January 2008 Edition
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Well-off Indians are reinventing their lives by volunteering with NGOs and helping under-privileged people acquire skills and education.
Civil Society News
New Delhi
YOU walk into the Barista at the Saket PVR market complex in south Delhi, pick up a sandwich and coffee and choose to sit among the smokers in the verandah outside. Just as you settle down and take a bite, a grubby child, clad in very little despite the chilly weather, sticks out a bony hand and asks for food. What do you do? Buy the child a meal? Give your sandwich to her? Give some money to her in the hope that she will go away and leave you in peace? Pick up your plate and go inside the Barista to protect your self from such unfortunate intrusions? Or do you rudely chase the child away and continue with your meal?
Most of us, if we are ready to be frank, will admit that we have at some time or the other done all of the above. Upwardly mobile India lives in growing secession from the problems of poverty by which it is surrounded..
As the economy expands and finds ways of generating money, some of us get richer, some of the poor get less poor, but poverty does not go away. It has ways of repeatedly haunting us. If it is not the child asking for a sandwich, it could be the child performing at the traffic lights as you look on from your well-heated new car. Or it could be that family huddled together in the apartment under construction that you and your wife are checking out to put those surplus savings to good use. When poverty doesn’t thrust an unwashed face in your well-creamed one, it could be the collapse around that makes you think and shudder. Perhaps you’ve seen those filthy hospitals where nothing seems to work, the government schools that don’t have toilets, the overcrowded buses, the chaos in the courts where the search for justice is a heroic struggle….
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Rita and Umesh Anand
New Delhi
AMIDST all the journalistic churning that takes
place in India, rarely do we stop and say here is
something truly remarkable. When a Tree Shook
Delhi by Manoj Mitta and HS Phoolka is one such special
offering that turned up on our desks at Civil
Society for review.
In fact, so taken were we that we did a long interview
with Mitta and then decided to ask him to do a
piece on why they wrote the book. His piece with pictures
appears on the next two pages.
Mitta is a journalist known for his integrity. Phoolka is a lawyer with the heart of a crusader. Together they have put together the first seriously independent account of the investigations into the 1984 riots against Sikhs after Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
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IN that fateful year of 1984, I was still a student in my hometown Hyderabad.
Although I did not witness the carnage or know anybody affected by it, I somehow
could not get over the fact that such a massacre had taken place at all,
that too right in the capital. The idea of writing a book on 1984 occurred to me,
though, about three years later.
The seed of the book was planted in 1987 by a story I broke, as a rookie reporter in The Times of India, on the first ever indictment by an official probe of a Congress leader in connection with the slaughter of Sikhs.
I found myself sucked into the issue as I became privy over the next few years to a series of subtle and not-so-subtle counter- fforts by state players, including senior judges, to shield Sajjan Kumar.The nature and extent of the coverup indicated that the stakes went way beyond the fate of a solitary Congress MP. The ruling party seemed taken aback by Sajjan Kumar’s indictment, especially since it figured in the first set of cases recommended by an administrative probe conducted by one Jain-Banerjee committee.
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Kavaljit Singh
ON 19 November, the Norwegian Embassy in New Delhi received some unusual visitors. Even the police and security personnel stationed in the heavily-guarded Chanakyapuri area of Delhi where the Norwegian and other embassies are located could not figure out the purpose of these visitors. Though they were Indian citizens, ethnically they belong to a distinct tribal minority group called Dongria Kondh. Dressed in their traditional attire, these tribal representatives came all the way from the remote Niyamgiri hills of Orissa to express gratitude to the Norwegian government for removing UKbased Vedanta Resources Plc from its investment portfolio.
What was even more perplexing was that instead of protesting with placards and banners, the tribal representatives quietly met officials at the Norwegian Embassy and handed over a letter of thanks besides gifting
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Shree Padre
Kasargod
KODUNGARAPALLAM, a 38-km river, originating from the arid Attappady hills of Kerala has silently created history. After a gap of more than 30 years, the river has started to flow again. This year, it is believed, the Kodungarapallam will become perennial. Attappady in Palakkad district had thick forests earlier. Large scale deforestation by contractors and industries had turned these hill ranges into a desert.
As a result, Kodungarapallam, a tributary of river Bhavani which flows into neighbouring Tamil Nadu was reduced to a seasonal river, flowing only during the monsoon.
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Civil Society News
Sayla (Gujarat)
IT is 7 pm. Darkness descends over Mouli, a Maldhari village in Gujarat’s Surendranagar district. Inside, 16-year-old Sejal, a Maldhari girl, gets busy converting her verandah into a laboratory. She places vials on trays, pulls out a lactometer and opens a long register. A midst laughter and bonhomie, Maldhari women troop in with pots of goat’s milk.
Sejal measures each sample, noting its protein and fat content, with the eye of a dedicated scientist.The milk is then plunged into a pan. The one for goat’s milk has a green circle and the other, for cow’s milk, has a red circle. The pans are loaded onto a cart hinged to a motorcycle which clatters down the road to a cheese factory in nearby Sayla.
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Riaz Quadir
Versailles
WHILE Michael Moore’s latest diatribe, ‘Sicko’, against the American system – this time it’s healthcare system – was showing across local movie halls in Europe, France was engaged in workers’ strikes that crippled the local public transport system for the few days it lasted. Ironically, Moore was extolling the social system of the French State at the very moment it was being challenged by the new right-wing government of Nicolas Sarkozy. Not that the right-wing, left-wing label means much in this brave new globalised world.
If one wasn’t informed about his Party membership, who would have believed Tony Blair to be associated with left-wing Labour as we once knew it. Nor would they associate Lionel Jospin with the Socialist Party of France after examining the list of privatisation deals that actually took place during his watch.
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