Cameron's apology could have made sense

It would have been commendable had the British prime minister David Cameron directly apologised for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.  On his visit to Amritsar on his recent state visit to India, Mr Cameron termed the massacre as 'a deeply shameful event in British history'.

His gestures of bending on his knees and maintaining a minute silence were good- many see it as indirect apology, but such actions, however great they may be, can never be a replacement for ‘sorry’.

Cameron invoked then secretary of state for war Winston Churchill when he quoted his 1920 remark where Churchill had termed the event as "monstrous”. However, history will  indicate that General Dyer was never really punished for the gruesome killing. He had a premature retirement, which earned him sympathy from then British gentry in India. Dominique Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight illustrates that funds were raised by the British elite in private parties to compensate for Mr Dyer’s premature retirement.

As a nation, India has been simply great in coming to terms with history. Indians have never really hated Britain or demonized the country in its history books. There has never been anti- Britain sentiments on events like Indian Independence Day. Indians by and large admire Britain; millions look at it as its natural partner in the West. Thousands of students flock to the UK for studies, businesses love to invest there. Britain too in return welcomed millions of Indians, and has around 1.5 million subjects of Indian origin.

An apology at the holiest city for Sikhs, where Brigadier- General Dyer mercilessly killed thousands of peaceful protestors could have been purely a non political, yet Britain would be forgiven for its 200 years of subjugation of India.

Britain would have won the hearts of Indians; David Cameron a hero! It would have greatly strengthened the ‘special relationship’ between the two great nations.

Uterus removed by mafia doctors?

Prem

As we travel 250 kilometers south of Delhi into the colourful state of Rajasthan, the colours become obvious: we drive through the lush green fields of countryside. From a distance, the fields seem to be sprinkled with colours. As we move closer, we see women working in the fields - clad in bright yellow and orange.

We stop in a village where peace and tranquility seem to be the order – it’s serene and pristine. We see women pumping water from tube-wells, men sitting on wooden string beds smoking hookah on the front yard, buffalos gazing lazily. Little can one imagine that behind the serenity, a silent crime against women were systematically committed.

We meet Prem Devi – a woman in her late thirties. She narrates how her uterus was removed from her body: “I had a pain in my stomach. I went to the nearest town to a private doctor. They told me that I have cancer, and said if my uterus is not removed, I will die. I was nervous.I was asked to organize Rs15000 (around $300) and get admitted as soon as possible. I borrowed the money and underwent an operation.’

She complains her pain never subsided after the surgery. Occasionally, she has swollen eyes, which she blames on the operation that she believes she was duped into.

She says: ‘ there was nothing wrong with my uterus. The doctors simply wanted to make money. We are poor people, we trusted them, we no longer trust doctors.’  

Like Prem, hundreds of women were forced into hysterectomy in the area by the private doctors in order to make some quick money.

A local lawyer and consumer right activist Mr Durga Prasad Saini from the neighboring Dausa first raised the matter with the authorities. He shows us hospital reports that he demanded from the five local hospitals under India’s right to information act.  We notice that almost 90 % of the surgeries were that of hysterectomy.

Failing public health service

Mr Saini tells that the private hospitals in the area mainly targeted women from four back ward castes. These women, he says, are illiterate and poor. The private hospitals mainly employ people of the targeted communities, who act as agents in the villages or sometimes even act as local doctors. When a woman complains about an illness, these agents direct them to the district hospitals. He calls it a ‘scandal’ run by ‘mafia doctors’.

A local journalist tells us that that the government hospitals don’t have any gynecologist, so women are forced to go the more expensive but better equipped private hospitals.

Mr Saini further tells is that until last year there was no law in Rajasthan to control the ever-mushrooming private clinics, but now the government has enacted a clinical establishment law to check the private clinics.

We speak to doctor R K Dhakar, owner of Madhur hospital in Bandikwe. His hospital has been accused of carrying out large number of surgeries. It is also one of the hospitals that refused to give out any information about the surgeries they conduct under the right to information act.

we join local men to smoke hookah 

Dr Dhakar refutes the allegation. He points out that the private health care is needed because public health care systems don’t have the infrastructure or doctors.

He says that the allegations are ‘politically motivated’ as the right to information was filed by a man who can’t even write.  We attempt to speak to another hospital but the doctor there refused to meet us.

Back in the village we ask the men about the situation of their women, who seems to be doing all the hard work, whist they simply smoke hookah.

They laugh and tell me “We go around in the bikes, smoke hookahs and love politics- we don’t do any work, we are men.”

  

No dawn for the midnight’s children

Deepa Mehta's adaption of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children gives a panoramic view of the troubled history of the sub-continent. Central to the film’s theme are the less privileged children born on that fateful day on the stroke of midnight when India was born. 

Though the fate of this country has changed over the last six decades; the fate of millions of poor Indian children remain unchanged. India is a home to the world’s largest malnourished children, and the country has desperately failed to provide safety and security to its children.

In the recent Delhi gang rape case, there is debate about the handing out harsher punishment to one of the rapists, who is a minor. Many have appealed for making an exception to the case and urged not to treat the convict as a juvenile. Child activist Nicole Rangel writing in The Hindu has passionately argued that the minor rapist must be given a chance to rebuild his life. Whilst his crime is horrendous, it also must be noted that we as a nation failed to protect his childhood. She notes that he has had ‘no interface with the state’, and he has never been given an opportunity to aspire for a different life. She asks should he be given a chance for reformation?

The answer is ‘yes’.  By reforming him and by inducting him into the main stream he could, potentially, in the future be instrumental in showing the right path to many other poor children living in depravity. His reformation process should be a long and well worked out process. It should be a part of a larger investment to create effective systems to safe guard children in India.

On the other hand, taking care of our children is the not responsibility of the government alone. The civil society also has a duty. In India, most middle class families employ domestic workers. For those who are well -off should try and invest in the education of the children of the people they employ.

Bringing in a law to that effect for domestic workers’ rights may be a dream, but the people of India, who have been rightly demanding for greater security of women following the Delhi gang rape, have also the moral responsibility to fix the society.  Innovative measures like tax rebate by the government for a family that pays for the welfare of the children of the people they employ at home could act an inducement.

The poor in this country, especially the children need our help. It is a mammoth task but the ripples of change can be created if the civic society, the government and the NGOs join hands. Hanging a minor is not an answer. If criminals in this country can be politicians, why should a minor be deprived be change to reform? We owe him this for a better future for this country.

Citizens of a mighty country called Facebook

Facebook now has one billion users every month. If it was country it would have been the third most populous in the world. The company says that those billion users were to date responsible for 1.13 trillion "likes", 219 billion photos and 17 billion location check-ins. How has it affected our lives?

On an average, I spend almost around 30 minutes on Facebook every day. I access it both on PC and on my smart phone. Since 2008, on a conservative estimate, I might have spent around 3000 hours doing something or the other on Facebook.  Being in the profession of media and communications, at one point, my job required me to engage only with social media tools. While at University in Scotland I actively used Facebook for recreation, heated debates and intellectual stimulation.

This is just me. Most of you who might be reading this could be spending (unknowingly) a similar amount of time on Facebook.  Depending upon the purpose you are using Facebook (and other social media tools) for you might say: ‘that’s really an awful amount of time – I just didn’t realise it.'

Many of us also suffer from Facebook syndrome. How many times have you sat in front of computer just to type facebook.com even when you didn’t want to visit the site? And what do you have to say when you hear that riot police in Netherlands were forced to break up crowds at a teenager’s 16th birthday party after 3,000 people turned up because she left the Facebook event invitation open!

In a nutshell, Facebook is a part and parcel of our life. Appealing to people of all age groups, Facebook not only serves as an interactive one-stop platform that enables someone to share messages and photos with their friends; it is also becoming a powerful media tool for citizen journalism, allowing people to express their opinions on a scale that has been unprecedented in human history.

During the Egyptian revolution in 2011,  Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian-born Google marketing executive, who first played a role in organising the opposition through Facebook, told the American audiences that without Facebook and( Twitter) their revolution ‘would never have happened.’   

For businesses and brands, Facebook enables them to directly get in touch with their core customers. It helps them to create communities, and brands such as Starbucks have more than 300,000 people following or liking them.  Whilst some see Facebook as an informal way to reach key buyers, others see it as their prime marketing tool. Brands today are increasing creating their Facebook page, and luring people to ‘like’ their pages to create brand loyalty.

Probably, in the years to come, Facebook can go beyond just being a social media tool.  It might want to integrate host of media platforms under one umbrella (which it already does to an extent) and charge subscription rates for its services.  Facebook can make available premium on-demand media content at very negligible price given its reach and ability create buzz.On the other hand, it might want the companies to pay an access charge to its billion plus users. It is often noticed that consumers are more convinced about a brand when they hear or see it on Facebook.

Facebook needs to have a business model where it can charge businesses for hosting their pages, and work more innovatively to penetrate in to the new emerging markets. Facebook has a massive data about each user. Without violating the privacy regulations, it can take permission from the users to display content or links of things that the user is interested in. 

A McKinsey report on mobile –internet revolution points out that  more than  70 percent of India’s urban consumers already spend about $1 a month on content and services through offline, unorganized retail channels—a market estimated to be worth more than $4 billion annually. Much of India’s young population loves to download videos and music, but not everyone is affluent or well educated. Due to their illiteracy or poor English they might not necessarily have the luxury of using an interactive tool. Facebook might want to pop out of the computer screens and develop tools that are easy to access and use. It might also contribute to areas like e-learning and beyond.

Over the years, Facebook has been offering the same things with a bit of tweaks.  The core strength of Facebook are its users, who patronise it and love it. Facebook has created a virtual (and largely a utopian) country. It is about time it lays the strong foundation to that country so that it can sustain itself in long run - it needs to offer us something new and more meaningful.

 

OH MY GOD! - my freedom of speech is safe

Bollywood’s  Oh My God! shows that satire on religions can be constructive, educative and can help balance freedom of speech with religious sentiments.

It is true that all major religions of the world have been around for centuries and millennia. They have certain values, ethos and have contributed to the global culture and development of societies around the world.  Any mockery of these epic establishments cannot really undermine them.

It is also true that religion is for people; it plays a dominant role in our societies and it is governed by the people. In many ways it is for the people, by the people (though the leaders are not always democratically elected) and is for the people. And given these virtues, religions in democratic societies should be subjected to scrutiny, criticism and satire.

However, the recent global events that saw a large scale violence across Middle East and south-Asia including a heinous murder of an American ambassador in Libya, following the release of an amateur provocative film Innocence of Muslims, has once again brought into question the legal and ethical standing of the freedom of expression particularly in relation to respect of religious beliefs.

Freedom of speech is supremely important. It is an empowerment right that allows people to demand other rights – the right to health, to food, to a clean environment to religion etc. It is a vital right and any means to curtail it is not acceptable.

Also, in a democracy (as observed by the Venice committee, instituted in 2007 by Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) religious groups must tolerate criticisms in public statements and debates related to their activities and beliefs as long as the criticism do not constitute deliberate and gratuitous insults or hate speech, an incitement to disturb public order, violence or discrimination towards people who adhere to specific religion.

Innocence of Muslims might have been extremely distasteful and provocative but it was made by some unknown person who probably has little comprehension about the greatness of any religion for that matter. The reaction that followed in the Middle- East and in Pakistan was therefore completely uncalled for.

But other actions like the repetitive publication of the images of the Prophet Mohammed by mainstream French and other European newspapers are equally needless and nasty in taste.

In this regard, the latest Bollywood film can be seen as an example to the world where a mainstream medium was used to ridicule the absurd beliefs and practices of major religions – mainly Hinduism in this context.

The film is a comedy but it critically lampoons gurus, clerics and priests for their manipulative ways to mislead and exploit people in the society. It questions the logic of religious rituals (some of which are extremist in nature) and the existence of God itself. In the film, God is taken to the court after the protagonist is denied claims by his insurance company when an earthquake damaged his property. The reason being: it was an act of God!

What was impressive about the film is that though it was very critical of the absurd religious practices, it also highlights the greatness of each religion, and quotes text from the holy books to substantiate its arguments.

Making a film on religious theme, or expressing controversial religious views in a religiously charged society like India is never easy.  Right wing groups of major religions are very active and easily resort to violence including acts of vandalism and burning of cinema halls. Oh My God! had to tread a very thin rope to drive its point and has been hugely appreciated by the Indian audience.

Most democratic societies particularly in the West have enormous cultural resources and massive pool of highly talented creative pool who are freely allowed to express their views through theatres, plays, movies, music, drama, art, sports and beyond.  Their work have greatly inspired people all over the world; it is about time that the Western intellectuals take up projects that talks about religion tolerance and liberal ideals that characterize their societies like the freedom of speech and multiculturalism. If a cartoon can sully the image of the West amongst an identifiable group of people, greater work of art can do the job of crisis management and strengthen the liberal values.

By doing so, we will be safeguarding the majority of moderate voices who were not party to the violence in the Middle-East or the American citizens who didn't approve the provocative movie on Islam.

Oh My God! does show  a middle path- the international community must learn and emulate.