Day: December 24, 2011

By B.G. Verghese
Speculation has ended with the tabling of the Lok Pal and related Bills. Now it is for Parliament to take over and whatever it adopts with or without amendments,will go forward. Even thereafter, shortcomings in the light of the Lok Pal’s actual working can be made good through subsequent amendments. So nothing is written in stone. The pontifications and histrionics we have had these past weeks have provided more entertainment than enlightenment, with the focus on party politics rather than on real substance.

If the Opposition wants its pound of flesh it may block the related Constitution Amendment Bill. But that can come later.

Many arguments made have been based on absolute and total suspicion of government, any government, as a genre, as it has been painted as a necessarily dishonest and self-serving institution. The prime minister, leader of the opposition and chief justice cannot be trusted says the BJP as the first two aspire to office and the third is part of the establishment, and none wishes charges of corruption to be probed too deeply. Why cannot the CBI be administratively under the government’s control if the Comptroller and Auditor General, Central Vigilance Commission, Chief Election Commission, Chief Information Commissioner, National HRC and the UPSC are appointed by it and function independently? The absurdity is palpable. These institutions have by and large served the country well and have refused to be suborned. What is important is the autonomy granted to and exercised by these institutions, their transparency and public support for them.

The BJP has again argued that the direction for constituting Lok Ayuktas in the States contained in the Lok Pal Bill undermines federalism. This is specious. The Centre has sufficient powers under the Concurrent List to do so while leaving detailed superintendence and control over this tier to the States. This has been true of the Right to Information Act and NREGA. The contrary argument by Team Anna that all functions, powers and jurisdictions be completely centralised under a gargantuan Lol Pal would be authoritarian and a danger to democracy and liable to crumble under its own enormous bureaucratic weight.

Hence it makes sense to place Category C and D government staff, all of them below the decision-making level, under the Vigilance Commissioner and to hive off the Citizen’s Charter as a separate body to deal with the grievances of the common man. Since manufacturing grievances by denial, short-charging and delay is a means of generating corruption, the Grievance Commissioner is in some ways likely to play a  more important role in ensuring good governance and public satisfaction than even the Lok Pal.

One can nit-pick at many aspects of the Lok Pal Bill but it is overall a good measure and can reflect a wider consensus and perhaps be improved through amendments debated and adopted by Parliament. The duration of the session has been extended for three days post-Christmas and can and should be further extended into the New Year if necessary. The charge of “undue haste” goes ill with the counter-charge of “waiting for 44 years from 1967”. Few pieces of legislation have been debated so intensively and so long, with resort to unusual consultative processes, as in the case of the Lok Pal Bill. Democracy cannot mean endless debate in the streets and in the media but no legislative decision. 

Anna and his Team remain obstreperous but have become increasingly irrelevant demanding that nothing but their own view shall prevail. They did capture a mood of public anger but became vituperative and now seem to have lost the plot, getting back to blackmail. Anna will fast, Anna will call for jail bharo and Anna will campaign against the Congress and all other parties that do not support a truly “strong and effective” Lok Pal, whatever that means. Finally, Anna is prepared to die, he repeats time and again. This is low farce. Attempted suicide is a criminal offence and Anna must know that the IPC too can be “a strong and effective Act”.  The man should now be ignored, and if he and his followers seek to trigger violent protest – and that is the unspoken threat – then the law must take its course to prevent anarchy.    

The media too must eschew embedded journalism and bogus polls which have magnified the Anna phenomenon beyond its true worth. Similarly, the term “strong” Lok Pal needs to be divorced from a particular form of words to something that works well. The proof will be in the pudding and not in competitive rhetoric.

One issue on which the Government has again succumbed to coalition pressure is that pertaining to four of nine members of the Lok Pal panel being drawn from among SCs, STs, OBCs, women and minorities so that the weak and oppressed are represented. His is a fallacious principle that skirts merit in favour of a populist division of any cake even when forms of affirmative action such as in relation to education and employment opportunities are not at stake. If this principle is accepted then why not mandate quotas in the cabinet, the courts, among ambassadors and PSU heads? Sensible politics in a plural society always emphasises inclusiveness but not at the cost of merit and integrity. So this matter of composition is best left to the prescribed selection committee. The issue is not one of constitutionalism but of common sense. The BJP has again got it wrong.

This leads to the conduct of the BJP in the entire Lok Pal debate. It is trying to play all sides, running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. It held up matters by preventing Parliament from functioning for many days, initially demanding that its business priorities be changed and then barracking the Home Minister for not tendering his resignation on its bidding. For the BJP, any charge made by anybody stands proven without investigation or trial except when the charge lies against its own henchmen when more than due process is demanded with masterly doublespeak. It has repeatedly stated that the onus of letting the House function rests on the Government. This is a strange plea, though it is true that the Congress too has on occasion been guilty of unruly behaviour, poor floor management and mishandling critical issues. 

The UPA alliance partners are likewise all demanding their pound of flesh. Mamata Bannerjee has again forced postponement of introduction of the Pension Bill on the plea that government employees must get a minimum fixed percentage return on their pension earnings. The Food Security Bill, just introduced, underpins the wellbeing of those most prone to hunger. This will cost the exchequer about one lakh crore rupees.  Nevertheless this may be construed worthwhile as malnutrition is a scourge. Reform of PDS delivery is promised but there is some risk in carrying welfarism to the point where is becomes a crutch and diverts funds from stimulating agricultural growth and employment as, by and large, food is even now available but cannot be accessed. The same notions of status quoist “protectionism” led to the FDI multi-brand retail, which would give a fillip to farming and the rural economy, being put on hold.            
www. bgverghese .com

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/12/over-to-parliament/

Christmas gets grumpy when people make far too much effort, then get resentful when it is not appreciated enough. So don’t bother

By Deborah Orr
If there has ever been a Christmas that I’ve made fewer preparations for, then I can’t remember it. I’ve done no frantic spending on expensive gifts, or on expensive cards, or on wrapping paper. I’ve bought no party dresses. I’ve thrown no parties, or even been to many.

I’ve bought no particularly special food, apart from a leg of lamb off the internet, delivered to my mum, in Scotland.

I haven’t even left the house on a specifically Christmassy mission, unless you count taking my son to see The Nutcracker, which was wonderful. I’ve made one small effort — to lower expectations, offering the payback of lower expectations in return. This deal has invariably been accepted with enthusiasm. The result of this seeming indifference is that I’ve never looked forward to Christmas more. For such a long time I’ve seen the holiday as a stressful chore, one that I need another holiday to recover from (ho, ho). Suddenly, I’m thinking of it as … a holiday, pure and simple.

Even last year, when I was having chemotherapy, and feeling like death warmed up, I dragged myself out to the shops, heaving bags around, clutching lists, fretting. There was no need.

People weren’t touched by my efforts. Actually, they were slightly horrified. The reason Christmas Day can be so grumpy is that people make too much effort, then get resentful when it is not appreciated enough, as if it ever could be.

People always joke about how the children got more fun from the box the present came in. But, a number of times I’ve had to actually think up an unrequested “big present” for my children, when they’d have been happy with something pretty modest. What idiocy. A celebration had become a test, a quite unnecessary one only I knew the questions or answers to, or even cared what they were.

During the boom, when people were maxing out their credit cards all year round, and drinking champagne because it was Friday night, it was hard to make Christmas special. On the contrary, hanging out with your family, when there was all that fun to be had out in the non-stop partying, big-wide world, seemed specially inconvenient, self-denying and dull. It was a mad time, really, that 20-year period of illusory plenty, in which a lot of perspective was lost, and a lot of simple pleasures were mocked. But relaxing, playing a few board games and watching a bit of telly after a nice meal, all in the company of the people who mean the most to you – what, really, could be nicer, or more easy to organise? Christmas is a grim time for people who have no family, or have no money. What’s really telling, however, is how little it’s enjoyed by so many people who have both. That’s a shame. Season’s greetings.
Courtesy: The Guardian, London

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/12/for-the-first-time-in-years-im-actually-looking-forward-to-christmas/

By Ian Jack
A couple of weeks ago, a nurse stood beside my hospital bed with a pen and a clipboard. After the questions about allergies and next of kin came the one about religion. None, I said, when she asked which one. Her English was hesitant. “You are … what do you call it … an atheist, then? Shall I write that?” “Please just write ‘none’, or ‘no religion’,” I said.

I don’t know why I jibbed at the word atheist. It may have been Jonathan Miller’s argument that non-belief in God is a narrow and entirely negative self-description that ignores all the other things you might either believe in or not, from homeopathy through necromancy to the Gaia theory. As a definition it belongs to the same dull category as “non-driver” or “ex-smoker”; not driving or no longer smoking, just like not believing in God, is an inadequate guide to the self. There are so many richer and more positive ways, or so you hope, to summarise your behaviour and beliefs and what you might add up to when the counting is done.

But after the nurse left with her questionnaire, I wondered about other motives for denying a truth about myself. Had it to do with social cowardice, or some ridiculous notion of politeness on my part? Three other men shared my bay in the ward, and who knew what beliefs they held? “Atheism” has such a scorning ring to it. I wouldn’t have wanted them to think (though, of course, they wouldn’t have cared less) that, as I lay beside them, I was quietly cackling at their misplaced faith in the other life to come. As it turned out, two of them may have declared at least the name of such a faith to the nurse, because the next day a visitor came into the ward and made a beeline for their beds, and talked briefly and earnestly to each man in a low voice.

The men were originally from Mayo and Dublin (I wrote about Joseph last week), and I can say only that their visitor seemed like a missionary woman, or my idea of one. She had cropped grey hair, a blue cardigan and flat shoes, and she looked like someone who ate sparingly and cared for God very much.

This visit, too, had a consequence. A priest came next. He may have been an Anglican or a Roman Catholic. As there was no religious content in what he said, and as I have a poor knowledge of clerical uniform, it was hard to know which. “How are you feeling? I don’t want to disturb you when you’re needing rest. It’s good that you’re feeling stronger, or so the nurses tell me. I’ll be off now and leave you to your tea.”

That was more or less what he said to each man. They nodded in return, and then the priest backed away.

Of all the people who came near our beds in any official capacity, he was the most deferential. What you might call the carer-patient discourse in a British hospital is marked by a certain robust chumminess. You hear all kinds of surprising things. A young nurse from Essex will put her arm around an elderly Muslim and tell him to “Cough it up, Abdul sweetheart, cough it up.” An equally young woman doctor of good Indian parentage will ask: “Any trouble with the old waterworks?” as though she had stepped out of Carry On Corporal. But the priest seemed to have found no way of introducing his specialism, the awkward subject of God, even as a euphemism.

Perhaps it wasn’t the right time. Perhaps that time would be later. As things stood, what Tony from Mayo and the Londoner in the next bed hungered for wasn’t religion, but tobacco.

They were in their 60s, with bad lungs. Soon after breakfast, Tony would begin to agitate for a porter who could put him in a wheelchair and take him down in the lift to street level, where he could join a dozen others in a row on the pavement outside, smoking and staring at the traffic in the Euston Road. If no porter was available, then Tony would fret till the afternoon, when a visiting relative would wheel him away for an hour or so. The doctors went pretty easy on him. They gave a harder time to the Londoner, who, in between his trips to the pavement, had regular bottles of oxygen.

“You’ve just got to co-operate and stop smoking, otherwise you’re going to be in hospital until you die,” I overheard the consultant telling him, which is as grim and certain a prognosis as you can hear. But the Londoner – let’s call him Ted – seemed not to hear it. According to him, all that being told not to smoke did was to make him smoke more: “It’s the stress you see, doctor.”

“In any case,” as he said later, “I’m not going to stop smoking so that they can make money out of me.” “They” were the hospital and, according to Ted, who may well have been right, the hospital was rewarded for every patient it turned into an ex-smoker. But why didn’t he want the hospital to make a little more money? After all, it was looking after us rather well. “Because it was built on one of them lend-lease deals,” Ted said, meaning one of the largest PFI schemes in England, “and the government was stupid and got taken for a ride.” So Ted’s position, as I understood it, was that he’d continue to curtail his life because to do otherwise would be in some minute way to subsidise a public-private partnership of which he disapproved.

This was probably no more than a labyrinthine excuse for the next John Player Special, but in its notions of foolish self-sacrifice (“He was a martyr to his cigarettes”) Ted’s conversation had a religious dimension that I never heard anywhere else in the hospital. Talking with him reminded me of the arguments I used to hear on the doorstep when anyone called with a Bible in their hand and my father got at them with his ferocious knowledge of scripture that had been acquired in his youth at Baptist Sunday school. My father was of a generation that imbibed God, took him seriously, and then found him wanting. Books by the Rationalist Press and the Thinker’s Library (with Rodin’s Thinker in profile on the spine) stretched across a shelf of his bookcase and promised the joys of atheism, agnosticism and an open mind.

If he were alive now, I think he would be surprised that writers such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens had become famous partly through their attacks on religion. The New Atheism? Surely those intellectual battles had been fought and won long ago – even by the 1960s, my father had found it hard to find a door-knocking Christian who was properly equipped for a decent debate. Resurgent Islam and America’s evangelical Christianity may provide a new focus for atheism – hence Dawkins and Hitchens – but here in Britain, believers move among us with diminished power, more shyly and uncertainly, so that it almost seems rude to say “atheist” in the kindness of a hospital ward. Not that I am not one, you understand – among other things.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/12/i-dont-believe-in-god-so-why-is-it-that-i-dont-want-to-be-labelled-an-atheist/

By Subir Ghosh
The consolidation of the Hollywood Studio System could not have happened without the power exerted by the moguls. There were many, among them being two Jewish immigrants from Russia – Joseph and Nicholas Schenck. In their heydays, the two brothers between them ran two major studios; while Joseph operated from behind the scenes as first as the head of United Artists and later that of Twentieth Century-Fox, Nick ran Leow’s Inc and its world famous subsidiary, Metro-Goldgwyn-Mayer.

The Schenck brothers migrated to New York City in 1892, and entered the entertainment business operating concessions at New York’s Fort George Amusement Park. In 1903, sensing the money-making potential that cinema had, they purchased Palisades Amusement Park. The Schenck brothers subsequently ventured into the film industry as partners with Marcus Loew, who owned a chain of movie theatres across the United States. So involved were they that Joseph even married Norma Talmadge, one of the top young stars with Vitagraph Studios.

Nicholas rose to the preidency of Leow’s, a position that he held for a quarter of a century. Joseph, on the other hand, was more independent.

The two brothers soon parted ways, though only in terms of staying together, and Joseph Schenck moved to the West Coast. Initially, he managed the careers of Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and the three Talmadge sisters. The Schenck-Keaton-Talmadge extended family became one of the most powerful in Hollywood. Within a few years, Schenck was made the first president of the new United Artists. In 1933 he partnered with Darryl F Zanuck to create Twentieth Century Pictures that merged with Fox Film Corporation in 1935.

As chairman of of this big corporation, Schenck became one of the most powerful and influential people in the Hollywood film business. Zanuck was gradually eased out, thanks to the financial support that Joseph Schenck got from brother Nicholas at Leow’s. Joseph remained behind the scenes and expanded Twentieth Century-Fox’s chain of theatres worldwide. During his tenure as chairman, he established equal pay rates for animals used in filming and more representative speaking roles for women and African Americans. He held clout, and used it too.

Later, caught in a payoff scam to broker peace with trade unions, Schenck was convicted of income tax evasion and spent time in prison before being granted a presidential pardon. Following his release, he returned to Twentieth Century Fox where he became infatuated with a young actress named Marilyn Monroe and played a key role in launching her career.

The payoff scandal remain the blot on Schenck’s career. Throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s, Schenck and other studio heads (including Nicholas) paid bribes to Willie Bioff of the projectionists’ union to keep their theatres open. This payoff practice was in due course unearthed by government investigators. Bioff was convicted. One of the studio heads too had to take the fall – Joseph Schenck did. He was convicted of perjury and spent four months in jail, till he was pardoned by US President Harry Truman in 1945.

One of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in 1952 he was given a special Academy Award in recognition of his very significant contribution to the development of the film industry. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6757 Hollywood Blvd.

Schenck retired in 1957 and four years later suffered a stroke from which he never recovered.

Among the moguls, Schenck was one who got a raw deal in terms of remembrance. He and his brother had a substantial role to play in the structure called Hollywood that became rock solid over the years. The payoff scandal in which Schenck had been indicted came at a time when Hollywood was beginning to reel under the impact of the Great Depression.

The 1920s had been a decade of tremendous growth for Hollywood – in terms of production, distribution and exhibition. So robust was the industry even with the advent of the talkie, that Hollywood even called itself “depression-proof” when Wall Street collapsed momentarily in 1929. In fact, the best year of the industry came in 1930. But as the economic downturn started taking its effect on the film industry, Hollywood’s Big Three – Columbia, Universal and United Artists – fared better than others. The first thing to be curtailed was production. But that was not enough. Schenck and others did what they felt necessary to keep themselves afloat.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/12/flashback-the-rise-of-the-moguls/