Today Times

A fat and portly air chief is an embarrassment

Times Of India
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Like many of you, I too was excited when the Indian Air Force conferred the rank of the Honorary Group Captain on the iconic cricketer Sachin Tendulkar Friday last. Although I have a poor opinion of the game and the way this nation wastes time on it, I have high regard for the man himself. To sustain oneself at that level for two decades, and still lead, is absolutely remarkable. While a lot of wannabes get a lot of recognition, in Sachin’s case, IAF’s recognition is well deserved.

(Tendulkar being honoured by Air Chief Marshal P V Naik. AP)

This short post, however, is not about Sachin and his fitness, but the state of our pride, the Indian Air Force. Look at these accompanying pictures and you would know what I mean.  My immediate reaction that day was to write something, but then, IAF is a venerated institution and a source of pride for a nation that has so little to crow about.  So I decided not to do anything to puncture that euphoria. But after waiting three days, and looking at the pictures again, I guess I couldn’t hold back any longer.
 
As I said, IAF is something of pride for us Indians. Its achievement in the wars, even while using inferior machines, has been stuff folklores are made of. But if this particular event was to add to that image, it failed, and miserably so.
 
Just a look at the air chief, Air Chief Marshal P V Naik, as he shakes Sachin’s hands or smiles or does anything. Do these pictures not embarrass you? Pot belly that would shame even a hardened police constable in deep Uttar Pradesh is certainly not something that I, as an

(Left: Sachin Tendulkar with IAF chief P V Naik. PTI)

Indian, would feel proud of in the man entrusted with the task of managing my nation’s air force.

Whatever might be the reason or explanation for this state of the air force chief, this is not on. It is not just a huge embarrassment but also gives a knock to our belief that while everything else in this nation would crumble, the standards maintained by the services would uphold all that we want. Alas!

('Group Captain' Sachin Tendulkar salutes Air Chief
Marshal PV Naik after being honoured by the IAF. PTI)

To me, this is nothing but symptomatic of the rot that has begun to engulf us so completely. Like elsewhere, there is a general tendency to compromise with things. I will do a post some other time about my experiences with the services in some areas, especially the rugged and inhospitable regions in high altitude, but this level of fitness in the chief is unexpected and unacceptable. Not too long ago, the same air force had A Y Tipnis as its head. His appearance was something to be proud of.

(Air Chief Marshal PV Naik honours Sachin Tendulkar. TOI )

Such a stickler was he of fitness, which should be a given in the services, that none dared come close to him if he felt his belt was hanging below his waist. Can the current chief even hold that threat to his subordinates? He can’t.

I am sure he is a great strategist and must have been great shape physically too in his hey days, but there can be no excuse for the state he is now. He is in the services, after all, where physical fitness is looked upon as an asset. In the current state, he wouldn't inspire much confidence, especially among youngsters who may look up to him as a role model.

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Mamma T

Times Of India
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It was 1970 and I had gone to meet Mother Teresa for the first time, in Nirmal Hriday, the Missionaries of Charity’s Home for Dying Destitutes in Kalighat, south Calcutta.

I’d taken a deep breathe before entering, fearful of inhaling the odour of death. What would it smell like? Sour and bitter, the ashes of flowers?

What had struck me first was the peace of the place. The inmates lay on pallets on the clean-swept floor of a large, airy hall. Golden motes danced in the light from tall windows. A Sister in the white habit of the order had taken me over to Mother.

Now, she knelt by the dying man on the floor. She covered his sores with bandages, her blunt-fingered peasant hands gentle on bleeding flesh. She took one of the man’s hands in both of hers. She spoke to him in a voice without words. There was no outrage in that voice, no accusation, no weariness.  As she held his hand and spoke to him in the voice without words, the dying man’s eyes opened and seemed to shine with understanding. Incredibly, a smile appeared on the ravaged face. It was then that I had my first intuition as to what Mother Teresa – whom I would always refer to myself as Mamma T as an antidote to icon-worship – was all about.

It was impossible to judge her work from a secular standpoint. No ordinary social worker, no matter how dedicated, could face the daily horrors she did without succumbing to despair. I was, and am, an atheist. And as an atheist I acknowledged that the source of her strength was her religious belief. Yet there was no odour of sanctity about her. No misty-eyed vision of the world to come to gloss over the ugly wounds of this world. She seemed to use the transcendent as a fulcrum to tackle the mundane, the way a workman makes use of a lever to lift a load otherwise too heavy to bear.

True, she talked about God a lot. “Let’s do something beautiful for God,” was one of her favourite phrases, as I soon learnt. But the way she said it made it sound like an idiosyncrasy, like the way an executive might talk about his golf handicap. If anything, the latter would have sounded more earnest about his game. She seemed so cheerful. Her infectious smile erased the wrinkles on the lined face. Her eyes were lively with awareness. She seemed so everyday.

Could this really be the woman all the fuss was about, who was already in the international limelight for having devoted her life to helping the most hopeless of human derelicts, dying beggars and shunned lepers? Who even then was in some danger of eventual canonisation?

Already the jetsam of humanity that she dredged from the streets of Calcutta, and a score of other cities around the world, viewed her as a living saint. In a streetside altar on Lower Circular Road, her picture had been installed as a deity. Foreign visitors were exhorted to go see her as if she were a human shrine, expiating Calcutta’s myriad sins. When she was talked about at cocktail parties, as she often was, the final diagnosis was that she was some sort of avatar of goodness, a being mysteriously inspired, unlike mere mortals such as us. In short, a saint.

Then, as now, we needed our saints. We could then walk by a beggar dying in the gutter, or a new-born child left on a refuse heap to be eaten alive by street dogs, and have the satisfaction of knowing that though there was nothing we ourselves could do, as looking after human derelicts was obviously not our job, we had nominated a special person for this chore, who could take care of everything. Mamma T was the moral garbage collector of our conscience.

The previous year before I first met her, I’d come across a beggar who had collapsed on the pavement on Chowringhee. The rush-hour crowd milled and eddied past. I too hurried by, telling myself that there was nothing that I could do anyway. When I got to the JS office, I told the story to Desmond’s secretary, Dhun Batlivala (Miss Forbes and Miss Singh had long since gone). Dhun suggested I call the Missionaries of Charity. I rang and gave the details to a matter-of-fact voice at the other end.

An hour later I went out and found that the man had been taken away. I felt a comfortable sense of relief. As when a speck of grit is removed from the eye, or a boil drained of pus. I felt I’d done my duty.

I was talking to a woman once, the wife of a company director, who told me with pride, “I always contact Mother Teresa in such cases. She’s so absolutely marvellous and knows exactly what to do.”

I nodded and said, “She is. But just suppose she wasn’t there?”

She looked at me as though I’d made an absurd remark. Like ‘But suppose the earth is flat’. Or ‘Suppose the sun doesn’t rise one day’.

Then she said, “But she is there, isn’t she?” And that was that.

Today, when we weigh her in the balance, what we are really weighing are our own values. When she received the Nobel Prize, Dan Sheppard, the then Time correspondent in Delhi, called me in Calcutta. He wanted to know how much Mamma T weighed.

“You know the Time style,” he said. “In the piece I write, when I say ‘tiny’, I have to give her weight to back up the adjective. Will you find out for me, please?”

I rang the Missionaries of Charity. Mother was unavailable, out on fieldwork, as she was more often than not. I spoke to one of the Sisters.

“I’m sorry, I know it sounds stupid. But could you tell me how much Mother weighs. It’s for Time magazine.”

There was silence. Then, very gently, “Do you really think that Mother herself would know, or care?”

In the end I made up 48 kg and passed it on to Dan. He seemed happy enough. Presumably so were Time readers.

When Mother died in 1997, I ended the edit I wrote for the Times of India, where by then I was working: “Lack of fuss was central to Mother Teresa’s style of functioning. That, and a rarely displayed but robust sense of humour, saved her from the sin of self-conscious piety. As she recounted once to Prince Michael of Greece, she dreamt she had died and gone to heaven where Saint Peter told her: ‘Go back to earth; there are no slums up here.’ There might not be any slums in heaven. But perhaps Mother Teresa would pardon us a touch of sentimentality – which she never permitted herself – for suggesting that there may be a little less heaven on this despairing earth after her departure.”

I never did find out how much she really weighed.

But, your Lordships, how?

Times Of India
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We are conditioned to think of our politicians as corrupt and our government as insensitive. We are also programmed to believe that courts often bring a recalcitrant government on to the correct path. That is why when the Supreme Court tersely reminded Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar that it was an order to distribute the excess foodgrains to the poor, the entire nation thought Pawar had met his come-uppance. Most newspapers reported the order with a scarcely hidden glee. Common people welcomed the whiplash as a necessary one to goad the bureaucracy and the politicians to do what is obviously right.

True, who could have argued with an order to distribute grains rotting outside government godowns to the poor? In fact, that was the first thought most people had when it was first reported that grains were rotting in the rains as government did not have enough warehouses to keep them. Why let them rot? Why not give them to the hungry of whom there are plenty? If only life were so simple.

Actually, Pawar was right in being a bit perplexed when the Supreme Court first spoke of giving away the foodgrains. He tried to sidestep it by saying it was a suggestion and government already had schemes to give subsidized foodgrains to the poor. This was apparently taken as an affront by the judges. The angry "That's an order" retort from the bench appeared more a reaction to this perceived insult than a judicially considered verdict.

Now, giving away to the poor would have been a lark if it were a private trader hoarding up the grains. Faced with such an order, he could have simply gone to the nearest temple and distributed the grains as alms. He could have thrown a feast for the town to mark his grandmother's birthday. He could even have gone and given a sackful to each household in the nearest slums.

But government, by its nature, cannot work thus. With government come the questions of entitlement, equity, fairness, and justice. It would have helped if, along with the order, the judges had also come up with a detailed plan of how the government should go about distributing the grains. That exercise would have involved crunching some numbers about exact quantity of excess foodgrains available and total number of people who could be given those. It would also have involved giving a thought to how the grains could be taken from warehouses to the beneficiaries, the logistics and the cost to be incurred. Pawar, probably, had such concerns in mind when he appeared taciturn about the earlier SC order.

How is the government expected to implement it? Could it just appeal to all the poor to come and take away the excess grain? In that case, how would anyone know that only poor were taking the grains? Could it announce a certain extra quantity to all BPL ration card holders? Is there enough excess available to give a certain minimum quantity to all beneficiaries all over the country? If not, how are people to be selected without being discriminatory? Could government give it to the poor located near the warehouses? In that case, would not people in other areas cry foul?

In the end, the government seems to have quietly shifted the onus on the states by announcing excess allocation through public distribution system. But PDS has shown itself incapable of properly distributing even the normal quantity allocated to it. It could just be that the grains, instead of rotting in FCI godowns, will now rot in respective state government ones. Or, more likely, they would find their way into the black market like most commodities distributed through PDS do.

While the judges may get an enormous sense of satisfaction at having shone the moral beacon to a misguided government, hardly anything would change on the ground. One cannot help get a feeling that the court too played to the gallery in this matter. Instead, the occasion could have been used to right the numerous wrongs that plague the entire system of procuring foodgrains and distributing it. That would have required a lot more thought to the nitty-gritty.

Indeed, the court could have questioned how did such an elaborate and intensive intervention of government in agriculture and food distribution create such a situation. It is a shame that foodgrains rot in a country where people are going hungry. But, populist orders are not going to change the situation. They would only complicate a tragedy.

Cops' barking dogs seldom bite

Times Of India
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Nagpur: The traditional detective novels would often come with representations of oval impressions of fingerprints and a magnifying glass close to it apart from a firearm or a blood dripping from a knife or both. Fingerprints, as rightly depicted on cover of such novels, occupied an important place in crime investigation.

The fingerprint experts of police department are still seen at the scene of crime. Equipped with their devices, the experts are found focused on collecting fingerprints left behind on the surfaces that criminals might have touched while committing theft or a murder.

Their work find curious audience among the public who observes the act with much awe as the fingerprint sleuths carry on their work in rapt attention. But, you ask them an hour or so later. Either they would offer one a dry smile indicating that they had got little to aid the probe or claim to have returned empty handed. All too often they return empty handed as criminals have turned smarter. They usually wear gloves or wipe the place clean after their act.

Recently, the experts were forgiven by a woman whose house was burgled at Mahal in east Nagpur. In their enthusiasm to collect fingerprints, the experts lost grip of a costly glass top and it crashed to the floor in pieces. The woman, who had already lost her jewellery and was grieving the loss of her pet dog whom the intruders had killed, could only stare helplessly at the shattered glass.

It is reasonable to question the effectiveness of the unit as they haven't been credited with many successes.

'Our system is crippled by the old software," said an expert. He also said that Nagpur unit had recently provided clues to two police stations about murder suspects. The argument, however, did not find any taker within the department. A senior cop blasted the unit for having a casual approach. “When we catch a thief, he confesses to committing a number of burglaries. How come the fingerprint unit that had been to all such scenes couldn't give us a clue," he asked.

Just like fingerprints, the sniffer dog unit acts more to complete the formalities than actually aid the investigation.

Though there had been instances in Gadchiroli when sniffer canines saved cops from blasts, no such work by the dog unit in Nagpur has been reported. The well-looked after dogs, trained even to salute a senior cop, make a great show when brought to a scene of crime.

Crowd stops to watch the dog sniffing around to either trace an explosive or track down a suspect. It also triggers much enthusiasm among the media photographers. But it has been years since anyone heard that a police dog had helped nab a criminal. After a recent bank heist at Butibori near Nagpur, the crowd saw the tracker canine hurriedly leave the bank and reach a road. It then walked a few metres with hurried steps in either direction, sniffed at a nearby nullah and relieved itself on a tree trunk. It then returned staring blankly at its handler.

Criminals now have a trick to confuse the dogs too. They just sprinkle a bit of gunpowder from crackers at the scene to mislead the canines into believing that search is for explosives. They forget the human scent they are supposed to follow and keep hovering around the gunpowder.

The situation is no better for sketch artists whose services the cops occasionally use to get an idea about absconding suspects. However, no one can recall when the last such sketch helped identify a suspect. “We had given descriptions of a suspect to sketch artist, he ended up making a portrait resembling our thanedar," quipped a sub-inspector.

Hand-writing experts fare equally bad. These days they are used more to settle civilian disputes than to help serious crime investigation.

The beheaders

Times Of India
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Healthy, wealthy and wise?

Times Of India
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'The Robbery of the soil'

Times Of India
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Are we congenitally corrupt?

Times Of India
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There’s been a disturbingly simplistic quality to the ongoing debate swirling around the latest match-fixing scandal to have hit cricket. Several commentators both here in South Asia and in the West have insinuated that the supposedly weak moral fibre of subcontinental players somehow predisposes them towards indulging in unethical behaviour. That corruption is actually hardwired into the South Asian DNA and that’s why players from the subcontinent are routinely involved in sharp practices. Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain, has been widely quoted as having said that Western cricketers have differing moral values from their subcontinental peers and have in the past therefore resisted inducements offered by fixers to rig matches. But we hope that the Pontings of the world only hold these views because they know no better. Endorsing such views would be to uphold the highly objectionable, if not down right racist, notion that some societies or people are congenitally corrupt.

In post-colonial discourse those who’ve tried to explain why the developing world may be riddled with corruption have postulated that ethical standards are culturally determined and therefore subject to a person’s 'individual choice'. In other words a moral relativist would argue that right or wrong are not absolutes, but can be determined by each individual. Morals and ethics can be ‘altered from one situation, person, or circumstance to the next’. Obviously, the moral relativist would be critical of anyone claiming that their moral standards are superior to those practiced by other peoples or cultures. But while that’s one obvious conclusion to be had, it is not the only one that can be drawn from it. The argument goes further than others to explain why there seems to be greater ambivalence to corruption in the subcontinent. If our moral responses are informed by our cultural impetuses then doesn’t the sheer diversity of traditions on the subcontinent make it almost impossible to judge or even act according to a one-size-fits-all moral code? What is easily codified as an acceptable standard for moral behaviour in the Judeo-Christian culture of the West becomes almost impossible to do for the many competing sub-cultures of the subcontinent. There is, in short, little room for unity of moral purpose in diversity.

The tension between the Indian State, for instance, and its peoples on issues of legislation aimed at ironing out ethical anomalies on the subcontinent is an example of how difficult it can be to evolve a universal normative credo in multi-cultural and ethnically diverse societies. This is most true for the evil of Casteism. The Indian state has been battling this ‘amoral’ practice using different strategies for sixty years. A sustained campaign similar to the one against Casteism will have to be mounted by the State against other forms of moral and material corruption. But for the State to withstand the rigours of battle it will first have to wage a war on its own agencies. Instruments like the Right to Information Act, which bring transparency and accountability to government, demonstrate that the State in India is not above self-improvement and that moral corruption in Indian society is therefore not a genetically encoded disease.

Nutrition is a bigger problem than hunger

Times Of India
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Activists demanding food as a fundamental right view the state as saviour, unperturbed by pervasive state failure in sector after sector. The public distribution system (PDS) is a public scandal. Activists say if only all states create as good a PDS as Tamil Nadu’s, the system will work beautifully. This is like saying that if only all Indian cricketers play as well as Tendulkar, India will be world cricket champion. Policies must not assume that the best can always be had with sufficient moral urging. Rather, policies should be designed to work even with very sub-optimal implementation.

I am all for aiding the needy but against entitlements parading as rights, which hugely expand a corrupt, inefficient state. In National Sample Surveys, the percentage of people claiming to be hungry has fallen steadily from 15% in 1983 to 2% in 2004-5.  Economists Dreze and Deaton have shown that as incomes rise, poorer Indians opt for superior foods rather than more calories. Clearly, only non-hungry people will prefer quality over quantity. Poverty is still substantial, but hunger is now marginal. Instead of rejoicing in this, leftists remain in denial.

The big problem is malnutrition, not hunger. A recent survey revealed anaemia rates of 51-74% in women and small children. Of children under three, 47% were underweight and 45% stunted by global standards. Protein deficiency is a culprit.  

How do we focus on nutrition rather than presumed hunger? Not through ever-rising subsidies on food. Sonia Gandhi wants subsidized grain even for better-off folk. This aims to provide electoral security for Sonia. Don’t confuse it with food security.

Dreze and Amartya Sen have shown that targeting the needy can lead to huge errors — exclusion of the poor, inclusion of the non-poor. Targeting can be socially divisive and create poverty traps — if a poor man becomes non-poor, he loses his subsidized food and slips back into poverty. Hence Dreze prefers subsidies for all.

However, self-targeting can avoid problems of exclusion, inclusion and poverty traps. Maharashtra’s rural employment schemes in the 1970s paid low wages that only the poor would accept, a good example of self-targeting.
Ajai Shankar, former industry secretary, has an excellent suggestion for self-targeting in food — mix wheat flour (atta) with soya flour, raising its protein content but making it less palatable. Richer folk will not eat this, but poor people will. Such protein fortification of atta could help reduce protein deficiency in pregnant women and children. Ajai Shankar also suggests offering brown, unpolished rice, which has more nutrition but is less palatable than white rice, and so will be self-targeted at the poor.

I would fortify atta with not only soya but iron (to combat anaemia), iodine (to combat goitre) and Vitamin A (to combat night blindness). This will cost very little extra, yet combat serious nutritional deficiencies. It’s not a silver bullet: other nutritional programmes need overhaul and strengthening too.

Brown rice has two drawbacks. First, it can be resold by shopkeepers to mills at a huge profit, so the PDS incentive for massive diversion will remain. Atta mixed with soya cannot be unmixed, and so eliminates diversion.
A bigger objection should be to rice in any form. Rice is the most expensive cereal, and guzzles the most water. It requires 22 irrigations per crop against eight for wheat. Rice cultivation is sustainable in high rainfall areas, but is environmentally disastrous in moderate-rainfall areas (Punjab, Haryana). It lowers the water table precipitously, so drinking-water wells and shallow tubewells of small farmers run dry, and some of them commit suicide.

Any food entitlements should be for basic food, not for the most expensive cereal. A right to rice is conceptually like Marie Antoinette’s right to cake. For centuries, poor Indians have eaten coarse grain (bajra, jowar) costing half as much as rice. If necessary, India can export rice to finance imports of twice as much coarse grain, which can then be fortified with nutritional supplements for the PDS. It will be self-targeting: richer folk will not buy it.

Some economists would rather send money to the needy than subsidize goods (food, fertilizers, electricity). But since this is politically unacceptable, a second-best solution is universal entitlement to nutritious but unpopular foods that only the poorest quarter or third of the population will actually buy.

This will be inclusive, yet relatively inexpensive. It will address the fact that nutrition is a greater problem than hunger. It will eliminate incentives to divert supplies to the open market, and so work even in corrupt states. But, like many good ideas, it will not translate instantly into votes. Will that be fatal?

Reduce CWG Puppeteers!

Times Of India
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The platform to host sporting events and to infuse a feeling of oneness and solidarity and improve infrastructure and image has only revealed how some ill minded elements have collectively ruined the euphoria surrounding Commonwealth Games (CWG) by unleashing forces of corruption.

As has been put forward by Jug Suraiya that Chetan Bhagat’s argument to boycott CWG to denounce corruption will merely make for an “excellent argument” is very true.

Now taking the argument a bit further we have to acknowledge that boycott of CWG, if it can ever be achieved, will have no impact in terms of viewer-ship of the much celebrated event.

Rather the fewer the “masses” attending the games the more relieved will be the managing committee and law and administration authorities as they will have lesser numbers to handle.

In any case there will be those humongous number of “classes” (read Very Important Persons) from distant and not so distant various parts of the country to view CWG on free and/or complimentary tickets.

In this melee to cry hoarse against the high level of corruption we have failed to ponder over loopholes that let corrupt elements to flout laws and flourish.

If we are to attempt a close examination we may land up with solutions to cure an acute and chronic ailment that afflicts management of events and also civic affairs of our cities, particularly mega ones.

Of course there may not be inhibitions in accepting that corruption and mismanagement are not new to India or Indians or for that matter any one else.

Despite the fact that rules have to be obeyed, still this saga points to a whole lot of questions that arise about the way rules have been framed.

Therefore our responses cannot just be a mere boycott of events that are being handled by an elected set.

First things first: Who was the person (s) who decided that the CWG should be held in Delhi in the first place?

Was he or they in a position to ascertain what would be the effect of holding big scale events on Delhi’s population and conditions of living? If yes, then how are these people responsible to the local residents?

Perhaps a smaller and less populated city could have been a better venue and laying out such expansive sports infrastructure would have accelerated development of that city and its surroundings.

The second point of concern is the way Indian cities and major ones are being managed (mis).

It is weird to see how modern day local city councils are largely based on c.1882 format when cities were few and not as complex.

Further state governments have always been seen to hold local governments as some sort of rivals, which is implied by the latter being subject of State List and governed by State Statutes or Union Parliament (in case of Union Territories).

This has therefore resulted in these local bodies being insufficiently empowered, which prevents them being good service providers to the local electorate.

Shortcomings of structural governance are reflected in mega cities becoming islands of prosperity in a sea of decay and crumbling infrastructure.

The never ending chaotic coordination of activities comes from a bewildering array of government bodies that push and pull governance in various directions.

In a classic case of “too many cooks spoiling the broth” the innumerable government bodies impede overseeing basic services like roads, water and housing and roads by the Mayor and his Council.

Any wish to bring in de-centralization that would lay the road for more systemic responses to pressures of urbanization by means of further amendment of 74th Amendment remains only in commission reports on local government.

Unlike in the West where the Mayor has real executing powers, the Mayor of an Indian city like Delhi is reduced to a mere figurehead as he/she is chosen through an indirect election by councilors from amongst themselves and for a year’s term.

Then there are constant overlaps of functions of urban bodies with state agencies that aggravate incoherence, non-clarity in demarcation of responsibilities, non-accountability, and non-collaboration.

The real task would be to fix this weak link in the Indian management system.

Evolutions in urban governance affairs will require capacity-building, quality-control and consideration of prevalent ground conditions.

The significant point is for the citizens and media to scream and clamor for rights at the right time.

As the popular Indian saying goes: “Dig up wells, well in advance, not just when you are thirsty!”