Day: December 17, 2011

By Pradip Phanjoubam
(article written for the web magazine MxMIndia.com on Sharmila completing 11 years of her marathon fast)
Irom Sharmila is in love with somebody who has been communicating and sharing soul anguish with her in her confinement through letters. A report in The Telegraph, Kolkota declared this loudly. Nothing very strange about this, after all Sharmila is only 39 years of age, and living alone in a prison cell after having vowed to sacrifice eating to demand the repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, AFSPA, for the last almost 11 years. Her fast completed 11 years on November 2 which is the day her family says her fast began, or November 5 when the newspapers first took notice of her fast and put it on record in the next day’s edition.

The terrible privation she has inflicted upon herself and how she has been coping with it is next only to superhuman and it is a wonder that her spirit had not broken down long ago. Ordinary men and women would have probably lost their sanity by now. She is still very much alive today, carrying on the fight she took upon herself to shoulder. It must come with a great deal of bewilderment for many to discover that a superhuman has the heart of a human within. This should not be a matter of discouragement but of elation. After all, what we want to see demonstrated is an ordinary human pushing the boundaries of achievement and not a god doing what are humanly impossible.

We would in this sense give three cheers to Sharmila for the revelation and not downgrade her stature in any way, although we do feel as a public figure she should have been a little wary and discreet about going public with her very private life. It is also unfortunate that she had not indicated this to the local media, making it seem as if the local media has been party to keeping her feelings under wraps. Or is it a case of efforts by interested parties to do just this? This should become known sooner than later.

But no great damage done, the truth is out, so be it, and hopefully for the better towards the actualisation of the noble cause she is fighting for. Her direct supporters, and all the rest of us, must come to terms with the new and more human image of the lonely tough-willed fighter, and carry the movement forward with renewed vigour. After all the movement is what is important, and with or without an iconic figure like Sharmila as standard bearer, it should carry on without any sense of loss or that the wind in the sail has diminished. She has done enough to highlight the issue, more than anyone behind the cause can imagine every doing. We should not be on the lookout for a martyr in her. Instead we should be encouraging her to end her self-inflicted privation and carry on the struggle without having to go through all the torture of unending hunger. The issue is the draconian AFSPA and not Irom Sharmila, however great she is.

We cannot however help wondering if Sharmila is not under psychological stress more than ever in the past few months. It is learnt that meeting her even by her own family members is no longer as easy as it used to be, permission now having to be acquired from the chief secretary of the state himself. All of us who have visited the iron lady in the past know her confinement was not so strictly guarded. For whatever the reason, her privation was being deepened and surely her loneliness too in equal measures, after all she is a human too. Imagine 11 years in a prison cell all alone, not even in contact with other prisoners as she is in a special jail ward in the Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital Porompat so as to enable medical care and nose feeding.

Not only this, going without food is not just about tolerating hunger. In fact, in her case, hunger may not be much of an issue for she is fed through the nose and kept alive. But her self-denial is more about foregoing taste and smell of food, some of the most gratifying of all human senses. Any lesser person would have lost sanity under the circumstance. Is this additional stress having a toll on her? We hope not.

In any case, the campaign against the oppressive AFSPA has been allowed to hinge on Sharmila alone for too long. This was not good for her as she is finding out now, or for the movement, for it deprived individuality of individual campaigners, most of them having simply to rally behind Sharmila, abdicating in the process the need to take individual stances in the manner Eric Fromm described the emergence of dictatorships in “Escape from Freedom”.

The episode is sad in another way though. The paradoxical thing is, to be a public leader entails a great deal of sacrifice of private life. Sharmila as a selfless crusader against the embodiment of an oppressive law automatically came to be lifted on an exalted public pedestal. Sharmila as a shy private woman can lead a happy individual life but will disappear from the public domain. This is the difference between an inspirational leader and a common citizen. The freedom to aspire for either should remain with the individual. Let Sharmila decide her own future without any guilt. She has contributed enough already. Manipur and its resistance against the AFSPA must however continue undeterred even if she decides to retire to a peaceful normal life.

Leaders and Followers
But there are more to what this recent development has proven. The fact that a personal decision of Irom Sharmila is now seen somewhat as a threat to the campaign against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, AFSPA, in Manipur is a demonstration of the strategic and structural flimsiness of any protracted struggle to resort to hero worship. It has to be said that Sharmila’s direct followers are guilty of having done this to a great extent. Even if it is not hero worship, they had built their campaign with her as the major, if not the only prop.

The approach should instead have been to see Sharmila as a star campaigner, but not the heart and soul of the campaign, but unfortunately, for whatever their reason, this route was not given much importance. And so a single report of Sharmila’s love affair with a hitherto unheard of man, and her reported statement that she is disillusioned with her followers, caused so much trepidation and even the fear that the campaign against the AFSPA would lose much of its steam.

We hope this does not happen and the movement is able to find new legs that could do with but did not absolutely need Sharmila as a prop if she at all becomes unavailable. Indeed, the myriad human rights organisations actively involved in the campaign must now take time off to rethink, retrospect and reorient their future strategies. Meanwhile leave Sharmila to be where she wants to be.

But increasingly confounding is also the reason why The Telegraph chose to give so much prominence to Sharmila’s declaration of her very personal affair. This is even more intriguing for in all of the 11 long years she has been staging her protest fast, even on the day she completed the 10 year landmark, she was not seen as deserving headline space by this newspaper. Many other newspapers and television channels even ignored the event. So why this sudden interest in her personal affairs, even though it is clear she was the one who revealed it to the journalist who did the report.

The timing, whether by design or coincidence is also curious for only a few days earlier the Union home minister, P Chidambaram had announced in New Delhi that the government was considering a review of the AFSPA. Moreover a reflected halo form the Anna Hazare blitzkrieg in New Delhi was beginning to hover over Sharmila, signifying perhaps liberal India’s conscience was being awoken, and the issue of AFSPA was beginning to attract national attention. It was in the midst of this that the story of Sharmila’s love affair butted in rudely.

The story was heart warming no doubt despite the hiccups caused by a passage suggesting Sharmila was having very serious differences with her supporters, still the question of its timing as well as the prominence given to it, would undoubtedly make many suspicious that it may have motives other than plain journalistic calibration of news value. Thankfully however, it does now seem the sensational revelation is unlikely to sidetrack the anti-AFSPA campaign.

The development also should bring back the old debate of whether leaders make situations or the situations make leaders. The Sharmila case should again highlight the need to find the right balance between two. Leaders with vision give any movement the right focus and charisma, but it is also equally true that it is the peculiarities of a given situation which throws up a leader. For instance it is unlikely Gandhi could have happened in the 18th Century or Abraham Lincoln in the 20th Century.

This notwithstanding, it would be wrong to also dismiss human agency in shaping event and indeed history. If everything were to be predetermined by circumstance and leaders too were forged only by the impersonal forces of history, as Isaiah Berlin noted in “Crooked Timber of Humanity” a difficult ethical situation would arise whereby it would become impossible to hold anybody accountable for history’s many atrocities. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and all the other mass murderers of history would then appear to be no more than quasi-tragic figures, compelled by historical circumstances to do what they did.

In this context, Pol Pot who killed two million of his countrymen in the span of a decade of his rule, believed whatever he did was for the good of his country even on his deathbed as became evident in what was to be his last interview by Far Eastern Economic Review. It would thus be prudent for the human rights movement in the state to assess the situation arising out of Sharmila’s changed emotional constitution from this light.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/12/irom-sharmila-and-the-loneliness-of-a-long-distance-runner/

By Michael D. Lemonick
They’re huge. They’revoracious. They’re blacker than a panther on a moonless night. They’re black holes, the mind-bending, space-warping cosmic objects with gravity so insanely powerful that even a beam of light that wanders too close will be sucked in, never to emerge. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted they might exist, but the great physicist himself doubted it would really happen.

Einstein was wrong. Over the past decade or two, black holes have been discovered all over the place — small ones peppered around the Milky Way and huge ones, impressively called “supermassive” black holes, lurking the centers of galaxies. The one at the core of Milky Way weighs as much as a couple of million stars, and it could swallow the sun without even noticing, the way you’d swallow a pistachio.

But that’s positively puny compared with the two new black holes, each about 330 million light-years away or so, just announced in the journal Nature. The smaller one, located inside a galaxy known as NGC 3842, is as massive as 9.7 billion suns, and the other, in a galaxy called NGC 4889, is more than twice as large: if you put it on a very large balance, it would take at least 21 billion stars to even things out. Another way to think about things: even the smaller of the two is nearly 30% bigger than the previous record holder, announced last winter, and it would make for a great storyline if astronomers were surprised, amazed, flabbergasted, blown away by the awesome giganticness of these monsters. Truthfully, though, they kind of expected it. “If we infer the existence of quasar black holes of ten billion solar masses at early cosmic times,” Harvard theorist Avi Loeb told Nature’s Ron Cowen for the journal’s online news blog, “we’d better find their counterparts in the present-day Universe.”

Loeb is referring to quasars — beacons of light so intensely bright they can be seen halfway across the universe. When astronomers first spotted them in the late 1950s, nobody knew what they were. Nowadays, everyone pretty much agrees that quasars are supermassive black holes at the cores of young galaxies. The holes themselves aren’t visible, of course, but when they suck in surrounding matter, the stuff heats up to millions of degrees, sending bursts of energy shooting across the cosmos.

Back when the universe was young, there was plenty of gas floating around to feed these monsters. Nowadays, much of it the gas is gone, and so are the quasars — but the black holes that powered them should, as Loeb says, still be around (where would they go, after all?). Now, thanks to some of the world’s most powerful telescopes, astronomers know that indeed they are. While scientists can’t see the black holes directly, they can see stars whipping around at high speeds in the two galaxies’ cores — and by clocking those speeds carefully, the astronomers can calculate how big and how dense the object they’re orbiting must be. In each of these cases, nothing but a supermassive black hole fits the bill.

Such observations are technically difficult, so in one sense the latest black-hole discoveries are extraordinary. Still, astronomers expected to find such things all along, so it might not seem like such a big deal to space experts. Indeed, Martin Rees, the British astronomer royal, dubbed the new results “an incremental step” in the New York Times, with nary a word about shock or awe. If you’ve got a professional interest in how black holes were born and how they evolved, this is more grist for the mill.

For the rest of us — well, they’re just kind of awesome.
(www.time.com)

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/12/the-blackest-black-hole-scientists-find-a-monster-the-size-of-21-billion-suns/

By B.G. Verghese
In India politics is sport. There is too much politics in our politics and too many are in it just for a laugh. Politics and elections are about power. Alas, power is quite often related more to pelf than to purpose.  Such gamesmanship has again been in evidence as the season of scams plays out.
The winter session of Parliament was stalled for the first week as the BJP insisted on the Home Minister’s resignation and would not permit him to speak. His alleged guilt: a post-mortem memo in 2008 that he would have handled spectrum pricing differently over the preceding years. This ex-post facto record of a view that was superseded by a subsequent collective decision does not amount to criminal collusion.  In any event, these very matters are pending before the PAC and being investigated by the CBI. The BJP nonetheless decided to block parliamentary proceedings with the support of other parties with similarly negative agendas demanding precedence in moving adjournment motions of their choice on issues pertaining to food prices, inflation and black money. 

The country lost. Parliament was stymied and both time and money were wasted by those who tirelessly demand debate but prevent it, ask for bold reform but stall pertinent legislation, seek a lowering of prices but come in the way of production, investment and employment, and posture in the name of the poor but are their worst enemies. The BJP, has much to answer for. The Government too has exhibited deplorable floor management in Parliament by failing to concert action through the business advisory committee and informal talks with opposition party leaders and coalition partners. Our politicians appear to have forgotten that time is a precious resource.

The conclusion of Advani’s nth yatra against corruption and black money is merely beating the air as much as Rahul Gandhi’s loud exertions in Uttar Pradesh. The BJP’s own record on corruption in states governed by it is hardly reassuring. That apart, it is surprising that Murli Manohar Joshi, the BJP chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, currently examining  the spectrum matter,  should have written to the CAG’s office earlier, inquiring into the status of its impending report and urging expedition so as not to allow the Government time to fiddle with the record! It is also puzzling why a notional or presumptive spectrum price loss for failure to follow the auction route, ranging from a few thousand crores to Rs 1,76 lakh crores (depending on the assumptions made and dates taken into consideration),  should in public parlance be pegged to the astronomic upper figure while totally disregarding the notional gain or value of social benefit and revenue earning from the huge expansion of telecom services under the adopted policy. 

An earlier CAG report on the so-called Kargil defence purchase “scam” , on which the Supreme  Court is calling for action against “errant” officials, again shows the somewhat mechanical manner in which auditing is done. The fact is that the armed forces had faced delays or denial of fresh acquisitions and procurement for long on account of procedural and strop-go hang-ups, as even today, when Kargil happened. In the circumstances, and not knowing how long the conflict might last and what degree of escalation might occur, the armed forces prudently prepared for the worst and placed orders from available vendors without extensive trials in all battlefield conditions so as to procure emergency supplies of ammunition, missiles, metal coffins and other stores. Nor could quantitative estimates be pegged to a pre-determined duration of hostilities.

The purchases were made and performed as required. The metal coffins allowed the dead to be carried back to their families and homes as far away as the Northeast and Kerala for the last rites with honour, without the indignity of body fluids oozing out of wooden coffins. Some stores arrived only after the war was over. But who would have assumed responsibility or calculated the cost had the stores not been procured and things had gone otherwise?

Parliament must be allowed to function if our democratic process is not to lose falter and fail. “Civil society” can be uncivil, incoherent and arrogantly authoritarian, as we find from the antics of the Anna brigade which, bleating about the bush, has sought to extenuate the Pawar slap with disingenuous ifs and buts. Whatever its past record, the Government is now moving on FDI in pensions and multi-brand retail, food security, land acquisition and R&R, and a clutch of bills to deal with corruption, judicial appointments, whistle blowers (other than the BJP’s cash-for-vote variety) and citizens’ grievances. These must be debated and improvements may surely be suggested. But to claim that little is being done or insist on “my perfect Bill” or nothing is to play spoiler.

The forthcoming UP elections have become a huge distraction from getting on with the job all round. Why should Mayawati’s resolution to split U.P into four states be considered a gimmick or an electoral “masterstroke”. The demand for smaller states in administrative and economic grounds has been made time and again by many. Uttar Pradesh is certainly a monster state with a population of over 200 million and growing. Mayawati urged its splitting up soon after assuming office and has sprung no surprise. The Congress is for a separate Budelkhand and its new-found ally, Ajit Singh, is for Harit Pradesh. The Congress was for Telangana, then against it. Thereafter, it, appointed a commission that made Hyderabad an issue. Then it proclaimed Telangana was coming. Now it says if UP is divided, then how will it cope with similar demands for Telangana, Vidarbha and so forth. 

The answer would lie in appointing a new states reorganisation commission with instructions to report within 12 to 18 months and prioritise its implementation in measured phases along with steps to ensure inter-state coordination in various matters.  The original SRC had recommended the establishment of five inter-state regional development councils. These were set up but have long disappeared. 

Finally, one must inveigh against the tendency for Wahabi groups, largely funded from Saudi Arabia, seeking to “convert” the humanist, sufi-infused Muslims of South Asia to intolerant radical Islamists of the Taliban/jihadi variety.  The latest manifestation is the rabble rousing around the conversion of some Muslim youth in the Kashmir Valley to Christianity. Conversion by force or inducement would be reprehensible. 

But if by choice, there is no reason to seek “action as per Islamic law” and to allege blasphemy. J&K is committed to secularism.   Shariat law does not prevail there and the Valley cannot be allowed to be Talibanised.
www.bgverghese .com

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/12/too-much-politics-in-politics/