Pondicherry

 

Here comes trouble

 

Air India Vintage Baggage Label

Thanks Amrita for the link.

Taare Zameen Par

Taare Zameen Par, which roughly translates as stars on the ground, is one of the best films that I have seen. Ammir Khan in his directorial debut does a great job of making a very sensitive movie on children that are different learners. The movie traces a young boy's travails at school, from bullying to abuse and ridicule by teachers.

All it takes is for one teacher to give a child the confidence that they can do, can learn, can progress and can succeed in academics, sports or arts. The people that I went to see the movie with, felt that at some point in their lives they had all experienced similar pressures at school and at home.

The movie has done more for special children and children with learning disabilities, in India, then anything else to create awareness. Now at least parents have a vocabulary to describe children that have different styles of learning and are not mainstream thinkers or learners.

The Hindu has an article on Learning Disabilities in India. Also The Indian Express has a spread on schools that do not follow the mainstream system of education based on rote learning and regurgitation. Mirambika in Delhi and Rishi Valley near Bangalore are part of the group.

NEW DELHI: With Aamir Khan’s directorial debut in “Taare Zameen Par” being lapped up by critics and masses alike, the movie’s theme -- dyslexia and children suffering from it -- has made people sit up and take notice, as parents and teachers try to understand the learning disorder with a sudden renewed interest.

The manner in which Aamir helps the protagonist in the film deal with his disorder left many in the audience thinking about dyslexia and the means of curing it.

A Delhi University professor who has been working in the field of dyslexia for 15 years has for the past one year been using a comprehensive package of assessment and intervention programmes evolved by her for such children in the city.

As part of her research project funded by the University Grants Commission, the Head of Psychology Department at the University, Ashum Gupta, has developed a package of tests and procedures for identifying dyslexia in children, assess their language (both Hindi and English) understanding and then address relating problems.

For the past one year, she has been holding workshops in schools and some non-government organisations to sensitise people about dyslexia.

“About 10 per cent of children in this country suffer from learning disabilities of various kinds. Nearly 3 per cent of them are dyslexic. The awareness about dyslexia is growing but more needs to be done. I have developed an assessment battery comprising different tests in Hindi and English to assess the exact problem with the child. The tests include reading, writing and spelling. The tests are administered to children in schools or their homes,” says Prof. Gupta, whose research has been published in many journals.

“Apart from dealing with the child, we also take interviews of parents and children spread over about five sessions. Including parents is important because there are times they start labelling their children as dyslexic because of some perceived symptoms. But they could be wrong,” she added.

Based on this assessment, an intervention package is put to use at the level of children as well as parents and teachers according to the nature of the problem.

“There are different types of disorders in children. For instance, some children have more of a reading problem than writing; there are others who find memorising things more difficult. Different strategies are employed in the intervention package. We enhance their reading ability by recording their sessions and then playing it again for them to understand where they made a mistake.”

“Phonological strategies are also employed that helps a child to understand different sounds. We use computers too as it always catches their fascination. There is emphasis on using images to make them understand the meaning of a word. Long words are broken into segments, written in big size and pronounced loudly. It is quite a laborious process,” Prof. Gupta points out.

The entire intervention process takes at least a year and the training has to be assiduously followed by parents and teachers till the children are mature enough to devise their own methods to augment their learning.

“We tell caregivers that they need to cultivate patience with such children. The package definitely benefits the children, but takes a lot of time. The rate of improvement is slow. They must not compare different children and not have negative perceptions about their wards,” she said.

Khushwant Singh on Modi's election win in Gujarat.

Khushwant Singh analyzes Modi's win in Gujarat.

Vox Populi is Latin for the Voice of the People. It is followed by two other words in Latin Vox Dei—the Voice of God. It has become a basic creed of democracy giving the will of the people the status of divine authority. We exercise our will at election time and accept the verdict as divinely ordained. In fact it is not so. People are swayed by caste and communal affiliations.

There is plenty of evidence that these factors play an important part in our elections. They condone crimes committed by their favourite candidates and vote for them; a few years ago there was widespread violence against Muslims. Some admitted to having committed ghastly crimes in sting operation carried out by Tehelka and explicitly stated that they had the tacit approval of Narendra Modi. Nevertheless, Modi won Gujarat elections single-handedly. Does he echo the voice of God? To me who is a non-believer in divinity the answer is no. To me Gujarat is Bapu Gandhi's home state and I regard the verdict as repudiation for what Gandhi (and Nehru) stood for.

I hold no grief for the Congress Party because of what many of its leaders did in November 1984, when over 3,000 innocent Sikhs were butchered in cold blood. Some of them were re-elected to Parliament and given ministerial positions, not one was expelled from the party. The turn round came with Sonia Gandhi taking over leadership of the party. She distanced herself from these elements and is doing her best to bring the party back on the path shown by Gandhi and Nehru. Her nominee-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh apologised to the nation for what had happened to the Sikhs. The confession purged the party of sins committed in 1984. It is something Bapu Gandhi would have approved of. The BJP comprising L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Kalyan Singh, Uma Bharati, Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal etc. have yet to apologise to the nation for knocking down Babri Masjid. Nor has Narendra Modi for what his supporters did to innocent Muslims following the burning down a train compartment at Godhra Railway station. Far from asking forgiveness they are again sponsoring Hindutva and repeating their plans to build a Ram Mandir on the exact spot where the Masjid stood. Is this patriotic? Will it not be a set back to our dream of making India a truly secular state?

A Policewalla’s story

Memoirs of retired General and Civil Servants rarely make good reading. They are so full of their achievements that make their readers feel inadequate. What is permissible in a biography is not good in an autobiography. Maxwell Pereira’s The Other Side of Policing (Vitasta) is an exception. Though he made to the IPS, spent 34 years as a Police Officer in various parts of India and retired, loaded with medals for distinguished service, he does not boast about them. On the contrary, he makes fun of himself and others under whom he served and writes felicitous prose. One also tells us quite a lot about problems facing policemen in our country in which many are prone to indulging in lawlessness from time to time. His account of the anti-Sikh violence of November 1984 following the assassination of Mrs Gandhi is revealing. He was perhaps the only police officer to open fire on a mob lynching unarmed Sikhs and burning their property while on its way to Gurdwara Sis Ganj in Chandni Chowk. When he narrated his exploit to his seniors he received a cold reception. He was never asked by any of the nine Commissions of Enquiry looking into the programme to tender evidence before them. However, he was honoured by Sikh organisations with Siropas —robes of honour. Pereira had scant respect for most of his seniors. To him: “A boss is like a diaper always on your ass and usually full of shit.” He was born in Salem (Tamilnadu), had his training in Phillaur (Punjab) and retired in Delhi. I give one example of his style of writing to prove his competence in wielding his pen.

“Though I had met Sikhs in Bangalore before, landing midst a sea of Sikhs in Punjab was understandably traumatic. To me, every Sikh looked just like another, and it was months before I learnt to distinguish between two, that too just by telling myself one was taller, the other shorter, or stockier and so on. Identifying by face features remaining my bete noire forever! Their colours fascinated me, so did their processions through the roads, led by the punj piyaras carrying banners and nishan sahib, with the blue and yellow attired nihangs in their humongous turbans and in full war finery doing their war dance with battle cries and sword fights. I never got tired of watching them. The Punjabis could not pronounce my name Pereira, Pareda, Pededa, Periyar or whatever — before settling down to plain and simple Pyara Singh!’’

King Khan’s Lament

When I said something about Amar Singh

His henchmen stormed my house

I am a Pathan, a Lion

Yet they treated me like a mouse,

When I mimicked Manoj Kumar in a film; He subjected me to a fierce whip

I had to apologise to him profusely

Though my fault was a minor slip.

When I went to watch Indo-Pak match; My object was to enjoy the game

The Cricket Board, however, attributed fanatic motive

They slapped at me a curious blame

They said, “Shah Rukh wanted to promote his film In the garb of sports lover, he acted as a Businessman”

I am an actor, no doubt, a famous actor; But can’t I be a cricket fan?

(Contributed by G.C. Bhandari, Meerut)

Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan

Yale Global reviews the situation in Pakistan post Benazir.

After Bhutto, Pakistan on Edge

With the country exploding in anger, Pakistan’s fate hangs on how Musharraf and political leaders decide to restore stability

Ahmed Rashid
YaleGlobal, 1 January 2008

LAHORE: In the aftermath of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan faces the gravest threat to its unity since the country was born amid bloodshed 60 years earlier.

Although the security of the whole world is at stake from the way power is transferred in this nuclear weapon state, world leaders can do little but look on helplessly as Pakistan’s cowed political establishment and dispirited military face the threat of a determined Al Qaeda–backed Islamic extremists. While enormous public anger and mistrust swells in the nuclear-armed nation, both President Pervez Musharraf and his leading backer, the US, have lost all credibility over managing free and democratic elections, combating extremism or delivering stability to the troubled region.

Musharraf, in clinging to power, cracked down on Pakistanis who demanded reform and democracy, and appeased extremists. The US, shrill in its “war on terror,” spent billions propping ally Musharraf and then, in the face of growing isolation of the general, hurriedly pressured Bhutto to go along with a power-sharing deal with him.

Evidence is emerging that Musharraf fooled both the Americans and Bhutto about the power-sharing deal. Until the last moment Washington wanted to believe that Musharraf was amenable to sharing power with Bhutto if she became prime minister after winning the January elections – even though it was clear by November that Musharraf had no intentions of doing so.

Instead Musharraf, the army and the intelligence services planned to rig the elections to reelect the same alliance of pro-army politicians who sustained him in power since the last rigged elections in 2002. After imposing emergency rule on November 3, Musharraf packed the Supreme Court and the Election Commission with his own nominees, stifled the press and put 10,000 civil-society activists in jail. No state institution was willing to hear complaints from any political party about rigging.

US diplomats refused to accept that the deal was dead or that Musharraf may have double-crossed them. US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte traveled to Islamabad in late November, urging Bhutto to continue collaboration with Musharraf, insisting that the general was sincere about the deal. In a private conversation I had with Bhutto three weeks before her death, she made it clear that she trusted neither the military regime nor Musharraf, that evidence of rigging was everywhere. But the US applied immense pressure, with Negroponte ringing her frequently.

During our conversation, Bhutto observed that the US put little pressure on Musharraf, that the Americans were taking him at his word, but there was enormous US pressure on her.

In Pakistan, scathing criticism targets the Bush administration for its naivety. The US role as interlocutor between the army and the political parties has been shaken by the series of miscalculations by the US State Department, and the Pakistani government has lost all credibility with its own people. Opposition political parties now refuse to have anything to do with Musharraf and call on him to resign.

Musharraf, long supported by the US, is considered the biggest obstacle to moving the country towards greater stability.

Mourning for Bhutto is marked by seething anger and bitterness. The entire country was bought to a standstill for three days as trains, planes, cars stopped operating and all business and bazaars shut down. Tens of thousands of people buried Bhutto in her ancestoral village in Sind province, and millions of people said prayers for her for several days running at mosques and open grounds around the country.

Most Pakistanis are convinced that the government was either directly responsible for Bhutto's death or at the very least failed to provide her with adequate protection. Bhutto's own appeals for increased security as she campaigned for the 8 January elections were ignored, even ridiculed by government agencies.

So when just 24 hours after her death the government claimed to have cracked the case, the media and Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party greeted the announcement with ridicule. Interior Ministry Spokesman Brig Javed Iqbal Cheema told a press conference on the evening of December 28 that Bhutto had fatally cracked her head on the lever of a sun roof, after bullets were fired and a bomb exploded near her vehicle. He then released a telephone intercept of Baitullah Mehsud, the emir of the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, congratulating the leader of a suicide squad for carrying out the bombing.

Despite a heavy crackdown against the media by the regime, Brig Cheema's comments were met with derision and even abuse by the press. His comments sounded particularly hollow in the light of demands by politicians across the country for an independent and international investigation into Bhutto's death – something that US presidential contender Hillary Clinton has endorsed and the Bush administration is weighing. Cheema subsequently retracted some of his remarks, saying he had been misquoted.

During the past six months, suicide bombers have killed some 700 Pakistanis, but the Musharraf regime has failed to track down a single culprit behind the blasts. Now it claims to have resolved the Bhutto murder in 24 hours.

Anger and grief at Bhutto's death is exacerbated by a crisis in which no political party is willing to accept an election under Musharraf's auspices. Nobody is willing to accept the government's explanations for Bhutto’s death. And no general or politician has Bhutto’s courage, to stand up to the growing militancy that has gripped Pakistan.

The insurgency launched by the Pakistani Taliban has now spread from the mountainous tribal areas into the valleys and plains of the North West Frontier Province, where more than 30 million people live. Hundreds of soldiers have surrendered, deserted their positions or fled rather than fight the militants. Al Qaeda uses the Pakistani Taliban to expand their area of influence and make territorial conquests so that a liberated area for the new Caliphate, comprising the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, can be won.

Restoration of political stability is no longer possible under Musharraf. But he will not resign unless the army pushes him out, the US withholds support or Pakistanis organize sustained street protests. New army chief General Ashfaq Kiyani is still a novice, feeling his way around and surrounded by generals promoted by Musharraf and loyal to him. The former head of the ISI led the intelligence services during the past three years as the threat of fundamentalism expanded across Pakistan, both in tribal areas adjacent to Afghanistan and urban areas. It is the first time in the history of the Pakistan army that an ISI chief has become army chief, but Musharraf has always heavily depended on ISI chiefs for principle advisers. Kiyanai is American-trained.

The military regime has become a master at playing divide and rule among the political parties, fragmenting them. It is essential that all the major parties form a common front, seeking to create a national government and pledge not to become victim to ISI machinations.

The parliamentary elections will likely be postponed and we must wait to see if political parties accept any new date. Few Pakistanis want another round of military rule. What they would prefer is that sustained public pressure forces Musharraf to step down and that the caretaker prime minister, with support from the military, set up a new national government of all the political parties, which could then organize fresh elections under acceptable ground rules. A change at the top is essential if even minimum stability is to return.

Ahmed Rashid is the author of "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" and "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia" and a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.

Benazir Rest in Peace

The assassination of Benazir is shocking for Pakistan and the rest of the world. This brave woman was challenging the authority of President Musharraf's authoritarian rule. Tariq Ali and William Dalrymple have put her political years in perspective for us.
Here is Tariq Ali's article.
Even those of us sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto's behaviour and policies--both while she was in office and more recently--are stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalk the country once again.

An odd coexistence of military despotism and anarchy created the conditions leading to her assassination in Rawalpindi yesterday. In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order--and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness. How else can one explain the sacking of the chief justice and eight other judges of the country's supreme court for attempting to hold the government's intelligence agencies and the police accountable to courts of law? Their replacements lack the backbone to do anything, let alone conduct a proper inquest into the misdeeds of the agencies to uncover the truth behind the carefully organised killing of a major political leader.

How can Pakistan today be anything but a conflagration of despair? It is assumed that the killers were jihadi fanatics. This may well be true, but were they acting on their own?

Benazir, according to those close to her, had been tempted to boycott the fake elections, but she lacked the political courage to defy Washington. She had plenty of physical courage, and refused to be cowed by threats from local opponents. She had been addressing an election rally in Liaquat Bagh. This is a popular space named after the country's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was killed by an assassin in 1953. The killer, Said Akbar, was immediately shot dead on the orders of a police officer involved in the plot. Not far from here, there once stood a colonial structure where nationalists were imprisoned. This was Rawalpindi jail. It was here that Benazir's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in April 1979. The military tyrant responsible for his judicial murder made sure the site of the tragedy was destroyed as well.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's death poisoned relations between his Pakistan People's party and the army. Party activists, particularly in the province of Sind, were brutally tortured, humiliated and, sometimes, disappeared or killed.

Pakistan's turbulent history, a result of continuous military rule and unpopular global alliances, confronts the ruling elite now with serious choices. They appear to have no positive aims. The overwhelming majority of the country disapproves of the government's foreign policy. They are angered by its lack of a serious domestic policy except for further enriching a callous and greedy elite that includes a swollen, parasitic military. Now they watch helplessly as politicians are shot dead in front of them.

Benazir had survived the bomb blast yesterday but was felled by bullets fired at her car. The assassins, mindful of their failure in Karachi a month ago, had taken out a double insurance this time. They wanted her dead. It is impossible for even a rigged election to take place now. It will have to be postponed, and the military high command is no doubt contemplating another dose of army rule if the situation gets worse, which could easily happen.

What has happened is a multilayered tragedy. It's a tragedy for a country on a road to more disasters. Torrents and foaming cataracts lie ahead. And it is a personal tragedy. The house of Bhutto has lost another member. Father, two sons and now a daughter have all died unnatural deaths.

I first met Benazir at her father's house in Karachi when she was a fun-loving teenager, and later at Oxford. She was not a natural politician and had always wanted to be a diplomat, but history and personal tragedy pushed in the other direction. Her father's death transformed her.



William Dalrymple's article is here.

Benazir Bhutto's assassination is another body-blow for Pakistan, whose trajectory is every day appearing more and more distinct from that of its estranged sister, India. The killing has already caused widespread rioting; if government involvement in the shooting is proven, or at least widely suspected, it might even push Pakistan into full-scale civil war.

The fatal assassin's bullet in Benazir's neck removes from the scene a courageous, secular and liberal woman who continued to fight on despite a suicide bomb attack aimed at eliminating her the day of her return from exile, and who shrugged off the clear danger to her life that further campaigning entailed.



Today she's being hailed as "a martyr for freedom and democracy". but in many ways, it was she who brought it into disrepute.


It gives further momentum to Pakistan's jehadis in their campaign to turn Pakistan into a Taliban-like Islamist state, and may well lead to the postponement of the January 8 election though the caretaker PM for the moment has said they will be held on schedule. Nawaz Sharif, leader of the rival


Muslim League (N), has said his party will now boycott the poll, which already makes its results meaningless.

Benazir's death is also, of course, a personal tragedy, both for the striking woman who embodied the hopes of so many liberal Pakistanis, and for her family. Benazir Bhutto has three children who will now be left motherless, and a party—the most popular in the country—which will be left leaderless. She has no clear successor, and trained up no one as a deputy who can easily fill her shoes. As she said herself in her last speech, shortly before being killed, "Bomb blasts are taking place everywhere", "The country is in great danger."

The West always had a soft spot for Benazir. Her neighbouring heads of state may have been figures as unpredictable and potentially alarming as President Ahmadinejad of Iran and a clutch of Afghan warlords—but Benazir has always seemed reassuringly familiar to Western governments. She spoke English fluently because it was her first language. She had an English governess, went to a convent run by Irish nuns, and rounded off her education with degrees from Harvard and Oxford. For the Americans, what Benazir Bhutto wasn't was possibly more attractive even than what she was: she wasn't a religious fundamentalist, she didn't have a beard, she didn't organise mass rallies where everyone shouts 'Death to America', and she doesn't issue fatwas against Booker-winning authors—even though Salman Rushdie went out of his way to ridicule her as the Virgin Ironpants in Shame.

However the very reasons that make the West love Benazir are the same that leave many Pakistanis with second thoughts. Her English may be fluent, but you can't say the same about her Urdu which she speaks like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi is even worse: apart from a few imperatives, she is completely at sea.

Equally, the tragedy of Benazir's end should not blind us to her as astonishingly weak record as a politician. Benazir was no Aung San Suu Kyi, and much of the praise now being heaped upon her is misplaced. In reality, Benazir's own democratic credentials were far from impeccable. She colluded in massive human rights abuses, and during her tenure, government death squads in Karachi were responsible for the abduction and murder of hundreds of her MQM opponents. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.

Within her own party, she declared herself the lifetime president of the PPP, and refused to let her brother Murtaza challenge her for its leadership. When he was shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances outside her home, Benazir was implicated. His wife Ghinwa, and her daughter Fatima, as well as Benazir's own mother, all firmly believed that she gave the order to have him killed.