Baibhav Agarwal; Author; The Cost of Ambition receives the prestigious Kalinga Literary Youth Award 2017 (Special Citation)

Bhubaneswar: Baibhav Agarwal; Author; The Cost of Ambition receives the prestigious Kalinga Literary Youth Award 2017 (Special Citation); now in its 4th year. The Kolkata based entrepreneur said, ‘There is a price you need to pay for everything. I paid for pursuing my dreams too. I’m glad that the book has received global acclaim and is gaining recognition; it being my first stint at writing.’ The highly coveted award was conferred onto him by the ace writer-author Anand Neelakantan; The Rise of Sivagami; Book 1 of Baahubali – Before the Beginning, who was also at the festival to receive an award.

About Baibhav Agarwal :

At twenty-nine, when most of us are trying to fit in the corporate milieu, trying to defy this world which is in a flux, Baibhav Agrawal shines from a distant horizon, steady on his feet. Baibhav, a Chartered Accountant par excellence is seen ably managing an empire of conglomerates. A youth icon in the making, Baibhav dared to dream and soared high like an Eagle, taking the world in his stride.

Success came early to Baibhav, who meticulously and industriously chalked out his plan; to make a difference in the society by becoming a social entrepreneur. His passion to excel combined with his value systems ensured that he was here to stay; an indelible mark in this fast-fading world. ‘I look at productivity each hour and hence, I have a firm and dedicated time-management system. I compartmentalize my weeks into number of hours and then divide them into various verticals, i.e. – Social, Personal, Work and Society’. This is his mantra that time needs to be valued.

Born into a family of Chartered Accountants, It is noteworthy that he leveraged his limited means and modest family background into creating and curating a magnificent empire in the making.

A Calcuttan at heart, the intelligentsia bug bit him in his formative days, with Baibhav aspiring to become an author. A go-getter, his maiden book, tiled ‘The Cost of Ambition’ provides an insight into his life and his pining for scaling up against all odds. A graduate from St. Xavier’s College; Kolkata, Baibhav crafted his dream by launching a consultancy and mentoring house in 2007. The year 2010 witnessed him joining his family business; the venerated CA firm. A stickler for innovation and expansion, the visionary in him prompted him to lay the foundation for coal and energy trading organizations. By 2012, he had commenced a shipping Company which was soon followed by mining operations. The same year, an industrious Baibhav was also seen purchasing cotton farms in Ethiopia; Africa.

If International and heavy industries didn’t fuel his passion enough, he forayed into real-estate in 2014, adding to the cityscape. 2015, he decided to venture in a start-up. Baibhav today is a globe-trotter, having offices at Singapore, Dubai and the United Kingdom. With an iron-fist and the soul of a seeker, he keeps an eagle eye on the transpiring of his global corporate kingdom. Solace for him is in the hours he dedicates to his Trust – Dor; Rukmini Devi Shivchandram Foundation, after his grand-parents. As people say, when passion meets perfection, master-pieces are born … so is the epitome of excellence, Baibhav himself. After all, one who draws inspiration from legends and stalwarts like Ratan Tata and Elon Musk, cannot be an ordinary man with average life goals! Can he?

Source: Indiaeducationdiary, 19-06-2017

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 52, Issue No. 24, 17 Jun, 2017

Editorials

Unquiet Fields

The Bane of Monetary Policy

Half Lives

From 50 Years Ago

From 50 Years Ago: All the Wrong Parallels

H T Parekh Finance Column

Is Banking Safer Today than before the Crisis?

T T Ram Mohan

Law and Society

Defecting from the Law

Alok Prasanna Kumar

Commentary

Trump’s Toxic Announcement on Climate Change

Navroz K Dubash

What Do We Know about Remonetisation? - Analysis of Available Data till April 2017

Arun Kumar, Ankur Verma

International Rhetoric, Domestic Evidence - Government Claims on Health Inconsistent with Reality

Jashodhara Dasgupta, Subha Sri B, Priya John, Sana Contractor, Renu Khanna, Sandhya Y K

Divide and Educate

Sukanta Chaudhuri

‘Strategic Partners’ in Defence Production - Deepening Dependence

Gautam Navlakha

Review Article

Bangalore and Its IT Industry - A Changing Landscape of Work and Life in Urban India

Michiel Baas

Perspectives

Nursing Education in India - Changing Facets and Emerging Trends

Sreelekha Nair, S Irudaya Rajan

Special Articles

World Bank’s Poverty Enumeration - A Critical Examination of the Process, Methodology, and Numbers

Amita Majumder, Ranjan Ray, Sattwik Santra

Farmers Need More Help to Adapt to Climate Change

Amarnath Tripathi, Ashok K Mishra

Notes

Negotiating the ‘Social’ in Elementary School Social Science

Karthik Venkatesh

Current Statistics

Current Statistics

Postscript

Once, the Monsoon

Suprabha Seshan

Nowhere Man

Usha Subramanian

Last Lines

Letters

Congress Must Come Back

S R Kasbekar

Gender Bias at Workplace

Supriya Singh

Academic Entrepreneur

P M Mathew

Web Exclusives

Old Plans, Ongoing Handouts, New Spin - Deciphering the Nuclear Construction Announcement

M V Ramana, Suvrat Raju

Appointments/Programmes/Announcements 

Appointments/Programmes/Announcements

- See more at: http://www.epw.in/journal/2017/24#sthash.g7gWlFoI.dpuf

A quantum step to a great wall for encryption

Quantum mechanics (QM) is the dark arts of physics. Though physics — in the Newtonian mould — tells us how every object will precisely behave when pushed and hurled, QM deals with the invisible world of subatomic particles, where counter-intuitive rules apply.

QM inhabitants such as electrons and photons live in zombie-like ‘undead’ states. The very act of observing them makes them beguiling tricksters. Though not always understandable, science knows, in bits and pieces, how they can be manipulated for purposes that benefit the visible world such as making integrated circuit chips and fibre-optic lines for global, instantaneous communication.

Transparency may be the shining ideal of modern society but countries and corporations are now infinitely more obsessed with secrecy than in the days of ancient Greece. On Friday, the world took a major leap in employing QM to the cause of secrecy.

How it works

China — as a study in the journal Science reports — has combined satellite technology and the elusiveness of quantum mechanics to demonstrate how secret information can be transmitted over a thousand kilometres — a tenfold increase over what has so far been achieved — with the guarantee that any unauthorised attempt to decipher it would be immediately discernible.

One of quantum mechanics’ cardinal principles, of Heisenberg Uncertainty, follows that no physical object can be known entirely. Measuring, say, its momentum with increasing precision reduces the accuracy with which you can determine its position. For long this was seen as a barrier imposed by nature to us fully comprehending a physical system but for a few decades now, the field of quantum cryptography has evolved around designing ‘keys’ or alpha-numeric codes exploiting quantum mechanical strictures.

Pairs of photons share their quantum properties no matter how long they are separated or how far they have travelled. These can even be created in a laboratory and are called entangled photons. Modern, electronic secrecy works by two parties encrypting the messages they want to exchange and sending each other ‘keys’ (which are chains of numbers) that can be used to decrypt the information. The trouble is that a third eavesdropper can intercept these keys. An “un-crackable” system would be one where both parties know if an intruder is trying to pry out information from the keys.

Enter the entangled photons of QM. Connected just like the ends of a see-saw, in that one going up necessarily means the other is going down, and using such photons to forge a key would mean that any change in their state indicates that someone’s been trying to manipulate them.

While this principle has been understood fairly well since the 1980s, it has been hard to transmit entangled photons through the atmosphere because they are extremely fragile and can disintegrate through contact with other particles in the air. Until last week the world record was a transmission of a few hundred kilometres.

Leading the way

The Chinese set-up transferred entangled photons through a satellite, called Micius, between two ground stations that were 1,200 km apart. According to a report in Science News, the researchers shot a laser beam into a light-altering crystal in the satellite. The crystal emitted pairs of photons entangled so that their polarisation states (or how they are oriented in space) would be opposite when one was measured. The pairs were split, with photons sent to separate receiving stations in Delingha and Lijiang, which are telescopes on mountains, 1,200 km apart. Both stations are in the high mountains of Tibet, reducing the amount of air the fragile photons had to traverse. This team then simultaneously measured more than 1,000 photon pairs. They found the photons had opposite polarisations far more often than would be expected by chance. The technological challenge in this case was ensuring that the transmission between the satellites and ground observatories was so steady that the stream of hyper-sensitive, journeying photons weren’t broken even though the satellite was cruising at nearly 8 km per second. “…The obtained link efficiency is [in] orders of magnitude higher than that of the direct bidirectional transmission of two photons through telecommunication fibres,” says an accompanying press statement.

Only one out of six million photons sent could be recovered, which experts toldScience News, was better than previous ground studies of entanglement but still not good enough for the moon-shot goal of sending secure keys using quantum mechanics principles. Doughty China has publicised plans for international collaborations and transmitting entangled photons in a trans-continental project. Were that to be successful, organisations and people reliant on online financial transactions — that are increasingly dependent on satellite-based Internet — and paranoid about security would take a shine to quantum satellite encryption technology.

The endeavour also underlines the extent to which the West’s domination of science has eroded. The so-called Quantum revolution in physics occurred in Germany after it had imbibed and innovated on the classical physics structure arraigned by Isaac Newton. The action moved on to the United States that built on theoretical insights to usher in the Information Age out of Bell Labs and then the enterprises of Silicon Valley. Today, the number of high-quality science publications out of China is second only to the U.S. Along with advances in the manipulation of stem cells, this latest step shows their command over the great symbols of the modern scientific age: the satellite, quantum and the Internet.

Source: The Hindu, 19-06-2017

What is Ordoliberalism in Economics?

An economic ideology that views the the state as an institution that offers an appropriate legal framework for the efficient functioning of the market economy. It emphasises that the state has a crucial role to play in fostering market competition, by preventing the rise of monopolies that can exert harmful economic and political power. At the same time, the state must also avoid distorting the free market. Ordoliberal principles, famously adopted by former German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, played a major role in the miraculous rise of the German economy in the post-Second World War era.

Source: The Hindu, 19-06-2017

Contest vs. consensus: on selecting a presidential candidate

ether an enlightened public figure or an active politician, the next President should be one who enjoys the widest possible acceptability. For this to happen, there should be meaningful discussions towards building a consensus among the major political parties ahead of the presidential election. The BJP’s overtures to key leaders in the opposition appear to be merely exploratory. Approaching opposition parties for their cooperation without putting forward a name will be unfruitful. It appears that the Union Ministers who met key opposition leaders requested that the latter should not field a candidate merely for the sake of a contest. Such an approach is more likely to succeed if the Centre draws up a list of possible names and seeks the cooperation of opposition parties in getting one of them elected. It would also help the opposition parties arrive at an agreement among themselves on whether to field a candidate or back the ruling party’s choice. The BJP may want to elect a President who will share its political outlook and philosophy. After all, in the last two elections the Congress succeeded in getting its party leaders elected President. But it is worth recalling that the main opposition of the day did not oppose K.R. Narayanan and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam in 1997 and 2002, respectively. A consensus is still possible if the candidate chosen meets one of the most important qualifications for the presidency — a general acceptability.

Too often, contestations in the political realm make it imperative for the opposition to field a candidate in the interest of demonstrating its unity in the hope that its combined strength will pose some sort of a threat to the ruling dispensation. There is little doubt that the current political mood in the country is not entirely conducive to successful cooperation among diverse political forces to get an eminent citizen elected without a contest to head the republic. There is widespread unrest among farmers and there are credible fears among several sections that there may be an attempt at homogenising the country’s cultural diversity. There will be little surprise if parties opposing the policies of the National Democratic Alliance regime would want to make use of this opportunity to join hands and make a determined attempt to challenge the electoral supremacy enjoyed by the BJP in the recent elections. On the other side, the BJP may believe it has an edge in the electoral college consisting of all members of Parliament and the State Assemblies, as it can count on the backing of some regional parties. In such circumstances, a contest is likely. However, it would be best if someone who inspires confidence that he or she would act in a non-partisan manner is elected with the support of both the ruling party and the major parties in the opposition. It would enable the next incumbent to be the honest broker and wise counsel the Constitution envisions him or her to be.

Source: The Hindu, 19-06-2017

Leaders as Servants

CHIRDEEP S BAGGA





Leadership is often associated with power. Today , the term has acquired negative connotations, particularly in politics. One has come to question the relative importance of being recognised as a “leader“ when what we sorely need are individuals who both lead by their service and example and follow the universally accepted principles of responsible living.We are beginning to see that traditional autocratic and hierarchical models of leadership are slowly yielding to a newer model. This model -of leaders as servants -will simultaneously enhance the personal growth of the led and improve the quality of our institutions through a combination of individual and community teamwork in decision-making infused with ethical and caring behaviour.
Servant-leadership is a practical philosophy concerned with the ethical use of power and authority . Servant-leaders believe that power and authority are for helping others grow, not for ruling, exploiting or gaining advantage by setting individuals or groups against one another.
Servant-leadership advocates a group-oriented approach to analysis and decision-making as a means of strengthening institutions, and of improving society . It also emphasises the power of persuasion and consensus over the old “top-down“ form of leadership. Some liken this to turning the hierarchical pyramid upside down, so that in the mind of the servant-leader, the needs of his or her employees, customers, constituents and community become the most important reason for a company's existence.

Yoga Sadhana And Progress Of Civilisation

Nivedita Joshi





Yoga has been defined as `Chitta vritti nirodha', that is, `stops all internal and external forms of thinking which may sprout with or without volition' ­ stilling the mind.Chitta stands for three things: mind, intelligence and ego. Mind has no discriminative power but has the power of gathering and feeling. Intelligence discriminates and reasons and comes to determinative knowledge. Intelligence is the tool to find the true Self, but the `i-ness' interferes with intelligence and prides itself on being the true Self. Intelligence is the vehicle of the true Self whereas i-ness is the impostor of the true Self.
The human body has three layers: causal, subtle and gross. The causal body is the sheath of the soul; it is incorruptible and non-decaying. When you are not in this body , you lose your true state and dwell in the chitta. Then, it is the subtle body or the physiological sheath. Senses of perception and organs of action are vehicles of gross body , dependent on mind, without which the outer body cannot function.
Gross and subtle bodies are interdependent. We use our senses to fulfil and enjoy the mind's demands and so get caught in the web of worldly desire. Like the spokes of a wheel, these enjoyments revolve between pleasure and pain. We become victims of circumstances, which create dual consciousness or personalities. This state is the seed of separation ­ viyoga, pain and dukkha, sorrow.
Practice of yoga sublimates the mind through conscious effort to obtain release from the web of pleasure and pain; it leads one to experience a state that is beyond pleasure and pain, as a pristine, pure and static shuddha swaroopa.
Yoga gives us ways to develop harmony and balance and achieve holistic health. Patanjali says that it is possible to achieve these either by practice and dispassion or by total surrender to the Supreme. Since total surrender is difficult, even impossible for most of us, Patanjali insists on abhyasa, practice and vairagya, dispassion. When harmony is achieved, then abhyasa and vairagya, starting out as forced regimental disciplines, become a natural process and the practitioner continues them without any motive or desire.From then on, his sadhana becomes vairagyabhyasa. In this state, the practitioner develops stability in mind and steadfastness in intelligence. He has no more disparities within himself or his encasement, the body . His sadhana becomes all in one and one in all, the true nature of oneself.
The practitioner of yoga, the yoga sadhaka, thus bridges the gap between body , mind and Self and becomes master of these three. The knower, the knowable and the known, become one.The journey of the seeker comes to an end. Through a constant process of evolving culture from yama to dhyana, he civilises himself and becomes kushal (adept), a true owner of the sacred body.
The light of wisdom dawns on him, like dharmameghas, a rain cloud of justice. As the dharma of clouds is to pour rain, the yogi's wisdom pours knowledge that is ever-pure, ever-green and continues to live for posterity . He becomes Krithartha, that is, his way of life reflects on humanity like the reflection of the mirror, and transforms it. Thereby , the culture of the yogi becomes the civilisation of the world.

Big data, big dangers

India needs to negotiate the world of big data technology with adequate safeguards

With the Supreme Court turning its gaze on privacy issues associated with Aadhaar, can we take a moment to look to the myriad ways in which our privacy is being assaulted in the digital world? When my neighbour across the street got too curious about my life, I installed curtains to block his gaze. But what about when the invisible drones at Facebook send him a message that one of my colleagues has tagged me enjoying a music festival in Goa and he might want to “like” this picture? How do we draw a curtain around our digital lives?

Think beyond the nosy neighbour to the corporations that want to utilise minutia of your life to sell products that you may or may not need. Corporations have always been interested in understanding consumer behaviour and been collecting data about users using their products or service. What is unique about Big Data Technology (BDT) is the scale at which this data collection can take place. For instance, Google has stored petabytes of information about billions of people and their online browsing habits. Similarly, Facebook and Amazon have collected information about social networks. In addition to using this data to improve products or services that these corporations offer, the stored data is available also to highest bidders and governments of nations where these companies are based.

Looming dangers

One major problem with collecting and storing such vast amounts of data overseas is the ability of owners of such data stores to violate the privacy of people. Even if the primary collectors of data may not engage in this behaviour, foreign governments or rogue multinationals could clandestinely access these vast pools of personal data in order to affect policies of a nation. Such knowledge could prove toxic and detrimental in the hands of unscrupulous elements or hostile foreign governments. The alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election tells us that these possibilities are not simply science fiction fantasies.

The other major problem is the potential drain of economic wealth of a nation. Currently, the corporations collecting such vast amounts of data are all based in developed countries, mostly in the U.S. Most emerging economies, including India, have neither the knowledge nor the favourable environment for businesses that collect data on such a vast scale. The advertising revenue that is currently earned by local newspapers or other media companies would eventually start to flow outside the country to overseas multinationals. A measure of this effect can already be seen in a way that consumer dollars are being redistributed across the spectrum of U.S. businesses touching them. For instance, communication carriers such as AT&T, Verizon and cable networks find that their revenue has remained flat to slightly falling in the last five years whereas the revenues of Google, which depend on these carriers to provide connectivity to consumers, are increasing exponentially. Unless we employ some countermeasures, we should expect the same phenomenon repeat itself for corporations based in India.

Sadly, BDT is a tiger the world is destined to ride. It is no longer possible to safely disembark, but staying on is not without its perils. The only way to negotiate this brave new world is to make sure that India does it on her own terms and finds a way to protect both financial rewards and ensure individual privacy and national security through appropriate safeguards.

What India can do

China has apparently understood this dynamic and taken measures to counter this threat. It has encouraged the formation of large Internet companies such as Baidu and Alibaba and deterred Google and others from having major market share in China by using informal trade restraints and anti-monopoly rules against them. India may not be able to emulate China in this way, but we could take other countermeasures to preserve our digital economy independence. The heart of building companies using BDT is their ability to build sophisticated super-large data centres. By providing appropriate subsidies such as cheap power and real estate, and cheap network bandwidth to those data centres, one would encourage our industries to be able to build and retain data within our boundaries. In the short term, we should also create a policy framework that encourages overseas multinationals such as Google and Amazon to build large data centres in India and to retain the bulk of raw data collected in India within our national geographical boundaries.

Moreover, we should also build research and development activities in Big Data Science and data centre technology at our academic and research institutions that allow for better understanding of the way in which BDT can be limited to reduce the risk of deductive disclosure at an individual level. This will require developing software and training for individuals on how to protect their privacy and for organisations and government officials to put in place strict firewalls, data backup and secure erasure procedures. In the West, we already are seeing a number of start-ups developing technology that enables users to control who gets access to the data about their behaviour patterns in the digital world.

The government has approved the “Digital India” Plan that aims to connect 2.5 lakh villages to the Internet by 2019 and to bring Wi-Fi access to 2.5 lakh schools, all universities and public places in major cities and major tourist centres. This is indeed a very desirable policy step. But unless we evolve appropriate policies to counter the side effects of the Digital Plan, this could also lead to the unforeseen eColonisation of India.

Hemant Kanakia is a computer scientist and investor in high technology companies. The views expressed are personal

Source: The Hindu, 15-06-2017

What is client politics in political science

A political situation where government policy is influenced by the interests of a small minority, rather than that of the overwhelming majority. In politics, smaller groups at times can exert a disproportionate influence on government policy by virtue of being more organised than larger groups. Individuals in these smaller groups have more incentive to organise since the benefits they gain from a favourable policy are larger when they are part of a smaller group. In contrast, individuals in larger groups have lesser incentive to organise since the benefits they gain are smaller.

World-class Institutes Plan Faces Autonomy Hurdle

Anubhuti Vishnoi

New Delhi:





CONCERNS RAISED IN CABINET ON THE LEVELS OF AUTONOMY PROMISED & THE POSSIBLE FALLOUT OF SUCH A MOVE

Prime minister's office (PMO) and Union human resource development (HRD) ministry may have finally ironed out their differences over the extent of autonomy for 20 chosen `world-class' institutes or `institutes of eminence', but the debate seems to have spilled onto the cabinet now.Concerns have been raised in the cabinet on the considerable levels of autonomy promised to these institutes and the possible fallout or negative implications of such a move.
The HRD ministry's proposed UGC (Institutions of Eminence Deemed to be Universities) regulations, 2017, which were moved for cabinet approval nearly three weeks back, have now been `deferred', ET has learnt.
During a cabinet discussion, a concern was also raised on how it would be ensured that such autonomous institutes will not end up creating more JNU like `Kanhaiyas', sources said. The proposal to catapult Indian institutes to global recognition first announced in the 2016 Union budget and said to be the brainchild of the PMO -had caused considerable friction between the HRD ministry then led by Smriti Irani and the PMO, with the latter pushing for greater levels of autonomy for the institutes while the ministry called for caution and some governmental role. The ministry and PMO were at that point at loggerheads on the autonomy framework for IIMs under the new IIM Bill with similar positions on the debate.
After Irani's sudden exit mid-2016, the HRD ministry under Prakash Javadekar was mostly in agreement with the PMO to draft a set of significantly liberalised regulations. The regulations now bear a distinct PMO mark and assure complete academic, administrative and financial autonomy to the select 20.
The regulations aim to create a group of degree granting `world class institutes' as a special category under deemed universities, but governed by a separate set of regulations. As was envisaged by the PMO, the regulations clearly indicate that UGC regulations will not be applicable in most part to these 20 institutes.
This required considerable heavy lifting after the Solicitor General of India advised that it is not legally feasible to create a separate regulatory structure for them in the form of the proposed Empowered Exper t Committee (EEC). EEC was originally proposed as a body that can function independent and autonomous of the UGC. After the SG's legal opinion, provisions had to be incorporated to get a UGC seal of approval on the EEC decision.
One of the key changes made was in the corpus fund requirement. It was originally proposed that a private institute must have a corpus of `500 crore to be eligible to be declared a world class institute. However, after the PMO's intervention, this was said to be reworked to keep it at `200 crore instead. Later, the HRD ministry has brought this down to just 60 crore to be raised to `150 crore in ten years' time. It was argued that corpus fund is also read as locked up money, so there may not be enough rationale for prescribing such a high amount being kept locked up.
The draft regulations had said the institutions must ensure a 1:10 facultystudent ratio, enroll 20,000 students in 15 years. These criteria finally stand revised and now to start with the faculty student ration will be 1:20 that may be improved to 1:10 in five years' times and a total enrolment of 15,000 students in 15 years.

Source: Economic Times, 15-06-2017

Goddess Of Big Things

Anil Nair





In her latest `big' novel, Arundhati Roy the polemicist trumps literature

The philosopher John Gray famously spoke of how secularism, like chastity, is defined by what it denies. Something similar afflicts Arundhati Roy , a passionate votary of all things small, perishable and precious but who somehow seems unable to write in sustained fashion about anything but the big, bad and ominous.Twenty years of ranting against mammoth dams, nuclear bombs and the Leviathan Indian state would have, one assumed, cured her of polemic and, when finally news arrived that her second novel was on its way , it appeared to herald her return to that rare talent evidenced in her maiden novel.
The God of Small Things, whose sentences, like two-egg twins, combined childlike precociousness with adult presentiment was essentially a story about love and loss, the first forbidden, the second inevitable. It was a story about individuals, ordinary ones, and the war of loss and longing occasioned in their souls. The big bad world was always there, but always as an outcrop, a backdrop.
On the contrary , what we have with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that just hit bookstores is an unabashed history lesson, where individuals are mere pawns in a larger-than-life plot.The story has beautiful, bleeding Kashmir at its centre and ugly India, imperial, impervious and with its “infrastructure of impunity“, slowly worming its way through the fine gossamer web to devour what is left of it.
By the time the well-worn plot is exhumed, examined and laid back to rest, the pro-Kashmiris, so to speak, have chosen one of the only two options available to such freedom fighters, patriots who are not nationalists ­ they scorn Pakistan but end up in Qabristan.As for the Indian end of the troika of individuals who are at the heart of this episode, the minion of the state develops a conscience, enough of it to concede at the end to the martyrdom-inclined, “you may be right but you will never win“.
The whole tone of the book is that of a Cassandra call, which declares that fascism is already here in India, that it is not a drill, that it is not alarmist to say such things but is merely true. Of course, these sections are very well-written, where scrupulous reportage melds with deadpan machismo, a world where Pankaj Mishra (investigating the alleged Chittisinghpura massacres) meets Frederick Forsyth (plotting The Dogs of War).
But, where, you might well ask, since this is a literary novel, is Amos Oz, an Israeli who surely knows quite a bit about wars within? Amos Oz, who unforgettably said that it is the task of any serious writer who enters the No Man's Land of conflicts, within and without, to always differentiate “the bad from the worse from the worst“. Nuance, in plain English. Something that The Ministry sadly lacks, determined as it is to deal only in big bromides and simplistic black and white. There is Aftab-turned-Anjum, of course, with whom the book begins, who periodically resurfaces and is adroitly there at the finale to tie up the loose ends, proof that even in an unfortunately expository work like this Roy's novelistic instincts do survive. Anjum is finely wrought, initially like her friend Razia, “a man who wanted to remain a man but be a woman in all other respects“, but is eventually reconciled to her new self after reconstruction surgeries coarsen her voice, with its peculiar rasping quality , like two voices quarrelling with one another.
This `in-betweeness', roiling ambi guity or hybridity if you will, is the real terrain of fiction and where Roy was so at home in Small Things. In The Ministry her perfect pitch is spoiled by abundant false notes, and in the final analysis it merits a verdict that mirrors what Orwell remarked about Dickens, that he “had rotten architecture but great gargoyles“, in other words, a floundering novel with flashes of brilliance.
In The Ministry , the politically unexamined life of the liberal, who is sure that she is right about everything, has trumped the novelist, a trap Roy could have avoided if only she had heeded her mentor John Berger's exhortation to convert self-pity to anger but also to beware of looking too far ahead, in fact, “a refusal to look ahead“. But Roy insists on looking too far ahead, always after a Chad Crowe new Camelot ­ if it was Paradise pickled and preserved in Small Things it is Jannat, “guesthouse in the graveyard“ in The Ministry . Instead of rubbing history against the grain and questio ning received notions, including her own, Roy toys with `revolution'.
A left-liberal autodidact, Roy behaves here more like a red diaper baby , conjuring, in the absence of a real political programme, possible prosthetic proletariats who might overthrow the existing order. “Lal Salaam Aleikum“, as Anjum intones at Maoist comrade Masse Revathy's funeral, and intoned in turn by Saddam Hussain, her sidekick and local cheat, who changes his name from Dayachand to that of the late Iraqi despot's because, “it would give me the courage to do what I had to do and face the consequences, like him“.
All so moving, if it was not all so contrived. The noted critic James Wood pertinently asked, “Which way will the ambitious contemporary novel go? Will it dare a picture of life, or just shout a spectacle?“ We all looked up to Roy , back from the wilderness after 20 years, to redress the balance. God, hasn't she disappointed us!

Source: Times of India, 15-06-2017

Ramzan Fasting Rejuvenates Body, Mind & Spirit

M Aslam





Fasting, during the month of Ramzan, not only serves as annual training for body and soul ­ which helps in renewal of life and encourages the spirit of sharing and giving ­ it also enables the promotion of spirituality and human excellence.The basic objective of this month-long annual process is to alter the behaviour and pattern of life of its practitioners in such a way that they turn out to be ideal human beings. It implies that a person observing fast will not only observe abstinence from eating and drinking but will get into a sublime state of mind in order to develop positive feelings. It essentially means restraining oneself from listening, speaking, hearing or thinking negatively about others. The expectation is that if one passes through this process of self-purification for a period of one month, its impact will last at least for the remaining eleven months.
I have practically observed that fasting instils moral courage and guides the heart. Fasting leads to tranquillity and calmness in the face of adversity , and helps one cultivate patience.
We are creatures of acquired habits. Some of these are good habits and some are bad, like smoking. Fasting provides the observer an opportunity to change his habit, as smoking is prohibited during this period. I was a chain smoker 12 years ago and it was fasting which created in me the necessary level of determination that enabled me to give up the bad habit.
Ramzan fasting can help us gu Ramzan fasting can help us guard against obesity and blood pressure, provided the faster follows the strict dietary rule: Eat at the designated time when you break your fast and avoid over-eating. “Eat and drink, but waste not by excess, for Allah loves not wasters.“ (Al-Quran, 7:31) Charitable acts recommended during Ramzan help us bond with the less privileged. And as the family comes together to break the fast at Iftar, and eat together at least twice a day for a month, and pray together, ties deepen and members of the family draw closer to each other.
Tajuddin B Shuaib, in `Essentials of Ramadan, The Fasting Month', summarises the essence of fasting as a tool for reconstruction of our spiritual faculties: “The institution of fasting is a unique form of worship prescribed as part of an overall system of Islam. Its uniqueness mirrors the uniqueness of the human being, a creature of physical and spiritual parts whose excellence depends on the right proportion of these two parts. Too much of the physical material will ruin man, and too much of the spiritual will too.Fasting orients the observer to the art of balancing the spiritual essentials with physical needs, a vivid proof that there is in all of us the will power, a pivotal element that controls our actions.
“This will be needed to help us curb the animalistic tendencies originating from the stomach, in full. It awakens the mind and kindles clear thinking and consciousness of Allah. Fasting is the sobering of a mind and reconstruction of our spiritual faculties.“
I only pray that our spiritual faculties get awakened during this month of fasting and we are able to balance spiritual essentials with our physical needs to receive God's blessings and protection, which we all need so desperately in these turbulent times.

Learning to read as adult changes brain'

Rosamma Thomas

Jaipur





Contrary To Popular Belief, New Research Finds You Can Start To Pick Up A Skill At Any Age

The adult brain, contrary to popular belief, is quite flexible, says a new study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. The research was conducted in collaboration with the Centre for Bio-Medical Research, Lucknow, and the University of Hyderabad.The researchers studied changes in the brain of 30 illiterate women from villages near Lucknow, aged between 18 and 30 years, after they received daily lessons in Hindi for six months. There were two control groups -30 illiterate women given no training, and a group comprising literate women who had received no formal education.
All three groups were made to undergo a restingstate functional MRI, used to analyse the functional connectivity in the human brain, at the outset. The first group underwent the scan once again after the training.
A comparison of the results showed changes in the brain -in the thalamus and brainstem -after the women learned to read and write.
“At the beginning of the training, the majority of them could not decipher a single written word of their mother tongue Hindi,“ website `ScienceDaily .com' said in a report on the study , adding that participants reached a level comparable to that of first-graders after only six months of reading training. “This growth of knowledge is remarkable,“ project leader Falk Huettig, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, was quoted as saying.
The findings, which hold enormous potential for assessment of conditions like dyslexia, were published in the journal `Science Advances' on May 24.
“Reading is such a new ability in human evolutionary history that the existence of a `reading area' could not be specified in our genes.A kind of recycling process has to take place in the brain while learning to read: Areas evolved for the recognition of complex objects, such as faces, become engaged in translating let ters into language. Some regions of our visual system thereby turn into interfaces between the visual and language systems,“ `ScienceDaily' explained in its report on the study.
Huettig was quoted as saying that the study flew in the face of the belief so far that changes in the brain were limited to the outer layer, the cortex, which adapts quickly to new challenges.
“In contrast to previous assumptions, the learning process leads to a reorganisation that extends to deep brain structures in the thalamus and the brainstem. The relatively young phenomenon of human writing therefore changes brain regions that are very old in evolutionary terms and already core parts of mice and other mammalian brains,“ the website reported.
Michael Skeide, scientific researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig and first author of the study , was quoted as explaining that the research explained why experienced readers navigated text more efficiently .
“We observed that the socalled colliculi superiores, a part of the brainstem, and the pulvinar, located in the thalamus, adapt the timing of their activity patterns to those of the visual cortex,“ Skeide was quoted as saying by `ScienceDaily'.
He explained that these deep structures in the thalamus and brainstem helped our visual cortex, which processes visual stimuli, fil ter important information from the flood of visual inputs even before we consciously perceive it. Interestingly , the more the signal timings between the two brain regions are aligned, the better the reading capabilities.
“We, therefore, believe that these brain systems increasingly fine-tune their communication as learners become more and more proficient in reading,“ the neuroscientist said.
Asked why the study was conducted on an all-women group, Uttam Kumar, assistant professor at the Centre for Bio-Medical Research's MRI neuro-imaging unit, said, “That was done to eliminate any controversy around differences in the learning pattern of men and women and to ensure uniformity in results.“
He said what the study showed was that “it does not matter what age you start to pick up a skill as long as it is a psychologically normal brain. If done in a sequential manner, the brain can accommodate the learning and the change is apparent.“
Source: Times of India, 15-06-2017