A Tech Truce in the Language War
With over 3,000 dialects, 300 languages and 22 official languages, India is blessed with so much diversity, but this can serve as a curse because of our frequent language disputes. Anand Neelakantan writes in his column in The New Indian Express, that instead of spending money and efforts to impose Hindi in the name of national or state unity, we could develop gadgets and apps that can understand and translate all our languages and dialects to each other seamlessly and in real time.
Many tongues of the Gangetic plains, which were flourishing even during the British period, are slowly giving way to the pervasiveness of official Hindi. But isn’t other official languages of India doing the same thing to the minority languages in their states? The Tulu of South Karnataka and North Kerala districts has as much antiquity or perhaps more than the respective classical languages of each state.But in either of these states, most of the documents are in Kannada or Malayalam, the films are in these two languages, the education imparted is either in English or these two state languages and so on. Despite the brave efforts of Tulu or Kodava speakers, the battle to preserve their age-old languages against the state language is a losing one. There are many tribal languages in Odisha, which are slowly being swallowed by the powerful Odia. Same is the case with tribal languages of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh or Jharkhand.
Fifth Column: Sanitation Is a Human Right
There are many who have appealed to the Gates Foundation to cancel Modi’s award, citing his poor human rights record - Kashmir, NRC, Gujarat riots - as the reason. Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express however believes if the Swachh Bharat movement deserves this award, because he has put an end to open defecation, then we should let it be. After all, sanitation too is a fundamental right and the successes of the programme are more to be celebrated than whine about its inevitable, small failures.
It is because we in India did not want to talk about it that until the Swachh Bharat campaign Indians continued to ‘defecate everywhere’. When Vidia Naipaul pointed this out in An Area of Darkness, he was reviled for being ‘anti-India’. But, when Modi said in his first speech from the Red Fort that it was time for this ancient Indian practice to stop, we had to take notice. Had he not lent his personal support to the movement to stop open defecation, it would not have been possible for the Government of India to declare on Gandhi Jayanti this year that every district in India is now ODF or open defecation free.
Why Ban Vaping but Not the More Dangerous Bidis?
S A Aiyar points out at the government’s hypocritical ban on e-cigarettes, which is in turn going to boost cigarette and bidi sales. In a column in The Times of India, he writes that finance ministers regularly increase taxes on cigarettes in a high moral tone, saying this will curb a deathly habit yet they fight shy of high taxes on bidis. Worse, the government even encourages and subsidises tobacco farming. He asks Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman - who had said all e-cigarettes are imported so they do not promote economic development - that if they save lives through reduced lethality, is that not development?
Bidis are given preferential treatment because they are hand-made and employ millions in gathering tendu leaves and working in the factories. So what? Does it make sense to encourage a million people to kill another million people slowly and agonisingly through long-term poisoning? Is this morality? A 2008 study by Emil Sunley, an IMF consultant, estimated that bidis account for 77% by weight of all tobacco consumption but only 5% of tobacco taxes. Bidis produce more nicotine and tar than cigarettes. The tax break for bidis was supposed to encourage employment but actually encouraged corruption and mis-declaration of factory-made bidis as hand-made.
Out of My Mind: No Winners in the NRC Exercise
Meghnad Desai questions the government if they really want to use NRC to break up India in search for Bangladeshi Muslims who may have arrived 48 years ago. In a column in The Indian Express, he writes that in their search for illegal immigrants, they should be careful to not leave their dream of One Nation under threat. He also points out the impracticality of asking people to produce identification papers before 1971 to prove their Assamese residence.
Whichever way the game ends, there are no winners. Those who want no exclusion would be unhappy and internationally India’s reputation will suffer as an inhumane polity. The Assamese who began this agitation way back in the Rajiv Gandhi days will also never believe the numbers unless they discover that these are huge. For them only ‘born and bred’ in Assam will qualify, but if I am from a tribe living in Assam but not Assamese speaker, do I have to produce paper evidence? Why did Rajiv Gandhi sign the pact (Assam Accord) in the first place?
A Year Since Metoo, What It Achieved — and Didn’t
Namita Bhandare answers the question - Was the MeToo movement worth it? - in a column in Hindustan Times. The power of women’s collective voice has given strength to many, cases of sexual assault have recently surged forward in the courts, has spread awareness among corporates and predatory bosses and though speaking up still comes at a cost, it’s a cost that many more are now prepared to pay. We may be miles away from a world free of sexual assault, but we are certainly getting closer.
A conversation that began post the December 16 Delhi gang-rape has grown louder. We may be miles away from a world free of sexual assault, but we are certainly a few notches closer.Is it a coincidence that two cases of sexual assault that predate the MeToo movement have recently surged forward in the courts? The Supreme Court has rejected Tarun Tejpal’s plea to quash charges against him, and asked the Goa trial court to wrap up proceedings in six months. And, in a Delhi court, a researcher has begun her deposition against RK Pachauri, four years after she filed a complaint against her former boss.“No woman now believes she has to remain silent”, says writer Mahima Kukreja, one of MeToo’s early accusers.
Laughing Away the Pain, One STEP at a Time
Sonal Kalra urges everyone to transform into a bunch of colourful, happy, laughing clowns warding away pain in hospital wards and old age homes. In a column in The Hindustan Times, she writes that if you give your time and heart, the payment in the form of smiles, giggles and kids forgetting pain, is absolutely rewarding.
These are people who are students, engineers, homemakers, teachers… you name it. They have stresses of their own life all through the week. But they also have blessings that they are thankful about. And they have the desire to be able to give back in some way. When they come on a Saturday or Sunday to a hospital and make so many kids and parents smile, it must be the biggest satisfaction one could get. Sheetal and her group shared that even the hospital staff participates in their fun games and acts…they are usually as stressed as the patients, after all the hard work and on seeing the kids suffer from pain.
It’s a Fact. We Don’t Want Farmers to Get Rich
Zia Haq writes in The Hindustan Times about India’s obsession with keeping food prices low even when there’s no inflationary pressure, which in turn has hurt farm incomes. The whole idea of an MEP is to discourage exports, so that domestic availability of produce increases and prices at home dip. Say, the potato policy choked off exports immediately and caused domestic prices to crash, but local farmers were hard hit.
Despite India’s agriculture being heavily subsidized, the ICRIER-OECD study, led by economist Ashok Gulati, found farmers suffered a “negative market price support”. Total prices farmers received during 2006-16 stood at minus 14%, meaning agriculture in India suffers “negative total revenues”. Put simply, it means total prices paid by those who belong to the farm economy (on anything they purchase from the market) are more than total prices they get (from anything they produce and sell). Farming therefore is, on a net basis, a loss-making activity.
No One Loves India More Than the NRI
Sampath pens a hilarious satire in The Hindu about how he wishes he was as patriotic as NRIs. He talks about his friend, who used to constantly bicker about the bad roads and economy in the country. Now that he has moved to another country, he has learnt to appreciate his own motherland for the most selfish yet justified reasons.
“The Indian economy is doing fantastic!” he gushed. “Where I live, we are growing at a paltry 1.1! India’s growth rate is a whopping 5%! What are you whining about!” “But there is a big problem of poor demand,” I said. “Nobody has money to buy anything!” “Rubbish,” he said. “You guys just placed an order worth $8 billion for 36 Rafales. You’ve given a credit line to Russia for $1 billion! You have splurged $146 million on a difficult Moon mission that nine out of 10 developed countries can’t even dream of! You’ve rejected the cheapest crude that money can buy in favour of more expensive oil from the richest country in the world! And yet you claim India has no money!? Boss, better get your head checked!”
Will Judiciary Enter the Political Arena Too? All Eyes on UK Verdict
The UK Supreme Court judgment is bound to have bearing on how a parliamentary democracy views the relationship between executive, legislature and the jurisdiction of the courts. Swapan Dasgupta writes in The Times of India, that the top court could choose to not be a referee on explicitly political matters or keep a check on the parliamentary sovereignty by projecting its powers.
One of the frequent charges levelled by the opponents of the Narendra Modi government is the destruction of institutions. Having won a majority in the Lok Sabha for the second time in succession, the government is being charged with reducing the Parliament to a rubber stamp. It is being accused of manipulating the media to ensure the dominance of a particular narrative and the suppression of awkward questions. Finally, there are fingers pointing to a supposedly compliant judiciary.
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