[Goanet] Livin' the Impromptu Life
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 2013 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2013/08/livin-impromptu-life.html Livin' the Impromptu Life On the Spiritual Roots of Loafing. There is a deeply spiritual element in spurning ritual to do something completely different: it's liberating, this idea that you can just go off the grid. Call it going AWOL. No permissions taken; no explanations provided. This is not about vacation or travel. There aren't any surveys or statistics to cite but it's a pretty good guess that not everyone can or wants to do it. It is an attitude that for me has begun to take hold as I grow older. Maybe it stems from a growing awareness that in the end, everyone goes AWOL. No; this is not a lament about growing old or a nervous look at death. On the contrary, it's about life and joy and sensual pleasures; about the free spirit and the liberated mind that enables the impromptu life. Periodic trips to Goa fall in that category. They let us explore the elasticity of time in which breakfast is on the table and every bite of buttered poi(Goan bread) with homemade jam satisfies so much you think you'll never have lunch. Thinking of lunch while eating your breakfast is the impromptu state of mind in which minutes expand to fill an hour; the same minutes disappear in a fleet rush of seconds to leave you breathless, as you finish the clams or put down the book. In the end, you become so embroiled in non-purposive activity that you lose track of time and begin to live on the wax and wane of nature: sunlight, moonlight, stars, dusk, dawn, rain, breezes, birdsong, rustling palms and the scent of the sea. You lounge, you laze, go on long drives; read books and magazines all day or go to the beach and watch the Arabian Sea churn and roil in the Monsoon or gently roll at other times. You look for exciting new restaurants, cafes and watering holes; hook up with local friends and shoot the breeze late into the night; catch a movie at Panjim's slick Inox cinema and in the auditorium, eat bhel instead of popcorn. Eventually, when the sojourn draws to a close, you are refreshed and ready to look routine in the eye. That lasts a few weeks; then the soul begins to stir; your mind turns once again to the impromptu life in Goa and the serene experience of green rice fields, large rivers, lovely beaches, calamari, clams, shrimp and beer. So you go back again and spend another few days, unmindful of time. In that sense, it is a slice of immortality. As you grow older and begin to see life's finite horizon, such experiences gain in importance. You realize you may have done okay for yourself if, in your later life, you can indulge in such spiritual pursuits. As you plan another journey into timelessness, thoughts hearken ahead to the new restaurant that's just opened; succulent figs for breakfast; shrimp curry and rice for lunch; for dinner, chilly fry; dessert, custard apple ice cream; pickled green peppers in the fridge and the very dry vodka martini which their corns will flavor. But wait.why can't we disrupt routine more often? Is the impromptu life only available in Goa or some other such idyllic place? Of course not; it is a state of mind, as I recently discovered. Having slept over at our house on a Sunday not too long ago, our granddaughter awoke early and climbed into our bed, making sweet sounds in her own dialect: Wake up, sleepy head, she seemed to be saying. My eyes opened and she smiled. I knew immediately then, Monday or not, there was no going to the office, no newspaper.even my tea remained undrunk. Soon we were in the garden, chasing after birds and chipmunks. Of course, they disappeared; so we spent time scanning the skies and trees, whistling, gesticulating, making noises: trying to lure them back. Finally, the sapping heat got to me so we shifted the impromptu show indoors and went upstairs to sit directly in front of the air conditioner. Then she happened on the remote control. Well, if we were going to watch TV, I felt Discovery HD was the best option for a stunning visual and learning experience. Except that we came upon the Cartoon Network while surfing.and lo and behold, it was the Tom and Jerry show, with Brahms' Hungarian Dances as the soundtrack. So heads leaning together we watched as Jerry outwitted the cat every which way. Another work afternoon, we took her to a playground in a nearby mall where she climbed up slides from bottom to top and ran around among the ingenious sprays that kept the place cool with their mist on a sultry day. Equally thoughtful were the soft cork board tiles that lined the playground.no scraped knees or elbows, no tears, no fears. Then last week, we took the time out of a weekday morning to take go swimming with her. There was a time when even a
[Goanet] Neo Middle Classes Protest
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 2013 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2013/01/neo-middle-classes-protest.html Neo Middle Classes Protest High on Aspirations, Low on Talent Let me just say it straight out. The Delhi protests against the shocking rape of a young woman in a bus were led by students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University and other universities and colleges where underpaid teachers spew their leftist propaganda to taint impressionable minds. They are high-minded but like all university students in India, somewhat moronic on the organization front. Their post-modern protest, inspired by the leftists of Europe and North Africa, simply didn't work. They neither have the ideological fervor of their Western European counterparts nor the rage against the machine of their Tunisian and Egyptian idols. What they are confronting is a political system that is bereft of vision beyond electoral calculation, a bureaucracy that is inept and obstructionist, a business class that is free of ethics and morality. And this is not today's news; the gridlock has been in existence since 1947. How otherwise do you explain the lack of basic infrastructure, not just roads, power, public transport but also the lack of education, public health and social security? It is mind-boggling that the protesters and the media, egged on by shadowy political interests, can hold public debate to ransom over a sordid criminal offence by marginal people like the monsters on the bus. The protest is all about the government and how insensitive it is. The young men and women seemed to be more interested in having major government officials talk to them. The real issue to be debated is what kind of a society has been created in which marginal men from urban slums take not just the law into their own hands but visit terror on hapless citizens. You don't have very far to look: the outskirts of Delhi, beyond the Lutyens zone, is a free for all. Scofflaws rule the roost. They harass women; drive like lunatics (including city-certified public transport drivers); they also rain chaos and arbitrary violence on unsuspecting citizens. This is a society and culture in which the girl child is killed at birth; those that survive rarely make it past five years of age; the remnant end up being victims of dowry and bride burning. Very few girls born in India make a steady income and or attain social dignity. Dare I say it: if you are born a girl the chances of you having a normal life are minuscule. These are the issues the heinous rape should have brought forth in public debate. Instead, the neo middle class protesters, egged on by the RSS, Arvind Kejriwal and Baba Ramdev, focused on the government and its shortcomings. I dare these kids and their mentors to go protest against the khap panchayats of Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, never mind Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh; or the Maoists in the central spine of India; or the cultural fascists in south and central India. Easiest thing to do, especially if vested interests ply you with funds, is to assemble at India Gate and capture the attention of the marketing-driven media. Looking at the chaos of cities and small towns and the complete neglect of rural populations, not just this government but going back to 1947, it is apparent the entire governance structure is about privilege and corruption. Even high-minded leaders like Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh are unable to make a dent; their writ simply doesn't run. As the Singapore Prime Minister said in a recent interview, India is held in thrall by vested interests. What he was saying, in a polite way, is India suffers from a lapse of governance: bad roads, poor street lighting, discontinuous water supply, no sanitation, poor public health facilities, and dysfunctional schools. In the end, there are two ideologies in India; one, the Congress that has its hands full just running the government peopled by know-nothings and do-nothings. Two, the others are all against the Congress and hoping to run the system, not for change and development; but for personal aggrandizement. What remains is the permanent government, the bureaucracy, and they have been having a ball since Rajiv Gandhi, with 220 seats refused to form the government in 1989. Since then the toadies have emerged from under their stones with caste and communal demands while the vested government officials simply twiddle their thumbs. Or milk their positions for rent in issuing licenses and permits. So poverty endures in a country that is getting richer by leaps and bounds. No government will pay heed to middle class demands for better governance. The refrain is we represent the poor who have nothing so you should accept an abysmal quality of life. Even the governor of the Reserve Bank, who has
[Goanet] Debate: BJP's Walmart attack
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2012 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2012/12/debate-bjps-walmart-attack.html Debate: BJP's Walmart attack The issue of Wal-Mart lobbying on Monday (December 10) led to a political storm with Opposition creating pandemonium in the Rajya Sabha and promising to create further trouble tomorrow by pressing its demand for a probe and a statement by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In a debate moderated by TIMES NOW's Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami, panelists -- Renuka Chaudhary, Natl. Spokesperson MP, Rajya Sabha Congress; Swaminathan Aiyar, Consulting Editor, Economic Times; Venkaiah Naidu, Senior leader MP, Rajya Sabha, BJP; Derek O Brien, Chief Whip MP, TMC; Rajiv Desai, Chairman CEO, Comma Consulting debate the issue. http://www.timesnow.tv/ http://www.timesnow.tv/videoshow/4416538.cms videoshow/4416538.cms http://www.timesnow.tv/ http://www.timesnow.tv/videoshow/4416540.cms videoshow/4416540.cms http://www.timesnow.tv/ http://www.timesnow.tv/videoshow/4416545.cms videoshow/4416545.cms
[Goanet] Advocacy of interest or corporate bribery?
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in MONDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2012 Advocacy http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2012/12/advocacy-of-interest-or-corporate.ht ml of interest or corporate bribery? ...to secure the public interest, it is vital that the government shine a light on the power brokerages and influences peddlers in Delhi and other states. Though the BJP's noisemakers may not appreciate it, through their hysterical outbursts against Wal-Mart, they may have unwittingly sponsored a major reform in pursuit of good governance. In its misbegotten campaign against the American firm, the BJP threatened to disrupt Parliament again, as it has done repeatedly for the past nine years. This prompted Parliamentary Affairs minister Kamal Nath to agree to a public inquiry into the company's lobbying activities in India. Though a spectacularly ignorant BJP spokesman suggested that the minister's assent to an inquiry proved their point, the truth is that the UPA's quick response saved the day and it appears that much overdue legislation will now be enacted. The BJP's empty-vessel strategy to corner the government on lobbying by Wal-Mart boomeranged in Parliament because of Mr Nath's finesse. Reports say the government will appoint a retired judge to conduct the inquiry. Most likely, the exercise will stretch out and will hold no more sensation value; the BJP will find some other dubious platform from which to rant against the UPA government. As such, the inquiry will join the long list of commissions that have provided not much more than sinecures for superannuated law officers. On the other hand, the government could actually use the inquiry to clean up the murk that surrounds lobbying in India. To secure the public interest, it is vital that the government shine a light on power brokerages and influence peddlers in Delhi and in the various states. A thoughtful judge at the helm of the inquiry might recommend the establishment of a Parliamentary registry that provides credentials to lobbyists, individual as well as firms. In accepting such credentials, lobbyists would be required to disclose their clients and fees received. The registry could go a step further and demand from various government ministries, departments and agencies periodic reports on any contacts they may have had with lobbyists. Recommendations of this nature could bring much needed transparency to the conduct of public affairs; you won't have a BJP president Bangaru Laxman accepting bribes or a DMK minister A Raja playing fast and loose with the allocation of telecom spectrum. A whole horde of middlemen, the kind you see at power lunches in The Taj or cocktail parties at The Oberoi, will stand exposed. The business of lobbying could become professional and cleansed of the stain of corruption. Lobbying is a time-honored practice that dates at least as far back as the signing of the Magna Carta in 13th-century England, from whence sprang the right of association and the right to petition authority, the cornerstones of the lobbying profession. Closer to home and to the age, lobbying has had many beneficial outcomes. These include campaigns for universal primary education, against sex trafficking, to lower taxes on toiletries and cosmetics, to amend laws governing the business of financial services, courier firms and cable operators, among others. They have been successful and have benefited the public interest as much as the interests of those who sponsored them. This article appeared in Hindustan Times on December 16, 2012. http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/NewDelhi/Advocacy-of-interest-or-c orporate-bribery/Article1-973355.aspx Advocacy of interest or corporate bribery?
[Goanet] Nostalgia live
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in MONDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2012 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2012/12/nostalgia-live.html Nostalgia live We should have been called the Magnificent Seven. I thought of this 40 years later. There were seven of us; one died; one didn't come. So we were left with the Infamous Five last weekend. Not to bore you or anything but aside of me there were Harry, Brave, Chua and Mirchi, (forgive me guys for using the given names), who were inseparable at Baroda's MS University's Faculty of Technology. Harry came from Perth in Western Australia, Chua came from Singapore and Brave and Mirchi came from Bombay for the reunion. Before anything else, I can only say that it was an amazing feat for busy people in their sixties; not that anyone behaved that old. The guards were down and the conversation was not that different than the ones we had sitting together on the wall of the MSU hostels. Except there was a lot more depth, given the 40 years of experience since we last met together. We talked about our lives and our time together in Baroda. And the swear words!So Harry has a respected career in the oil business and is still the innocent; Mirchi runs a successful engineering business and still remains the best standup comic I have known; Brave actually runs the world with his phenomenal perspective on the human condition; Chua, the genius, virtually ran Citibank globally and now plays golf. When we knew each other in Baroda, we were mostly broke and way behind the academic curriculum. We had dreams. And one way or the other, we may have realized them. Chua, aka Venky, put the whole thing in perspective: We are normal people, married to the same woman for all these years, with wonderful children and now grandchildren. And Venky, being Chua, asked: Are we really boring people? This whole business of the reunion began when I sent my friends a reminder of the fabulous stuff we did in Baroda as mere kids. We were in the Shakespeare Society; we ran a newspaper called Implosion; we set up Beaux Esprit, an event management unit that held several rock concerts. Plus most of all, we went to almost every night show in the local theater, regardless of the movie. We even saw a South Indian move called Danger Biscuit, which Venky says he uses to screw everyone's happiness in the charade game. In the two days we spent together, we felt connected. Yes, the connection was engineering school and the hostels; but there seemed to be more: why would anyone come from all over the world to have dinner? Clearly, we all liked each other, never mind that we may have had differences. What was obvious we enjoyed each other and admired what we had done in the 40 years that had passed. Actually, the relationship now was more civil and fond than we ever experienced in Baroda. Most of us had met individually over the years but never together. The reunion was unique: we all realized it was a special occasion. The chances of this ever happening again are remote. My view, echoed by Venky, is we should meet again; life has raced past and it is wonderful to put a brake on it and catch up with friends who influenced it in ways we just now begin to realize. We all got along in fabulous way. Plus we had better food and drinks since we last met together in some dhaba in Baroda. Our reunion got me thinking. When we last met together, we had the world ahead of us in which to make a mark. Forty years later, we've done what we can in many different ways. The general take among us was we've all not done too badly. My take on this is we can do much more. Regardless of what I may or may not have achieved, my trip in life has been to reach out to friends who have influenced my life. Turns out they are all high achievers. It is more satisfying than any professional or financial achievement. The post Diwali weekend with old friends endorsed two things: one, all my friends have done well for themselves; two, all our wings have roots in our undergraduate days of a basic life that may be difficult for us to live today. All I can hope is this reunion will lead to new relationships and that we can meet again and explore beyond hellos the ties that bind us. For me, Marcel Proust said it: Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. What a wonderful weekend after the triumph of good over evil!
[Goanet] The rise of righteous reaction
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in THURSDAY, AUGUST 9, 2012 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2012/08/the-rise-of-righteous-reaction.html The rise of righteous reaction The Tradition of Righteous Reaction Mahatmas with a small m Through my pre-teen and teenage years, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather. He was a medical doctor, a theosophist, a Congress party activist and a compassionate human being. He was my ideal. One summer when my siblings and I were visiting his home in Surat, someone told him I had eaten meat. Grandfather wasn't incensed or censorious; he simply said We don't eat meat. I was in awe of this man who attracted eminences like Rabindranath Tagore, Annie Besant, George Arundale, among others to his home. When he said something, I listened, deferentially. However on this occasion his comment rankled. Grandfather seemed to be suggesting that because of caste and religious strictures, our family was vegetarian. Having eaten a mutton samosa at a friend's house, I thought to myself that his reaction was over the top. I knew he was tolerant and liberal; his extensive library included books by Bertrand Russell and other free thinkers. Thanks to him, we were spared worst traditions of caste and religion. This incident haunted me over the years. Since I admired him, I dismissed the episode as a one-off occurrence. Nevertheless, it came back to haunt me in the mid-1970s, when I was living in the US. Our high-profile India Forum group in Chicago became a magnet for NGOs and activists of all types, looking at times for financial support but mostly to spread the gospel of the jholewala alternative. I termed it the rise of righteous reaction. The ascent of the righteous activist posing alternative, mostly woolly and impractical models, was like a riptide generated by the Navnirman wave. Led by Jayaprakash Narayan, a Congress party dissenter, the movement was against the perceived corruption and, in a phrase cherished and propagated by the jholewala, 'anti-people' development policies of the Indira Gandhi government of the time. Training his guns on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Narayan called for Total Revolution, a Maoist-style leap backward into anarchy which prompted the imposition of the Emergency in June 1975. Condemned worldwide as a dictatorial regression, the Emergency destroyed the government's credibility. The Congress Party was defeated in the general election of 1977. However, even before the first non-Congress government assumed office in Delhi, things had begun to go awry. During what he thought was a revolutionary war; Narayan had called on the armed forces to revolt against the government. That's when the steady erosion of his vastly inflated stature began, helped in no small measure by the subsequent fumbling and ineptitude of the Janata government which came to power in 1977. Narayan's movement had its roots in the margins of the Gandhian movement. The Mahatma's success with the independence struggle allowed him to exhume and propagate an anti-Western, anti-modernity ideology drawn from his 1909 tract Hind Swaraj. Mohandas Gandhi challenged Jawaharlal Nehru's modernization agenda, recommending simplistic notions like village republics, self-sufficiency, nature cure and vegetarianism as national alternatives. Like many students who studied in the US after him, Narayan became a Karl Marx admirer. However, when he returned to India he found his position pre-empted by Nehruvian economic policies that emphasized central planning and nationalization of core industries. For him and his acolytes, it was a short step to the vituperative and impractical edicts ofHind Swaraj. The Navnirman movement was confused at birth. It combined the anti-Western, anti-modern strains of Gandhian utopianism and the anti-market, anti-constitutional Marxist dogma. This weird and unsustainable campaign fell apart as casually as it was formed. After the failure of Narayan's movement, the role of righteous reaction became marginal. The protest against the Narmada Dam project led by a global coalition of NGOs gave it a second wind. Through the 1980s, the Indian jholewala brigade became involved with relatively benign campaigns against child labor, deforestation, and for employment generation, education, healthcare, among others. In 2004, the newly-elected UPA government, recognizing their contribution to social welfare and poverty alleviation, sought to co-opt the jholewala brigade into the National Advisory Council (NAC). The NAC's deliberations focused on welfare and (Citizen's) rights rather than the legitimacy of the government and the political system. But a more virulent strain of Jholewala activism surfaced with the appearance on the national stage of Anna Hazare and his disciples. The Hazare
[Goanet] Asleep at The Wheel?
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in TUESDAY, JULY 10, 2012 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2012/07/asleep-at-wheel.html Asleep at the Wheel? He drank heavily in his prime and still enjoys a nightly whiskey or two at 74. India's leader takes painkillers for his knees (which were replaced due to arthritis) and has trouble with his bladder, liver and his one remaining kidney. A taste for fried food and fatty sweets plays havoc with his cholesterol. He takes a three-hour snooze every afternoon on doctor's orders and is given to interminable silences, indecipherable ramblings and, not infrequently, falling asleep in meetings. Atal Behari Vajpayee, then, would be an unusual candidate to control a nuclear arsenal. But for four years the Indian Prime Minister's grandfatherly hands have held the subcontinent back from tumbling into war. Despite the fact that he heads the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a constituency stuffed with extremists, Vajpayee has ambitiously pursued peace with neighbor and rival Pakistan, even traveling to the Pakistani cultural capital of Lahore in 1999, vainly hoping to bury the bloody animus of the past and start an era of good feelings. With 1 million soldiers facing each other at high alert on the India-Pakistan border, those days seem long ago. At the same dangerous time, Vajpayee's stewardship is looking less and less comforting. The frail bachelor seems shaky and lost, less an aging sage than an ordinary old man. He forgets names, even of longtime colleague and current Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, and during several recent meetings he appeared confused and inattentive. After a meeting with a Western Foreign Minister, his appearance was described by one attending diplomat as half dead. At a rare press conference last month in Srinagar, the Prime Minister tottered to the podium. Indian TV crews are asked to film him from the waist up to avoid showing his shuffling gait to find he had trouble understanding questions, repeatedly relying on whispered prompts from Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani. Even then Vajpayee stumbled over his replies. He is very alert when he is functional, says one BJP worker. But there are very few hours like that. Adds one Western diplomat: We have a lot of conversations about his health. Some of his mannerisms come down to his personal style. But some of it is definitely spacey stuff. While no one questions that key decisions on national security and foreign policy are still made by Vajpayee, the focus is now turning to the two men behind the throne: Vajpayee's low-key National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, and Vajpayee's hard-line BJP colleague of 50 years, 72-year-old Advani. The consensus among observers and diplomats is that the hawkish Advani is preparing to succeed Vajpayee at the next national elections due by late 2004. There is no doubt he is the Prime Minister in waiting, remarks a diplomat. In the meantime, Vajpayee has undergone a sudden conversion from peacemaker to warmonger primarily in response to political pressures. This year's standoff on the border shows the dovish Prime Minister has accepted the argument that war or the threat of it works. In comments that set off alarm bells around the world, Vajpayee last month spoke twice of an impending decisive battle against India's enemy. Although he has repeatedly said that he does not want war, the Prime Minister has sound strategic reasons for ratcheting up the rhetoric. Since Sept. 11, he has found the international community more sympathetic to the idea of India waging its own war on terror against jihadis in the contended state of Jammu and Kashmir, where many of them have been inserted by Pakistan. And it plays well for India to keep the pot boiling: New Delhi can claim a victim's solidarity with the U.S., avoid addressing the awkward issue of its heavy-handed rule in Muslim-dominated Kashmir and just possibly get Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to actually shut down the jihadi industry on his territory, ending what India calls a proxy war. Last week, Musharraf told visiting U.S Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that he was going to put a permanent end to terrorist incursions into India. Vajpayee's government promised in turn some de-escalation measures, though a withdrawal of troops from the border has been ruled out. The big risk, however, is that no matter what Musharraf does, there are enough jihadis already in Kashmir to keep hammering India with suicide bombs and death squads. Four people were killed by terrorists Friday night in Kashmir, even as heavy shelling continued at the frontier and an unmanned Indian spy plane was shot down by the Pakistani air force. Any small spark can still push Vajpayee to deploy his soldiers in some punitive counterattack on Pakistan, which can lead to full-scale war.
[Goanet] Will my children still need me?
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in THURSDAY, JUNE 14, 2012 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2012/06/will-my-children-still-need-me.html Will my children still need me? NEW YORK: It is a brilliant Father's Day afternoon and I am sitting at McSorley's, the oldest pub on the buzzing Lower East Side of Manhattan, where my younger daughter lives. She has invited her friends to quaff a few beers with me. Focused on making a life for herself in this city that never sleeps, she works hard and makes the most of the vibrant metropolis; mindful, I suspect, of the old Frank Sinatra standard: If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. My older daughter, on the other hand, has chosen to make Delhi her home, hanging out with friends from all over the world who happen to live in the capital. Both of them traverse the world with an easy sophistication that is enviable. When my first daughter was born, my mother gave us a plaque, which read You must give your children roots and wings. Roots will give them the strength to face any adversity; wings will help them soar above everything to explore new worlds and go farther than you ever did. As I sat in the pub, with the group of bubbly twenty-somethings, I couldn't help thinking of my mother's plaque and marveling at just how we may have got it right with our daughters. The older daughter's roots and the younger one's wings are a perfect foil for my mother's advice. They both make their way in the world. While I do draw a sense of satisfaction from their achievements, there is a nevertheless a disturbing arrhythmia in my mind. My thoughts go back to the cheerful holidays spent in our various homes in the US and in India: the warm Christmases, the lazy Sundays; the vacations we shared in Goa, in Europe and in the United States; the hysterical laughter while watching the bumbling antics of Inspector Clouseau in Pink Panther videos. These are comforting and pleasing memories; the sadness comes from knowing such togetherness will become less frequent in the years to come. Such sweet and sour emotions are a luxury that today's fathers enjoy. When I was growing up, fathers were remote persons. They inspired awe, some-times admiration; most often fear but hardly ever love. Whether liberal or conservative, they just did not get involved in their children's lives. The au-thoritarian ones ran their children's lives according to their worldview; the more liberal ones simply accepted things. If they couldn't control their children or satisfy them with baubles, they pulled back and became even more distant. The distant father, the absent father, the authoritarian father, the indulgent father... these are classical personality formulations on which much of today's psychology and literature are based. This is the thing about Father's Day: even in blasé Manhattan: it evokes teary reactions in grey-haired men, who are otherwise balanced and not prone to sentimentality. Ever since it was first observed in Fairmont, a small mining town in West Virginia in 1908, the day was etched in sadness as well as thankfulness. The Fairmont event was a church service in remembrance of the 360 men, many of them fathers, killed in a mining disaster the previous year. However, it was not until 1972, when President Richard M Nixon proclaimed it a national holiday that Father's Day became established and its observance began to spread around the world. Father's Day is when children honour and indulge their father. There is some amount of Hallmark Card artifice to it. However, for me, it has always been a pause; a chance to remember the wonderful times growing up with my children; to recognize that the relationship with them is always ambiguous. You love them and hope for nothing in return. Most times, you experience pure joy; other times, there may be sheer aggravation. Underlying it is a bittersweet taste: as involved fathers we try to move heaven and earth to smooth things for our children when they are dependent on us. The haunting question is: will they still need us when we're 64? On a brighter note, some day we will have grandchildren on the knee. This column appeared in DNA, June 26, 2007. http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/comment_will-my-children-still-need-me_110 6250 Will my children still need me?
[Goanet] Reaping the Modi whirlwind
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in MONDAY, JUNE 11, 2012 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2012/06/reaping-modi-whirlwind.html Reaping the Modi whirlwind It is now clear that Narendra Modi is making an open bid to be the BJP's prime ministerial candidate, your correspondent shares his analysis on the Modi phenomenon from a 2007 column. Narendra Modi's victory in Gujarat is an emphatic statement by the people of the state that they have no time for the Congress ideology of political correctness. A proud and entrepreneurial people, if somewhat insular, Gujaratis have historically embraced radical ideologies, starting from Mohandas Gandhi's fight against the British in the 1930s to Jayprakash Narayan's nihilist navnirman movement against the Congress in the 1970s. In the 1990s, Gujarat embraced Hindutva, partly for primordial reasons, but also because they had no faith in the Congress. The Congress held sway over Gujarat for nearly two decades after the state was formed in 1960. Then, slowly and surely, the Congress appeal diminished. If Narendra Modi survives the next term to 2012, Hindutva will have become the mainstream ideology in the state. Many liberal Gujaratis have become disenchanted with the Congress; an editor told me: We don't want Modi, but where is the Congress? Gujaratis are not going to throw up a Mulayam Singh Yadav or a Mayawati because they want stability. We are rich and have good infrastructure, long before Modi got here. Modi has tapped into the Gujarati disillusionment with the Congress. To begin with, they have no time for socialism and nonalignment; in 2002, they challenged the Congress on its secular ideology. In handing Modi a significant electoral triumph, they have begun to question the idea of democracy, preferring an authoritarian leader. Gujarat has revolted against the four pillars of Indian nationalist ideology: socialism, secularism, democracy and nonalignment. These are the norms the Congress propagated during the nationalist movement and then after Independence. Trouble is, socialism became an excuse for the license-permit Raj; secularism mutated into a pandering to a Muslim vote bank; nonalignment became an anti-American ideology and democracy became a family business. Gujaratis would have none of it; they turned first to JP; now they are willing to take their chances with Modi. The people of Gujarat are decent and hard-working and try to get along; typically they would support a party like the Congress. Over the years, they came to see the Congress as an elitist and Stalinist organization in which regional leadership was not encouraged. Instead, the party's leaders in the state had to be anointed by the High Command. Even today, young leaders in the state, as on the national stage, are sons and daughters of veterans of the party. This is not true of the BJP. Thus, even sensible people in the state chose to support the nasty and dangerous Hindutva ideology over the feudal setup of the Congress. It's not just in politics, but in business as well. The scions of the old mill-owning families in Gujarat are now reduced to living off their parents' wealth; my friend Sanjay Lalbhai, who presides over the growing Arvind empire, is a notable exception. Gujarat recognises and rewards only entrepreneurship and hard work; while they respect the old generators of wealth, they have no time for their progeny. Today's big business names in Gujarat were unknown a decade ago. Perhaps that's why the Gujarati diaspora has done so well all over the world, despite their obvious and severely limiting insularity. So we must realise that Modi's success is a vote against the elitism of the Congress. And against the lack of new ideas in the party of Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel, the most revered icons of Gujarat politics. The general feeling in Gujarat is that the two were given short shrift in post-Independence politics. The widespread belief is Gujaratis rarely joined the civil or the defense services because of their proclivity to business. On the other hand, many middle class Gujaratis believe they remained outsiders because of their problems with Hindi, English and Western ways. This is the cause of the dangerous Modi whirlwind we are reaping today. This column appeared in DNA, December 26, 2007. http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/comment_reaping-the-modi-whirlwind_1141526 Reaping the Modi whirlwind
[Goanet] The US poll battle: race vs gender
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in FRIDAY, JUNE 8, 2012 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2012/06/us-poll-battle-race-vs-gender.html The US poll battle: race vs gender Now that the US presidential race is a straight fight between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney, your correspondent revisits his 2007 column. http://www.blogger.com/ A bright 20-something who lives in New York City captured the essence of political debate in the US. If you back Obama, the feminists will get you; support Hillary and risk being branded a racist, she said. As voters turned up to select nominees for both parties, Republican and Democratic, it was evident that the contest in the Democratic Party between Senators Barack Obama (Illinois) and Hillary Clinton (New York) drew most ink. On the face of it, Democrats must decide their nominee on 'primordial considerations' of race and gender. But there's some rational selection criteria. While the Republicans appear to have settled on John McCain as their presidential candidate, the Democratic aspirants are running neck and neck. With most states having completed their primaries, no clear winner seems to have emerged. Analysts say the race may not be decided until April and most agree that the balance is now tilted in favour of Obama, an African-American with a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas. Brought up in Hawaii and having lived in Indonesia, Obama's curriculum vita is a sparkling record at Harvard Law School and as a community organiser in Chicago. Hillary Clinton's resume is as glittery: Yale Law School and eight years in the White House as First Lady. In the achievements department, both candidates sort of cancel each other out. Obama's campaign seems to be more sophisticated and better-financed. His message of change has a subtext in which is an acknowledgment that the days of the 'boomer generation' are over. This refers to Americans born between 1946 and 1964, during which a post-war boom saw the US emerge as a global superpower. During the time it dominated public consciousness, in politics, in business, in the arts and in the academy, this generation also came to be known for what the critic Christopher Lasch called 'the culture of narcissism'. The term was a catchall for a set of beliefs and fears including worship of fame and celebrity, fear of aging and aversion to commitment and lasting relationships. Obama is 46 and can be considered a late boomer. He first perked my interest when he was quoted as saying that turn-of-the-century America was dominated by the rule of two major boomers, Bill Clinton and George W Bush; that the dorm-room debates of the '60s and '70s over ideology and lifestyle had carried over into national and global politics. Stirred by the Vietnam War, these differences have polarised America as never before, especially with the 'shock and awe' invasion of Iraq ordered by President Bush. Phrases such as 'coalition of the willing' and 'either you're with us or against' sharpened the divide. Obama wants to change that, bringing Democrats, Independents and some Republicans together to restore America's standing in the world and to bridge the rifts at home. With this central theme, Obama challenged Hillary Clinton, whose candidacy at the start of the primaries seemed to be a shoo-in. Now that he's managed to overtake her, the Hillary camp appears to have panicked. Campaigning in Wisconsin, a top Hillary aide accused Obama of plagiarism, claiming he used words from a 2006 campaign speech by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.Obama was quick to dismiss the charges as a 'desperate' effort to stay in the race. The Democratic race is now a fight devolving on character. Both candidates have turned to economic populism posing against the wealthy bankers, oilmen and corporate executives, who amassed huge fortunes under the benign Bush regime and its free-market policies. As the primaries draw to a close and one of the candidates, woman or black, secures the nomination, he or she will have to contend with the effective dirty tricks lobbies of the Republican underbelly. It could get down and dirty. In the end, we will have the answer to the crucial question: Is America ready to elect a non-white or non-male President? This column appeared in DNA, February 20, 2008 http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/comment_the-us-poll-battle-race-vs-gender_ 1151984 The US poll battle: race vs gender
[Goanet] Bombay Journal
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 2012 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2012/03/bombay-journal.html Bombay Journal Deja Vu All Over Again... Three friends, 45 years later, sit in a palatial Khar apartment in this siren city, enjoying the cocktail hour. Dinner is a couple of hours away. This is the first time that I can remember that Yogi, Mirchi and I have sat together since our Baroda days. Sure, we've met en famille...in Bombay, in New York, in New Jersey. In Baroda, we met every day, largely because we were roommates at different times. So this evening was special. In the course of the evening, we exchanged a few desultory comments about Baroda and the people we knew then. Mostly the conversation was about today and things happening in our lives. Mirchi regaled us about his fumbles with remote controlled curtains in his bedroom; Yogi about how he has given up his crusade against honking and rash driving in Bombay; I showed them pictures of my freshly-minted granddaughter. It was wonderful to be interested in each other's lives today and not go into a nostalgic shoosha about the good old days and what have you. Even if I do say so myself; I am mostly the guy who makes the effort to keep in touch with old friends. In the past few decades, I have connected with friends from the 1950s, 1960s and onward. It's been marvelous because they responded with enthusiasm. The key to sustaining renewed relationships is to eschew stuff like: remember the time and get with the modern day program. Most renewals have succeeded in the sense that we catch up with great eagerness from time to time; the ones that have fallen by the wayside were the ones that could not get beyond the magic of the old days. What was remarkable about the reunion was that the nostalgia was about the established friendship, not about what we did when we were in our twenties. We were all engineering students enrolled in the Faculty of Technology at the MS University in Baroda; we were from Bombay and in love with the city. In Baroda, we were inseparable, together every day: dinner, movies, late night chai; living in a world of our own. It wasn't always smooth; there were ups and downs. But we were young and sure to have our way. Then the busy years went rushing by us; as the Baroda experience came to an end, we drifted apart. For more than a decade, we lost touch, making our way in the world: establishing careers, building families. The bond apparently survived. I reached out to them and they were happily receptive and over the years, we built a whole new relationship that peaked with the dinner in Bombay this week. We laughed, ribbed each other and were comfortable together as though 45 years were a blink of the eyes. If you could rewind to Baroda, you'd see the three guys, now in their sixties, really hadn't changed much, except they were older and definitely wiser. There was much familiar laughter and in our hearts, the dreams were still the same. In the sixties, we defined friendship; 45 years later, we were redefining nostalgia. No syrupy memories of the past; no obsessive recall of the days gone but robust conversations about today, secure in the feeling that our friendship had withstood the test of time. There was no looking back, only hope we could do this again whenever we had the chance. Our lives are different but the bonds hold firm. We don't really need to see each other every day; just to get together every opportunity we can get. It really doesn't get better than this. My trip in life is to link up with old friends, to establish new ties based on old camaraderie. In that, I am the luckiest person in the world: reviving old friendships is to renew life and to keep you young and fun loving. On that score alone, I may have a ticket to the place where angels play harps and it is always springtime. That evening in Bombay, it felt like I was there already. --- Protect Goa's natural beauty Support Goa's first Tiger Reserve Sign the petition at: http://www.goanet.org/petition/petition.php ---
[Goanet] Something In the Way She Smiles...
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 2012 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.in/2012/03/something-in-way-she-sniles.html Something In the Way She Smiles... A Glimpse of Immortality Yeah, yeah, we've all heard that: a guy who gushes about his grandchild. This is different. I had the most amazing opportunity of spending four days with my granddaughter Kiara at our house, Imagine, in Goa. It rang true to its name. Imagine: Goa had a cool Spring; even in March, people wanted wraps sitting out on our patio; unusual weather to herald Kiara's first trip to Goa. Imagine: she is just two months old. Her presence at Imagine blew away my routine: newspapers, tea, bread and cheese, figs and pineapples for breakfast. The papers were left unread and between bites of poi (fabulous Goan bread) laden with butter, goat cheese and blueberry jam, I sat in the patio with her. Granddad or whatever, I am her personal physical trainer, working her arms and legs, lifting her up and down, turning her side to side, getting her in training for whenever Olympics. She seemed to love it. Her smile was to die for. And that sort of works: when the sixties refer not to Beatles generation but to the candles on your birthday cake. The deal is everyone smiles with their eyes. Kiara's bright black eyes were fascinating. Shining like full-beam headlights, they dazzled me. I kept staring at them and she looked back unblinking. Dude, her eyes seemed to say, Look into my eyes. I am your glimpse of immortality. Whoa! That's intense coming from a child that is younger than the vintage of the plonk they serve as Indian wines. I stared harder. And in them, I saw several films, only one of which I could understand. This was the story of a guy born in Surat, grew up in Bombay and made his home in Chicago, where one cold, snowy winter his daughter (Kiara's mother) was born. After a complimentary steak and champagne dinner in my wife's hospital room, we brought the baby back next day to our condo in Oak Park and doted on her and continue to do so three decades later. Hanging with Kiara on our patio in the cool of a Goa morning, I thought of every morning in Chicago, horsing around with her mother and she also smiled. Months later, the baby, at the smallest provocation, laughed like a certified lunatic and we have a cassette (remember those?) of her in hysterical gales of laughter. We hope to present that to Kiara when she is older; which is why I am saving my old school but slick Nakamichi cassette player. When our daughters were born, we were too busy to think philosophy. We had to attend to them and love them; no time for bigger issues. As a grandparent, and mostly because I am so much older, I can look into Kiara's eyes and see a continuity, once removed. It sounds weird but I see in her eyes an assurance that my life has not just been wasted making a living. Her look tells me: Yo, 20th century man, you did well! In my mind, she is the Nobel Prize my daughter awarded me. --- Protect Goa's natural beauty Support Goa's first Tiger Reserve Sign the petition at: http://www.goanet.org/petition/petition.php ---
[Goanet] Power, Not Principles
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11, 2012 http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archiv eSource=PageSkin=TOINEWBaseHref=CAP/2012/01/10PageLabel=14EntityId=Ar01 400ViewMode=HTML Power, Not Principles Anti-Congressism is the common plank of those motivated by short-term political gain. Peeling the onion of political ideology in India is an assault on reason. You have Hindutva rabble-rousers who held sway from 1998 to 2004. Then there is the intellectually bankrupt Left that met its Waterloo on the India-US strategic partnership agreement. Sitting on opposition benches, their one-point agenda is to defeat - which is difficult - or cause problems - which is easy - for the Congress. It is a matter of wonder how closely these two so-called inimical forces, the BJP and the Left, have combined time and again to oppose the Congress for short term political gain. There are also 1960s-style anarchic groups that include the Anna Hazare autocratic clique and Mamata Banerjee's socially and intellectually challenged Trinamool Congress. Plunk into the mix the personality cults of Mayawati; the dynastic set-up of Mulayam Singh Yadav, Karunanidhi and Naveen Patnaik; the slippery appeal of Jayalalithaa and the holier-than-thou stance of Nitish Kumar. These are mercenary formations that will sway whichever way the wind blows, depending on the political advantage they can derive. It is not clear what any of these groups stand for except opposition to the Congress. In 1974, the great anarch Jayaprakash Narayan talked of total revolution and called on the army to revolt against the Indira Gandhi government; today Anna has subverted his fight against corruption into an anti-Congress political movement. Talk about deja vu. The foolishness of the Anna band of civil society buccaneers was exposed when the moving spirit, Arvind Kejriwal, was forced to issue a statement that they are not anti-Congress. Earlier, when cornered by thinking people on a television show, he said thatIndia's muchadmired parliamentary democracy is a fraud. Such increasingly shrill utterances suggest he is completely out of depth on the national stage. Meanwhile, BJP leader L K Advani led a rath yatra against money in Swiss banks in a nonetoo-subtle bid to cash in on Anna's storm in a teacup against corruption. Of classic RSS vintage, he believes no one remembers his other 1990 Ram temple effort which led to communal riots. So where is the glorious temple he promised? He served as home minister and deputy prime minister for the six years the BJP-led coalition was in power. Advani's confusion was complete when he went to Karachi and lauded Mohammed Ali Jinnah as a secular leader. There are many ideological fig leafs that political formations wear in their relentless grasp for power: socialism, casteism, social justice, identity, chauvinism, Hinduism. Scratch the surface and it all turns out to be an anti-Congress position. As such, political analysis in India is best conducted on a dyadic presumption: there is the Congress and there is everyone else. So let's look at the Congress record. It has been the default option for the electorate. In the past quarter century, it suffered seminal defeats in the elections of 1989 and 1996. In each case, it was voted out of power on allegations of corruption. Each time, a coalition of parties was hastily put together that stood for nothing except opposition to the Congress. In both those defeats, any objective analyst could conclude the Congress lost because its governments undertook significant reforms that hurt the status quo. In 1989, an agglomeration of forces came together to restore the status quo of inequity and discrimination that http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7537489380457243489postID=297443 1450053907549 Rajiv Gandhi had challenged. The motley crew of political parties that formed the opposition put together a makeshift government that did not last the full term; nor did they pursue the charges of corruption that brought them to power. In the ensuing decade, the BJP's unbridled appeal to communalism brought it to power: first, for 13 days in 1996; then in two desperate coalitions in 1998 and 1999. The saffron dispensation lasted until 2004 and was then showed the door because of its misplaced nationalism that saw India conduct nuclear tests that were replayed tit-for-tat byPakistan and because of its insensitive India Shining hype. Since then, the Congress has held sway. The key difference is the Congress's approach to social harmony and economic development: the phrase inclusive development was introduced to the political vocabulary. In the interim, India, warts and all, grew to be a big player in the global dialogue. Most important, economic growth was accompanied by the
[Goanet] Setting the Record Straight
--- Annual Goanetters Meet --- The annual Goanetters Meet is scheduled for the first week in January 2012. Details to follow. If you plan to attend, send an email to eve...@goanet.org with contact details so we could reach you once the details are finalized. --- This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2011 Setting the Record Straight A mature response by the UPA government put an end to the disruption of Parliament led by the BJP. In a passionate statement, Pranab Mukherjee said, I may be the most illiterate man in the House, but I fail to understand what purpose is served by dividing the House on a motion that seeks adjournment over black money in foreign banks. We have no conflict of interest on the issue. We are with you on the need to curb the menace. So why have a division? Involving as it does international tax treaties and laws of privacy; extracting information on Indian holdings in foreign banks is difficult, the finance minister said. The Mukherjee speech rates, in my mind, among the better interventions in the 60-year history of Parliament. Mr Mukherjee said there are enough laws on the books to deal with black money squirreled away in tax havens but they have not been effective. No banks will violate their secrecy code. Warming to his theme, he asserted that the BJP was in power for six years and had plenty of time to persuade foreign banks in tax havens to divulge their Indian secrets. In his forceful speech, Mr Mukherjee implied that the BJP is not a serious player and simply obstructs Parliament with a view to showing the government does not enjoy majority support. In the event, the adjournment motion was soundly defeated, leaving the BJP with egg on its face. The BJP's assault on foreign holdings is meant to reinforce the canards they have spread for several decades that Congress leaders, especially the Gandhi family, have money stashed away abroad. It is of a piece with Anna Hazare not inviting the NCP's Sharad Pawar to the muchhyped debate on the Lokpal Bill issue simply because they believe he is corrupt. Mr Pawar is the leader of a major political party that has a sizeable presence both in Parliament and in the Maharashtra state assembly. It has ministers in the Union Cabinet and in the state government. Two decades ago, V P Singh played the same game. He campaigned in 1989 with a piece of paper saying he had the Swiss bank account numbers of various Congress leaders and their friends. He promised he would reveal names once he was voted into power. It turned out that with the support of the BJP and the Left, he did become Prime Minister and all he did was to unleash the Mandal mayhem. If we must talk of public life and political leadership, you have only to look at Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, three tall leaders who were assassinated by fanatics. Then there is Sonia Gandhi, who suffered the slings and arrows of the BJP propaganda machine for being Italian by birth; she stepped back when she was entitled to become the Prime Minister in 2004. Since then, the BJP has pushed the line that Mrs Gandhi is the real power and Manmohan Singh is a mere puppet. The BJP leader, L K Advani, has been voluble in seeking to portray Dr Singh as a weak leader. I served on the Congress media committee for seven years and can say, having seen it at close hand, the relationship between Mrs Gandhi and Dr Singh was one of immense mutual respect. The question needs to be asked: did Mr Advani, home minister in December 1999, display great strength and resolve when the government cravenly succumbed to the demands of the hijackers of Indian Airlines flight 814? Could the Congress have accused him of being weak? The answer is yes, but they did not. It was a matter of national security and the Congress lent its support. The hijackers sought the release of three militants including Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born terrorist with ties to al Qaeda, who was implicated in the murder of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. The BJP had its chance from 1998 to 2004. It started out with nuclear explosions in May 1998 that altered the balance of power in the subcontinent negating the conventional edge that India enjoyed till then after Pakistan responded by staging its own nuclear tests. The curtains came down on BJP's rule in 2004 when, turned off by an insensitive India Shining poll campaign, voters turned away. Also, we must never forget the 13-day BJP government in 1996. That
[Goanet] American Life: Washington Journal
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Capital Letter December 10, 2011 American Life: Washington Journal Liberalism... A Saturday afternoon at the Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington DC: I am waiting for my bag. It shows up and so do my hosts Gautam and Rita and with them the promise of a fabulous weekend plus. Gautam is the most insightful person I know. You really have to read his book, The Intolerant Indian, to know how perspicacious this man is. Yet, I have always thought of him a rock star, never mind he's been the editor of The Times of India and founding editor of DNA. His book, however, leads me to believe there is so much more to Gautam than his editor persona or his Elvis singsong. So there he was with his wife Rita, wheeling my bag to the parking lot. We drove to his house in Chevy Chase, savoring the prospect of the next few days. As soon as we got in his car, Gautam was all about business. And his business was about pleasure. We're going here, there and everywhere, he says, in his Beatles-besotted way as he pulls his car out of the parking lot. He makes me sit shotgun while Rita sits in the back; she is the chopdi (book) aunty, as a friend christened her once in Goa, for her encyclopedic knowledge about everything. That afternoon, she was leading the charge against these reactionary Republicans. In his wry way, Gautam reminds her that I am the only one in the car who had shaken hands and had a picture taken with George W Bush, the hate figure for American liberals. We make our way through this gorgeous city and I can't help but marvel at the stuff that flies by the car window; stuff we see all the time on television: this monument, that government building, whatever. It is truly a beautiful city and whether you like it or not, it is the capital of the world. Driving through the city, we cross into Maryland's Chevy Chase, where Gautam and Rita reside. The place has an air of understated class; which also describes my hosts. Through the stay, I spent time with their friends and loved every minute of it. What was remarkable was these friends were as comfortable with me as I was with them; as though I'd known them forever. More likely, it was the old any friend of Gautam and Rita's syndrome. Conversations were enlightened and at times, enlivened by my minor intrusions into their liberal groupthink. They seemed to be all McGovern liberals. I gave up that ghost a long time ago when it became clear unadulterated American liberalism is about class and privilege, on the one hand; on the other hand, it has a streak of populism: a patrician dislike of business and commerce. Bill Clinton was not about that and W was a foaming-in-the-mouth response to classic American liberalism. In the several salon-type interactions Gautam organized, it became clear the hatred for W and the Republicans among liberals is entrenched and ultimately as divisive as the agenda of their hate object, George W Bush. Equally puzzling is their lukewarm support for Obama, who has brought to the national scene the art of compromise and negotiation that is part and parcel of state and city politics in this admirable country. The flight of liberals from Obama's camp is, dare I say it, an expression of disappointment. They seem to be saying: we elected you, our first black president; you were proof of our liberal credentials and you compromise with all manner of people and policy positions that are anathema to us? Much like in India, the ruling dispensation here seems to have lost its way between the assaults from the religious right and indignant liberals. The fate of Obama and Dr Manmohan Singh in India will determine the future of democracy and liberalism in the world. The EU crisis, as always with the Europeans, is about money. On the way back to Delhi, at Dulles, I contemplated the stentorian arbitrariness of the Homeland Security system that stalks all American airports. Struggling through the gauntlet of not-so-bright people, who may have been recruited from the American jail regime or street gangs, I thought to myself: America national security state and India anti-corruption zeal are probably the two greatest threats to liberal democracy. At American airports and in Indian media, it appears as though the regimentation and anarchy are on the rise. At Dulles, O'Hare, Kennedy and various points of entry, agents of the emergent national security regime evoke fear and awe, largely because they have the power to whisk you away and throw you in jail and keep you there for months without framing charges. In India, prodded by anarchists and their anti- corruption protests, the judicial system can do much the same. ### This article appeared in The Times of India on December 17, 2011. ---
[Goanet] Evergreen Optimism
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Monday, December 5, 2011 Evergreen http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/12/evergreen-optimism.html Optimism As I stood there shaking hands with him when he came to receive the Dada Saheb Phalke award, the years seemed to melt away. It was as though I was in my pre-teens, having just watched Nau Do Gyarah , Munimji , Paying Guest or whichever film I first saw starring Dev Anand. I can remember going straight into the bathroom, wetting my hair and trying to work up the stylish pompadour. Dev Anand was my absolute favourite screen personality and I religiously caught every single film he ever made. My friends say I am an inveterate optimist, that's why I came back to India after nearly two decades in the US. The optimism has its roots in my early exposure to Dev Anand's films. Since the late 1950s and through the early 1960s, he was my favourite hero, not necessarily because he was a good actor but because he stood for hope. While Dilip Kumar represented the tragedy of the Indian condition, Raj Kapoor the misbegotten ideology that messed up India, Dev Anand stood for what India could be, smiling and stylish with a song on the lips. Dev Anand represents the most modern of all creative idioms: Find talented people and let them grow. Through his organisation, Navketan, we were introduced to Guru Dutt, S D Burman and dozens of others, who entertained generations with movies and music that today are part of our memories. About the time Dev Anand began to be recognised as an entertainer, the operative mood in Indian films was down-in-the-mouth, a victim of the colonial experience. The theme song was Duniya mein hum ayein hain to jeena hi padega, jeevan hai agar zahar to peena hi padega . Along came Dev Anand with his worldview expressed best in the song from the film Hum Dono : Barbadiyon ka shok manana fuzul tha, har fikr ko dhuein mein udata chala gaya . His films filled me with hope, the ultimate global value that was in short supply in India at that time. Congratulations on the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, and thank you Dev Saheb, you instilled me with optimism about India before I reached my teens. In the words of your immortal song: Jeevan ke safar mein raahi... de jaate hain yaadein . Indeed, you have given me, a fellow traveller in the world, a rich lode of memories, never mind your lyricist's other lines, which I have left out in the ellipsis. This article appeared in The Times of India on February 16, 2004. I am posting it as a tribute to my personal hero, Dev Anand, who died on December 4, 2011. --- Protect Goa's natural beauty Support Goa's first Tiger Reserve Sign the petition at: http://www.goanet.org/petition/petition.php ---
[Goanet] India at the limits
--- Goanet Classifieds --- Enescil, a Brazilian engineering firm requires Engineers, Architects and Draftsmen, proficient in AutoCAD, for their new office in Goa Those interested can email enescil@gmail.com by 15 November 2011 Selected candidates will be sent to Brazil for 2 months training --- This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Tuesday, November 15, 2011 India at http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/11/india-at-limits.html the limits Command-and control system failure If you ever needed evidence that socialist ideology, political populism and the utter lack of governance holds India to ransom, all you have to do is to study the power crisis gripping India. For the past several weeks, the country has reeled from outages that last so long that they have become the norm; the few hours that power is available are the unusual occurrence. The gap between supply and demand is thought to be in excess of 15 percent on the average: ranging for zero in the case of Lutyens Delhi, home of the ruling class, to more than 50 percent in rural areas. India's power crisis bears examination because it highlights the sheer inability of the public sector edifice to meet the demands of a rapidly growing economy. Let's start at the source. The predominant fuel used in power generation is coal. The mining of the material is in the hands of a government monopoly, Coal India Limited, widely regarded as inept and corrupt. Faced with demands for increased production, the company actually told the coal ministry it is lowering its production target for 2011-12 by four million tons. Most analysts believe when March 2012 comes rolling around, the company will report a much bigger shortfall. In the first half of the year, ended September, Coal India fell short by 20 million tons. Among other fuels, the government has been unable to secure assured supplies of natural gas or alternative fuels to mitigate the coal deficit. Power generation is also largely a government monopoly run by similarly inept and corrupt public sector companies. Despite grandiose plans to increase power generation, the government achieved only 50 percent of its targets in the 20 years ending 2012. A Planning Commission official was quoted as saying that if the power ministry had succeeded in meeting its targets, the coal shortages would have been worse. One of the key risks in the generation of power is environmental pollution. The agency in charge of ensuring that the risk is mitigated is the ministry of environment and forests, which in recent years has become a hotbed of populism. The ministry, in 2009, announced a ban on mining in forests and tribal areas. It also opposed hydroelectric projects in various parts of the country. Its views on nuclear power are also skeptical, led by fears of accidents. Beyond that, because power supply is a concurrent subject, state governments are in charge of the distribution of power to citizens. Mostly, provincial governments supply electricity through state electricity boards (SEBs). Again, corrupt and inept, the utilities are bankrupt entities. A 2001 Planning Commission report on the working of these utilities says, It may be noted that the information provided in the report is not always based on audited reports of the SEBs as the accounts of many SEBs are audited with a considerable time lag. In certain cities like Bombay and Ahmedabad, where the generation, transmission and distribution of power in the hands of private companies, the costs of power are higher but the supply is reliable. I have lived in both cities and thereafter in the US, so my first experience of a power cut was in Delhi. Things improved dramatically in the capital after 1998 when the Sheila Dikshit government privatized power distribution. Just the drastic reduction in the huge (nearly 50 percent) transmission and distribution losses (theft) made more power available. India's power conundrum provides a snapshot of the challenges policymakers faces as they try to cope with the demands of a new India. The Socialist command-and-control system simply does not work. As its hold diminished, businessmen and entrepreneurs showed that without the dead hand of government bearing down on the economy, they could work wonders. But what the noted German social psychologist Erich Fromm called the freedom from moment has passed; the freedom to moment of the modern economy calls for bold political leadership such as greater, crony-free privatization; it demands better-trained, more responsive and
[Goanet] European Odyssey: Swiss Journal
--- Goanet Classifieds --- Enescil, a Brazilian engineering firm requires Engineers, Architects and Draftsmen, proficient in AutoCAD, for their new office in Goa Those interested can email enescil@gmail.com by 15 November 2011 Selected candidates will be sent to Brazil for 2 months training --- This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Thursday, NOVEMBER 10, 2011 Capital http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/10/capital-letter_20.html Letter European Odyssey: Swiss Journal http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/capital-letter/entry/european-odyss ey-swiss-journal-theme-for-a-gandhian-dream Theme for a (Gandhian) dream... Milan's Malpensa airport is a bit like Ahmedabad airport before it was modernized. We arrived there on a hot and sultry day and waited forever to retrieve our bags. I was a bit grumpy; who would expect this in Milan, the world's fashion hot spot? What next, I asked my wife? Rickshaw guys milling about the exit? I want my money back! Within minutes of emerging into the arrival area, my frown disappeared. We were greeted with warm smiles by Beat (pronounced 'bey-ut' though our daughters often say his name to rhyme with neat) and Raul, the Swiss component of our family. As we loaded our bags into Beat's Audi, I looked forward to the drive that skirted the city to take us into the hills of Switzerland, headed for Tessin, aka Ticino. The picturesque Ticino canton is spread across mountainous country and is the southernmost part of Switzerland. Called Italian Switzerland, the region, I am surprised to learn, is, after Zurich and Geneva, the third largest financial center in the country. It took us all of 90 minutes, including a stop in a farm with a tumble down barn where we bought fresh fruit and vegetables, to get to Al Ruscello, the house by the brook, in the heavenly little village of Gordola in the Locarno district. With a view of the northern tip of Lago (Lake) Maggiore, the house is Beat and our niece Lisa's family home. On the northern side, it is surrounded by vineyard slopes that grow the local Merlot grapes. Ticino is the warmest part of Switzerland. Lisa and Beat come here to get away from the hustle and bustle of Zurich, where they live. Really? They need to get away from a picture-postcard city that is consistently voted the most livable city in the world? I guess it takes all kinds. Maybe the civilized 400,000 residents; maybe the smooth flowing traffic; perhaps the quiet neighborhoods and the picturesque lakefront get to them and they want to go rough it out in Ticino. But it's just more of the same: quiet, easy, beautiful...only on a much smaller scale; Gordola's population is just 5,000. Even for just 5,000 people, there is a wealth of local infrastructure. Some of it is evident from the balcony of Al Ruscello, which offers a view of local trains, commuter railroads, private boats and ferries, civilian planes and helicopters for medical emergencies. And it's not just in Ticino; it's all over the country: a display of civic extravagance that towers above the fabled wealth of Swiss banks and the affluence of its citizens. Meanwhile, the superstructure is unobtrusive: the grocery store, the butcher shop, the bakery, the fruit and vegetable store appear modest and innocuous but are lavish with an abandonza of local products. It was this local aspect that also struck me when we visited Ticino five years ago. In a column for a national newspaper, I wrote: ...isn't this what Mohandas Gandhi said when he talked about...villages being self sufficient? 'Every village will be a republic... (It) has to be self sustained and capable of managing its affairs even to the extent of defending itself against the whole world,' he wrote in the Harijan, some 65 years ago, on July 28, 1946. So while the Swiss people exult in their village republics, they also have a global presence with world beating companies in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, machine tools, textile machinery and also in lifestyle brands like Swatch, Omega, Mont Blanc and even ultimately the Swiss Army. Sadly, in India, villages are dens of filth and inequity; major stumbling blocks to progress. As far as global brands, India now finally boasts some companies like Infosys, Wipro and Tata. In political terms, self sufficiency in India means cronyism and a seller's market. But the Swiss version, which I experienced in Tessin, was modern and enlightened. I thought to myself: isn't this exactly what Gandhi advocated? In reviewing Amartya Sen's book, The Argumentative Indian, the
[Goanet] European Odyssey: Paris Journal
--- http://www.GOANET.org --- Protect Goa's natural beauty Support Goa's first Tiger Reserve Sign the petition at: http://www.goanet.org/petition/petition.php --- This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Thursday, October 20, 2011 Capital http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/10/capital-letter_20.html Letter European Odyssey: Paris Journal http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/capital-letter/entry/european-odyss ey-paris-journal C'est si bon... It grows and envelopes you, this city. You feel like you belong here. You understand, mostly, the language. Give me a month here and I will speak the language fluently. Whenever I come here, I feel the language on the tip of my tongue but somehow can never get myself to speaking it. One way is to talk in English the way my friend Cedric Labourdette taught me. I have learned to do the inflections and the expressions so my English is French enough that people can understand. We must to continue. We came in the old Orly airport and take some taxi to Rue de Fondary, where lives our friend, the family Labourdette, in the 15th, close to metro station, Emile Zola. Though our ticket-plane said it would arrive at five pm, the flight was late and it took forever to get our baggage. We reach in time for dinner. Not so late, like in India, says Cedric as I suggest an aperitif; the flight was a nightmare and the traffic on the Peripherique was bad. I don't really care, I told Cedric, You must to give me some wine. Cedric is the only French person I know who does not drink wine. He points me to the bar and says, I must to watch Dominique Strauss Kahn interview on TV. DSK admits he had consensual sex with his accuser. Much difference from Indian TV, n'est ce pas? Cedric was referring to Claire Chazal, the businesslike anchor, who did the interview. He has spent a lot of time in India since 2001; he knows that Indian television journalism is infantile. We sit in his garden and savor his Dad's Beaujolais from the Cru village of Morgon, made from the famed Gamay grapes of the region. That is how starts our Paris trip. We are old Paris hands. The joy of walking and hassle-free public transport is a bigger highlight for me than the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or Montmartre. We walked everywhere, nipping into neighborhoods, darting into churches, sitting by the Seine, listening to church bells heralding the eventide Angelus. Braving tourist hordes, we wended our way into Notre Dame Cathedral to hear the mass and the soaring Kyrie. We walked around Le Marais, the old aristocratic quarter on the Right Bank, marvelling at the renewal that kept the grace of the old and infused it with the excitement of the new. Paris seems to me to be beyond liveability; it is about an innate sense of lifestyle. From mere shop attendants to artists and writers and intellectuals and politicians and executives and businessmen, they casually exude a je ne sais quoi sensibility that is difficult to explain. Old and young, men and women and children, good-looking or not, they make a statement with their personality. The scarf is a classic example. From elaborate wraps to a casual throw-it-around- your-neck insouciance, Parisians walk the street as though they are walking the ramp at a fashion show. Except that they appear not to be dressed by a fashion designer; it's just the fiendishly stylish way they wear their clothes. The overall impression is not of narcissism but of immense self-esteem drawn from good food, good wine, good clothes and a cradle-to-grave social security blanket. But we were not in Paris as mere tourists. Cedric and his folks are our extended family. Whenever we go in Paris, his brothers must to come and say hello and various nephews and nieces and family friends. It is a warm and wonderful feeling that I treasure. That is why Paris is so special. We visited Cedric's grandmother, a regal woman in her nineties, perfectly coiffed and attired, with great social skills. Sitting in the drawing room of her majestic apartment that offers vistas of the Eiffel Tower, Michelin Faure talks to us about Algeria, where she was born. There was in her conversation, even nearly 50 years after Algeria won its independence from France, a sense of betrayal that Charles de Gaulle called the election in which the Algerians voted for independence. She was part of a million-strong community, the pied noir, evacuated to France following the election. The same day, we went to dinner at the apartment of Dominique Charnay. A
[Goanet] European odyssey: Barcelona journal
--- http://www.GOANET.org --- Protect Goa's natural beauty Support Goa's first Tiger Reserve Sign the petition at: http://www.goanet.org/petition/petition.php --- This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Tuesday, October 18, 2011 Capital http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/10/capital-letter.html Letter European odyssey: Barcelona journal http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/capital-letter/entry/european-odyss ey-barcelona-journal How many streets must a tourist walk... Wrong shoes. Bad mistake. Barcelona knocked the stuffing out of my back. We walked and walked and walked and walked. Mostly in celebration of the freedom to walk the streets, which you can't do in Delhi. BCN is a wonderful city, as we all know. A bit like Paris. Indeed the French were early settlers. Nice buildings, great cafes, superb metro, the buzzing waterfront, museums, surprisingly nice beer, awesome food and drink Sangria till the sunrise. Thought of the word anomie in trying to describe a tourist's jaunt through this comely city. All the other times I've been here, it's been on a mission: a junket, a conference, and several meetings. This was the first time I came here at a loose end. A quick search of the web told me my first instinct about the word was right. Wikipedia says that in common parlance, the word anomie is thought to mean something like 'at loose ends.' And you don't get much more common than a tourist, tramping the streets of this city of creative geniuses including Picasso, Miro, Dali and Gaudi. So anomie is the word. Gilded somewhat from the Wikipedia definition, I extended it to mean footloose and fancy free. From our apartment in the upscale Eixample district, we walked everywhere or took the Metro. We went to the Cuitat Vella (Old City) and meandered through the byzantine streets of Barri Gothic (the Roman Quarter), spilling onto the tourist-infested Las Ramblas to the Paral-lel metro station and up the funicular to the Miro museum atop Montjuic hill. We wandered the narrow street of La Ribera to the Musee Picasso. Just north of Eixample past the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's famous church into trendy Gracia and beyond that into Placa de l'Angel, considered home to the finest of the numerous urban renewal projects the city is famous for. But how much can you walk? With my bad shoes and my spasmodic back, I was often reduced to debilitation. Had to sit and down a beer, eat some tapas. So how much tapas can you eat? How much Sangria can you drink? Judging from my own record, a lot. It became sort of addictive; every hour my back would act up and I had to sit. A beer or glass of wine, grilled meat and all was well again. Back to the trudge. This worked the first day; after that my traveling companions, my wife and my New York daughter, got wise to it. And so I had to walk hours before relief. At times, my daughter, clever young woman, would back my complaint of deathly pain and sit down and have a beer with me. It was all very democratic. Sometimes two-to-one against me; sometimes in my favor. Sat in more cafes, I did, than even in Paris. Ate more, drank more, walked more. The only time we didn't sit in a café and chose instead to look at a map to find a recommended restaurant, we stood under a tree at the entrance to a park right beside the Miro museum on the Montjuic hill, a tourist trap in the southeast part of the city. We were all three of us, sprayed with what appeared to be bird poop. As we reeled from the violation, a woman ran out from the park and said, Come, water to clean. Gratefully, we followed her. But there was no water. A man appeared with tissues to help us clean the crap; another man appeared from the bushes with a bottle of water. Such nice people, my wife said. And asked where they were from. Portugal, the woman replied. But the poop spill was substantive, so we hopped a cab to go back to the apartment to get cleaned up. Obrigado, said my Goan wife in farewell to the threesome. But clearly they had no idea what it meant. In the apartment, I discovered I had been pick-pocketed. Fast forward to when we recounted this to our friends. Chechens, they said. Despite my sheer despair at losing all my credit and debit cards, money, driver's license and what have you, I could not help marveling at the slickness with which the threesome had diddled us. As if that was not enough, thanks to my research on my phone, we chose a Basque restaurant for dinner. The street number suggested it was close to our apartment, so we
[Goanet] Bangladesh and Our Foreign Policy Elitism
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Friday, September 16, 2011 India http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/09/india-journal-bangladesh-and-our_16 .html Journal Bangladesh and Our Foreign Policy Elitism http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/09/15/india-journal-bangladesh-and-o ur-foreign-policy-elitism/ When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced he would visit Bangladesh, there were great expectations. It appeared as though ties between the two nations were finally on the right track, backed by diplomatic and political goodwill. Many believed that during his visit, the Prime Minister would make a game changing policy shift in the matter of the international border, trade and especially shared river waters. Such issues have crimped relations between the neighbors. Mr. Singh's visit was to herald a new dawn. His timing was impeccable. Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is much more India-friendly than the previous regime. Her father, Mujibur Rahman, the leader who challenged and triumphed over Pakistan, could not have done so without massive Indian support. It seemed as though as the ducks were lined up and Indo-Bangladesh ties were headed north. However, one of the Congress party's major allies, the Trinamul Congress led by Mamata Bannerjee, chief minister of West Bengal, pulled out from Mr. Singh's delegation at the last minute. Her pique apparently was over the amount of water the government proposed to divert from the Teesta River, which also runs through her state, to Bangladesh. The mercurial Ms. Bannerjee was concerned that her Communist political rivals could make the deal into a political controversy and cause her to lose the support of the farmers in the northern parts of the state. Ms. Bannerjee's decision caused heartburn in the Ministry of External Affairs. In foreign policy circles, many termed the chief minister's behavior unwarranted, obstructionist and downright petty. The tendency of the foreign affairs establishment to disparage local political sensibilities stems from a belief that foreign policy is a highbrow pursuit best handled by the Oxbridge lot. The corollary is that they would allow no moffusil (local) interests to get in the way of Delhi's international relations agenda. Similar thinking pushed Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi into a misadventure in Sri Lanka. Between 1987 and 1990, Delhi sent an Orwellian-named Indian Peace Keeping Force to fight the Tamil Tigers, who had fought a long and violent war in pursuit of Eelam, an independent state in northern Sri Lanka. Faced with an unexpectedly fierce guerrilla challenge from the militants, the IPKF eventually withdrew. At that time too, local politicians in Tamil Nadu had advised against supporting the Sri Lanka government. The elitist mindset that led to India's misadventure in Sri Lanka and the subsequent assassination of Rajiv Gandhi survives two decades later. It is evident from the reaction to Ms. Bannerjee's intervention in the river waters issue. Neither Ms. Bannerjee's recalcitrance nor the protest of the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu against the IPKF had merit. Dravidian parties support for the Tigers never did get much political traction; Ms. Bannerjee, as always, has very narrow political concerns. The issue, however, is not about the limited perspective of state politicians. It is about the inability or unwillingness of the Indian foreign policy establishment to take into account domestic sensitivities before they decide what they are going to do. In 1955, the story goes, Jawaharlal Nehru conceded to China the United Nations Security Council seat offered to India. With his fabled vision and ideals, Nehru realized quickly that India, with high levels of poverty and illiteracy as pressing domestic concerns, was in no shape to take on global responsibility. Even after 56 years, the Internet chatteratti rant and rave about Nehru's decision, arguing that his naïveté cost India a place in the UNSC. Nehru was right. The British government of India was a powerful force, whose writ ran from Afghanistan to Burma. The newly independent government that inherited the colonial mantle faced insurgencies in Kashmir and the northeast as well as the perils of poverty, disease and illiteracy. In addition, while the wealthy colonial government of India played a huge role in the British Empire, the newly independent entity was poor and powerless in the international arena. Many in India and those who live abroad wrongly believe Nehru lost India a Security Council seat because of his arrogant idealism. The more important issue is that any concern for India's standing in the world, and its relationships with other countries, has to take into consideration domestic realities. This is especially true today. With the Indian
[Goanet] The Politics of Destabilization
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Sunday, August 28, 2011 The Politics of Destabilization Failed Protests Targeted Reformist Government The “India against Corruption” campaign focused somewhat obsessively on corruption in high places. Accordingly, politicians and bureaucrats were labelled corrupt. As such, they have to be brought under the purview of an ombudsman; a body whose powers have to be decided by civil society activists, justices of the various high courts, eminent citizens and whoever else Hazare and his cohorts feel should be included. The campaign attracted members who work in the modern Indian economy and are among the most obvious beneficiaries of economic reform. Bright and educated, they nevertheless overlooked Hazare’s unconstitutional political demand to override Parliament’s law-making powers, preferring to focus on the larger, more romantic objective of fighting corruption. These are men and women, incensed by reports of corruption and hungry to hitch their wagon to a messiah; much like the programming code they write or use at work to provide quick and effective solutions to problems; never mind that they are complex such as rural poverty, urban squalor, entrenched corruption, inflation, economic growth and poor infrastructure. The messiah will deliver! Now the drama has ended, the question we must put to Hazare and his supporters is this: isn’t the bribe giver as culpable as the taker? Shouldn’t bribe givers also be brought under the ombudsman? In that case, private sector business and individual citizens will need to be included. Thus the agency would be given powers to haul up citizens, executives, boards of directors, owners. Such a sweeping empowerment holds in its own constitution the possibility of abuse. Creating a super agency that can be abused or run amok is hardly an effective way to investigate and penalize corruption. If you look at recent allegations of corruption in the allocation of mobile spectrum, in infrastructure development, in mining…you will find these are sectors which are still under government control. To deal with this, the government introduced several bills in Parliament. Of the ones that got passed into law, there is the hugely successful example of financial sector regulation. The rest have been stalled because of the paralysis caused by the Opposition’s questionable tactics of stalling proceedings in Parliament. As the Prime Minister said, these “second stage” reforms need political consensus. These have to do with land acquisition, environmental protection, financial regulation, education, judicial changes and a series of other difficult tasks in sectors like mining where vested interests hold sway and power, where the entire state-run system is bankrupt. Hazare's handlers demanded their version of the “Lokpal” bill be adopted by a certain date. This was clearly not in the government’s power to promise because the bill must go before a parliamentary committee. The demand militated against compromise, leave alone consensus. It was divisive and corrosive and seemed to target a duly- elected government. In doing that, the Hazare protest revealed its ultimate goal: to destabilize the UPA government. The agenda seemed to be: create an anarchic situation that the government is unable to control it without resort to force and is thus forced to agree to mid-term elections. What started out as a political demand to carve for themselves a role in drafting an anti-corruption bill appeared to have grown in scope. Clearly buoyed by incessant and uncritical media coverage that attracted crowds, Hazare's supporters raised the ante: derail the government. Meanwhile, after initial missteps, the government managed to put a strategy in place to deal with the protest. Aware there was a sizable, perhaps dominant, segment of the population that wanted nothing to do with the Hazare campaign, the government moved to rally support. More and more voices spoke out, on television, in print and online, against the strong-arm nature of the agitation and its “with us or against us” stance. Anyone who challenged, as a respected television anchor did, the demands raised by the agitators, was branded as “pro corruption.” Faced with adulatory fans in designer T-shirts and Gandhi caps, Hazare’s rhetoric became more self-congratulatory, more truculent and even abusive. He has called the Prime Minister names; the people at his rally used foul language to abuse UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, fuelling renewed suspicion that the RSS may be behind the protest. The crowds also attracted gaggles of hoodlums and petty criminals, resulting in instances of sexual harassment and theft. Also people started looking into the antecedents of this new messiah. On Facebook, a post quoted from an article on Hazare that appeared
[Goanet] Breaking News: Drowning Out a Tragedy
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Monday, July 25, 2011 Breaking http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/07/breaking-news-drowning-out-tragedy. html News: Drowning Out a Tragedy Bombay Blasts Show Up Television News What exactly were the television news crews after when they fanned out in the broken precincts of Bombay on the evening of the serial bomb blasts? They were intrusive, unmindful of the privacy of injured citizens and the grief of relatives of dead victims. Screaming and shouting, they collared eyewitnesses to ask them what they had seen. Worse, they tramped into hospital emergency rooms to focus on blood and gore. The result was a jumble of accounts. Piecing the fragments together, the picture that emerged was distorted, like looking at a high definition satellite television picture in a rainstorm. As the news spread via television, the confusion seemed to grow. The jumbled pictures and stray, disjointed comments from shell-shocked citizens did little to reveal the dimensions of the tragedy. Amid the hysterics, rumors emerged to heighten public anxiety. Emergency services took time to get to the blast sites; police officers at the venues appeared clueless and the government response hesitant. The next day, July 14, the focus changed completely. News channels seemed to have decided to go a step beyond reporting the news. Instead, they came up with an angle: enough of praising Bombay's resilience; time to hit out at politicians, bureaucrats and policemen for failing to prevent the attacks. Their reporters waded into trains, scoured the city, looking for the man in the street. They ambushed hapless citizens and made them perform to a script. There are two problems with this: one, can journalists in reporting an event come to it with a premeditated slant? Can editors accept their reporters passing off opinions as facts? Man-on-the-street interviews are useful as local color but they can't be the story. Or chasing celebrities for their views on the tragedy? This latter approach can only be in pursuit of ratings. Two, what does it mean when you say Bombay is resilient? A city can have a character and Bombay certainly does have a business-like approach to life. Residents of this city carry on efficiently despite crumbling infrastructure, slums, the underworld, housing shortages, milling crowds and a general sense of decay. That is resilience but it is on display everyday, not just at times of crisis. It appears that the day after the blasts, the channels decided that resilience was an old bromide with no traction among viewers. You would have thought they would have upbraided their reporters for hyping the tragedy. Instead, they sent them, armed with a line, to barge into the tragedy once again: hectoring citizens to read from their script. The crews set out afresh to interview citizens in different parts of the city, asking leading questions. The story angle was clear: left to its own devices, resilient Bombay was angry. This city has been the victim of many terrorist blasts. Aren't you angry and tense? Aren't you tired of being called resilient and left to fend for yourself? Aren't you tired of being taken for granted by the government? The questions flew thick and fast as did the changing headlines on television screens. Resilient, tired, angry, they screamed. The television news channels seemed to have decided on the line; their field reporters goaded citizens into confirming the story in front of the cameras. The journalistic practices of the television news media could be the subject of scholarly analysis some distance from breaking news. What is of immediate concern is that such ambulance-chasing tactics stoked public insecurities. Television reporters instigated citizens to berate the government in prime time. This is not to suggest that criticism of the government is unacceptable. Indeed, authorities must be held answerable if they fail or are slow to respond. To do this, reporters need to ferret out hard facts. The analysis can only be effective at some distance from the events. Instant judgments spread fear and rumor at a time when public anxiety is running high. Where they had a chance to calm things down, bring people together in the face of a major terrorist attack, the news channels took a lowly road. They hyped the events and indulged in the worst kind of speculation and rumor. Sensationalism reigned supreme. In the face of shrill attempts by news channels to show up its inadequacies, the government response was restrained. The home minister and the prime minister winged their way to Bombay within 24 hours of the incidents. The prompt steps by the leadership blunted the edge of the media's hysterical coverage. Finally, Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan made an appearance on
[Goanet] English: An Indian Language
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Thursday, July 14, 2011 English: http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/07/english-indian-language.html An Indian Language So here we go again. Language chauvinists in Goa have launched disruptive protests against the state government's proposal that will allow primary and secondary schools to offer English as a medium of instruction. This is in addition to Marathi and Konkani. A bunch of rabble, associated with the Hindutva forces, stopped traffic in Panjim and threatened to hold the state hostage to their misbegotten worldview. It's not just about Goa, it's all over India. Same people who protested against the screening of the film Slumdog Millionaire; same people who assaulted women coming out of a bar in Mangalore; same people who renamed the airport and the railway terminus in Bombay; same people who renamed Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. English, both the language and our cultural heritage, is a convenient horse to flog. Increasingly, though, the burgeoning middle class is embracing it as the key to success in a modernizing country. Thus, while politicians go on renaming sprees, Indianizing names of city streets and entire cities, real estate developers across the country sell their projects with Western-sounding names such as Provence, Belvedere and what have you. In Ahmedabad, Gujarat, I have actually seen commercial and residential properties called Manhattan or White House. Coming back to the Goa language disturbances, even the normally rational Manohar Parrikar, opposition leader and erstwhile chief minister, backed the obscurantist protest. He said if children are educated in English, they look down on their parents who don't speak the language. He is right. The problem with the English language is it subversive. To accept it is to accept the cultural and philosophical worldview of the Enlightenment. For example: reason, courtesy, egalitarianism and dissent. In the Hindutva worldview, these are not values that are accepted. Instead the focus is on superstition, indulgence, exclusivity and conformism. Children schooled in the English language do not easily buy into backwardness. If you look around today, journeyman classes that offer students English-language proficiency are burgeoning everywhere. Parents and their children know that to make their way in the world, English is essential. They have no time for chauvinist arguments against the language. They just want their children to get ahead and like all solid middle class Indians place their faith in education. This is why the Goa government's bold move is admirable. Clearly, the state government understands that people want the choice to choose English as a medium of instruction. Given the state's high level of literacy and per capita income, the pro-English segment is sizable and has rallied behind the government. English has always been an Indian language. In recent years, the number of people who use English as the lingua franca has increased exponentially. A new form of the language has taken shape that incorporates Indian idioms. We are like this only. And it is increasingly accepted. R K Narayan is an early example; Salman Rushdie thrived on it. Today global literary salons celebrate Indian writers in English bringing Indian cultural flavours to the world. I can name at least a dozen and their number is probably in the hundreds. So it is bit of madness for people in India to dismiss English as a foreign language. Supreme Court judgments are in English as are government policies. They may be translated into various languages but in the first draft they are written in English. Vernacular chauvinists, who disparage the use of English in India, are products of a feudal mindset that portrays India as a long-suffering victim of colonial oppression. They draw inspiration from the jingoist ranting of M S Golwalkar in his aptly titled book, Bunch of Thoughts and amazingly enough also from the Luddite fulminations of Mohandas Gandhi in Hind Swaraj. Their India is a closed and diffident victim of unchaste foreigners. Today, such postures appear ridiculous and out of touch with the new, resurgent India. Protests like the one in Goa flare up now and again, led by fringe groups that are communal and chauvinist. But they fly in the face of what citizens want. The protestors assume that the vast majority of the Indian population has no use for English. They are right; only a small section of the population use English in their lives. However, English is the language of aspirations. Even a semi-literate family in the rural areas knows that for their children to get out of the rut, the passport is proficiency in English. Unlike yesteryear, when the language of Milton and Shakespeare was a mark of elite status, in the new India,
[Goanet] The Anxiety of Freedom
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Wednesday, May 4, 2011 Goa Journal http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/05/goa-journal.html The Anxiety of Freedom Panjim: The beginning is mundane. You arrive at a jetty on this capital city's iconic waterfront, tumble out of the car, make an awkward climb to a floating jetty and jump into the boat. After that, it is a liberating experience. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-v-FXiefOPCk/TcD8Es4TDKI/AsI/y57om3akRc8/s 1600/IMG00137-20110426-1741.jpg Within minutes, the speedboat set off to explore the Mandovi River and its backwaters. We flitted in and out of waterways and their littorals, the mangroves that seemed to eat into the river as our boat maneuvered past overhanging branches through the twisting, winding backwaters. A calm descended on us; the outside word ceased to exist. For a fleeting moment of schadenfreude, we thought about friends in Delhi and Bombay, stuck in traffic jams and all manner of urban discomfiture. As we floated through the backwaters, it seemed to me we had chanced upon an undiscovered world. And as we emerged from this mysterious water world back into the mainstream, we were confronted by sweeping vistas on offer by the mighty Mandovi. Rivers play an important role in the life of India. They are considered sacred but modern India treats them as sewers, dumping waste and poisons in them. Most rivers in India are dirty and dying. The Mandovi is, in stark contrast, clean and is used for commerce and transport. Now, it is being increasingly used for pleasure. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jmiRvgqOmNY/TcJP93qyVKI/AsQ/6HzYwPnKoS0/s 1600/IMG00154-20110426-1858.jpg And so it was for pleasure that we found ourselves rolling on the river. With the wind upon our faces and wonder in our eyes, we floated in the waters and saw a Goa that is mind-boggling; away from the beaches and the tourist spots. Time stood still here and the two hours stretched to an eternity. The Mandovi tidal basin is an intricate system of wetlands, marshes and paddy fields, intersected by canals, dykes, bays, lagoons and creeks. The river and the backwaters are governed by regular tides that reach up to 20 miles upstream. Our two-hour long experience on the Mandovi filled us with reverence for the majesty of nature. The river seems eternal; I use the word seems because it is impossible to grasp and define eternity in terms of years, centuries or millennia. And understanding this, the use of seems, puts you face to face with spirituality and its temporal offshoots: faith and communion. Herman Hesse in his book Siddhartha wrote about the restless departures and the search for stillness at home; the diversity of experience and the harmony of a unifying spirit; the security of religious dogma and the anxiety of freedom. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gKaDjBkgvoQ/TcJQDzOeTiI/AsY/moo0oouKOUY/s 1600/IMG00152-20110426-1858.jpg Over the years, I have come to celebrate diversity, to value harmony. Now I am concerned about religion and its effect on, the anxiety of freedom. These imponderables have occupied my thoughts. I have often wondered, wouldn't it be so much simpler to be a man of faith? But where do you place your faith? Of all the religions, I have always been intrigued by Catholicism and its celebration of faith and communion, week after week; generation after generation; across communities, nations and cultures. Each Sunday, believers go to church and reaffirm the dogma that Christ was born of Immaculate Conception; He was crucified and rose from the dead. This they call proclaiming the mystery of faith. They receive the wafer and wine believing them to be the body and blood of Jesus Christ, which they call the Holy Communion, the Eucharist, the thanksgiving. That afternoon on the boat, contemplating the majesty of the river and its various branched waterways, I began to get a glimmer of the spirituality of faith and the mystery of communion. And no, I have not found religion. I still remain firmly a skeptic. But that experience on the Mandovi will make me a tad slower to challenge matters of faith. Call it the anxiety of freedom. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gGPVih8a_IA/TcD6BJ7pPqI/Arg/Vz8cPO5__i8/s 1600/IMG00148-20110426-1822.jpg On our way back to the dock, we stopped midstream for a libation and a view of Panjim as the lights came on. It was a spectacular sight; the neat laidback city on the estuary came alive with its nocturnal personality. It was not Manhattan or Chicago but from the darkness enveloping the river, it was a sign of civilization. In the end, despite the majesty of nature, the lights of Panjim were comforting, a sign that in the end, civilization is what this world is about. As we returned to shore, we were forced to contemplate
[Goanet] A Thoughtful Budget
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Monday, March 7, 2011 A http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/03/thoughtful-budget.html Thoughtful Budget Media Don't Get It Except for The Wall Street Journal and the very thoughtful program anchored by Prannoy Roy on NDTV, the budget got short shrift everywhere else in the media. The general assessment was it was a mediocre or bad budget. Which is as far from the truth as Alaska is from India. Hours on television and pages in the newspapers were full of meaningless analyses. Some said there were no major reform announcements; others moaned about the tax provisions. One particularly egregious businesswallah, member of the tribe that shows up on television each February 28, ranted about the tax on centrally air conditioned hospitals. The growth brigade was out in full force lamenting this, that and the other. The Left and jholewallahs also dismissed he budget as a continuation of the neoliberlal conspiracy to sell India to the West. The BJP, its credibility waning by the minute, made its usual noise. The media, civil society groups, the Left and the Hindu nationalists couldn't have got it more wrong. The media are ill-informed and incompetent. The activists are naysayers; the Left works on a discredited economics model and the BJP, aka the Hindu nationalists, are clueless. Consider the following ten points taken straight out of the finance minister's speech: 1. Food prices are high despite improved availability. The finance minister said this was because of shortcomings in the marketing and distribution system. Held in thrall by the government and random retailers and middlemen the marketing and distribution system is a problem. So the signal is they will open up to organized retail marketing. 2. Inflation management calls for a focus on agriculture. The need is to improve productivity. The finance minister's message was to improve the quality of inputs including mechanization, nutrient-based fertilizers and biotech applications. 3. Also addressed in the budget was the need to remove bottlenecks in value-added farming, including horticulture, dairy, poultry and meat. This is of a piece with the findings of the S S Johl committee that was formed in the 1980s and recommended that at least 20 percent of farm land be given over to value-added crops. 4. The finance minister announced the formation of a public debt management agency. The idea is to depoliticize debt and curb populist spending. 5. Disinvestment of public sector units is a huge problem. Calling it the need to increase people's ownership of these government owned companies, the minister said the government looked to raising 40,000 crore from the sale of their shares in the stock market. 6. Amendment of the banking regulation act is a major announcement. In its purview, private sector banks will be allowed to open more branches. As such, the so-called aam aadmi will not have to battle for banking services that are a problem in the nationalized banks. 7. Also announced was a plan to modernize the stamp and registration administration and the setting up of a central electronic registry for immovable properties. It is a strike in the heart of darkness because real estate is the major source of black money. 8. This is perhaps most important. The government will now do direct cash transfers to people below the poverty line. It's a brilliant move to stop leakages from welfare schemes. 9. On the taxes front, the finance minister has left most levies untouched but has given a break to the bulk of taxpayers by increasing the exclusion amounts. These are a few, and there are many more, of the budget's highlights. It is abundantly clear the government knows what it's doing. The budget is beyond is beyond partisan politics and is a sophisticated response to the globalization of India's economy. It is clear that this government understands the issues and the problems. It is, as the finance minister said, a transition to a more transparent and result based economic management system. I think it is a great budget for an increasingly sophisticated economy. What do you think? Write me. Copyright Rajiv Desai 2011 http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php Bookmark and Share Posted by Rajiv N Desai at http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/03/thoughtful-budget.html 11:18 AM 0 https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7537489380457243489postID=7140337 089527008493 comments http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=7537489380457243489postID=71403 37089527008493 http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7537489380457243489postID=714033 7089527008493 Labels: bjp http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/search/label/bjp , budget http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/search/label/budget , economy
[Goanet] India: Hostage to a Demented Culture
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Wednesday, February 9, 2011 India: http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/02/india-hostage-to-demented-culture.h tml Hostage to a Demented Culture My father, who is in his 90s, suffers from dementia. As such, he has no memory of the past and no idea of the future. He lives in the here and now. Just the other day, he fell and hurt his head. We took him to the emergency room at a local hospital, where the doctor examined him and declared him fit. The nurses cleaned the superficial cut on his head and released him. In the interim, I was heart broken to hear him utter the words, internal sorrow, not once but twice. As I got to thinking about his condition, I couldn't help marvel how closely it parallels the state in which India finds itself: without any wisdom from the past, without any vision of the future; just the here and now. The words internal sorrow are often expressed and lived out in the myriads of petty conflicts and self-centered postures. India is in a state of dementia, largely because of the here-and-now culture that has taken hold since the turn of the millennium. It is hard to discern if there is anything learned from the past or if there are any plans for the future. And let's not blame just the government or politicians; the citizenry has a lot to answer for. At a recent lunch in the Delhi Golf Club, I saw the unseemly spectacle of a child fooling around with the lawn umbrella, changing its incline in dangerous ways while his mother shoveled food into his mouth; or on a Spicejet flight a few weeks ago, where a mother, diverted her bawling son's attention by allowing him to play with the call button that summons a stewardess. Both taught their sons to be oblivious of other people who might be disturbed and diverted their attention rather than discipline them. Such children grow up to be inconsiderate adults, rich or poor, educated or illiterate, who have no restraints on public behavior and the need to be alive to the privacy and wellbeing of others. Thus, on an automated walkway at Delhi's dysfunctional Terminal 3, a couple, obviously well educated and affluent, walked abreast, not giving way, unmindful of me right behind them, in a hurry to get to the gate where my flight had been called. These child rearing practices have bred a uni-dimensional culture. Such cultures are demented in the sense that only a self-serving present matters; there is no learning from the past, no dimension of a better future other than instant gratification. Barbaric rituals and hypoglycemic hypocrisy are the hallmarks of such a culture. In the grip of this demented culture, India is increasingly rich but less modern; increasingly powerful but less civilized. And government and politics and corruption and inequity have little to do with it. Some years ago, I complained to a senior police official about the inability of his force to ensure the smooth flow of traffic. He looked me squarely in the eye and said, I could have five million traffic cops on the streets but still you will not have order; the culture seems to breed chaos. More recent: another senior policeman told me last week the problem is that despite clear-eyed laws, we are told to encourage consensus even in the face of flagrant violations. In other words, adjust! Yet, civil society groups, the media, the business elite and the intellectual set would have us believe that the system works but is subverted by corrupt businessmen, politicians and bureaucrats. The arguments are essentially messianic based on a belief that ascetic figures like Medha Patkar and Anna Hazare; brand ambassadors like Sachin Tendulkar and Amitabh Bachchan or soothsayers like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Satya Sai Baba could restore values and bring order into public life Messianic zeal in Indian public affairs is the legacy of Mohandas Gandhi, who acquiesced in his lifetime to the title, Mahatma. He was indeed a great soul who challenged and ultimately defeated the British Raj. Trouble is Gandhi had a lifelong problem with modernity. His book, Hind Swaraj, was a diatribe against modern culture, which he equated with Westernization. His retort on Western civilization, (I think it would be a good idea) remains in my mind the tipping point in his conversion from political strategist to the Mahatma. In that flippant remark, Gandhi dismissed the Renaissance and the Enlightenment that brought modernity and economic prosperity to the West. Gandhi's view of the West still has acolytes in 21st century India. That is one reason why economic prosperity is there for all to see in India today; but modernity, defined as civil values stemming from a concern for others, is a long way away. The key to India's modernization is education. Today,
[Goanet] American Life 10
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Wednesday, January 19, 2011 American http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2011/01/american-life-10.html Life 10 Hatemongering... New York: It was a jaw-dropping piece of news. Gabrielle Giffords, a young Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Tucson, Arizona was shot in the head by a crazed assassin in a parking lot as she did her regular meeting with her constituents on Saturday January 8. The shooting shocked America. Since March 1981, when John W Hinckley Jr took a shot at Ronald Reagan, I can recall no other such event. The Reagan shooting precipitated a national debate on gun control; this latest one raised issues about the polarization in politics that took hold when George W Bush was president. For me, the news harked back to the night of May 21 1991 when I got a call informing me that Rajiv Gandhi was killed in Sriperumbudur in the southern state of Madras. My heart went out to the family, friends and staff of Giffords. Giffords' immediate supporters probably feel today as I felt on that stormy night in May 1991: the dream was over; political violence has a way of putting paid to ideals. I worked with Rajiv for many years and was devastated at the news of his death. When Rajiv was assassinated, I told an interviewer from The Times of India that he was killed because of the hate atmosphere that was created by his opponents in politics and in the media. Amazingly, this was among the issues being debated 30 years later in America. In a television discussion on January 12, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, told the host Charlie Rose that hate mongering is an important determinant of political assassinations. It brought to mind the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Their opponents had launched a relentless and visceral hate campaign against them. In his cool, scholastic way Remnick endorsed what I told the Times in a fit of emotion some two decades ago. Among the many stories that emerged from the Giffords shooting, one was about Sarah Palin's website on which she had marked targeted constituencies for her yet-unspoken campaign in 2012 with cross-hair targets and one of them was Giffords' 8th congressional district in southern Arizona. In the middle of the reasoned debate about how a polarized hate atmosphere can move deranged people to target public figures, Sarah Palin, the erstwhile Republican vice presidential candidate, the Narendra Modi of American politics, weighed in; she accused the media of blood libel. In turn, her detractors pointed out that her phrase blood libel was anti-semitic. The phrase has been used since Biblical times to reinforce the fundamentalist Christian view that Jews are the killers of Jesus Christ. Like Gujarat's Modi, she lacks sophistication, preferring the use of propaganda to work up her constituents; like Modi, she uses insulting and intemperate words to score over her opponents. A recent example of this was in her tweet: So how's the hopey-changey thing working out for ya? Contrast Palin's tilt in the debate to the much anticipated speech that President Barack Obama gave after the shooting. Rising above the clamor, he said that political differences are real but should not be allowed to become the source of violence. He reached out to his opponents and asked for a compact of civility that would foreswear hate. Watching television coverage and debates on the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords, I was struck by several things. One, the coverage was wall-to-wall. Two, there was a liberal slant to it in that most reporters and commentators pointed discreet fingers at the right-wing cable and radio mafia for hatemongering. Three, they got Sarah Palin embroiled in it. It's much like what the Indian media do except the Americans did it in a sophisticated, understated and well-researched fashion. No screaming and shouting and rumor-mongering, just well-reasoned arguments. Conversations on public affairs in India are sophomoric with opinions based on prejudice rather than facts; debates are in the nature of high school encounters; the discourse as a result is usually twisted and misses the point. Indeed, if America is a post-doctoral democracy, India is still to get into college. Though it may be not the most politically correct thing to say, fingers can be pointed at Mohandas Gandhi's jibe. Asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said, It would be a good idea. In that one smug remark, Gandhi dismissed the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment movements that raised the West to unprecedented heights of prosperity and civility. Consider 21st century India: people urinate and defecate in public; female
[Goanet] Imagine there's a Heaven
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Thursday, January 6, 2011 Imagine there’s a Heaven It Was Easy Because We Tried Goa: Think about it for a minute. It’s New Year’s Eve at our house, Imagine. It’s easy if you try. And because we’re dreamers, our daughters and our entire extended family deigned to spend the evening with us. It was about 20 degrees Celsius officially but in the village where we live it was a little colder. Actually, we’ve rarely seen Goa as cold as to need sweaters. Anyway, we let it out and let it in with mirth and merriment; we made our world a little warmer. We shrugged off the cares that were upon our shoulder and sang and danced as though this eve was forever and a day. We gave little thought that night to the busy years that had gone rushing by us because we still had our starry notions. And spending the end of the first decade of the millennium with the extended family was a treat that all in the world would devoutly wish. Though many who came were friends, the operative thing was they were all family: from New York, London, Zurich, Washington, Bombay, Ahmedabad and of course locally in Goa. It was a global celebration in a village that does not even appear in any map of this haven. Arriving here on December 29 on an afternoon flight on our favorite IndiGo Airlines, we drove straight home and landed up at our favorite Cavala restaurant and rocked for many hours to the band Abracadabra into the wee hours of the night. There was this little girl Jessica, not even 10 years old, who jived with her father to the old time rock and roll. She was so good, I asked for her autograph, which she shyly wrote on a coaster. I will treasure forever despite the fact I may never see her again. Tell me: how can you beat this anywhere else in nerve-wracking India? Is it any wonder that I believed it when a guy, who runs a beach shack in Morjim in the northern part of Goa, told me that nearly 250,000 people were expected in Goa on December 31? For the record, the population of Goa is just 1.5 million. Goa lives and dies on tourism. This year because of the bad weather in Europe (few Americans come), many charter flights were canceled. The slack has been taken up by free-spending Indians. As such, the Goan tourism infrastructure that is geared to low-level European tourists is trying to adjust to domestic tourists, who demand what they can get in Thailand or Malaysia. Local demand will improve infrastructure in Goa. In the end, as in America, domestic demand makes for a more egalitarian economy. Indian tourists are known worldwide to be big spenders. You now see in Goa the big Indian brands like Fabindia and hotels like Vivanta and Fortune that cater to the new middle class. They are better and more professional than the cramped little resorts that cater to British truck drivers in Calangute or the illegal purple, green and yellow resorts for Russian mafia and drug dealers in Morjim. In the end, the growth of high-end domestic tourism may be the savior of this gorgeous haven. Again for the record, there is no McDonald’s outlet in Goa. The fear in Goa is that domestic tourists will bring the Indian sickness to their home, spitting paan, urinating in public, driving rashly and recklessly. Also the new thrust of domestic tourism is a more affluent class of tourists. The question remains: are hippies and backpackers, dubious Israelis and Russians better than high-end Indians from Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore? Meanwhile, as I sit in my verandah outside my bedroom in our house, annoyed at the buzz of crickets and cicadas late at night, I realize it is all an academic wonder for now. These problems are all about the beaches and the “happening” strips. I’m happy to stay in my house and imagine ours is a haven; to be with family is very heaven. Love, indeed, is all you need. And the love of family and friends is a treasure. Copyright Rajiv Desai 2011 Posted by Rajiv N Desai at 3:42 PM Labels: ahmedabad, america, bombay, delhi, Goa
[Goanet] On the Need for Citizenship Education
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Tuesday, November 16, 2010 On http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2010/11/on-need-for-citizenship-education_1 6.html the Need for Citizenship Education When our older daughter began to attend elementary school in the United States, I was struck by two things: first, the school day for all students began, hand over heart, with the Pledge of Allegiance, which was effectively a solemn declaration of loyalty to the republic. Second, on the very first day, the teacher taught them the golden rules: think before you speak and treat others the same way in which you would expect them to treat you. Thus, the first lesson learned in the school was a civic one: respect for the constitution and a rule-based way of dealing with fellow citizens of the republic. In fact, the American community-led public education system started out as a citizenship training program; the idea was to enable and empower citizens in the discharge of their civic obligations and in their quest for economic opportunity. It was a simple idea that drove elementary public education in America: an informed citizenry, compliant with the laws, is the best guarantor of liberty and justice. Some years later, I was dropping my daughters off at one of Delhi's better schools to which they had been admitted after we moved from the US. The picture couldn't have been more radically different. First, it was a school for girls only; students wore a hideous uniform and the ambience was chaotic, with girls running around, pushing and shoving, unmindful of the safety or convenience of others. Later, we discovered that it was a tyrannical place, subject to the Victorian whim nuns who ran it. Our daughters were traumatized; on the academic front as well the school was a zero. The curriculum as dictated by the Central Board of Secondary Education and the National Council of Education Research and Training was lame. The faculty did very little but race through a rote method of teaching; it was clear our daughters were not learning much and that added to their misery. We withdrew them from the school to the disbelief of many; the school was among the most sought after in the city. Far from teaching students the virtues of citizenship, all that the school did was to prepare their students to take board examinations in which only very high scores can ensure admission to an even more dysfunctional university system. The psychological costs that students have to pay are never addressed, simply dismissed by teachers and parents alike as collateral damage in the race to succeed at examinations. We pulled them out of the twisted system and enrolled them in an international school, where they blossomed. In the current debates over education policy, the focus has centered on reforms at every level: elementary schools, institutes of higher education, vocational training. Issues of private ownership versus government control, entry of global education providers, certification and accreditation are among others that have been raised. What seems to have been missed completely is the civic aspects of education. Respect for you neighborhood, your city, your state, your country needs to be instilled at a very early age without crossing the line to become chauvinism. Sadly, most political parties, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party, have fallen into the trap of jingoism. The Congress, for its part, has a version; let's call it patriotism in which there is still a chip on the shoulder that prevents a realistic assessment of the Indian situation. Chest thumping or moaning and groaning about inclusive growth is hardly the way to instill civic values in the citizenry. The so-called youth dividend can only succeed if the education system instills a sense of civil values in the populace, beginning right from primary school. The proposition is not that difficult to grasp. Civic authorites cannot prevent people from urinating, defecating or spitting paan on the streets; they cannot keep people from driving like lunatics, blowing their horns or jumping a line or being smelly because they have never heard about deodorants. But they can teach their children to respect public spaces. In Delhi, for example, the Metro is a big hit as are the new low-floor sleek buses; new flyovers, expressways and underpasses, even parks and landscaped streets and slick new bus stops. In the next decade, a whole generation will grow up used to these public goods. What schools need to teach them is how to use these and not be vandals. Amazingly, none of this is part of the academic agenda. On the right, people talk about India shining with its economic growth. On the left, people talk about hunger, poverty and disease. Smack dab in the middle, we need to teach young people, increasingly more exposed to the world through the
[Goanet] The Monsoon Magnificence
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Thursday, July 15, 2010 Goan Journal http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2010/07/goan-journal.html The Monsoon Magnificence You've got to be a hardy soul to come to Goa in the Monsoon. It rains incessantly and does drumbeats on the roof; the percussion is as good as anything Max Roach did, especially on his album, Money Jungle, with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. Still, as Credence Clearwater Revival sang, the rain keeps falling. And I don't really wonder, amid the sophisticated Roach-style beat of the rain on my roof, who'll stop the rain. Goa in the rains is a sight for sore eyes and a balm for troubled minds. It has a calming effect: nothing really matters, except the drain of stress. We start from the chaotic airport. You can deal with it because in minutes you can get in the car and leave India behind. Goa is our foreign destination where people are civilized, traffic is orderly and everyone looks out for others. The skies open up with huge rainfall and all you want to do is stop the car, jump out and let yourself be drenched in the Monsoon rains. We arrived in Goa on an afternoon in July and later that evening drove to Chicalim in the north to celebrate a friend's birthday. His place is approximately in the middle of nowhere. I may be wrong but even the Portuguese didn't venture there. And so we're in our car, negotiating the twist and turns to get there. Once we reach his people-friendly house with its inviting come, hang out charm, we forget the world. The only bummer was Germany destroyed Argentina in South Africa; the South Americans were the team I picked to win the Cup. Goa in the rains is a magical mystery tour. Green is the operative color; moss is your ground cover and the world stands still. Here, you add years to your life. Time is stretched out. Read a book, listen to music, and drench yourself in the rain: you can do stuff you wish you could do in the stressed out reality of India. In the rain-lashed season, Goa can also be an adventure. There are few places open for lunch or dinner; all the beach shacks are closed; in fact, even the beaches are run over by the sea. You have to be resourceful and find spots that are open. You may have to travel a fair distance or experiment with all manner of local places. But the best thing is to eat at home and then find a rock on a beach, sit on it and watch the thunderous majesty of the sea in the rains. We've had a place here since the turn of the century. More important, this is my sasural; my wife's family is from Goa and our place is just 15 minutes away from her family home. Also, we have other family here in Chicalim and Aldona and good friends in Panjim, Anjuna and Colvale. For us, this emerald haven is not a vacation spot; it is our second home. We feel we belong here. Plus Goa is full of random surprises. At dinner one evening at a local diner, a bunch of people showed up. There was this handsome guy sitting in a chair right next to me. He pulled out a bottle of scotch and offered to share it. We demurred but he was insistent. So we had a drink from his bottle. He said his name was Kumar Gaurav, son of the famous Bollywood tragedy king, Rajendra Kumar. He said he was married to Namrata Dutt, daughter of Sunil Dutt and Nargis. As such he is the brother-in-law of Priya Dutt, the Congress MP and Sanjay Dutt, the actor of Munnabhai fame. We struck up a conversation in this diner called Starlight and he was insistent to take us to his house in Parra, a suburb of Mapuca. It turned out to be a gorgeous place, slick and breathing of wealth. He showed us around and when we left after 15 minutes, we drove away impressed. In the end, we marvelled that something like this could happen in such an impromptu fashion. But that's Goa for you. You meet some guy in a restaurant or in a market or a grocery store and you become friends. That's the social part of Goa. And it's wonderful. What is equally spectacular is the majesty of nature here, especially in the Monsoon. As I sit in my verandah, surrounded by a cathedral of coconut trees and watch and hear the rain falling, I am struck by the bounty of nature. As the rain stops, the garden is awash with fireflies everywhere, lighting up, for a brief moment, the darkness of the clouds. My friend Aasif, an architect, who lives here, having come from 30-plus years in London, tells me that the glow in the fireflies is about sex. It's their penis that lights up with a view to attract to females, he says. He also added that fireflies are rapidly becoming extinct with growing urbanization. Because of city lights, their glow doesn't show and they cannot mate. Aasif can identify bird calls, butterflies and constellations in the sky. He lived for 30 years a busy life in London but now he is a
[Goanet] American Life 5
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Monday, June 21, 2010 American Life 5 Washington DC: A New Home The five-day-long party that was DC began in New York City’s West Village on a Saturday afternoon. My daughter and I stood outside a café, waiting for our friends Gautam and Rita and their daughter Brinda and her husband Peter. Suddenly, amid the general noise of revelry that envelops this oh-so-cool segment of Manhattan, I heard someone call my name in the distance. I looked around because my name is not a common one in these parts. And there across the street, I saw Gautam waving at me. We crossed the street to join them and to begin what turned out to be five rollicking and fulfilling days. Gautam has served as the senior most editor in The Times of India and is the founding editor of Bombay’s newest daily, DNA. Above all, he is a rock star whose rendition of Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog can get even a lead-footed person to do gyrations on the dance floor. In his days in India, he was a regular at our house; all our friends took to him and he became part of our family. So there we were on the brink of a raucous evening in Manhattan. We went to a blues bar and ate dinner in a French bistro before traipsing home with a song let out of our heart. It was a memorable evening, even if we had too much wine. When good friends get together in a happening place like the West Village, you can be sure it will be a highlight (dare I be unsubtle and say: yes there were lights and yes we were high). So after an evening in the Village, Sunday morning we hit I-95 en route to Washington DC. For all the 229 miles of the way, I luxuriated in the company of Gautam and Rita. I was excited to be going to DC after too many years. The plan was to arrive at their place in Chevy Chase in the early afternoon and then head out to the home of their friends for dinner and singsong with guitars. These are friends whom we’d met last summer at the wedding in Vermont where Brinda and Peter took their vows in a gorgeous farm in Vermont. Can people talk to each other for five straight days and never once be bored? With Gautam and Rita, it’s not only easy but enjoyable. We talked about the whole world, about rock’n roll, The Beatles, Indo-US relations, and what have you. The most amazing thing about being with them is you can talk about foreign policy, international relations, and world economics but also about music, going back to the good old days of Hindi film music and classic rock. A friend christened Rita “chopdi (book) aunty,” given her voluminous knowledge of just about everything under the sun, starting from education to Bollywood. You want to know about the latest issues on education? About the lives of Bollywood stars? About the story behind the Oscar awards? About the buzz in DC, New York, Boston, Bombay or Delhi? Rita’s got it all down pat. She is the source: wire service, book of quotations, thesaurus and encyclopedia, all rolled into one. What she doesn’t know is not worth knowing. Coming into Washington after a long gap was an immensely interesting prospect for a public affairs junkie like me. This is the capital of the world, where leaders from all nations come to get things done. It’s also the first time I came to DC where Martin Luther King’s dream had come true in the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Obama is from my hometown, Chicago. As we drove around the city, I was struck by the small-town beauty of the place. There were flowers everywhere and people were dressed in their spring best: linens and cottons. To read the newspapers and to watch television, you’d expect a sense of doom and gloom. I saw none of it. The cafés were full; restaurants were abuzz and people were walking about with a spring in their step. “There’s John Podesta,” said Gautam as we drove around the downtown area, close to the White House. He was crossing the street. Podesta, another Chicago boy, served as White House Chief of Staff for three years under Bill Clinton. As you drive around the stressful streets of Delhi, you are not likely to see any person of any consequence, surrounded as they are by security and minions. And walking? What a contrast! There is an understated elegance about Washington. The city seems to know it is the center of the world. It doesn’t have to pretend. Economic upturns and dips have little impact on it. Everyone seems to be confident about their jobs and income. True, there are neighborhoods in the city where America’s recession-hit economy is playing havoc. But to walk the streets, you feel the sense of power and stability. While it seems not to have the buzz of New York or the vitality of Chicago or the laid back sophistication of San Francisco or the in-your-face character of Los Angeles, Washington stands for stability. It
[Goanet] American Life 4
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Monday, June 14, 2010 American Life 4 Chicago, My Kind of Town On a bright beautiful spring morning, I landed in Chicago, where I have a family of friends. The airport, the city, the drive to River Forest is full of fond memories. This is the town that I’ve come back to, over and over again. It’s just gotten better and better. What more can I say: I love Chicago. As I lug my bag across the street and wait in the vestibule for my friend Prakash to pick me up, I wonder about my past life in this city of broad shoulders. Usually, it was my wife and two excited kids, who would welcome me back from wherever. “Love ya, Dad,” my daughters would trill as I kissed my wife. What a warm comforting feeling it was! In the event, Prakash pulls up to the sidewalk and gives me a hug. I am back home, I think to myself as I snap the seatbelt on, en route the familiar way to the Oak Park-River Forest area, where we lived. As we drive to Prakash’s house in River Forest, I look out the window and go into a reverie of my happy days in Chicago. It’s my town, the toddlin’ town; I ask myself: why did you ever leave here? The existential question was in my mind as we drove through the familiar streets. What I looked forward to was a wonderful week with friends and the sheer joy of being there. This is the city where I got my first job, bought my first house; where my daughters were born. I lived here in the heady days, when my fellow columnist in the Chicago Tribune newspaper invented the word “yuppie.” It is the city of jazz and blues but also the Chicago Symphony, one of the finest orchestras in the world. Chicago is where I grew up and learned the lesson of self sustenance. It wasn’t easy but the city permeated me with a sense of optimism: tomorrow will always be better than today. You can do anything, do what you want: that was the city’s ethic. And it has become better and better, leaving me breathless with wonder. This is a city that has transformed itself from the Rust Belt blues into a shining example of urban renewal. On hindsight, it seems to be obvious that Chicago would throw up a Barack Obama. The reveries came to an end as Prakash pulled into his driveway. We got my bag out and I settled myself into the bedroom that his wife Alice reserves for me. Then I came down and waited over a beer for our fiends to show for the traditional pizza party when I arrive. We had the pizzas and the beer and talked late into the night. My family of friends was keen to know about India and its ways. They wanted to talk to me about politics, the economy and every other aspect of India; they had many questions. For my part, I was just grateful to be there in the city that I love and the friends whom I miss fiercely. Clearly though, there was no escaping the questions. I had to answer. But my message was clear: I’m here to escape from the loud ineptitude of India. Nevertheless, development issues like jobs, equity, education and health care are important to my friends. This goes back many decades to the 1970s when we had formed India Forum to discuss and debate the issues. Among the members of India Forum in Chicago was Satu “Sam” Pitroda, in whose office we held our Sunday morning meetings. In the early 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi appeared on the scene; many of us, including Sam, moved to India in the hope of changing things. What we did not reckon for was the strange ways of politicians and the slimy ways of bureaucracy. They opposed us tooth and nail. Our optimism was singed by the relentless cynicism of the bureaucracy and the political establishment. In the end though, we succeeded beyond our wildest imagination. From being a basket case, India is now regarded as an engine of global growth. We have “development” in India now but it is subverted into mediocrity by the knot of ignorant politicians and venal bureaucrats. The Indian system is simply unable to deal with growth and the concomitant demands for fairness and transparency. That evening in Chicago over pizza and beer, old friends met and talked about the issues. As the evening wore on and I was steeped in being there; it was almost as if I had never left. Dreamy as I was, I felt it was late and I had to go home. Our house was barely a mile away from where my friends live. It may have been the beer. I lost track and thought I had to go home to my wife and daughters. It is so easy within hours of arriving in Chicago to believe I had never left. I know how to get around, driving myself. I know where to shop, where to eat, where to drink. I know the city like the back of my hand. It is a city I proudly call my home. It’s a place where the ordinary citizen can enjoy music, plays, festivals…all free; all in celebration of the citizen. Back in Delhi, I find the city only
[Goanet] Bureaucratic Subversion
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Monday, June 7, 2010 Bureaucratic http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2010/06/bureaucratic-subversion.html Subversion The Bane of New India When the government steered the Right to Education bill through Parliament, those of us who had fought for it through two decades were pleased. The important thing, however, is how the act would be notified. The language of the bill leaves a lot of gray areas. And well it might because bureaucrats wrote it and they will fully exploit the obfuscation. For example, they will come down heavily on private schools that cater to the poor in urban slums and rural areas and impose impossible conditions that such enterprises simply cannot fulfill. There are too many vested interests: the government school system; the high-end private schools that have bribed their way into existence and above all, the alternative NGO schools that survive on government subsidies. With such firepower arraigned against it, the RTE bill will go the way of every well-meaning initiative of the government such the NREGA or the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan. The net outcome will be zero. And so everything will come to naught. If this sounds cynical, then you should listen to my story about a small community on the outskirts of Delhi. This is an upscale community of successful professionals that includes about 30 houses. It is an oasis in the chaos of Delhi, with trees and birdsong. It's a wonderful community where neighbors meet frequently to have a drink or dinner and to discuss issues of India's development. The people who live there are respected professionals whose interests span public health, wildlife conservation, media, law and what have you. The community came into being in the early 1990s. Because it was part of rural Delhi, it was offered no municipal services like water, sanitation or roads, never mind street lighting. Like pioneers, residents made their own arrangements: people built septic tanks, drilled bore wells and got their own garbage collection. Power was an issue until distribution was privatized, when the resident association petitioned the distribution company. Realizing these were high-end customers, the company quickly ensured that power cuts and fluctuations were minimized. On the roads issue, the resident association petitioned the Delhi government arguing from a taxpayer viewpoint; so the road was built: badly but still motorable. It took several years including the fact that the first allotment of several crores was swallowed by the pirates of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Now this community faces water a problem because the bore wells have dried up. This is precious real estate but more important it represents the single major investment for most of the residents. Without water, their homes are worth nothing. The association applied to the Delhi government for permission to drill a community bore well. It seemed a logical and eco-friendly thing to do. But between the local water authority, the local police and several residents who had bribed their way into deepening their bore wells, the application has been kicked around from pillar to post. So here you have this huge Indian-style standoff: members of the community paid bribes to the water authority and the police to deepen their wells. As a result, other residents found their bore wells running dry. When the association sought to build a community well, some residents and recipients of their bribes in the water authority and the local police struck a dissonant note. Between corrupt citizens, bureaucrats, police officials and local politicians, this pleasant community is caught in a cleft. It needs the rule of law to be enforced but the local government: the municipality and the police, are locked in various corrupt projects. Residents of the community are not without influence but stand divided because several members, who own houses there, are compromised because the deals they did to buy their houses don't stand up to scrutiny. This is a small localized community problem, to be sure. But its implications have a larger footprint. Even though the union government has introduced various enlightened policies, local governance is caught in a medieval time warp. In the matter of schools as well: a sweeping and enlightened law stands to be subverted on the rocks of bad governance. In notifying the RTE act, many activists fear the education bureaucracy will not let private schools for the poor flourish. Then there is the issue of the RTE-mandated 25 percent quota for poor children in private schools. The vast majority of private schools, however, cater to the poor. So how will the quota be enforced? Clearly, framers of the bill were thinking of the elite private schools with no acknowledgment of the private schools for the poor. Whether it
[Goanet] We Are Also Part of India's Democracy
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Friday, May 21, 2010 We http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2010/05/we-are-also-part-of-indias-democrac y.html Are Also Part of India's Democracy Keynote Speech at the Exchange4Media PR Summit The Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi May 21, 2010 Good morning, Thank you, Anurag and your team, for organizing this PR Summit. I hope that over the years it grows and becomes a major platform for dialog within our profession. I have titled my remarks: We Are Also Part of India's Democracy. I have stated my SOCO up front. As PR professionals, we are as much a part of India's democracy as we are of its economy. But PR is also about telling stories. So I'm going to tell you a story that I hope will give you a perspective on how our business has grown and developed and the challenges it faces. Many years ago, when I came to India to set up IPAN, I used to tell the story of how PR became the world's second oldest profession. We all know what the oldest profession is. It has to do with Moses, who led the chosen people out of Egypt with the Pharaoh hot in pursuit. They found themselves stranded on the banks of the Red Sea. This was a huge problem. So Moses got his core strategy team together to look at the options. There seemed to be none. His defense guy said they should stand and fight. His finance guy, who understood the salubrious impact of money, suggested the possibility of buying them out. But in their heart of hearts, his key advisers knew only a miracle could save them. Don't worry, said Moses, I will part the sea and we will walk across to liberty. At that point, his PR guy spoke up, Sir, if you can do that that I will get you ten pages in the Old Testament. So Moses performed the miracle and got his ten pages in the Old Testament. I told this story 20 years ago, when PR consulting was a little known business. Times were simpler but mindsets were rigid. The press (and it was just the print media those days) did not entertain any releases or information from the corporate sector. For its part, the corporate sector saw PR as a free advertising. Meanwhile clever operators like the public sector and some private sector firms managed to play the press like a fine-tuned fiddle. Just think, the public sector delivered very little but no questions were asked. It was the holy cow. I can remember the PR strategy of a Calcutta-based public sector firm: Kill the story and I'll get you two tickets on the Rajdhani. Some private entrepreneurs also cultivated friends in the press to oppose liberalization and reform. The notorious Bombay Club fought tooth and nail against foreign investment and against any changes in the license-permit raj. Fast forward two decades and we find that the media are friendlier; our profession is recognized in its own right and is a significant player in the fast growing economy. Recent developments have however cast a shadow that could affect our standing. I am referring to the current media attention on the role of PR firms in influencing choices in public policy. It is not at all surprising that the telecom sector is the source of stories about corporate sleaze and government corruption. Why do I say it is not surprising? Let me digress a little: to the early 1980s, when I lived in the US. We had formed a group called India Forum that met weekly to consider developments in India. All of us were struck by the emergence of Rajiv Gandhi. In the event, many of us including my good friend Sam Pitroda took our first tentative steps to engage with India. Our focus was on telecom because that was Sam's field. At the time, the sector was in a primitive state. There were not enough phones and existent phones rarely worked. It was a project to make long distance calls, impossible to get connections. In fact, it was said that the entire telecom bureaucracy made money from providing out-of-turn connections. We took the matter up with Rajiv Gandhi. The task was to convince him that the sector was vital to economic growth and to change political mindsets that held telephones to be a luxury. As such, Rajiv put his heft behind our recommendation that India should go in for digital rather than analog technology. The rest is history. But the baggage is still there. The telecom sector seems to be a magnet for sleaze and murkiness as the recent controversy shows. And our profession risks being stigmatized unless we make some forceful interventions. In a recent email interview to a leading financial paper, I was asked about lobbying and what the reporter saw as concomitant sleaze. She did highlight my responses in her front-page story and I believe I may have even helped her re-look at the lobbying controversy in which it was alleged that a PR firm tried to influence the choice of telecom minister and subsequently telecom policy.
[Goanet] Good Policy
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Wednesday, April 21, 2010 Good Policy http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2010/04/good-policy.html Need Governance In many ways, the government has embarked on a path breaking route, in terms of both domestic and foreign policy. To begin with, there is the issue of fertilizer subsidies. In one fell swoop, by targeting subsidies on the basis of nutrients, the government has changed the game. Now farmers will look to nutrients other than urea. This will increase yields dramatically. Urea-based fertilizers were good and government policies championed their use. Over the years, it became clear that they had passed the point of diminishing returns. Everywhere in the world, governments promoted suplhur-based and other nutrients in the mix to increase yields and protect the soil. With all the noise about food inflation, the government has pointed to the exploitative role of middlemen in the journey that farm products make from the fields to the market. The finance minister made several references to the need for organized retail in the grocery business, most recently at the CII national meeting in Delhi. Coming to taxes, the finance minister, in his budget speech, cut individual taxes while increasing some indirect levies. The idea is sterling: put more money in the hands of middle class families and let them decide what they can or cannot afford. If I am considering buying a car and it costs a few thousand rupees more, it is my call. By putting economic decisions in the hands of citizens, the government has made a major paradigm shift. On internal security, the government has made major moves. It has taken on the Maoist movement in central India with force. The most recent incident in Dantewada only underscored the Prime Minister's six-old assessment that Maoists pose the most significant threat to national security. True, there are complaints of security forces riding roughshod over the militants. But then, Dantewada showed that the Maoists are not known for their grace and diplomacy either. This tough approach seeks not only to contain the insurgents but to send a clear message that this is a hard government that will not stomach violent agitations. On the national security front, the government has embarked on a new course. While initiating talks with Pakistan, it authorized a major Air Force exercise in the desert of Rajasthan to demonstrate its fighting capabilities. It was a brilliant move to invite most defense attaches of diplomatic missions and to leave out the representatives of China and Pakistan. The idea clearly was to exhibit hard power. To reinforce the government's hard line, the Prime Minister went to Saudi Arabia and urged the authorities there to weigh in with Pakistan to control the various terrorist groups that operate from there. It's clear the Pakistan government has neither the wherewithal nor the will to reign in various terrorist groups that have a free run within its borders. A Saudi nudge could go a long way to boost the crippled Zardari government and the rogue elements within its army and the intelligence agency. The emphasis on infrastructure is a key feature aspect of the government's priorities. Roads, ports, airports, railroads are being built. The trouble is that corrupt and inept government agencies are in charge and its users are citizens, who lack civic consciousness. Thus it gets caught up in the bottlenecks caused by lackadaisical enforcement and scofflaw citizens. Many cities now have modern airports; they are like white elephants because the minute you step outside there is total chaos. It's the same thing for the highways. We recently traveled to Chandigarh from Delhi. The road is a work in progress and there are significant flyovers and wide pavements. But there is total traffic chaos. Even as you rev to the top speed of 90 kilometers an hours, you find yourself having to deal with vehicles going the wrong way, underpowered trucks, three-wheeled vehicles, bullock carts, cycle rickshaws, handcarts, herds of cows and sheep and scariest of all, daredevil pedestrians trying to cross the highway. There is simply no policing, no signage or any other accoutrements that go with modern highways. It's almost as though modern amenities are made available to people with a medieval mindset. Tragedy is the police have no authority to enforce the law. Even worse, they don't even know the law. Just recently, I stopped a police car on the spanking new expressway that connects Delhi and Gurgaon to the airports. I told the police officer that the unchecked use of the expressway by two- and three-wheeled vehicles was a major traffic violation. I told him there were signs that these vehicles were not allowed. He told me to mind my own business. The government needs also to show its hard self here as much
[Goanet] RTE: The Devil in the Detail
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Tuesday, February 9, 2010 http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2010/02/rte-act-bedeviled-details.html RTE: The Devil in the Detail Parliament recently passed the Right to Education act that is intended to provide universal and compulsory education for children from eight to 14. For those of us who have been in the vanguard of this nearly two decades long effort, passage of the act was a historic vindication. In the early 1990s, UNICEF led the effort to convince lawmakers that universal and compulsory primary education was India's ticket out of poverty. As adviser to the resident representative, I helped develop an advocacy campaign to reach members of parliament, business leaders, members of the academy and journalists. With evident satisfaction, I looked closer at the act and found there were several problems that could complicate the implementation of this admirable initiative of the UPA government. There are the usual issues of definition; plus, there are plenty of grey areas that could subvert its intent. In the end, the goals of this laudable law could become obscured and it could degenerate into a tangle of rent-seeking opportunities for bureaucrats and politicians. Thus in section 12, the bill mandates that schools shall admit in class I, to the extent of at least twenty-five per cent of the strength of that class, children belonging to (the) weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighborhood and provide free and compulsory elementary education till its completion. Here's the problem with this otherwise beneficent provision: who will define the weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighborhood? It has the potential of turning into slippery scams like BPL cards and ration cards. The act goes on to say that the school in question shall be reimbursed expenditure so incurred by it to the extent of per-child-expenditure incurred by the State, or the actual amount charged from the child, whichever is less. According to most estimates, the government spends less than 3,000 rupees per child per annum or about 250 rupees a month. According to the government's own NREGA scheme, the minimum wage is 100 rupees per day for 100 days a year. That's the rub: if the government can pay 10,000 rupees a year to help a rural laborer keep his body and soul together, why is it so miserly when it comes to primary school children? These are but two examples of how the devil in the detail could sabotage a noble-minded effort. There are other such minefields in the draft that the small band of officials who are transcribing the act into law ought to be aware of and ensure that the notified law closes all possible loopholes. As such, the new law will overcome the threat of poor draftsmanship. It is important to abide by the letter, yes; but it is crucial to uphold the spirit of the RTE act. However, some of the spirit behind the act may already be vitiated. In framing the new law, the government may have left itself open to the charge of bureaucratic thinking. Accordingly, the universe of primary schools is divided into several categories: the first broad distinction being government and private schools. Then, it further subdivides the former into the category of ordinary schools and special schools like Kendriya Vidyalaya, Sainik School, Navodaya School, etc. Under the provisions of the act, these special schools will be subject to Section 12, which mandates that at least 25 percent of students admitted in class I must be from the weaker sections. In the government's thinking, private schools also come in several avatars: aided and unaided, recognized and unrecognized. The biggest chunk of students can be found in the unrecognized category. These are essentially private schools based in urban slums and rural outposts; stepchildren of the government dominated education system, simply because they are for-profit private ventures run by entrepreneurs focused the weaker sections of urban slum dwellers and rural poor. The notion that only the government can provide education and other services for the poor is an outdated concept, dating back to the colonial raj. It is a relic of the white man's burden, a cousin of racism and imperialism. In making government recognition the touchstone of its education policy, lawmakers in India simply perpetuate the colonial tradition of imperial government and missionary charity. For all the names of cities and streets they change to demonstrate their anti-colonial credentials, the ruling elites are nevertheless inheritors of the white man's burden. Socialism, central planning, nonalignment were all part of the same burden. Today the economy and foreign policy are largely directed by the public interest; the economy has been broadly privatized; foreign policy is free from ideological blinkers.
[Goanet] Trick Or Teach?
This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Monday, January 25, 2010 Trick Or Teach? Here is an incontrovertible fact: the majority of children between the ages of eight and 14, rich or poor, attend private schools. Even poor families shun government schools and willingly pay fees to enrol their children in private schools. To cater to this demand, private schools are flourishing, not just in cities and small towns but in villages as well. These schools have been established as commercial ventures. They are of two kinds: recognised and unrecognised by the government. To obtain recognition, private schools have to fulfil impossible criteria including infrastructural demands and have to pay teachers according to the government-appointed Pay Commission's recommendations. Thus, teachers must be paid upward of Rs 20,000 a month as entrants and the scale rises with experience. Of course, schoolteachers should be paid well and the new scales are welcome. These salary standards, however, are daunting for private schools except elite institutions securing funds from trusts and alumni. In the end, most private schools are commercial ventures that need not just to balance their books but also make a profit. There is a limit on the fees they can charge. And yes, in order to sustain themselves, they must have money to pay their bills and provide a return to investors. Most people are aghast that schools can be run as commerce. Actually, all schools are: the recognised ones are eligible for government grants; the elite ones depend on trust funding; government schools eat up taxpayers' money. Any which way, schools are an enterprise and cannot indefinitely sustain themselves without government funding, alumni benefaction or fees. Parents shun government schools because these don't function. Government schoolteachers are political factotums who must perform election duty and schools are closed because they are venues for the vote. Politics always get the right of way. In my neighbourhood, i have to cast my vote in the local government school that is truly a beautiful setting, with huge grounds and trees. But when I go into the classrooms where the voting booths are, I find the rubble of broken desks, splintered blackboards and a general aura of decay. One election agent told me very few teachers actually attend class; they mostly have a side business as private tutors. It makes me wonder: what are the children in these schools learning? The government school system is broken beyond repair and everybody knows that, including the poor. Yet the new Right to Education (RTE) Act turns a blind eye and instead seeks to impose impossible burdens on private schools, not just elite institutions but others catering to the common man. Recognised or not, these schools are filling the gap that government apathy and ineptitude has created. Recently I attended a conference in which participants debated the newly-enacted RTE Bill. The focus of the discussion was Section 12 of the legislation, which mandates: For the purposes of this Act, a school, specified in sub-clause (iii) [special schools like Kendriya Vidyalaya, Sainik School, Navodaya Vidyalaya, etc] and (iv) [private unaided] of clause (n) of section 2 shall admit in class I, to the extent of at least twenty-five per cent of the strength of that class, children belonging to (the) weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighbourhood and provide free and compulsory elementary education till its completion.. Also, the school specified in sub-clause (iv) [private unaided] of clause (n) of section 2 providing free and compulsory elementary education as specified… shall be reimbursed expenditure so incurred by it to the extent of per-child-expenditure incurred by the State, or the actual amount charged from the child, whichever is less (sic)... Talk about obfuscation. Who is to decide who this weaker section and disadvantaged group in the neighbourhood is? And what is the extent of per-child-expenditure by the State? The answer to the first question is: state-level bureaucrats and local politicians will decide who qualifies. It sets up one more opportunity for milking the poor and holding private schools to ransom. In addition, the government's per-child-expenditure is about Rs 3,000 a year, based on an extrapolation from figures provided by the standing committee on human resources development. That's Rs 250 a month! Under the NREGA, the government pays Rs 100 a day for the poorest of the poor to dig ditches. Even that is low. In Goa, the mandated rate for manual labour is Rs 200 a day. The RTE Act is poorly framed. It is currently being translated into policy under the ministrations of half a dozen bureaucrats. Like all well-meaning legislation, it will only create more problems. Government schools will
[Goanet] In the Early Hours of 2010.
--- http://www.GOANET.org --- Happy New Year Twenty-Ten --- This article is from the blog res gestae (www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com http://www.rajivndesai.blogspot.com/ ) you can reach the person managing the list at i...@comma.in Saturday, January 2, 2010 In http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2010/01/in-early-hours-of-2010.html the Early Hours of 2010... A Family Celebration Breathes there the man with soul so dead whose children are alienated from him? When the hurly burly's done, my daughters seem actually to enjoy time spent with me. Nothing is more fulfilling; nothing so soulful. And so it was on New Year's Eve in Goa, we ordered several bottles of champagne while awaiting 2010. There was music and dancing and much merriment. I felt lucky to be me. Those assembled that night were an incestuous mix of family and friends. Above all, it was a raucous lot. Noise somehow seems to be directly proportional to the fun you are having. And our noise started before even the first glass was poured. If a bunch of stone-cold sober people can stir up the pot, what happens after a couple of bottles of champagne? Answer: it does not get maudlin or sentimental or nostalgic, only much more fun as people yell and smile and nod at each other to communicate over the loud music, without really hearing what anyone's saying. They happily pour themselves that extra glass of champagne that teeters between enhancement of reality and oblivion. So what's the big deal about this particular midnight? I think it is a generic birthday celebration when we all get older by the calendar year, never mind specific birthdays. It's not as though human existence can be subsumed by accurate accounting: no, I'll be 50 only in March; or 65 in September or 21 in July and 40 in April. On January 1, everyone is a year older, give or take 365 days. New Year's Eve is a communitarian birthday celebration and as such egalitarian. Random strangers come up and wish you with a smile in their eyes and good cheer in their heart. And you think to yourself, what a wonderful world! You think about new beginnings, rather than endings; of spring, not fall. The key message is renewal, not decay. There's no denying, for many of us, more such celebrations are behind rather than ahead of us. Growing older is a complicated process. At once, you are wiser, more sure of yourself. You realize clearly you will never run a four-minute mile or do a breakdance. The real issue is whether you find value in your life or moan the years that have flown My wish for New Year's Eve is we will continue to have fun with family and friends, not just on mankind's common birthday but on every occasion we can grab. Happy New Year! Copyright Rajiv Desai 2010 http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php Bookmark and Share Posted by Rajiv N Desai at http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/2010/01/in-early-hours-of-2010.html 12:29 AM 0 https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7537489380457243489postID=3206010 90348292 comments http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=7537489380457243489postID=32060 1090348292 http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7537489380457243489postID=320601 090348292 Labels: celebration http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/search/label/celebration , family http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/search/label/family , Goa http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/search/label/Goa , new year http://rajivndesai.blogspot.com/search/label/new%20year
