Monday, November 16, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
PUBLIC , POLICY AND CORRUPTION
"It is important to emphasize that corruption is not simply a developing country problem. Fighting corruption is a global challenge."
Daniel Kaufmann, Director for Governance World Bank Institute
“It is not the earthquake which kills most people, it is collapsing buildings that do.”
(Transparency international, commenting on the huge causality in a Turkey earthquake because of shoddy buildings constructed in violation of building code.)
Corruption and Public Policy
The World Bank has identified corruption as the single greatest obstacle to economic and social development. Even though corruption is a global vice, it is of special importance to the Asian policy makers since the problem is particularly acute in these parts in these parts of the world. This can be judged from the fact that non except three of the Asian nations featured even in the top 50 of the list of honest nations according to the latest Corruption Perception Index released by Transparency International, the Berlin based NGO dedicated to root out corruption. The Asian landscape has been dotted with the graveyards of many a public policy fallen victim to the inexorable force of corruption.
The socio-economic upliftment of a nation requires effective policy making. But if policy making gets contaminated by corruption it gives rise to shadow goals and fictitious objectives with the very actors posited for policy success inhabiting in a parallel universe where personal enrichment subjugates public value. By shifting motivation of the policy community away from the cause of organizational advancement, corruption sets the stage for gradual destruction of the institution and values. Take for example the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant which was created at a cost of US $2.3 billion as a result of power sector reform exercise of Philippines. The goal was to produce much needed electricity for the people of Philippines. But today, 32 years after its construction began; it has not produced a single unit of electricity and is not likely to produce any. The reactor is situated on an active earthquake fault line which can create a major nuclear contamination if the power ever becomes operational. Why did the policy process not envisage such fundamental design aspects of a costly power plant created with sole purpose of providing clean energy to a power deficient nation? Some of the answers became evident when the contractor, Westinghouse, admitted paying a commission of US$17 million to a friend of former president Marcos to secure the contract.
There are two enduring myths about this issue. The first is the myth of ethical tolerability. For those who think that corruption is only an economic offence, a much less moral digression than crime or brutality, the trial of 1993 Bombay serial bombing case back home would be shocking reminder of their intimate connection. When information about RDX landing at the western coast was made available, the custom officer in-charge promptly sent his crack team in the opposite direction. The concerned police sub-inspector swung into action and stopped the explosive laden truck to bargain for a larger slice of bribe and then released it , possibly with full knowledge of its lethal cargo!
The second is the myth of peripheral impact of corruption. Leaders and policy makers , many a time, wishfully deny its overwhelming influence and insist that corruption is only a marginal issue, peripheral to the core issues facing the society and economy. The statistics, given below, of the amount of money siphoned off by some of the top corrupt leaders , juxtaposed with the per capita income of that country, shatters this myth.
TOP TEN PERFORMERS OF LAST 20 YEARS
Name - Rank Who was He ? Corruption Volume GDPPC (2001)
Mohammed Suharto ----1 President, Indonesia, 1967-98 $ 15-35 bn $ 695
Ferdinand Marcos ---2 President, Philippines, 1972-86 $ 5-10 bn $ 912
Mobutu Sese Seko ----3 President, Zaire, 1965-97 $ 5 billion $ 99
Sani Abacha ---------4 President, Nigeria, 1993-98 $ 2-5 bn $ 319
Slobodan Milosevic --5 President, Yugoslavia,1989-00 $1 bn N/A
Jean-Claude Duvali---6 President, Haiti, 1971-86 $ 300-800 mn $ 460
Alberto Fujimori ----7 President, Peru, 1990-2000 $ 600 million $ 2051
Pavlo Lazarenko -----8 Prime Minister, Ukraine, 1996-97$ 114-200 mn $ 766
Arnolodo Aleman -----9 President, Nikaragua, 1997-2002 $ 100 mn $ 490
Joshph Estrada ------10 President, Phillipines, 1998-01 $78-80 mn $ 912
GDPPC:GDP per capita
Most of Money of Rank 1,2 & 6 were made in the Nineties (Data taken from various Global Corruption Reports and other special reports released by Transparency International Germany)
As globalization spreads, the world community is waking up to the reality that corruption is no longer an East-west or North-South issue. Like terrorism, it knows no geographical boundary, race or religion as has been evident from the string of corruption scandals involving multi-national corporations like Enron (USA) & Elf (France)[iii] with ramifications in various continents through contagion effect. Pervasive corruption is already undermining the very process of economic adjustment in the transition-economies of erstwhile communist nations. Global awareness against corruption can be seen in the flurry of creation of several multilateral conventions and declarations like the UN Convention against Corruption (2003) and the OECD Anti-corruption Declaration (1997) in the last decade.
Intensity of global corruption:
More than $1 trillion dollars (US$1,000 billion in Year 2005) is paid in bribes each year, according to ongoing research at the World Bank Institute (WBI). This US$1 trillion figure is an estimate of actual bribes paid worldwide in both rich and developing countries not accounting for deferred amounts and disguised types. This is nearly double than the World Foreign Direct Investment inflow in 2004 and many times more than the entire aid given by rich nations to poor countries. The graph below illustrates the intensity of global corruption.
As per World Bank estimate countries that tackle corruption and improve their rule of law can increase their national incomes by as much as four times in the long term and decrease child mortality by as much as 75 percent .One can see how the issue is vital to the leaders and policy makers of developing economies.
It is in this context one has to view the astounding success of Singapore. Being a tiny island nation with no natural resources it has been able to leapfrog from being a developing nation to a developed one in just one generation .The main reason for this is the near maniacal importance attached to the issue corruption by Singapores leaders who equated its absence with the very survival of the nation. They have created a society where adultery is perceived as a lesser crime than taking a small amount bribe from a government contract! Barely 40 years ago, its founding father Lee Kuan Yew, on a visit to Sri Lanka, had publicly mentioned that Sri Lanka is their role model which are trying hard to emulate. While most nations of Asia appear to be fighting a losing battle against this malaise, Singapore has found itself in the top ten honest nations for last several years. As one of my Vietnam friends once commented Vietnam had defeated a superpower , but the superpower of corruption seems to be defeating it now! For achieving prosperity, the Vietnamese leaders have attched top priority to design and implement a nation wide anti-corruption grid and that too with the help of policy specialist from Harvard and Princeton!
Where to start first? The Procurement Sector?
There is no doubt that anti-corruption has to be a Top-Down approach. If the leadership and the major institution of a country or society are not purged of this virus, no management at down-stream level will succeed. But, if the apex policy makers themselves are already affected, then can they or rather will they create, implement policies to curb this menace. So we are faced with the classic chicken-and-egg syndrome! But, given a chance to reform, and mandate to design policies at sectoral level, the question arises is where to start? Or where to give the biggest push ? This is outlined below:
A major portion of public expenditure at every level of government is incurred through the procurement of goods and services and construction activities. Typically, procurement accounts for 20% of central government expenditure and even up to 50% public expenditure in developing countries (including construction contracts). The range of government contracting and purchasing is vast, from weapons systems and large industrial plants to raw materials and mundane services. Poor procurement management has an impact beyond project implementation and functioning of the public agency concerned .It also delays and dilutes the intended program benefits to society, constrains the private sector performance. But the most important aspect of this sector is its inherent potential to be abused for corruption, nepotism & cronyisms. The Global Corruption Report 2005 has made this sector the central focus of global anti-corruption movement while stating the following:
Surveys repeatedly reveal corruption to be greater in construction than in any other sector of the economy. The scale of corruption is magnified by the size and scope of the sector, which ranges from transport infrastructure and power stations to domestic housing. Corruption affects both private and public players as they vie for their share of the global construction market of around US $3,200 billion per year. This market represents 57 per cent of GDP in developed and advanced developing countries and around 23 per cent of GDP in lower-income developing countries. [Global Corruption Report 2005]
How important the activities in procurement sector are from the viewpoint of combating national and international corruption can be judged from the following:-
"More than US $4 trillion is spent on government procurement annually worldwide. From the construction of dams and schools to the provision of waste disposal services, public works and construction are singled out by one survey after another as the sector most prone to corruption in both the developing and the developed world. If we do not stop the corruption, the cost will continue to be devastating.
Corruption in procurement plagues both developed and developing countries. When the size of a bribe takes precedence over value for money the results are shoddy construction and poor infrastructure management. Corruption wastes money, bankrupts countries, and costs lives."
(Peter Eigen, Chairman, Transparency International, Germany)
According to the Department of Budget & Management, Philippines waste 22 billion Pesos per year to corruption from the public procurement of locally funded projects. This sum, according to Procurement Watch Inc., an internet based NGO of Philippines dedicated to root out procurement corruption in Government Sector, was twice the budget of the Department of Health. It could have bought 520 million textbooks for school children or build them 63,000 new classrooms. DBM Undersecretary Laura Pascua said that the government lost some 20% of the procurement budget to corruption. In fact the leakage was even greater in infrastructure - some projects were bled to the tune of 50%.[vii] Similarly, in India after liberalization started in 1991, the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) by Government of Maharastra with Enron Corporation, arguably the most costly Foreign Investment project of the day, was marred by allegations of bureaucratic corruption. The first phase of this contract had been finalized in a very short period without recourse to competitive bidding. The terms of the PPA were so favorable to Enron while being so much detrimental to the States interest that it continues to evoke surprise among financial analyst and policy makers world wide.
In the recent Global Corruption Report 2005, Transparency International laid down Minimum Standards for Public Contracting, setting out a blueprint for transparent public procurement. According to Juanita Olaya, TI Programme Manager for Public Contracting,
International donors and host governments must do more to ensure transparency in public procurement by introducing effective anti-corruption procedures into all projects. Tough sanctions are needed against companies caught bribing, including forfeiture of the contract and blacklisting from future bidding.
GITA AND BOMBING THE ATOMS OF CONSCIENCE:
"Without cloud, a million thunders roar ,
Lightning slashes at the stillness of morning sky.. ..
Outside the window, a ferocious inferno grows bigger and bigger,
Drowning in it , a thousand innocent soul’s cry."
.... S.K.Sadangi
63 Years ago, on 6th August 1945, an object, code-named “Little Boy”, fell from the sky on the city of Hiroshima. The conscience of humanity has been shaking since then.
But the prelude to that momentous day which changed the course of human history , started 18 days ago .I will try to take you there in the narrative below …
16th July, 1945, 05:29:45 local time. The outbreak of the day was still a good one hour away at the White Sands Missile Range, Jornada del Muerto desert, New Mexico, USA. Over the desolate desert landscape, that day, a new sun suddenly arose in the sky. It was not the usual sun which rises slowly and silently across the horizon bathing the world with its soft glowing rays. It was not the sun which is the source of life and energy for all the living beings on earth and which has been fondly worshipped by all her cultures since the ages of forgotten millennia.
It was brighter, much brighter than even the midday sun. It was as if an angry sun had suddenly leapt into the late night sky with the radiance of a thousand suns, ready to devour everything on its path. Even though the sky was cloudless, the rumbling of a thunder reverberated in the nearby hills as they were being illuminated brighter than day time with a strange light whose color ranged from purple to green and eventually to white.
Ten miles away, near a watch tower like stricture, you could see the silhouettes of some men in protective uniforms - some lying on the sand and some looking at this grand spectacle from behind thick glasses. They were, after all, no ordinary men. They were an enviable collection of some of the finest brains and best scientific talents available on the planet. Their sole purpose was to give birth to the most awesome power known to the mankind - The power of the atom.
While the jewels of world physics had assembled to witness the successful testing of first Atomic explosion at the Trinity Test Site in this remote, inhospitable New Mexico desert, their leader leaned against the wall, distraught and unsure of what he had accomplished. The awesome display of energy released by this explosion had shaken him to the core. The Nuclear genie had finally escaped the Atomic bottle. Physicists clapped and congratulated each other at the spectacular success of this bizarre dress rehearsal for the murder of a hundred thousand innocent souls, scheduled to take place on 6th August, in Hiroshima. Amidst this frenzied atmosphere, R.J. Openheimmer, Scientific Director of Manhattan Project and the unofficial Father of worlds first atom bomb, wrestled with his conscience silently. Has he done the right thing? Was it ethical to be the chief inspiration behind the creation of the most powerful killing machine? Do scientists have any duty rising above their narrow national obligation? As the giant nuclear fireball moved heaven-ward, floated above a twelve miles high mushroom cloud, in this moment of intense remorse and self doubt, he remembered the following text from his favorite book-The Hindu Scripture Gita
kalosmi loka-ksaya-krt pravrddho
lokan samahartum iha pravrttah
rte 'pi tvam na bhavisyanti sarve
ye 'vasthitah pratyanikesu yodhah
(Viswarupa Darshan Yoga, Gita, Ch. 11:32)
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds is how Oppenheimer translated it in the famous television interview to NBC in 1965. He attributes the above sloka to Vishnu, though actually it is Krishna who spoke this to Arjuna in Gita. But Oppenheimer knew his Sanskrit well enough to understand that Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu only).
The actual Indian translation is as follows:
[Sri Bhagavan said:-I am Kala (the eternal time-spirit), the destroyer of the worlds. I am out to exterminate these people. Even without you ( Arjun), all these warriors arrayed in the enemy camp must die, Translation as per Tatvavivekani, Gita Press]
Though most authorities on Gita translate Kala as Time, Oppenheimer translates it as Death(kalah asmi). Actually Kala is Sanskrit can mean both-Time and Death. Kalajayee, a word frequently used in Hindu mythology refers to conquerer of death which automatically means conquerer of time
Since that fateful moment during Trinity Test, this sloka from Gita has been cited profusely in history and literature of nuclear science. It is probably the best known sloka of Gita in the western world. Roger Shattuk, the writer of the book Forbidden Knowledge, is on record, saying that popularity of this legendary quotation from Gita has percolated to even the school curriculum of west where children routinely memorize it. Since then this dubious connection between Gita and Bomb has spawned many philosophical debates.
After all, Oppenheimer only had remarked, after the Trinity Test, that the scientists who built the bomb had known sin and that he has blood on his hands. It is he who later became the centre of anti-nuclear lobby in post-war USA warning the world about the dangers of nuclear holocaust. How , then could this diminutive effable scientist , a product of orthodox god fearing Jewish family who was educated for ten years of childhood in the Ethical Culture School of New York , came to preside over the bomb factory at Los Alamos and directed the Manhattan Project with such great conviction and steadfast determination ? And finally, why and how did this enigmatic father of the bomb take recourse to Gita on the day of reckoning at Trinity Test site? How could he ratify his actions through this sacred text? In other words, how did this ancient Hindu scripture which had influenced the thinking of some of the greatest peacemakers like Gandhi and Vivekananda, came to serve as the inspiration behind the inspiration to create the worlds first atom bomb?
The answer lies in the fascination of Oppenheimer with Gita from his early student days and the unusual influence it had on him during his life time and especially when he was serving as the scientific director of the vastly complex Manhattan Project that had 130000 scientists, six Nobel laureates, spread all over USA and was the costliest ever scientific venture undertaken in the history of mankind (It cost $2bn then which translates to $24bn in current dollar price!)
Right from the dawn of 20th century, every physicist knew that the Atom, literally meaning indivisible in Greek, is actually divisible into smaller particles like electron, neutron and proton. Just before the war in 1938, Nazi Germany stunned the world when two of its Scientists, Hahn and Strassman, discovered nuclear fission, making the atom bomb a theoretical possibility. To convert such a bomb from theory to reality, one has to control the wayward activities inside the nucleus during its fission. Physicist in every country scrambled to unravel this mystery and knew that the war can be instantly won if the awesome power trapped inside the atom of some special elements like a particular type of Uranium (U-235) can be packaged into a deliverable bomb. The side that tamed the nucleus would tame the enemy. At that time Germany was the mecca of theoretical physics with the likes of Heisenberg, Plank and Schrdinger leading the way. Together, these three scientists probably knew more about the mysteries of atom than all other scientists in the world put together. As the war gathered momentum after 1939, Hitler notched up one effortless victory after another and the Nazi Juggernaut rolled on from the Baltic Sea to the English Channel.
At this moment, physicist Leo Szillard, a Hungarian Jew who fled an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe to US, realized that Germany, with the legendary atomic scientists at its disposal, may beat the allies to the bomb. He knew that if that happens then Hitler would have no qualms to use it and the entire civilization will be at his mercy. He requested Einstein, who, disturbed by the rise of intolerance and hatred towards Jews spread by Hitler, had already renounced German citizenship and settled in Princeton, US, to write a letter to Roosevelt about the possibility of Nazis making the bomb. Einstein wrote the letter, warning Roosevelt about the distinct possibility of an early Nazi Atom Bomb and the extraordinary destructive power such a bomb can deliver. The result was the start of the historic Manhattan project that saw Oppenheimer as its charismatic administrative chief.
Oppenheimer had the uncanny ability to navigate among contradictory scientific possibilities and reconciled the often conflicting egos of the many giants of science working in the project. Without him, the bomb would not have been created soon enough to be dropped on Hiroshima. Had it been delayed by even a few months, the tottering imperial Japan could have surrendered lock, stock and barrel to US - thus removing the very military rationale to use the bomb. In fact when it was suggested that instead of dropping the bomb on a civilian city, US should give the demonstration of its awesome power by blasting it in an un-inhabited area of Japan in front of her military leaders, he was reported to have said that the Japanese would not care to surrender by the demonstration of a firecracker in a desert. US air command which had been routinely firebombing Japanese cities by that time had been cautioned not to harm Hiroshima in any manner so that the effect of the scheduled nuclear blast can be precisely measured by US scientists. Von Neumann, refugee Hungarian Jewish mathematician and the father of modern electronic computer who worked in Manhattan Project under Oppenheimer theorized that the Little Boy (the codename of the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima of 6th August) should be made to blast not when it reaches the ground but a little above it for attaining maximum sphere of influence! For months he had been solving complex equations of physics to determine the exact height of explosion. Few incidents in the history of human brutality have parallels with such cold blooded and calculated mass extermination effort! And yet, Oppenheimer, the lover of Gita could stoically reconcile all of these and led from the front knowing too well about the consequence of his brain child!
Of course, you would not associate these qualities with Oppenheimer if you knew that merely 12 years ago, when Hitler was ascending the steps of German Reichstag in 1933, he was busy learning Sanskrit from Professor W.Ryder at Berkeley University to be able to understand the original Bhagavad-Gita better. After leaving school at New York, he went to Harvard and then to the famous Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge, UK for higher education. There, he was seized by strange despair bordering on psychotic depression which took him to the brink of suicide. It was possibly at that time he was acquainted with Gita and regained his zeal for science.
This ancient Hindu text seemed like a fountain of inspiration to him. He wrote to his brother Frank that Gita was the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any human tongue. So fond was he of Gita that he used to gift its translated version to friends. In a bookshelf, close to his desk inside the Los Alamos bomb laboratory, he kept an old copy of original Sanskrit Gita and browsed it intermittently.[1] When Roosevelt died in April, 1945, he even quoted a sloka from Sradhhatrayamarg Yoga (Chapter 17) in his memorial speech [2]at Los Alamos to describe the life and belief of Roosevelt.
The parallels would now be obvious. In Gita, a reluctant Arjuna is persuaded by Krishna to abandon his sadness and ambivalence to battle on without unduly bothering about inevitable bloodshed of war. He explains Arjuna the irrelevance of the mortal body tagged to the ever changing soul. And finally In Ch 11:32, God solemnly declares that even without Arjun, the evil forces of the enemy camp would have to die as He; Himself has decided to destroy them.
From the brink of suicidal despair he, Oppenheimer, the modern-day Arjuna, was now poised in the centre of the battlefield of virtue and vice!
In the epic battle of WW-II, Oppenheimer had to do his duty, just like Arjuna, to build the bomb without thinking as to how many lives will be lost as a consequence. It was not his duty to decide its consequence or when and where it should be dropped. As scientists, this was a technical challenge and his sacred duty. The decision to drop the bomb lies elsewhere, with the political leaders of the nation, who have the relevant information about the subsequent utility of such a device. Not only did he believe that the scientists have no control over the outcome of their research, he actively discouraged everyone from even discussing the future consequence of the bomb as it would distract from their duty of creating it. He frequently used the term fruit of action a well known phrase from Gita. He repeatedly stressed that the futility of scientists to think about the uses to which their discoveries would be put forward. According to him, they had a right over their actions and not the consequence of it and therefore cannot be held responsible for the outcome of their research. A direct flashback to arguably the most popular sloka of Gita in India would explain the underlying mental process of this distinguished scientist:
(Describing the glory of karmayoga, represented by equanimity, an fruit the Lord now, devotes two verses to an exposition of the character of karmayogi and exhorts Arjun to perform his duties: -)
Karmanyevaahikarastey, maa phaleshu kdaachan,
Maa karmaphala heturbhuh maa te sangvastu akarmani.
(Karma Yoga, Chapter -2, sloka-47)
(Your right is to work only, but never to the fruit thereof. Be not instrumental in making your actions bear fruit, nor let your attachment be to inaction.)
So when, fellow scientist Leo Szillard, whose initiative with Einstein started the very project, wanted to circulate a petition urging US government not to drop the bomb on a Japanese city, Oppenheimer opposed [3]it as he felt such an action is inconsistent with the duties of a scientist. Of course, he could not have been unaware of the subsequent verse which must have resolved the doubt as to what should be the duty of the scientists:
Yogastha kuru karmani sangam tyaktva dhananjaya
Sidhhi asidhhyayosamo bhutva samatvam yoga uchyate
(Karma Yoga, Chapter -2, sloka-47)
(Arjun, perform your duties established in yoga, renouncing attachment and be immune to success or failure; evenness of temper is called yoga.
On that fateful day at Trinity test sites, while Oppenheimer remembered Gita to justify his actions, a few feet away, Enrico Fermi, Nobel prize winning Italian scientist was tearing some papers to fly it in the in the wind like a happy child. The distance the papers will be shifted in the resulting shock wave, he had calculated, will give a rough indication of the nuclear yield. Just before the blast he and Isaac Rabii, another Nobel physicists, had been asking other scientists to lay bets on the odds of the bomb destroying whole world or just the new Mexico desert. None appeared to be bothered by any murmur of their inner conscience. In fact just two years earlier in 1943, a person , no less than Enrico Fermi, the father of modern nuclear technology whose four students went on to win the Nobel, discussed the feasibility of contaminating the German food supply with radio active by-product available from Uranium enrichment plants. The idea was abandoned not because it was unethical to poison a nation but because of its technical complexity and the fact that it was easier to build the bomb instead.[4]
So what were the moral duties of the great scientists and thinkers who went on to build the bomb? Did Oppenheimer never think about the future of the bomb? Subsequent research shows that it is not entirely true. Despite his karmic stoicism, Oppenheimer thought that a demonstration of this bomb over Hiroshima will make nations in future renounce armed combat and resolve their disputes peacefully as no war will be winnable by any nation. In any case , it will save a lot of lives if the bomb helps bringing the WW-II to a close and spare millions of lives of Japanese and Americans in case of a mainland invasion by US. The instant killing of a 130000 in Hiroshima and nearly 50000 in Nagasaki may seem horrendous, but they are small in comparison to the overall causality in the whole war. (Only a month before Hiroshima bombing, 100000 had perished in Tokyo in the firebombing of the city by low flying US airplanes carrying napalm bombs that set fires to a large portion of the city). The bomb did end the war. There has been relative peace and a remarkable lack of imperialistic aggression among nations because of the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) shift in international defense paradigm. Everybody knows that a full fledged conflict will gravitate to a nuclear war which ensures destruction to both the victors and the vanquished. Even though the world passed through the cold war where a million nuclear bombs were made by both superpowers, the 1962 missile crisis was resolved under the realization that, in case of war, the bombs become the death and destroyer of all worlds. So in a way, the discovery in Los Alamos has contributed to world peace, albeit an uneasy one.
Later in 1954, before the US Atomic Energy commission[5], Oppenheimer said I did my job which I which I was supposed to do. I was not in a policy making position at Los Alamos. I would have done anything that I was asked to do, including making the bomb in different shapes, if I had thought it was technically feasible. How strikingly similar this sounds to General Dyers confession in front of Hunter Commission that had he been able to maneuver a canon in the narrow by lanes of Amritsar, he would have used it on the innocent people who gathered in the meeting at Jalianwalabag all as part of his duty to protect the British Empire ! In the book Man and the Universe: Continuity from India, Murray Kempton described oppenheimers words as the words in cold tone stripped of every ideal except the rules of functionalism , a pinnacle of dispossession which is the spiritual payload Oppenheimer extracted from Gita..
This was also what Paul Tibbet, the pilot of the B-29 Superfortress (Tibbet had named the plane Enola Gay after his mothers name) bomber that and dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, had to say in a 1975 interview:
I am proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it, and have it work as perfectly as it did... I sleep clearly every night. In another interview in March 2005, he expressed no regret and maintained, If you give me the same circumstances, hell yeah, I would do it again.
All these people were just doing their assigned job, their allotted karma. Al their statements are eerily similar to what Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, who sent 2.5 million innocent Jews to death including helpless infants and women, said during the historic Nuremberg trial: I was an SS man. I was taught to obey orders without thinking (and not the result of my actions). I was taught from my childhood that a Jew is an enemy of Germany. So I had no problem in sending these people to efficiently constructed cyanide gas chambers. I was leading a perfect normal life all through the time I spent as commandant in the Auswitchz camp. Stunned by the revelation of this dark side of human nature, when American Military Chief Psychologist, Gustave Gilbert asked him whether not even once he had felt guilty about sending so many innocent men to their death, he calmly shot back Does a rat catcher think about the rats when he kills them?
So was Hoess also doing the duty of a Karma yogi? Well, if so, then he was not rewarded but hanged for steadfastly devotion to his karma by the International War Crime tribunal at Nuremberg. The court, which set new trends in international jurisprudence, ruled that blind obedience to duty without concurrent individual responsibility of its consequence is against human value and civilization.
One final question If Gandhi, the apostle of peace and another ardent practitioner of Gita, would have been questioned as to whether the duty of atomic scientists at Los Alamos was in accordance with the text of this scripture, what he would have said? Probably he would have echoed what Einstein once said Science without religion is lame, Religion without science is blind.
( Written on the night of 5th August 2008 )
Lightning slashes at the stillness of morning sky.. ..
Outside the window, a ferocious inferno grows bigger and bigger,
Drowning in it , a thousand innocent soul’s cry."
.... S.K.Sadangi
63 Years ago, on 6th August 1945, an object, code-named “Little Boy”, fell from the sky on the city of Hiroshima. The conscience of humanity has been shaking since then.
But the prelude to that momentous day which changed the course of human history , started 18 days ago .I will try to take you there in the narrative below …
16th July, 1945, 05:29:45 local time. The outbreak of the day was still a good one hour away at the White Sands Missile Range, Jornada del Muerto desert, New Mexico, USA. Over the desolate desert landscape, that day, a new sun suddenly arose in the sky. It was not the usual sun which rises slowly and silently across the horizon bathing the world with its soft glowing rays. It was not the sun which is the source of life and energy for all the living beings on earth and which has been fondly worshipped by all her cultures since the ages of forgotten millennia.
It was brighter, much brighter than even the midday sun. It was as if an angry sun had suddenly leapt into the late night sky with the radiance of a thousand suns, ready to devour everything on its path. Even though the sky was cloudless, the rumbling of a thunder reverberated in the nearby hills as they were being illuminated brighter than day time with a strange light whose color ranged from purple to green and eventually to white.
Ten miles away, near a watch tower like stricture, you could see the silhouettes of some men in protective uniforms - some lying on the sand and some looking at this grand spectacle from behind thick glasses. They were, after all, no ordinary men. They were an enviable collection of some of the finest brains and best scientific talents available on the planet. Their sole purpose was to give birth to the most awesome power known to the mankind - The power of the atom.
While the jewels of world physics had assembled to witness the successful testing of first Atomic explosion at the Trinity Test Site in this remote, inhospitable New Mexico desert, their leader leaned against the wall, distraught and unsure of what he had accomplished. The awesome display of energy released by this explosion had shaken him to the core. The Nuclear genie had finally escaped the Atomic bottle. Physicists clapped and congratulated each other at the spectacular success of this bizarre dress rehearsal for the murder of a hundred thousand innocent souls, scheduled to take place on 6th August, in Hiroshima. Amidst this frenzied atmosphere, R.J. Openheimmer, Scientific Director of Manhattan Project and the unofficial Father of worlds first atom bomb, wrestled with his conscience silently. Has he done the right thing? Was it ethical to be the chief inspiration behind the creation of the most powerful killing machine? Do scientists have any duty rising above their narrow national obligation? As the giant nuclear fireball moved heaven-ward, floated above a twelve miles high mushroom cloud, in this moment of intense remorse and self doubt, he remembered the following text from his favorite book-The Hindu Scripture Gita
kalosmi loka-ksaya-krt pravrddho
lokan samahartum iha pravrttah
rte 'pi tvam na bhavisyanti sarve
ye 'vasthitah pratyanikesu yodhah
(Viswarupa Darshan Yoga, Gita, Ch. 11:32)
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds is how Oppenheimer translated it in the famous television interview to NBC in 1965. He attributes the above sloka to Vishnu, though actually it is Krishna who spoke this to Arjuna in Gita. But Oppenheimer knew his Sanskrit well enough to understand that Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu only).
The actual Indian translation is as follows:
[Sri Bhagavan said:-I am Kala (the eternal time-spirit), the destroyer of the worlds. I am out to exterminate these people. Even without you ( Arjun), all these warriors arrayed in the enemy camp must die, Translation as per Tatvavivekani, Gita Press]
Though most authorities on Gita translate Kala as Time, Oppenheimer translates it as Death(kalah asmi). Actually Kala is Sanskrit can mean both-Time and Death. Kalajayee, a word frequently used in Hindu mythology refers to conquerer of death which automatically means conquerer of time
Since that fateful moment during Trinity Test, this sloka from Gita has been cited profusely in history and literature of nuclear science. It is probably the best known sloka of Gita in the western world. Roger Shattuk, the writer of the book Forbidden Knowledge, is on record, saying that popularity of this legendary quotation from Gita has percolated to even the school curriculum of west where children routinely memorize it. Since then this dubious connection between Gita and Bomb has spawned many philosophical debates.
After all, Oppenheimer only had remarked, after the Trinity Test, that the scientists who built the bomb had known sin and that he has blood on his hands. It is he who later became the centre of anti-nuclear lobby in post-war USA warning the world about the dangers of nuclear holocaust. How , then could this diminutive effable scientist , a product of orthodox god fearing Jewish family who was educated for ten years of childhood in the Ethical Culture School of New York , came to preside over the bomb factory at Los Alamos and directed the Manhattan Project with such great conviction and steadfast determination ? And finally, why and how did this enigmatic father of the bomb take recourse to Gita on the day of reckoning at Trinity Test site? How could he ratify his actions through this sacred text? In other words, how did this ancient Hindu scripture which had influenced the thinking of some of the greatest peacemakers like Gandhi and Vivekananda, came to serve as the inspiration behind the inspiration to create the worlds first atom bomb?
The answer lies in the fascination of Oppenheimer with Gita from his early student days and the unusual influence it had on him during his life time and especially when he was serving as the scientific director of the vastly complex Manhattan Project that had 130000 scientists, six Nobel laureates, spread all over USA and was the costliest ever scientific venture undertaken in the history of mankind (It cost $2bn then which translates to $24bn in current dollar price!)
Right from the dawn of 20th century, every physicist knew that the Atom, literally meaning indivisible in Greek, is actually divisible into smaller particles like electron, neutron and proton. Just before the war in 1938, Nazi Germany stunned the world when two of its Scientists, Hahn and Strassman, discovered nuclear fission, making the atom bomb a theoretical possibility. To convert such a bomb from theory to reality, one has to control the wayward activities inside the nucleus during its fission. Physicist in every country scrambled to unravel this mystery and knew that the war can be instantly won if the awesome power trapped inside the atom of some special elements like a particular type of Uranium (U-235) can be packaged into a deliverable bomb. The side that tamed the nucleus would tame the enemy. At that time Germany was the mecca of theoretical physics with the likes of Heisenberg, Plank and Schrdinger leading the way. Together, these three scientists probably knew more about the mysteries of atom than all other scientists in the world put together. As the war gathered momentum after 1939, Hitler notched up one effortless victory after another and the Nazi Juggernaut rolled on from the Baltic Sea to the English Channel.
At this moment, physicist Leo Szillard, a Hungarian Jew who fled an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe to US, realized that Germany, with the legendary atomic scientists at its disposal, may beat the allies to the bomb. He knew that if that happens then Hitler would have no qualms to use it and the entire civilization will be at his mercy. He requested Einstein, who, disturbed by the rise of intolerance and hatred towards Jews spread by Hitler, had already renounced German citizenship and settled in Princeton, US, to write a letter to Roosevelt about the possibility of Nazis making the bomb. Einstein wrote the letter, warning Roosevelt about the distinct possibility of an early Nazi Atom Bomb and the extraordinary destructive power such a bomb can deliver. The result was the start of the historic Manhattan project that saw Oppenheimer as its charismatic administrative chief.
Oppenheimer had the uncanny ability to navigate among contradictory scientific possibilities and reconciled the often conflicting egos of the many giants of science working in the project. Without him, the bomb would not have been created soon enough to be dropped on Hiroshima. Had it been delayed by even a few months, the tottering imperial Japan could have surrendered lock, stock and barrel to US - thus removing the very military rationale to use the bomb. In fact when it was suggested that instead of dropping the bomb on a civilian city, US should give the demonstration of its awesome power by blasting it in an un-inhabited area of Japan in front of her military leaders, he was reported to have said that the Japanese would not care to surrender by the demonstration of a firecracker in a desert. US air command which had been routinely firebombing Japanese cities by that time had been cautioned not to harm Hiroshima in any manner so that the effect of the scheduled nuclear blast can be precisely measured by US scientists. Von Neumann, refugee Hungarian Jewish mathematician and the father of modern electronic computer who worked in Manhattan Project under Oppenheimer theorized that the Little Boy (the codename of the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima of 6th August) should be made to blast not when it reaches the ground but a little above it for attaining maximum sphere of influence! For months he had been solving complex equations of physics to determine the exact height of explosion. Few incidents in the history of human brutality have parallels with such cold blooded and calculated mass extermination effort! And yet, Oppenheimer, the lover of Gita could stoically reconcile all of these and led from the front knowing too well about the consequence of his brain child!
Of course, you would not associate these qualities with Oppenheimer if you knew that merely 12 years ago, when Hitler was ascending the steps of German Reichstag in 1933, he was busy learning Sanskrit from Professor W.Ryder at Berkeley University to be able to understand the original Bhagavad-Gita better. After leaving school at New York, he went to Harvard and then to the famous Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge, UK for higher education. There, he was seized by strange despair bordering on psychotic depression which took him to the brink of suicide. It was possibly at that time he was acquainted with Gita and regained his zeal for science.
This ancient Hindu text seemed like a fountain of inspiration to him. He wrote to his brother Frank that Gita was the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any human tongue. So fond was he of Gita that he used to gift its translated version to friends. In a bookshelf, close to his desk inside the Los Alamos bomb laboratory, he kept an old copy of original Sanskrit Gita and browsed it intermittently.[1] When Roosevelt died in April, 1945, he even quoted a sloka from Sradhhatrayamarg Yoga (Chapter 17) in his memorial speech [2]at Los Alamos to describe the life and belief of Roosevelt.
The parallels would now be obvious. In Gita, a reluctant Arjuna is persuaded by Krishna to abandon his sadness and ambivalence to battle on without unduly bothering about inevitable bloodshed of war. He explains Arjuna the irrelevance of the mortal body tagged to the ever changing soul. And finally In Ch 11:32, God solemnly declares that even without Arjun, the evil forces of the enemy camp would have to die as He; Himself has decided to destroy them.
From the brink of suicidal despair he, Oppenheimer, the modern-day Arjuna, was now poised in the centre of the battlefield of virtue and vice!
In the epic battle of WW-II, Oppenheimer had to do his duty, just like Arjuna, to build the bomb without thinking as to how many lives will be lost as a consequence. It was not his duty to decide its consequence or when and where it should be dropped. As scientists, this was a technical challenge and his sacred duty. The decision to drop the bomb lies elsewhere, with the political leaders of the nation, who have the relevant information about the subsequent utility of such a device. Not only did he believe that the scientists have no control over the outcome of their research, he actively discouraged everyone from even discussing the future consequence of the bomb as it would distract from their duty of creating it. He frequently used the term fruit of action a well known phrase from Gita. He repeatedly stressed that the futility of scientists to think about the uses to which their discoveries would be put forward. According to him, they had a right over their actions and not the consequence of it and therefore cannot be held responsible for the outcome of their research. A direct flashback to arguably the most popular sloka of Gita in India would explain the underlying mental process of this distinguished scientist:
(Describing the glory of karmayoga, represented by equanimity, an fruit the Lord now, devotes two verses to an exposition of the character of karmayogi and exhorts Arjun to perform his duties: -)
Karmanyevaahikarastey, maa phaleshu kdaachan,
Maa karmaphala heturbhuh maa te sangvastu akarmani.
(Karma Yoga, Chapter -2, sloka-47)
(Your right is to work only, but never to the fruit thereof. Be not instrumental in making your actions bear fruit, nor let your attachment be to inaction.)
So when, fellow scientist Leo Szillard, whose initiative with Einstein started the very project, wanted to circulate a petition urging US government not to drop the bomb on a Japanese city, Oppenheimer opposed [3]it as he felt such an action is inconsistent with the duties of a scientist. Of course, he could not have been unaware of the subsequent verse which must have resolved the doubt as to what should be the duty of the scientists:
Yogastha kuru karmani sangam tyaktva dhananjaya
Sidhhi asidhhyayosamo bhutva samatvam yoga uchyate
(Karma Yoga, Chapter -2, sloka-47)
(Arjun, perform your duties established in yoga, renouncing attachment and be immune to success or failure; evenness of temper is called yoga.
On that fateful day at Trinity test sites, while Oppenheimer remembered Gita to justify his actions, a few feet away, Enrico Fermi, Nobel prize winning Italian scientist was tearing some papers to fly it in the in the wind like a happy child. The distance the papers will be shifted in the resulting shock wave, he had calculated, will give a rough indication of the nuclear yield. Just before the blast he and Isaac Rabii, another Nobel physicists, had been asking other scientists to lay bets on the odds of the bomb destroying whole world or just the new Mexico desert. None appeared to be bothered by any murmur of their inner conscience. In fact just two years earlier in 1943, a person , no less than Enrico Fermi, the father of modern nuclear technology whose four students went on to win the Nobel, discussed the feasibility of contaminating the German food supply with radio active by-product available from Uranium enrichment plants. The idea was abandoned not because it was unethical to poison a nation but because of its technical complexity and the fact that it was easier to build the bomb instead.[4]
So what were the moral duties of the great scientists and thinkers who went on to build the bomb? Did Oppenheimer never think about the future of the bomb? Subsequent research shows that it is not entirely true. Despite his karmic stoicism, Oppenheimer thought that a demonstration of this bomb over Hiroshima will make nations in future renounce armed combat and resolve their disputes peacefully as no war will be winnable by any nation. In any case , it will save a lot of lives if the bomb helps bringing the WW-II to a close and spare millions of lives of Japanese and Americans in case of a mainland invasion by US. The instant killing of a 130000 in Hiroshima and nearly 50000 in Nagasaki may seem horrendous, but they are small in comparison to the overall causality in the whole war. (Only a month before Hiroshima bombing, 100000 had perished in Tokyo in the firebombing of the city by low flying US airplanes carrying napalm bombs that set fires to a large portion of the city). The bomb did end the war. There has been relative peace and a remarkable lack of imperialistic aggression among nations because of the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) shift in international defense paradigm. Everybody knows that a full fledged conflict will gravitate to a nuclear war which ensures destruction to both the victors and the vanquished. Even though the world passed through the cold war where a million nuclear bombs were made by both superpowers, the 1962 missile crisis was resolved under the realization that, in case of war, the bombs become the death and destroyer of all worlds. So in a way, the discovery in Los Alamos has contributed to world peace, albeit an uneasy one.
Later in 1954, before the US Atomic Energy commission[5], Oppenheimer said I did my job which I which I was supposed to do. I was not in a policy making position at Los Alamos. I would have done anything that I was asked to do, including making the bomb in different shapes, if I had thought it was technically feasible. How strikingly similar this sounds to General Dyers confession in front of Hunter Commission that had he been able to maneuver a canon in the narrow by lanes of Amritsar, he would have used it on the innocent people who gathered in the meeting at Jalianwalabag all as part of his duty to protect the British Empire ! In the book Man and the Universe: Continuity from India, Murray Kempton described oppenheimers words as the words in cold tone stripped of every ideal except the rules of functionalism , a pinnacle of dispossession which is the spiritual payload Oppenheimer extracted from Gita..
This was also what Paul Tibbet, the pilot of the B-29 Superfortress (Tibbet had named the plane Enola Gay after his mothers name) bomber that and dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, had to say in a 1975 interview:
I am proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it, and have it work as perfectly as it did... I sleep clearly every night. In another interview in March 2005, he expressed no regret and maintained, If you give me the same circumstances, hell yeah, I would do it again.
All these people were just doing their assigned job, their allotted karma. Al their statements are eerily similar to what Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, who sent 2.5 million innocent Jews to death including helpless infants and women, said during the historic Nuremberg trial: I was an SS man. I was taught to obey orders without thinking (and not the result of my actions). I was taught from my childhood that a Jew is an enemy of Germany. So I had no problem in sending these people to efficiently constructed cyanide gas chambers. I was leading a perfect normal life all through the time I spent as commandant in the Auswitchz camp. Stunned by the revelation of this dark side of human nature, when American Military Chief Psychologist, Gustave Gilbert asked him whether not even once he had felt guilty about sending so many innocent men to their death, he calmly shot back Does a rat catcher think about the rats when he kills them?
So was Hoess also doing the duty of a Karma yogi? Well, if so, then he was not rewarded but hanged for steadfastly devotion to his karma by the International War Crime tribunal at Nuremberg. The court, which set new trends in international jurisprudence, ruled that blind obedience to duty without concurrent individual responsibility of its consequence is against human value and civilization.
One final question If Gandhi, the apostle of peace and another ardent practitioner of Gita, would have been questioned as to whether the duty of atomic scientists at Los Alamos was in accordance with the text of this scripture, what he would have said? Probably he would have echoed what Einstein once said Science without religion is lame, Religion without science is blind.
( Written on the night of 5th August 2008 )
AMUL-THE REAL TASTE OF INDIA
If the unceremonious exit of Dr Verghese Kurien, the architect of India’s White Revolution, ‘Operation Flood’, winner of Ramon Magsaysay Prize for Community Leadership, the Carnegie-Wateler World Peace Prize and the World Food Prize in 2006, from Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation had not numbed your senses at that time, here comes the shocker: They are now planning to withdraw facilities of a car and a driver for his personal use and a cook at his Anand residence. All this, because something written in ’fine print’ of the Cooperative Act will be violated according to a well cushioned pen-pusher who has the blessings of a political authority.
This is the honour given to the man whose untiring efforts of five decades created an empire of milk, which provides job to 9 million poor farmers and milkmen belonging to more than 10,000 cooperatives across India. This is the homage paid by the current management of the very cooperative he had created and nurtured for half a century.
The great Indian ’System of Politicisation’ has succeeded in driving one more nail into the coffin of one more legend. You can’t forget Dr Verghese Kurien. In case you do not recall, rewind your memory a bit and you will find a certain Bill Clinton of United States dancing with milkmaids of Rajasthan in 2001 and expressing amazement at the milk-cooperative system that had empowered those poor women. One of the pictures on page 1 of The New York Times that day showed a garlanded Clinton pensively listening to a group of women in the Rajasthani village in Nayala explaining to him their efforts to be self-sufficient. Well the dance steps of those ’empowerd milkmaids’ had been choreographed way back in 1949, in a remote village called Anand in Gujarat by an unassuming US returned mechanical engineer named Veghese Kurien who set up AMUL and kickstarted the milk cooperative revolution in India. Not only did his brainchild make India self-sufficient in milk, it made India the largest producer of milk beating US in 2003.
Today when a green card or temporary US citizenship is viewed as the gateway to heaven by our starry-eyed NRIs, Verghese returned to India after getting his engineering degree from Michigan University to pursue a dream. He sacrificed his well settled job as a dairy engineer at a government creamery in Anand, in May 1949 and joined a start-up cooperative dairy, Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union (KDCMPUL), to help its chairman, Sri Tribhubandas Patel and set-up a processing plant. This marked the birth of Amul. The rest, as they say, was milk and honey!
Is providing a driver and a cook to such a visionary at his old age not our national duty? Is it really too costly? Kurien does not have a personal car! When he was forced to resign in 2006, the driver and cook was provided by GCMMF as a mark of respect for his lifetime contribution to the cooperative movement in India. Now, after 30 months, someone has discovered that these perks to a retired chairman infringe on the divine rules of the cooperative concern! For the records, the driver and the cook working for Dr Kurien, together command a princely salary of Rs 20,000. Because of failing health and old age, Dr Kurien rarely ventures out and his petrol bills rarely exceed Rs 2,000 a month. Dr Kurien had stopped accepting any salary ever since he attained the age of 58 years and gave honorary services to the NDDB for the next 24 years and the GCMMF for the next 28 years till he quit both the offices.
If you think that it is too much of a drain on the national exchequer consider this: A World Bank audit in 1998, revealed that of the Rs 200 crore the World Bank invested in Operation Flood, the net return into India’s rural economy was a massive Rs 24,000 crore each year over a period of 10 years. Which bureaucrat or politician can claim to have contributed that much too Indian economy? And how much perks and privileges do our politicians and bureaucrats enjoy when they retire? Many of them, on retirement, make their way to the management board of some government/semi-government body/PSU/co-operative society/sports association for a lifetime of freeloading!
Wouldn’t Kurien be better placed in his old age had he got into some bureaucratic post earlier in his career or volunteered to contest an election for a convenient political party well before his retirement?
Think of another distinguished person, E Sridhran. Dubbed as ‘Metro Man’ for completing the Delhi Metro Rail Project in record time, he was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) by the government of France and Padma Vibhusana by Indian Government. But when, in his capacity as the consultant to Hyderabad Metro Project, he warned that ’making available 296 acres of prime land to the BOT (Build, Operate and Transfer) developer for commercial exploitation was like selling the family silver which smacked of a big political scandal’, he was immediately pilloried. In November, 2008, Finance Minister K Rosaiah, Municipal Administration Minister Koneru Ranga Rao and the managing director of Hyderabad Metro Rail Limited, NVS Reddy, stated at a Press conference that they would sue E Sreedharan unless he took back his comments without reservation and tendered an unconditional apology. Two months down the line when Satyam collapsed, it was found that this conscientious BOT operator was none other than Maytas Infra, run by Ramalinga Raju’s son, Teja and the bureaucratic establishment had to eat their words! Remember, when Kurien had resigned in 2006, he had protested about the creeping corruption and attempt to corporatise the co-operatives, which had served the poor over half a century. Whether his words will prove as prophetic as Sreedharan’s remains to be seen!
Kurien is not an isolated case of the widely prevalent systemic disdain in India towards nurturing or honouring talent. This is not just the case with India but with many Asian countries. But the best example of this genre is in our neighbouring country, Pakistan. When Abdus Salaam became the first Pakistani to get a Nobel in Physics, he became an embarrassment for General Zia and his establishment since the Ahamediya Community to which Dr Salaam belonged, had been declared an un-Islamic sect through a constitutional amendment. In his speeches delivered in various universities of Pakistan immediately after receiving Nobel prize, references to Islam or any Islamic scripture were deliberately omitted by the official press. When he died, the Pakistani state was scared to touch his body since Ahmedis are non-Muslims and no ‘kaalima’ could be read at his funeral. So much so that the epitaph on his grave at his village now terms him as the ’First Nobel Prize Winner’ instead of ’First Muslim Nobel Prize Winner’, the middle word ’Muslim’ having been erased by a zealous district administration in accordance with the prevailing religious dictates.
Kurien, who has been treated shabbily is popularly known as the real ’milkman of India’. Paradoxically, the other ’milkman’, Lord Krishna, is revered and worshipped by millions of our countrymen.
This is the honour given to the man whose untiring efforts of five decades created an empire of milk, which provides job to 9 million poor farmers and milkmen belonging to more than 10,000 cooperatives across India. This is the homage paid by the current management of the very cooperative he had created and nurtured for half a century.
The great Indian ’System of Politicisation’ has succeeded in driving one more nail into the coffin of one more legend. You can’t forget Dr Verghese Kurien. In case you do not recall, rewind your memory a bit and you will find a certain Bill Clinton of United States dancing with milkmaids of Rajasthan in 2001 and expressing amazement at the milk-cooperative system that had empowered those poor women. One of the pictures on page 1 of The New York Times that day showed a garlanded Clinton pensively listening to a group of women in the Rajasthani village in Nayala explaining to him their efforts to be self-sufficient. Well the dance steps of those ’empowerd milkmaids’ had been choreographed way back in 1949, in a remote village called Anand in Gujarat by an unassuming US returned mechanical engineer named Veghese Kurien who set up AMUL and kickstarted the milk cooperative revolution in India. Not only did his brainchild make India self-sufficient in milk, it made India the largest producer of milk beating US in 2003.
Today when a green card or temporary US citizenship is viewed as the gateway to heaven by our starry-eyed NRIs, Verghese returned to India after getting his engineering degree from Michigan University to pursue a dream. He sacrificed his well settled job as a dairy engineer at a government creamery in Anand, in May 1949 and joined a start-up cooperative dairy, Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union (KDCMPUL), to help its chairman, Sri Tribhubandas Patel and set-up a processing plant. This marked the birth of Amul. The rest, as they say, was milk and honey!
Is providing a driver and a cook to such a visionary at his old age not our national duty? Is it really too costly? Kurien does not have a personal car! When he was forced to resign in 2006, the driver and cook was provided by GCMMF as a mark of respect for his lifetime contribution to the cooperative movement in India. Now, after 30 months, someone has discovered that these perks to a retired chairman infringe on the divine rules of the cooperative concern! For the records, the driver and the cook working for Dr Kurien, together command a princely salary of Rs 20,000. Because of failing health and old age, Dr Kurien rarely ventures out and his petrol bills rarely exceed Rs 2,000 a month. Dr Kurien had stopped accepting any salary ever since he attained the age of 58 years and gave honorary services to the NDDB for the next 24 years and the GCMMF for the next 28 years till he quit both the offices.
If you think that it is too much of a drain on the national exchequer consider this: A World Bank audit in 1998, revealed that of the Rs 200 crore the World Bank invested in Operation Flood, the net return into India’s rural economy was a massive Rs 24,000 crore each year over a period of 10 years. Which bureaucrat or politician can claim to have contributed that much too Indian economy? And how much perks and privileges do our politicians and bureaucrats enjoy when they retire? Many of them, on retirement, make their way to the management board of some government/semi-government body/PSU/co-operative society/sports association for a lifetime of freeloading!
Wouldn’t Kurien be better placed in his old age had he got into some bureaucratic post earlier in his career or volunteered to contest an election for a convenient political party well before his retirement?
Think of another distinguished person, E Sridhran. Dubbed as ‘Metro Man’ for completing the Delhi Metro Rail Project in record time, he was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) by the government of France and Padma Vibhusana by Indian Government. But when, in his capacity as the consultant to Hyderabad Metro Project, he warned that ’making available 296 acres of prime land to the BOT (Build, Operate and Transfer) developer for commercial exploitation was like selling the family silver which smacked of a big political scandal’, he was immediately pilloried. In November, 2008, Finance Minister K Rosaiah, Municipal Administration Minister Koneru Ranga Rao and the managing director of Hyderabad Metro Rail Limited, NVS Reddy, stated at a Press conference that they would sue E Sreedharan unless he took back his comments without reservation and tendered an unconditional apology. Two months down the line when Satyam collapsed, it was found that this conscientious BOT operator was none other than Maytas Infra, run by Ramalinga Raju’s son, Teja and the bureaucratic establishment had to eat their words! Remember, when Kurien had resigned in 2006, he had protested about the creeping corruption and attempt to corporatise the co-operatives, which had served the poor over half a century. Whether his words will prove as prophetic as Sreedharan’s remains to be seen!
Kurien is not an isolated case of the widely prevalent systemic disdain in India towards nurturing or honouring talent. This is not just the case with India but with many Asian countries. But the best example of this genre is in our neighbouring country, Pakistan. When Abdus Salaam became the first Pakistani to get a Nobel in Physics, he became an embarrassment for General Zia and his establishment since the Ahamediya Community to which Dr Salaam belonged, had been declared an un-Islamic sect through a constitutional amendment. In his speeches delivered in various universities of Pakistan immediately after receiving Nobel prize, references to Islam or any Islamic scripture were deliberately omitted by the official press. When he died, the Pakistani state was scared to touch his body since Ahmedis are non-Muslims and no ‘kaalima’ could be read at his funeral. So much so that the epitaph on his grave at his village now terms him as the ’First Nobel Prize Winner’ instead of ’First Muslim Nobel Prize Winner’, the middle word ’Muslim’ having been erased by a zealous district administration in accordance with the prevailing religious dictates.
Kurien, who has been treated shabbily is popularly known as the real ’milkman of India’. Paradoxically, the other ’milkman’, Lord Krishna, is revered and worshipped by millions of our countrymen.
THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM
"WHERE THE mind is without fear
And the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free…
Into that heaven of freedom, my father,
Let my country awake!"
- Rabindranath Tagore
Thus penned the great Tagore on the subject of freedom in his immortal epic Gitanjali. And this was what came to mind when my 13-year-old asked,“Mama, can we visit South City Mall in this Independence Day?"
“No, You can’t”, I shot back. “Don’t you know that Independence Day is probably the worst day for an outing as crowded places in large cities are prime targets for terrorists who happen to be moving freely in our country? Moreover, haven’t you read the recent outbreak of H1N1 virus in India. Avoid public places and crowds at all costs. Multiplexes have already been shut down in Mumbai.”
“Mama, last week when we planned to go out, there was a bandh, the one before last week it was auto-strike and now it is a virus! Are we really free to go anywhere at our own choice in our country? “
“No my dear boy, no. The country may be free but today our minds are shackled with undefined fear and confined in a prison of glorious uncertainties. Anything can frighten us and send us scurrying to the only safe place we know now – our little homes. Or is that even safe?”
Today when we go out, we are never sure when we will return ... or in some cases whether we will return at all. You send your kid to school in the morning and any trouble in the city has the potential to close down the city making his or her return uncertain. You start boarding a train and all it requires for the train to stall midway is for a few miscreants with almost any excuse ranging from a neighbourhood accident to the fallout of globalisation on the poor and downtrodden. Remove a few fish plates from the track and make your political or social presence felt across the whole country while robbing the hapless train travellers of their freedom to move. Ten years after hundreds died in the country’s financial capital because of floods resulting from rain water finding no passage to the nearby sea, the average Mumbai citizen still shudders at the music of the monsoon song!
Sixty two years ago the freedom we won was just a political freedom. For the past sixty two years, the average citizen was supposed to have been the controller of his/her own destiny. The highest number of poor people in the world live in our country – how are they free when they fear that they might not get their next meal? The largest number of terrorist-related deaths outside of Iraq happen to be in our country. How is a person free when he does not when the next bomb will blast? Despite years of subsidy and grand literacy campaigns, half of our children drop out before the tenth grade. How are they free, if they do not have the right to education? Today, if you want to have decent education, you have to shell out a lot for entry into plush private institutions. Knowledge is no longer free in this country where great gurukuls once dotted the landscape!
The real freedom comes when, as Tagore said, the mind is without fear! And the mind is without fear, when he has a reasonable control over the uncertainties of the economic, social and cultural environment around him/her. His mind can’t be without fear if he is overwhelmed by the these uncertainties at each moment of his life. Years ago, psychologist Maslow had spelt out a hierarchy of needs for humans. Safety comes second in that hierarchy, next to our basic primal needs. The need to feel sovereign, the freedom to exercise political choice is a secondary and higher-order need. Until the lower order needs, such as safety (freedom from fear) have been meet, the freedom will ring hollow in the average citizen’s ears.
That is just what happened in the small island nation of Mayotte in Africa. When a political referendum was held in that country in 2009, their people voted overwhelmingly to remain under France, their earlier colonist, rather than become an independent African nation. In 1974, they had voted similarly. In fact, in the recent referendum, the choice for remaining “dependent” had a harsh conditionality attached with it. To lose their freedom to France, this predominantly Muslim country would have to force its residents to adjust to the cultural customs of France such as raising the minimum age for women to marry from 15 to 18 and outlawing polygamy. To exercise the choice of “freedom” they did not have to do any such thing. Yet they consciously chose to inflict these counter-cultural changes on themselves, merely to remain without “freedom”.
Why did this country choose not to remain “free” when given an explicit choice? In fact, today many African nations, under such a hypothetical referendum, would probably vote to remain under their earlier colonial masters rather their own home-grown despots. Their socio-economic condition has deteriorated very fast after they attained their exalted status of freedom. For them, freedom cannot be contemplated on an empty stomach and with a frightened mind. While celebrating our freedom, let us a do a bit more this year. Let us try to search the meaning of freedom and find out whether this is the same as what was so pertinently meant by Tagore.
And the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free…
Into that heaven of freedom, my father,
Let my country awake!"
- Rabindranath Tagore
Thus penned the great Tagore on the subject of freedom in his immortal epic Gitanjali. And this was what came to mind when my 13-year-old asked,“Mama, can we visit South City Mall in this Independence Day?"
“No, You can’t”, I shot back. “Don’t you know that Independence Day is probably the worst day for an outing as crowded places in large cities are prime targets for terrorists who happen to be moving freely in our country? Moreover, haven’t you read the recent outbreak of H1N1 virus in India. Avoid public places and crowds at all costs. Multiplexes have already been shut down in Mumbai.”
“Mama, last week when we planned to go out, there was a bandh, the one before last week it was auto-strike and now it is a virus! Are we really free to go anywhere at our own choice in our country? “
“No my dear boy, no. The country may be free but today our minds are shackled with undefined fear and confined in a prison of glorious uncertainties. Anything can frighten us and send us scurrying to the only safe place we know now – our little homes. Or is that even safe?”
Today when we go out, we are never sure when we will return ... or in some cases whether we will return at all. You send your kid to school in the morning and any trouble in the city has the potential to close down the city making his or her return uncertain. You start boarding a train and all it requires for the train to stall midway is for a few miscreants with almost any excuse ranging from a neighbourhood accident to the fallout of globalisation on the poor and downtrodden. Remove a few fish plates from the track and make your political or social presence felt across the whole country while robbing the hapless train travellers of their freedom to move. Ten years after hundreds died in the country’s financial capital because of floods resulting from rain water finding no passage to the nearby sea, the average Mumbai citizen still shudders at the music of the monsoon song!
Sixty two years ago the freedom we won was just a political freedom. For the past sixty two years, the average citizen was supposed to have been the controller of his/her own destiny. The highest number of poor people in the world live in our country – how are they free when they fear that they might not get their next meal? The largest number of terrorist-related deaths outside of Iraq happen to be in our country. How is a person free when he does not when the next bomb will blast? Despite years of subsidy and grand literacy campaigns, half of our children drop out before the tenth grade. How are they free, if they do not have the right to education? Today, if you want to have decent education, you have to shell out a lot for entry into plush private institutions. Knowledge is no longer free in this country where great gurukuls once dotted the landscape!
The real freedom comes when, as Tagore said, the mind is without fear! And the mind is without fear, when he has a reasonable control over the uncertainties of the economic, social and cultural environment around him/her. His mind can’t be without fear if he is overwhelmed by the these uncertainties at each moment of his life. Years ago, psychologist Maslow had spelt out a hierarchy of needs for humans. Safety comes second in that hierarchy, next to our basic primal needs. The need to feel sovereign, the freedom to exercise political choice is a secondary and higher-order need. Until the lower order needs, such as safety (freedom from fear) have been meet, the freedom will ring hollow in the average citizen’s ears.
That is just what happened in the small island nation of Mayotte in Africa. When a political referendum was held in that country in 2009, their people voted overwhelmingly to remain under France, their earlier colonist, rather than become an independent African nation. In 1974, they had voted similarly. In fact, in the recent referendum, the choice for remaining “dependent” had a harsh conditionality attached with it. To lose their freedom to France, this predominantly Muslim country would have to force its residents to adjust to the cultural customs of France such as raising the minimum age for women to marry from 15 to 18 and outlawing polygamy. To exercise the choice of “freedom” they did not have to do any such thing. Yet they consciously chose to inflict these counter-cultural changes on themselves, merely to remain without “freedom”.
Why did this country choose not to remain “free” when given an explicit choice? In fact, today many African nations, under such a hypothetical referendum, would probably vote to remain under their earlier colonial masters rather their own home-grown despots. Their socio-economic condition has deteriorated very fast after they attained their exalted status of freedom. For them, freedom cannot be contemplated on an empty stomach and with a frightened mind. While celebrating our freedom, let us a do a bit more this year. Let us try to search the meaning of freedom and find out whether this is the same as what was so pertinently meant by Tagore.
BUSH DISCOVERS HIS WMDs , AT LAST! (SATIRE)
" Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised”-George Bush, March 18, 2003
AT LAST Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) have been revealed to the world. That this much awaited discovery happened right in front of the very person, who first told the world about the dangers of these secret lethal weapons hidden somewhere in Iraq is a double whammy! After all this was the man who started it all. It was he who even risked a trillion dollar war to pursue these elusive WMDs all over in Middle East!
Alas, the WMD was not to be found till the very end of his tenure. And, suddenly it was all over his face, at a joint conference in Baghdad on December 15, 2008 and just when he was bidding farewell to his beloved audience.
It manifested itself in a pair shoe that belonged to a 28-year-old nondescript Iraqi journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi. It was possibly the only weapon that the beleaguered common Iraqi was left with by the time Bush bade goodbye to his Middle East misadventure.
When the talk is about a shoe and a superpower, can one forget the one banged by Nikita Khrushchev, the powerful premier of the erstwhile mighty Soviet Union who once removed his shoe in the United Nations’ General Assembly and banged it on the podium infuriated by the remarks of a Philippino delegate? He did not throw his shoes at him, perhaps thinking that the delegate was not important enough to deserve it!
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes,” said Mark Twain.
While Bush had already travelled halfway around the world to be at Baghdad on that fateful evening, Zaidi had not only completed putting on his shoes, but was preparing himself to throw them away. As the first of Zaidi’s shoes sailed towards Bush, he ducked to save himself. When the other shoe made its journey towards the presidential head, the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, sprang to defend the dignity of the world’s only superpower.
Cricket aficionados in the Indian sub-continent might not have failed to notice the excellent reflex and surprising agility of Iraqi Prime Minister exhibited to intercept the flying object before it could hit its intended target. In that split second, Zaidi looked like an Islamic incarnation of the great South African cricketer Jhonty Rhodes who made it a habit to conjure up amazing catches out of thin air. Had the Iraqi Prime Minister pulled it off, just inches from Bush’s face, it could have been the “Catch of the Year” - possibly a more prized catch than Osama and certainly a major consolation for Bush who could not catch the fugitive during his term.
Physicists will, of course, scorn at the lazy and careless manner, in which Zaidi threw his shoes at such a high value target. The trajectory was just not perfect. May be he should have been more careful about the launch angle of his projectile. Careful, be always careful about it and don’t forget gravity in such situations, they would say. Forty-five degree to the horizontal is the way to get maximum range and please don’t mix it up your emotional energy. One definitely can conclude that Zaidi must not have been fond of physics in his early days if at all he was a student of science
Military strategists, especially those who swear by the efficacy of missiles in modern warfare, will marvel at the impact of this innovative missile. It was immediately clear from this episode that Iraqi underground resistance had been pursuing a highly clandestine but successful MDP (missile development programme). None of the countless Tomahawk missiles they had earlier hurled at Baghdad received such phenomenal accolade and publicity. This was after all an indigenous Ground-to-Air, Short Range Ballistic Missile (SRBM) designed to be operational at low altitudes. Yet, at least the first one, almost knocked down a superpower.
One shudders to think what would have happened if these would have been “guided missiles” (fit with electronic guidance system and thus capable of altering course midway) instead of being of ballistic variety. And the thing that really matters in missile based offence system is the total cost of deployment. The Zaidi missiles can be produced at less than $50 compared to half a million greenbacks that a single Tomahawk guzzles. Produced on a shoe-string budget, you would say! Even though both the missiles missed their target, we are sure that an in-depth aerodynamic analysis of their flight trajectory conducted by weapon experts at Pentagon could show their accuracy and resolution to be far superior to Soviet Scuds.
It is customary in India to offer garlands to Gods as a mark of respect and devotion. So if Indians get angry with their politicians (walking Gods in flesh and blood), they are not satisfied with just two shoes as Zaidi was but make a garland out of several and put it round the portrait of the politician who happens to face their wrath! They think, only that way the shoe would pinch.
You may well ask what Bush could have done when someone thinks that two shoes on his legs are not better than even one at Bush? Well he could have followed advice of the great apostle of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi, who once said: “Three quarters of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world would vanish if people were to put on the shoes of their adversaries and understood their points of view.”
AT LAST Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) have been revealed to the world. That this much awaited discovery happened right in front of the very person, who first told the world about the dangers of these secret lethal weapons hidden somewhere in Iraq is a double whammy! After all this was the man who started it all. It was he who even risked a trillion dollar war to pursue these elusive WMDs all over in Middle East!
Alas, the WMD was not to be found till the very end of his tenure. And, suddenly it was all over his face, at a joint conference in Baghdad on December 15, 2008 and just when he was bidding farewell to his beloved audience.
It manifested itself in a pair shoe that belonged to a 28-year-old nondescript Iraqi journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi. It was possibly the only weapon that the beleaguered common Iraqi was left with by the time Bush bade goodbye to his Middle East misadventure.
When the talk is about a shoe and a superpower, can one forget the one banged by Nikita Khrushchev, the powerful premier of the erstwhile mighty Soviet Union who once removed his shoe in the United Nations’ General Assembly and banged it on the podium infuriated by the remarks of a Philippino delegate? He did not throw his shoes at him, perhaps thinking that the delegate was not important enough to deserve it!
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes,” said Mark Twain.
While Bush had already travelled halfway around the world to be at Baghdad on that fateful evening, Zaidi had not only completed putting on his shoes, but was preparing himself to throw them away. As the first of Zaidi’s shoes sailed towards Bush, he ducked to save himself. When the other shoe made its journey towards the presidential head, the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, sprang to defend the dignity of the world’s only superpower.
Cricket aficionados in the Indian sub-continent might not have failed to notice the excellent reflex and surprising agility of Iraqi Prime Minister exhibited to intercept the flying object before it could hit its intended target. In that split second, Zaidi looked like an Islamic incarnation of the great South African cricketer Jhonty Rhodes who made it a habit to conjure up amazing catches out of thin air. Had the Iraqi Prime Minister pulled it off, just inches from Bush’s face, it could have been the “Catch of the Year” - possibly a more prized catch than Osama and certainly a major consolation for Bush who could not catch the fugitive during his term.
Physicists will, of course, scorn at the lazy and careless manner, in which Zaidi threw his shoes at such a high value target. The trajectory was just not perfect. May be he should have been more careful about the launch angle of his projectile. Careful, be always careful about it and don’t forget gravity in such situations, they would say. Forty-five degree to the horizontal is the way to get maximum range and please don’t mix it up your emotional energy. One definitely can conclude that Zaidi must not have been fond of physics in his early days if at all he was a student of science
Military strategists, especially those who swear by the efficacy of missiles in modern warfare, will marvel at the impact of this innovative missile. It was immediately clear from this episode that Iraqi underground resistance had been pursuing a highly clandestine but successful MDP (missile development programme). None of the countless Tomahawk missiles they had earlier hurled at Baghdad received such phenomenal accolade and publicity. This was after all an indigenous Ground-to-Air, Short Range Ballistic Missile (SRBM) designed to be operational at low altitudes. Yet, at least the first one, almost knocked down a superpower.
One shudders to think what would have happened if these would have been “guided missiles” (fit with electronic guidance system and thus capable of altering course midway) instead of being of ballistic variety. And the thing that really matters in missile based offence system is the total cost of deployment. The Zaidi missiles can be produced at less than $50 compared to half a million greenbacks that a single Tomahawk guzzles. Produced on a shoe-string budget, you would say! Even though both the missiles missed their target, we are sure that an in-depth aerodynamic analysis of their flight trajectory conducted by weapon experts at Pentagon could show their accuracy and resolution to be far superior to Soviet Scuds.
It is customary in India to offer garlands to Gods as a mark of respect and devotion. So if Indians get angry with their politicians (walking Gods in flesh and blood), they are not satisfied with just two shoes as Zaidi was but make a garland out of several and put it round the portrait of the politician who happens to face their wrath! They think, only that way the shoe would pinch.
You may well ask what Bush could have done when someone thinks that two shoes on his legs are not better than even one at Bush? Well he could have followed advice of the great apostle of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi, who once said: “Three quarters of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world would vanish if people were to put on the shoes of their adversaries and understood their points of view.”
THIS IS NOT CRICKET (SATIRE)
THE COMMENTATOR was hollering in a hoarse voice 150 for 8. The game was not yet over. It was well past midnight in Mumbai. The TV analysts and talk show experts were giving blow by blow account of the fiery Indian spells, meant to curb the flow of shots. An entire nation was on the edge, millions of viewers taut with suspense and fear. Will India lose? When will the tenth fall? After the fall of the first eight, the 9th and 10th had settled in, forged a deadly partnership and were unleashing lethal strokes all around the ground. They kept the scoreboard ticking at a furious rate much to the dismay of India.
Looks like a day-night one day cricket match between India and Pakistan? Pakistan was batting with gay abandon and Indians were fighting, as usual, with their backs to the wall! Such situation was not new to Indian viewers – it had been repeated in many venues like Jaipur, Varanasi, Guwahati and Bangalore the same year! After each humiliating defeat, the viewers had been promised by the players, coaches and administrators that useful lessons had been learnt and the same would not happen again! But still, Indians have again been caught unawares and found themselves in the same sticky situation.
The audience was now asking: When will our great bowlers get those last two wickets and wrap up the match?
But this time it is not cricket! This match was not being played in Wankhede Stadium. It was set inside the labyrinthine corridors of the luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel, the iconic hotel of globalised Mumbai. This was a game of blood and gore played between 10 terrorists and the Indian forces. The 150 on the score board were not runs but number of innocents who ran for their lives and lost! The eight were not batsmen but the terrorists who had fallen to the Indian security forces. The last two were still on the crease at Taj Mahal Hotel, spraying bullets on innocent people, setting floors on fire and playing an effortless cat and mouse game with the clueless but brave security men, betrayed by a nation’s political and bureaucratic leadership.
Ensconced safely in the VIP gallery, protected by gun-toting SPG men, the well-fed great-Indian-politician (GIP) looked on. His devilish brain was working overtime, calculating the extent of political mileage he can derive from this match. Remember, Zia ul Haq’s sudden visit to the Jaipur stadium which relieved Indo-Pak tension and went down as “cricket diplomacy”! He had an urge to come before the TV crew for some sound bites but thought it was not safe. Many times he had grabbed national limelight for nothing. This was, after all, a tempting stage for international publicity.
But even he had to admit, that his was small time stuff compared to these audacious criminals operating from inside the luxury hotel. He was sorely envious of the publicity and the huge slice of air time these two batsmen were grabbing, while he, the great-Indian-politicians, were a mere spectator! Can hee ever attain such dizzy exposure to electronic media in his life time? The last time he got such public adulation was when he walked out of a police station after breaking some sort of law of the land. That day he did not even know which law he had broken. It is common knowledge that “everybody” who is “somebody” in India has to break some laws if he does not want to remain a “nobody”.
The ferocious batsmen in Taj Hotel showed no signs of tiredness. It was going to be long drawn battle. The NSG bowlers were being whipped in every direction. The poor fellows, already tired after a six-hour journey from Chandigarh and developing cramps from the rickety buses that ferried them from airport to this dangerous ground, had no quality equipment. Still the he (the GIP) could not but marvel at their bravery to bowl persistently in this treacherous ground and under such adverse condition.
The GIP ordered a ‘black cat’ standing near him to get some cola. Nothing like cola in troubled times! After all he and his fraternity were the organisers of this grand game. 172 for 9! Someone announced that one of the batting pair was out and the other probably retired hurt. But not before inflicting a stinging defeat on India! Anticipating a match loss by record margin, many of his friends -- other politicians and bureaucrats - had already started their favourite game, “Pass the Buck”. Thank God, it was all over, the Great Indian Politician sighed with relief. So what if the opposition scored 182. Small defeats like that do happen in big cities like Mumbai! The Indians, after all, did manage to get 9 of their scalps and did not seem to lose by heavy margin. Small consolation! Otherwise, the way these batsmen had started hitting sixes on the very first over to two of India’s best speedsters --Karkare and Salaskar - one thought that the match will be over without a fight! Still the GIP could not but admire the tenacity of these batsmen -actually the tailenders - who were on the crease for nearly 60 hours holding to ransom India’s bowling might. After all Pakistan had such great coaches and well-equipped training centres, not to mention the incredible infrastructure they had for this beautiful game in their North West Frontier Province. No wonder their real master blasters mostly come from that area! “If I had been a Pakistani, I could have made splendid political material out of these boys”, the GIP muttered to himself!
A sudden burst of grenade shook him on his seats. Smoke was billowing out of the Taj stadium. “Are these celebratory crackers ?” the GIP asked his SPG man. “Keep close to me and don’t move away. Sometimes the viewers can get unruly and stampede may break out; what are you being paid for?”
And then a prayer escaped from the Great Indian Politician ‘s (GIP) lips “Thank God, I am not inside the Taj tonight. I have always been so fond of this place with free boarding and lodging! Thank Almighty for protecting me so that I can continue to serve my people in future. May I live for ever to organise such exciting matches. God is Great, Long live the Great Indian Politician”.
The stars were fading in the night sky over the Taj Hotel. Dawn was approaching. The fire from a dome of the hotel provided an eerie backdrop to Gateway of India. The doves who usually gather in front of Taj Hotel early morning had long flown away – scared by the staccato burst of gunfire. The contest between India and Pakistan was far from over!
And the Great Indian Politician continued to watch the now empty stadium - in awe and inspiration
Looks like a day-night one day cricket match between India and Pakistan? Pakistan was batting with gay abandon and Indians were fighting, as usual, with their backs to the wall! Such situation was not new to Indian viewers – it had been repeated in many venues like Jaipur, Varanasi, Guwahati and Bangalore the same year! After each humiliating defeat, the viewers had been promised by the players, coaches and administrators that useful lessons had been learnt and the same would not happen again! But still, Indians have again been caught unawares and found themselves in the same sticky situation.
The audience was now asking: When will our great bowlers get those last two wickets and wrap up the match?
But this time it is not cricket! This match was not being played in Wankhede Stadium. It was set inside the labyrinthine corridors of the luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel, the iconic hotel of globalised Mumbai. This was a game of blood and gore played between 10 terrorists and the Indian forces. The 150 on the score board were not runs but number of innocents who ran for their lives and lost! The eight were not batsmen but the terrorists who had fallen to the Indian security forces. The last two were still on the crease at Taj Mahal Hotel, spraying bullets on innocent people, setting floors on fire and playing an effortless cat and mouse game with the clueless but brave security men, betrayed by a nation’s political and bureaucratic leadership.
Ensconced safely in the VIP gallery, protected by gun-toting SPG men, the well-fed great-Indian-politician (GIP) looked on. His devilish brain was working overtime, calculating the extent of political mileage he can derive from this match. Remember, Zia ul Haq’s sudden visit to the Jaipur stadium which relieved Indo-Pak tension and went down as “cricket diplomacy”! He had an urge to come before the TV crew for some sound bites but thought it was not safe. Many times he had grabbed national limelight for nothing. This was, after all, a tempting stage for international publicity.
But even he had to admit, that his was small time stuff compared to these audacious criminals operating from inside the luxury hotel. He was sorely envious of the publicity and the huge slice of air time these two batsmen were grabbing, while he, the great-Indian-politicians, were a mere spectator! Can hee ever attain such dizzy exposure to electronic media in his life time? The last time he got such public adulation was when he walked out of a police station after breaking some sort of law of the land. That day he did not even know which law he had broken. It is common knowledge that “everybody” who is “somebody” in India has to break some laws if he does not want to remain a “nobody”.
The ferocious batsmen in Taj Hotel showed no signs of tiredness. It was going to be long drawn battle. The NSG bowlers were being whipped in every direction. The poor fellows, already tired after a six-hour journey from Chandigarh and developing cramps from the rickety buses that ferried them from airport to this dangerous ground, had no quality equipment. Still the he (the GIP) could not but marvel at their bravery to bowl persistently in this treacherous ground and under such adverse condition.
The GIP ordered a ‘black cat’ standing near him to get some cola. Nothing like cola in troubled times! After all he and his fraternity were the organisers of this grand game. 172 for 9! Someone announced that one of the batting pair was out and the other probably retired hurt. But not before inflicting a stinging defeat on India! Anticipating a match loss by record margin, many of his friends -- other politicians and bureaucrats - had already started their favourite game, “Pass the Buck”. Thank God, it was all over, the Great Indian Politician sighed with relief. So what if the opposition scored 182. Small defeats like that do happen in big cities like Mumbai! The Indians, after all, did manage to get 9 of their scalps and did not seem to lose by heavy margin. Small consolation! Otherwise, the way these batsmen had started hitting sixes on the very first over to two of India’s best speedsters --Karkare and Salaskar - one thought that the match will be over without a fight! Still the GIP could not but admire the tenacity of these batsmen -actually the tailenders - who were on the crease for nearly 60 hours holding to ransom India’s bowling might. After all Pakistan had such great coaches and well-equipped training centres, not to mention the incredible infrastructure they had for this beautiful game in their North West Frontier Province. No wonder their real master blasters mostly come from that area! “If I had been a Pakistani, I could have made splendid political material out of these boys”, the GIP muttered to himself!
A sudden burst of grenade shook him on his seats. Smoke was billowing out of the Taj stadium. “Are these celebratory crackers ?” the GIP asked his SPG man. “Keep close to me and don’t move away. Sometimes the viewers can get unruly and stampede may break out; what are you being paid for?”
And then a prayer escaped from the Great Indian Politician ‘s (GIP) lips “Thank God, I am not inside the Taj tonight. I have always been so fond of this place with free boarding and lodging! Thank Almighty for protecting me so that I can continue to serve my people in future. May I live for ever to organise such exciting matches. God is Great, Long live the Great Indian Politician”.
The stars were fading in the night sky over the Taj Hotel. Dawn was approaching. The fire from a dome of the hotel provided an eerie backdrop to Gateway of India. The doves who usually gather in front of Taj Hotel early morning had long flown away – scared by the staccato burst of gunfire. The contest between India and Pakistan was far from over!
And the Great Indian Politician continued to watch the now empty stadium - in awe and inspiration
Monday, March 23, 2009
VEDIC TEA : MUSINGS IN AN UNCERTAIN COSMOS
THE VEDIC TEA : MUSINGS IN AN UNCERTAIN COSMOS
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“The existence of a Creator and Controller God has always been at the core of all religions and in fact central to the very psyche of humans “, declared my friend Devjani with an air of apparent finality, “till this foul science came along and challenged it “. She was quoting from a respected columnist and waved the newspaper at us as it’s irrefutable proof!
“The existence of a Creator and Controller God has always been at the core of all religions and in fact central to the very psyche of humans “, declared my friend Devjani with an air of apparent finality, “till this foul science came along and challenged it “. She was quoting from a respected columnist and waved the newspaper at us as it’s irrefutable proof!
The debates between Science and Religion, Fate and Free Will, Duty and Destiny were staple conversations in our morning tea sessions. Sparks flew and sometimes the tone even got personal. But that day, it took a really serious turn. Satya, my friend and IT guru, was in no mood to take all these. He had always regarded Devjani as the quintessential woman, prone to rituals and superstitions despite her acclaimed background in Medicine. Satya was a cold rationalist for who reason reigned supreme everywhere.
Priyambada, never the one to be interested in such heavy topics, was less concerned about the impending storm over our tea cups. She always held the role of a moderator and stopped such bouts just before the combatants threatened to inflict lasting injuries upon one other. It was, after all, her house and she had to take good care of it before any such hot discussions attempted to blow it up. She inhaled the drifting aroma of morning tea and winked at me as the combatants got ready to lock horns.
Devjani was a votary of God, Spirituality and all those good things we are supposed to be. Even though she was a doctor, she had a streak of obedience and conformity to the traditions. For her, Satya symbolized an unemotional, machine like boring personality with no respect to tradition and authority – something which no one should ever be. She particularly disliked those moments during tea session when Satya would read the Science Page of the daily newspaper aloud and made all tea club member to listen to him. Today, with the views of such a celebrated columnist on a top national daily, she wanted to pay Satya back in his own coin – with compound interest!
But Satya, instead of getting agitated at such a blasphemous declaration (blasphemy ?), smiled benevolently. He sensed an easy kill, perhaps. Taking a sip from his cup, he rubbed his hands and told “ Devjani, it is time you brushed up your “Science”, “History” and “Religion” early morning. If you haven’t, allow me the opportunity to do so, madam! “
With this he stood up , surveyed the audience imperiously as Hercule Poirot does, in the final chapter of an Agatha Christie Novel before declaring the murderer’s name and posed us the following question ..
Which of the great persons could have told the following?
“Gripped by fear people go to sacred mountains, sacred groves, sacred trees and shrines. Religious ideas, especially the idea of God, has its origin in fear.”
a. Bertrand Russell b. Stephen Hawking c. Pope John d. Paul-II e. Buddha
“Of course Bertrand Russell “, shouted Priyambada.
“No way”, thundered Satya.
“Makes the job rather easier for me”- quipped Devjani. It has to be Stephen Hawking, that silly scientist who had the audacity to declare that the goal in his life was to make God redundant as a hypothesis for understanding the origin of the universe. What other derogatory remarks would he not have passed with his evil mouth, had he not been afflicted with that strange neurodegenerative disorder, only he knows! “
“Wrong again” thundered Satya. “It is Buddha – as quoted in Sukta 188 of Dhamm Pada, the main religious text for the Budhhists. So you see, here is a religion, well before the birth of Christ and long before science as we know came along, which not only questioned the existence of a God but even went to explain why such a concept persisted in the contemporary belief system .“
“Want to know more? Why Buddha told so?” Satya queried. “He actually noticed that people turn to God, in times of stress, sadness and uncertainty- out of fear and to feel assured that God will help them. The real reason for origin of sadness is desire. Buddha taught us to try to understand our fears, to lessen our desires and to calmly but courageously accept the things we cannot change. He replaced fear, not with the irrational belief of God but with a rational understanding of our strength and limitation. It is a tragedy that the birth place of such a rational revolutionary – India - today teems with Godmen, Soothsayers and Astrologers, all peddling their dangerous ware to a gullible public whose mind is far away from the concept their Buddha had preached!”
Reeling under such a blow, lesser mortals would have finished their tea and signed the peace treaty. But Devjani was made of sterner stuff. She was not to be so easily undone.
“Yes, Satya, we know that Buddhism is an exceptional case of agnostic religion. But all other religions do have a God as their core belief and have never questioned his existence and his role in creating and still controlling their world! Nobody ever challenged that! This in turn validates mine as well as this columnist’s claim.”
Satya’s grin grew wider. He expected such a salvo from the enemy camp. But it was probably his day and not Devjani’s. He delivered his knockout punch in style –
“Oh yes. Buddha was agnostic! He was an exception! Can I then refer to Hinduism, please? Lets than talk about our good old Rig Veda and its famous “Nasadiya Sukta, or the Hymn of Creation”. Let me tell you just four verses of possibly the mother of all mysterious hymns which has captivated even modern rationalists and scientists “
He took another sip from the already cold tea kept on the sofa side and tried to remember some thing. We thought he was probably slipping into an unchartered territory this time and did not have enough ammunition in his arsenal.
But we were wrong. In crisp Sanskrit, Satya started reciting what he called the Nasadiya Sukta, his tone faltering at times with suspected devotion:
नासदासीन नो सदासीत तदानीं नासीद रजो नो वयोमापरो यत किमावरीवः कुह कस्य शर्मन्नम्भः किमासीद गहनं गभीरम
न मर्त्युरासीदम्र्तं न तर्हि न रात्र्या अह्न आसीत्प्रकेतः आनीदवातं सवधया तदेकं तस्माद्धान्यन न परः किं चनास
न मर्त्युरासीदम्र्तं न तर्हि न रात्र्या अह्न आसीत्प्रकेतः आनीदवातं सवधया तदेकं तस्माद्धान्यन न परः किं चनास
“What is the meaning of these slokas ? Why should they be mysterious?” We asked . “They sound like any ordinary mantras that priests recite during Pujas”.
“Let me not translate them for you. I will let the great German Philosopher, Max Mueller, do that for you. I want the exact translation so that you can appreciate as to why these are not ordinary mantras.
“Let me not translate them for you. I will let the great German Philosopher, Max Mueller, do that for you. I want the exact translation so that you can appreciate as to why these are not ordinary mantras.
Then there was not non-existent nor existent:
there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.
What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter?
was water there, unfathomed depth of water?
Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal:
no sign was there, the day's and night's divider.
that one thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature,
apart from it was nothing whatsoever.
Let us remember that these verses ( the 129th hymn of the 10th Mandala of Rig Veda) are supposed to explain the Creation of Universe. But instead of answering, these pose questions: probing philosophical questions of impenetrable depth. These lines pack so much thoughts that even 3000 years after they were first recited, countless scholars are gasping for answers for one question - How could primitive humans in 1000 BC , be so profoundly wise and sceptical about God’s role in creation ? And at a time, when the order of the day should have been to sing your prayer in the praise of the Almighty, bow humbly before Him to prevent flood and famine and get down to the business of your daily farming .
Why are they so enigmatic ?
Think ! What are” not non-existent” and “nor existent” ? Why should Rig Vedic poets or philosophers think of such riddles? What purpose does it serve?
Or does it sound a little like Black Holes? You can not see them as the escape velocity from them reaches speed of light. So neither light nor any other form of information can escape them. They are invisible, non-existent for all practical purposes ! Yet they exist. And influence others by the tremendous gravitational force exuded from their huge mass. They are “cosmic nothings” made up of “huge things”, created when large stars die after their nuclear fuels runs out!
Solid matter - contained in star clusters, galaxies and black holes that we have around - is actually very rare in our universe. Matter floats in the universe like cosmic dust particles with immense expanse of nothingness separating them. So much rare is matter that the average matter-density of observable universe is just one hydrogen atom in every four cubic meter volume. (Lucky that we have so much matter around us on earth!). But recent scientific observation has concluded that what seems like empty space among the floating galaxies is actually not empty. It is filled with mysterious “dark matter “ and “dark energy” which account for most of the observable universe and explains the force behind its rapid accelerated expansion. This seemingly “non-existent” dark matter and energy really account for the “existent” ones , their motion and position. They also hold the secrets of understanding what happened during creation of Universe .
And what about death? Was it there? Of course not! Death, as we know it, of complex organic cells generated by the coded messages of DNA , was initially not there. That arose long after billions and billions of chance combination of atoms led to the fortuitous birth of self replicating molecule .! But then there was no immortality either. New stars were being born and old stars died and collapsed into white dwarfs or super novae. Planets arose around some stars. The cosmic dance birth and death, of stars and galaxies continued. And somewhere in the cosmos, clusters of inorganic molecules became self-replicating and in some cases ,as in the case of humans, self-conscious! “
“Seems like a heavy does of philosophy? Wait till I get to the next two verses” , chuckled Satya.
“ It gets even more intriguing there “
को अद्धा वेद क इह पर वोचत कुत आजाता कुत इयंविस्र्ष्टिः
अर्वाग देवा अस्य विसर्जनेनाथा को वेद यताबभूव
इयं विस्र्ष्टिर्यत आबभूव यदि वा दधे यदि वा न
यो अस्याध्यक्षः परमे वयोमन सो अङग वेद यदि वा नवेद
Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation? The gods are later than this world's creation. Who knows, then, whence it first came into being?
He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows it not.
“This is what has baffled even modern scientists. This piece from the ancient Rig Veda is really the extreme in scepticism . Only a highly philosophically evolved society could dwell on such posers ! Who were these people in Rig Vedic period to conclude that “gods were later than the world’s creation”? If Gods came afterwards, who completed creation ? A super God ? Nice ! But the writer (s?) of the above verses even doubts that? What then is the truth ?”
Satya went on , encouraged probably by our undivided attention .
“ These two verses have generated great debates over years – from religious leaders to quantum physicists . Cornel University Astronomy professor, Carl Sagan often quoted this mysterious sukta to prove that a spirit of “doubt” persisted even among the most ancient societies and rues the fact that even today, many of us do not have such a spirit of rational enquiry!”
“One more round of tea ? For deeper soul searching?” , asked Priyambada and nobody dared to disagree! “
“Ideal to dispel the philosophical fog hanging in the air “, I interjected.
Satya was not listening. He had relapsed into his trade mark monologue. Tea or not, there was no way to bring him back to reality immediately.
“Do you want to know what I personally think of these two verse s.”. Said Satya.
“Yes, Yes go on, we are all ears for you!” , I encouraged him to speak , for his own theories were often made of bizarre stuff ,- ranging from the banal to the bewildering !
Satya did not need my encouragement. He had already started.
“ I think they ( the verses ) declare the boundary of human knowledge and announce a limitation to its capability . You see, can humans know everything by using their brain? Or is there something which can never be known to them, no matter however much they tried through a system “reason , logic and observation”. In other words, is there an upper limit to the application of knowledge ? Is there something absolutely unknowable for ever? Is there something which will forever remain uncertain”
“How could that be ?” I asked and went on to prove that I also knew a bit of modern science to participate! “Why should there be an upper limit? By application of their “mind” human beings have achieved so much! They have even transcended and augmented the limits of their god –given senses. They can listen to ultrasound and see infra-red. They can see beneath their bodies by sending invisible rays and converting them into printable images which can be interpreted by their natural eyes . They can set up powerful radio telescopes to detect feeble signals from exploding stars in deep space, magnify them and create visible maps. They can literally listen to the dolphins and whales who talk in sound waves with frequencies undetectable to human ears. They seem to go on and on in their victorious march on nature . With the help of a soft 1.5 kg of bloated, wired mass called “brain” , sitting on top of their erect bodies, this strange specie have been able to contemplate on the abstract subject of infinity , visualize great distance in our cosmos and comprehend the behaviour of the tiniest entities inhabiting the sub atomic quantum world. They may be mere mortals, yet they are self-conscious and are able to do one thing that no other species does – “ contemplate on the fact of their own contemplation” . If they still don’t know something, that is because of the fact that their latest knowledge tool “science” has not yet got enough time since it’s invention. Why therefore should there be any uncertainty? I think, the Rig Vedic fellows were merely kidding !” , I said in one breadth and having the satisfaction of defeating Satya in his home turf .
Devjani, who thought I was on her side, gave me a glance laced with a you-too –Brutus accusation.
“Sorry to disappoint you My friend” , said Satya, “ Much as I would wish human knowledge to be a winner all the way right up to the end , it actually is not . “
“Let me tell you an interesting story. As the 20th century dawned mathematicians of the world gathered in the second ever “ World Congress” on Mathematics in Paris. Its opening address was by a German Mathematician called David Hilbert. His speech has since been regarded as the most famous and most influential speech in mathematics. That was a time when science was riding on the wheels of mathematics and mankind was waking upto its combined potential. Great discoveries tumbled out one by one from the European Laboratories. Scientific optimism was on the air! But certain mathematical problems remain unsolved and some mathematical conjectures appeared true but unproven. Hilbert was of the view that key to all human understanding lies in mathematics, the language of the universe. He singled out 23 unproven problems and declared that their solution will define the course of 20th century mathematics. Everybody agreed that there must be some way to prove them. Nothing is improvable by human intellect. So the final declaration of this great congress was “We must know, we will know”.
But within a few years, a sickly looking Austrian mathematician destroyed the second part of this triumphant declaration for ever. His name was Kurt Godel and what he invented sent shivers down the spine of mathematician, logicians and thinkers of al hue around the world. For what he proved was a theorem which states that “there will always be something improvable”. Proving that something will always remain improvable to any system of logic was exactly opposite to Hilbert’s futuristic claim , “We will know”. According to Gödel, there really is something about which we can never be certain about whether it is true or false , right or wrong ! Sounds eerily similar to the last lines of “Nasadiya sukta” , isn’t it ? Godel called this “incompleteness theorem” , others called the “The God Principle “. Here at last is the final frontier for human knowledge. Religious leaders and theologians, wary of a marauding Science, heaved a sigh of relief realizing that here was a proof that humans could never be omniscient, thanks largely to Godel. But God did not help Godel, who turned increasingly delusional at later life, refused to take food as he saw unseen enemies poisoning him and died a lonely death in a psychiatric hospital at Princeton . His best and only friend with whom he daily walked from his apartment to college and back , watched helplessly . Thus died the greatest ever logician of all time about whom Einstein had once remarked “I have no more interest in my works on Relativity. These days, I go to the college, merely for the privilege of walking back with Gödel”
Just when the news was out the “unknowable” really exists, albeit mathematically, another young mind, the German Physicist Heisenberg noticed something strange about the nature of the subatomic particle- one can not tell the position and speed of a particle simultaneously no matter how sophisticated instruments you employ. If you know one exactly, the other one is uncertain and vice-versa. It is as if, uncertainty is woven into the very fabric of nature. It is as if there is a real world within “is and isn’t”, “right and wrong” and “existent and non-existent”. Humans have to accept this seemingly unreal nature of reality and the uncertain behaviour of the micro-particles which constitute the certain , ready to touch macro-world! Heisenberg called it this “the uncertainty principle”. Unlike Godel who had to flee Europe to avoid persecution, Heisenberg received a Nobel and was made the Director of Nazi atomic bomb project by Hitler!
So where does that leave us. Today’s science knows about the existence of the non-existent and the certainty of the uncertain in the universe . Dozens of quantum mechanical and relativistic experiments testify to it on almost daily basis. “
“Just as the ancients mused in the last four line of the Nasadiya Sukta, replied Devjani.
It was close to 9.30 AM.
Satya glanced at his watch, gave a shriek and rushed out. It was time for him to go to office and push his pen in the highly certain world of Indian Babudom !
---------------------------------------
Saturday, March 14, 2009
WORLD WAR II - WHEN SANITY TOOK A BREAK
This is the 70th year of start of WW-II. Few days back , when my 12 year old son , Shreyans , after being asked to do a school project on World War, wondered as to why he should bother at all about such silly things , I decided it was time to tell him the story of this great human conflict. 
The war started with a German cavalry charge on the borders of Poland just like any other ancient war but ended with the devastating exhibition of the most modern weapon known to mankind-The nuclear bomb. The war started as a limited European conflict but ended encompassing the entire planet’s continents and all its oceans. From the cold steppes of Russia to the burning deserts of Africa, from the impenetrable jungles of Indonesia to the desolate islands of Okinawa – it caused destruction of lives and property never seen before in human history.
But apart from the victory and defeat which are normal part of any war in history, this war exposed the weakness of human nature and the beast like cruelty it is capable of - in the name of nationalism. It showed that man can not only create factories for industry but also build industries for death in the form of concentration camps. Designed by engineers, architects and scientists, these murder mills were progammed to deliver death to their unsuspecting victims-six million in all- with unprecedented efficiency. Those who were led through the gates of these death-factories were not people of war but simple innocent men , women and children , who happened to be having a particular religion not liked by their executioners! Deception ran in concentration camps right from the start –The entry gates had euphemistic German slogans like “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Woks make you free) , flower gardens lined up the path leading to gas chambers which in turn were masquerading as community shower rooms. As frightened naked men women and children huddled for a supposedly disinfecting bath, lethal Zyklon-B tablets rained from hidden roof vents snuffing the lives out of their bodies in a matter of minutes. As the tablets evaporated and rose upwards, small kids fell first , some even clutching their toys up to the last moment, and then the adults fell on top of them in heaps. When the shrieks gradually stopped , it was time to feed one more batch of processed dead bodies to the burning ovens of the creamatoria to churn out the finished products - the ashes of innocent human beings and hairs of Jew women - to be used as fertilizers for German agriculture and mattresses for Nazi soldiers. Even as the war was drawing to an end, these murder mills remained surprisingly active, turning out their daily quota of dead bodies at furious pace. At the end six million of civilian Jews had vanished into the sky – through the chimneys of Auswitchz, Treblinka , Bergen-Belsen and countless other concentration camps !
What do all these teach us? The potential of hatred? The absence of a God supposed to rescue his creation from periodic chaos and turmoil? Or the real picture of the animal that hides within all of under a veneer of civilization - ready to emerge at the slightest outbreak of insanity ?
In his groundbreaking BBC television series “Ascent of Man” , standing in front of a pond in Aushwitz (the largest concentration camp) into which ashes of two million bodies had been flushed, Jacob Brownski, the British Mathematician and Biologist tries to drive the same message. Elie Wisel, the nobel peace prize winning author, echoes the same feeling in his book “Night”.
But as a human conflict, WW-II was unique- a war of sharp contrasts and grand contradictions. The war saw crushing victories of dictatorship over democracy at the beginning and its dramatic reversal at the end. It shook the faith of mankind in the virtue of democratic way of life for a short duration as Hitler and Mussolini notched victories after victories and appeared nearly invincible but made us finally believe that democracy is the only surviving kits for mankind. Before the war, Germany was the epicenter of European learning where the fire of knowledge raged in its institution and universities. And it was the same Germany, the land of Beethoven and Goethe which, within few years , witnessed huge bon-fire of books on its city streets. During this period Germany drove the world’s greatest ever scientific genius, Albert Einstein, to America and surrendered to the greatest evil genius of history, Adolf Hitler - the vegetarian , non-smoking, non-drinking ordinary soldier of WW-I who disapproved killing of animals , led a simple life and slept on a hard bunk with his mother’s photo by the bed side. It is amazing to think that Hitler, the ultimate dictator had been a product of a genuine German democratic process.
Well , the contrasts do not end there.
In the years leading to war , like a magician, he made Germans believe the unbelievable – That the Jews, a race that has given the largest number of Nobel Winners in history- is actually a race of morons! And those who have broad shoulders and high cheekbone –The Aryans - are destined to rule the world forever. Throughout the six years of war, he possessed the German soul like none before – making the average German see things that never existed and believe in victory when defeat stared . Even the Swastika sign which Hitler chose for the Nazi flag and which signified fear, terror and often death, is actually taken from ancient Hindu mythology that symbolizes peace, luck and well being to its bearer. Such was the devastation let loose by its bearers that even today, the symbol continues to be dreaded in the West . Yet in the east and far east, the followers of three world religions, Hinduism, Budhhism and Jainism, bear it adoringly everywhere- from tattoos on their shoulders to designs on daily apparel.
The war quickly made Hitler the winner - the master of Europe with an empire larger than that possessed by Alexander or Napoleon . But it was the same winner who drove his nation to its tragic denouement. The thousand year rule of third Reich that he had promised to German people did not last even for 12 years, leaving on its wake, a trail of death and destruction everywhere in Europe.
Here is how it went, for the introductory chapter (Part-1).
THE WAR LIKE NEVER BEFORE (PART-I)
World War-II is the single most destructive conflict in recorded human history. In terms of human loss, it counts more than all other previous wars of world put together. No other event in the past has influenced the course of human history as much as this did. As the war ended, there was hardly any country in the world which was either directly or indirectly not affected by it. Every field of human activity- politics, society, science, technology, warfare and even painting and literature – underwent momentous changes because of it.
World War-II is the single most destructive conflict in recorded human history. In terms of human loss, it counts more than all other previous wars of world put together. No other event in the past has influenced the course of human history as much as this did. As the war ended, there was hardly any country in the world which was either directly or indirectly not affected by it. Every field of human activity- politics, society, science, technology, warfare and even painting and literature – underwent momentous changes because of it.
The war started with a German cavalry charge on the borders of Poland just like any other ancient war but ended with the devastating exhibition of the most modern weapon known to mankind-The nuclear bomb. The war started as a limited European conflict but ended encompassing the entire planet’s continents and all its oceans. From the cold steppes of Russia to the burning deserts of Africa, from the impenetrable jungles of Indonesia to the desolate islands of Okinawa – it caused destruction of lives and property never seen before in human history.
But apart from the victory and defeat which are normal part of any war in history, this war exposed the weakness of human nature and the beast like cruelty it is capable of - in the name of nationalism. It showed that man can not only create factories for industry but also build industries for death in the form of concentration camps. Designed by engineers, architects and scientists, these murder mills were progammed to deliver death to their unsuspecting victims-six million in all- with unprecedented efficiency. Those who were led through the gates of these death-factories were not people of war but simple innocent men , women and children , who happened to be having a particular religion not liked by their executioners! Deception ran in concentration camps right from the start –The entry gates had euphemistic German slogans like “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Woks make you free) , flower gardens lined up the path leading to gas chambers which in turn were masquerading as community shower rooms. As frightened naked men women and children huddled for a supposedly disinfecting bath, lethal Zyklon-B tablets rained from hidden roof vents snuffing the lives out of their bodies in a matter of minutes. As the tablets evaporated and rose upwards, small kids fell first , some even clutching their toys up to the last moment, and then the adults fell on top of them in heaps. When the shrieks gradually stopped , it was time to feed one more batch of processed dead bodies to the burning ovens of the creamatoria to churn out the finished products - the ashes of innocent human beings and hairs of Jew women - to be used as fertilizers for German agriculture and mattresses for Nazi soldiers. Even as the war was drawing to an end, these murder mills remained surprisingly active, turning out their daily quota of dead bodies at furious pace. At the end six million of civilian Jews had vanished into the sky – through the chimneys of Auswitchz, Treblinka , Bergen-Belsen and countless other concentration camps !
What do all these teach us? The potential of hatred? The absence of a God supposed to rescue his creation from periodic chaos and turmoil? Or the real picture of the animal that hides within all of under a veneer of civilization - ready to emerge at the slightest outbreak of insanity ?
In his groundbreaking BBC television series “Ascent of Man” , standing in front of a pond in Aushwitz (the largest concentration camp) into which ashes of two million bodies had been flushed, Jacob Brownski, the British Mathematician and Biologist tries to drive the same message. Elie Wisel, the nobel peace prize winning author, echoes the same feeling in his book “Night”.
But as a human conflict, WW-II was unique- a war of sharp contrasts and grand contradictions. The war saw crushing victories of dictatorship over democracy at the beginning and its dramatic reversal at the end. It shook the faith of mankind in the virtue of democratic way of life for a short duration as Hitler and Mussolini notched victories after victories and appeared nearly invincible but made us finally believe that democracy is the only surviving kits for mankind. Before the war, Germany was the epicenter of European learning where the fire of knowledge raged in its institution and universities. And it was the same Germany, the land of Beethoven and Goethe which, within few years , witnessed huge bon-fire of books on its city streets. During this period Germany drove the world’s greatest ever scientific genius, Albert Einstein, to America and surrendered to the greatest evil genius of history, Adolf Hitler - the vegetarian , non-smoking, non-drinking ordinary soldier of WW-I who disapproved killing of animals , led a simple life and slept on a hard bunk with his mother’s photo by the bed side. It is amazing to think that Hitler, the ultimate dictator had been a product of a genuine German democratic process.
Well , the contrasts do not end there.
In the years leading to war , like a magician, he made Germans believe the unbelievable – That the Jews, a race that has given the largest number of Nobel Winners in history- is actually a race of morons! And those who have broad shoulders and high cheekbone –The Aryans - are destined to rule the world forever. Throughout the six years of war, he possessed the German soul like none before – making the average German see things that never existed and believe in victory when defeat stared . Even the Swastika sign which Hitler chose for the Nazi flag and which signified fear, terror and often death, is actually taken from ancient Hindu mythology that symbolizes peace, luck and well being to its bearer. Such was the devastation let loose by its bearers that even today, the symbol continues to be dreaded in the West . Yet in the east and far east, the followers of three world religions, Hinduism, Budhhism and Jainism, bear it adoringly everywhere- from tattoos on their shoulders to designs on daily apparel.
The war quickly made Hitler the winner - the master of Europe with an empire larger than that possessed by Alexander or Napoleon . But it was the same winner who drove his nation to its tragic denouement. The thousand year rule of third Reich that he had promised to German people did not last even for 12 years, leaving on its wake, a trail of death and destruction everywhere in Europe.
Seventy years after the event, if you can identify a single non-religious personality that is recognizable in every country or society on earth as the symbol of totalitarianism, it will undoubtedly be Hitler. As a recent historian put it, he was perhaps Satan’s best answer to God! No wonder, when Times choose, Einstein as the Person of the Century , they had to offer an exclusive explanation as to why the choice was not Hitler ! (Person of Century is not about whether a person is good or bad but about having maxim influence on the events of the period under consideartion) .
The war was not without certain positive fallouts. Great scientific and technological advancements took place during the war. The jet planes that we see today, the ubiquitous computers, the security of internet commerce, the space suit that Neil Armstrong wore to moon, the antibiotic we take to fight against germs and the cruise missiles of modern warfare – all owe their origins to the developments made during this period. As the war came to an end, the world saw the emergence of two new superpowers – America and Soviet Russia - and the extinction of a previous super power – the British on whose empire, it was said that “sun never sets”. Unable to maintain distant colonies with a war ravaged economy and relegated to a lower status in the global power hierarchy in the new world order , the great imperial British gradually retreated from Asia and Africa resulting in unexpected freedom for many countries like, perhaps, India ! While it’s end brought peace , it also started the beginning of a new confrontation - between two new superpowers and their two contending economic ideas-Capitalism and Socialism. Before the light of new found peace bathed an exhausted world, it got divided into two hostile blocks and the shadow of Cold War lengthened across every nation heralding the deadly age of nuclear arms competition and possible annihilation of the entire human race.
Why is this period so important? Practically any scientific or technological feat that we see today, every hue of political or economic philosophy we come across , has some trace in this tumultuous period of human history. Therefore to understand these things, appreciate them in right perspective and above all to prevent this chapter of history from repeating itself, a proper knowledge of this period is a must for every one.
"That is why, my son, you should bother about this period in History ", I told Shreyans!
Monday, March 9, 2009
Globalization@Recession.com : Mails From a Globalized World
Globalization@Recession.org
Looking out of the classroom window, in the Belfer Center of Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, USA, I tried to focus my mind on the ongoing lecture – “Globalization”. It was a part of the curriculum in my Masters degree in Public Management.
I know... today it is a much maligned word, especially in the developing world. In the desert settlements of Sub-Saharan Africa, where much of the teeming humanity strives to live in one-dollar-a-day income, it assumes the proportion of a divine curse.
But not too long ago it was the Holy Grail for the developed world, as Jagadish Bhagawati, the famed American Economist of Indian Origin would testify. Never mind the occasional attacks mounted by a certain Joseph Stiglitz, another American Nobel Economist.
At the beginning of the lecture, the Nash looking professor had asked all of us to define “globalization” in our own words. It was so difficult to define it. I mean you know a thing in a kind of vague way , but when someone asks you for a precise definition , you would be kind of "dashed" as Wooster ( of P.G.Wodehouse fame) would have put it . The classroom had students from all over the world- from Mexico to Kenya. Yet only a few ventured to define. None was satisfactory...at least to the professor.
Right after that moment my mind was not on the lecture. So simple and familiar a word and yet it appeared to confound us all. After struggling for a while an American student, sitting near me opened his lunch box and closed his mind.
I tried to pen my thoughts on a scrap of paper and surprised to see it taking the shape of a rhyming poem. Here is what I wrote that day :-
“
Globalization
When a virus in Pakistan,
Crashes computers from Botswana to Boston...
When a twist from Michael Jackson,
Triggers epileptic feats in a Mongolian maiden...
You feel an invisible force,
The force, my friend, of globalization!
When a terrorist in Jordan, Transfers money from Japan
To buy a bomb in Ukraine, for a target in Manhattan...
You feel an invisible force,
The force, my friend, of globalization!
If Dollars catch fever from the sneezes of a Yen,
And pizza-wars over market share are fought in dry Congo-terrain,
When Baggio turns Buddhist and Beckham’s tattoo reflects Vedic Religion...
You feel an invisible force,
The force, my friend, of globalization!
What is globalization?
Is it an attempt to create a single face and one vision?
For a planet that ploughs through the space,
In a state of perpetual motion …? “
======================
PostScript: - As recession casts its long shadow over the global economic landscape, virtues of Milton Freedman style capitalism seem less evident. The Keynesians appear to be back with a bang in the free market havens of USA as Obama tries to drag the country away from the approaching apocalypse through Government intervention - an euphemism for “Capitol crying for Capital”. The Indian-GDP sized stimulus package announced by US government to pull the omnipotent multinationals of yesterday up the abyss of bankruptcy brings the curtain down on a quarter century of unbridled free market economic theory. Remember, the cardinal principle of Free Market Capitalism – “No artificial correction to the “Aggregate Demand” through Fiscal and Monetary measures. The market would recover by itself in the long run.” More than 700 billion dollars of tax payer’s money for correcting the imbalance! Seems more of a “creation” of a new economic curve than a “correction” to an existing one.
Remember how Keynes had ridiculed the free market champions in his famous phrase “In the long run we are all dead .... His policy prescription during the depression years was that instead of trying to save ,the Government should “spend the money they don’t have”. In recession his innovative idea was when the private industry shrinks and hands over the pink slip to its workers, the State should create work and may even pay its citizens “ for digging holes and filling them back”.
So we will be unfortunate to witness one more epic battle of “Free market Philosophy” (that is at the heart of “Free Trade and Globalization”) of Bhagawati and the “Interventionist” approach of John Maynard Keynes – a battle that has been witnessed more than once in the last century. So far Obama seems to listen to the ghost of Keynes while Hayek and Freedman turn in their graves.
And as I write today , my sacred belief in Hayek and Freedman seems to shake, wobble and totter – a dashed unpleasant state of mind as Bertie Wooster would have testified...
-----------------------------
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE DREAM IS OVER (PART-5 of 5)
Back To The Future - The Dream is Over!
After visiting the Valley of Kings at the West Bank, we went to see the giant statues of "Colossi of Memnon" and the temple of the queen Hatshepsut . While the Colosssi statutes offered the best photo-op for the tourists, the temple of Hatshepsut was unique - It was constructed by the a queen pharaoh who shined through a long line of male knigs dominating Egypt's past. So those of us , who were bored with the male mummies so far , took notice . A female pharaoh aroused our curiosity. It is said that upon the death of her father in 1493 B.C., Hatshepsut married her half-brother Thutmose-II and assumed the title of Great Royal Wife. Incest among Egyptian Royality was not rare. ( Did you know that the ravishing Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, , had to marry her brother aged 11, in order to be the queen of Egypt as the rule demanded a female to have a consort to ascend the throne !) Thutmose-II was the greatest campaigner of ancient Egypt and better remembered as "Egypt's Napoleon". After his death, she assumed the titile of "God Amun's wife" and ruled Egypt.
As the hot sun prepared to settle down for the day , we arrived at the famous Karnak Temple complex. Some say, this is perhaps the largest temple in world history before the era of organized religion. Standing inside a bewildering maze of pillars and obelisks , I realized that this vast temple complex was as important as the pyramids or the Valley of Kings in historical and archaeological terms. In fact, if you go to Egypt, the three places I would advise you not to miss are the Great Pyramid, The Valley of Kings and the Karnak Temple Complex of Luxor.
Karnak was known as Ipet-isut (most select of places) by the ancient Egyptians. It is a city of temples built over 2000 years and dedicated to the Theban triad of Amun (Sun God), Mut (Mother Goddess) and Khonsu (Moon God). Standing there , I wondered whether it is a matter of coincidence that the largest Sun Temple in India is named “Konark” and that in Egypt is called “Karnak” ? Did the Kalinga kings borrow this name from their African Counterpart? After all , the scene of a Giraffe being gifted to the king is depicted in the stone relief of Konark Temple and India had no giraffes when Konark was being built . The derelict place, much like Borobuddur or Angkor Vat, is still capable of overshadowing many of the wonders of the modern world and in its day must have been an awe inspiring sight. For the ancient Egyptian population this could only have been the “place of the gods”. It was the mother of all religious buildings, the largest ever made and a place of pilgrimage for nearly 4000 years. It covers almost 200 acres .The area of the sacred enclosure of Amon alone is 61 acres and can hold ten average European cathedrals. The great temple at the heart of Karnak is so big; St.Piter’s, Milan and North Dame Cathedrals could be lost within its wall. There are columns which are nearly 15 mtrs in diameter and would take 10 adults with their outstretched arms joined together to cover a single pillar’s circumference. ( Remember how tourists try to embrace the Iron Pillar in Delhi with their outstretched hands. Here , you have to line up 15 of them to encircle one pillar ! )Each pillar, each wall of this temple is like personalized dairies of the pharaohs who ruled Egypt thousands of years ago- all written in hieroglyphic language and still well preserved. These writings, correlated with papyrus accounts of ancient times , give a remarkable clarity and authenticity to Egypt’s past. In fact, in Egypt’s history not only the year but even the date of ascension of some kings can be fixed easily though the event happened some three to four thousand years ago. Unlike the ancient Indians, the ancient Egyptians believed that the written word has magical powers. So they wrote wherever they could – on the walls and obelisks of Karnak, inside the tombs of the Valley of Kings and even on articles kept for a king’s use in afterlife.
Compare it to ancient history of India where even some of the major happenings are mired in controversy and lack authenticity because of what Historians call the “lack of genuine source material”. Even , Ashoka ( 273 BC-232BC?) the greatest of ancient Indian King, was unknown to all subsequent kings- the Guptas, Hrashvardhan, Moguls and so on- till a British official of Calcutta , Joseph Princep, deciphered the Brahmi script and interpreted the inscription on the stone edicts of Ashoka. Even then, in none of the rock edicts the name “Asoka” was mentioned which led to an unprecedented historical manhunt by the British historians till finally one such edict was discovered , clearly bearing the name of Ashoka, in Karnataka in 1915! How Princep put the various pieces of this historical jigsaw resulting in discovery of Ashoka is nothing short of modern crime thriller . Isn't it astonishing that the Great Ashoka was introduced to our history books only 100 years ago! When I pass by the Princep Ghat back home in Calcutta, I feel a sense of gratitude to this great man, Joseph Princep, for giving us , Indians, our greatest ever king. But even now, nothing definite is known about Ashoka’s ancestors or whether he had 99 brothers (whom he is alleged to have killed to ascend the Mauryan throne!).
Though we may be proud of the antiquity of Indian civilization, think of it –our earliest surviving ancient monuments belong to post Buddhist era (3rd century BC onwards). The lion capitol of Ashoka at Saranath, which is our national emblem, is dated 250 BC. The only historical relics surviving out of our Indus Valley (contemporaneous to Old Kingdom of Egypt) are few single storied houses and drainage! Our oldest written documents with unambiguous historicity (Kautilya’s Artha Shastra ) belong the early Mauryan period only, hardly 3rd century BC. In the Vedic period, no durable writing medium was known to Indians and the sages passed down the sacred texts to their disciple through continuous verbal repetition ( shruti ). Hence , none of these exist in written form today. Compared to us, the ancient Egyptians had mastered the ultra durable Papyrus as a writing medium and were busy penning their history right from the period of Egypt's 1st Dynasty (4,000 BC) upto upto 11th century AD. Truly, their antiquity- unambiguous , well preserved and documented, dwarfs many of contemporary civilizations!
In the evening we went to buy some souvenirs and Egyptian curios. The hot favourite – Papyrus paintings , mummy masks and Egyptian cotton shirts . Our guide had informed us that it is comparatively cheaper in Luxor town. As I was going through the crowded bazaar, a shopkeeper called out “India? I nodded. He shot back “ Amitabh Bachhan! Come to my shop please. Really good stuff here for you”. Everywhere in Egypt I went, I heard the name of Amitabh Bachhan next to the word “Indian”. For all practical purposes, Amitabh, is a synonym for India as far as Egypt is concerned . Everyone from little children to bearded shopkeepers knows about him. I was told that Hindi films especially that of Amitbh are extremely popular in Egypt. That must be so, because we had noticed that one cable channel in our hotel room beamed Hindi movies continuously. When I asked a boy at a shop about Hindi movies he told me that he had recently seen Shakti movie. “What acting man, this Amitabh of yours! This guy is really great” he gushed. Everywhere, we went, we found the Egyptians extremely fond of Indian Tourists and when a shopkeeper even offered his mobile phone to me as a loving gift from Egypt,I was truly overwhelmed. Never, in any foreign land, have I seen so much fondness for India ! Bosses in the ministry of tourism and producers of Bollywood potboilers, please take notice - here is an untapped market for you with unlimited goodwill!
In Luxor market, I was puzzled to see some shops marked as “hassle free”. I asked the guide what it means and he told me that in those shops, tourists are not pestered to buy something at any cost. I asked the price of a papyrus painting, the shopkeepers answered 100 pounds. I turned away and immediately the shopkeepers became very apologetic, “do not be angry, my friend. You tell your price. Does not matter whether you buy or not. Let us do business”. Tourism is taken seriously in Egypt. No wonder ten million of them from all around the globe flock here every year. The guide came running from another end and immediately enquired whether the shopkeeper was trying to hassle us. They probably do not know what hassle means in a typical Indian bazaar.
The tour finally came to an end as we headed to Luxor station for a train to Cairo. A porter called out “India! Amitabh !” and came running towards us . When the train arrived , it was a sheer coincidence to find the same ticket collector on our coach. He immediately recognized us and greeted us with “Hello India, back from the trip? How is Amitabh Bachhan back home?”
Alps Tours, Calcutta had fulfilled all its promises. We had heard many horror stories from people about travel agencies promising a heaven to tourist and leaving in the lurch in strange foreign lands ( after, of course the payment is made!). But not so with Alps Tours, whose owners Abhijit Dhar personally accompanied the group and took care throughout the trip. He had promised us a pyramid for breakfast, a Karnak for lunch and a belly dancer for dinner- all served with slices of History! He truly kept his words. What more can you expect for a sum of a little above $1000?
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