An old disfigurement

Pratap Bhanu Mehta | Twitter@@pbmehta | June 20, 2014 12:57 am

The most important signal this government needs to send is 
that it is going to write a new chapter in the history of Indian 
institutions.

It seems that the NDA has not learnt the first lesson from the UPA’s mistakes. It appears hell bent on continuing the decimation of institutions that has been the bane of Indian politics. The same contagion of small-mindedness that corroded the UPA is spreading its poison, under the facade of the new. The joke doing the rounds in Delhi, that the party in power has changed but the politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats have not, seems to be coming true, alas. The surprise is not that it’s business as usual. The surprise is how quickly business as usual has asserted itself.

Think of the unseemly spectacles unfolding around us on institutions. The hallmark of a new governance paradigm is that one party does not use the past misdeeds of the other as an alibi to repeat the same mistakes. Yet this is exactly what has happened in the way in which this government has handled the matter of governors. An article of faith in a civilised democracy is that we sometimes hold our noses, but give the offices the respect due to them. After they assume office, governors are not individuals belonging to a party; they have to be judged in relation to a role. This government is right to say that certain political appointees, like H.R. Bhardwaj, demeaned the office of the governor by playing low politics. But that is at best an argument for transferring a couple of governors in states where there were reasonable political apprehensions. It is not an argument for the wholesale denigration of the office. One of the distortions the UPA produced was upsetting the constitutional deference due to offices. The idea of secretaries calling up governors, as if they were minions in the civil service, and asking them to leave, reflects a culture of corroded institutions, where all formal deference is subordinated to political whim. The objection made is that the governors, by virtue of being Congressmen, are unfit to be governors, that they will somehow not transmit what one spokesman called the “national agenda”. But this is tacitly admitting that the last set of governors were right to do the Centre’s bidding; now the government wants a set that can do its bidding rather than discharge the duties of the office. The government’s argument against the Congress would be more credible if there were some undertaking that the next set of governors would be more non-partisan.

The contagion of petty partisanship will now afflict a large number of other institutions. A range of bodies, from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations to the National Commission for Women, will have their heads replaced. Again, the desire of this government to appoint people it deems fit is not unreasonable. There is also something unseemly in a country where people do not gracefully offer their resignations, giving the new government a chance to rejig. But by asking for wholescale resignations, the underlying message that goes out is simple: there are institutions that do not have an identity and mission that can be identified independently of partisan politics. We may not like everything the past occupants of these positions have done, but by reducing these institutions to mere politics, we shrink them in the long run. The itch to reward supporters after a major victory is understandable. But the crudity and haste with which people are being eased out will diminish future occupants because the office has been diminished.

The mistakes continue. The UPA’s besetting sin was an incurable casualness. Just think of the chain of events that led up to the Andhra fiasco. The advisory order requiring many states to communicate in Hindi suggests exactly that same lack of forethought. India has a delicate language settlement, hard-won through careful compromise and informal conventions. This settlement has served India well. Indeed, it has even served the cause of Hindi well, allowing it to grow without being associated with the fears of state domination. This is exactly the kind of issue on which it is not worth creating distracting noise that unnecessarily raises fears.

One reason we want institutions is that they are necessary to securing certainty and liberty alike. Some NGOs deserve scrutiny and certainly, any illegal actions need to be accounted for. But the manner in which the government has handled the supposed leak by the IB is creating a climate of uncertainty and fear, and empowering all those who wish to intimidate independent actors in civil society. This was exactly the same mistake the UPA made twice over. It first created an environment of uncertainty and intimidation. It then went on to craft laws like the amendments to the FCRA Act, whose sole purpose is to give the state more discretionary power over citizens. If the NDA was serious about governance, it should reprimand the IB for doing a shoddy job on facts, for letting the report leak, and it must address the climate of intimidation that is being created in its wake.

Admitted, it’s early days yet, and in the larger scheme of things, these may be small matters. But these are telling signs in so far as governments usually get more, not less, arrogant with time, as the UPA showed. The government is right to think that economic development is uppermost on people’s minds.

But underlying our logjam in development was the breakdown of institutions. Every single ministry is beset by an institutional crisis, which is at the core of its failures: the HRD has, in the past, treated autonomous institutions as appendages to the ministry when convenient, the main weakness of environmental processes is not delay but the fact that the ministry has made their integrity hard to defend, the office of the attorney general has acted as the political arm of government, not an office of law, the relationship between civil servants and ministers, between the cabinet secretariat and secretaries, has been skewed beyond recognition, and the ministry of finance failed to craft a credible new narrative on inflation instead of repeating “hoarders” on auto pilot, because there are few honest brokers left within the government system who can stitch together an all things considered narrative.

The most important signal this government needs to send is that it is going to write a new chapter in the history of Indian institutions. It should repeat this like a mantra: no institutions, no development. But more than playing footloose with institutions, this creeping display of conventional politics has a disfiguring moral psychology behind it. It shows a pettiness that sits at odds with India’s challenges and aspirations.

The government quickly needs to show that it is not going to be business as usual, that its institutional conduct will elevate the smallest office, not diminish even the highest ones. It is not too late for that lesson.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi, and a contributing editor for ‘The Indian Express’

express@expressindia.com

 

       Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Source: The Indian Express

... see how caste is disappearing fast!

Freedom is the only condition of growth; take that off, the result is degeneration. With the introduction of modern competition, see how caste is disappearing fast! No religion is now necessary to kill it. The Brahmin shopkeeper, shoemaker, and wine-distiller are common in northern India. And why? Because of competition. No man is prohibited from doing anything he pleases for his livelihood under the present government, and the result is neck and neck competition, and thus thousands are seeking and finding the highest level they were born for, instead of vegetating at the bottom.

Letter to Alasinga. November 2, 1893. Complete Works, 5. 23.

From Swamiji's article in the February 1895 issue of the New York Medical Times. Complete Works, 9. 286.
Vivekananda Vedanta Network

Out of my mind: Who’s afraid of Hindutva?

Meghnad Desai | June 15, 2014 12:26 am

Nationalism is a 19th century European idea. 

The electoral history of the BJP shows it has learnt that no party can
win a majority by being merely Hindu majoritarian.

I  live under an Anglican Christian monarchy, not a secular State. In the House of Lords, we have 26 bishops and each day begins with an Anglican prayer. Yet I live in a tolerant secular society. There are faith schools run by various Christian denominations and other religions. There are also State schools which are secular. Elsewhere in Europe there are Christian Democratic and Christian Socialist parties.

No one has thought of them as breaching secularism.

In India, over the years, the dread word has been Hindutva. The BJP is routinely described as a Hindu nationalist party. This is supposed to send a shudder down the spines of all good secular Indians. While the election was being fought, the spectre was created of Narendra Modi as some dangerous dictator — Hitler was frequently mentioned — who was about to impose Hindutva on India. The implication was that he would decimate all Muslims. Many secular parties almost wished that Muslims would believe that story and rush to vote for them. Alas, that did not happen. There are estimates that a fifth of Muslim votes went to the BJP. The Catholic Church in Goa and elsewhere urged people to vote for secular parties. Maybe the voters decided the BJP was a secular party.

What is Hindutva and why is it so dangerous as its critics want to make it out to be? At one level, it just means Hindu-ness rather like Panjabiyat. Gandhiji thought Ambedkar lacked Hindutva, which was not far from the truth. Savarkar, who wrote an essay on Hindutva, was an atheist and an enthusiast for European-style modernisation as an answer for India. His arguments with Gandhiji in London in 1909 led the latter to write Hind Swaraj. Nehru chose the Savarkar path after Independence and modernised India along European lines while keeping Gandhi on a pedestal.

Nationalism is a 19th century European idea. There were few nations as of 1900. Italy had just become one and Savarkar wrote a biography of Mazzini. As European nations began to be formed after the break-up of empires at the end of the First World War, the question arose, ‘What defines a nation?
Poland, Hungary and Romania and other new nations fixed on the idea of a nation being constituted of a people who primordially belonged to the soil. The words nation, race and people were used interchangeably.

The Indian elite who gathered at the Congress sessions during the first few decades were politely asking for concessions from the British rather than arguing for nationalism. There was the Hindu revivalist movement of Dayananda Saraswati, Vivekananda and then much more politically of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, which was one basis for building the idea of an Indian nation. The Muslim elite had doubts about democracy where the majority could swamp the minority. To get Muslims on board, the Congress and Muslim League negotiated a joint platform at the 1916 Lucknow meeting for seat-sharing where Jinnah played a crucial role. The climax for Hindu-Muslim cooperation came in the Khilafat movement, which Gandhiji launched and after Chauri Chaura suspended. Hindu-Muslim unity became elusive after that.

Savarkar was looking for a European-style argument for Indian nationhood. Following that logic, he began by defining Hindutva as the basis for what constituted a nation for people living in the territory that was India before Independence. Much of the essay is concerned about showing that the word Hindu does not come from Persian but is derivative of Sindhu. His stance was without doubt hostile to recognising Muslims as equal parts of the Indian nation unless they accepted India as their motherland.

The times have moved on. India is a nation and a nation state. The electoral history of the BJP shows it has learnt that no party can win a majority by being merely Hindu majoritarian. Neither Ram Mandir nor the destruction of Babri Masjid delivered a majority. The argument for nationhood even for a Hindu majoritarian party has to be inclusive. That in my view is what Modi offered and voters have bought. Let us see how well he delivers on his promise.

Source: The Indian Express

శ్రీ కౌముది జూన్ 2014

Modi happened in Election 2014

This Lok Sabha election was a structural break for India as its voters comprehensively rejected their Nehru-Gandhi past.

 Written by Surjit S Bhalla | May 20, 2014 8:49 am



Essentially, the Indian polity has called the Congress’s bluff,
seen it for the calculating set of politicians they have been.

Just what happened on May 16? In a word, Modi. Of course, there are several other factors that determined the contours of Election 2014, but the defining characteristic was the PM-designate, Narendra Modi. Can one individual define an election? Possible, if that individual rightly senses the mood of the country, and its changing sense of direction. Recall what happened in that other defining election, albeit of a lower seismic magnitude — Barack Obama in 2008. The parallels are close — a black man winning the presidency in a country where the blacks obtained civil rights just 50 years ago; a lower caste OBC winning in a country where caste matters a lot. Post the 2008 election in the US, one found out that maybe white Americans are not that racist after all; post-May 16, India has found out that caste has ceased to occupy an important place in the minds of voters.

So what did happen in India? Several myths abound as to what explains Modi’s record-breaking win — 336 seats for the NDA, and the highest ever seat per vote recorded for any alliance or party in India, that is, nine seats for every 1 per cent of the vote. In the record-setting 1984 election, the Congress obtained 8.5 seats for each per cent vote. A partial listing of the myths:

Myth 1: The Congress lost because it operated a corruption and scam infested regime: Commonwealth Games, Coalgate, 2G, etc. As if UPA 1, and all governments before, have not been corrupt. Corruption is one of the factors affecting voters’ choice, but not a very important factor. Else, why would all opinion and exit polls suggest that corruption was one of the least important determinants of voters’ choice? And just look at the results for the Aam Aadmi Party, which ran exclusively against crony capitalism and corruption — and managed to win only four of the 432 seats it contested, and lost its deposit in 413, another record.

Myth 2: The Congress lost because of a weak economy — high inflation and low growth. I am a card-carrying member of the club that believes that economic performance determines voting behaviour. But this election was not an average election, to which average explanations are applicable. By itself, the weak economy and corruption would mean that the Congress and UPA would lose seats. But to lose 200 seats is a black swan event. In 2009, with the best economy ever, the UPA gained “only” 54 seats, and the NDA lost “only” 26 seats. So, with the worst economy ever, one might have expected the NDA and UPA to go back to approximately their 2004 levels, that is, around 200 for both the UPA and NDA. Indeed, according to the CNN-IBN tracker poll, both alliances were in a near neck-to-neck battle as late as August 2013.

Myth 3: Anti-incumbency, voter fatigue after 10 years of UPA rule resulted in the Modi win. When all else fails, indulge in an anti-incumbency explanation. Too many counter examples exist. Remember 2009, when the incumbent UPA got elected. Or Madhya Pradesh 2003, when Digvijaya Singh, and the Congress, got unceremoniously voted out after 10 years in power. Or Modi’s Gujarat, or Chouhan’s MP, returned for a third and second consecutive term, respectively.

Myth 4: The weak leadership of Rahul Gandhi affected the Congress’s performance. Imagine that any individual but Modi was the leader of the BJP — say, L.K. Advani, Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj or Shivraj Chouhan. No one was betting that any of these individuals would offer a large difference with respect to the UPA leadership. The common refrain of many, including myself, has been that there isn’t a naya paisa’s worth of difference between the UPA and NDA. And there hasn’t been — till Modi came along.

So what explains the Modi win? The UPA campaign offered two all important “reasons” to vote for the UPA. Vote for us because we do so much for you, and don’t vote for Modi because he is evil.

Look what the Congress guaranteed to the Indian citizen, especially the poor. A jobs guarantee programme, so that the poor had jobs. A food security bill, so that two-thirds of the population was guaranteed food at throwaway prices. A land acquisition bill, so that the poor got a fair price. A right to information act, and a Lokpal bill, so that corrupt government officials could be caught red-handed. And yet, the Congress managed to win only 44 out of 543 seats, about half of what the BJP got in only its second election in 1989.
 
Modi is evil, we are not: An important fact about the recent election, and possibly related to the overwhelming beyond-expectations majority that Narendra Modi obtained, is that, to the best of my knowledge, no individual in Indian or world history has been unjustly vilified as much as Modi has been. This vilification continues even to this day, especially by the “sickular” parties and their left-intellectual storm troopers. I am choosing my words wisely, because the condemnation campaign has almost universally invoked images of the Nazi and Fascist European regimes of the 1930s.

What is most informative, and disturbing, about these storm troopers (among whom are many domestic and foreign journalists), is that they invariably belong to the Congress party and/or have been its sympathisers until recently. Let me make my position clear, possibly for the umpteenth time. Narendra Modi was chief minister at the time the Gujarat riots happened just as Rajiv Gandhi was the prime minister of India at the time the Delhi pogrom against Sikhs occurred. Both have to assume responsibility for what happened under their watch. All I am asking is whether the Congress storm-troopers, or Modi-baiters, have ever condemned Rajiv Gandhi and/ or the Congress party with the same language and allusions to Hitler as they have done, and continue to do, about Modi?

Morality and philosophy aside, an election is not an absolute choice but rather a choice between individuals. So, especially in the case of the Congress versus Modi, the issue of 2002 versus 1984 is irrelevant, that is, individuals who are upset by Modi should be equally (if not more) upset by the Congress.

Strategic Voting by Muslims — backfired: In the Muslim and Yadav states of UP and Bihar, the turnout was higher by about 12 percentage points. Did the UPA whizkids consider that their strategy of concentrated Muslim and Yadav voting against Modi might engineer a counter-strategy — for every one Muslim and Yadav (MY) that indulged in strategic voting, there were probably four non-MY voters ensuring that the negative strategy (sic) did not succeed.

Essentially, the Indian polity has called the Congress’s bluff, seen it for the calculating set of politicians they have been. Their governance demanded not only change, but wholesale rejection. The Indian polity has elected a leader. The “historical low” losers contend that all Modi has done is package a dream, a dream that will not last, a dream that will soon become a nightmare. The losers, and Congress apologists, believe that Modi will soon crash to earth. I have no doubt that the expectations of the Modi government are sky high, and that it is impossible for the transformed reality to be an equal match to the expectations. Equally, I have no doubt that the Modi-led government will make a strong effort to match a large fraction of these expectations — and that they will largely succeed.

The writer is chairman of Oxus Investments, an emerging market advisory firm, and a senior advisor to Zyfin, a leading financial information company.

Source: The Indian Express

Why It’s So Hard for Men to See Misogyny

Men were surprised by #YesAllWomen because men don’t see what women experience.

By Amanda Hess

When Santa Barbara police arrived at Elliot Rodger’s apartment last month—after Rodger’s mother alerted authorities to her son’s YouTube videos, where he expressed his resentment of women who don’t have sex with him, aired his jealousy of the men they do choose, and stated his intentions to remedy this “injustice” through a display of his own “magnificence and power”—they left with the impression that he was a “perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human.” Then Rodger killed six people and himself on Friday night, leaving a manifesto that spelled out his virulent hatred for women in more explicit terms, and Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown deemed him a “madman.”
Amanda Hess Amanda Hess

Amanda Hess is a Slate staff writer. Email her at amanda.hess@slate.com, or follow her on Twitter.

Another rude awakening played out on social media this weekend as news of Rodger’s attack spread around the world. When women took to Twitter to share their own everyday experiences with men who had reduced them to sexual conquests and threatened them with violence for failing to comply—filing their anecdotes under the hashtag #YesAllWomen—some men joined in to express surprise at these revelations, which amassed more quickly than observers could digest. How can some men manage to appear polite, kind, even “wonderful” in public while perpetuating sexism under the radar of other men’s notice? And how could this dynamic be so obvious to so many women, yet completely foreign to the men in their lives? Some #YesAllWomen contributors suggested that men simply aren’t paying attention to misogyny. Others claimed that they deliberately ignore it. There could also be a performative aspect to this public outpouring of male shock—a man who expresses his own lack of awareness of sexism implicitly absolves himself of his own contributions to it.

But there are other, more insidious hurdles that prevent male bystanders from helping to fight violence against women. Among men, misogyny hides in plain sight, and not just because most men are oblivious to the problem or callous toward its impact. Men who objectify and threaten women often strategically obscure their actions from other men, taking care to harass women when other men aren’t around.

Placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor.

The night after the murders, I was at a backyard party in New York, talking with a female friend, when a drunk man stepped right between us. “I was thinking the exact same thing,” he said. As we had been discussing pay discrepancies between male and female journalists, we informed him that this was unlikely. But we politely endured him as he dominated our conversation, insisted on hugging me, and talked too long about his obsession with my friend’s hair. I escaped inside, and my friend followed a few minutes later. The guy had asked for her phone number, and she had declined, informing him that she was married and, by the way, her husband was at the party. “Why did I say that? I wouldn’t have been interested in him even if I weren’t married,” she told me. “Being married was, like, the sixth most pressing reason you weren’t into him,” I said. We agreed that she had said this because aggressive men are more likely to defer to another man’s domain than to accept a woman’s autonomous rejection of him.

A week before the murders, I experienced a similar dynamic when I went for a jog in Palm Springs, California. It was early on a weekend morning, and the streets that had been full of pedestrians the night before were now quiet. When I paused outside a convenience store to stretch, a man sitting at a bus stop across the street from me began yelling obscene comments about my body. When my boyfriend came out of the convenience store, he shut up.

These are forms of male aggression that only women see. But even when men are afforded a front seat to harassment, they don’t always have the correct vantage point for recognizing the subtlety of its operation. Four years before the murders, I was sitting in a bar in Washington, D.C. with a male friend. Another young woman was alone at the bar when an older man scooted next to her. He was aggressive, wasted, and sitting too close, but she smiled curtly at his ramblings and laughed softly at his jokes as she patiently downed her drink. “Why is she humoring him?” my friend asked me. “You would never do that.” I was too embarrassed to say: “Because he looks scary” and “I do it all the time.”

Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize. Two weeks before the murders, Louis C.K.—who has always recognized pervasive male violence against women in his stand-up—spelled out how this works in an episode of Louie, where he recalls watching a man and a woman walking together on a date. “He goes to kiss her, and she does an amazing thing that women somehow learn how to do—she hugged him very warmly. Men think this is affection, but what this is is a boxing maneuver.” Women “are better at rejecting us than we are,” C.K. said. “They have the skills to reject men in the way that we can then not kill them.”

When Elliot Rodger finally snapped, he drove to a Santa Barbara sorority house as part of his plan to give the “female gender one last chance to provide me with the pleasures I deserved from them,” and killed two women who were walking outside. Before he hit the sorority house, he stabbed three men in his apartment; after he left the sorority, he killed another man who was entering a nearby convenience store. In the course of the attack, he wounded 13 more people. Rodger hated all the women who did not provide him sex, but he also resented the men he felt had been standing in the way of his conquests, though they were never made aware of this belief. (Many men die of domestic-violence-related murders this way, killed by ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands, and family members of the women in their lives.) Some men are using this death count to claim that Rodger’s killings were not motivated by misogyny, but that is a simplistic account of how misogyny operates in a society that privately abides the hatred of women unless it’s expressed in its most obvious forms.

Source: Slate

Amanda Hess is a Slate staff writer. Email her at amanda.hess@slate.com, or follow her on Twitter.

Door by Door, India Strives to Know More About Death

 By MALAVIKA VYAWAHAREMAY 22, 2014















The New York TimesMAGADI, India — M. R. Gundappa, 60, died the way most Indians do: with no doctor present, no monitors beeping by his side and no written record. The only person present was his wife, Sushilamma, 48, who spent the day of his death trying to get him admitted to a government hospital where he could be treated for abdominal pain.

On a recent afternoon, Sushilamma spent an hour trying to retrieve her memories of the fateful day in 2013 for an official from the Office of the Registrar General of India, who sifted through her story for clues to what had caused her husband’s death.

Nearly 70 percent of deaths in India, five million in all each year, take place in the absence of medical supervision, according to the office, which is responsible for registering births and deaths.

To fill this gap, a new survey, the Million Death Study, is trying to turn the clock back on a million premature deaths that took place between 2001 and 2014, sifting through evidence provided by families and caregivers. By assigning causes to these deaths, based on the accounts of witnesses, the study hopes to identify the major causes of premature death in India.

“The idea is to show, with evidence, that many of these deaths are preventable,” said Prabhat Jha, a professor at the University of Toronto, who conceived of the project.

While full results are not expected for four to five years, some preliminary findings have been released, and those have stirred controversy. The survey’s estimate of total malaria deaths in India is more than 10 times the World Health Organization’s. Its figure for deaths related to H.I.V. infections is significantly lower than what the United Nations predicted, and the Indian government, which has spent heavily to control the spread of the disease, may take that into account as it settles on future medical priorities.

Approaching strangers to ask about the deaths of their loved ones is no simple endeavor in India, a fact that was brought home to Ashok Kumar, a registrar official, when he knocked on a door in the town of Magadi, in the southern state of Karnataka, on a recent day.

Seeing his credentials, Sushilamma opened the door, allowing him to settle into the cramped living room, under the watch of a pantheon of family gods perched on the pale walls. A garlanded photograph of her husband was a recent addition, and her eyes were drawn to the photograph as she discussed the details of his death with the visitor.

Then the neighbors came, to watch, to listen, to offer sympathy and sometimes to fill in some gaps when her account faltered.

As the interview stretched and Mr. Kumar went into the details of the death, her answers became vague as his questions became more pointed.

“Did he have a pain in his heart?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” she replied.

“Are you sure? Was there any pain in this region?” he asked, gesturing to his chest.

No. No, she insisted.

“Try and remember,” he said.

“I really don’t remember,” she said in an apologetic tone, shaking her head, a weariness creeping in.

Mr. Kumar’s questioning was part of an unusual form of medical investigation, a verbal autopsy, that traces its roots to 17th-century London, a city haunted by epidemics, where “death searchers” regularly showed up at homes after someone died.

In India, two pioneering studies were conducted in the 1950s and ’60s, but were more limited in scope.

“We are literally chasing down death in millions of homes over a decade now,” said Suresh Rathi, a senior researcher who manages the project. “Where would we find the doctors for that?”

Twice a year, senior registrar officials like Mr. Kumar visit households across India that reported deaths in the previous six months, carrying verbal autopsy forms. Scans of the completed forms are shared with the Bangalore office of the Center for Global Health Research, an international nonprofit group that is collaborating with the registrar’s office on the project.

Each verbal autopsy form is sent to two doctors from a pool of about 300, who independently assign a probable cause of death. If their verdicts match, the cause of death is made final. Otherwise, a senior doctor is asked to arbitrate and make a decision.

This part is completed fairly quickly, Professor Jha said. The real challenge is getting the verbal autopsies.

In urban areas, Mr. Kumar said, “we may be welcomed into homes, but are not always welcome to discuss details of a loved one’s death.”

Village residents are more willing to share their stories, according to Professor Jha. “It is almost cathartic,” he said. “For many it is a chance to vent about the treatment or the lack of it at government and even private hospitals.”

Language poses an additional obstacle: Autopsy narratives are recorded in regional languages, and though the project employs doctors fluent in 18 of India’s 20 officially recognized languages, 2,000 verbal autopsies have had to be thrown out because they were incomprehensible.

Some 42,000 autopsies have been gathered and analyzed, each on a paper form. Because of the study’s reliance on paper, it could take anywhere from four to five years before the final results are available. That reservoir of information will be valuable to public health specialists, but will probably bring little to the families who were its subjects. The results will never be shared with them, and the deaths will remain unexplained.

Still, the researchers persist. On a hot afternoon in the village of Uragahalli, Mr. Kumar was trying to obtain an account of the death of a girl who had survived barely an hour after her birth.

The girl’s mother had lost consciousness after the delivery, and remembered very little. So Mr. Kumar relied on the baby’s aging grandparents, who struggled to put what happened into words.

“What’s the use talking about this now?” the grandmother asked in the local Kannada language, her irritation clear.

The interview with Sushilamma, the widow, was equally exhausting. The end of the interview had the quality of a bandage being slowly unwrapped from an open wound: She described many hours of pleading with doctors to tell her what was wrong with her husband.

“The worst part is I still don’t know what happened,” she said, her voice tinged with something more than grief.

Source: The New York Times

Assets of 165 re-elected Lok Sabha MPs shoot up by 137 per cent

PTI | May 22, 2014, 18.05 pm IST

Bharatiya Janata Party leader Shatrughan Sinha and
Telugu Desam chief Chandrababu Naidu (Photo: PTI/DC)

New Delhi: The assets of 165 MPs re-elected to the 16th Lok Sabha have on an average risen by a whopping 137 per cent between 2009 and 2014, and the highest increase in assets among them was that of BJP's Shatrughan Sinha.

According to a report of Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), the assets of the actor-turned politician who was re-elected from Patna Sahib seat in Bihar, grew by a whopping 778 per cent in the span of five years.

Sinha's assets jumped from Rs 15 crore in 2009 to Rs 131.74 crore in 2014, which is an increase of Rs 116.73 crore.

Second on the list is BJD MP from Puri constituency of Odisha, Pinaki Mishra whose assets increased from Rs 29.69 crores in 2009 to Rs 137.09 crores in 2014.

Former Union minister and NCP leader Sharad Pawar's daughter Supriya Sule, who won from Baramati constituency in Maharashtra, is on the third position with her assets increasing from Rs 51.53 crores in 2009 to Rs 113.90 crores in 2014, a rise of Rs 62.37 crore.

The civil society group, ADR have analysed the affidavits of 165 out of 168 re-elected MPs.

The rest of the MPs were not analysed due to unclear or incomplete affidavits uploaded on the ECI website, ADR said.

"The average asset growth for these 165 re-elected MPs, between the Lok Sabha Elections of 2009 and 2014 is Rs 7.40 crores which is an increase of Rs 137 per cent," the ADR report said.

The report reveals that the average assets of these 165 re-elected MPs fielded by various parties in 2009 was Rs 5.38 crore. Their average assets in 2014 have grown to Rs 12.78

crore which is a rise of Rs 7.40 crores.

When it comes to parties, the highest rise in assets was registered by the re-elected MPs of Shiromani Akali Dal whose assets rose from Rs 31.75 crore to Rs 58.88 crore.

This was followed by Jaganmohan Reddy's YSR Congress whose candidates' assets grew from 18.53 crore to 29.06 crore. Third on the list is Biju Janta Dal (BJD).

Assets of the party MPs grew from Rs 7.09 crore to Rs 24.15 crore.

N. Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party (TDP) is fourth on the list with its MPs' assets growing from Rs 4.44 crore to Rs 17.03 crore. They were followed on the fifth position by MPs of Samajwadi Party. Assets of SP MPs rose from Rs 3.94 crore to Rs 15.5 crore.

The assets of SP MP Dimple Yadav grew by 210 per cent while her father-in-law and SP supreme Mulayam Singh Yadav's properties grew by 613 per cent.

The two major national parties, BJP and Congress were on number sixth and seventh on the list.

While assets of BJP's MP s grew from Rs 5.11 crore to Rs 12.6 crore, properties of Congress MPs rose from Rs 5.66 crore to Rs 11.57 crore.

A total of 78 MPs were re-elected from the BJP whose assets grew by around Rs 7 crore on an average, a rise of 146 per cent. There average assets in 2009 were around Rs five crore which grew to more than Rs 12 crore in 2014.

Twenty nine Congress MPS managed to stage a comeback to the Parliament. Their average assets rose by around Rs 5.90 crore during the last five years. The average assets of these MPs in 2009 were around Rs 5.55 crore which swelled to Rs 11.57 crore in 2014.

Among the other prominent leaders whose assets grew exponentially are Gopinath Munde, Varun Gandhi, Maneka Gandhi, Dimple Yadav, Jytiraditya Scindia and Mulayam Singh Yadav.

Gopinath Munde, who won on a BJP ticket from Beed, Maharashtra saw his assets rising from Rs 6 crore in 2009 to Rs 38 crore in 2014, a hike of 511 per cent.

Assets of BJP MP Varun Gandhi, who won from Sultanpur, grew by Rs 30 crore, a whopping 625 per cent. He had declared assets worth Rs 4 crore in 2009 while in 2014 he declared that he has properties worth Rs 35 crore.

His mother and BJP MP from Pilibhit, Maneka Gandhi, saw her assets increase by 105 per cent.

Assets of Congress MP from Guna Jyotiraditya Scindia grew by 122 per cent during the last five years and he has bene ranked eighteenth on the list. His assets in 2009 were Rs 14 crore which grew to Rs 33 crore in 2014, a rise of Rs 18 crore.

Source: Deccan Chronicle

Top Official Decries 'Colonial Mindset' in Governance

By Express News Service - HYDERABAD    |    Published: 15th May 2014 09:55 AM
Last Updated: 15th May 2014 09:58 AM

Despite the efforts of the government to remove bottlenecks by adapting new technologies, governance in the country still smacks of a ‘colonial mindset’ where the government is mistrustful of its citizens, Sanjay Kothari, secretary, Union Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, has said.

Delivering the fourth foundation day lecture of the Centre for Innovations in Public Systems (CIPS), at the Administrative Staff College of India here on Wednesday, he said, “This trust deficit has resulted in major bureaucratic hurdles like numerous affidavits and need for a gazetted officer’s signature that a citizen has to obtain before receiving a certificate from the concerned official.”

Expressing concern over red tape in governance, he said, “Although the fact remains that we are an independent nation for more than 60 years, even today we still use archaic tools of governance. In a nutshell, we are a modern government still using the circulars of 1950s-style, or rather 1850s-style. The time has come to bring a sea change and simplify the governance and keep it citizen-centric.”

Further, he called for re-engineering in issuing caste, income and residential certificates. “One does not understand the insistence of the government to know the income of a person before giving him an income certificate because for the large section of poor who remain in unorganised sector, it is difficult to assess their own income. Even the officials know this, but continue to do it. Similarly, efforts should be made to provide caste and domicile certificates at school level through the headmaster,” he explained.

Listing out initiatives the Centre is likely to take up, he lamented Class-I officers of All India Services remaining aloof to the issues on the ground.

Source: The New Indian Express

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Blogger's opinion:

It is about time Indian Administration Service chastises Government to discontinue practice of submitting income, caste and domicile certificates issued by Karnam, Munsubdar and Tehsildar. In Villages get a certificate from Karnam, it is then countersigned by Munsubdar. Take it to Tehsil's office, now called Mandal, and get Tehsildar's signature. Then only it is official for admission to institutions of higher education, fee concessions (FC, BC, Other, SC, ST), applying welfare scholarships etc.,

Income, caste and domicile information exists already in School Leaving Certificates. Why do we need a certificate from local officials? This is duplication of process and it is about time for Government to repeal.
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The New Age Nuptial Solution

By Suhas Yellapantula - HYDERABAD    |    Published: 15th May 2014 09:56 AM
Last Updated: 15th May 2014 09:57 AM

‘I’m an artist and I’m not unemployed’, ‘I’m a man and I love to cook’, ‘We are from South India and we are not Madrasis’ – these are only a few examples from #Breaking Stereotypes, a social campaign by a matrimonial website that has taken the web world viral.

Catchy in their concept and to the point, the campaign had many youngsters share a knowing smile before they went ahead and shared the post. As urban India looks to break away from the shackles of traditional notions of society, what has made the campaign pick up so fast is the freedom of expression it affords youngsters.

“When we started this website, we wanted to be different from the traditional matrimonial websites and we wanted to target people from the age-group of 22 to 27. As we started to speak to more people, we realised that youngsters today are not looking for caste or sub-caste or religion for marrying a person, they just want to connect with the other person. That’s when we decided to start #Breaking Stereotypes,” shares Hitesh Dhingra, co-founder of Trulymadly.com that launched the campaign.

Explaining the process, Hitesh, one of three co-founders at the company, says “We reached out to around 50 people through our friends and family. These are real people with real stories. So we decided to click their pictures and post them on Facebook.”

The campaign, which started on April 9, has received over 90,000 shares in a little over a month. Hitesh admits that they had never imagined it to be such an overwhelming success. “We never expected it to go this viral! It clearly suggests that there is a complete shift in the mindset of youngsters. Not just children, but even parents are slowly opening up to the idea and prefer their child to choose their own partners,” added the 34-year-old.

When 42-year-old Rajesh Dudeja from New Delhi was one of the first people to share the the campaign on Facebook, little did he know that it would become a trending topic on social media.

Within four days, the album had received 3,750 shares and Dudeja himself received 128 friend requests from people who thought he was the fountainhead behind the idea and wanted to be a part of the album.

“I happened to come across this offbeat matrimony site which had posted these in their blog. I really liked their concept, and thought it would be a great share on Facebook as there are many liberal youth out there who are trying to break free from the chains of tradition, dogma and stereotyping,” said Dudeja.

One of the reasons for the campaign going viral was the fact that it was easy to relate to as many youngsters could see the story of their lives through these pictures. “One picture shows a man holding a placard which reads ‘I studied electrical engineering and I design clothes’. It’s the story of my life really – when I decided to design clothes after completing my engineering, people laughed at me. Even my parents were not very supportive but I went ahead and followed my passion. I’m  sure there are a lot of people out there with similar stories and I’m glad this campaign is creating awareness,” expresses city-lad Uday Bhaskar.

Messages from the campaign

I have a degree in science and I’m a make-up artist

I am a doctor and I have good handwriting

I run an NGO but I still love my H&M blazer My best friend is a guy and I’m not sleeping with him

I am a Punjabi and I don’t like Yo Yo Honey Singh

Source: The New Indian Express

Chennai is a Telugu word, nothing Tamil about it: Historian

M T Saju,TNN | May 4, 2014, 05.08 PM IST

CHENNAI: What does Chennai mean? The question troubled Paris-based historian J B P More quite a lot. After painstaking research, he found the answer.

In his recently released book, titled 'Origin and Foundation of Madras', More says, "Chinapatnam and Chennapatnam were the other names for Madras used by Tamil and Telugu settlers in the area. Chennapatnam was 'Tamilised' as Chennai but the word didn't mean anything in Tamil. It's undoubtedly a Telugu word."

Madraspatnam was derived from Medu Rasa Patnam, said More, who was in Chennai on Saturday to release his book. "When Nayak Venkatappa (a local chieftain) issued a grant (a portion of the area where subsequently Fort St George came up) in favour of the English in 1639, only Madraspatnam was mentioned in it. But during the 1640s, two new names for Madraspatnam or for the area inhabited by Tamils and Telugus around Fort St George seems to have come into existence. They were Chinapatnam and Chennapatnam," he said.

Chinapatnam would have been the first name that would have come into existence in the Tamil-Telugu quarters to signify the Black Town of Madraspatnam. "'Chenna' in Telugu means fair and is not to be confused with the Tamil 'Chinna', which means small. In Tamil, 'Chenna' is meaningless," said More.

He said in the Tamil Lexicon, the Tamil word 'Cennai' has been mentioned which would signify 'a drum announcing religious procession of an idol'. More said there was no reference in documents and literature of the period to 'Chennai' as a drum.

"In the document of Beri Timanna, we find 'Chenna' written as 'Chennai'. Thus Chenna Kesava Perumal became Chennai Kesava Perumal and Chennapatnam became Chennai Pattanam.

This seems to be purely the work of a translator of the 19th century who had preferred to Tamilise the Telugu word 'Chenna' into 'Chennai' so it sounded more Tamil," said More. "The word 'Chennai' seems to have been born to designate Madras town. Its origin is Telugu. There is nothing Tamil in it," he added.

Source: Times of India

       

శ్రీ కౌముది మే 2014

Homemade' at a Store

By Rajitha S - HYDERABAD

Published: 14th April 2014 09:25 AM

Last Updated: 14th April 2014 11:26 AM

In summer, ladies of the house preparing mango pieces for making Avakaya (pickle) was a common household tradition that was passed down. However, today, hardly anyone from the latest generation even know what goes into making pickle, let alone do it at home.

With many shops specialising in ‘homemade’ pickles and other traditional foods like vadiyams and other pindi vantellu (flour-based deep-fried snacks), summer has lost the charm and aroma that usually envelops the house.

Says Sudhani Nalini, a home-maker, “I have never made these items in my life. It has been 25 years since my mother stopped making them. Owing to the space constraint in an apartment complex and other factors that need to be catered like want of sunlight, it becomes impractical.”

While making pickle requires at three days in the sun, with no moisture around, boiled rice flour needs to be laid out in the sun to dry to make vadiyams. With terraces becoming a luxury, and balconies shrinking by the day, hardly any home prefers to go through the extra care, especially when you can just pick these off the rack at a store.

But there are some who still cherish the summer season for the excitement of these pindi vantellu.

Sudhani Ahalya, a 75 year-old, has been making these summer delicacies for 30 years now and recalls how she learnt them from her grand mother.

“My grand mother would make all the ingredients from scratch, starting from selecting chillis that would be ground for the chilli powder,” she shared.

Mustard powder, the basic ingredient for mango pickle, was also ground at home back then. However, over the years, plenty of lifestyle changes have diluted the tradition of making these summer delicacies.

Today, Ahalya picks up the basic ingredients from stores but insists on still making the pickle at home. “Everything is available, and the grounding process needs special grinding stones. There is no place where I can dry these ingredients before hand. That is why I opt for readymade ingredients,” she explains.

Other preparations were also made at home, much to the excitement of the rest of the family.

“Vadiyalu were made from Bombay rava, rice flour, pumpkin, rice, sago and potato. The most sought after variety then was the ones that are made out of milk from wheat. We don’t make them anymore as it needs to be soaked for three days and then dried,” she laments, adding that she makes some for her children as well who haven’t picked up the cooking technique.

“They probably will buy the readymade pickles and vadiyams that are available in the market since all of them are working professionals,” she says.

In the market, the options have exploded from just the typical recipes to everything under the sun – bittergourd, mixed vegetable, amla, chicken, prawns, fish and what not! These are also a favourite among those who currently live abroad. Companies like Swagruha Foods, Joshi Pickles and Vellanki foods all owe their market to this community.

G Subhadra, branch in-charge of Vellanki foods in Madura Nagar, Ameerpet tells us that there are 180 orders on an average every month that are couriered to UK, USA and Canada from a single branch. They have four branches in total in the city. “We have tied up with DHL courier service. People from these countries can order online and we deliver within two to three days,” she informs.

Source: The New Indian Express

It's Heartbleed Everywhere

By Kota Saumya - HYDERABAD

Published: 14th April 2014 09:25 AM

Last Updated: 14th April 2014 09:25 AM

Most of us take the necessary precaution when it comes to keeping our personal computers safe with the usual anti-virus softwares available. And keeping up-to-date with the latest troublemakers is part of that. However, for two years, the Heartbleed bug has gone undetected and yet has affected millions of websites, wreaking havoc.

Actually a loophole in the programme OpenSSL software version 1.1, the open-source encryption standard used by the most of the websites, hackers across the world have been using this vulnerability to access personal information uploaded by users on to these sites.

Google’s security researcher and security firm Codenomicon discovered the culprit last week, by which time most popular websites that use this encryption software like Facebook, Instagram and Dropbox and Gmail were affected, including certain bank transactions.

Now in damage control mode, code experts are working overnight to reign in the bug. While word is some of these sites have managed to mitigate the problem, there isn’t any official confirmation yet.

What makes this such a deadly vulnerability is the rather late wake up call.

Explaining the issue, Kiran Chandra, general secretary, Free Software Movement of India, says, “Websites use this to transmit data which users want to keep secure. The encryption comes into play by making the information appear unreadable for anyone except the intended person. It helps provide a secure connection when one is chatting on Gmail or using any other application, working from point to point.”

So when one computer wants to check if there’s still a computer at the end of its secure connection it will send out what’s known as a ‘heartbeat,’ a small packet of data that asks for a response. The twist in the story comes here: researchers at Google and Codenomicon found that one can send a well-disguised packet of data which looks like this heartbeat to trick a computer at the other end into divulging data stored in its memory.

“Due to this loophole, hackers can access information like usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, etc, that are stored on servers. Hackers have been able to access encryption keys of websites which turn the unreadable information into valuable information,” adds Kiran. With encryption keys at their disposal, hackers can access the information from the site’s server and read it without establishing a secure connection. Unless websites change their encryption codes, users and the future traffic will continue to remain affected, he opines.

Most popular sites are powered by the Open SSL inlcuding Twitter, Tumblr, Yahoo, GoDaddy and Minecraft to name a few more. While sites try and secure their users information in the mean time, you can check if you are still vulnerable by taking the Heartbleed test on to http://filippo.io/Heartbleed.

Source: The New Indian Express

శ్రీ కౌముది ఏప్రిల్ 2014