into as many as 100 couplets or more in monorhyme, the ghazal seldom exceeded twelve, and settled down to an average of seven. Because of its comparative brevity and concentration, its thematic variety and rich suggestiveness, the ghazal soon eclipsed the qasida and became the most popular form of poetry in Iran.

The ghazal came to India with the advent and extension of the Muslim influence from the 12th century onwards. The Moghuls brought along with them Iranian culture and civilization, including Iranian poetry and literature. When Persian gave way to Urdu as the language of poetry and culture in India, the ghazal, the fruit of Indo-Iranian culture, found its opportunity to grow and develop. Although the ghazal is said to have begun with Amir Khusro (1253-1325) in Northern India, Deccan in the South was its real home in the early stages. It was nursed and trained in the courts of Golconda and Bijapur under the patronage of Muslim rulers. Mohd. Quli Qutab Shah, Wajhi, Hashmi, Nusrati and Wali may be counted among its pioneers. Of these, Wali Deccany (1667-1707) may be called the Chaucer of Urdu poetry. Wali's visit to Delhi made in 1700 acquires a historic significance. This visit was instrumental in synthesizing the poetic streams of the South and the North. Wali's poetry awakened the minds of the Persian-loving North to the beauty and richness of Urdu language, and introduced them to the true flavor of ghazal, thus encouraging its rapid growth and popularity.

In its form, the ghazal is a short poem rarely of more than a dozen couplets in the same metre. It always opens with a rhyming couplet called matla. The rhyme of the opening couplet is repeated at the end of second line in each succeeding verse, so that the rhyming pattern may be represented as AA, BA, CA, DA, and so on. In addition to the restriction of rhyme, the ghazal also observes the convention of radif. Radif demands that a portion of the first line -- comprising not more than two or three words -- immediately preceding the rhyme-word at the end, should rhyme with its counterpart in the second line of the opening couplet, and afterwards alternately throughout the poem. The opening couplet of the ghazal is always a representative couplet: it sets the mood and tone of the poem and prepares us for its proper appreciation. The last couplet of the ghazal called maqta often includes the pen-name of the poet, and is more personal than general in its tone and intent. Here the poet may express his own state of mind, or describe his religious faith, or pray for his beloved, or indulge in poetic self-praise. The different couplets of the ghazal are not bound by the unity and consistency of thought. Each couplet is a self-sufficient unit, detachable and quotable, generally containing the complete expression of an idea.

Some poets including Hasrat, Iqbal and Josh have written ghazals in the style of a nazm, based on a single theme, properly developed and concluded. But such ghazals are an exception rather than a rule, and the traditional ghazal still holds sway. However, we do come across, off and on, even in the works of classical poets, ghazals exhibiting continuity of theme or, more often, a set of verses connected in theme and thought. Such a thematic group is called a qita, and is presumably resorted to when a poet is confronted with an elaborate thought difficult to be condensed in a single verse. Although the ghazal deals with the whole spectrum of human experience, its central concern is love. Ghazal is an Arabic word which literally means talking to women.

Aftab Ahmad

aftab@touchtelindia.net

The British Raj and the famines of good governance

2005-08-16T21:06:00.000-07:00

In his recent trip to Britain, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh thanked Britishers for their “Good Governance” in India. Let, take a glimpse of that “Good Governance”.

Between 24 million and 29 million Indians died in famines in the era of British good governance. In fact, barring the scale, it all sounds depressingly like the present. In terms of ideology and principle at least.

No other country in the world was quite as fortunate as ours, a Times of India editorial gushed in 1841. Talk of luck. Not only were we ruled by White Gentleman, the Times pointed out, we were ruled by White English Gentlemen. (It could have been the Dutch, you know.)

So committed were these Gentlemen to the governance of this heathen land, they "would do the utmost to protect our independence... " And this was not "superhuman or romantic.' After all, our rulers merely "act[ed] like English gentlemen of good common sense."

For the enslaved to choose between colonialisms is for the chicken to choose the sauce it prefers to be cooked in. Yet, some still cling to the notion that British colonialism was more benign than others.

This week we mark our escape from good English common sense. As smart a time as any to review its legacy. When the Times (then called the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce) ran that edit in 1841, it was, after all, owned by other White English gents. When brown Indian gentlemen echo those views 164 years later, it is worth revisiting. When the Prime Minister does not "entirely reject" British claims to good governance, it becomes pressing.

That governance was certainly good for the British. Tax collections rose even as millions died of man-made famines. Like Bengal of 1770-72. The East India Company's own report put it simply. The famine in that province "exceeds all description." Close to ten million people had died, as Rajni Palme-Dutt pointed out in his remarkable book, India Today. The Company noted that more than a third of the populace had perished in the province of Purnea. "And in other parts the misery is equal."

Yet, Warren Hastings wrote to the directors of the East India Company in 1772: "Notwithstanding the loss of at least one-third of the inhabitants of this province, and the consequent decrease in cultivation, the net collections of the year 1771 exceeded even those of [pre-famine] 1768." Hastings was clear on why and how this was achieved. It was "owing to [tax collection] being violently kept up to its former standard."

The Company itself, as Palme Dutt observed, was smug about this. It noted that despite "the severity of the late famine and the great reduction of people thereby, some increase has been made" in the collections.

Between 24 million and 29 million Indians, maybe more, died in famines in the era of British good governance. Many of these famines were policy-driven. Millions died of callous and wilful neglect. The victims of Malthusian rulers. Over 6 million humans perished in just 1876 — when Madras was a hell. Many others had their lives shortened by ruthless exploitation and plunder. Well before the Great Bengal Famine, the report of that province's Director for Health for 1927-28 made grisly reading. It noted that "the present peasantry of Bengal are in a very large proportion taking to a dietary on which even rats could not live for more than five weeks." By 1931, life expectancy in India was sharply down. It was now 23.2 and 22.8 years for men and women. Less than half that of those living in England and Wales. (Palme-Dutt.)

Mike Davis' stunning book, Late Victorian Holocausts, also ought to be required reading in every Indian school. Davis gives us a scathing account, for instance, of the Viceroy Lord Lytton. Lytton was the most ardent free-marketeer of his time — and Queen Victoria's favourite poet. He "vehemently opposed efforts ... to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces. All through the autumn of 1876, while the kharif crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton had been absorbed in organising the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India." The weeklong feast for 68,000 guests, points out Davis, was an orgy of excess. It proved to be "the most colossal and expensive meal in world history." Through the same week as this spectacular durbar, "100,000 of the Queen Empress' subjects starved to death in Madras and Mysore" alone.

In fact, barring the scale, it all sounds depressingly like the present. In terms of ideology and principle at least. The Raj nostalgia of today's neo-liberals is quite heart-felt. Thousands of farmers have killed themselves as the agrarian crisis deepens. Tens of millions have seen their livelihoods destroyed. They now hotfoot it to the cities in hope of succour. Massive amounts of grain were exported during the National Democratic Alliance rule. Even as grain per Indian in 2002-03 fell to the levels of the great Bengal famine. And with all the misery in the countryside, the elite orgy of excess goes on. Lytton would have approved.

In his time, Lytton ordered that "there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of government with the object of reducing the price of food." Leave alone the Times of India of 1841. Lytton could surely land the editorship of most Indian daily newspapers in 2005. Imagine the edits his "sensitive and poetical mind" might have thrown up on the idea of guaranteeing employment. Lytton's era saw huge amounts of grain exported to Europe from here while millions of Indians starved to death. Even as he scorned the Indian populace for its "tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from its soil." (Davis: Late Victorian Holocausts.)

The neo-liberals of the present have not achieved the scale of death their White English forbearers excelled at. This is surely due to hundreds of millions of brown Indian men and women of good common sense. Blessed with an unpleasant habit of voting now and then. (And, oh yes, the Brits set up roadblocks to stop the rural hungry from pouring into Bombay and Poona. Police threw out tens of thousands of famine refugees. Sounds familiar? How well it sits with the brutal crackdown on slum dwellers in Mumbai.)

It's a good thing the great uprising of 1857 might be back for a bit on the agenda thanks to a Bollywood film. But it's also worth recalling that the then elites of cities like Bombay held meetings to pray for the success of the British troops. Not for Mangal Pandey and his comrades. Their descendents now plan on how to rid Mumbai of the poor. And would be happy to send Indian troops (mostly from poor rural families) to fight alongside the White English Gentlemen now floundering in Iraq.

Cannon fodder
Yes, there's that, too. British good governance killed more than those tens of millions in famines. Countless numbers of Indians died in wars waged for, by, and against the British. Over 8,000 died in the single battle around Kut in Iraq in 1916. London used them as canon fodder in its desperate search for a success against the Turks after the rout at Gallipoli. When there were no Indians around, the British sacrificed other captive peoples. "Waste the Irish" was the term used by an English officer when sending out troops on a suicidal mission.

In his book Global Capitalism and India, C.T. Kurien gives us a stark example of British-led globalisation from the 1860s. The civil war in America had hurt the flow of cheap, slave-labour cotton to Britain. So the Raj forced the growing of that crop here on a much larger scale than before. "From then on, commercialisation of agriculture continued to gain momentum. Between the last decade of the 19th century and the middle of the twentieth, when food production in India declined by 7 per cent, that of commercial crops increased by 85 per cent. Widespread and regular famines became a recurring feature during this period."

The collapse of the purchasing power of the poor was a big feature of British rule. (Sounds a bit like the present?) The policies, bungling, neglect and corruption of Good White English Gentlemen had much to do with the death of perhaps 4 million people in the Great Bengal Famine of 1942-43. As Amartya Sen points out, this appalling event was never officially declared as a famine. It was only in October 1943, when much of the damage had been done, that the famine was "acknowledged officially in Parliament by the Secretary of State for India... "

The Statesman of Calcutta, notes Prof. Sen, raised the issue after the government coyly confessed to the great disaster. The paper wondered why there was "no direct admission of grave misjudgement on the higher authorities' part." How did this square, the paper sought to know, with earlier claims "that there existed virtually no food problems in India."

Again, while the scale is wholly different, the parallels are odd. In June this year, we could see Montek Singh Ahluwalia speaking solemnly of problems, even a crisis in agriculture. (Gee! I wonder who told him.) These headaches, he feels, go to back to the mid-1990s. No mention of who was shaping the ghoulish policies of that — and the present — period. And no questions asked about it in the media. There's good governance for you. Welcome back, Lytton. All is forgiven, come home.

Aftab Ahmad

aftab@touchtelindia.net

Freedoms, Won And Lost

2005-08-16T04:08:00.000-07:00

On 15th August 2005, India’s 59th Independence Day

Whatever be the definitional problems with freedom, it is possible to identify those that India has squandered and gained in the past 58 years.

"We must never forget in the present day that those people who have got their political freedom are not necessarily free; they are merely powerful. The passions which are unbridled in them are creating huge organisations of slavery in the disguise of freedom." Rabindranath Tagore in Nationalism.

In our preoccupation with growth-rate figures, surging stock-market indices, nuclear might and the quest for a permanent Security Council seat, we no longer ask what it is to be free. Is it because the idea of freedom is elusively difficult to define? Has our preoccupation with the here and now made us shrink and limit the notion of freedom? Or is it just a case of taking freedom for granted? Is it because we have begun to believe in the propaganda of our own power and invincibility, illustrated only a year ago in the shrillness of the "India Shining" propaganda? The answer to all these questions is a bit of all these and much more.

Enslaved by poverty
Whatever be the definitional problems with freedom, it is possible to identify the substantive freedoms India has lost and won in the past 58 years. The most visible loss of liberty during this period is the lack of freedom from poverty. Poverty is ugly and the most grotesque form of slavery. It dehumanises the spirit and shows the inadequacy of an entire people. Gandhi said that he was working for winning Swaraj (independence) "for those toiling and unemployed millions who do not get even a square meal a day and have to scratch along with a piece of stale roti and a pinch of salt." In that sense, a very substantial part of India still lives in bondage.

Closely linked to this is the lack of freedom from hatred, violence, bigotry and corruption. Communal riots, sectarian violence and ubiquitous corruption have severely restricted the freedoms a citizen enjoys. Parochialism and a limiting notion of nationalism have reduced considerably the amount of freedom a citizen enjoys today, and to that extent, the quantum of unfreedom has been on the rise.

Inability to build institutions and nurture them is the next roadblock in the path of freedom. Consequently, freedom from arbitrariness still remains a distant dream. The ordinary citizen is constantly being assailed by what Tagore called the "insolent might" of the powerful. In large areas of public life, might seems to be the only right.

Mediocrity
Above all, freedom from mediocrity is still a distant dream. This manifests itself visibly in ugly buildings, inadequate civic infrastructure and environmental degradation. Otherwise, the inability to produce original ideas and new knowledge is the most obvious illustration of this loss of freedom. Predictably, the ability to use technology someone else has created is often mistaken to be a sign of originality. In routine ways, we are mostly happy to settle for the second best or intellectual handouts.

The story of freedom in India is not, however, one of gloom and doom alone. The most substantive liberty to be enhanced since independence is freedom for women. Despite continuing instances of violence and injustice, women have begun to seize the initiative in all walks of life, in villages and in cities, and have asserted their will and their ability to be heard and counted. Freedom for the Dalits has been another singular achievement of the last five decades or more. Dalits have found a sense of self-possession and a voice that compels attention. If there exist powerful forces that still oppose the rights of the Dalits, they do so against an entity that is empowered and assertive.

Plurality, a survivor
Another freedom that has survived constant onslaughts is the plurality to choose from many tongues, many gods, manifold ways of life and culture. Religious intolerance, communal hatred and politicisation of religion haven't been able to take away the diversity that underwrites the very essence of this freedom to choose one's own life and destiny. The best thing about this freedom is that it has survived and strengthened without a great deal of help from either the Indian State or the formal processes of politics.

A very important freedom that independent India has fabricated for itself is the freedom to be happy. This has very little to do with metaphysical notions of happiness or the classical idea of contentment. Contrasted with crass materialism or consumerism, this freedom manifests itself in the celebration of shared joys and ecstasies. Cricket and cinema are the most obvious instances of this form of freedom. They provide an invisible way in which every Indian communicates his happiness to every other Indian.

The freedom to demand one's rights has grown from strength to strength. There is hardly any segment of society, which has not become conscious of its rights and the ways in which to protect them. The Indian citizen has graduated from being a receptacle of rights to being an individual who not only demands them as a matter of entitlement but also someone who redefines their nature and scope.

Very little of all this would have happened had India not exercised the freedom to remain a democracy. The longevity and perpetuity, if not the excellence, of democracy has ensured that no individual or ideology has been able to paint this country in monochromatic colours. The noise and chaos of democracy might often produce an unbearable cacophony, but it still affords its people to have a voice. All that is needed is for the voice to be regularly modulated in ways that will ultimately reduce the overall shrillness of public discourse. A little restraint will also help to listen more carefully to the disquieting, but meaningful, silence of the silent majority.

Aftab Ahmad

aftab@touchtelindia.net

India, 1757 and after: Similar Situation in Middle East.

2005-07-31T23:57:00.000-07:00

Regime change — history repeats itself

A fanatical Muslim despot was resisting the West, there were calls for regime change. We have, of course, been here before.

The current situation of Middle East is just like the situation India faced in 1757 and after.

By the end of the 1990s, the hardliners calling for regime change in the east found that they had a powerful ally in government. This new President was not prepared to wait to be attacked: he was a new sort of conservative, aggressive in foreign policy, bitterly anti-French, and intent on turning his country into the unrivalled global power. It was best, he believed, simply to remove any hostile Muslim regime that presumed to resist the West.

There was no doubt who would be the first to be targeted: a Muslim dictator whose family had usurped power in a military coup. According to British sources, this chief of state was an "intolerant bigot," a "furious fanatic" with a "rooted and inveterate hatred of Europeans," who had "perpetually on his tongue the projects of jihad." He was also deemed to be "oppressive and unjust ... [a] sanguinary tyrant, [and a] perfidious negotiator."

It was, in short, time to take out Tipu Sultan of Mysore. The president of the board of control, Henry Dundas, the minister who oversaw the East India Company, had just the man for the job. Richard Wellesley was sent out to India in 1798 as governor-general with specific instructions to effect regime change in Mysore and replace Tipu with a western-backed puppet. First, however, Wellesley and Dundas had to justify to the British public a policy whose outcome had long been decided in private.

Vilification campaign
Wellesley therefore began a campaign of vilification against Tipu, portraying him as an aggressive Muslim monster who divided his time between oppressing his subjects and planning to drive the British into the sea. This essay in imperial villain-making opened the way for a lucrative conquest and the installation of a more pliable regime that would, in the words of Wellesley, allow the British to give the impression they were handing the country back to its rightful owners while in reality maintaining firm control.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a politician in search of a war is not over-scrupulous with matters of fact. Until recently, the British propaganda offensive against Tipu has determined the way that we — and many Indians — remember him. But, as with more recent dossiers produced to justify pre-emptive military action against mineral-rich Muslim states, the evidence reveals far more about the desires of the attacker than it does about the reality of the attacked.

Recent work by scholars has succeeded in reconstructing a very different Tipu to the one-dimensional fanatic invented by Wellesley. Tipu, it is now clear, was one of the most innovative and far-sighted rulers of the pre-colonial period. He tried to warn other Indian rulers of the dangers of an increasingly arrogant and aggressive west. "Know you not the custom of the English?" he wrote in vain to the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1796. "Wherever they fix their talons they contrive little by little to work themselves into the whole management of affairs."

Modernising technocrat
What really worried the British was less that Tipu was a Muslim fanatic, something strange and alien, but that he was frighteningly familiar: a modernising technocrat who used the weapons of the West against their inventors. Indeed, in many ways, he beat them at their own game: the Mysore sepoy's flintlocks were based on the latest French designs, and were much superior to the company's old matchlocks.

Tipu also tried to import industrial technology through French engineers, and experimented with harnessing water-power to drive his machinery. He sent envoys to southern China to bring back silkworm eggs and established sericulture in Mysore — an innovation that still enriches the region today. More remarkably, he created what amounted to a state trading company with its own ships and factories dotted across the Gulf. British propaganda might portray Tipu as a savage barbarian, but he was something of a connoisseur, with a library of about 2,000 volumes in several languages.

Moreover, contrary to the propaganda of the British, Tipu — far from being some sort of fundamentalist — continued the Indo-Islamic tradition of syncretism. He certainly destroyed temples in Hindu states that he conquered in war, but temples lying within his domains were viewed as protected state property and generously supported with lands and gifts of money. When the great Sringeri temple was destroyed by a Maratha raiding party, Tipu sent funds for its rebuilding. "People who have sinned against such a holy place," wrote a solicitous Tipu, "are sure soon to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds."

Tipu knew what he was risking when he took on the British, but he said, "I would rather live a day as a tiger than a lifetime as a sheep." As the objects in tomorrow's sale show, the culture of innovation Tipu fostered in Mysore stands record to a man very different from that imagined by the Islamophobic propaganda of the British — and the startling inaccuracy of Wellesley's "dodgy dossier" of 1799. The fanatical bigot and savage was in fact an intellectual.

The whole episode is a sobering reminder of the degree to which old-style imperialism has made a comeback under George W. Bush and Tony Blair. There is nothing new about the neocons. Not only are westerners again playing their old game of installing puppet regimes, propped up by western garrisons, for their own political and economic ends but, more alarmingly, the intellectual attitudes that buttressed and sustained such imperial adventures remain intact.

Despite over 25 years of assault by Edward Said and his followers, old-style Orientalism is alive and kicking, its prejudices intact, with columnists such as Mark Steyn and Andrew Sullivan in the role of the new Mills and Macaulays. Through their pens — blissfully unencumbered by any knowledge of the Muslim world — the old colonial idea of the Islamic ruler as the decadent, destructive, degenerate Oriental despot lives on and, as before, it is effortlessly projected on a credulous public by western warmongers in order to justify their own imperial projects. Dundas and Wellesley were certainly more intelligent and articulate than Mr. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld, but they were no less cynical in their aims, nor less ruthless in the means they employed to effect them.

Aftab Ahmad

aftab@touchtelindia.net

Hope

2005-07-29T02:35:00.000-07:00

Human morality and spirituality would have been crushed out under the dead weight of hopelessness. Hopelessness is considered to be one of the most socially dangerous illness, and it cannot be treated except by injecting a strong feeling of hope. Hope lifts the spirit and morale of humankind. The spread of hopelessness is dangerous to the health of all kinds of individuals as well as all kind of societies, including the modern man and the society.

If one looks at history, one will see that humankind cannot survive without hope, for life without hope is utterly unbearable. The hope inspired by religion is especially an antidote in circumstances when everything around seems gloomy, when grief and hardships disturb the equilibrium of people's lives; in fact, and they ravage them physically, psychologically and morally. In such circumstances hope intertwined with faith, offers the necessary strength both to individual and collectivities to survive the crises they encounter. Hope is just one aspect of the religious phenomenon. There is a vital relation between hope and religion. As a contemporary Scholar has said:

“Faith is power; the person who has real faith can challenge the whole universe.”[1]

Indeed, hope is one of the most significant virtues embedded in the human paradigm. The Qur’an and the numerous other religious books set forth hope as an indispensably desirable attribute. This means that to continue to look forward to the eternal world, or to think about a better life, is not a form of escape or wishful thinking. Were we to study history, we would find that the people who entertain such ideas are able to have impact on history. They were precisely those who were animated with hope for a better life in this world and in the hereafter.

In several verses of the Qur’an we find that a great stress has been placed on the idea of hope. According to the Qur’an, God certainly puts people to different tests of fear, hunger and loss of property, but they must remain full of hope and be patient:

"...And give good news to those who patiently endure." (Qur’an 2:155)

On the whole, the Qur’an teaches peoples that they should not succumb to the illusion that they would not be faced with difficult times. For this is the nature of life:

“Ease and hardship go hand in hand.” (Qur’an 94:6)

But the faithful should remain optimistic about a good end even in the most difficult times, this because of their trust in God's promise to them. In this regard, the Qur’an makes mention of the experience of the prophets. These prophets were always hopeful about God's aid and God never abandoned them. God never leaves His people who struggle against evil in a state of despair. The Qur’an mentions the story of the struggle between Talut (Saul), the leader of the believers, and Jalut {Goliath), the leader of the non-believers. The followers of Talut complained that they had no power against Jalut and his army. According to the Qur'an:

"Those who were certain that they would meet their Lord said: 'How often has a small party vanquished a numerous host by Allah's permission? And Allah is with those who patiently endure'".

They were full of hope when they asked God to grant them patience against non- believers:

"Our Lord! Pour down upon us patience, and make our steps firm and assist us against the unbelieving people" (Qur'an 2: 50).

The story ends with the believers defeating Jalut and his army despite the believers’ apparent lack of power.

The Qur'an also narrates the story of the prophet Ya'qub (Jacob) when he had lost his son, Yusuf (Joseph). According to the Qur'an, Ya'qub tells his sons:

"O my sons! Go and inquire about Yusuf and his brother (Bin Yameen [Benjamin]), and never give up hope of Allah's mercy. Certainly none despairs of Allah's mercy, except those who disbelieve." (Qur'an 12: 87)

Here the Qur'an clearly indicates that hopelessness is a characteristic of non-believers. Despair is one of the major sins against God in Islam (as it is in Christianity), for it is antithetical to trust in God. Hopelessness, as we have just noted, is one of the attributes of non- believers, and as the Qur'an states elsewhere:

"And who despairs of the Mercy of his Lord except those who are astray." (Qur'an 15: 56; 41: 49)

Hopefulness, on the contrary, is one of the attributes of believers and one of the principles of true faith. The Qur'an mentions the people who trust in God's infinite power:

"They are those who, on being told: 'Your enemies have mustered a great force against you: fear them,' grew more tenacious in their faith and replied: 'God's help is sufficient for us. He is the best protector'." (Qur'an 3: 173)

God's power is more than enough to protect the faithful against difficulties.
The Qur'an mentions that natural disasters like droughts and earthquakes, which cause hopelessness, can also be remedied by hope provided by God:

"And it is He Who sends down the rain after they have despaired". (Qur'an 42: 28)

Another verse says: "O My servants who have acted extravagantly against their own souls, do not despair of the mercy of Allah" (Qur'an 39: 53). For the faithful, therefore, there should be no reason to lose hope: "We gave you good news with truth, therefore be not despairing." (Qur’an 39:53)

The Qur'an commands people to contemplate the ultimate end met by the nations that opposed God and followed evil ways. They should do so because the example of those nations shows that the ultimate victory belongs to God and to the faithful.

In fact, sociologists agree about the importance of hope both for an individual and a society. Hope in individual or social life is like a sound set of reflexes in organisms. As the French social scientist Emile Durkheim (d. 1917) explains, a society without hope would be a monster incapable of living. According to Durkheim an actual society can no more do without this collective ideation than an organism can do without reflexes.[2] It would be no exaggeration to claim that the idea of hope is planted in human nature. As the religious and mystic poet Angelus Silesius (d.1677) says:

“Hope is a rope’, which rescues people.”[3]

It seems evident that the idea of paradise and a happy future also provides of hope. This strong hope gives people ease of heart in their individual and social life. This idea is accepted as a sociological fact:

"Periodically humanity marches toward an ideal world with infinite tentative efforts."[4]

Some psychologists believe that "hope is a dream of an awakened man."[5] They claim, however, that dreaming is absolutely essential for the health of the individual and a decrease in dreaming is the sign of serious illness.[6] Hopeful people suffer fewer illnesses such as stress and heart attacks. Since hope is the dream of the awakened, any society or individual without a dream of better life and without any hope for a better future is seriously ill.

Hope is not only a system of ideas, it is above all a system of forces. Hopeful life implies the existence of very specific forces. Recalling a well-known phrase, I will restrict myself to saying that they are the forces that can move mountains. By that, I mean that when man lives a hopeful life, he believes he is participating in a force that dominates him, but which at the same time supports him and raises him above himself.

[1] Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, The Words, tr. Sukran Vahide (Istanbul: Sozler Publications, 1993) pp. 322.
[2] Emile Durkheim, La Science Sociale et L 'actron, 197 cited in Henry Descroche, Sociology of Hope, tr., Carol Martin Sperry (London and Boston: Poutledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 42.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.

Aftab Ahmad

aftab@touchtelindia.net