Friday, June 22, 2012


I returned to north Bengal last week for a short holiday in the Darjeeling hills. I spent my early childhood in north Bengal and it has always been my remembered fairyland. Nestled deep in the mountains is the delightful Glenburn Tea Estate, modelled as a remnant of the Raj. Glenburn is a tea
planters “burra bungalow”, complete with bearers serving hot cups of ‘cha’ and campfire dinners of gin and tonic, roast chicken and lemon soufflĂ©.
Raj nostalgia works beautifully to attract tourists but when an entire state remains trapped in nostalgia, as Bengal seems to be, then nostalgia becomes a force of deadly inertia. Even if Pranab Mukherjee becomes India’s first Bengali president, Bengal may never again experience a 21st century version of its famous 19th century renaissance or re-birth. Arriving at the dilapidated chaotic Bagdogra airport and driving on bumpy roads through shockingly primitive villages, it seems as if Bengal is in danger of being left far behind the new-age dynamo states like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.

Banerjee’s victory last year created hopes of change. To be fair, her first year has been burdened by massive expectations. Struggling with an enormous debt, a deeply politicised society and a non-existent work culture, the change in government has not yet begun to change society. Bengal’s highly talented people, its greatest resource, continue to flee. The state is now so poor that soon Bengal will be the main supplier of domestic servants to the rest of India, as even Bihar slowly pulls out of the Bimaru trap. There is still no promise of industry returning to Bengal. A terrible possibility looms: are we witnessing the End of Bengal?
Today every great Bengali is either dead or living outside Bengal. Rammohun Roy, Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray have passed into Bengal’s ancestral pantheon. The celebrated Bengalis of our time from Amartya Sen to Amitav Ghosh have migrated from Bengal. The only resident Bengali who is still somewhat of an all-India hero is perhaps Sourav Ganguly. But after Ganguly, who? Why is Ganguly Bengal’s only cricket star, in spite of the passionate celebrations after Kolkata Knight Riders’ Indian Premier League win? Don’t stars beget other stars? After Satyajit Ray, shouldn’t there have been other Satyajit Rays?

As we celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, we must also mourn that Bengal has failed to produce another Tagore. Worshipping past icons as deities is a disservice to those very icons who themselves were original iconoclasts, who broke dramatically with their own pasts and were unafraid to challenge convention.

Talented new film directors like Sujoy Ghosh of Kahaani, doyens of the arts like Aparna Sen, the Shankars and even designer Sabyasachi do Bengal proud, but the majority of young Bengalis are failing to obtain the kind of quality education and access to new ideas, that Bengal was once famous for. Bengal is no longer generating the one resource it has always generated: the visionary, inventive and iconoclast mind.

New ideas and clever technology are buzzwords of the economy and Bengal should have been the first to jump onto the knowledge industry. But alas the power of the Bengali’s mind was considered least important to the progress of Bengal by a Left regime that stamped out free thought. Even more damagingly, the flight of capital and the gradual destruction of an entrepreneurial culture prevented the intellect of the Bengali from being turned into a resource for the global economy. There are no Narayan Murthys and Nandan Nilekanis in Bengal.

The golden era of Bengal, the Bengal renaissance of the 19th century, happened as a creative response to the shock of British rule. The jolt to traditional values from the British created new cultural dynamism within the Bengali. Today, one set of party faithful may be replaced with another, but without a shock or a jolt from the outside, a social and political re-birth cannot happen. That shock therapy lies in reversing the industrial decline of three decades, on a war footing.

Can a Rammohun Roy be born in today’s Bengal? When educational institutions are on the verge of collapse, when there has been an anti English language policy for 25 years, when the ideological core of the Left has evaporated leaving behind the Left’s worst imitators, that is, those who believe only in violence and thuggery, when a society has been almost irreversibly damaged by the legitimisation of violence, how can there be another change agent as impactful as Roy?

The educated have been edged out of public life by clashing rival cadres of the CPI(M) and the Trinamool Congress. Unless the educated Bengali, the bhadralok and bhadramahila, plunge once more into Bengal’s public life, another renaissance of Bengal is impossible.

If dissent leads one to being labelled a ‘Maoist’, how can Bengal generate new ideas? Paranoia breeds isolation, a truism that Banerjee has failed to recognise. Yet Mamatadi’s task is unenviably humongous. Society’s roots have been cut because every social institution has been politicised by the Left. When politicisation is so deep rooted, another party can only bring in its own version of politicisation. The larger social tragedy remains untouched.

This is the tragedy of a society where excellence is considered elitism, where rich and poor are seen as mortal enemies, where agitational confrontational politics has been legitimised as the only method of so called pro-poor politics.

Bengal’s growth rate is slowing, literacy rates lag behind Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Tripura, the school drop-out rate is 78.03%, only Bihar, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Sikkim fare worse. In 2005-06, only 27.9% of Bengal’s households had access to safe drinking water, in Maharashtra, the figure was 78.4% and in Tamil Nadu 84.2%. Regime change has occurred but Bengal is still destroying the one resource it was famous for: the mind.

“Mon-o-mor -megher shangi- ure chole dig diganter pare”, my mind flies with the clouds towards the far horizons, wrote Tagore. When Bengal’s mind is not free to fly, how can the state take off?

Sagarika Ghose is deputy editor, CNN-IBN.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Wife & Girlfriend

If they were computer programs

Last year a friend of mine upgraded from GirlFriend 6.0 to Wife 1.0, and found that it’s a memory hog leaving very little system resources available for other applications. He is now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomena was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application.

Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system initialization, where it can monitor all other system activity. He’s finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before).

During installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired Plug-Ins such as Mother-in-law 55.8 and Brother-in-law Beta release. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.

Some features he’d like to see in the upcoming wife 2.0:

a “Don’t remind me again” button.
a Minimize button.
an install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 be installed with the option to uninstall at any time without the loss of cache and other system resources.
an option to run the network driver in promiscuous mode which would allow the system’s hardware probe feature to be much more useful.

I myself decided to avoid the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 7.0. Even here, however, I found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 7.0 on top of Girlfriend 6.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 6.0 first. Other users say this is a long standing bug that I should have known about. Apparently the previous versions of Girlfriend have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. You think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now. To make matters worse, The uninstall program for Girlfriend 6.0 doesn’t work very well leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system. Another thing — all versions of Girlfriend continually popup little annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0.

Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.

To avoid this bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and never run any file transfer applications such as Laplink 6.0. Also, beware of similar shareware applications that have been known to carry viruses that may affect Wife 1.0. Another solution would be to run Mistress 1.1 via a UseNet provider under an atechinternet-users.gifnonymous name. Here again, beware of the viruses which can accidentally be downloaded from the UseNet.

Tech Support Suggestions

These are very common problem men complain about, but is mostly due to a primary misconception. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 6.0 to Wife 1.0 with the idea that Wife 1.0 is merely a Utilities & Entertainment program. Wife 1.0 is indeed an operating system and designed by its creator to run everything.

It is unlikely you would be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 6.0. Hidden operating files within your system would cause Girlfriend 6.0 to emulate Wife 1.0 so nothing is gained. It is impossible to uninstall, delete, or purge the program files from the system once installed. You cannot go back to Girlfriend 6.0 because Wife 1.0 is not designed to do this.

Some have tried to install Girlfriend 7.0 or Wife 2.0 but end up with more problems than the original system. Look in your manual under “Warnings - Alimony/Child support”. I recommend you keep Wife 1.0 and deal with the situation. I suggest installing background application program C:\YESDEAR to alleviate software augmentation.

Having installed Wife 1.0 myself, I might also suggest you read the entire section regarding General Partnership Faults (GPFs). You must assume all responsibility for faults and problems that might occur, regardless of their cause. The best course of action will be to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE. In any case avoid excessive use of C:\YESDEAR because ultimately you may have to give the C:\APOLOGIZE command before the operating system will return to normal. The system will run smoothly as long as you take the blame for all the GPFs.

Wife 1.0 is a great program, but very high-maintenance. Consider buying additional software to improve the performance of Wife 1.0. I recommend Flowers 3.1 and Diamonds 2K. Do not, under any circumstances, install Secretary with Short Skirt 3.3. This is not a supported application for Wife 1.0 and is likely to cause irreversible damage to the operating system.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012


The Right Time for An Islamic Reformation

By Salman Rushdie



When Sir Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, admitted that "our own children" had perpetrated the July 7 London bombings, it was the first time in my memory that a British Muslim had accepted his community's responsibility for outrages committed by its members. Instead of blaming U.S. foreign policy or "Islamophobia," Sacranie described the bombings as a "profound challenge" for the Muslim community. However, this is the same Sacranie who, in 1989, said that "Death is perhaps too easy" for the author of "The Satanic Verses." Tony Blair's decision to knight him and treat him as the acceptable face of "moderate," "traditional" Islam is either a sign of his government's penchant for religious appeasement or a demonstration of how limited Blair's options really are.
Sacranie is a strong advocate of Blair's much-criticized new religious-hatred bill, which will make it harder to criticize religion, and he actually expects the new law to outlaw references to Islamic terrorism. He said as recently as Jan. 13, "There is no such thing as an Islamic terrorist. This is deeply offensive. Saying Muslims are terrorists would be covered [i.e., banned] by this provision." Two weeks later his organization boycotted a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in London commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago. If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.

The Sacranie case illustrates the weakness of the Blair government's strategy of relying on traditional, essentially orthodox Muslims to help eradicate Islamist radicalism. Traditional Islam is a broad church that certainly includes millions of tolerant, civilized men and women but also encompasses many whose views on women's rights are antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expression, who routinely express anti-Semitic views and who, in the case of the Muslim diaspora, are -- it has to be said -- in many ways at odds with the Christian, Hindu, non-believing or Jewish cultures among which they live.
In Leeds, from which several of the London bombers came, many traditional Muslims lead inward-turned lives of near-segregation from the wider population. From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line and taken up their lethal rucksacks.
The deeper alienations that lead to terrorism may have their roots in these young men's objections to events in Iraq or elsewhere, but the closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims are places in which young men's alienations can easily deepen. What is needed is a move beyond tradition -- nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air.
It would be good to see governments and community leaders inside the Muslim world as well as outside it throwing their weight behind this idea, because creating and sustaining such a reform movement will require above all a new educational impetus whose results may take a generation to be felt, a new scholarship to replace the literalist diktats and narrow dogmatisms that plague present-day Muslim thinking. It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it.
It should be a matter of intense interest to all Muslims that Islam is the only religion whose origins were recorded historically and thus are grounded not in legend but in fact. The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system. Muhammad, as an orphan, personally suffered the difficulties of this transformation, and it is possible to read the Koran as a plea for the old matriarchal values in the new patriarchal world, a conservative plea that became revolutionary because of its appeal to all those whom the new system disenfranchised, the poor, the powerless and, yes, the orphans.
Muhammad was also a successful merchant and heard, on his travels, the Nestorian Christians' desert versions of Bible stories that the Koran mirrors closely (Christ, in the Koran, is born in an oasis, under a palm tree). It ought to be fascinating to Muslims everywhere to see how deeply their beloved book is a product of its place and time, and in how many ways it reflects the Prophet's own experiences.
However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical, scholarly discourse all but impossible. Why would God be influenced by the socioeconomics of seventh-century Arabia, after all? Why would the Messenger's personal circumstances have anything to do with the Message?
The traditionalists' refusal of history plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron certainties and unchanging absolutes. If, however, the Koran were seen as a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of successive new ages. Laws made in the seventh century could finally give way to the needs of the 21st. The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance of the concept that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities.
Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace. This is how to take up the "profound challenge" of the bombers. Will Sir Iqbal Sacranie and his ilk agree that Islam must be modernized? That would make them part of the solution. Otherwise, they're just the "traditional" part of the problem.