Pain for some is gain for others

Financial World  20 August 2013

When I watch Namo speaking - - - - -

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Choices reflect our persona

Once bitten but not twice shy

 Finally on the 23rd of June I was able to get back to my routine of going for a run in the morning. So at 5 am I hit the road at a slow trot. The humidity in Delhi was oppressive and bore down as a heavy weight on my shoulders, but nothing could diminish the joy of waking up to an early morning run.

From my residence I passed the Saket Mall where I was greeted by a pack of dogs. Nothing usually happens, but that morning one of the dogs was as surprised as I to find my right leg in his jaws. He trotted away shaking his head in disbelief, I too stood there incredulous. The pain was inconsequential when compared to the shattered camaraderie that I felt for the canine species in general. I felt betrayed and I am not ashamed to say that I chased the animal not in an attempt to pursue the well written remedy of biting the dog in return but of getting closer so that the stone, which had found its way into my hand by then could reach its intended target.

I now realise that this relationship that I felt I had with these stray canines was no different from that of the many TV presenters on 'nature channels' believed they had while they man-handled animals in their attempts to de-mystify them for viewers many miles and time zones away.

I was treating the strays not only as kindred spirits but also as 4 legged anthromorphs. I had assumed that my predilection towards dogs combined with the strays living in close proximity with our species would result in better understanding if not appreciation of each other.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that the main difference between a domesticated animal and a wild one is one of being able to curb one’s animal instincts. Domesticated animals are able to curb their animal instincts because of training. However, stray dogs are not domesticated. They are in fact wild animals living in a concrete jungle. They have adapted their ways to survive in a hostile environment. So instead of recognising the danger that they pose to us humans I had enveloped them in a warm blanket of concern, empathy and marvelled, like many others, at the canines ability to live off the land.

I had mistakenly fallen for the pithy 'proximity breeds familiarity', which even we humans avoid in some of our intra species interactions, to assume that my relationship with these animals was one of mutual bonhomie.

The fact that strays are not solitary but live in packs, something which their forest dwelling relatives do, indicates that they recognise the urban environment as wild. The only reason they do not hunt is because humans inadvertently feed them with the waste generated in daily life.

This waste also breeds a variety of other creatures everything from, flies and mosquitoes to rats and cockroaches, who we see as pests. So even while we try to exterminate them, our hearts bleed for the street dog, we feed them and we clothe them, we have no problem with them lolling around our hospitals and we go to untold lengths to avoid confrontation with them.

Why so?

The answer is easy and it goes beyond the philosophical and the treat all animals with respect trope. We have extended our feelings for the canines in our homes to the strays. We have gone to such an extent that we have even got court rulings to help the strays live safely.

There are rulings on where and how to feed the unlucky critters and even on how many meals a day should they be fed.

This is a double boon for these animals, first they feed off the waste generated by humans; next humans go out of their way and make 'home deliveries' to feed and protect the strays.

In the wild would sensible people brook any man-made interference to the lives of the animals there? There is a reason why zoo's and wild life areas have 'dont feed animals' signs. Its not only for the safety of humans and animals, its also recognition that man is not master of all he surveys and more importantly it is necessary for nature to take its course.

Should we adopt the same form of behaviour for dogs that live with us and dogs that live on the street? There is a difference between ensuring strays are not ill-treated and treating strays like kings. The former is akin to ensuring that peacocks are not hunted down or tigers are not poached while the latter is similar to feeding animals in the wild. We should do the former and not the latter
Most will not consider stray dogs to be vermin like other creatures living off the waste of the land. However, the way we show our concern for them is putting a spanner in the works of their interaction with the urban environment.

Spaying and vaccinating the dogs for rabies is touted as a way to solve the problem of strays. But one doesnt really know how well the programme of sterilisation and vaccination of the strays has been going on. For example in Delhi, in 2008, a MoU/agreement was signed between the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and the Animal Welfare Board of India for 'Humane Stray Dog Population Management', which included sterilisation and anti rabies vaccination for which a Society for Stray Canine Birth Control was jointly created by the MCD and AWBI. Its budget was met equally by both organisations.

This money was to be allocated to 10 NGOs working on Animal Birth Control. According to the agreement the NGO's were given a target of number of animals to be controlled per locality for which the NGO's would get a certain amount of money. However, in 2011 there was news that the MCD was going to set up its own sterilisation units.

Reports of a recent survey indicate that there has been an increase the number of dog bite cases in the city, 30608 dog bite cases in North Delhi alone in 2012-13 while in the previous year for the whole of Delhi it was 17634? One needs to make mention that there was no clear differentiation given between bites from strays and from domesticated canines.

When I went to Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya Hospital today (26th June), for the day three injection in the anti-rabies treatment series there were three others who had come for the same treatment, and I was in the 'injection room' for not more than five minutes. One can appreciate the preponderance of dog bites by the fact that rabies shots are kept filled in their syringes at the ready on the injection tray. This is of course unhygienic and may just reduce the efficacy of the dose.

While trying to get more information on this issue, I came across a website of an NGO dealing with strays. They say that they mark spayed and vaccinated strays by tattooing the inner thigh, they mention other NGOs brand or cut into the ear of these animals. Collars don't seem to be an option even though they are the best form of visual recognition and verification. I wonder if this is because putting a collar on a dog means that there is need for regular monitoring of its welfare (replacing collars etc) that would go beyond the mandate of the NGO, also it is cheaper to brand/tattoo/cut the dog, the issue of cruelty can be swept aside as the animal is under anaesthesia.

Stray dogs attacking and or biting humans is a form of man-animal conflict which needs some thought on how it should be dealt with. We need to come clean on what we want to do with the strays. Do we want to ensure that they are not ill-treated by other humans? Or do we want to make their life comfortable or in other words interfere with the natural process of living in an urban jungle? If it is the latter then there must be more responsibility than just feeding, providing warm clothes to these animals. It goes without saying that spaying and vaccination are programmes that have to continue.

I thought I was smart enough to recognise that the mongrel pup who entered home when I was 7 years and was baptised Snooty and who lived with us to the age of 15 is very different from her kith and kin that continued to live in the boondocks.

I made the mistake of not respecting the difference between the life in her adopted home and the life that she left behind. There were no territorial ambitions at home, there was no threat from other species or canines, food wasn't a cause of anxiety, further my father trained her, all this curbed her natural instincts. These very same instincts are needed in a jungle for a stray dog to survive. This is something we need to realise and then accordingly frame a programme that ensures both strays and humans can live together in peace.

Published in http://www.powerpolitics.in/Issues/August2013/page64.php 

Another one bites the dust!

Even as there is another Dodo in the making, one realises that technology becoming redundant is a prime example of the human's god like abilities – innovating, creating and then finally disposing.

I went to the CTO on Saturday to bear witness to another technology getting off our life support system. I wasn't alone, there were many like me. Most had never been inside before nor had they ever received what it spewed out. Some journalists from radio, print and TV had come to record this farewell, they captured faces and quotes and another moment of history that would soon be forgotten.

The crowd was young, you could have counted the grey hair in the hall on your fingers. The one grey spot among them reminisced, to anybody interested, how this technology had connived with others and got him married, sent him to the eastern front in the 1971 war and seemed to have served as milestones in his life. 

The other side of the counter was a different matter. There was grey everywhere and it was noticed. The young who had come to bask in the glow of something that was being propelled into the black hole of history saw those with the grey in the same light as the technology that was operated by them.

They both were irrelevant, their soon to be obsoleteness made all the more apparent by this sudden and short burst of interest.

Terms like VRS, inept,  unnecessary, waste of government money, were mouthed not as foul language but as hard reality of the young world they seemed to inhabit. These were of the generation that understood that bits and bytes and 0s and 1's made a language, they had never experienced the world of dots and dashes. They all clutched more than one telegram form sending messages to friends and family with things like 'congratulations this is your first and last telegram'.

Through the dark humour of reality it did not come to them that the grey that
they see today was jet black once. That both the human and the technology operated 24x7 sending and receiving messages that not only brought the world closer but also changed it.

This technology did keep up with the times. The 0s and 1s of the computer age replaced the dots and dashes, the key board replaced the Morse Code Machine, and so the telegram found a little corner of relevance in the world.

But today in India where more people have access to a cell phone than a toilet the relevance of the telegram has finally come to an end.

Soon people will forget that CTO meant Central Telegraph Office, it could come to mean Check This Out or Click To Operate, and by then another queue would form to catch a glimmer of another fading star.

 Web Based Telegraph Service

 The queue at CTO

CTO Janpath New Delhi

The Old and the New

Telegram Messages

 Inside the counter

Justice Katju's idea - a much needed immunisation for the media

A few days ago I watched the movie Fair Game. Its based on real life incidents leading to the 2^nd Iraq war and its fall out on an American family. Everyone knows the story – the Bush junior government leaked the name of a CIA operative to newspapers, endangering her life and those of her children and husband. This was because her husband – Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat and Ambassador to Niger, stated that American claims of yellow cake being exported to Iraq for their nuclear programme was completely false. He made that statement because the American government had sent him to determine whether these claims, initially made by the British, were actually true. Ambassador Wilson went to Niger and found that these claims were baseless.

While working in the CIA Valerie Plame, the Ambassador's wife, had successfully argued that a waylaid shipment of Aluminium Tubes enroute to Iraq were not meant for the Iraqi nuclear weapon programme. This punctured the claims of Dick Cheney and Condellizza Rice who were hell bent on believing that these tubes were heading for centrifuges in Iraq's non existent nuclear facility. Valerie's report gave these war hungry officials less fodder to feed their cannon, aimed at Iraq, with. However, that did not stop Bush and his cohorts, including those from across the pond in the UK, from publicly using these false arguments to attack Iraq eventually.

Bush and Blair never found any weapons of mass destruction – but they did destroy a country and a people.

This would not have been possible if the media had not been cheer-leading the warmongers, lead by Bush and his merry men including Blair, into war.

The media whose role was to be unbiased and extract the truth failed miserably in their duty to report the truth and question their government in the lead up to the 2^nd Iraq war. This was a result of human frailty, US was coming out of the 9/11 attacks for which the Bush government had also blamed Saddam, without proof. So everyone wanted to ride the 'wave' in every possible way.

Thus, for the media to go against the prevailing hysteria in the country would have been nigh impossible because many in the media too were affected by the 9/11 events. More importantly if that was the mood that was selling at that time it would have been suicidal to have gone against the tide.

So, the the media toed the official line and then went to battle with the troops in an arrangement termed as 'embedding' where reporters would tag along with troops to the frontline on the condition that their reports would be vetted by the military. Thus to sell their newspaper and news channels, media outlets sold the war to readers back home.

Would it be wrong to say that in its desire for breaking news and exclusivity, the media sold itself down the river? Did it lead to the current situation we have in Iraq and even Afghanistan?

It is not that this has happened only in the West, we have had our Iraqi moments too. Who can forget the 'live reporting' during the 26/11 which though farcical at times was enough to update Pakistani handlers who could then help their terrorists thereby endangering the lives of Mumbaikars and soldiers. Who can forget the Nira Radia tapes and kingmaking role that certain media personnel were playing a few years back. An immediate fall out of that was Vinod Mehta was no longer seen on NDTV as a commentator.

So its a bit unfortunate when people of the media say that for journalists “The best training is on the field.” The only response to that is - our society, readers and news viewers cannot be used as guinea pigs or held hostage as journalists gain experience and hone their skills in the field.

Which therefore brings us to Justice Katju's suggestion about minimum qualifications required to be a journalist.

That meetings in the news room go just beyond news to TRP, marketing and revenues is no longer fiction – the case going on between Zee News and JSPL and the Caravan article about TimesNow point to it. Advertorials are now passé, news reports in papers are regurgitated directly from corporate newsletters. So the need for a little more professionalism in the media is not something that is coming out as a bolt-from-the-blue.

The argument about such a move curtailing freedom of press, decreasing opportunities for potential journalists and ignoring the special role that journalism plays in society is fallacious. It would seem that those arguing against the Katju idea of minimum qualification think of it as a 'pedigree'. This is unfortunate, a minimum eligibility has to be seen as a 'immunisation' against the potential hazards a journalist will face which could either make him an inadvertent transmitter of news, or lead him to act or commit acts, that goes against journalistic ethics, at the very least.

The point that can be argued is what kind of minimum qualification would be required? Would that qualification be an outcome of an educational course? Or could that qualification be tested and be reflected in a potential journalist's communication skills, knowledge of a variety of topics, understanding of the ethics and responsibilities of this profession?

The fact that there are no qualifications for entry into journalism puts the responsibility on the line managers to mentor these young reporters. Besides mentoring, the question of taking onus for the errors made by novice journalists also raises its awkward head. More importantly these trainee journalists may not have a benchmark, especially of the do's and dont's, that they can compare with and thus can easily be swept into the flood of unacknowledged perks that come along with this profession that also wields a lot of power. Basic qualifications can provide future journalists with certain markers that can guide them in their profession. That is not to say that those with such qualifications wont be fallible, pedigreed hacks with higher qualifications have been found wanting in more than one occasion.

If highly qualified and experienced media professionals can falter leading to grave repercussions for society, one can only imagine the threats from those learning on the job and the consequences it has on our society. The need is to create and foster inbuilt mechanisms that allow journalists to gauge professional and moral grey areas so that their choices reflect the needs of society – which is what journalism is about. I am not a mind reader but it would seem that this is what Justice Katju is aiming for and this can't be a bad idea.

The strange case of the cold, demand for justice and cricket

 

My train to Delhi was delayed by eleven hours. I had checked the status of the train on the web where it did say that the train had been delayed, but for some reason the tele-service mechanically proclaimed that the train was on time. This was a very real dilemma of who to believe and the kind of loss that would result from choosing one from the other. Finally I did go to the station with my luggage and lunch, and came back to have that lunch at the dining table. This gave me an opportunity to watch,later that evening, Sunil Gavaskar and Imran Khan - former captains of their national cricket teams - discuss that day's one-day-cricket match in Eden Gardens which India lost.

Sunil Gavaskar made some pertinent observations about the Indian cricket team. He said that the IPL is destroying cricket in general, which Imran Khan agreed to. Indian cricketers are choosing self before the nation in opting to play for the IPL. He explained that test cricket was the foundation for all forms of cricket and a cricketer who did well in test cricket would do well in the shorter forms of the game but this was not true in the reverse case.

Test cricket is a long dawn out affair; some of the qualities that a test cricketer builds from this game and needs to excel in this game are temperament, skill, perseverance, patience. I am sure he would agree that the game also needs the players to build and have stamina, concentration, unflagging team spirit and self motivation besides other things which a non-sportsman like me may not be aware of. What Sunil Gavaskar was indicating is that test cricket is the foundry which toughens the cricketers, enabling them to deal with other forms of the game. By cricketers and cricket management choosing to opt for the shorter and more lucrative forms of the game these sportsmen and administrators are building a team which is hollow in every aspect of the game as they havent gone through the winepress that builds and hones the skills and qualities of a good cricketer.

This philosophy as explained by Sunil Gavaskar can also be used in dealing with the current social problems facing our country. Take for example the case of the outcry for justice for rape victims post the brutal gangrape of a young women in a moving bus on the 16^th of December and her subsequent death. After the youth took to the streets with their demands for justice, stricter punishment which ranged from chemical castration to hanging others – from politicians to film stars followed suit. Jaya Bachan shed tears and the lawyers of Delhi declared that they would not represent the accused.

These demands and gestures are all forms of the IPL mindset that beset Indian cricket which have now come to roost within our society. Why do you think rape cases take so long in court? One reason is that lawyers themselves ask the court for adjournments. Lawyers in our country think of the legal process not as a way to get justice but as a method to ensure that the case does not come to trial and thereby allowing the accused to continue living within society.

What exactly was Jaya Bachan shedding tears about? The way women are treated in tinsel town – ala casting couch or the manner of their depiction in movies through vulgar item songs, lurid lyrics and scripts and the clothes worn?

Why is there a hue and cry by society and youth about police and government insensitivity? Dont these very people complain when they are stopped for minor misdemeanour’s? Dont they jump the line on occasion by asking for favours from powerful contacts? Why do they try to bribe their way through police sanction when they are caught transgressing – traffic rules for example? How do they tolerate young children working in homes of their own families or in families of their peers?

It is easy to paint ourselves out of a picture and put the blame on others. What is happening today to women is not something new. We need to ask some basic questions - why do mothers, and inlaws try to kill her as a foetus, why is she not allowed into religious places? And where are we in this picture? Rape is another form of brutality that the female sex has to endure in Indian society.

The point is that this is another instance of missing the forest for the trees. These demands are for quick solutions that do not question the systemic problems faced by women and our role in perpetuating them and our responsibility of preventing them.

This is much like another debate that is doing the rounds of some news channels – that of the cold and homeless. TV channels display shock and anger as poor outstation patients live on the streets of Delhi in the biting cold as they wait for appointments at India's best and largest hospital. The basic question that they repeatedly ask is why isnt the government and the hospital constructing more shelters? Another pointless question which is trumpeted is 'isnt the government shocked'? These half-baked questions do not resolve the problem and only depict the channel as being concerned.

The point is why do patients have to come to Delhi to be treated? Why are private hospitals not following the court's orders to provide beds and treat the poor? It is not enough to ask the government what they are doing, one should also question why government plans and schemes and court orders are not followed.

It is not enough to demand stronger laws and harsher punishments to stop rapes, nor will problems of the sick coming for treatment be solved by building shelters. What Sunil Gavaskar said about cricket has a lot of substance in the current issues faced by our society. We need to build a temperament that respects laws and each other. We as individuals and society need the skill and patience to prevent crimes from occurring and we need the perseverance to use our institutions in a manner that makes them work and deliver.

Seeking quick fix solutions will not solve the problem as they do not question our role in perpetuating a problem and our responsibility in fixing it. It is not without reason that 'be the change you want to see' and 'Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country' were words spoken by two people who are beacons for freedom and democracy.