Category: Uncategorized

By Sonja Karkar

Just when it seemed that the Viva Palestina convoy from London to Gaza had successfully completed its mission, a new development greeted the British MP George Galloway when he returned home after announcing yet another convoy to Gaza from the US leaving on 4 July. Now it seems that the British Charity Commission has frozen £100,000 of aid money raised for the suffering Palestinians in Gaza because it claims “concerns” over Viva Palestina’s structure and the million pounds raised for Gaza when it never sought charitable status in the first place. It was always clearly stated that each of the participants would bring their own vehicles, fill them with desperately needed goods via donations and raise their own money to help the Palestinians. It is no surprise that George Galloway MP is going to fight what is obviously an orchestrated campaign to thwart any further attempts to bring aid to Gaza. He very clearly points out in his letter, the Charity Commission’s extraordinary double standards in closing its eyes to the British Zionist Federation’s call in January for Britons to send “care packages. . . to our [ie Israeli] soldiers fighting on the front line in Gaza” through the charity Operation Wheelchairs Committee. A charity which
solicits donations for a foreign army that is attacking a defenceless people is reprehensible. One can only imagine the outrage if a Muslim charity had asked for care packages for our [ie Palestinian] fighters on the front line. More importantly, people everywhere should be asking questions about why any organisation – in this instance, the Charity Commission, but earlier the BBC for refusing to air an advert on aid for Gaza – would seek to interfere in transparent efforts that might bring relief to a people under siege?
(submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

By A.G.Noorani

Jawaharlal Nehru said in 1963: “The danger to India, mark you, is not communism, it is Hindu right-wing communalism.”

“AFTER Independence, when the first government of the country was taking shape, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru gave priority to give berth only to Congressmen in it. But Gandhiji advised him to include scholar leaders like Shyama Prasad [Mookerjee] and Dr. Ambedkar in the government,” L.K. Advani said in Gwalior on March 1.
He did not stop at this brazen falsehood and went on to add one more: “Though Dr. Ambedkar was later made chairman of the committee formed for framing the Indian Constitution in which he ensured that all sections of society are protected, the Congress at the time of elections adopted such tactics which ensured his defeat in the polls” (The Hindu, March 2, 2009). It is a matter of record that (a) Gandhi intensely disliked Ambedkar and (b) that Ambedkar lost in the 1952 elections to the Lok Sabha because of his own clumsy tactics. The Congress did not adopt or need to adopt any “tactics”.
This is what Gandhi wrote in a letter in Gujarati to Vallabhbhai Patel from Pune on August 1, 1946, only a year before Independence: “The main problem is about Ambedkar. I see a risk in coming to any sort of understanding with him, for he has told me in so many words that for him there is no distinction between truth or untruth or between violence and non-violence. He follows one single principle, viz. to adopt any means which will serve his purpose. One has to be very careful indeed when dealing with a man who would become a Christian, a Muslim or Sikh and then be reconverted according to his convenience. There is much more I could write in the same strain” (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi;Volume 85; page 102).
Whether Ambedkar was capable of saying what was attributed to him – and that too, to a political adversary – is not the issue here. What is plain beyond doubt is that a person who held such an opinion of Ambedkar would not have exerted himself only a year later to ensure for him a seat in Nehru’s Cabinet. Ambedkar’s own fine record ensured that seat. He issued an erudite statement debunking the princes’ claim to independence on the demise of the Raj.

His speech in the Constituent Assembly in December 1946 was statesmanlike: “I have got not the slightest doubt in my mind as to the future evolution and the ultimate shape of the social, political and economic structure of this great country. I know today we are divided politically, socially and economically. We are a group of warring camps and I may go even to the extent of confessing that I am probably one of the leaders of such a camp. But, Sir, with all this, I am quite convinced that given time and circumstances nothing in the world will prevent this country from becoming one. With all our castes and creeds, I have not the slightest hesitation that we shall in some form be a united people.” He was lustily cheered by the members (Constituent Assembly Debates; Volume 1-6; page 100).
Ambedkar resigned from the Union Cabinet on September 27, 1951, on the eve of the general elections. Everyone knew that the Congress was ready and willing to ensure his election. Highly emotional, he lost patience on the Hindu Code Bill, little realising that Nehru was facing opposition from President Rajendra Prasad and from some in his Cabinet. N. Gopalaswamy Ayyangar advised Nehru to postpone the debate to a date after the polls, which he did.

When Ambedkar introduced the Hindu Code Bill in Parliament on February 5, 1951, it instantly aroused opposition though in the Congress Parliamentary Party, Nehru had insisted on its passage. It was decided to take up one part, on marriage and divorce, first. The day for debate was fixed – September 17, 1951. Who opposed it most? Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. It would “shatter the magnificent structure of Hindu culture” he said as Dhananjay Keer recorded in his book Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission (1962, page 429). He adds that, replying to the debate as Law Minister, Ambedkar said that “Dr. Mookerjee’s remarks were not worth consideration as he had not opposed the Bill while he was in the Cabinet but opposed it now for the sake of opposition”.

Ambedkar’s credentials as a scholar are unmatched. Mookerjee’s lie only in the eye of Advani and the like. Has Mookerjee written a single work of scholarship? Ambedkar wrote over a score of them.
An angry Ambedkar gave the press the statement he had intended to make in Parliament on October 11, 1951, but did not because the Chair wanted a copy in advance. It was a wide-ranging attack on the government’s foreign and domestic policies: “The right solution for the Kashmir issue is to partition the State. Give the Hindu and Buddhist parts to India and the Muslim parts to Pakistan.” He was against non-alignment. Keer records Ambedkar’s statement that “it was Nehru who called him in his chambers and gave him an offer of ministership”.

THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY

President Rajendra Prasad (centre, front row) with members of the Central Cabinet at Government House, New Delhi, on January 31, 1950, just before he delivered his first address to Parliament. (Left to right, first row) B.R. Ambedkar, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, Sardar Baldev Singh, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, John Mathai, Jagjivan Ram, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. (Second row) Khurshed Lal, R.R. Diwakar, Mohanlal Saxena, Gopalaswamy Ayyangar, N.V. Gadgil, K.C. Neogi, Jairamdas Daulatram, K. Santhanam, Satya Narayan Sinha and B.V. Keskar. Ambedkar resigned from the Cabinet on September 27, 1951, on the eve of the general elections.

The too-clever-by-half socialist leader Asoka Mehta forged an electoral pact with Ambedkar. In the clime of 1952, it harmed both parties. The Socialists, Mehta included, were wiped out in Bombay (now Mumbai), losing in the process their morale, which they never recovered, thanks largely to Mehta and Ram Manohar Lohia. Ambedkar was prepared for the defeat. He blamed Communist Party of India (CPI) leader S.A. Dange for it, not Nehru as Advani does in 2009 (page 438). Keer thought that the electorate was ungrateful. But he noted fairly: “The advocacy for the partition of Kashmir, his speech before the Bombay Muslims on separate electorates for the Muslims, lack of positive speeches before the people and above all the weakness of his disorganised party resulted in the rout” (page 437).

Prime ministerial ambition

Advani’s are not minor factual errors. The record shows him up as one who recklessly, wilfully made statements of fact that were utterly untrue and widely known to be untrue. The law of libel recognises, among falsehoods, statements known to be false, the lie proper, a word not to be used in civil discourse. But, on a par with it, legally and morally, is the statement made with utter disregard of whether it is true or false. Whatever drove Advani to stoop to this? Desperation for power is one reason. It is his last bid for the Prime Minister’s office. Festering old hatred for Nehru is another.

Advani is the first politician in India to lay claim to the office of the Prime Minister so openly and for so long.
Read more

(Mallika Sarabhai is an actress, activist, dancer and is contesting a Loksabha (National Assembly) seat from the Indian state of Gujarat. The opposition candidate is Lal Krishna Adwani, leader of the major political party, Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP.)

By Mallika Sarabhai

I want to begin with a simple statement. It is not meant to be provocative or quarrelsome. It is what I believe. I believe that independents are the third parties of tomorrow. This is a statement, most people do not want to accept. Because, political parties dislike independents. They believe that parties define the political, decide the fate of politics and still are the basic units of electoral politics. I want to argue that independents will slowly make a difference, they will bring a different style, a different sensitivity, a more personal concern to issues of governance, to the question of deprivation and exclusion, to the very idea of suffering.
Political parties reinforce current politics, they refuse to respond to issues of violence and corruption. They make the ordinary citizen fatalistic or cynical. Political parties feel that they must be sensitive to the public at election time. They are dense enough and large enough to be insensitive. They uphold the logic of numbers and not the logic of people. Today it does not matter, whether its right or left, they have narrowed the idea of politics and homogenised it. This is why parties can say that there are no permanent values only permanent interests. Parties do not have hearing aids which listen to the silent voices of the people. Look at Mr. L K Advani. He comes to Gandhinagar and addresses the nation. It is as if that Gandhinagar is a locality, a community, a family, a constituency hardly exists. The party leaders display an arrogance of power which the independents must resist.

Let me state clearly, that I stand as an independent knowing that I am vulnerable but recognising that vulnerability adds to my sensitivity. I do not need ten security guards around me. I think independents are constructive people, professional people who want to address problems personally and professionally. I am directly accountable, directly accessible. I am part of the people, responsible to the people and will hopefully be elected by the people. No party boss will determine my fate. No party adjustment will affect my choice. It is the logic of party politics that says that independents are destructive. I think as an independent I have a lot to offer. First, time. Two, the fact that my family has been a part of this locality and that my parents have added much to the culture and industry of it, I can identify concrete problems of particular communities. I have studied in detail the problem of children, the issues of water, the reasons why violence against women continues on and on without question and also why no one responds to corruption. There are also technical problems.

As MP, I realise, one can be the chair of the district planning board and make choices that can build up the idea of the city concretely and visibly. I have a local team which can help me do that. Gandhinagar is not just an automatic seat for an automatic man. Gandhinagar is a local constituency for a local person to address local problems with care, concern and a deep sense of participation.
I think it is the independence of the independents that will make the difference with a promise and a hope. And I stand as an independent committed to both.
Read more

It is vital for patients to keep their blood sugar levels under control
Failure to control type 2 diabetes may have a long-term impact on the brain, research has suggested.

Severe hypoglycaemic episodes – hypos – occur when blood sugar levels drop dangerously low.
A University of Edinburgh team found they may lead to poorer memory and diminished brain power.
The study, based on 1,066 people with type 2 diabetes aged between 60 and 75, was presented at a conference of the charity Diabetes UK.
The volunteers completed seven tests assessing mental abilities such as memory, logic and concentration.

…

HYPOGLYCAEMIA
1. Hypoglycaemia is caused by a lack of sugar (glucose) reaching the brain, which uses it as fuel
2. Symptoms can include sweating, fatigue, hunger, feeling dizzy, feeling weak, a higher heart rate than usual and blurred vision
3. More severe episodes can led to temporary loss of consciousness, convulsions and coma

Read more
(Submitted by a reader)

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but severe homesickness led her to return home after one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her house and visitors were scarce. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her thoughts and poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important figure in her life, it is not certain that this was in the capacity of romantic love—she called him “my closest earthly friend.” Other possibilities for the unrequited love in Dickinson’s poems include Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican.

By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost total physical isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. She spent a great deal of this time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother Austin attended law school and became an attorney, but lived next door once he married Susan Gilbert (one of the speculated—albeit less persuasively—unrequited loves of Emily). Dickinson’s younger sister Lavinia also lived at home for her entire life in similar isolation. Lavinia and Austin were not only family, but intellectual companions during Dickinson’s lifetime.

Dickinson’s poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want, but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility of happiness. Her work was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity.

She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumor of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886.

Upon her death, Dickinson’s family discovered 40 handbound volumes of nearly 1800 of her poems, or “fascicles” as they are sometimes called. These booklets were made by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems in an order that many critics believe to be more than chronological. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, removing her unusual and varied dashes and replacing them with traditional punctuation. The current standard version replaces her dashes with a standard “n-dash,” which is a closer typographical approximation of her writing. Furthermore, the original order of the works was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) remains the only volume that keeps the order intact.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson (1945)
Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems (1962)
Further Poems of Emily Dickinson: Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia (1929)
Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890)
Poems: Second Series (1891)
Poems: Third Series (1896)
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924)
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)
The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime (1914)
Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson (1935)

Prose

Emily Dickinson Face to Face: Unpublished Letters with Notes and Reminisces (1932)
Letters of Emily Dickinson (1894)

Because I could not stop for Death

By Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –

Read More

By Göran Therborn

The evidence that unequal societies inflict great damage on the lives and health of their citizens is clear. Why does it matter and what can be done? Göran Therborn thinks big.

There are at least three quite different kinds of inequality, and they are all destructive of human lives and of human societies.

The first is inequality of health and death, what might be called vital inequality. Here, hard evidence is accumulating that health and longevity are distributed with a clearly discernible social regularity. Children in poor countries and poor classes die more often before the age of 1, and between the age of 1 and 5, than children in rich countries and rich classes. Low-status people in Britain die more often before retirement age than high-status people. Vital inequality, which can be measured relatively easily through life-expectancy and survival rates, destroys millions of human lives in the world every year.
The second is existential inequality, which hits the individual as a person. This kind of inequality restricts the freedom of action of certain categories of persons, for instance that of women and other marginalised groups in public spaces and spheres. This form of inequality means denial of (equal) recognition and respect, and is a potent generator of humiliations – for women in patriarchal societies, for indigenous groups in the Americas, for poor immigrants, for those of low caste, and for black people or stigmatised ethnic groups. It is important to note here that existential inequality does not only take the form of blatant discrimination; it also operates effectively through more subtle status hierarchies.
The third is material or resource inequality, which means that human actors have very different resources to draw upon. There are in turn two aspects here. The first is access to education, to career-tracks, to social contacts, to what is called “social capital” (in conventional discussions, this is often referred to as “inequality of opportunity”). The second is inequality of rewards (often referred to as “inequality of outcome”. The latter is the most frequently used measure of inequality – the distribution of income, and sometimes also of wealth.

The production of inequality
Inequality can be produced in four basic ways:
* exclusion: meaning that a barrier has been erected making it impossible, or at least more difficult, for certain categories of people to access a good life.
* institutions of hierarchy: meaning that societies and organisations are constituted as ladders, with some people perched on top and others below.
* exploitation: meaning that the riches of the rich derive from the toil and the subjection of the poor and the disadvantaged.
* distantiation: meaning that some people are running ahead and/or others are falling behind.
The historical importance of these mechanisms in generating the configuration of the modern world is hotly disputed. It can be argued that exploitation, though the most repulsive generator of inequality and still a significant feature of today’s world, is not the major force. A major role is played by organisations and societies that are permeated by subtle hierarchies of social status: these create inequality through their unequal allocation of recognition and respect, the limitations they impose on the freedom to act, and their impact on self-respect and self-confidence. The existential inequalities of these social hierarchies in turn have serious psychosomatic consequences.

In the course of the 20th century there was a substantial income equalisation in most western countries; but class differentials of life-expectancy widened, particularly among men. In 1910-12 an unskilled manual worker in England or Wales had a 61% bigger risk of dying between the ages of 20 and 44 than a professional man; by 1991-93 this extra risk of early adult death had risen to 186% (calculated from R. Fitzpatrick & T. Charandola, “Health” in A.H Halsey & Josephine Webb, eds., Twentieth-Century British Social Trends [Macmillan, 3rd edition, 2000]).
Read More
(Submitted by a reader)

By Mutahi Ngunyi

As part of civil disobedience, I have stopped praying for Kenya. In fact, I want to invite the women of Kenya to join me. They pray too much. And who knows, maybe their prayers have sustained the country.

But together, we can hold a ‘‘prayer boycott’’. This may sound crazy, but allow me to explain.

One, our country has been hijacked. The two principals and their ‘‘gangs’’ are like Somali pirates. Self-seeking, greedy and dangerous.
If they disagree, they will collapse the country. If they do not, the country will collapse in 2012 anyway! Either way, we are hostage. To pray for our leaders, therefore, is like praying for pirates.
And because God is fair, He will shower the ‘‘pirate leaders’’ with blessings galore. Blessed and healthy ‘‘pirates’’ can only increase our misery. No wonder the country is captive, anxious and afraid.

My second reason is about President Mwai Kibaki. The old man suffers from the ‘‘Pharaoh Complex’’. He is stubborn, self-assured and deaf.
No amount of plagues, ranging from drought to the invasion of Migingo Island, will move him. And the more severe the plague, the harder his heart gets.

But he has a crack on the wall. Like Pharaoh who gave up when his son was killed, President Kibaki loves himself. Anything touching on his family causes him to jump. And this is where our prayers should target.

Instead of praying for good health and long life, our women ‘‘prayer warriors’’should pray for the following: that he experiences the pain of IDPs, the loss felt by the bereaved, and the horror we feel when we think of the burning Eldoret church.

Read More

By Ryan Nakashima

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Google Inc.’s YouTube said Thursday it is vastly expanding its library of full-length movies and TV shows it offers online, while also launching a new advertising service and adding about a dozen new content partners.

The long-form videos will be housed on a unique page at www.youtube.com/shows and get a “Shows” tab on the main YouTube site.

The offering, which went live late Thursday, marks a further departure from the fuzzy homemade clips that made the Web site popular and is the latest move in YouTube’s attempt to boost sales and profits. Last week, YouTube announced it was teaming up with Universal Music Group to create an online music video venture.

“It’s a first step in a long commitment,” said Shiva Rajaraman, a YouTube senior product manager, in a conference call with reporters.
The company hopes to add to its movie and show content over time. The titles available at launch are mostly older fare that are already available elsewhere on the Web. It will offer for free hundreds of TV show titles including “Beverly Hillbillies” and “Married With Children,” and hundreds of movies, including “Casino Royale” and “Cliffhanger.”

The service expands on YouTube’s existing partnership with several studios, whose parents include Sony Corp., Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., CBS Corp., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and Liberty Media Corp.

On Thursday it also announced new partnerships with 13 smaller companies such as Discovery Communications Inc., National Geographic and SnagFilms LLC.

Advertising revenue will be shared with the content providers.

The news came on the same day Mountain View-based Google said it earned $1.42 billion, or $4.49 per share, in the first quarter, up 9 percent from a year ago.

Google bought YouTube for $1.76 billion in late 2006 but it hasn’t emerged as a major marketing vehicle and the company does not disclose its revenue figures. Analysts have estimated its revenue in 2008 at around $200 million.
Read More
(Submitted by a reader)