A stillborn idea |
- A stillborn idea
- BJP outgrew Kalyan, SP outgrew Amar: Everything is transitional in UP politics
- A Weapon Called Time
- Many masters, many voices!
- Don’t teach English to your children in Class I
- We need private firms in defence
- Mind your language, we’re all Indians
- Dark clouds hover over Indian sport
| Posted: 31 Jan 2010 05:11 AM PST
There is a palpable sense of drift and dither with the government, if you leave aside P Chidambaram's handling of the home ministry. And while the home ministry's administrative elan has gone up significantly, it is far from clear that politics informs and modulates internal security operations as it should. But why do we have this listless lethargy in the first year of the government when it should be going on all cylinders on tackling the most difficult of problems? There is no Left hanging around to provide a 24 Karat alibi for inaction. Apart from the Trinamul Congress, there are no unstable allies either. The president's address to the joint session of Parliament had some decent ideas on what needs to be done. Yet, the government remains strangely passive. What could be the problem?
|
| BJP outgrew Kalyan, SP outgrew Amar: Everything is transitional in UP politics Posted: 31 Jan 2010 04:03 AM PST
Mayawati owes her political existence to upper caste-bashing and espousing Bahujan cause: True
|
| Posted: 31 Jan 2010 03:20 AM PST
It took sixteen years to get a verdict in the Ruchika case (nine years to register an FIR) and seventeen years to get a report from the Liberhan commission (it was originally given 3 months to do so and received 48 extensions). And as we all know, these are by no means exceptions; it is normal for court cases to drag on for decades. Enough has been said about the many shortcomings of the judicial system in India and there is hardly any articulated disagreement among most commentators about the need to overhaul it.
|
| Posted: 30 Jan 2010 05:01 PM PST
Do your child's confident choices leave you with a lingering sense of inadequacy? As the family finally sets off from home after many arguments and exchange of blame for the delay, there is a moment of lull as the car takes off. "Alright, so where are we going for dinner now?" asks someone, invariably the one at the driving wheel. What follows is chaos as multiple voices make as many suggestions.
By the time order is restored and a decision arrived at, tempers have frayed, sensitivities injured and there is at least one person sulking, while another simmers.
Twenty years ago, you would step out of home, decision of meal and venue already made with no arguments or opposition, and everybody looking forward to the meal with equal enthusiasm. The decision then was made by one person - the head of the family -- and the others fell in line. Today, every member of the family has a say in every decision. On the positive side, this also promotes a great sense of togetherness and bonding.
We empower our kids to take their own decisions from a very early age. We ask them the cuisine they prefer, the movie they want to see, the holiday they wish to go on, the colour of walls they prefer, kind of furniture in their bedroom and study, and even the subjects they wish to study!
Are we doing the right thing by encouraging children to make their own choices in fields ranging from entertainment to academics as we take the backseat? Before we realise, we get them used to being the masters of their own Destiny. And we are the first ones to suffer the consequences.
Truth is that the generation gap between our parents and us was much narrower than that between our children and us. Children today grow physically, mentally and emotionally by leaps and bounds and it may be difficult for us to accept, but they more often than not know their own mind and what they want.
Truly speaking, do we even have a choice? Do our kids ALLOW us to guide them? In fact, their confident choices often leave a lingering sense of inadequacy in parents. In the midst of the many voices surrounding our children, where is the space for us? Between hundreds of friends they link with on Facebook and various other social interaction fora, where do they have the time to listen to their parents?
It's a networked world out there where children consult and guide each other and openly share their disappointments and triumphs on the World Wide Web. Very often the parent may hear through another of what his or her child is going through.
Such is the blind belief in peers that a parent's well-meaning advice can sound like nothing more than unnecessary preaching. How then do we reach through all the social clutter and make the voice of reason be heard? And, more important in this world of multiple choices and innumerable career choices, are we even sure what direction to nudge our child towards?
How many of you can say with a degree of honesty that you are absolutely sure your kid is made to be an engineer, a bureaucrat, a policeman, businessman, politician or an academician? Even as we attempt to guide our children, we are all deep down unsure of the choices we make for them. Those who claim to be absolutely certain are either misled or too rigid for our own good, or that of our children. In fact, thank God, children today question our choices and prefer to go with the flow, to follow the rhythm of their lives.
How then can we ensure that we stay on the same page as our children? When my children were young, I had devised a means of catching them at their most vulnerable moment of the day to chat and ensure all was well in their little worlds. At bedtime, I would sing them lullabies and in between ask them about their day. As they grew up and have started staying awake later, sometimes through the night, lullabies and bedside chats disappeared.
However, recently I have started thinking it's important to reinstate the same (chats, not lullabies). How else would you stay connected and learn to think like them, follow the process of their rationale and then take a hard look at their decisions?
What then is the best path to take? I would say the most important thing one can do is listen. Listen to your children speak to you; learn to listen to even the silences. Ensure you keep some time aside for them; insist they keep some time aside for you as well. Do not invade their private spaces; create a space for yourself with them. Step into their world, try to understand what rivets them and learn to speak their language. It's not as complicated as it sounds; just a daily half hour of the clichéd "quality time" would do the trick.
So long as you have inculcated basic values in your child in the initial formative years and given them a good education, you have already cut through the clutter and been heard. You can then trust your child to do the rest… |
| Don’t teach English to your children in Class I Posted: 30 Jan 2010 10:39 AM PST
A recent news report highlighted the fact that only 48.3% of Indian children in Class 1 could read the English alphabet, even in big capital letters. The annual education audit by the NGO Pratham showed that Gujarat had the worst record: only 25.3% of Gujarati children could read capital letters in English, and only 8% could read English sentences. To rectify this, and join the globalisation bandwagon, the Gujarat government proposes to teach English in Class 1. Other states are making similar moves.
Yet this is an error. Global research shows that children should learn reading and writing in their mother tongue first. Only after they can read fluently at a minimum of 45-60 words per minute can they absorb what they are reading. Such fluency is most easily achieved in the mother tongue. Once that is established, learning a second language becomes much easier.
Premature teaching of a second language — like English — can prevent a child from learning to read fast enough in its mother tongue. Early reading and writing is vital: children that cannot do so fluently by Class 2 will likely never catch up with classmates in higher classes.
These insights flow from research on the neurological foundations of learning. In "Efficient Learning for the Poor: Insights From the Frontier of Cognitive Neurosceience", educationalist Helen Abadzi shows that human short-term memory works well for up to 12 seconds. So, within 12 seconds, a person should be able to read a sentence (or complete grammatical unit), process its meaning, and classify and file it within his or her mental library (what experts call "cognitive networks").
In a separate work, Abadzi writes "people must be able to read one word per second, or per 1.5 seconds at the outside, to be functional readers. If they read more slowly than that, they find that they have forgotten the beginning of their sentence by the time they reach the end." Children struggle to decode letters of a new language. If they cannot read fast enough, then all their mental attention is taken up in decoding the letters, and no attention is left for grasping the meaning of the text.
If a child cannot read quickly, it cannot follow what textbooks or teachers are conveying. All schooling can bypass such children. They can spend eight years in school and remain functionally illiterate. This, alas, is common in India.
This is not an argument against learning two or three languages. Indeed, children under 8 earn new languages most easily. But research shows that proficiency in one language makes it easier to master a second. Learning the first language expands the cognitive networks of a child's mind, making it easier to grasp the same concepts in a second language.
Rich children with pre-school education enter school with a vocabulary of 3,000 words, but poor children may have a vocabulary of just 500 words. So, poor children already struggle to keep up in Class 1. Their struggles can become intolerable if they have to learn a second language.
Abadzi recounts an experiment from Zambia. Initially, children were taught both English and the local language from class1. In an experiment, some schools taught only oral reading in Class 1 and English writing from class 2. The results were astounding. Earlier, reading scores of children were on average two grades less than the standard benchmark in English, and three grades lower in the local language. But once English was introduced at a later stage, reading and writing scores shot up 575% above the benchmark in class 1, 2,417% higher in Class 2, and 3,300 % higher in class 3. Scores in the local language showed similar upward leaps. The system was then extended to all schools in Zambia.
This holds a lesson for India. English skills are undoubtedly important, and give us a big edge over China. Poor parents are keenly aware that English language skills improve earning ability, and so many have switched their children from government schools to private schools claiming to teach in the English medium.
Faced with half-empty classrooms in government schools, some state governments plan to introduce English from class 1 to win back students. That would be a serious error.
English is important. But even more important is reading and writing in your mother tongue. |
| We need private firms in defence Posted: 30 Jan 2010 10:36 AM PST
In theory the Republic Day parade is an exposition of our military strength. In practice it might have become an exposure of military fragility. If it were merely a question of poor display, it would not have mattered. The crisis lies in the degradation of our armed capability, arising from years of political indifference, bureaucratic ego and military frustration.
Defence, appropriately, is a word with a double-edge. Its obverse, offense, is a complementary necessity. An army does not have to be offensive in order to maintain the capacity to offend. A purely defensive force will always be in psychological retreat during peacetime, and physical retreat in war. You don't have to be Clausewitz to understand that; common sense should be sufficient. A few years ago a Chinese general famously told the world that his country had the capability to put a nuclear missile into California. This did not lead to a collapse of Sino-American relations; China's ambassador to Washington was not summoned for a dressing down. Nor was the general cashiered by Beijing. It is useful to remind even friends of the strength of the arm at the other end of a handshake. And it is essential to tell an actual or potential enemy the weight of the iron beneath the glove.
The state of night-vision devices, essential to border-watch, is, to stretch a pun into irony, illuminating. We have 3,000 tanks, enough to overwhelm the western front. The trouble is that 75% of the tanks are daytime warriors; they go blind at night, while Pakistan has just received the latest, third generation devices from the US as an ally in the "war on terror". Night sights on infantry light machine guns have batteries that drain in two hours. Everyone knows what to do, but not how to get it done. Government wants the Army to buy India-made devices from a particular public sector undertaking. This undertaking cannot find a foreign supplier that will transfer technology. Foreign companies are reluctant to part with knowledge that could affect their business; and if they had to collaborate, they would prefer to do so with private companies. Indian private sector companies are not allowed to manufacture weapons.
This is inexplicable and unforgivable, but, paradoxically, comprehensible. The official reason is that defence is "sensitive". In other words, India's government does not trust Indian businessmen. The same government trusts Russians, Europeans, Israelis and is eager to trust Americans to supply the most critical weapons, but finds Indians untrustworthy. This is the inexplicable part. Why is this comprehensible? An interlocked system of demand-supply-lubrication has been set up in defence. The international arms industry supplies quality goods, but at hugely inflated prices. It is loathe to permit any domestic competitor in one of the world's largest markets, and the Indian political-bureaucrat class listens to this lobby because a safe system of percentages and lifestyle protection keeps it satisfied.
In 1947 India had a defence production capability, inherited from the British, that was infinitely superior to China's. It would take many pages, rather than a mere column, to report the pinnacles that China has scaled in six decades while we cannot even produce enough Ichapur rifles. Where necessary, China adapted foreign technology to create superior products, including warplanes. The difference is not in human ability, but in commitment to a term that was a hallmark of the Nehru era but has been abandoned in the last two decades: self-sufficiency. Nehru, alas, is a poor example for self-sufficiency in defence, because his minister, V Krishna Menon, thought politics could protect the nation. But this Nehruvian principle would have served us best in the sector he and his successors ignored.
Our model was a mixed economy, but we refused to mix the economics of defence production. If Indian entrepreneurs had been permitted space in weaponry they would have been supplying the world by now, enriching themselves and the nation in the process. China believed in, and delivered, self-sufficiency. We chose the easy, and buttered, road to a dead-end.
If it is any consolation, Pakistan is an even worse situation. Maybe that is why doves are cooing in Delhi and Islamabad, while terrorists check their options and opportunities in both countries. |
| Mind your language, we’re all Indians Posted: 30 Jan 2010 10:33 AM PST
For someone whose fluency in the languages of the Aryavarta is fairly basic, there are few things more exasperating than being caught in the crossfire of incomprehension at social gatherings where, as a rule, you meet people of your own social strata. Delhi is ostensibly the Capital of India, the administrative centre of a country with multiple languages and cultures. Yet, there is an unstated presumption that most Indians are sufficiently multi-cultural to able to laugh at risqué jokes in Punjabi and say 'wah-wah' to the Urdu couplet most appropriate for the occasion.
The one occasion when, out of sheer perversity, i feebly asked for subtitles, there were twenty pairs of eyes accusing me of being a rootless Angrez.
Negotiating the linguistic clutter of India is never easy and invariably prone to social and political misunderstanding. I recall a curious encounter with a shopkeeper in Southall, the 'Indian' ghetto in London, in the early-1980s. Having ordered a takeaway, the man at the counter asked me politely: "Are you an Indian?" "Yes," i replied. "Can you speak Punjabi?" he queried. "I'm afraid not," i confessed. "Well, can you speak Gujarati?" Again, i confessed my inability. "What sort of an Indian are you?" he barked indignantly.
It's a question that left me flummoxed. Unwilling to engage in a discourse on the linguistic complexities of India, i left the Southall desi content with the satisfaction that he had ticked off a rootless wonder—one who didn't know the two Indian languages most prevalent in the UK.
The encounter in Southall came to mind last week on reading a report from the Jaipur Literary Festival, an event that is fast becoming the place-to-be-seen each January. In a bewildering intervention, diplomat-author Pavan Varma suggested that independent India began on the wrong culture when Jawaharlal Nehru delivered his memorable "tryst with destiny" speech in English. According to him, it was indicative of a perverse mindset and "testimony to how the roots of our own languages were weakened in 200 years of colonial rule." Nehru, it would, seem, set the tone for the subsequent marginalization of the mother tongues in India.
Like the man from Southall, Varma seemed to be asking: "What sort of Indian was Nehru?"
Having tasted the Jaipur experience for two consecutive years, it may be presumed that Varma's tirade against the cultural inadequacies of those Indians who see English as a status symbol went down rather well. The festival has always been marked by an undercurrent of tension between those who crave the opportunity to hear and interact with internationally-acclaimed writers and those who turn to protest against the less exalted billing to bhasha—the newspeak for what was earlier called the 'vernacular'. The bhasha brigade tends to be somewhat assertive in flaunting their victimhood and, like Varma, invariably succeed in guilt-tripping the Angrezi-wallas. Denouncing the apparent colonization of the mind is trendy.
Bhasha may be shorthand for Indian languages but in practice it has become a euphemism for Hindi. The real grievance of the Hindi chauvinists isn't that the language has been ignored. Hindi is the primary language of politics (but not statecraft). It dominates TV and Bollywood, and it is the language most understood throughout India. Its functional importance is undeniable. Apart from Tamil Nadu where its encroachments are fiercely resisted, a smattering of Hindi can see you through most of India.
However, there is one shortcoming Hindi hasn't been able to overcome: its lack of respectability. It suffers from a deep, age-old inferiority vis-a-vis Urdu and an inability to cope with the disdain of more evolved languages. Contrary to what Varma believes, colonial rule and exposure to European ideas saw a flowering of regional languages in the three presidencies. Hindi's rise was post-1947 and dictated by political necessity.
In Bengal, a state familiar to me, the upwardly mobile, concurrently fluent in English, were never embarrassed by the presence of bhasha newspapers and books in their homes. In Hindi-dominated Delhi, material prosperity has triggered a comic Westernization, not least of which is the massacre of the English language.
India is routinely embroiled in contrived controversies over language. Periodically, nationalist assertion involves
Angrezi-bashing and shadow boxing with a colonial past. Yet, thanks to a globalization from which India has profited greatly, these outbreaks of seasonal hysteria rarely cross the bounds of a phoney war. English has continued to gain in usage but India isn't likely to become a cultural outpost of the Anglosphere. India's English is the language of abstraction, ideas and business; Hindi is for everyday communication.
It's a replay of the Persian-Hindustani hierarchy in Mughal India. Perhaps Nehru anticipated this: he spoke to the nation in English and to voters in Hindi. |
| Dark clouds hover over Indian sport Posted: 30 Jan 2010 10:26 AM PST
Every dark cloud, they say, has a silver lining; when it comes to Indian sport, however, the silver lining is nothing but a mirage. It is a trick played on our eye and will vanish when we blink.
What else can you say when you see not only the country's most popular sport, but also its national game, embroiled in the vilest of controversies? How do you find something positive to hang on to, when you realise that the main source of this hara-kiri is politics?
Let us begin with cricket: like always, Lalit Modi was patting himself after a job well done, when the clouds emerged. They started as a trickle, with the franchises simply holding on to their purse strings when the Pakistani players were put on the block.
It was, without doubt, a reasonable gambit: why punt on a bunch of players who might not exactly be welcome in at least one city, if not the entire country? Why put their investments, if not the IPL itself, at risk when the government was not giving any clear signals?
The clouds seemed to be quietly passing; but then, politics reared its hideous head: the government had no objection to the presence of our friends from across the border, declared the home minister. He turned a little spark into a fire by declaring that the IPL had done a disservice to cricket.
Shah Rukh Khan, at the same time, gave a glimpse of the machinations behind the scenes: he revealed that there was a silent pact of a different kind among the franchisees; he even indicated that those who were keen on the Pakistani players were forced to back off. He turned the fire into an inferno by stating that the entire episode was humiliating.
An already seething Pakistan became angrier: a team of parliamentarians cried off from their trip to India; another bunch of golfers too stayed home. There were calls to boycott the upcoming hockey World Cup as well. Clearly, the clouds had turned dark and they were ready to come down.
The TOI, however, saw a hint of the silver lining, when it learnt that Deccan Chargers were on the verge of breaking the code; but the very next day, its team owner claimed that there were no plans to sign up Abdul Razzaq; Lalit Modi, as can be expected now, bad-mouthed all the reports.
What happened in those 24 hours? Why did the Chargers chicken out? Why was Razzaq dropped as a hot potato? The PCB, in an attempt to save face, declared that the NOCs to its players were being withdrawn; in other words, Pakistans players will now surely not be seen in action during IPL-3.
The point is: why was such a delicate issue handled so clumsily? If there was a nudge from the government, or if the IPL or its franchisees had fears, why didn't they contest the pact at the right time? Worse, does this mean that we will never see Pakistans players in the IPL again?
Sadly, the beast has been cut loose. Now it is Pakistan; tomorrow, the Australians might be forced out too. What will be the fate of the IPL then? Will it really hold its charm and allure? Won't the bandwagon shift to another venue, another country? For good? The implications and ramifications are too scary to even contemplate.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have hockey. The country is bracing for a World Cup; but nobody associated with the game really seems interested. Everybody is fighting to wrest power, or to stay in control; why else would two associations go to court, at virtually the last moment? Look at their timing, and you can easily comprehend their real motivation.
Pargat Singh went to the extent of saying that there is a sports mafia in operation. These are strong words from a former India captain; they don't augur well for Indian hockey, or indeed Indian sport. It is high time the government stepped in and cleaned up the rot.
Otherwise, forget a silver lining, we won't even be able to see the horizon amidst the dark clouds. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Times of India Blogs To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
