What Should I Do With My Life?

The real meaning of success -- and how to find it.

It's time to define the new era. Our faith has been shaken. We've lost confidence in our leaders and in our institutions. Our beliefs have been tested. We've discredited the notion that the Internet would change everything (and the stock market would buy us an exit strategy from the grind). Our expectations have been dashed. We've abandoned the idea that work should be a 24-hour-a-day rush and that careers should be a wild adventure. Yet we're still holding on.
We're seduced by the idea that picking up the pieces and simply tweaking the formula will get the party started again. In spite of our best thinking and most searing experience, our ideas about growth and success are mired in a boom-bust mentality. Just as LBOs gave way to IPOs, the market is primed for the next engine of wealth creation. Just as we traded in the pinstripes and monster bonuses of the Wall Street era for T-shirts and a piece of the action during the startup revolution, we're waiting to latch on to the new trappings of success. (I understand the inclination. I've surfed from one boom to the next for most of my working life -- from my early days as a bond trader to my most recent career as a writer tracking the migration of my generation from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.)
There's a way out. Instead of focusing on what's next , let's get back to what's first . The previous era of business was defined by the question, Where's the opportunity? I'm convinced that business success in the future starts with the question, What should I do with my life? Yes, that's right. The most obvious and universal question on our plates as human beings is the most urgent and pragmatic approach to sustainable success in our organizations. People don't succeed by migrating to a "hot" industry (one word: dotcom) or by adopting a particular career-guiding mantra (remember "horizontal careers"?). They thrive by focusing on the question of who they really are -- and connecting that to work that they truly love (and, in so doing, unleashing a productive and creative power that they never imagined). Companies don't grow because they represent a particular sector or adopt the latest management approach. They win because they engage the hearts and minds of individuals who are dedicated to answering that life question.
This is not a new idea. But it may be the most powerfully pressing one ever to be disrespected by the corporate world. There are far too many smart, educated, talented people operating at quarter speed, unsure of their place in the world, contributing far too little to the productive engine of modern civilization. There are far too many people who look like they have their act together but have yet to make an impact. You know who you are. It comes down to a simple gut check: You either love what you do or you don't.
Those who are lit by that passion are the object of envy among their peers and the subject of intense curiosity. They are the source of good ideas. They make the extra effort. They demonstrate the commitment. They are the ones who, day by day, will rescue this drifting ship. And they will be rewarded. With money, sure, and responsibility, undoubtedly. But with something even better too: the kind of satisfaction that comes with knowing your place in the world. We are sitting on a huge potential boom in productivity -- if we could just get the square pegs out of the round holes.

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Irish Blessings And Prayers Of Faith

Blessing is a spiritual act of recognising and affirming. It is a hope, a wish, a prayer, where we acknowledge and remind the ones who are blessed of the connection between them and the Divine. The Celtic tradition of Ireland, Scotland and Wales widely uses this. Many of its ways and beliefs have been incorporated into Celtic Christianity, which perceives eternity and this world as intertwined. Its prayers — so real, so funny even, that they bring a smile to your face — contain an awareness of God’s everyday, all-day presence. An old, still-popular Irish blessing goes: “May there always be work for your hands to do. May your purse always hold a coin or two. May the sun always shine upon your window-pane. May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain. May the hand of a friend always be near to you, and May God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.” Often the brevity holds a sweet poetic reality: “May you have warm words on a cold evening, A full moon on a dark night, And the road downhill all the way to your door.” There is also gentle humour: “If God sends you down a stony path, may he give you strong shoes.” John O’Donohue, the Irish Catholic poet and theologian who connected deeply with this tradition, has written some of the most powerful and moving modern blessings. His writing is inspired by “the Celtic imagination”, which “represents a vision of the divine where no one or nothing is excluded”. In his last book — published before he died in January 2008 — To Bless the Space Between Us’, O’Donohue tells us a blessing is “a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal and strengthen. ...when a blessing is invoked, a window opens in eternal time.” His crafted blessings go beyond the usual ones for a new home, marriage or birth, and include blessings for parents of a criminal, for those who have lost a child, for those experiencing exile, solitude and failure, for those faced with a sudden, serious illness. It was his belief that the human heart always longs for a state of wholeness, that place where everything comes together, so to bless someone is to call some of that wholeness upon that person right now. As the ending of his blessing for solitude says: “May you learn to see your self, With the same delight, pride and expectation, with which God sees you in every moment”. From an earlier work, ‘Echoes of Memory’, O’Donohue’s poem ‘Beannacht’ (meaning Blessing), begins: “On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you...” and ends with the words: “And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life.” The true beauty of blessing is how it affects everything — by the fact that we live, we are blessed; we have the power to bless others and they reflect love back to us. In the very act of blessing we are blessed. You may confer a blessing with a silent prayer or a spoken or written wish. But there are other ways. When, with awareness, you honour another, express admiration or give a gift, you share a blessing. In a sincere greeting, when encouraging and complimenting someone, through small acts for the environment, you participate in the act of blessing. Like the Celts, learn to bless all of creation with deep awareness, so letting all of creation bless you.

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On The Tale _UPA

In the aftermath of the UPA government winning the trust vote, many questions remain unanswered about the charges of bribery raised so dramatically by three BJP MPs in Parliament on Tuesday. The truth behind the allegations must be thoroughly investigated and exposed. However, the shock waves that the incident has justifiably generated should be tempered by the fact such things are not unknown in Indian politics. Fifteen years ago, four Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) MPs, including Shibu Soren — who was once again a key figure in boosting the UPA’s tally in Parliament — were given money to help defeat a no-confidence motion against the Narasimha Rao government. More recently, 11 MPs were expelled for accepting money for raising questions in Parliament. Clearly, MPs on the take — even if they are a minority — are a problem. The investigation of the allegations made by the three BJP members could conceivably be kept out of the hands of investigating agencies on the ground that Article 105(2) of the Indian Constitution gives MPs immunity ‘for anything said or any vote given by him in Parliament’. The Supreme Court reiterated this in a 1998 judgment in the JMM bribery case where it said bribe-takers were immune from prosecution whereas bribe-givers had no such immunity. It is questionable whether the immunity given to MPs was meant to shield them from bribery charges. Indeed, the minority judgment in the JMM bribery case said immunity could not be extended to MPs who had taken a bribe. Several constitutional experts believe that in spite of the charges by the BJP MPs being made inside Parliament, this should be the subject of a criminal investigation. They say an FIR could be lodged under the Prevention of Corruption Act since the Supreme Court has clearly said MPs are “public servants”. But that itself won’t solve the larger issue of MPs being open to corruption and lobbying. There must be a move to document money being given to MPs by interest groups or lobbyists. This is done, for instance, in the US where details of contributions from lobbyists to elected representatives are recorded. This not only legitimises giving funds to legislators but also enables voters to track which interest group is backing whom. In addition, there must be greater transparency in the way parties and MPs raise money for election campaigns. Unlike many other democracies, the source of funds for political parties in India remains murky. Unless this is made more transparent, we could well see a repeat of what happened during Tuesday’s trust vote.

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China- Visiting The Past

Imagine visiting the Taj Mahal by day, and in the evening going to a theatre-cum-restaurant in Agra, where someone dressed like Mian Tansen sings Mian ki Malhar while you tuck into kakori kabab and chicken shahjahani! In Xi’an, in the Shaanxi province of China, you can do something similar. First, visit the beautiful Huaqing hot spring, 30 km away at the foot of the Lishan mountains, the favourite site of kings since the 11th century BC. It acquired fame during the reign of Tang dynasty emperor Xuanzong (685-762). Xuanzong built a lavish palace for his concubine Yang Guifei, reputed to be one of the four most beautiful women in ancient China. Then, come back for dinner at the Tang Dynasty Cultural Theatre and Restaurant in Xi’an. While you eat and drink, artists in Tang period costumes play ancient musical instruments, sing and dance. That China is an ‘old’ civilisation is well known. The exact import of the word old sinks into people like me while visiting the past in archaeological sites around Xi’an. The mausoleum of the First Emperor Qinshihuang (259-210 BC), located 36 km east of Xi’an, has an outer wall covering over 2 sq km. More than 2,000 years ago, it was reportedly built over three decades by more than half a million labourers. It is famous for its approximately 8,000 life-size terracotta warriors and horses, arranged in battle formations to guard the tomb. The main tomb, under a man-made hill for protection against plunder, is still unexcavated. The artistic quality, distinctive style and striking posture of each terracotta soldier, and their sheer strength in numbers fill us with a great sense of awe and curiosity about what lies buried deep in the tomb. One gets this same feeling of being overwhelmed by history at the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an itself, or at the Huaqing hot spring. The Wild Goose Pagoda, built in 652, is famous for its association with the monk, Xuanzang, also known as Hsuan-tsang. He undertook a 17-year overland trip to India and back, and is famous for bringing about interaction between China and India. Inside the Da ci’en temple complex, he built a pagoda to translate the Sanskrit sutras and store them. The seven-storey mud and brick pagoda, tapering at the top, shows distinct signs of Indian temple architectural influence. Looking at the pagoda you marvel at the adventurous spirit of Xuanzang. He travelled across the Himalayas almost 1,400 years ago, without marked-out paths, nice trekking shoes and woollen anoraks, and no interpreter! At the Huaqing hot spring stands a recent statue of the beautiful Yang Guifei. There’s also the Wujian five-room suite, famous for the Xi’an incident. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of the Chinese Nationalist Party lived in this suite for a while. On December 12, 1936, two of his own generals, Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, staged a coup d’etat. Hearing gun shots at 4 a.m., Chiang Kai-shek escaped through the window and fled barefoot. He was arrested from the adjoining mountain and forced to negotiate with the armies of the Chinese Communist Party to jointly fight the Japanese. Seeing the bullet holes on the wall, and the bed, tables, chairs and other furniture purportedly used by Chiang Kai-shek gives one a palpable sense of visiting the past. In Humayun’s tomb, imagine seeing where the last emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was hiding after the debacle in the First War of Independence. Among the millions of visitors who have been to Humayun’s tomb, it is doubtful whether more than a few hundred are even aware of the fact that the last Mughal emperor had taken refuge in this mausoleum after the unfortunate and tumultuous developments of September 1857. Apart from the richness of its past, the efficient manner in which the authorities have managed and organised the facilities for visiting the past are very impressive. Travel to the sites is through broad motorways. No tedious hours of navigating through traffic jams. Xi’an, an ancient city like Agra, had its own share of narrow roads, slums, and unauthorised encroachments. They have been cleared and replaced by broad avenues. North of the Wild Goose Pagoda, they have even built a delightful large plaza with a large number of fountains, parks and statues. Many archaeologists have strong opinions against restoration of ruined old monuments. However, for the ordinary tourists, seeing a restored old monument is a much more exciting experience than seeing old, dilapidated ruins and imagining — with the help of old manuscripts, pictures and paintings — what it must have looked like at the height of its glory. Wonder how many visitors to Delhi’s Red Fort can even imagine what the fort complex may have looked like before the British, after the First War of Independence, destroyed many of the pavilions and gardens and started to use it as their headquarters. The Chinese have managed to renovate and maintain the monuments well. Of course, someone has got to pay for all these facilities. Entry fees to the sites are charged to pay for their upkeep. However, foreign tourists pay the same as domestic tourists. India, with its enormous potential for tourism can certainly learn a thing or two about making the country’s rich heritage more accessible to tourists, and profiting from the venture, from its neighbour.

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A Necessary Victory

UPA should build on momentum of winning floor test
Constitutionally the signing of international treaties is a cabinet matter. But the India-US civil nuclear deal generated enormous political heat, with the Left withdrawing support to the government on the issue. A robust debate in Parliament, followed by the holding of a trust vote — where the government won a convincing victory — was the fairest institutional way of resolving it. While the debates went well on Monday, yesterday’s parliamentary proceedings were marred when BJP MPs produced bundles of currency notes just before the trust vote was about to be held, alleging that those were bribes paid by an SP leader for abstaining from the vote. These are serious charges if proven. But the concerned MPs ought to have gone to the Speaker or the police, as a determination of their veracity is hardly likely to be made on the floor of Parliament. Although BSP chief Mayawati called for the resignation of the prime minister on moral grounds, the mode of presentation of the evidence made things still murkier. A high-level inquiry needs to be conducted into the allegations and action taken if the charges can be proved. But once the dust has settled, it’s also time to get on with the business of governance. There are pressing tasks ahead for the government. Tackling inflation has to be the highest priority. The country can’t afford to be rudderless at this time. There are signs of an economic slowdown now, coupled with a sharp rise in inflation rates. Fiscal deficits are going out of whack, leading international rating agency Fitch to revise India’s local currency outlook from stable to negative. Standard and Poor’s is considering lowering India’s rating to below investment grade. If that happens it would lower investor confidence in the economy and further dim India’s growth outlook. That’s at a time when the draft National Employment Policy of the government has projected that the Indian economy must grow at 12.3 per cent a year in order to eliminate joblessness by 2012. Now that the government has passed the floor test and is no longer dependent on the Left for support, it’s imperative that it makes up for time lost and presses ahead with longdelayed reforms. It can open up insurance and retail, pass the pension reforms Bill, list public sector units for disinvestment. Disinvestment of PSUs as well as important Bills in the area of pension and banking reform had been held up because of opposition by the Left. Labour and company bankruptcy laws can also be looked at. Reform measures in these and other areas can give the economy the bounce it sorely needs.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may have described UPA’s victory in the trust vote as ‘‘impressive’’, but the voting pattern shows that the victory really came about thanks to ‘cross-voting’, otherwise known as horse-trading. As many as 14 MPs defied their parties to favour the trust vote, while four went against the whip by abstaining and three simply stayed away. Had all of these MPs voted according to their respective party’s diktats, the MPs in favour of the motion would have been 261, those against 277! Six SP MPs also went against the party whip and voted against the motion, as did Congress’s Kuldeep Bishnoi. Counting the 14 MPs who crossvoted for the government, seven who abstained or stayed away to help the UPA, and the seven SP and Congress MPs who voted against the motion, a total of 28 MPs defied party whips. The biggest victim of cross-voting was NDA, BJP in particular. As many as five BJP MPs — Somabhai Patel from Gujarat, K Manjunath and H T Sangliana (Karnataka), Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh from UP and Chandrabhan Singh from MP — voted for the government. Another BJP MP — Manorama Madhwaraj from Karnataka — abstained, while Babubhai Katara from Gujarat and Harisingh Rathod from Maharashtra simply didn’t turn up for the vote. Another party MP from Chikmagalur in Karnataka, D C Srikantappa, was also absent, but in his case it was because of a genuinely serious illness. The JD(U)’s Ramswaroop Prasad from Bihar was another NDA member who voted for the government, while his party colleague P P Koya of Lakshadweep stayed away. BJD’s Harihar Swain also defied his party whip. Another alliance constituent, NPF, could do little to prevent its lone MP Wangyuh Konyak from supporting the trust vote. The Akali Dal also was unable to prevent Sukhdev Singh Libra from abstaining. TDP saw one MP, M Jagannath voting for the government and another, D K Audikesavulu, abstaining. UPA had already sewn up TRS’s A Narendra who voted for it despite his party whip. That was true also of two MDMK members, L Ganesan and Gingee Ramachandran, as well as NLP’s Baleshwar Yadav.

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Listen to women

We know from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that women and girls make up 60 per cent of the hungry people in the world, and in parallel we know that women produce between 60 and 80 per cent of the food we eat. This situation where women shoulder the burden of hunger at the time of crisis, and yet provide the solutions that could boost production is being almost entirely ignored. There is no specific mention of women in the final declaration for the recent high-level conference on the food crisis held in Rome. The Elders group — which includes Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson and myself —is working with non-governmental organisations this month to highlight the right to food as part of its response to the global food crisis. When it comes to the crux of the matter, food is a women’s issue. So why, with hunger so prevalent, are we not asking our mothers, grandmothers, wives, sisters, daughters — who have put food on our tables for centuries — how to solve the problem? We rely so much on women’s labour but the FAO has estimated that women farmers benefit from less than 15 per cent of agricultural support, including technology, seeds and other inputs, or training. Women are mainly responsible for subsistence farming to feed families and this is considered a domestic or household activity rather than an economic activity. As a result, the majority of public agricultural support goes towards cash crop farming. Surely governments can see that this is one of the contributory factors to the food crisis. Women also farm on the family cash crop plots, even where this means less time for subsistence farming, to help increase the family incomes. However, revenues from that produce might not find their way to women’s purses to buy food for their families. If policymakers were to look more closely at women’s needs and contribution, and take measures to ensure they enjoy all their rights without exception, then many of the world’s poor would not be so poor, the hungry would be fewer and vulnerable groups would be less vulnerable. Rural women regard some level of food self-sufficiency as critical to livelihoods. They would rather grow food and sell the surplus than have to buy food when there are cash requirements for so many other needs. But for this they need to have land and other productive resources and must be able to control these to suit their interests. Governments must ensure that women are empowered to influence how the land in the family or community is used. Of course, there are thousands of communities where rural women and women farmers and producers are organising collectively to claim their land rights and gain greater control over their lives. Fortunately too, there are some examples where governments have undertaken affirmative action to support better access to and control over land by women. These must be held up as best practices in food security and women’s rights. In Namibia, 30 per cent of land redistribution beneficiaries are women, most of them single. But it is time that this became the rule rather than the exception. It is time that the world woke up to the contradictions, hypocrisies and fallacies surrounding women’s land ownership. The truth is that women work hard for little recompense, they are knowledgeable about their environment but are not given control over its resources, they are financially prudent but are not given credit, they are good farmers and entrepreneurs but cannot access markets, they unite communities and build social capital but they suffer the worst violence in their homes and elsewhere, they raise children but are treated as minors. The voices of rural women would tell us all these things and more, giving us stories of hope, struggle and achievement, and more importantly blessing us with their wisdom. If we are really looking for solutions to world hunger, we should start by listening to them.

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It’s Messy, But It Works

Plenty has been said over the past few days on television and in drawing rooms about the levels to which Indian politics has sunk. CPI general secretary A B Bardhan’s statement that the going rate for members of Parliament was Rs 25 crore is now folklore. And the bag of cash produced dramatically in the well of the House by the BJP MP from Morena at the fag end of the debate on Tuesday seemed to confirm the public’s dim view of politicians. It was indeed a new low in the history of Indian democracy. Do we then dismiss Parliament as a charade? Let’s not forget that the unprecedented act by the Morena MP, Ashok Argal, came after several hours of passionate debate and possibly at a time when the opposition had realised that they didn’t have the numbers to bring down the government. And the way the television channel, which claimed to have visuals of Argal getting the money, kept mum about it instead of airing them or giving them to the police was fishy to say the least. Over the better part of two days, the best speakers from major political parties held forth with varying degrees of eloquence on the Indo-US nuclear deal and its consequences for the country. Lalu Prasad was his inimitable self, leaving the House in splits with his brand of humour; Mohammed Salim showed why he is so highly regarded as a speaker in Bengal; Rahul Gandhi — not the finest of orators with his tinny voice — gave a statesman-like performance exhorting MPs to rise above party differences; and the Speaker, Somnath Chatterjee, did a fine job in extremely stressful circumstances. And the best part was that there was a mad scramble for seats in the visitors’ gallery to hear speeches. That is precisely what Parliament is supposed to do — debate issues of national importance before voters — but often ends up not doing. The figures for business conducted by Parliament speak for themselves. The number of sittings of Lok Sabha has come down from an yearly average of 124 in the first decade of 1952-61 to 81 between 1992 and 2001, a decline of 34 per cent. For the same period, the decline for Rajya Sabha was 20 per cent. The picture in the state assemblies is no different with an average of 20 to 50 sittings a year. This has had a direct impact on the number of Bills passed by Parliament. The annual average of the number of Bills passed has come down from 68 in the first decade to 50 between 1992 and 2001. Last year was particularly bad. In 2007, Parliament worked for the least number of days in non-election years during the last eight years. Though we — the citizens of India — vote our legislators into Parliament, we unfortunately know little about many of them. Undoubtedly, Parliament is a great leveller where farmers, teachers, business tycoons and scions of political dynasties sit next to each other. But a study by the Public Affairs Centre, Bangalore, on the present Lok Sabha throws a good deal of light on the actual composition of Parliament. The interesting bit of the study is an analysis of the wealth of MPs. This has become possible after the Supreme Court in a 2002 ruling made it mandatory for all candidates who contest Lok Sabha polls to declare their assets. The study says that on an average an MP is worth Rs 1.64 crore. If the scheduled caste and scheduled tribe members are taken out, the figure rises to Rs 2 crore. There is, of course, great variation in the wealth of individual MPs. But the average assets of MPs of all major parties are Rs 1 crore and upward. Only the members of the communist parties have assets well under Rs 1 crore. This shows that by and large only rich people are getting elected to Parliament. On top of that, nearly a quarter of the MPs have either criminal charges against them or cases pending in courts. Another finding is that a larger proportion of elected MPs have criminal cases against them compared to those who were defeated in the elections. This is not a pretty picture. But we must not make the mistake of judging Indian democracy and Parliament only by its low points. Except for a brief period during the Emergency, India’s democratic institutions have proved to be far more robust than what most people would have expected in 1947. Indeed, they stand out in comparison to most developing countries. Indian democracy can often be exasperating and messy. The Argal episode and the chaos that followed was one such instance. But we can rest assured that this will only be a temporary blip. After all, Aya Rams and Gaya Rams have been around for several decades. For all its chaos, Indian democracy and its institutions have served us reasonably well. Yes, in spite of the tamasha in Parliament that you all saw last evening.

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Continuing quest for life on Mars

For well over a century, the prospect of life on Mars has been the subject of feverish speculation among scientists. In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing “canali” on Mars through his telescope and thought that the dark areas he noticed on the planet were the result of vegetation. By 1894, Percival Lowell, a wealthy American astronomer, who established the observatory that now bears his name, was asserting that in the Martian canals “we are looking upon the result of the work of some sort of intelligent beings.” What those Martian beings might look like and how they would behave towards neighbours on planet Earth have been the subject of much science fiction writing and films. It is no wonder that humans began sending probes to study the Red Planet almost as soon as the space age began. Just three years after Sputnik went into space in 1957, the Soviet Union attempted to send the Korabl-4 but the probe did not even reach the orbit around the earth. Since then, close to 40 spacecraft have been despatched to Mars, but over 60 per cent of those missions also ended in failure. It was Mariner-4 launched by the United States that sent back the first close-up images of another planet as it flew past Mars in July 1965. Finally, the Viking-1 lander, again from the U.S., touched down safely on its surface in July 1976, and it was followed by the Viking-2 lander a few months later. Both Viking landers were sent to look for signs of life. When the planet appeared to be barren, so great was the disappointment that it eroded political support in the U.S. for further Mars missions.
But interest in Martian life has revived. If such life exists — or existed in the past — it is likely to take the form of tiny microbes, not little green men travelling in flying saucers. There was an uproar in 1996 when a team of U.S. scientists reported in the journal Science that a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica carried telltale traces of primitive microbial life. Although that interpretation of the traces found on the rock is now not generally accepted, the possibility of life on Mars is not discounted. Space probes have discovered signs that liquid water was present on the planet in the past and that water in the form of ice is still plentiful below the surface. Where there is water, there may well be microscopic life. The Phoenix Mars Lander, which has landed safely in the far north of the planet, joins three other spacecraft and two robotic rovers that are currently examining Mars in unprecedented detail. The objective is not to look for life, but to determine if the Martian arctic soil could support life. Let us wait and see what it finds.

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Significant move on political chessboard

There was an inevitability to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s official embrace of Lal Krishna Advani as its prime ministerial candidate that only superficial and politically blind-sided analysis could have missed. Hindutva strongman and ideologue, charioteer of the motorised rath yatra, five-term-party-president, and Deputy Prime Minister under the redoubtable Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Mr. Advani unexpectedly stepped off the beaten track in mid-2005 and set Mohammed Ali Jin nah, and his indisputably ‘secular vision’ of August 1947, among the parivar. When the resultant furore gave him no choice but to resign his party presidentship in December 2005, pundits were quick to proclaim the end of the Vajpayee-Advani (‘Ram-Lakshman’) era. The reading could not have been more off-target. In 2006 Mr. Advani, facing political adversity, dug in his heels. The man who joined the RSS in Karachi 65 years ago not only stood by what he had said about the Quaid-e-Azam in Pakistan but also sent out this interesting message to the RSS: “Lately things have happened which give the impression that the BJP cannot take a decision unless it is endorsed by the RSS...this perception…will do no good either to the party or to the RSS.” The pundits missed a vital subtext, which he put out, more or less simultaneously, in a magazine interview: yes, he was Prime-Minister-in-waiting by virtue of his position as Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Advani was already looking beyond the contradictions and tensions within the parivar to the 15th general election.
2007 has been the year of caution and political correctness for the Prime-Minister-in-waiting. He might be all of 80 years old — five years older than the Congress incumbent — but he is a fit octogenarian with plenty of fight in him. Scenting a 2008 general election and much of disaffection and confusion in the polity, Mr. Advani has taken charge of strategy and tactics, incrementally raising the Hindutva pitch as the fissures in the UPA-Left relationship have widened on the nuclear deal and the strategic partnership with the United States. Fifty-six-year-old Rajnath Singh as challenger? The question can only be taken as a joke. Nor will Mr. Advani be losing any sleep over breathless journalistic chatter about the prospect of Narendra Modi stepping on to the national stage as some kind of rival — if he were to triumph in Gujarat again. But what lies ahead for the BJP? After all, as Prakash Karat, now the CPI(M)’s general secretary, pointed out in a 1992 journal article, the BJP’s journey from an amorphous right of Centre platform, constructed during the Vajpayee presidency of 1980-86, to the aggressive platform of Hindutva — ‘Hindu nationalism’ targeting an internal enemy, India’s 150-million-plus Muslims, and all key issues revolving round this theme — was accomplished between 1986 and 1989, during the first Advani presidency. It will be costly, if not fatal, for the BJP’s political opponents to underestimate the strategy, tactics, and mobilisational capabilities of the shadow Prime Minister.

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Merger

In an attempt to develop responsible and active citizen and promote a clean environment, Air India has taken up an innovative venture of encouraging students and teachers alike in nation-building exercise as part of the airline’s pan-India corporate social responsibility initiative. To merge the two national carriers — Air India and Indian (Airlines) — have been talked about for quite a few years now, without any concrete follow up measures. Now Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel has announced the setting up of a Group of Ministers to finalise the plans and complete the process by the end of the current financial year. There has been a prolonged debate on the future of these national carriers — does it lie in privatisation, taking in a strategic partner, bringing about synergy between the two airlines, or a full merger? The question of privatisation no longer seems to be on the agenda, and the Government of India is not talking any more of the strategic partner option. The attempts to foster some synergy in the operations of the two airlines were not exactly fruitful. Both airlines lost substantially on their market share. The single entity created by the merger will be in a position to face up to the growing competition in the skies. Unfortunately, successive governments at the Centre rather unduly deferred the expansion plans of the two airlines, leaving them to manage with their ageing fleet. Both Air India and Indian have now firmed up the plans and Indian's first A 319 aircraft from Airbus has just arrived. Air India has formed a subsidiary, Air India Express, as a low-cost regional or international airline. Officers and staff of both airlines have expressed certain reservations over the merger and these need to be sorted out.
The task before the Group of Ministers is clear. It has to take the management and employee unions of both airlines into confidence and address their concerns. They have to be taken fully on board to ensure that a public sector player can be efficient and competitive, to take on the challenge of private airlines. Without delaying it any further, the Government must complete the processes before the end of the financial year. Telecommunications and insurance are the two areas where the public sector has demonstrated it can remain competitive in a liberalised environment. This, along with the recent success story of the Indian Railways, will also prove the point that public sector undertakings can be efficient and profitable. At a time when most, if not all, airlines are running up losses because of the fare wars and the burdensome increase in fuel costs on account of the abnormal rise in oil prices earlier this year, there can be no logic in duplicating efforts and adding to costs. A consolidated national carrier must look to dramatically improving the quality of its service to passengers and customers. A new service culture needs to be inducted along with the new aircraft if the public sector airline is to give a good account of itself

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Free trade and new regionalism

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report on Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) may be music to the ears of Indian industry and trade. The U.N. agency has cautioned developing countries against entering into FTAs with developed or industrialised countries, saying it could not only weaken the multilateral trading system, but also reduce the scope for national policies. But that note of caution seems limited to the North-South bilateral or regional trade agreements. The report for 2007 advocates: “Rather than subscribing to the ‘new regionalism,’ developing countries may examine other areas of cooperation with partners in the same geographical region and at a similar level of economic development, in a spirit of true regionalism. This could help strengthen their own strategies for national development and integration into the global economy.” It is in the case of an FTA between developed and developing countries that UNCTAD says the latter would lose out in competition and their domestic industry would get overwhelmingly exposed on account of foreign competition. But the fact remains that the number of FTAs rose from a mere 20 in 1990 to 86 in 2000 and to 159 in 2007, pointing to a clear wave in favour of regional or bilateral arrangements. This has been attributed to a growing frustration among developing countries over the stalemate in multilateral negotiations under the World Trade Organisation.
The UNCTAD report has identified East Asia and South Asia as the most dynamic regions of growth, powered by the sustained momentum of the Chinese and Indian economies. But strangely, these very countries are finding it difficult to forge FTAs. From the larger canvas of the Asia Pacific economic grouping called APEC, to the smaller, regional entities such as Asean in South East Asia and SAARC in South Asia, not much progress has been made on regional trade agreements. While the Asean has taken a full three decades to strike an FTA — that it is beset with problems is another matter — South Asia’s SAARC has not been able to clinch an agreement even after two decades of existence. Despite the problems and sensitivities inherent in an FTA, even the WTO has considered them to be building blocs of the global free trade area that should ultimately take shape. While waiting for the multilateral negotiations to succeed, developing countries should focus on regional arrangements with economies at the same level of development, building upon the advantages of proximity, similarity of interests, and economic complementarity.

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Political tamasha

In the theatre of the absurd known as Uttar Pradesh, the oddest things happen with complete nonchalance. With elections called to the State Assembly, it ought to have been curtains for political histrionics of the kind witnessed over the past fortnight. Yet on Monday, Chief Minister Mulayam Singh won a second vote of confidence in one month — this time with sections of the Opposition holding the house in a purposeless gherao, and the main Opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, reduced to the status of a sorry spectator. Mr. Singh sailed through the exercise as only a man of his sangfroid and political skills can. In a tenure of three and a half years, he has sought and won close to two dozen confidence motions in the face of relentless opposition pressure. The trigger for the latest floor test was the February 14 judgment of the Supreme Court, disqualifying 13 former Bahujan Samaj Party MLAs who propped up the Samajwadi Party Government in August 2003. The judgment did not require the Chief Minister to reassert his strength. But this is not all. Once the Election Commission announced a seven-phase poll schedule, the need for a floor test disappeared. After all, parliamentary convention is for a defeated Prime Minister or Chief Minister to stay on as caretaker until the election produces a new government.
It is a different matter that the party leading the Central government has been impervious to such reasoning. With only 15 seats in the State Assembly but in command at the Centre, the Congress continued to issue dark threats about President's Rule. Earlier, Congress spokespersons argued that the disqualifying judgment had robbed the Mulayam Singh regime of its legitimacy. When this argument collapsed, the contention was that there could be no free and fair elections if the Mulayam government remained in place. In effect, Congress bosses have been questioning the ability of the Election Commission, which has gone the extra mile in U.P., ensuring 95 per cent Central force coverage for an election staggered over seven phases so that at any given time there would be no more than 60 seats to oversee. For its part, the BSP enacted a farcical mass resignation drama on the eve of the trust vote; the resignation letters of its MLAs reached Mayawati instead of the house Speaker! Of a piece with this deception was another fiction by the BSP. The party insisted that the Assembly was illegally in session, ignoring the Election Commission's authoritative clarification that the term would end only on May 14. Ironically, in 2001, Samajwadi Party MLAs resigned en masse on the same specious ground. With elections approaching, it is time for all serious players to get serious.

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Grappling with financial crisis

A year after the U.S. financial crisis surfaced, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has explained its causes and ramifications. The BIS has for long spoken of the dangers in unbridled credit expansion and asset price inflation, two interrelated factors that are at the heart of the crisis. The current market turmoil in the main financial centres is without precedent in the post-war period. There is a significant risk of recession in the United States, while many c ountries are ravaged by inflation. There are genuine fears that the global economy might be at some kind of a tipping point. The factors responsible for the crisis are well known: loans of increasingly poor quality were made and sold to “the gullible and the greedy.” The latter relied on leverage and short-term funds to boost their profits. The sheer opacity of the process has made it difficult to determine the final location of the risks. The loans were securitised and widely distributed. In many instances, it is difficult to determine who owns them and how much these are worth. Obviously internal governance and outside regulation failed. Even so it is surprising that such a huge “shadow banking” system that should normally cause concern could emerge and stay out of sight of any regulatory body. There are still substantial risks from the crisis. The world economy is poised between deflation caused by the financial crisis in the U.S. and an inflationary global commodity price boom. There are heightened uncertainties everywhere and no one seems to have the right answers.
It is the view of the BIS that central banks should tighten monetary policies even if that causes some slowdown. The trade-off between price stability and growth is easily understood in the current Indian context. It might be less clear in some other countries. A direct fallout of the crisis is the massive re-rating of risk. At a time of high inflation this is bad news for India and other emerging economies. The BIS urges policy makers and the financial sector participants to recognise reality. Specifically, asset prices cannot remain high all the time. Debts that cannot be serviced must be written off. The modern financial system is prone to some degree of instability. Regulators need to look at the system as a whole. Altering regulatory rules and tightening control over specific institutions will help only up to a point. Needed are “macro prudential policies” that focus not on misbehaviour of individual institutions but on minimising, if not avoiding, systemic risks that might arise from their shared exposure to common shocks, among others.

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Focus on inflation

In a recent update of its World Economic Outlook, the International Monetary Fund has called upon developing countries to make the fight against inflation their top priority. While marking up inflation forecasts for these countries by more than 1.5 percentage points to 9.1 per cent in 2008 and 7.4 per cent in 2009, it urges central banks to tighten their monetary policies, and governments to exercise fiscal restraint. Unless these policies are pursued vigorously, there will be no moderation in inflation over the near-term. In addition to soaring commodity prices, the IMF cites “above- trend” economic growth in some of these countries and accommodative policies followed by their governments as the main factors behind the inflation. In developed countries, inflationary pressures are likely to meet with a fall in demand. In the European Union, fears of a sharp economic slowdown have overtaken the fears of inflation. Until recently, the European Central Bank has focussed on price stability. The U.S. Federal Reserve, having brought down the interest rates sharply, has not yet signalled a tightening presumably to forestall a full-blown recession.
The world over, policy makers are forced to balance the demands of economic growth and price stability. The IMF expects the world economy to slow down from 5 per cent last year to 4.1 per cent in 2008 and 3.9 per cent next year. Developing countries including India and China are widely expected to partially off-set the slowdown in the West. However, partly due to monetary tightening in the past, they are expected to grow at a slower 7 per cent in 2008-09, one percentage point less than in the previous year. In India, the WPI inflation has climbed to 11.91 per cent during the first week of July. There can be little consolation from the fact that the index increased only marginally over the previous week or that the prices of some food items have come down slightly. Global oil prices, despite their recent unexpected fall, are still on the high side. The secondary effects of the last hike in domestic petrol and diesel prices will take time to work their way through the system. The spatial distribution of the South-West monsoon has been uneven so far. Despite a record harvest, food prices are still very high. Citing some of these reasons, RBI Governor Y.V. Reddy has said that there is little likelihood of inflation coming down to single digits in the next six months. Hence some more monetary measures involving hikes in the CRR and the repo rate are strongly indicated, by July 29 when the RBI is due to review its monetary policy, or even earlier

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DUMP THE ANTI-WOMEN BILL

THE PERMANENT RESIDENT (Disqualification) Bill, 2004, which was unanimously adopted by the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, is a patently discriminatory and obnoxious piece of legislation. Even though the country-wide outcry has forced a rethink on the People's Democratic Party-led Government, the Bill, aimed at denying women who married non-residents the status of permanent residents of the State, should never have been contemplated. Such a law would deeply damage the livelihood prospects of women. Under the special laws in force in the State, the legal right to Government employment, to admission in Government-administered professional colleges, and to purchase and retain property is a privilege available only to permanent residents of Jammu and Kashmir. Following an executive order issued under the State Subjects Law of 1927, women who married non-residents of Jammu and Kashmir could no longer retain their status as permanent residents whereas men continued to enjoy the right when they married outsiders. In 2002, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court overturned this position on the ground that a female resident who inherited the status of a State subject by birth could not be put to a disadvantage that would not be visited upon a permanent male resident. Any move to go back to the pre-2002 situation would be in direct conflict with the idea of gender equality.
There is a history in the State of governments re-opening sensitive issues during the run-up to an election, ostensibly to buttress the constitutionally guaranteed special status of Jammu and Kashmir. Prior to the State Assembly elections of 2002, the National Conference Government led by Farooq Abdullah attempted to revive the controversial Jammu and Kashmir Resettlement Act of 1982. That opportunist move offered all those who migrated to Pakistan before 1954 the right to reclaim lost property. The 1982 law itself had been drafted to woo Muslim voters. Such short-sighted attempts at bolstering an incumbent Government's prospects in an election can provoke a chauvinist and communal backlash elsewhere in the country and work against fulfilling the real aspirations of the Kashmiri people. Political parties in this strife-torn State must show greater responsibility and statesmanship than they have done this far.
Matrimonial ties are one of the commonest ways for ordinary people to secure the right of passage into different countries and continents, overcoming the narrowness of national frontiers. Conversely, governments seeking to appease chauvinist and sometimes racist constituencies tend to whittle down this human right and play down the legal significance of marriage-conferred entitlements in order to check immigration in large numbers. In distinct cases, adherence to humanitarian norms and civil niceties become casualties of such measures. Malaysia, for instance, denies permanent residence to overseas spouses of its women while foreigners who marry Malaysian men may be granted citizenship. While the gender bias in this policy stands out like a sore thumb, the Malaysian law at least does not disown its own citizens. The Jammu and Kashmir Bill falls foul even in this respect. It is heartening that there is a national outcry over this crass move to appeal to the most backward sentiments in society for presumed electoral gain. Democratic women's organisations must be commended for taking a sensitively nuanced stand on this question: while it is necessary to respect and keep intact the demographic profile of the volatile State, the answer cannot possibly lie in making the already vulnerable situation of women in society worse through discriminatory legislation. It is imperative that J&K's special status is anchored in defensible democratic rights and sentiments

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Quotas as incentives

THE TWO RECENT rulings by the Supreme Court (S.C.) in the matter of admissions to post-graduate medical courses serve as timely reminders on establishing norms and special procedures that must govern selection criteria. When it upheld the Rajasthan Government's decision to increase the percentage of seats reserved for Government doctors to post-graduate courses, the S.C. merely reinforced the rationale behind the time-tested scheme of offering incentives for enrolment in Government service, namely, the promotion of the public interest that such a measure would serve. Alternatively, in quashing the scheme of reservations to post-graduate courses in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) for its former students, the apex court underscored the necessity to adhere to the elementary principle of fair play in admission procedures. That an institution's policy aimed to preferentially treat its alumni without regard to merit is a gross violation of the norms of fair competition hardly needs emphasis. The anomaly is all the more glaring considering that the AIIMS is one of the premier medical institutions in the country with a national representation.
Turning to the larger question of quotas for in-service candidates, this was created as an incentive to retain young medical graduates in Government service. Accordingly, practising doctors who enrolled for post-graduation through such a quota were expected to serve in Government hospitals for a period of about five years subsequent to the completion of the degree. The disrepute that the service quota system has fallen into is clearly on account of the failure of the state to enforce relevant rules. Perhaps non-enforceability was built into the terms of the contract, since its premature termination through devious means always remained a possibility once the candidate obtained the degree. In that case, the current policy should be revised so as to commit young doctors first to a minimum period of service in the Government as a prerequisite to securing a seat for post-graduation under this quota.
The need to attract fresh graduates to serve in state-run hospitals can hardly be over-emphasised in the current climate of rapid privatisation of health services. The fact that the philosophy that underlay the scheme of incentives which came into vogue a few decades back runs counter to the rationale that informs cuts in health expenditure by the state is of course a separate matter. But to the extent that the state will continue to remain a key player in the health care delivery system, the quality of service conditions in Government hospitals would have to be addressed on a priority basis. For only these are the avenues open to those imbued with hope and idealism to renew the Nehruvian pledge to redeem the teeming millions of India from disease. Moreover, a recognition of the imperative to gear up the public health care machinery would further lend credence to the fundamental case for liberalisation, i.e., to retain core services in basic health and education as a responsibility of the state, while allowing the market to step into other arenas. On the practical side, rules and regulations that have room for abuse built into them should not be allowed to jeopardise sound principles premised upon loftier objectives. For, the need for qualified professionals in remote regions cannot be wished away simply because doctors do not feel inclined to rough it out.

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Evollution of Man

MR. MEAVE LEAKEY'S latest findings on man's evolution should further add to the reputation which the distinguished Leakey family had earlier won for itself for the light it had thrown with its sustained anthropological research in Kenya. At a time when the British rulers of Kenya had a rough time with their efforts to suppress the deadly Mau Mau rebellion in the mid- Fifties, the celebrated anthropologist, Dr. L.S.B. Leakey (1903- 1972), decided that it would be worthwhile to explore the origins of the Kikyus of the country and their traditions. His fossil discoveries were published in The Mau Mau and the Kikiyu along with a number of other seminal works on the Kenyan tribes, one of which is the revealing White African. While it would be far- fetched to imagine that research on African tribes and their origins initiated and sustained by anthropologists and the better understanding it had led to brought down the racial barriers in Africa and elsewhere, the scene today in that multi-racial continent is one of greater tolerance and understanding than in the earlier decades of the last century.
The older Dr. Leakey had established that the evolution of man had taken much earlier than had been previously believed and that it was centred in Africa and not in Asia. His son, Richard Leakey, carried the research further and if the present findings of Mr. Meave Leakey throw more light on a subject of unflagging interest, they could call for a fresh assessment of earlier data. The earliest fossil remains of the anthropoid ape dating back to over 30 million years had long been supposed to be very closely related to man while the skull fragments of the Neanderthal man indicated that the evolution of humans should have taken place much later at around 150,000 years ago. A distinction was also made between homo sapiens and homo erectus, the latter being regarded as the forerunners of the earlier species of Neanderthal man. The latest fossilised discoveries by paleontologists of a battered but complete skull estimated to be 3.5 million years old, suggesting a different breed of early humans, should add to the uncertainty about the evolution of man. The questions which they might throw up would hinge upon whether in the course of its evolution, the human race had looked very different and even unrecognisable from how it had been during the last few thousand years of recorded history. It might have taken anywhere between several thousands and millions of years for the fossilised remains scattered across this millennia to bring about an evolving resemblance to the human being. Obviously the humans did not arrive as the finished product which the non-anthropologists might presume it to be. The evolutionary conveyor belt on which the human race was placed should have been moving slowly to accommodate mutations. The latest discovery of a complete skull and face of an entirely new breed of early humans dating back to 3.5 million years suggests how the human anatomy was responding to changes across time.
The evolution of man could not have been in a straight line placing him in succession to the earlier species which were going to perish. The rest of the pre-historic creatures amidst whom he had to take his place should have found him easy prey and it was going to take a long time for him to emerge from being the hunted to become the hunter. The crucial role which the evolving human race was going to acquire for itself was determined by the special qualities of the brain enclosed by the cranium, the earlier shape of which has now been discovered. It should probably tell us a great deal more about how the human head mentioned by Mr. Leakey played a crucial role in the evolutionary process heading towards the ascendancy of man over other species.

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New find strengthens Darwin's theory

In what is one more body blow to those who question Darwin's theory of evolution, scientists recently have discovered well-preserved fossils of a fish that provide the vital transitional link between fish and land dwelling four-legged vertebrates — tetrapods. One of the many objections to Darwin's theory is based on the apparent lack of transitional links and intermediate forms in fossil records to prove conclusively that evolution had ever occurred. But the discovery of three well-preserved nearly complete skeletons of Tiktaalik roseae, "an intermediate between fish with fins and tetrapods with limbs" has proved the sceptics wrong. Tiktaalik, with its many morphological and functional changes, has provided the much sought after scientific evidence to the transition of fish to land living animals. Found in sedimentary rocks belonging to the Late Devonian period, 375 million years ago, in the Canadian Arctic region, the fossils show characteristics of a shallow water river deposition in subtropical to tropical climatic conditions before drifting continental plates carried them to their present habitat. Tiktaalik fits well between the earlier evidences of fish able to walk in shallow water that lived some 385 million years ago and fish with limbs bearing digits that lived about 365 million years ago. Shallow water has been found to play a pivotal role in the evolutionary changes; the fish developed a new mechanism of head movement, respiration and body support system, thus allowing Tiktaalik to exploit both water and sub-aerial habitats.
Tiktaalik provides a vital missing link in the fish to tetrapod transition spanning a period of about ten million years. For a transitional fossil to fit snugly between existing fossil records, it should resemble as well as differ from those immediately higher and lower down in the phylogenic tree. Tiktaalik has many morphological features that are intermediate between its nearest neighbours. In fact, it resembles a poorly preserved animal that belongs to a lower order in the evolutionary tree. The discovery of Tiktaalik can be likened to the finding of proto-bird Archaeopteryx, considered a breakthrough in tracing the transition from reptiles to birds. Despite the finding of a vital link, there still exist lacunae in fossil records tracing the transitional changes going up to tetrapods. Tiktaalik found in the Canadian Arctic, one of the most inhospitable terrains, is proof that rocks do contain within them many secrets waiting to be uncovered. The answer lies in searching for the right rocks in the most probable depositional environment and geological time period for the missing link, just the way scientists zeroed in on the most probable rocks while looking for Tiktaalik fossils. The latest discovery of Australopithecus anamensis, a transitional link in the evolution of humans in the Middle Awash region in northeastern Ethiopia, which is also home to seven other human-like species, is yet another example.

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Losing the sheen

The benchmark stock indices, Sensex and Nifty, plunged to new lows on Tuesday. The Sensex lost almost 500 points to close below 13,000. The Nifty went below the psychologically important 3,900 level. On the first day of the new quarter, the indices were at levels last recorded during April 2007. From those low points the Indian stock markets rose to dizzy heights with the Sensex peaking at nearly 21,000 in January. Since then until Tuesday, the markets had fallen by as much as 36 per cent. On Wednesday, the markets recovered sharply with the Sensex closing nearly 700 points above the previous day’s figure. However during this year there were several such rallies that did not last long enough to reverse the general declining trend. In any case, the overall trends do not indicate that the stock markets have reached their lowest points and are poised to go up on a sustained basis. In the second half of 2007 Indian stock markets were among the top performing emerging markets. On their way down during this year, they are among the worst performing ones. A plethora of bad news including some from abroad have contributed to sharp declines in the markets in India. Inflation currently ruling at over 11 per cent is expected to remain so for some time. Fuelled by record oil and commodity prices, inflation continues to extract a heavy toll on the equity markets everywhere. European and U.S. equity markets have just recorded their worst half-year performance in more than a decade.
With oil prices unlikely to moderate, governments and central banks across the globe are gearing themselves to tackle the consequences. Some of those measures would necessarily involve monetary tightening even if that entails sacrificing growth. A related problem has been the continuing U.S. financial crisis. As many banks continue to provide for loan losses, there has been a growing tendency for risk aversion. At this juncture global investors are flocking to the safety of debt instruments and developed markets. India seems to be low on the list of their preferred destinations now. That has meant a sizable withdrawal of portfolio money from Indian stocks. The macroeconomic outlook in the country has become more uncertain and economic growth is expected to be sharply lower. The widening current account deficit, expected to touch 3-3.5 per cent of the GDP at the end of 2008-09 is a major cause for worry. The government which prided itself on fiscal rectitude has virtually given consolidation the go-by. Finally, of course, the prospect of general elections has heightened the uncertainty in financial markets.

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For liberty's sake, POTA must go

IN AN OVERALL sense, India deserves its international reputation as a country that has valued its democracy and basic liberties in a more sustained and effective way than most other developing countries. Taking stock of the country's performance over half a century of Independence, the economist Amartya Sen offered the assessment in 1997 that "perhaps the biggest achievement is in the maintenance of democracy." India's fourth Nobel Laureate pointed to the press remaining "largely free," civil rights staying in place, and the military staying "in the barracks rather than ruling our lives" as "achievements of considerable distinction." Various others, in India and abroad, have echoed this judgment.
Two serious qualifications need to be entered here. First, India's democratic achievement is relative in the sense that most other developing countries, starting with countries in the immediate South Asian neighbourhood, have done demonstrably worse. Secondly, for much of the 56 years of Independence, various extraordinary powers the Indian state has conferred on itself through special legislation have encroached on the bedrock of the fundamental "Right[s] to Freedom" guaranteed by the Constitution under Articles 19, 20, 21 and 22. These vital provisions relate to protection of freedom of speech and expression, life and personal liberty, and basic individual rights in respect of arrest and detention, and conviction for offences. The list of mischievous encroachments over the decades is long. It includes draconian laws for preventive detention, `maintenance of internal security', `prevention of unlawful activities', the notorious Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, which remained on the statute books between 1987 and 1995, and the even more notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002.
In targeting these basic democratic rights, the Bharatiya Janata Party, supported by opportunist and short-sighted allies, has proved a worthy successor to the party that enacted the Emergency and continues to be, on the whole, apologetic about that benighted, but fortunately short-lived (June 1975-March 1977), coup against democracy. The same arguments about `misuse' of extraordinary powers and `excesses' heard in Congress circles in defence of the Emergency even after its revocation are being heard in the specious distinction the BJP tries to make between the `use' and `misuse' of POTA provisions. While doggedly defending POTA as an anti-terrorism instrument, the Central Government seems to have veered round to the view that the use of Section 21 of the Act against those like Vaiko (a BJP ally who has been languishing in jail for well over a year for reiterating in a public meeting a general statement made in Parliament in support of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) is a misuse. So, the BJP concedes, was the use of POTA to put behind bars the independent Uttar Pradesh MLA, Raja Bhaiyya, by the Mayawati regime. The incarceration of R.R. Gopal, Editor of the Tamil magazine Nakkheeran on highly implausible POTA charges; the threat by the Tamil Nadu Government to use POTA as well as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act against a pro-LTTE Central Minister, M. Kannappan; and the death sentence awarded to S.A.R. Geelani, a Delhi University lecturer, for an apparently marginal role in the December 2001 terrorist attack on Parliament are other instances that cause serious concern. Unfortunately, the higher judiciary has not done what the Constitution expects it to do: rush to the aid of fundamental rights. Just as the Supreme Court badly let down the people and the cause of democracy during the Emergency, the higher judiciary went along with TADA and appears, thus far, to be going along with POTA. The devil, it seems, is not in the detail or even in the misapplication of extraordinary powers. It is in the authoritarian mindset, expressed and engendered by anti-libertarian enactments like POTA, that civil liberties are dispensable in this era of the `global war against terrorism'. Political India must wake up to the truth that the only use of POTA can be its misuse. For the sake of liberty and democracy, it must do away with this awful enactment root and branch — as soon as the opportunity arises.

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Rendezvous with an asteroid

THE LANDING OF a spacecraft on Eros, an asteroid in deep space, is truly a magnificent achievement for more than one reason. Launched by the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University, the spacecraft Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), is the first cosmic probe launched by a non-NASA (the U.S. National Aeronautic and Space Administration) outfit. It is the first time that a space vehicle has landed on an asteroid which should give it a grandstand view of the star- spangled universe. And it is not exactly a ``near Earth rendezvous'' as it has been called since Eros is quite far away at a distance of 165 million miles. The Earth-based manoeuvring which has gone into the steering of the spacecraft should have been highly intensive and brilliantly executed to enable it to catch up with the asteroid which should have been extremely difficult even if it had only been moving at high speeds. The movements of all asteroids and the directions they take unlike those of planets are highly irregular and the landing of NEAR virtually turns out to be a trapping of Eros into the service of space scientists.
Sir Arthur Clarke who is globally known for his studies of space exploration had actually regarded such a rendezvous which he called ``interplanetary hitch-hiking'' almost as an impossibility in his Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds. Such hitch-hiking has now turned out to be a reality and the space vehicle it has left on Eros could have a piggyback ride on the asteroid which would continue to meander in space as it has been doing for several million years. The landing of the space vehicle on Eros should immensely enrich the knowledge about what is going on with its beaming of data to Earth-based stations from the asteroid. The landing of NEAR on Eros also provides an occasion to recall the potential hazards which were foreseen by space scientists earlier. Asteroids of varying shapes and sizes - mostly of rocks - range from those which are quite a few hundred miles in width to those much smaller. The possibility of asteroids moving wildly in space and straying into Earth's orbit to hit the planet with a destructive ferocity is no longer deemed as unlikely. Such hits had taken place earlier and one of them is said to have snuffed out the hardy dinosaurs which roamed over the Earth for as long as 150 million years ago to black out the planet from the Sun under several million tonnes of dust. Such a catastrophe is now being foreseen for the Earth during the next century from a comet heading towards it. The defensive measures being considered for averting the catastrophe envisage the deflection of the comets or asteroids away from the Earth. The NASA had set up a committee in 1994 headed by Dr. Eugene Shoemaker to draw up a plan to identify and catalogue possible collisions of comets and asteroids with the Earth. Such a collision had already taken place within the solar system itself when the comet christened as Shoemaker-Levy had crashed on Jupiter and the cosmic disaster was captured in a remarkable live telecast. It is learnt that such near misses, known and unknown, are already said to be taking place. Direct hits by these asteroids would spell doom and could litter the Earth with craters like the one left in the Gulf of Mexico by an asteroid-hit a few million years ago
The landing of NEAR on Eros should throw more light on asteroids which are not just space jetsam and should initiate further studies on how they came into being. However, unlike in the case of the moon from where soil samples were brought to Earth by astronauts, access to the geology of asteroid rocks million of miles away can only be through hi-tech space probes. Space scientists have in fact already gained such access to just as far away Mars and discovered that it has water in its poles.

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Mysteries of the brain

PENETRATING STUDIES CARRIED out so far suggest conclusively that the human brain is the most unexplored and mystifying territory which would baffle scientists for quite a long time yet. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran, Professor and Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, Santiago, in his recent presentation of the subject at the Apollo Hospitals gave some tantalising glimpses of the ways in which the brain behaves and responds for dictating behaviour and which he has dealt with in absorbing detail in his Phantoms in the Brainwith his co- author, Sandra Blakeslee. The picture which emerges is of a mocking, teasing presence inside the human head submitting itself to the exacting demands of Einsteins on the one hand and remaining hopelessly beyond the reach of morons on the other. If, as Dr. Ramachandran has pointed out, India's achievements have ranged from the realistic to the abstract, it is an indication of the powers locked up in the brain which could throw up glittering images of the cosmic dance of Shiva brought to life in sculptures.
The diverse creativity of the human brain has enriched the world with discoveries spread from that of the Copernican theory which replaced Earth and the planets by Sun as the centre of the universe much to the indignation of the Roman Catholic Church to the Theory of Relativity. It had led to the flight of imagination in the plays of Shakespeare to the writings of Boris Pasternak who had kept alive the longing for freedom in the Soviet Union even while remaining silent for nearly twenty years. However, it could go haywire and throw up hallucinations which are ``more real than reality''. A great deal which yet remains to be known about the brain is about its right and left ``hemispheres'' with the former having a much broader ``searchlight'' than the latter. While the left hemisphere is concerned with speech, language and semantics, the right is projected by Dr.Ramachandran as the ``intellectual'' half for taking care of the ``more subtle aspects of language, such as nuances of metaphor, allegory and ambiguity''. Any damage to either of the hemispheres could affect proper brain coordination which would look strange and despairing to a normal person. Among the lessons which are taught in elementary physics is that the image in a mirror is ``as far away from the mirror as the object is in front of it''. Dr. Ramachandran mentions the case of mentally ill patients who take this description literally and try to reach the image on the other side of the mirror as the result of the inability to distinguish the real object from its image. It is an instance of a brain suffering from a disturbance to its intricately placed perceptions.
Among the oft-mentioned instances of the strange manifestations of the brain is the still very little understood mathematical genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan. The world would never have known him but for the equations mailed to the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy who was initially inclined to dismiss them as the scribblings of a ``crackpot''. It was perhaps another case of the brain taking over at the right time when Hardy thought again of the equations and saw that no one else except Ramanujan had the imagination so far to think about them. The equations which could well have remained as just the jottings on a piece of paper as they might have to most were coming alive to Hardy to put him on a trail blazed by Ramanujan. If the brain is a teaser, it could be because it is very demanding on the geniuses who have blazed and would continue to blaze new trails in their chosen disciplines. The brain which intrigued the caveman with images on the wall thrown up by the sunlight continues to tease today's cosmonauts with the beckoning, expanding space. The real wonder here, however, is the brain which comprehends it all.

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INSATS - Flying High

THERE IS ONE more Insat communication satellite in space. The Indian Space Research Organisation's newest bird, Insat-3E, was successfully put into orbit early Sunday morning aboard Europe's Ariane 5 rocket. Operations to move the satellite to its allotted position 36,000 km above the equator have begun. Insat-3E will join four other Insats already in orbit, making the Insat system, in ISRO's words, "one of the largest domestic communication satellite systems in the Asia Pacific region." After the 3E becomes operational, the Insat system will have 128 transponders available for communications and broadcasting. ISRO intends to double that capacity by 2007.
ISRO's success with the Insats has been, as with its other endeavours, the result of farsighted planning. Vikram Sarabhai, who began the space programme, foresaw even in the 1960s how satellites could provide telephony and TV services in a vast and poorly connected country like India. In the mid-1970s, using an American satellite, ISRO conducted the world's earliest large-scale experiment in direct TV broadcasting. Over 2,000 villages all over the country were equipped with direct reception sets. This was long before cable TV or direct-to-home broadcasting was thought of. With the experimental APPLE satellite launched in 1981, ISRO got its first experience of building its own communications satellite.
When ISRO mooted the idea of building an Indian satellite system, the Insats, neither the Ministry of Communications nor the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting — which would be the principal user agencies — was enthusiastic. Both thought that their ground infrastructure sufficed. Considerable persuasion was necessary before the two departments, along with the Ministry of Civil Aviation (which in those days had charge of the India Meteorological Department), agreed jointly to fund the first Insats. The Insat-1 satellites were built in the United States and launched abroad. Even here, ISRO took over the handling of these satellites immediately after launch. The first of the Insat-2 satellites, which were designed and built within the country, was launched in 1992. Four more Insat-2s were built and launched in rapid succession. They had their problems, often for reasons beyond ISRO's control. But then so did the foreign-built Insat-1s. The Insat-2 satellites raised the Insat transponder capacity manyfold and put the Insat system squarely on the map. The Insat-3 satellites have undoubtedly benefited from ISRO's experience with their predecessors.
ISRO has demonstrated that it can build world class communication satellites. One of its aims must now be to make sure the Insat system serves much of the country's communications and broadcasting needs. The private sector is already the dominant force in satellite TV broadcasts, but many private TV channels are currently carried on foreign satellites. Likewise, private sector investments in telecommunications will only grow. At a time when international satellite companies want to expand their share of the Indian market, the Insats must be able to attract private sector customers and not get restricted to serving Government agencies. ISRO has already taken some steps to make it easier for companies to lease Insat transponders. Even so, the procedures for allocating and leasing transponders remain cumbersome. Since aggressive marketing could hold the key to Insat's future growth, ISRO needs to ponder further steps. For instance, is the Insat Coordination Committee, on which the three primary Government user departments are represented and which controls the allocation of the Insat transponders, still necessary? Another issue is whether corporatisation in some form of the Insat system will help. These are thorny issues no doubt, but for that very same reason, they need to be resolved speedily.

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speed with Broadband

Year after the Government unveiled an ambitious policy to promote broadband use, the Ministry of Communications is discovering the depressing reality that not all subscribers are ready to make the transition from dial-up Internet. Costs have dropped by nearly 75 per cent in the 12 months ended September, but the tariff reduction for 256 kilobits per second connections is rendered unattractive by restrictions on usage patterns or downloads. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that only about 600,000 subscribers among over 5 million Internet users have opted for broadband. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which envisaged a liberal policy framework for broadband, has rightly called for concerted efforts by service providers to achieve the original goal of 1.5 million connections each in the private and public sectors by December. Given the relatively slow pace of growth, it would seem the opportunity to create a competitive and subscriber-friendly regime was lost simply because the Government was disinclined to share the BSNL and MTNL telephone networks with the private sector for service provision.
International experience indicates that a mix of entertainment and social benefits has fuelled expansion of broadband, where subscribers generally have unlimited access to upload and download content. Music, entertainment and multimedia information, e-governance, health and telemedicine, social connectedness, and the availability of information have all actively promoted its use. New multimedia content such as podcasts (audio programmes of a specified format which can be located by search and book-marked) that inform and educate, is adding to the popularity of high bandwidth connections; some universities in the United States have begun to post podcasts of lectures delivered in classrooms online for downloading by students. Sadly, in the Indian context broadband has not made the major strides thought possible only a year ago, in the absence of a wider base of users and active promotion of content creation in areas such as education, agriculture, health care, and e-governance. It is unlikely this situation will change dramatically if the "rationing" mindset that limits data downloads is not replaced by a more progressive outlook; the Confederation of Indian Industry had, in its submission to policymakers, envisaged affordable access of 1.5 megabit speed and unlimited downloads for home users to boost broadband penetration. Besides lifting of data download restrictions, initiatives to provide free wireless Internet in educational institutions, public libraries, and government offices may be necessary for wider and more equitable access. There is some evidence available from the Pew Internet Project in the U.S. to show that adoption of broadband may have slowed (there was only a three per cent increase in 2005 over the previous year) because a significant number of the remaining dial-up subscribers have low purchasing power. Clearly, policy intervention holds the key.

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RESEARCH WITHOUT BARRIERS

THE GLOBAL MOVEMENT seeking open access to credible research reports took a significant step forward when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States recently unveiled its Public Access Policy that urges the scientific community to provide universal access to work funded by the state. Advocates of free access as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2002 generally welcomed the NIH move — which encourages researchers to file copies of their peer reviewed articles within 12 months of acceptance by a journal, and choose a date for their dissemination through the Internet. As a concept, open access has found supporters even among some private sponsors of medical research. The question of removing barriers has long been debated against the background of the high cost involved in subscribing to quality journals; there are nearly 28,000 international journals and the more expensive ones are priced around $20,000 a year. The policy approach of the NIH therefore marks a progressive step, however limited, for medical professionals and scientists, and also organisations representing patients with chronic conditions such as HIV/AIDS, cancer, arthritis, Down's syndrome, and a variety of rare disorders.
Advocacy for open access is growing with expanding connectivity to the Net. It has generated debate on the high cost of publishing research articles. The meticulous scrutiny involved in the process of publication is cited as a reason for the high cost of journals. Authors sometimes are required to pay page charges for getting their scientific work published in journals, although most of them are aided by project funds or other grants for the purpose. Happily, these concerns are not beyond resolution, as the most famous model of open access publishing, the Public Library of Science (PLoS), has demonstrated over the past couple of years. PLoS has set for itself the goal of giving any scientist, physician, patient or student anywhere in the world unlimited access to the latest scientific research. In keeping with this credo, its co-founder and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus has hailed the NIH policy as a "significant and positive step." While PLoS is not the first or only forum to enable open access to articles (there are over 1400 quality controlled open access journals listed in major directories), it took the idea forward by leveraging the strengths of the Internet and evolving its own model that welcomed original submissions from scientists for peer review and publication. Authors who can afford it pay a $1,500 fee to meet the costs, but this can be waived for scientists from the developing world. PLoS and its journals of Biology and Medicine have understandably won acclaim in the world of science.
Given the growing base of national medical and scientific research, India's open access advocates will no doubt be inspired by the NIH initiative and seek similar and stronger direction in domestic policy approaches. Important work is carried out in specialised institutes and a part of the university system in India. While most national journals are affordable, international publications are, as a rule, beyond the reach not merely of scientists in specialised fields but of most colleges and universities as well, given their meagre library budgets and the large number of journals they need to subscribe to. One solution will be to permit and encourage authors to archive their publications on the Internet, and offer their peer reviewed articles, free of charge, to reference libraries within a reasonable time frame for release in the public domain. That will ensure the integrity of research and also enable the community of scientists and other users worldwide to share knowledge much more equitably — by drawing on a broad searchable base of research.

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