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
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