Suicidal spate

by Manish Anand


Delhi is unfortunately threatening to earn the sobriquet of a "suicide Capital" in place of the tag of much maligned rape Capital. Print is just full of reports about too many suicides committed in different parts of the city. Disheartening at the most, but ironically sociologists are yet to take notice of the alarming trend. Probably they must feel alarmed and institute a study to probe what's going wrong in the city of hearts.


I always feel horrified about the incidents of suicide. I had the most horrible time listening to the story of a suicide told to me by one of my friend from Kerala, which is infamous for reporting the largest number of suicides by any state in India.


"A friend of mine just gave up after being condemned to the cruelty of poverty," my friend began telling me the story with me staring him with my skin going cold. "He just threw himself against a train running at full speed, and his body was found in the worst possible condition," he said. And, why did he do so, I asked meekely. "He had no father, no income, and no other means to support his four unwed sisters. For some time he became reclusive, would not speak to anyone. Just for being in an hopeless conditions he gave up," said my friend. He rounded off the discussion with the sad truth that too many youth in Kerala were committing suicide.


The most terrific moments that I recollect is from my childhood. Just seven-year-old, I remeber the chilly month of December damped by continued rains at that moment. A 12-year-old girl had gone with her younger brother to a dam where women used to celebrate "Chath" festival just one day before the festival. On the way, the boy was asked to go back home, which he did most obediently. The next day the swollen body of the girl was found on the bank of the dam with her shoes on in the beautiful frock, which, however, was bloated.


Later on I overheard that her father always wanted her to come first in her class, but that time she unfortubately had come second, and she was subjected to the most cruel treatment that he father could have given. However, grown people added at that time that the girl was always beaten up with her mother watching her helplesseley. That suicide had something to do with her misfortune at home, elders concluded.


I too had a close encounter with the dreaded suicidal tendencies. One afternoon, driven mad with hackling of all around me on my knack of all round failure in competitive examinations, I had taken a long march of more than five kilometer to take a jump in the riven Ganges in my hometown. However, at the most crucial moment I started thinking about the consequences of my act, and the thought dawned on me that my parents will have to live under a permanent shame because of me, and I took a retreat.


However, the first place where I went was my friend's home whom I told about my aborted move. And, my friend, though alrmed, shared my agony, empathising with his own experiences, which were similar to mine, said: "Look, we all have to go to God one day. What's the hurry in this wwhen it's a certainty. let's take our time and endure whatever comes our ways." These were words permanently etched in my mind, and despite seeing more worst times in life, I contune to live.


Social collapse no doubt is leading to suicidal spates. Anonymity of lives in lage cities with belief setting in that there is no one to care for you may be another reason. The reasons may be numerous, but social compassion is the most missing link in today's society, that must be noted earnestly.

For Love of words

by Manish Anand

A great sight yesterday was an old Sikh with a book yellowed due to ages, reading intensely while he came out to his gallery out of curiosity to peep at the bustling road below his window. Books, which give reasons to live, are still vogue, and many more people are reading them. Most exciting sight was a girl reading a novel while waiting for the Metro standing among innumerable people jostling for a space. Nothing can get the girl away from the book that she was soaked into.

I shared my literary passion with a one-time room-mate, Solgy, now an Indian Revenue Service Officer. Recently, as we chatted I dangled my great experience or having read “100 years of solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Expecting that it will lead to discussion on Marquez’s masterful skill of story-telling, I was caught unaware as he gave me a virtual dressing down.

“You bloody! You read this book now! You should have read it 10 years ago. What a pity you could have been a different person if you had read the book earlier,” he retorted.

Then, he went on to tell about his experience with Marquez. “I first read the malyalam translation, and feeling restless I read the English version. The moment I finished reading, it I began re-reading it. What a book! The magical realism in literature at its best. You believe while you read all the stuff,” bristled Solgy.

Then he read out “when humidity peaked, the fish started flying”. Reading and re-reading a fiction are testimony of a good book as Garcia Marquez wrote in his autobiography “Living to tell a tale”. “I did not consider a book good as long as I did not re-read it,” says Marquez.

Yes, I am under the spell of Marquez with his exquisite writing. I do not think I am going to stop as long as I read most of his literature.

As Marquez reproduces the words of red-light district girls, it turns out the masterful skill of presenting a world so distant to be so near that you can find it in your neighbourhood. “I you people fucked the way you all shout, we girls would have bathed in gold.” Only a genius could come up with such masterful portrayal.

The other evening I was reading the autobiography while the bureau chief of the newspaper I work for came and asked what I was reading. The moment I took the name of Garcia Marquez, the boss came alive, brimming with all energy. “A great artist. What a wonder." Glee in his eyes, he poured his art out for the great Latin American Novelist.

“Read his small book, Chronicle of a death foretold,” he told me. “What a book. In the first sentence, he tells what the whole story. And, then he goes for another 100 pages, and you remain glued to the book,” said my boss with energy so original. “The book is all about our helplessness. We know that we all are doomed, but still we can not do anything,” he said about the book.

Again elaborating, he gave his parting note about the book as he walked away. “You know that you are being fucked, but you can not do anything about it.”

The world of literature can live till humanity lasts for the talent of Gabriele Garcia Marquez.

Merchants of tragedies

by Manish Anand

The Mumbai serial blasts were very much in the making. And, so are many more like that across all parts of India. Security and intelligence experts after hanging their boots had time and again stressed how easily common civilians in India are waiting to be maimed and butchered. Listening and acting on that have become virtues of past with everyone yelling to speak, from rank idiotic stuff to sheer bull-crab, adding to cacophony of public discourse.


Quite expectedly the breed of intellectually bankrupt television journalists with deadened grey cells started yelling their crass “in-depth analysis of blasts” with bemused panelists, soaking into collective surrender of sanity.


News channels have to make fast bucks and deaths on large-scale in India just like a one-day cricket match make the advertisers scurrying for eyeballs. Added to that is the business of SMS – “make your comments heard by SMSing either yes or no to a pointed question irrespective of whether you are capable of answering the question or not". And, why should you feel that you can not answer a question if you are not equipped by skills when the TV anchors can reach to a conclusion with just the skill of speaking and patience for sitting for hours while their beauticians polish them for the camera.


Deaths and disasters are abhorrent for any normal person. A poise of maturity and a determined resolve to fight all odds have been the hallmark of any mature society. Security lapses and intelligence failure are always reasons for terrorist blasts. And, when the nation is at an open war against the known adversary who has succeeded in filtering into the ranks of the minority community who number around one-fifth of the population, it becomes commonsensical that no powerful nation despite all resources can avert a determined bid of terrorists to bleed the nation.


Yes, there has been a justifiable demand for a federal bureau of investigation, but did any of the yelling news channel succeeded in having any fruitful discussion on the subject. The mushrooming madrassas on the border areas of Bangladesh on the Indian side have been the breeding ground of hardened terrorists. Did anyone get a commitment from the politicians of the border states that schools of terrors on Indian soil would be dismantled?


The main suspect, which happens to be Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), still flourishes in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Kerala with the monetary channel funding them flowing without any check from the Gulf countries. Nothing happens on this front as well.


India is blessed with the worst Union home minister, Shivraj Patil, under whose regime the nation has just seen bloodbath in all his tenure, but nothing again happens.


In another two weeks, we shall be dancing to the tune of the shots of Sachin and Sehwag, and the Mumbai nightmare will be a matter consigned to general awareness.


God forbids if there were to be another terror strike at least the News Channels should show bare minimum shame and desist from crass commercial exploits of tragedies. Media is above all not merchants of tragedies!

Is Brain Drain II on the anvil ?

Manish Anand/ SNS

For long India’s politicians lamented the slowdown in the country’s progress, attributing it to the brain drain of the late 70’s and early 80’s when a huge amount of young talent made an exodus to greener pastures, a la the USA. Unfortunately, neither did they take into account the reasons which contributed to the exodus and nor are they doing it in circa 2006. If at that point in time United States welcomed immigrant talent with open arms, allowing it to contribute to its intellectual property, today you have similar opportunities in Europe, Middle East, Australia, New Zealand, China and even small countries in Africa, acknowledging India’s strength especially in the field of Information Technology.


It was the extraordinary reservation policy of the Tamil Nadu government in government jobs and professional institutions which pushed Tamil Brahmins to the wall. When seeking admissions in state engineering and medical colleges became an onerous task, they began scouting around for options in USA, Europe and the Middle East and, in due course, made their mark in a land which respected their talent and allowed them to be adopted by the nation in return.


If past trends are any indication, another brain drain of much higher intensity is on the cards, with the Union minister for human resources development, Mr Arjun Singh, hell-bent on “mandalising” professional institutions. “The government has failed miserably in developing educational infrastructure at the highest level these past years. With more than 50 per cent reservation being pushed through, the general category students are left with practically no choice but to head to the US for higher studies. A much larger brain drain is imminent with professional institutions coming under the ambit of excessive quota,” said, Mr Vikash Aggarwal, an IIT-Kharagpur alumnus. Add to this are the plethora of private players in the market with foreign universities aggressively wooing Indian students with not just top of the line professional and educational courses but also facilities of loans, easy repayment options et al.


No formal assessment has been made quantifying the kind of work that Indians have done in the USA or the quality of intellectual capital that the Indian community has created in the last three decades, be it in the field of medicine, law, IT, science and technology, military science, research, business or economics. NASA is driven by Indian engineers’ talents. Indians constitute more than 25 per cent of Microsoft’s staff strength at its Seattle headquartres. Some of the finest doctors across USA are of Indian origin. Sam Pitroda, the blue eyed man from Rajiv Gandhi’s inner coterie and also probably the Indian with the highest number of patents is a prime example of what India could have gained by holding him back. Afterall the STD revolution in India, especially in the rural hinterland, is thanks to him. Although attempts are being made to involve him in the Knowledge Commission, we have still lost out on the man’s genius which could have steered things back home in India.


Historically, it is immigrants who have given America its hugely distinct character and contributed in a major way to its wealth creation. If they as a nation have monopolised the world politically, economically, and militarily, it is because of those millions of people who abandoned, unrecognised and unrewarded in their own homeland, chose to toil in a nation which at least recognised their potential and allowed them to blossom and prosper, in the process contributing to their rising GDP and development.


Ironically in India, no one has bothered to question the plank of social and educational backwardness on which the reservation policy is being pushed. Had the plank been justifiable, the reservation in government jobs and educational institutions would have uplifted a vast chunk of population in a broad based manner. However, the fact belies the justifiability of the much milked plank for what are largely political compulsions. According to a senior bureaucrat with the Central government, “the benefits for the scheduled tribes have been mostly pocketed by the Meena tribes of Rajsthan and by those in the North-east region. The former are the most affluent section in Rajsthan with most being landowners. The North-east tribes have never been socially backward and have still enjoyed financial assistance by the state and Central government. Scheduled caste tribes of Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Kerala, and other states were left behind in the process of social empowerment through the reservation policy,”


A Union Public Services Commission member while interviewing a candidate from the Meena tribe in an All India Services Examination was curious to know why he was claiming quota facility when he hailed from an affluent family. “You have already claimed the reservation facility in Rajsthan and now you are a sub-divisional magistrate. Why are you claiming the facility once again? The smug response was, “since the facility exists, I might as well claim it,”


A 2002 batch IAS officer had the modesty to acknowledge that it was the mindless reservation policy that allowed him entry into the prestigious IAS along with his three brothers who too would never have been able to make it had it not been for reservation. He humbly said, “I know I do not deserve to be in the service. Having been in the company of the general category students who were preparing for IAS, I could clearly see that I lagged behind in practically every area. Yet, inspite of my father being the director general of police of a state and the fact that I went to the best school in Bhopal, I still availed of the reservation policy and exploited it as a matter of right, first for IIT and then IAS.”


After 50 years of India’s independence when the practice of reservation should either have been done away with or revamped, we have in a regressive manner embarked on a path which will only lead to greater chaos and not to forget a mass exodus of talent in the form of Brain Drain. All is still not lost. The youth is a very potent force in any country, moreso in India, which is on the verge of an economic boom with the front runners being its young people.


A critical review of the policy can instill hope. Parliamentarians must rise above the small gains of petty vote bank politics and examine the efficacy of the policy in totality. “At least the government could ensure that the quota policy benefits one member in a family and the facility is taken just once in a lifetime by a beneficiary,” said a senior Indian Revenue officer, frustrated with endless benefit that the quota policy bestows on its beneficiaries. However, politics based on populism can hardly be expected to do the needful to bring in sanity in reservation based politics. It was understandable when a junior doctor sitting on hunger strike at AIIMS in the Capital bemoaned that no politician has visited them despite more than 100 of his colleagues collapsing due to the hunger strike. The hurt and disappointment of the youth who feel that they are the new untouchables, since they have taken a stand that is politically untouchable, could hurt the country’s growth and development, unless quick steps are not taken to address these specific concerns.