Mediafile

    Who´s to evaluate the real sons for the paradox between high human development indexes and suicide rates, as reported by Bharat Dogra in his never-say-die feature service, News From Fields and Slums? The suicide rate for Kerala is 25 per 100,000 as against the all-India rate of 9.9. Over the waters, 46 Sri Lankans out of every 100,000 population kill themselves. Given such statistics, will someone make a case against development? Stay poor, uneducated… and alive!

The Answer is the Bangladeshi port city If you have heard of Robin Raphel, you are not likely to hear of Ric Inderfurth. He has been nominated by Bill Clinton to head the State Department´s South Asia Bureau. If he wants fame (no fortune on this assignment) he will have to insult some South Block highup, which is what Ms Raphel did and look at the press she got in India. Here is my submission for the best South Asian writing in a newspaper for March: Siddharth Varadarajan in an article entitled, "Music Died in the Shadow of the Taj" in TOI, on the reception accorded to American composer Yanni when he commandeered the Taj Mahal. Yanni´s music is an advertiser´s ultimate antidote to thought. A potent weapon with which to induce mental sloth and passivity in the listener….In that nether region of mental drift, of mindlessness masquerading as meditation, the senses are benumbed and ready to be worked over by commercial sponsors. This, then, is the secret of Yanni´s fame and fortune. His music is one extended jingle, protean and subliminal, for the vacuous values and globalised commodities of the marketplace in the New Age. Anil Agarwal, and his Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, who I have written about more than once in this column, did a hat trick over March and April. He invited three heavy-weights (Sonia Gandhi, K.R. Narayanan, Atal Bihari Vajpayee) to launch three books, all of them with grim titles: Dying Wisdom, on water harvesting; Slow Murder, on vehicular pollution; and Homicide by Pesticide. Here is the Chhetria Quiz of the Century: what does it mean when a headline in the Independent of Dhaka states: "Ctgneeds Infrastructure"? Find the answer, written most cleverly in reverse Urdu-style, at the bottom of this column. Has the cinematised Oscar-winning The English Patient done South Asia an injustice? And is Michael Ondaatje an accomplice in all this? The central character in the book is the Sikh sapper, Kip (played by Naveen Andrews), who is lover of the nurse Hana. Not only was Kip´s part marginalised in the screenplay, with Ondaatje´s apparent acquiescence, but Mr Andrew´s name does not even make it on the billboards. It is thought, and said, that Kip received short shrift because a relationship between White Girl and Brown Man with Long Hair would not make for box office success, and the Sri Lankan author seemed to have readily agreed. There is one airline in Nepal which does not fly, but does advertise. And where other airlines put in their slogans, this one has this to boast, "The only private sector airline designated to Europe". Give the airline credit, however, for a good design to go on the tail of their airplane, when it arrives. I liked what H.Y. Sharada Prasad had to say in an article entitled "A requiem for great hopes of an ageing nation," in speaking up for the achievements of Indian democracy. Penned the venerable adviser to the powerful and the dead of India, in The Asian Age of 8 April, "… No country has more outspoken commentators and cartoonists and angrier authors. Free speech may not mean a full stomach. But free speech means that despite all the outward despondency, deep down we have faith in ourselves and the confidence that we have the capacity to throw out the scoundrels." Hear! Hear! An International Conference on Creativity and Innovation at Grassroots (ICCIG 1997) was held in Ahmedabad in early January, hosting 400 delegates from 40 countries. It had a wonderful symbol, The Goddess of Creativity, presiding over the deliberations. Wrote Sudhirendar Sharma, editor of Undhyoo, the Conference newspaper, "The goddess of creativity has picked up from where Archimedes left. He neither got the pole nor the place to stand. But given the fulcrum of R&D, this goddess will move the world. But who will give her the space to stand?" Casino Times, the publication which serves the pleasure palaces of Kathmandu, has this to say in a recent editorial on the Indian clientele who come to try the one-armed-bandits : ´The speculative spirit, ever present in the Asian blood, found no outlet at home—due to lack of casinos in India. Thus, Nepal gained tremendously by the inflow of tourists. ´The Indian´ traveller spends much more money in the (Kathmandu) valley than his European counterpart. ´The Indian´ loves to shop, eat, drink and of course to play. He has money to spend and he does. It is this ´Indian´ that we are trying to bring to our clients—the advertisers." The Economist ran a report on the Third International Maths and Science Study (TIMSS), which studied the average scores of 13-year-olds in 41 countries. Singapore tops the list in both Maths and Science, and South Africa is at the bottom on both counts. The countries of South Asia are nowhere to be found. It might be that the TIMSS tabulators forgot about a fifth of humanity, but more likely they thought it was not even worth it. Such is the well-publicised gradation of Subcontinental education. So what was Bill Gates doing here in March? Did you watch how the cameras followed a  certain   lady   at  the  Non-Aligned Movement´s conference on 7-8 Apri? Granted, she was Chairperson of the conference, but the papparazzi homed in on Maria Emma Mejia Velez, Foreign Minister of Colombia, mainly because she was, ummm, photogenic. And, granted, given a choice of the goateed Gujral and the somnolent Deve Gowda, who would you chose? There is a strict ban on advertising alcohol in Pakistan. And so when an overzealous News editor saw the word "root beer" on a Garfield cartoon, she blacked it out for fear of protests by the fundamentals. Root beer is an unhealthy-tasting aerated concoction favoured by American young ´uns, whose alcohol content is limited to its name. I think it was Bishop Desmond Tutu who once said: "When the whites first came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. Now, we have the Bible and they have the land." An interesting cartoon in the South Asia special of Global Issues, a supplement to Australian Geography and selected Teacher Association journals, provides quite a similar perspective to the British arrival in the Subcontinent. Talking of the same journal, the editors of Himal South Asia had a pleasant surprise to find their magazine listed under Resources for South Asia. But wait, what is that spelling again? "The New Calcutta", proclaimed the 31 March Newsweek on its cover, adding that "The World´s Worst City Has Cleaned Up Its Act". However, the editors failed to provide any proof by way of picture inside.

The article by Sudip Mazumdar in the Pacific edition, all of one full page in terms of text (divided over three pages) seems to have made the cover only as a token gesture to South Asian readers. The original American edition, meanwhile, probably featured on the cover the more fully reported article "Is God Listening?". When will the editor sahibs over at 57th Street begin to see the light and stop throwing morsels at us?