the Anti-Politics Blog

Education in a Fascist Democracy

2016-04-29T21:41:00.000+05:30

Who do you call a Psycho?

1. "I am not a parent, and I have other issues to think about."
2. "I have children close to me, or mine, and I do my bit to take care of them. Others should take care of their own"
3. "Children should be reared in a strict disciplined atmosphere and taught to distinguish clearly between right and wrong. And I know about what is right and wrong".
4. Middle-aged men who have children and pretend they are dead?
5. Someone, anyone, insider, outsider, foreigner who know all about goodness and the "dodgy", the family and national values, and just want to walk on?

6. Or some small shopkeeper or businessman who screams at the ugly little rag-picker animal stealing his cellphone, and then takes lead to tie that 11-year old vermin to a lamp post as is the practices with thieves and start to hit him until he starts to bleed?

Check it out:

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090703/jsp/calcutta/story_11188948.jsp

If you said yes to just no. 6, and not chosen all the above, you could be wholly, or at least partly wrong there.

Maybe we all need to be ashamed, no outraged. Are the authorities there at all: will they the state make a case against Sanjoy Biswas, the small businessman, probably a parent too? It's not such a surprising bit of news anyway. I wrote a similar story, a short story at the age of sixteen about two cycle thieves caught in a fairground and lynched by the mob. That was set in rural Bengal, in the romantic countryside of "ranga mati" (red earth).

Sometimes I like to call our country a fascist democracy. Yes, you got that right: it is a bit of a contradiction in terms, isn't it? How can that be? Fascism needs some kind of regimentation, and the mob is not regimented. Well, the mind can be.

Even mob violence has character, it's not plain anarchy. A pattern. A bloody indelible mark of the stench of confused values.

So how did this come about? Let's start with the children and their education, and the supposed agent provocateur of the current system: Lord Macaulay. This brilliant methodical mind noted in Minute on Indian Education, 1835:
"It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population."If you look up sources in the internet, you might come across a rather creative interpretation which has the first Baron stating:
I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.

It is interesting what some rightists in India think of Macaulay: tampering of historical evidence is commonplace, especially with extreme leftists and rightists.

The issue here is of course western education as we know it in India. It was introduced at various levels as a model of modernisation without taking into consideration the unique local factors (a lot of which is often put on the pedestal of the glorious past, never mind if that past consisted of feudal communalism practiced at almost every Princely state or Sultanate). The west tried to look at India as a nation, or a race, or at least an empire. While progressive democratic thinking was being infused right into British imperial culture after the democratic movements in France and United States, in the colonies, the role of the enlightened modernists in the establishment became that of laying down the basis of the new world order to arise and establish itself for the next century and perhaps beyond. The trouble with enlightened modernists in the establishment is they have a plan, but they sometimes lack in detail, and execution.

It followed that a brutal old punitive system of education was enforced on all classes of people in place of the privileged education based on caste alignments or nobility which either followed a traditional Hindu model or that of the Islamic rulers. Centuries old ingrained misconceptions and prejudices do not get replaced by a new model of education easily enough. What ensued was subversion at many levels by Indians and foreigners, tainted by revisions using confused concepts from orientalist, religious revivalist and finally, nationalistic thinking. New India came of age with independence in 1947 in a culture of bureaucracy rather than an enlightened nationalist movement, if there can be one. By the time India became free, it was already clear what nationalism could be: Hitler had shot himself in a bunker and the world was beginning to hear about the death chambers and mass crematoria in East Europe.

The mob, the people, the masses, whatever you will, are an intelligent people with one big weakness: value system. It's like the fatal weakness of a heroic figure. Whatever the form of government, there can be no peace, no progress without facing up to the fact what the ground reality of living standards and human rights is like.

A nation that allows itself to accept the systematic violence of an unimaginable degree on children, and then to adults who are weaker (usually women), or just born poorer, and promotes dynastic rule in the framework of a democracy, a nation that continues under leaders who perpetrate mass murders and riots, or those that will subvert or block every positive initiative to play to traditional or populist ideas (which is which?) in order to practice the "realpolitik" of a modern state, is a nation fast going into decline.

Take the Minister of Human Resources, Kapil Sibal's recent initiative to do away with examinations at the grade 10 level (for sixteen year olds). Both the left and right has come up quite vehemently in criticism of such a preposterous proposition. There has been no decline in student suicide rates as far as I can see although I do not have any statistical data to prove it right away. Are there any researchers, any bodies, any lone academic keeping track of student suicides rates and rates of beatings, canings and other punitive strategies that our current education system use to discipline the would-be masses? I think I may be out of line in this argument because many authoritative figures will immediately point out that for one, I do not have self-confessedly the statistics right, but more importantly, the examination system does not necessarily lead to suicides in a simple causal relationship.

Suicides, in the end, no pun intended, mean more dead people, whatever age they died. The living has to continue with the torture and the handicap of trauma that affects millions and millions of people. Very few, after all, commit suicide, in the country that's going to be the world's most populous country of enfranchised citizens. A country which has a long "civilisation" as opposed to "tribal" culture. That reminds me of the fictional Indian Chief of Lou Reed's song "Last Great American Whale", especially the last sentence of the two verses excerpted below:

Off the Carolinas the sun shines brightly in the day
The lighthouse glows ghostly there at night
The chief of a local tribe had killed a racist mayors son
And he'd been on death row since 1958

The mayors kid was a rowdy pig
Spit on Indians and lots worse
The old chief buried a hatchet in his head
Life compared to death for him seemed worse

That's another continent, another extinct old culture.

I have just one last thing to say about the topic of examination-based education system: failures in examinations are stigma. When you fail to be promoted from one class to another, as a eight, ten, or even fourteen year old, you are branded, which translates to a psychological badge of "low self-esteem" for the failed child. Even the fear of failure is enough to cause trauma. Even though you had no chances of failing, ask yourself honestly: didn't you get that sick feeling at one point or the other in your childhood about how it would feel like to fail in a subject, a mid-term examination, or the annual one that promotes you up with your peers to the next classroom?

The roots of unreason lie in our education system, never mind who enforced it on us, it's a system that has failed. We need to learn from that failure: we need to stop the violence against children, may be they are dead for us, may be they are someone else's, may be they belong to some other caste or tribe.

As a die-hard optimist (it is a little difficult to identify oneself as a "logical positivist" in these extreme, trying times), I hope the Minister gets to implement his agenda, whatever the politics. In absence of another framework of education, this will be very challenging. I sure hope he has a blueprint, and I sure hope that blueprint has the necessary elements of the "holistic" education system he has hinted at aimed at creating a less violent and psychotic pan-Indian or South Asian culture.

The Good Earth and Metaphysical Materialism

2012-04-15T22:50:00.032+05:30

I read an article about a professor from the Chemistry department of Jadavpur University who has been recently arrested for posting a certain cartoon that apparently defames the new lady Chief Minister of West Bengal. He was also assaulted by the land mafia and political thugs at this residence in a manner that's not unheard of in our glorious country, punched and kicked around by a group of cowards for whom it might be a special privilege to do so every time they get a chance.

It's easy to see it's all about "mati" (earth/land). It has been that since the last government became too ambitious and tried to sell off land in large parcels to people like "Salim". That name, a few years ago well known in West Bengal, and is now almost being forgotten anyway, is behind a lot of real estate wealth in Indonesia. The Salim Group is a huge conglomerate, perhaps the largest in that region, and if you have ever been to Jakarta, you will find the sprawling Lippo satellite townships, malls, water parks, golf courses, et al. Lippo banks, Indofood, most everything, and the family behind it were once collaborators of the dictatorial regime of Suharto, who ironically cleansed that nation of leftists for the US, and used popular xenophobia against the "Chunkwoh"(street slang for ethnic Chinese) to hold on to power till the last desperate days of his regime. Chinese Indonesian by ethnicity, the Salim group owners were once supposed to have been involved with the fathers of the modern Indonesian nation, Soekarno and Hatta, smuggling arms for the revolutionaries in their final, brief struggle against the Dutch shortly after WW2, when the country had just been liberated from the short and brutal Japanese occupation after it's long colonized past.

During the Suharto regime, while ethnic Chinese were openly oppressed, it wasn't just a pure racial hatred that manifested, and the elite and rich Sino-Indonesians never had it bad, and I daresay they had enough connections with the top military brass of the Suharto regime. Indonesia is a country you do not have any "MRP" a friend once pointed out to me. In short, a capitalist paradise. American and western-style businesses rule along with the local creamy layer composed of ethnic Chinese, and the usual band of local politicians of all variety,... except the left. Leftists are banned in that country. The repression against leftists during the 60s-70s was much more brutal there, even worse than S. S. Ray's regime anti-Naxalite phase. Any small protest in workplaces to this day is brutally suppressed and even telecast on TV.

It's all about land. Fertile or not, people do not seek spices, milk or honey anymore. Local politicians are just neo-fascists who usually come up from the ranks of land sharks and land grabbers. It's a culture we have lived with for a long time now, ever since we got down from the trees and started to cultivate the land, in the social and political life. In the past, the land was coveted for its yield. Now we know how to make box-like monstrosities called apartments, or simply 'flats', and that can yield huge profits. Except that is going to be the death of our planet sooner or later, if this goes on. The only ideology, if there is one left for politics of ethics, is perhaps environmentalism.

All said and done, what did we expect? Some kind of great sea change under a leader whose party is composed of more or less the same land sharks. The bigwigs in CPI-M (Communist Party of India - Marxist) tried to sell off agricultural land in large tracts to make a final killing. A little investigative journalism would have unearthed the condos in Singapore and undisclosed foreign bank accounts our top leaders were getting as rewards for their 'positive' role. The previous power group was ruled by terror. Their cadre had almost full control of the streets and the villages. But quietly they also used the state's machinery for personal benefit. And I am just talking about building contracts like the Gariahat flyover or Dumdum metro extension. Those in the know will know, but it's too late, many of the leaders are dead and gone while others have lost their mass appeal. Then there is the opportunist group who have joined the ranks of the present ruling party shedding all their leftist pretensions one fine morning.

All the time, during the 80s and 90s, and 2000s, both parties fought small battles, and sometimes even co-operated wherever they could to get the ill-gotten gains from land grabbing. There were intrigues. Sometimes some more ambitious local councillor or politician higher up in the corruption food chain got quietly murdered, and even the top brass of whichever party they belonged never made any sounds. If it made news, they made the same old speeches full of political rhetoric but justice never prevailed. The assassins were never found out. The story lost its front-page coverage in a few days.

They lasted in power so long for just two things: terror and generally letting small-time farmers keep their piece of "mati" (land). At the height of the Singur movement, almost at the onset, I visited the village and heard the proverbial voice of the people. For 30 years they voted for the party faithfully and what had they got for that? A tube-well for each over-populated neighbourhood. And finally, land grab by the authorities to sell to the Tatas to build their microcar factory at prices which are best described as next to nothing. They did not have money, social security, jobs, education, but they had a piece, usually a tiny piece of land that yielded a crop three times a year, and with that, at least you did not have to take the begging bowl to the city streets to earn your square meal.

The party cadre towards the bottom of the ladder are usually composed of thugs and petty middlemen running after land sale commission percentages and such. It's their ethos: their beliefs and their culture that is on has been on the rise, and that, sadly is the dominant culture of Bengal today, so much for our intellectual heritage. More university students aspire for a career overseas or professorship in some obscure department of the academia, and others are content to look for any government job - primary school teacher, postal clerk, fire brigade official - and so on; with such glorious aspirations of our middle class, and constant exploitation of workers, knowledge or otherwise, how far this society will get ahead in any field of life, it is an open question. And I don't think there's anything to be optimistic about the changes we are seeing and will continue to see.

In a way it is class war, I would tend to agree, the divide between the literate and "cultured", educated and elite may not be so clear. That is primarily because of the sheer burden of hypocrisy that our traditions impose on our sensibilities, but departing from a strict Marxist (and perhaps unfashionable) analysis, what we may safely predict is worse than war: its oppression. Of the fascist kind. In technique. But unsupported by any ideology. The only common denominator among the class of political arrivistes that we have let ourselves be ruled by is their sheer, unmoving, relentless desire to make good out of the land, their "shubh laabh" (holy or pure profit).

In doing so, they twist the logic of the supreme command of the Gitas:

Therefore without attachment, do thou always perform action which should be done; for by performing action without attachment man reaches the Supreme

an excuse for detachment in professional, social and political life that allows them to ignore the humanitarian ideas. Metaphysical materialism, if you ask me.

Shampa

2011-07-11T20:49:00.005+05:30

It's hard to believe she is no more. No obituaries, not even a mention in the papers. Only yesterday she was there amongst us, smiling her ready smile as always.

Yet another victim of the dreaded disease, that "Empress of All Maladies", cancer.

Shampa, it seems to me had a tragic life now cut short all of a sudden. All who knew her a little or intimately will tell you that in spite of her trials, she was always cheerful, always smiling. In fact, the moment I think of her, I can see a radiant smiling face, like some kind of brilliant heavenly body in full glory. What trials she had endured only those who closely knew her might have known. But she was not the one sit around moping with a long face. She would go about cheerfully smiling, sometimes patiently lending a sympathetic ear to others tales of troubles without a hint of irritation, be there in bad times as well as good, and that is the memory of her I will always cherish.

Behind her charming and benevolent appearance lay a perceptive intellect; that, with an uncommon ability to make others around her feel the good cheer she radiated. Last I knew she had been involved in a project benefiting street children. With her personality, looks and formidable acting skills she might have chosen to be a film actress and be quite a successful in that. The only film she ever acted was a tragedy about the of the despicable practice of Sati or the act of self-immolation by a wife on her husband's funeral pyre practised by Hindus in the past. In Antarjali Jatra (The Voyage Beyond) she was the young woman Yashobati, barely out of her teens, who is washed away by surging waves in the climactic end after a long eventful day awaiting the death and funeral of her octogenarian husband whom she was wedded to in a hurry by her father who thought that the act would bring honour to his poor family.

That was real life in the 19th century. In real life today tragedies occur too but I can't help feeling that there is a common element in it. And that is what makes me angry and helpless at the same time. If I told you that Shampa's cancer was curable, that she did not have to die, would you think so too? It was sometime last year she had an operation. It wasn't such a major thing: a standard procedure I believe for removing an uterine stone. And as standard practice the stone was sent for biopsy. The pathological laboratory reported negative result for cancer and there the matter was settled. Except it wasn't. At a much more advanced stage when she had to be finally shifted to Delhi, it was evident that the pathological report had clearly indicated signs of malignancy. It was staring right in the face of the pathologist. And yet it was overlooked until it was too late ...

That such a thing could happen to anybody is becoming more and more possible. What is the real malaise here? Not cancer, not the disease of the body. Sooner or later there's every chance that one of us may fall victim to some dreadful malady and never recover from it. But with all the modern tools and knowledge, and the results of a laboratories and tests, the disease it seems to me is that of the mind. A combined unwillingness to do any good, make any improvement in the quality of medical care.

I have earlier written about the healthcare in this blog (Healthcare: Hell may care more). Things remain the same, I guess. It's not even a matter of private or public practice any more. It's spirit of the times: wave upon wave of tragedy wash our shores and good people we know are lost to us forever, dying a lonely and horrible death. Of all people Shampa never deserved any of it and there's no consolation.

In the political arena, the leftist government of three decades have been toppled from the seat of power and the new Chief Minister of Bengal, the grassroot party's angry woman of yesteryear is now settling down to face realities of trying to reform a system rotten from within. She has kept the health portfolio herself among other important ones. On the very first week after her assuming power she went on surprise visits to a few state hospitals, wielded her newly acquired power suspending a doctor here, demanding explanations and reports there, her populist persona for once totally grabbing the attention of the local media. Since then, I haven't heard much more about what is going on in the way of reform except an able bureaucrat has been especially transferred from Dellhi to our city to assist the CM in the task of reforming the system. We shall wait and see...

But what's lost is lost. Shampa will never walk the streets again. Never will we have the pleasure of her company in soirées. She was very fond of my niece, she loved children so much. She is no more, I still can't believe it, it's not right. She deserved much, much more, and she had so much more to give. May her memory be with us always just as she was: smiling radiantly with a charm you could not resist.

The Death of the Last Brave 'Gorkha'

2010-06-04T20:11:00.012+05:30

When he spoke his face shone with such sincerity and enthusiasm that you couldn't help but be captivated by his charisma. I never heard a single bitter or angry word spoken by him about anyone in spite of his so called "chucha" reputation. Here was a man driven by ideas and willingness to implement them come what may — ideas that were path breaking by any standards. A handsome man with a disarming smile, who was of above average intelligence, well read and traveled, Madan Tamang always saw the positive side of all things in life and was dedicated to bettering not only his own but everyone else's life around him if he could. Yes, that was what I remember of Madan Tamang, or Madan uncle as I knew him.

In another era, another political set up he would doubtless be the same, or even more. The man who has been cowardly murdered by a group of neo-fascists of the GJMM was much more than those aspirants to power can ever aspire to be. Madan Tamang was not only well educated but was perhaps one the finest native sons of the soil, and much before those cowardly assassins or their provocateurs ever made noises about their supposed understanding of the need for active politics of self-determination and development, he had a very clear and realist's vision of what was needed and how it had to be done.

I remember shortly after the time Subash Ghisingh had been rendered powerless and driven away from the hills for good, most probably in the early 2000s, when he visited our flat in Calcutta on one occasion, in a conversation about the future of the "Gorkhaland" movement, he told me very clearly that the options were not restricted to just statehood, but perhaps even a merger with Sikkim. Above all he recognised the importance of the alienation that the people of the hills felt being a part of West Bengal. But one should not get this wrong: he was committed to the cause of statehood much more than anyone before or after him. What he said was meant to be the last option in the way of a demand at a time when the political climate was such that people had all but given up hope of the formation of a separate state. He would rather prefer a merger with Sikkim than a compromise in form of a Hill Council under the West Bengal administration. Indeed Madan Tamang did not belong to a breed of provincial politicians bent on exploiting people's ethnic sentiments just for their personal goal but looked at aspirations of self-determination of a community which has a distinct and unique cultural identity.

The cowards have murdered the last brave Gorkha of his generation and perhaps many many more to come. I wonder what he might have been thinking bleeding to death after the fatal blow of the assasin to his neck. Did his spirit soar above the unfortunate congested town that Darjeeling has become today right back to his very own part of the hillside at Rhododel and then high above to Meghma where he grew Oolong tea in perhaps one of the highest tea gardens of the world?

It was always a great feeling to visit Madan uncle's idyllic house Rhododel, a stone mansion set in a large property occupying the better part of the hillside in the outskirts of Darjeeling town. Whether it was sipping freshl Oolong tea or taking a walk down to the nursery and the small cottages which he rented out to guests from all over the world, like (he said laughing) "a burnt out siftware developer from Microsoft Word team who wanted to try out yoga for inner peace", it was always his presence that made the place so special. He knew much about flora and fauna of the Eastern Himalayas than anyone I know personally.

Had Gorkhaland been a state, this man should have been at the top. He had taste, and more importantly he had a vision. He knew and said as much: that the Darjeeling hills are so rich in natural resources that economic development should be based on factors such as social empowerment through agriculture and diversified industry coupled with environmental conservation rather than only large scale commercial exploitation of land by the tea corporations and tourism. He was above all an idealist, ethical to the core. Bravery in thought came to him naturally because he looked at truth in the face. Now that is the mark of real courage. Since his college days he had been active in politics demanding self-determination for the populace of Darjeeling hills whose fate has been wrongfully left in the hands of cynical politicians in the corridors of power in the Writers' Building at Calcutta, yet another example some people think of the injustices that was part of the old colonial policy of divide and rule by the Brits.

Perhaps the real reason of his murder was his courage to disagree with anyone, even with politicians in his own party or those in alliance with powerful external forces. As long the administration followed a policy of suppressing the real cause of the Gorkhas with brute force, Madan Tamang was not really a threat to them, but in an odd way, their ally. With the new policy to let the neo-fascist GJMM goons to rule the roost in the hills, it was uncomfortable for the administration to allow such vocal opposition to GJMM's rhetoric. With his keen understanding of the political mindset of our leaders Madan Tamang realised the West Bengal government and other political forces of the plains, left, right or centre are all opposed to letting go of Darjeeling as an entity "inside" the state of West Bengal (Darjeelingta amader). At the same time, Madan Tamang was hell bent on exposing the next wave of impostors after Ghisingh having fully realised that the Bimal Gurungs, Roshan Giris and other such opportunists of the world would sooner or later settle with some kind of power sharing arrangement with the state and the centre. That represented to him yet another blow to the people's aspirations. As an idealist who clearly had to hack his way through the jungle of corruption and treachery he lashed out without any restraint and that proved to be his end. Here was the Gorkha spirit, the brave soldier charging against all the odds without fear of his life as the deadly bullets whizzed past him. Here we are today who don't understand or recognise his sacrifice. Nor do we do anything against those cowards who continue to spread lies and slander against such a great man.

Wistfully I begin to wonder about what a great statesman he would have been. If there's any portfolio he could have taken up at the provincial, state or even the national level, it would doubtlessly have been environment. But this age has not been favourable to him in his short life. He lived a full life for sure, trudging the mountainside he loved so much and when he came down to the plains, I can almost see him in his smart outfit — blue flowery printed shirt and light beige trousers — taking us to his favourite restaurant and leisurely enjoying every moment of a dinner. But somewhere back in his mind I know he is worried about the fate of political prisoners like his own elder brother for whose freedom he left no stones unturned.

Madan uncle, they have killed you, those cowards, but you will live forever in our hearts and minds. Good night, sweet prince. Never again will you be able to provide the people with your visionary leadership that was so much the need of the hour. But your legacy will live on in the common aspirations of all freedom loving Gorkhas and all freedom loving human beings in this world.

Healthcare: Hell may care more?

2010-01-15T09:26:00.008+05:30

About two hundred youths armed with rods and sticks came rioting to a nursing home not fifty metres from where I stay last evening. A thirty-three year old with some kind of heartache (or was it heartburn?) was admitted there yesterday. The seniormost doctor in charge administered what became a fatal injection. The young man died. His neighbourhood friends were angry and it took police to fight them back, but only after the zone began to resemble any riot-torn locality although on a smaller scale.

Nothing is new in the story, only a few names and locations. Mob fury erupts from time to time, property is laid to waste, nothing really changes except some damage, and a few lives sometimes. We live in a country with few records of doctors facing charges of negligence. There are jokes about doctors becoming true doctors after killing a few. Yet this is the country which has "exported" countless doctors abroad. Once upon a time, Calcutta was at the forefront of medical research. But that's once upon a time. With politicisation of education, nothing has been spared. Not even the medical profession.

Healthcare, some may argue has improved with proliferation of countless nursing homes and clinics and technology. However it has actually become a profession in which to remain ethical and true to the Hippocratic oath is often impossible. That does not mean we do not have any good doctors or nurses. The question is more often about the quality of healthcare that is available. It is not always an economic issue.

We had a neighbour who had multiple kidney failure. With dialysis, and sometimes with successful transplants, patients with malfunctioning kidneys get a fresh lease of life. She was in her fifties and her case was complicated with high blood sugar. She was admitted for dialysis. In a day or two they operated on her heart in spite of her blood sugar. She died. All her medical insurance went into it. May be we do not know enough about medical science to comment on what happened. But I have heard a patient with blood sugar should not be operated on in the first place without getting the sugar levels in check. Secondly, there was no history of such a heart condition. Makes one one wonder what really happened.

There are cases that the private clinics charge as much as possible for any patient. Even the ones who are dead. There have been cases that medicine and clinic costs have been extracted for a dead patient, some even left on ventilators for over five days. At the time of grief, most people pay up, or if they have insurance, the clinics very efficiently use up the entire amount or more while the near ones are rarely in any condition to protest. Sometimes they do, like yesterday evening, with results which only inconvenience other people. That is a risk the businessmen behind healthcare are willing to take anyway: they probably are covered against acts of god and mortals in any case.

Government hospitals are notorious. It is depressing to even go into one. The sickly smell of medicine and disinfectants hang heavy on the masses of lesser privileged who go there. The staff can be downright rude or even threatening. Supplies, even essential life-savers are hard to come by. Animals and pests do rounds of the ward as do touts and other such people who make a living out of the establishment. There are horror stories of new borns eaten to death by ants, rats and other pests while left unattended.

Air conditioned private establishments are spic and span. They are looking for your insurance plan. They will take you in even for indigestion if you have the money or a good insurance plan. And some even try to kill you or extend your stay as long as possible so your plan is made use of fully. It's good to know people on the inside, you might just get out alive, or at least, with less damage to your health and less burden on your personal finances.

A friend's father, a geologist who worked for the central government is seriously ill and needs a major heart surgery. The thousand dollars needed for it should be paid by the government from a scheme which covers all employees and pensioners of the government. However, since he was admitted to a private centre which of course is reputedly the best place in the city, they needed to approach the government agency in charge of disbursement. The bureaucrats with their checks and balances emphasised the need to regulate private clinics, and while the patient was ailing, declared "Procedure cannot be changed". The outcome: the "panel" did not approve of the surgery, so they would not pay. That is what most people after a life time of hard work for the country can expect to get back. No doubt the governmental agency has an expert panel of doctors from the best institutions of the country as advisers. No doubt that they also have those bureaucrats in their ranks who have perfected the techniques of creating a Kafkaesque hell on earth.

Healthcare indeed, I call it hellcare.

The Great OS Wars: The Clash of Ideologies?

2009-12-09T14:02:00.057+05:30

This blog post began as an answer to a question in "LinkedIn" Questions and Answers (embedded version of Yahoo Answers) to "Is There Room for Microsoft at the Linux Table?"

As I have a habit of ranting away rather than answering a question directly at first, let me get over with the answer bit first: Yes, and it's already, sort of already found a place.

Now for the reasoning rant... (okay, I know, I am politicising things again, but it's actually anti-policising things if you know what I mean... as a proof):

An ex-colleague and friend has confirmed that my blog is inaccessible in the
"People's Republic"...

Big deal,... anything with the words politics is suspect in China anyway, not to mention their blogosphere and related sub-culture. Remember Sister Lotus (Shi Hengxia, 芙蓉姐姐 or Fúróng Jiějiě)? )

In the late nineties, while Microsoft Windows looked and acted very much, excuse my allusion, like a poor country cousin of Mac OS (and I am not even talking about the new Panther, Tiger or Snow Leopard OSXes but old GUI OSes like Mac OS 7.2 which I used back in mid-nineties), Linux became the de facto techhead OS. Suddenly, this free Unix like OS kernel and its distros became the secret powerful tool manager for techies and amateurs alike, and by 1997, Linux distros running OS GUI like Gnome Desktop, K Desktop Window Maker became so popular that we were thinking, hey, it's not only free lunch, they serve the beer free too.

MS Windows	Mac OS	... Linux
Microsoft Windows 95 for PCs were way behind in usability and even the "looks" in comparison to much older Mac OS. The reason it pulled off a marketing coup over Mac OS, never mind it's "clunkiness" and tedious "viral" infections owing to almost no security at all, was because it was a cheap alternative to Apple's proprietary OS which could only run on Motorola chips with which Apple MacIntoshes were manufactured at that time.	Mac OS 7 came with the LC and Power PC series in the early and mid-nineties and were growing strong for better rendering and manipulation of graphics, animation and multimedia back then but was usually out of reach of non-professionals because of the high costs involved.	Linux distributions or "distros" as they are called have been available for a long time (since the early nineties) but unless there are some enthusiasts, or supergeek evangelists around, nobody seems to talk of them much. The average user whose numbers have grown by leaps and bounds to include almost anyone who has access to a home or office computer does not usually have access to it or do not know how to access it. But even in the late nineties, there were interesting "desktops" available packaged in with distros which ranged from pretty neat ones to the downright eccentric experiments like the Japanese "WindowMaker"

For technology enthusiasts, especially those who saw the "future" cloud computing in the sky, Microsoft Windows, its "viruses", "worms" and "trojans", and it's clunky apps which you had to pay to use were beginning to look like things of the past. Since then a lot has happened, but we have seen how the dot com bubble was created and how it burst, how Microsoft's brand image suffered, not in terms of the company's money power but for trying to monopolise the OS world and win the browser wars through "good old" business strategies which may be compared to the moves of any big industrial house.

Jaded academic or entrepreneur?

Rabble rouser?

At this time of writing this blog, Web 2.0 is already an old catchword for the informed and it has crossed over into other spheres never mind what detractors are saying. Web 2.0 has come under considerable attack. The most damning of what I have seen so far is from a person called Andrew Keen. This is a man who speaks somewhat in the guise of an academic but was an internet entrepreneurs in the early years of Dotcom Bubble. Then the bubble burst! And so it seems his own career in technology.

To re-invent himself, he has taken up what seems to be the best of his abilities, public speaking and writing. But when he does so, he sounds like a man in pain trying in vain to be politically, and morally righteous. This is where politics comes in through the back door. And trailing behind it, the issues that are central to every society, culture and nation: survival, education and values.

Andrew Keen has written a book, perhaps one of the first to criticise the Web 2.0 paradigm. When you think of it, you wonder, what has this chappie got against it all? Keen has put together the age-old ravings of some jaded and unsuccessful professional in their sunset years: rage against innovations. In case of Keen, it's technology and the latest innovations. That he missed the bus long ago is evident from his ravings; to read more into it, it 's nothing but alarmist outcries against perceived anarcho-Marxist threat and so-called inevitable signs of demise of the free market economy.

The bogey of Marxist takeover and inevitable collapse of Free Market sounds as real as his claim that Google is the same league as Nike or other big monopolies of the enlightened Capitalist world of the nineties. What Keen does not get is that none of this is the reality and somehow both neo-capitalism and communism are as passé as his outcries about the obscure cults of amateurs, a book he has authoured.

In recent years, the Web 2.0 "revolution", as many Open Source "evangelists" may like to call what they made possible through Linux and a host of database tools, programming platforms, etc., is also facing criticism of the "political kind", what with the public-speaking Andrew Keen ranting on about the dangers and threats to industralised countries and their values that the so-called waves of digital revolution have brought about. Then again, who is Andrew Keen? He is an excellent academic speaker who was also an Internet entrepreneur when the dotcom bubble grew to an amazing and glorious dimension almost a decade back. Today he rants derisively about internet and new developments and somewhere, I suspect, it has got more to do with his personal failure when the dotcom bubble burst than the threat to way of life under capitalism. Well, Keen's take on all this is as alarmist as that of so many other such failures, and right away I can think of the whole bunch of cyber-safety experts out there creating a confused pandemonium about values and how the younger generation is in greater need of being regulated when in their hearts all they wish for is their fifteen minutes of fame which has eluded them so far, and may be a bigger piece of the cake of cyber tools which seem to make all the money right in front of their noses.

So, if good money is there, if careers can be made out of open source OS distros like Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian and its popular flavours like Ubuntu or Edubuntu, can Billy Boy be far behind? Well, Billy Boy is busy giving away substantial part of his wealth with Melinda in tow. And we can only get the answers from Steve. Not Mr. Jobs, the cancer survivor whose brilliant innovations take the world of technology by storm every other decade (iPods and iPhones), not the good old Wozniak, who assembled the first nice GUI-based OS on the mouse-attached Apple, but Mr. Ballmer, the head hauncho of Microsoft. This good old Swiss American man understands good old capitalism better than academics ranting about the inevitable collapse of the world economy as we know it from threats posed by Google (which Keen of course speaks of in the same breath of old school industrial capitalist giants like Walmart or Nike). If he does have better gumption about the market, he ought to definitely think about it as Billy Boy did before: if you can't defeat 'em, join 'em.

The man and his tux:
Linus Torvalds is one of the heroes of yesteryears which made possible the advances in computing, and seriously, what we call cloud computing these days. Cloud as in the "Internet" cloud. Over the last decade, with advances (and innovations, or are they one and the same thing?) in network technology, today we talk of not only a connected world, but also one that uses common tools for interaction and information processing. In one single catchword, we have explained this phenomenon as Web 2.0.

It's a bit saddening to see Linus' page on Wikipedia have this entry:
In 2006, Business 2.0 magazine named him one of "10 people who don't matter" because the growth of Linux has shrunk Torvalds' individual impact.

If you are still with me, and have not heard about Linus Torvalds, let me first explain what he did. He wrote a portable Operating System, while still in university. At least he wrote the "kernel" for it. Or the first 2% of the core code. The idea was to get it work on desktop computers we use today, and even laptops. At that time, the only few available Operating Systems which were available for lay users were Mac OS and by 1995, what I call a poorer "country cousin", called Windows 9x. Not that there weren't other systems. But they were definitely for scientists and techies. In fact, the mother of all OS'es, Unix was always available out there for anyone who could use it. What Linus did was a project to make the kernel he wrote free under the GNU license (copyleft). Yes, free as in free lunch.

Whether that was a dangerous thing to do or not, soon, there were a storm in the developer community. And later still in the user community. By the second half of the nineties, we had graphical user interfaces created based on the Linux kernel advanced enough to give Windows 9x, and even Mac OS a run for their money. And just as the buggy Windows systems became a great hit through monopoly marketing, or Mac OS went into oblivion with it's restrictive rules, for discerning techies, Linux distributions (or distros) like Red Hat or Debian opened the floodgates of innovation.

The Dotcom bubble began to swell bigger... information, knowhows, techtalk and more and more innovations began to turn into viable technologies, and then small, even large scale businesses that generated more businesses and defined many new career paths and lifestyles too. Much of it was made possible by work based on Linux. Back in late nineties, I remember how I could run brilliant new graphical user interfaces on Linux running on any cheap computer which gave me the power of an internet server right there in my bedroom. Nowadays, even your laptop possibly runs a few server daemons or "services", server apps behind your back. Every Mac OSX has quietly included a nice new version of the free Apache server to author and publish your own web pages at http://localhost if you know how to do so!...

So what do I think about a Microsoft Linux distro? Certainly possible, except there's already Windows 95 clone out there for a long time called Lindows. All Mr. Ballmer has to do is to buy them out: a bunch of coders churning out a nice Linux distro which looks and feels like Windows 95 could be paid some long-awaited dollars and asked to create a Vista clone Linux distro. That would get a perfect A+ score on business strategy from Bill Gates himself; he did that for most tools himself starting right from DOS (or the infamous disk operating system)!

Well, it is all history now anyway:
In July 2004, Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows. As part of this licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated $20 million US, and Lindows transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed their name to Linspire. (source Wikipedia)

Checkout, Xandros for more information about the latest developments...

Actually for those who might not be aware, of this, Microsoft now also supports many Open Source projects "officially" or "legally" and, get this, a Microsoft .NET Open source compatibility project called MONO received some, uh, official recognition in Canada a few years ago when some, um, Microsoft "suits" turned up at their conference in Montreal or Quebec, I forget where it was.

The question is therefore not so much about OSes, but business, and politics. And the answer is always yes, notwithstanding problems pointed out by alarmists and such. And the solution is simple. A MS Linux distro does not sound like such a contradiction to me at all: just visit Nanjing Lu or the Bund in Shanghai and you will be amazed at what industralised communism can do!

It was Linus Torvalds who once said that when Microsoft starts writing software for Linux distros, we have won. The day has almost dawned. On the other hand, Mac OSX is just another Unix-based platform now although I hate to think what they have done to the bash shell and the directory structure. But it's really quite good to work as a workstation as well as a backend server.

The real new kid on the block will be the Google Chrome OS: Yes, you heard right and it's no longer a whisper of a rumour in the tech circles. All the Google tools, all web based and offline Gears-enabled gadgets and such will work on this new lightweight OS. And the best part is it's, yes, you guessed it written on the Linux kernel. Google is a company that goes by the motto of "do no evil" but Keen goes on to rubbish it as just another monopoly ploy by Sergei and gang. But frankly, it's hard to think of Google as unethical like sports shoes makers. Google Chrome OS is being created for the average user in mind and we know it's going to be free and good for practically all that anyone needs to normally do with a computer at home or at work.

The real issue here is of course rights, human rights: this is a subject no extremists, neo-capitalists or hardline communists like to address. For others like big corporate bodies and other businesses, their reaction is sometimes paying lip service or a shrug of helplessness at best. A man who has very much been at the frontiers of OS wars and Open source rebellion, Eric S. Raymond wrote at the very onset in is book Cathedral and the Bazaar that "Linux is subversive. Who would have thought even five years ago (1991) that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet?" Subversion? Now what is he talking about? The open source revolution of course. But more to the point, about rights and work ethics. Years later, now, as the world is still coming to terms with digital divides and equally digital natives, sooner or later, to borrow the words of Arthur Kroker, we come "upon the insistent demand for thinking ethically in the face of digital technologies".

This blogpost is dedicated in the memory of Subhankar Chatterjee, Linux hack and Siemens techie, brother, who met an untimely death in a motorbike accident barely in his thirties early this year.

Educating InfoZombies?...

2009-11-30T03:20:00.017+05:30

This blog may read like a bit of a rant, that's because I am a very worried man, you could say scared and it reminds me of a youth, or possibly even very early teens, when while reading about formal world war history in text books we were also great admirers of comic books, and there used to be the Commando series of mainly tales of heroism of the British or Allied forces against Axis powers. They were set anywhere, in the north Africa against Rommel's Afrika Korps or in some Burmese jungle, or in the dark cockpit of Bombers heading for Hamburg, sometimes even behind enemy lines in Nazi occupied France.

To our childish minds, war, the reality of it did not seem so horrible, but there was always this nagging suspicion, and slowly as the real facts, the bits and pieces about real people killed or maimed, about the Holocaust, the racial and ethnic-cleansings, mass murders, brutal regimes began to sink in, as did the reality of the troubled political times in the hills in the eighties, it became pretty clear what Pete Seegar's song "What did you learn in school, today, what did learn in school?" ("I learnt that war is not so bad, I learnt about the great ones we've had, we fought in Germany and in France and someday I might get my chance...") meant, the post second world war was not as peaceful as I thought. The Vietnam War, the Pol Pot regime, Koirean wars... the theory of perpetual war, "1984", and the horror became real: it was scary. Doomsday prophecies, Kali Yug, the end of times was not some silly superstitious notions simply fantasies of the superstitious, it could be bedcome a reality brought about by one of the nuclear super powers, and even be the THIRD WORLD WAR with a just remote-controlled ballistic missile launch by accidental or deliberate by some power-crazed lunatic, a state or non-state actor who had ceased power just long enough to do the damage by triggering a set of events when M.A.D becomes inevitable.

Then came that delightful man called Gorby, glasnost and perestroika, and the Wall was broken down by jubilant crowds, and we basked in the light of a new dawn: the dawn of the 21st century. Y2K was not even a fraction of the scariness that we learned of about or became aware of during the seventies and eighties when the world was still in the grip of the Cold War...

Not even a decade has gone in this by in this century and there already eems to be new hope: an African-American with some Asian roots at least by schooling is today maybe the world's most powerful man: almost a miracle and the proof that democracy works. In the intervening wars, I have changed, changed so much I can barely even recognise myself... what happened to the shy boy from the Himalayas, who had no social skills to speak off... where is he now? The world was becoming a village, a global one; optimism, hope, love, and friendship despite the insularity of races, and the narrow parochial mindset of closed cultures, was being replaced by the joie de vivre for being alive in an amazing era of globalization, a phenomenon unparalleled by anything in the entire history of mankind, made daily life idyllic to spendd happily, working away at what one loves best, and enjoying the fruits of man's pioneering enlightened state brought about by rationality and intelligence. The gloom and darkness of the seventies, and eighties, the trauma of the Cold War, and other "lesser" ones, the purges, mass murders, and genocides were part of a history we would perhaps never ever have to contemplate.

Sometime during the nineties the digital revolution began to overshadow our lives in more ways than one. It was not only restricted to the professional sphere: those were heady years with text only access with people like maddog in Brooklyn and Eddie in Copenhagen in now non-existent communityware.com, an all text virtual community, ... and multimedia,... the addiction to information,... infojunkies is just a cliché today, but that's what they called us back then. Today, those of us who have not been seen on FaceBook, people, like our decades old friends, even childhood ones whom we have lost contact or who might have somehow fallen behind in becoming tech-savviness, they too are easily foun: it's all a part of popular culture now. It' is generally accepted now that you'd be online on your favourite IM client even though you might have put a "BRB" status on it perpetually (after all who wants to world to know you are lurking around at the edge of online presence even in some ungodly hour when you are supposed to work or sleep).

Wait a minute, I was talking about education, right?... And about fear, about wars, about darker things, and ... zombies,... yes, right. I am scared again. In the last few years of this decade we have seen with increasing cynicism of the events that followed 9/11. The British are now conducting an inquiry about Iraq. And sanctions that would not stop their dictator from stopping what he did,- manufacture and stockpile WMDs in form of chemical weapons and wage bio-warfare against is real or perceived enemies,- did not even make sense, and sure enough, he was soon found a disheveled old man hiding in an underground bunker and after a mockery of a trial in which he put up a spirited defense, was finally "defeated", and sent to the gallows hastily where he put on a brave and defiant face before being blind-folded and dangled at the end of a noose until his last breath.

What do we make of these facts, these bits of "info". Scientists have come up with momentous discoveries about the digital basis of life itself. There is some new optimism that biotechnology will eventually wipe out the pain of killer diseases by eradicating the root cause of those diseases. I am thinking of even staying alive longer, only hope against hope in the polluted cities of India, hoping that stem cell research will replace a lung or a liver just in time by the time I am older. Just good to be alive, and what harm can a little naïve and childish day dreaming about the good technology can do like a little bit of fantasy even in good science fiction?

Meanwhile another oil-rich nation's fundamentalist hard-line dictator has dared the world with the announcement of ten new nuclear reactors defiantly in face of international criticism. Sounds vaguely familiar to happenings in another era: the Japanese walkout after the Manchurian incident from the League of Nations. Or the Nazi party's continuing defiance of the defunct League and arming itself to the teeth for world conquest with blitzkrieg. Oil-rich,.. oil, didn't that start it all in the gulf? The crazy search for more sources of fossil fuels is like chasing big billionaire day dreams while we have made our atmosphere just what we had feared our geography teacher talked about back in the eighties: if the ocean sea level rose by even a metre, most low lying areas will be flooded and inhabitable. Climate change will start taking its toll in a major way brining back a planet level extinction event like the mythological Great Floods or the very real ones after the meteor strike which killed almost all species the dinosaurs except for some avian species.

Yesterday it rained in the Gulf, flooded Jeddah...

Nuclear energy is the only way to go. No amount of viable friendly energy source can replace the global village's addictive dependence on oil. But it's far too dangerous: there are traumas that are so real that a centre for nuclear research for peaceful purposes was not allowed to be opened in any prefecture of Japan, except in their northern most of the Hokkaido island, a relatively poorer and currently "out of political favour" of the centre administration. At Aomori, a multinational team of scientists take helicopters every day back and forth to a research and manufacturing facility leaving their families living at the village of Rokkasho, the nearest human habitation. But as their children need education too, there's a tiny government-sponsored international school in the village which is quite in probably the one of its kind in Japan where they traditionally and still today look down upon foreign educational systems, and even make it pretty difficult for ordinary students to access to the international curriculum as a matter of strict policy ever since the end of the war followed by the occupation. Well, in all countries, it's pretty much the same: few government likes to let foreign education systems or educators to dictate their ways, especially in education.

There was an article in the papers today about schools, and inevitably the older and more traditional organisations of repute commented about "the latest" international schools and their curriculum of being elitist, a bit of a show and not really, this is damaging, worthy of inculcating the values that brings to front the real purpose of education.

There was an old man in the bus a few days back. He was talking to young chap who came from a different ethnic community, Nepalese. And he was offering his wisdom freely to him incessantly in a patronising manner to a point that I felt compelled to rescue the boy by speaking in his local dialect and asking him to ignore the old man's rant. It was basically a sorry monologue about his knowledge about education: he had invested many years and hard-earned money to so that his son could "grow up" and become an engineer. And now the son earns about a thousand dollars a month, a small fortune in these parts. And his advice to this young man was seek counselling. Just studying architecture followed by a course in civil engineering won't help you, son, you have to go through right counselling at study in the right "professional" academies. "RICE", that's where he had sent his son. Wait a minute, early in this century wasn't it the same racket who were running a technology campus and wanted a website done, I recalled. They hadn't even paid me for booking their domain name (at that time it was already down to $15 or so I think, from $70 in mid-nineties)...

Yes, "the more sugar you pour in it, son, the more sweet it will be"! Values? Whoever said education was about values? It was about learning how to make a big buck. What was this old man anyway? If his son earned so much, then why didn't he travel in a car or a taxi,... or was the son-investment not really his value system? Yes, Indians, a generation ago, and now too, mostly DO "invest" in their sons' educations, and of course, also their daughters too. Slightly less priority there though, but that's how it is mostly. I remember my own father: he cared nothing about it;he told me to go make it for myself. He can only do this much... he never objected to anything I did: drop out from high school, then art college, then even French literature. But he sure did show up in my exhibitions. And one day, when he somehow got to know about my new interest in a computers, he did a minor miracle by providing me enough to buy a second-hand Apple MacIntosh desktop (LC 630) taking a loan from a friend whom to he returned the money in instalments.

Sure he did a lot. But not for just himself, he just gave what he thought I could make him proud with. He never asked money from me and expected I return it in some way. He'd always caution me not to be a spendthrift but did forgive a little excess now and then without a word except, observing that I might regret my actions one day if I indulged in them. But the best thing he ever gave me in life was his own example and the complete freedom to make what I wanted to do with mine. Make no mistake about it, those dropping off from courses did not go unnoticed: in our middle class society dropping out is a major, yes, major disasters. It surely leads to a "spoilt" son, a lost career and the nightmarish fear of becoming a working class labourer or some low down clerk, even worse, some small time trader at best. Not an engineer? Not a doctor? Oh, I see. Tsk, tsk, couldn't make a "man" out of his son...

My father never felt that way. He was from another generation. Born in the twenties, he loved history, collected rare coins, was a member of the numismatic society of India. He even tracked down some coins of the Emperor Kanishka from some obscure village in Gujarat in the western India, the opposite side of the country, and presented some of the best ones from his collection to Indian Museum in Calcutta. In his youth, he saw revolutionaries, and the fight for freedom from colonial rule. He was involved in some politics but never seemed to have affiliated to any big sounding ideals, left or right, however passionate he might have been about some issue or agenda. He was issues-based as we say today, and lost faith in many a leader he worked directly or indirectly with, fell out with them for his uncompromising stance against what he thought was unethical but never ceased to be an optimistic man till the end of his life.

Most of all, he made us feel the pride for being one of those rare civil servants who was never ever corrupt, never accepted a bribe and actually fought all his life against his superiors who had power over him and were more of than not, thoroughly corrupt. He retired as a first class officer, but was denied a lot of promotions early on for his ... uh, should we say brash aggressiveness? He had seen second world war as in his youth but was too young to be drafted and apart from an odd Japanese bombing or two, this part of the world was unscathed by open aggression yet experienced another kind of genocide in form of an artificial famine which saw miilions die of starvation while Chruchill callously diverted food grains for feeding Greek soldiers rather than the natives of Bengal (and remarked why has Gandhi not died yet when reminded of the condition); he saw India become a free democratic country and had hoped to see much more progress in a positive direction, and later in life openly spoke against politicians who had failed to deliver; but he was pragmatic in his thinking, did his work in a thorough way so that he built a reputation of a doer, even so much so that the Indian Railways would not throw him through disciplinary action as he was the reliable person when work to done was of utmost importance and no one could be entrusted by the superiors to see no stones unturned. Being in the unique stressful commercial department, he was once the awfully busy controller of reservations, later an officer who handled the rates and claims department which was full of controversies due to corruption, and planner behind many large scale and complex projects which were personally dealt with by the railway minister himself, and no doubt, had he been even slightly greedier, he could have easily his position to amass a small fortune, which many openly thought of the natural thing to do and the reason why one should take up a government job for.

No, he did not leave behind a large Salt Lake two-storey bungalow, or even the one storied kind we were accustomed to when he was in service as the free residence of officers with a staff that comprised of a gardener and many other perks, a relic of the colonial era. His pension was peanuts when I think of it, for the amount of work he did, and there is no concept of monetary rewars ion the civil service. He had some savings, and all he could do was a buy a tiny apartment for all the four of us after his retirement and also being forced to abandon his father's house the larger part a large mansion with a garden and a pond, a property belonged to my grandfather biut developed mostly by his earnings of which another large part went into the living costs and education of his four sisters and as many brothers, most of whom were still getting an education when he sacrificed his own to join the Indian Railways at the an age he as barely seventeen or eighteen, perhaps lying by increasing it for the sake of escaping feeding a large family reduced to to relative poverty. Even after buying this apartment, whuch was every bit his own, although he got was cheated again by the promoter who promised much and delivered very little so that he was compelled to fight yert another bitter decade long civil (and criminal) suit which he eventually won, but after being even beaten up by a local thug and at every step, facing all kinds of hardships including two pace-maker changes, once an advanced liver disease which could have been fatal, diabetes which turned his hair to white very early on, not to speak of so many other hardships he did not deserve... but he lived, and slept well, and he was not scared and never expressed even the slightest bit of self-pity or complained in a bitter way ass is the habit of many a jaded man who faced hardships like him or much less.

On a bus, if I could picture him, he might also have turned to talk with the young student. He would find out all about his interest in architecture and other career too, perhaps make an observation or two about one great building or architect he admires. Then he would may be even start telling him a story or an anecdote about how he once got into a town planning project or some related topic. We would wink to each other, our family members,- here he goes again,- his often repeated stories which were more or less the same he told it and we already knew by heart except he never tired of telling them as if it was the first time he had ever done so. Now, as in the towards the later years of his life, quite opposite to how in my late teens, I felt embarrassment whenever he started to to tell one of his stories to a complete stranger, triggered perhaps by a casual exchange, or a small incident knowing immediately which of his stories it will be, this is what I looked forward to hearing and even asking for clarificarions, and this is precisely what I miss about him the most.

Oh, have I ranted a bit too far away from what I was talking about. Yes, sorry for the diversion. I could go on and on for days. But yes, fear, he did not seem to have any. But deep down, he had it too, a fact I learned about much later in life. He loved life like anyone else and his eyes glittered at the prospect of a small meal of his favourite dish, of which he had many. He had a full life or made sure he did in whatever circumstances he found himself in. My elder brother took him touring across Europe twice and I know he loved every bit of it. The year before he died he was travelling again with my mother and spent months across India. including a whole month at Pondicherry, an erstwhile French settlement. I had seen fear in his eyes only a few times, only the times before the operations to install pace makers, and once when he had a bad case of the dreaded liver disease, ...why can't I suddenly remember the name, worse than jaundice, of the class B or C which could make it fatal if you did not rest completely and control your diet strictly for at least six months?*

Mom and dad touring India in 2003, the last of year of my Dad's eventful life

But he had survived. When three years into my marriage and living separately away from my parents although we were in the same city, we my ex-wife and I decided to leave the country to start afresh in a new city, Jakarta, I still remember him bidding us farewell as the taxi drove away. I am sure he was so happy for us: He said, "Go and make a good beginning, and above all, live well". I had bought some first-day covers, stamps and "sens" (coins he had mentioned in his last letter to me) but little did I know that farewell as the taxi drove off was the last time I would see him again...

Anyway, what is it like to be afraid? I know it again. We are not infojunkies any more, we have become like zombies... like that song: with our guns, and our bombs, zombies, infoZombies. How do we educate, what are the real values, what's us and who's them? What is intelligence and what are feelings? What are we? Where are we going? Why?

Paul Gaugin: Painting entitled "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" (More ..)

* Hepatitis.

Two Book Reviews

2009-10-02T05:43:00.012+05:30

Relevant to politics and education are the myriad perspectives of authors and engineers, and artists, people who live their lives building new tools, researching ideas and concepts and putting forward radical new knowledge and techniques for the general progress of mankind. Sadly we ignore them until it's too late and even when we do think their ideas are relevant and important, politics of selfish agenda and self aggrandisement often discourage and muffle the voices of these usually unsung revolutionaries without guns.

Here I present two brilliant minds and review of their books: one who gave us the PC as we know it today, the other Steve of Apple. The latter, Matt Ridley, even less known, is a science writer who brings to the non-scientific community of readers a deeper understanding of genetics and biotechnology, through introduction of the human genome, the book of life about which, owing to mainly politics and lack of awareness, so much is either misunderstood or not understood at all by the general populace but yet often suppressed frequently without any real justification.

Why Indians cannot hold their drink... A genetic explanation?

Book review of:
Genome
by Matt Ridley

For most science journalists, writing about the latest research and breakthrough in the frontiers of genetics is quite an "in" thing today as it was not so long ago about all things related to IT or the info-highway. Perhaps this is rightly so. I am not attempting to share yet another scoop from that world, no. This is just a review of the book I recently finished, in many readings on genetics which is subtitled, and aptly so, the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters. The book is "Genome" by Matt Ridley and each chapter is dedicated to one gene in each of the 23 chromosomes of the human body (other species do not share this number with us, but that does not prove anything about superiority: far less apparently complicated life-forms might have almost the equal number of chromosomes as human beings and also more than ours).

The genome, or the collection of genes in chromosomes which usually come in pairs for mammals, is often called the ultimate book of life. Ridley's remarkably well researched presentation of facts and arguments reflects a true academician's creativity and love of connecting concepts to derive other original concepts although sometimes it may be a bit too fastidious and lengthy for laymen. At the same time for the lay reader, even those with basic high school knowledge of science, he is careful enough to tell it all like a story, or 23 short stories on the same theme and each titled with a chromosome number and a general theme such as "history", "environment", "politics", "eugenics" and yes, even "sex".

Ridley's amazing accomplishment as a popular science writer shines through and I would dare compare him with some stalwarts of our times as well as the past in this area: Stephen Jay Gould, Arthur C. Clarke, Richard Dawkins, etc. the last whose exposition of the "digital" basis of life as expressed in the "Blind Watchmaker" is a well known exposition of theories of creation, and a strong and definitive rebuttal against intelligent design championed by the creationists.

In Ridley's form of writing I came across various influences. Notably,there is the anecdotal style of Gould's presentation of obscure facts from the world of palaeontology (study of fossils) and linking them to broader concepts of universal and moral-ethical import. Ridley also presents facts in such way that moral, ethical and universal concepts come forward and shake us up in a radical way so as to make us think from a different perspective. This is reminiscent of Gould, who was a radical Darwinist thinker who even exposed the stupidity of the so-called intelligent quotient test (IQ), a well-known racist segregation tool that most of the academic world know to be of little use to measure intelligence, but sadly still used to this day by a lot of ill-informed or "half-baked" educationists and human resource professionals. (FaceBook users, don't take the IQ test, it will only prove how stupid you are!). Ridley is a science writer and though it might be ill-advised for me to dare to compare such a brilliant figure as Gould with him, remember this is in context of popular science writing, not the science itself.

Professor Dawkins is also known as somewhat of a "failed" scientist, a remark which I came across during a casual discussion with a robotics engineer, and it seems his later works like the God Delusion has been criticised among other things as being not so well written, which may well be the case as most writing by even the most brilliant minds for any cause (in this case atheism) are often known to suffer from such defects. However, Dawkins's earlier books of the theory of creation with which I am more thoroughly acquainted is definitely a thought provoking and well written book that gets across difficult ideas and concepts, and the latest theories from the scientific frontiers to the lay reader with remarkable ease and mastery, no doubt because of his writing style. And popular science books are just that,... not literature!

I must also observe that Ridley's style is brilliant both in style, content presentation as well as in the overall idea of form (those 23 chapters). Each chapter often starts or sooner or later zeroes on to the a particular gene with a statement like such and such gene "found on the long arm of" such chromosome or something like that... Remember that 23 chromosomes of various shapes like the sickle-shape are repeated as almost cloned copies of each other in the millions and millions of cells that make up our body. The mind not only boggles at the concept of astronomical numbers of genes, proteins and other organic "chemicals" within, the chapters gave me almost equal reading pleasure I get reading about objects in deep space such as some radio wave emitting quasar in some arm of some spiral galaxy or Horse-head nebula.

What is radically different from the frontiers of space in genetics is that it is so real, so near and so personal that it is mostly very uncomfortable to talk about. One may be tempted to use a sort of reasoning as in Freud's theory of dream interpretation "censorship mechanism" in this case as a likely reason for such discomfort (however circular the logic might be), or others may bring up ethical or moral issues, as is more common in any debate about genetics. We must clearly distinguish that for one genetics is not a social science as psychoanalysis which is more often considered as one these days. Also, more importantly, the ethical and moral issues involved do not change natural laws which are in some reasonable set of circumstances explained by a deterministic framework. Therefore it follows that since genetics or biotechnology is generally proved more often than not a well established empirical science, certain causal phenomenon which have been established as scientific facts in this discipline are worth considering as facts however alien or unacceptable they may feel to our individual subjective sensibilities.

Take the possible explanation of why Indians or people in tropical regions cannot consume as much amount of alcohol as those who come from Europe and other colder regions. While some may disagree to this idea, and there might be many Indians who are able binge drink equally at par with any person of a race historically from colder regions, I am sure you will agree that Indians are much less of alcohol drinkers. The argument goes that we don't drink as much as people in the cold countries because it's too hot to drink alcohol here (or rather we should not). While this is somewhat true, it is not entirely the real reason. When one starts to drink anyway, and especially a chilled beer in a hot afternoon, most will inform you that it's a pretty pleasant experience.

The argument that alcohol was never brewed in India may seem to be evidently true based on the social taboos about drinking alcohol in most Indian households. Nothing can be further from truth. Among the aboriginal santhals and the Indo-Aryans who invaded India a few thousand years ago, alcohol was well known in various forms. The rice beer called "Hariya" of the Santhals have probably existed since the early days when man discovered cultivation of rice right here in the tropics and it is said this light alcoholic beverage actually helps in digestion.

Shom Ras was known to Aryans who even called it Amrit (the elixir of life and immortality: note that the ancient Gaelic word whisky also translates as the same) and there's a good chance it contained ingredients like alcohol and even some opium in very low quantities. Furthermore there's even evidence that a similar drink exists to this days in the north-west frontier province of Pakistan and on the other side of border, in Afghanistan, the land around the ancient silk route, the land which now faces in first hand the intolerable consequences of extremism and religious intolerance born out of politics of cold war and deprivation.

To add another example from many more, the popular "tari" (fermented date palm juice) is definitely not an import from a colder region where date palm would not even grow.

While alcoholism is just the slow poison for ruining relationships, families and of many untold miseries, including road accidents and rages that often rob us of our near ones, it can hardly be called a liquid with life lengthening properties to be named as an elixir. I know what you are thinking: it must have originated from the typical drinkers' talk glorifying the taste and effects of their favourite drink. All drinkers they say will call their poison in an affectionate term which can only be of comparable to tongue-in-cheek poetic notions: remember "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun"? My brother whose wife's family hails from Poland says that in the Polish villages, vodka is perhaps jokingly considered as a cure-all drink!

Now for the radical theory that the study of genetic theory seems to have pointed out. Ok, I do admit that this is a bit of fact which may not have been proved beyond reasonable doubt: it might be still at a hypotheses level. I am no expert on this. But just be open to this proposition and think how plausible this explanation might be. In the tropics there is an abundance of microbes in the water as in the air, much more than in the colder regions. Evolution simplistically put according to genetics is an effect of gene mutation, which consequently leads to racial differences (very tiny changes) to speciation (which sometimes takes thousands of years even in splendid isolation as in Australia or the Galapagos). Even for the former, it can easily take natural selection thousands of years to allow a particular genetic mutation in an isolated race to spread in the majority of the population if it proves to be "beneficial" in evolutionary terms.

However mutations are happening all the time, even in your life time and mine owing to the sheer number of cell production in our bodies. Often this leads to irreversible fatal cell growth outbreak called cancer. Ridley takes pains to often emphasise that genes are not there to cause diseases, it's accidental mutations that can cause diseases: the book of life is like the book of knowledge in this aspect. You can use knowledge to create, preserve and but also destroy.

I digress, but please hold on for a little while if you are still with me: the connection lies in tropical populations' resistance to the abundance of microbes that are sometimes not even found in colder places. And it is precisely because of this reason, in cold countries from ancient times, water borne microbes could wipe out the population easily and natural resistance to it would build up through genetic mutation of some people in the affected population in a far longer period than in the tropics where the population would normally be more exposed to such microbes or similar specimens, and therefore more likely to have already developed resistance through generations of drinking the same water laden with these invisible agents of deadly disease.

Prevention is better than cure goes the old adage. Probably without realising it people learned to digest or to be more precise, break down alcohol into digestible sugars easily ("hold the drink") as it proved to be a life saver: plain water could potentially carry life-threatening germs (and in most of human history people could die just as easily by dysentery as by some more rarer and still considered dangerous disease). The so called Elixir of Life makes new sense doesn't it? It is a well known fact that boiled water and fermented water (once jokingly called "sara hua pani" by own of my teetotaller vegetarian ex-boss, literally rotten water in Hindi) are liquids in which few or no microbes can survive!

I don't know if I have convinced you to read the book, but let me tell you this: it's one of those rare books that will give you a new and original perspective about how you perceive your own self, the inner space within. No, man is not only an island, no man is just one individual too: man has a universe within. The concept of "self" can itself radically change and you can even begin to may be get a glimpse of why you make a decision or why you act or fail to act in a somewhat deterministic pattern, a pattern which is often termed as personality.

So, my fellow compatriots, those with more historically "tropical" ancestors, for the want of a less racially incorrect term for native Indians, drink, but learn to drink in moderation, as you may not be hold it easily: it's not you, it's your genes which has not evolved to hold that drink. And it's not a negative trait either: Think of it, you can enjoy puchkas and chaats served with tamarind water of dubious source or quality on the streets without a worry than your friends from Finland who are sure to suffer from the Delhi Belly or equivalent. I am willing to bet serious money on this: if they eat like us is India, within a week after arrival they will suffer from a much more nasty case of ill-digestion than you and I! Anyone in the house ready to take my bet? Cheers!

The wOz Way
Book Review:
I, Woz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon - Getting to the Core of Apple's Inventorby Steve Wozniak

Unknown to many, it was the other Steve, not Jobs but Wozniak who engineered the first Apple computers, Apple I and II. The latter has possibly brought about the revolution in desktop computing and changed the public perception of computers as large boxes with complicated panels of lights and switches which only rocket scientists could operate to the what it's current avatar looks like: the quintessential desktop home PC or laptop as we know it today which you don't have to be a geek to use.
The book is full of exciting insights into the what goes on in an inventor's mind, how engineers are really artists, and what honesty, firmness of purpose and integrity really means for them. A must-read for not only geeks and engineers who aspire to leave their mark on the all too well known frontiers of computing today, but also any lay person who wants to know more about how engineers change the world with technology, and don't quite always subscribe to the often repeated jaded view about the bad effects of technology and science.
Wozniak clearly explains how technology in itself is not a bad thing at all and it's use to make people's lives and work much easier comes from a dedication to human-centric causes rather than power, money, fame or glory. In many a funny incident recalled vividly in the narrative, what comes through is the author's great capacity to have fun while working on serious and challenging projects and at the same time his brash disregard for formal, corporate hierarchies when he argues that no revolutionary products or ideas were ever really born from committees formed in large companies comprising of technocrats, sales people and managers. He urges every engineer or inventor in the making to work alone at night after regular work hours in order to create something new, something that has the potential to change how things are done. This coming from someone who single-handedly created products which would revolutionise computer usage is advice you cannot afford to shrug away.
Apart from being the supergeek that he is, Wozniak's book has delightful stories, many of which were first time events in history or about things which one does not ordinarily come across even in a lifetime full of travelling and accomplishments: the US music festival, satellite uplink with USSR, the management of a movie theatre, the invention of the universal remote, phreaking subculture... Wozniak is the kind of genius that does not restrict itself to one domain for an entire lifetime. An engineer's engineer, he is also a much accomplished philanthropist, humorist, music-lover, parent and teacher. It's amazing that so few know about this quiet and unglamorous man, a man who nevertheless has a "cool" road named after him called the "Woz way".

9/11

2009-09-15T03:44:00.003+05:30

No, this is not about terrorists. It's about a diminutive woman called Dolly, the wife of a rickshaw puller. Here she is, with a raised arm, aiming to throw a piece of brick at the police station, with a policeman in the background, half-smiling, and in a posture that reveals what he is probably thinking: mad woman, does she think she can take on the police force single-handedly?

This made front page news in a local newspaper, but I doubt if it even made it anywhere else. I turned to every news channel that are broadcast from studios in either Delhi or Bombay. Nothing. Not even BBC International News or website at any had any comments on the incident: it was 9/11, this year, anniversary of one of the biggest terrorist attacks in history, one that started a few wars, and one that has led to so much action and introspection, so many protests and regime changes, so many candle-light vigils and political rhetoric. But there's very few protests we hear of about the plight of people like Dolly, a mother who has lost her 10-year old child Rimpa about four years ago, not caught up in some spectacular mass murder, victims of which are usually remembered by thousands all over the world, the cause of their murder condemned and often the murders brought to justice on immense public demand and outcry, but in the house no. 5D in Nithari, the slaughterhouse of south Delhi, India's very own heart of darkness in this times of rapid progress and modernisation... the horror, the horror.

Like Rimpa, 19 other young girls ranging from ten to twenty two years old, many from far away Bengal villages, whose parents had migrated to the capital city in search of a better livelihood but usually ended up in abysmal living conditions of the slums and still tried their best to raise their children, working as labourers in one form of back-breaking manual labour or other on the streets, or in people's homes as domestic servants, earning a pittance to run their families and yet hoping to educate their children so they grow up to be self-sufficient citizens living a better life than their largely impoverished existence so far.

In Nithari, in the house of horrors, Pandher, a businessman, and his servant, Surender Kohli partied at nights, abducting these girls whom they subjected to unspeakable horror of abuse and killed everyone of them. To get rid of their bodies, they cold bloodedly cut them into smaller pieces and buried the remains in and around the sewers behind the house. This went on for about two years or more. The people of the slums nearby had all along complained of about fourty children and young people, mostly girls disapperaing during this same period. The police abused these poor people when they went to file complaints about their missing children. Most of them could not even manage to lodge their complaints hounded by the police's inexplicable but all too familiar behaviour towards any person who does not seem to be from a "good" family (read powerful or rich with connections). We know it is a fact that on many a night, many a police personnel, among them surely some high ranking officers enjoyed Pandher's hospitality for the evening. It is also rumoured that Pandher had political connections and I am inclined to believe it fully because who does not know what our breed of successful businessmen are like?

Initially the police and CBI were in denial about Pandher's complicity and it seemed they tried to pin the blame only on the psychopathic servant, the gruesome agent of horror who also seems to have confessed to necromancy and cannibalism. However, during the investigation there was enough evidence found in the house that pointed to a child pornography and even organ trade racket.

Earlier in February this year, both Pandher and Kohli were awarded the death sentences as is the practice for the "rarest of the rare cases" by a court in Ghaziabad, much to the embarrassment of the Criminal Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India's highest organ of fighting domestic crime as many CBI officers, just as their colleagues in the police department often made statements that gave a "clean chit" to Pandher. This businessman in his fifties educated at what would be considered as elite schools and colleges, at least my the likes of Rimpa's parents, was supposedly in Australia at the time of Rimpa's murder, a fact that has not been made public so far we can see. There had been no investigation to uphold Pandher's alibi: no one from Australia has been reported to have seen Pandher during the same period. If there is indeed any such alibi in existence, the public at large has had no access to it so far.

Today his son, who claims his father was an ideal parent, is feeling greatly relieved. The reason? A higher court has acquitted Pandher, much to the dismay of the parents of the missing children, all of them like Dolly are from a strata of society who rely on day to day manual labour to make a living. Poor parents, mere labourers who might at best earn a hundred dollars a month, even they have spent the last few years paying lakhs and lakhs of rupees (one lakh = one hundred thousand, or about a one thousand dollars) in hopes of getting some justice for their brutally murdered children. Prosecution lawyers agree that this has set a precedent for the other 18 pending cases against Pandher and Kohli, and it might mean that Pandher is likely to get away with it all in those cases too owing to this major judgement.

This is another 9/11. It's horror beyond belief that continues beyond the initial relevation. Not only the basest form of criminal activity has come to light in this nation's capital, the political will is that of denial, and of shielding the rich and powerful. It is a well known fact how politicians can influence the judiciary besides the corrupt elements of the judiciary itself. No doubt that they have let time to pass so the public forgets about the horrific case, and they were awaiting the day when those poor people will also give up, or be driven away merely because they have no more money, or no more will to keep fighting through a costly and expensive legal system. These are the same people whom the police harassed when they approached the police many times before the murders were out. At first the authorities refused to take any complaints, then later, when the murders were exposed by a citizen's welfare committee, they tried to take the credit of discovering the bodies.

I wonder if the courts took cognizance of the fact that many people of the neighbourhood often saw police personnel and other guests visiting Pandher's house late at night, the coming and goings of call girls, and above all, the unmistakable foul stench emanating from the hydrants in the rear of the property? It is just impossible to believe it was all the handiwork of an illiterate village manservant dubbed as a "psychopath" by the investigation;did he also know how to use webcams and laptop computers to record pornography? Where did he acquire such skillful techniques of surgically removing organs and dismembering bodies of the victims, putting them in plastic bags and dumping them in shallow holes around the sewers? Is it possible that without the house owner's full support and approval, he abducted young children and call girls and finished them off, ripped open them to extract their organs, make pornographic films and even indulged in necromantic acts and cannibalism for so long?

And what about Pandher himself who seems to have often travelled abroad to Australia, what business did he have that took him there? What kind of business man was he anyway? Why did Pandher's family never live with him, the ideal parent his son claims that he is? And why are the police and CBI protecting this man, and why has a higher court acquitted him even after all evidence brought to court has already once succeeded convincingly to uphold his complicity? Is the true reason the existence of are many more actors in this gruesome tale, actors who are placed high in the police and political establishment? How else could anyone so openly allow such an activity to take place right in the middle of a densely populated city? There's no doubt that the truth is perhaps much more horrible than what has been revealed so far. Perhaps they are letting off Pandher fearing that if he is convicted and awarded death penalty, he might reveal the names of many more people with nothing else to lose any more. Names which might shake up the current establishment to its very roots. To my mind, I can find no other explanation as to why anyone can do what he and his servant did right in the middle of the city with almost full impunity until citizens took the law in their own hands to force a search without warrant.

This nightmarish incident has brought to light the tragedy of a country that has been hijacked not only by corruption and greed, but a society which is infected with a kind of indifference that will allow almost any act of violence and suppression without being shocking to its people who keep accepting the day to day dehumanisation and lack of ethical behaviour as the reality, the way of the world. Terror as we know it is sometimes far more horrible than hijacked planes and tragic collapse of buildings brought about by dramatic acts of violence perpetrated by some remote fanatic cult. The terror we live in is all around us, in minds and hearts of some very ordinary people, people who otherwise are known as civilised and respectable, educated in the best of the country's institutions, role models for the young and just another gentleman from a good neighbourhood.

Read more
Latest story about Pandher's acquittal (incident on 9/11):
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090912/jsp/frontpage/story_11484856.jsp

http://news.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/11/hc-sets-pandher-free-in-nithari-case.htm

2006 serial murder investigation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Noida_serial_murder_investigation

Crematorium: as told to me by Gopal

2009-06-26T17:33:00.004+05:30

Who is Gopal? Just a father of a little girl, working as unskilled/semi-skilled labour at a small motor repairing shop. I think his work involves cleaning the motors and oiling them. He is in his early forties. Education up to standard 10 (but never passed secondary school leaving examination). He is the third of five brothers. He also works for our company as a night watchman. He earns double the money sleeping at my office (about $50-$70) while earning about $25-30 in his primary job at the mechanic's where he has been working for more than a 12 years now. He has to work there 6 days a week from 10 AM to 9:30 PM (about 11 and half hours). On Sundays, he is usually asked to work from 11 AM to 4 PM (5 hours) for which he is sometimes promised a bonus, but sometimes has to do with nothing anyway. At my company, we had supported his daughter's education for about a year or more providing him with $50 extra each month as part of the EduAid program. However, in these bad times, we have had to stop the program but we want to revive that as soon as we can. We allow Gopal to go sleep at home once a week on weekends. But ideally, he should get more nights back at home. His house roofing is made of asbestos, a banned carcinogenic substance but somehow widely used by the urban poor and sometimes in the countryside.

There are many kinds of people who go to the crematorium. Some observe silence, others don't. Some create trouble amongst themselves, they feel restless, while others are silent and grave.

Sometimes, some make the acquaintance of someone they had never met before. Sometimes, they ask each other, "what happened?", "how do you know the deceased?", "how did they die?", or "did the deceased person commit suicide?"

Then these acquaintances can lead to more intimacy or friendship. It may also happen that those who are rough and intoxicated, make trouble and leave without doing what needs to be done, while others in the same group do what they came for.

Sometimes, someone says something which is possibly an expression of their inner pain, and if others find the comment objectionable, which happens often, it causes ruptures,... it can also lead to old relationships to break down. Later what happens to those relationships cannot be predicted easily without following the lives of those people concerned over the next few weeks or months, even years.

The cremation process takes a certain amount of time: the time taken to burn a dead human body. It can be 45 minutes to about one hour and ten minutes. There's also a question of whether an electric crematorium is used; traditional wooden funeral pyres are different.

Then, as it is well known and observed in the Hindu religion that the navel cannot be burnt or it does not get burned into ashes, and therefore it is extracted and embedded in a clod of earth. In my experience, I have seen they use two earthen bowl-like dishes and put some mud in one of the dishes. Then they put the unburnt navel in the mud, and then they also put certain objects like small sea-shells ("koris", once upon a time used as currency like coins), and cover the mud-filled navel dish with the other empty one.

This is done always by a male member of the family, usually a son or brother. The rule is that it is usually the eldest or the youngest. If there are no male members (sons or brothers), then females may do this task.

Then all these objects with the navel are usually buried in the banks of a nearby pond. The better option is of course to bury it on the banks of the river Ganges if possible. In some cases the ashes and the navel (all the remains) are thrown into the river Yamuna or Ganges.

After the burial, the two or three people who perform these tasks return to the crematorium. Others might have been waiting for them to come back. Now they take a large earthen pot, the one that is used to pour water on the funeral pyre after the body is burnt in order to put the flames out. All the people who came for the funeral are asked to proceed to the exit. Just before that, every member of the family is supposed to pour a bit of the water from the pot on the ashes to "cool" off the funeral pyre. Then the funeral priests then permit the people to leave and they command that when the earthen pot is to finally broken, no one should look back again at the remains, and they should leave.

The pot is then supposed to be broken by a close person of the deceased, again usually the son or the brother. It is said that from that moment onwards he needs to be looked after and supported for a whole year by someone close in the family, someone who should always keep an eye on him in order to protect him. At night, if he needs to go to the toilet, he should be accompanied by someone close who may wait on him outside. This is because the deceased may exert some influence on him, and something bad or unfortunate may happen to him.

Then the funeral party returns home. On the way back, this party is usually given some kind of refreshments, usually sweets, or whatever is possible or can be afforded, even a drink of tea. The members of the funeral party are supposed to take a bath in a pond or anywhere possible, usually outdoors. They should take a dip in the pond or river, or bathe with their clothes on, but nowadays some people do not always follow the rules and excuse themselves by saying that they will do it elsewhere, and go home.

The ones who stay on after the bath return to the home of the deceased. An iron implement such as a kitchen implement like a "bothi"* (a cutting/chopping sickle-like tool with support stands so that it can be placed on the floor, held on steady with one leg while using both free hands to chop or cut vegetables before cooking) is brought out. A small fire is lit with some straw or leaves usually in the porch, if there is one, or in an empty corner in the house. Some "neem" leaves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neem) are also gathered along with some sugary candies or sweetmeats. The members of the funeral party then go on to touch the fire with their bare hands, then touch the "bothi" or any other iron tool. Then they chew a bitter "neem" leaf or two for a while and spit it away. In the end, they eat a sugar candy or some sweetmeats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetmeat).

At the crematorium, there are some people who perform puja ("worshiping rituals") to the Goddess Kali (the black woman incarnation of Shiva the destroyer's wife, Parvati).

There are also the "tantrics" who like to hang around the crematorium and meditate there.

Now Gopal is feeling sleepy... end of narration.

My notes:
Kali went into a mad frenzy of bloodbath when, at an ancient unspecified era the world was being dominated by evil men. In her frenzy she lost her powers of judgment and began killing even the good and virtuous. And she used their severed heads joined together to make a garland in her orgy of mass murder, while remaining fully nude. Shiva went down to earth and laid himself at her feet. She stepped on him, and then realised immediately she had placed her feet on her husband, her Lord, her Master. She came to her senses and realising that she had committed a sin (stepping on her master, not the killings, mind you!), she felt embarrassed and stuck her red blood stained tongue out, a gesture commonly associated with the realisation of guilt.)

* References to "bothi" in different contexts (search by the word bothi in the links below):
i. Variation: http://www.bongcookbook.com/2008/03/boti-unique-cutting-instrument.html
ii. Ancient history: http://www.panhwar.com/Article31.htm
iii. In Bengali culture: https://mailman.rice.edu/pipermail/sasialit/2007-April.txt

Educating to kill?

2009-04-18T17:28:00.001+05:30

I have been holding back on this one for a long time now. Sometimes the words come gushing out, in anger and in pain, and sometimes, no matter how I feel about it, it refuses to make sense even though it stares right into my face.

The "largest" democracy in the world is going in for the polls. In an article "THE CROWN IN THE GUTTER, - In India, democracy creates its own royals" written by an eminent journalist from South Asia, Sunanda Dutta-Roy clearly distinguishes between "western-style" and "eastern-style" democracies:

The elections seem to have little bearing on the nitty-gritty of government. Voters and their representatives enter into a different compact in the West where democracy is equated with good governance. Our monarchical ethos places elected representatives above accountability.

If you look at the spectacle of India going to polls, you might perceive that it is no better than a bunch of feudal lords of the new age and their affiliates stage-managing a great ritual for the confused billions who have trouble making ends meet or even secure a square meal a day. In this frenzy, I am trying to hear the voices, I, who come from a relatively privileged middle class with some education to speak of, the manifestos of the left, right and centrists: I am trying hear what they are talking about and what they are thinking of doing about education.

Every day I open the newspaper and news article after news article tell me about five year olds raped and killed, ten year olds fatally wounded and left standing in forty degree heat with bricks on their shoulders until they collapse and never recover from life support and comma... every day there are stories of "teachers" abusing students at every level, every age, physically and mentally.

In his blog post "Educating to failure?", Peter Kenny, a well-renowned Australian educator notes:

‘Training to failure’ is a common term used often when referring to weight training. The controversial method of training basically promotes athletes to increase repetitions of lifting weights until the muscles fail and the athlete cannot lift again until rested. This, it is thought, promotes muscle growth and increases stamina and strength.

The same day little ten-year-old Sanno died, a young man aspiring to be a software engineer with a Bachelor's degree on Technology hung himself from the ceiling, yet another casualty of an education system which has systematically turned people into confused, scared and obedient corporate slave workers in a country that prides itself as the cradle of the Eastern civilisation and the land of spirituality. Poor soul was not a rebel, he did not blame the corporate body whose tough training program is perhaps designed to "cut the flab" of trainees on the bench in these times of global recession. He was a follower, and in his six-page suicide note, he blamed himself as a failure.

Again, I will quote Peter who puts it succinctly into perspective in the very first few lines of his post:

Standardized tests, benchmarks, high stakes testing and the external pressures placed on both student and teacher by Governments (eager to quote a ‘value added’ for political gain), Organizations, media and some curriculums corrupt the minds of our youth and eliminate the art of critical analysis, creativity in thought and entrepreneurial endeavor.

No, I will not go and vote in this elections whether it makes a difference or not. No matter how much TV ads or electoral advocates like "jagore.com" ("wakeup".com) try to entice me into participating in the Great Indian Democractic Process. I will strain my ears and look out for the day when our political class give up their power or use it right from the grassroot level to the crème de la crème institutes and educate the future generations to learn how to learn , and not turn into violent, aggressive, self-serving and competitive individuals who continue to rape, kill and plunder, with their hands or their means, this land, this nation and this earth we live on.

The latent violence in our society is manifest in our speech, our body language, our actions and what we do to earn a living or consider pleasurable. Rahul Guha Roy, a musician gets into the "psycho" headspace of the young man who put a bullet between the eyes a young lady, right where Indian women stick their bindis, in a farm house at Meherauli (south of Delhi) . This young man, son of a politician, "well-educated", went out that night like so many others for a night out. He is just a conformist in a society shaped by politicians and leaders, and an education system, which once served to create "colonial" masters, and now creates glorified clerical jobs outsourced from another part of the globe where, now, people are just beginning to come in terms of the word called "globalisation".

Where does all this violence come from? Ashoka fought a bitter war at Kalinga centuries ago and then, horrified by the violence, he denounced war and all forms of violence and built the largest ever known empire founded through peace and diplomacy, and the unifying mission of Buddhist spirituality. In more modern times Churchill called Gandhi the naked fakir who, in his loin cloth and diet of little else than goat milk, moved masses to ask the colonialists to quit India in no uncertain terms. From the east, another man, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose led a troop of irregulars at the head of the Japanese army advancing towards India through Burma only to be massacred by the Allies as late as 1945. With that every Indian young man's Garibaldi-influenced dreams of fighting an armed battle for freedom ended even before it begun.

Our feudalist mindset continues, and is all pervasive. The education system we patronise continues - the education that teaches you to be a machine to kill, or be on the side which kills the most. "Spare the rod, and spoil the child": even our best teachers wanted to be figures of authority, they were the good cop and the bad cop rolled in one. Every Indian child goes through a systematic inhumane series of rituals every morning from the prayer assembly to period after period of unconnected classroom tasks. They get scolded, slapped, beaten up, turned out of the room, humiliated and told they are not good enough. Never good enough.

It is precisely this experience in the growing years that rob them of their innocence, and their natural curiosity, the positive little risks taking attitude invaluable for learning life lessons, and turn many of them into adults with very little values to speak of.

Friday the 13th, 2009

2009-03-14T20:45:00.000+05:30

Yesterday I went on a bike ride to a friend's workplace about 15 kilometres from the city limits east of Science city. A relatively newly built road in a much better condition than most of the other city roads in Calcutta, it starts from below the bridge over the dirty canal at Dhapa. My friend Sudip works at a leather designing and training institute originally set up by UNIDO about 12 years ago. Now they have moved to their brand new double-storied campus equipped with "state-of-the-art" leather designing and manufacturing machines (German Adler, Italian Atom, ...) which my friend showed off to me gleefully like a child given unlimited access to a wonderland.

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Earlier Ms. Kumar, the head of the Institute under whose leadership Freya has come so far where other such projects have closed down, showed me around the facility. From the terrace we could look at the vast expanse of plots where some leather manufacturing companies have already started operations whereas others are at various stages of construction. Had it not been for the recent economic downturn, she said, this place would have been full of operational leather processing and production units by now. We were looking at the Bantala Leather Park, an area specially earmarked as one of Calcutta's first special economic zones exclusively reserved for it's long flourishing leather export industry.

On our way through gateway no.1, the first thing that greeted me was the unmistakable smell of tanneries, the smell we were so used to around the Tangra and Dhapa region when driving past them on the way to Salt Lake or the airport until mid-nineties. Wait a minute? This SEZ (special economic zone) was supposed to be "clean" and "environment friendly" ... that was the point of it, after all.

A little down the road inside the SEZ, a canal filled with water no doubt made toxic by the clearly visible floating waste from new tanneries came into view. Sudip remarked that the waste treatment plant set up by the SEZ authorities was not functional and already people were beginning to show some concern. Not far away a brand new building dominated the north-eastern horizon. A tech company, Mahindratech, here in the a leather SEZ! I think techies will need to get used to the smell too unless that treatment plant starts operating properly soon.

A milestone we came across on the road about a few kilometres from Calcutta said the village of Basanti was 83 kilometres down the road. Basanti is the one of the "gateways" to Sunderbans where tourists often travel to in hopes of seeing the famous Royal Bengal Tiger, or at least a crocodile or two. The well-maintained road is just a two lane stretch lined with lamp posts on one side which mostly don't work in the evening. I couldn't help but compare our very own SEZ with those I visited in Tianjin or in the outskirts of Suzhou and Wuxi in China. It's hard to call our infrastructure anything but an excuse for real development. In China, even in Vietnam, road space is at least four times of what we have here in our version of SEZ. And at night road lighting and traffic signals do work.

This road, I wouldn't want to travel everyday: the way the public and private buses rushed past us, I think it would be a miracle if one did not meet with at least one accident or a few close shaves every other day. Sudip's phone rang once during the trip and he stopped to take the call, a little irritated having to take off his helmet and fish out the phone from his bag. Can't blame the wife though calling to find out if we had reached safely. Just before that we had encountered a Calcutta tramways road hog of a bus driver deliberately running us out of the asphalted road area as it sped in the opposite direction.

In broad daylight, a stretch of the road had all the lamp-posts fitted with high powered sodium vapour lights left on. Sudip thought it was inefficiency and callousness. Someone leaves the street lights on every morning for the rest of the day, but in the evening, every other lamp does not work. I have a better explanation. The lights are left on during the day time deliberately.

The reason? Power consumption levels are being deliberately recorded as two or three times higher than what it should be. No doubt later, that excess power can be sold off illegally every month through illegal connections. Yet another brilliant scheme by some bureaucrats and their staff on ground in the power department.

That however does not explain the non-functional units at night. Maybe, just may be they are being reported as non-functional deliberately so replacement quotas are also higher than real figures in the official records. No prizes for guessing where the "non-functional" equipment will end up later, and who will be slightly richer from taxpayers' money.

Back in office, I got a mail from Greenpeace: activists roughened up by goons in Orissa. They want people to phone Mr. Ratan Tata and ask him why such an incident happened in a port owned by the industrialist. A port whose operations are dangerous and life-threatening for the last few surviving Oliver Ridley turtles found in the Orissa coastline. For a moment I was tempted to try my luck at phoning Mr. Tata himself and asking him if he cares at all. Then again this is the same man who wanted to set up the now infamous "cheapest-car-in-the-world" Nano production unit in Singur, a village almost about the same distance from Calcutta as Bantala.

Opposition to land acquisition from farmers made it impossible ultimately. But only after much politics of propaganda and misinformation besides the killing of many people including a sixteen year old girl, Tapashi who was horribly raped and set on fire. West Bengal earned yet another "D" in investment-friendliness. And Ratan Tata went west to Narendra Modi's Gujarat to set up the Nano plant saying goodbye to our "Marxist" government and joining hands with the most extreme right-wing leader of them all. Goons, they said, goons who beat you up and leave you to die if you dare to take on the establishment.

I was wondering about how the government had acquired the land at Bantala? This also seemed to be fertile agricultural land. What happened here? My mother told me about a girl who worked as domestic help in one of our relatives house came from that area. Their family got money for their land, even a concrete one-room house in their village. Some family members even got jobs in the SEZ.

The Leather park's polluted water will now make it's way south to the marshy Sunberbans and no one knows what effect it will have on the ecosystem there. This much is certain, it will not be for the better. Sudip told me about workers from villages in Sunderbans who come to work at the leather complex. He got this one from one of them he had given a lift to the park gates on his bike one day: Two workers had not shown up for work that morning. They were attacked and killed, probably eaten alive by a man-eating tiger which strayed near their village. Forest department officials shot the man-eater with enough tranquillizer darts that it would not ever wake up again. Normally the Royal Bengal tiger is not a man-eater. Only when it is wounded or sick, does it turn to easy (really slow-moving) prey: human beings. I really hope the toxic water does not pollute the tigers' habitat and make the last few surviving members of the species too weak to hunt their natural prey.