This piece below from The Times of India (Mumbai), was published after the 26/11 attacks, and carried my views. We have just completed 2 years this November since the heinous attacks took place. Then, I had argued about the need to keep a simple yet an effective and proactive security system that relied on processes and systems rather than knee jerk responses. Though the Mumbai police has acquired bullet proof vehicles and M-16 rifles among other equipment, the level of training-to-performance conversion ratio remains doubtful (since training has mostly been absent!). The likelihood of casualties in a potential terrorist attack in future remain as high as 26/11, as the speed and alacrity of a police response might be found wanting yet again. Worse, the preparations across several cities remain woefully short on imagination, planning and delivery. For example, two years have gone by and in some cities, the NSG doesnt even possess the land that was supposed to kick off their nodal centres. Also, most state counter terrorism police units have little or no exposure to insurgency and terrorism.
Paranoia and panic, which have shorter memory, have once again been replaced by inertia and indifference. Neither have proved a good antidote in initiating adequate security measures, let alone bring in solidity in counter terrorism delivery.
Read the Times piece below...
Times of India
TNN, Dec 8, 2008
THANE: The 26/11 terror strikes seem to have spurred a blind rush to purchase hi-tech gadgets, with government agencies and corporates set to spend crores to enhance security measures.
In Thane, the civic body is understood to have sanctioned Rs 90 lakh to buy 60 CCTV sets, 100 mounted cameras, 14 multi-zone metal detectors, door-frame metal detectors and vehicle-checking machines, among other equipment. The gadgets will be installed at municipal hospitals, auditoriums, ward offices and so on.
The terror attacks have also compelled several commercial establishments, including hotels and cooperative banks, in the city to consider spending on security systems.
Counter-terrorism experts, however, do not think that installing sophisticated surveillance and security systems will reduce the risk. "The terrorist is a mercenary on a mission. His strategy is low-tech with high impact. Hi-tech gadgets will not deter him as he uses infantry tactics to penetrate the defence and cause maximum damage,'' said Probal Dasgupta, a former major in the Indian Army who had seen combat in the Northeast and Jammu & Kashmir.
The former member of the Gorkha regiment said there was an urgent need for a military-cum-management approach to security. "Unless we have an integrated security plan, where hi-tech devices are complimented by specially trained and skilled manpower, the crores spent to provide business to security agencies and vendors hawking their products will prove futile,'' Dasgupta said.
Driving home the point, he said the terrorists who launched coordinated attacks in Mumbai broke all lines of defence at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. "They got in with ease despite the metal detectors and armed personnel. Their only expenditure was on satellite phones. Equally audacious and low-tech was the 9/11 attack in the US where terrorists armed only with box-cutters used aircraft and rammed them into the twin towers. Their only expenditure was on prior pilot training and purchase of flight tickets,'' he said.
"Their strategy is to keep it simple, search for gaps in the security systems and cause mass casualty. The US had the best control over their airspace and the best of hi-tech gizmos. Nonetheless, the gaps were exposed to the hilt and an assault carried out successfully,'' Dasgupta said.
Most public spaces are vulnerable to attacks in spite of the presence of door-frame metal detectors and armed policemen. "The metal detectors are located inside the premises and the police personnel, too, sit inside. Once inside, the terrorist is not going to wait to get caught and will just open fire, as happened at CST on November 26,'' he said, adding that hi-tech devices with low-tech supervision and manpower would result in chaos.
According to him, it is vital to provide regular training to the security personnel and equipping them with the right weapons. "Training them to engage the terrorist in a gun-battle so as to rattle him is mandatory. The terrorist caught at Girgaum Chowpatty was caught because of the resistance put up by the police, which left him confused and ducking for cover,'' Dasgupta said.
Moreover, there is a need for regular shooting practice. "The accuracy of a weapon gets affected if it is not used for long. To avoid dealignment of the weapon, it is important that the police are exposed to firing all sorts of weapons every quarter,'' he told TOI. Dasgupta stressed the need to create a special corp of police trained for such operations. "The civilian police are unable to tackle such incidents and too much time is lost in calling the special forces. The gap between the police and special forces should be filled in by creating a separate armed corp of the police to deal with situations such as the Mumbai terror strikes,'' he added.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Airborne in Airports
Aviation in India seems to move at the speed of light these days. Time was when air travel in a domestic carrier was subject to the wishes of the mandarins that roamed those innovatively named counters called customer services. The customer would service the airlines and its indeterminable flying schedules by having to change his routine, route or reactions to travel cancellations, delays and unpredictability – not necessarily in that order.
The travails would continue till he touched down on the right airport. The question of landing a flight on the correct airport tarmac may cause you to wonder whether all that which went up in the name of Indian Airlines came down at the designated place on earth. Almost always, I assume. Which is not that bad a record. A personal experience that I went through, some years ago, prompted me to include this uncertainty as one of the hurdles one had to cross before you were assured of walking across the arrival lounge with your head held high instead of being retrieved from a corn field, having been mistaken for a MIG-21 pilot!
I was on a flight from Calcutta to Agartala (Tripura) around eleven years ago. We had flown over Bangladesh (the Indo-Bangla border incidentally, runs along the outer wall of the Agartala airport) when the announcement had just been made that the plane would be landing in a few minutes. Peering out the window, I took in the quaint landscape that breathed through the rolling countryside down below.
The plane descended sharply and touched down with the rattle of an oxcart traveling across the dry Tons river of Dehradun (where the whole world's pebbles seem to exist underfoot)! As soon as it did land, it swung this way and that, and then all of a sudden, picked up speed and dash on the tarmac, the kind that you would associate with a nervous space shuttle challenger taking off, when chased by Osama and his suicide bombers.
In a flash, the plane aimed its nose towards the stars and was hurtling up the sky like a diarrhoea-hit rocket, keen to complete its job before it got worse! I don’t know what a diarrhoea-hit rocket looks like, but I sure now know how passengers sitting inside such flying objects look! I was facing the sky as the angle changed (as did all my fellow passengers). A couple of unlucky, embarrassed ones burst out rather untimely from inside their toilets, wrenched out during the process of undressing. And all of a sudden, the plane was climbing as if it had been released from Cape Canaveral and in a moment, the earth was due to appear like a little irrelevant dot in the distance! Though Columbia hadn’t crashed till then, you could spot the ghosts of the Kandahar hijacking being re-run in everybody’s eyes!
This continued for a few minutes, as the shocked passengers regained composure and demanded to know why they were being forced to become unwilling astronauts. It seemed there were few people, if any, in the aircraft that day who knew the right answers. And the crew was certainly not one of them. The aircraft regained its regular trajectory soon after and proceeded to land safely, although without as much as an apology from the people who flew us. It was only later did the news come through that the initial landing had happened at a wrong, unauthorized airfield, used originally for World War II purposes.
My first reaction was that I had now known what it was to have flown with a modern day Don Quixote as a pilot – someone who was still doing duties as a fighter pilot against the Japs almost sixty years on, and had landed on a World War strip after flying like he was doing a valiant dogfight manouevre. The Agartala airport is a storehouse of many anecdotes, most of which can be left for another day.
Though private airlines have sped up travel and customer service (safety is still a concern), the one thing that refuses to change is the audio system in most airports in India. The funny aspect is that each time such a cacophony would start off in the airport, conversations would die and everyone would be hooked onto this incomprehensible balderdash. Immediately afterwards, people’s faces would contort; they would either be asking each other for clarification of the audio-message through silent messages or would be blasting the sound system as the announcement ended, depending on the level of urgency about catching a flight. Some years ago, Amar Bose of Bose Sound Systems offered to rework the noisy systems at our international airports for free, as a gift to his country of birth. The offer was turned down for unexplained reasons. The result is that the country that has produced the innovations of Bose still prefers noise to sound.
The Mumbai airport may have changed a lot but the approach from the sky hasnt! An incident I particularly remember is when I had to sit with the pilots in the cockpit since the airlines had sold one seat more than what could be accommodated! These were pre-911 times when aeroplanes still landed on flat pieces of earth rather than vertical objects of concrete and steel. Since they ran out of seats, I was happy to volunteer for a seat in the cockpit when offered one. The flight was bound for Mumbai and the pilot, a former Air Force officer, was generous enough to show me how the controls functioned and what those blinking lights all over the panels meant.
When we were about to land, I struggled to find the runway as all I could see was hundreds of shanties, hutments and chawls huddled together right under where I presumed the wheels of the airplane may have been. As I almost braced myself for a crash landing, and this time in the airport of the finance capital of modern India rather than a deserted World War II runway, out came from the miles and miles of shanties below, a black line that seemed at first to be a narrow lane between two rows of hutments. The line grew thicker and thicker and broader into a strip of road. The shanties around kept growing bigger too and I saw long rows of people, crouched like Wimbledon ball-boys, distanced at strategically planned intervals, and relieving themselves – the noise and wind of a passing airplane perhaps conditioning nature’s call. The strip kept growing till it emerged as the full-fledged tarmac of Mumbai’s Santa Cruz airport – the doorway to the emerging economic power of the world where I eventually landed.
The travails would continue till he touched down on the right airport. The question of landing a flight on the correct airport tarmac may cause you to wonder whether all that which went up in the name of Indian Airlines came down at the designated place on earth. Almost always, I assume. Which is not that bad a record. A personal experience that I went through, some years ago, prompted me to include this uncertainty as one of the hurdles one had to cross before you were assured of walking across the arrival lounge with your head held high instead of being retrieved from a corn field, having been mistaken for a MIG-21 pilot!
I was on a flight from Calcutta to Agartala (Tripura) around eleven years ago. We had flown over Bangladesh (the Indo-Bangla border incidentally, runs along the outer wall of the Agartala airport) when the announcement had just been made that the plane would be landing in a few minutes. Peering out the window, I took in the quaint landscape that breathed through the rolling countryside down below.
The plane descended sharply and touched down with the rattle of an oxcart traveling across the dry Tons river of Dehradun (where the whole world's pebbles seem to exist underfoot)! As soon as it did land, it swung this way and that, and then all of a sudden, picked up speed and dash on the tarmac, the kind that you would associate with a nervous space shuttle challenger taking off, when chased by Osama and his suicide bombers.
In a flash, the plane aimed its nose towards the stars and was hurtling up the sky like a diarrhoea-hit rocket, keen to complete its job before it got worse! I don’t know what a diarrhoea-hit rocket looks like, but I sure now know how passengers sitting inside such flying objects look! I was facing the sky as the angle changed (as did all my fellow passengers). A couple of unlucky, embarrassed ones burst out rather untimely from inside their toilets, wrenched out during the process of undressing. And all of a sudden, the plane was climbing as if it had been released from Cape Canaveral and in a moment, the earth was due to appear like a little irrelevant dot in the distance! Though Columbia hadn’t crashed till then, you could spot the ghosts of the Kandahar hijacking being re-run in everybody’s eyes!
This continued for a few minutes, as the shocked passengers regained composure and demanded to know why they were being forced to become unwilling astronauts. It seemed there were few people, if any, in the aircraft that day who knew the right answers. And the crew was certainly not one of them. The aircraft regained its regular trajectory soon after and proceeded to land safely, although without as much as an apology from the people who flew us. It was only later did the news come through that the initial landing had happened at a wrong, unauthorized airfield, used originally for World War II purposes.
My first reaction was that I had now known what it was to have flown with a modern day Don Quixote as a pilot – someone who was still doing duties as a fighter pilot against the Japs almost sixty years on, and had landed on a World War strip after flying like he was doing a valiant dogfight manouevre. The Agartala airport is a storehouse of many anecdotes, most of which can be left for another day.
Though private airlines have sped up travel and customer service (safety is still a concern), the one thing that refuses to change is the audio system in most airports in India. The funny aspect is that each time such a cacophony would start off in the airport, conversations would die and everyone would be hooked onto this incomprehensible balderdash. Immediately afterwards, people’s faces would contort; they would either be asking each other for clarification of the audio-message through silent messages or would be blasting the sound system as the announcement ended, depending on the level of urgency about catching a flight. Some years ago, Amar Bose of Bose Sound Systems offered to rework the noisy systems at our international airports for free, as a gift to his country of birth. The offer was turned down for unexplained reasons. The result is that the country that has produced the innovations of Bose still prefers noise to sound.
The Mumbai airport may have changed a lot but the approach from the sky hasnt! An incident I particularly remember is when I had to sit with the pilots in the cockpit since the airlines had sold one seat more than what could be accommodated! These were pre-911 times when aeroplanes still landed on flat pieces of earth rather than vertical objects of concrete and steel. Since they ran out of seats, I was happy to volunteer for a seat in the cockpit when offered one. The flight was bound for Mumbai and the pilot, a former Air Force officer, was generous enough to show me how the controls functioned and what those blinking lights all over the panels meant.
When we were about to land, I struggled to find the runway as all I could see was hundreds of shanties, hutments and chawls huddled together right under where I presumed the wheels of the airplane may have been. As I almost braced myself for a crash landing, and this time in the airport of the finance capital of modern India rather than a deserted World War II runway, out came from the miles and miles of shanties below, a black line that seemed at first to be a narrow lane between two rows of hutments. The line grew thicker and thicker and broader into a strip of road. The shanties around kept growing bigger too and I saw long rows of people, crouched like Wimbledon ball-boys, distanced at strategically planned intervals, and relieving themselves – the noise and wind of a passing airplane perhaps conditioning nature’s call. The strip kept growing till it emerged as the full-fledged tarmac of Mumbai’s Santa Cruz airport – the doorway to the emerging economic power of the world where I eventually landed.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
A Degree in Terror
The nature of professions has diversified in the last few years at a phenomenal rate. You name a sector and you can find it - software, energy, fashion, cuisine, networking, diverse consulting and terrorism. The last named has obviously recorded a higher rate of growth than the others - the demand and supply mechanisms chugging along at a frenetic pace, each one keeping up with the other.
Career opportunities have risen sharply since terrorism as a profession has made some stupendous strides in the last few years. Earlier you could be a terrorist by just signing up with one of those lunatic organizations and agreeing to blow up some obscure building in Beirut. However, most of the times you ended up neither blowing the building nor yourself, but ended up having your picture on the front pages of newspapers - peering out from the pages like a lousy idiot who had bungled! Things became more specialized since the 1990s as the profession began to become more corporatised and better funded. A terror grad could now travel to better places worldwide and get televised coverage flying over Wall Street.
Endowment guarantees from that other Buffet: Bin Laid-on, the Oracle of Osama from the Bin Laid-on Terror Monger Associates brought in the money that could hire eminent Pyongyang trained professors like AQ (AQ for Albert Qaida) Khan who were otherwise consigned to becoming dangerous ‘nuclear wastes’. You could specialize in fudging facts, snuffing lives, distorting facts as well as lives. As the money came in, career placements became more assured and internships at crucial ‘hedge’ funds like the Lash-e-Toybar and with relocation industry experts like the Deadwood Ibrahim’s D (D for Democratic) Company Associates helped serious aspirants. Afghanistan soon replaced US as a popular student destination where bren drain (from the word bren gun) helped research on how to create market explosions, how to make skyscrapers out of oil prices and make rubble pieces out of existing skyscrapers.
When my friend along with a career counseling team visited the other IIT - International Institute of Terrorism in West Pakistan (run by the Taliban, ISI fogies and out-of office generals), they were astonished to see that there were indeed innovative education themes to ‘inculcate’ a real learning experience. They met with the Dean of the International Institute of Terrorism (IIT). The Dean was a well-traveled professional who specialized in altering flight paths of airplanes, even while traveling as a passenger! He suggested they take a look at the mathematics and international relations exams for the school that was taking place the same day.
As they walked into the class where the exam was being held, they found in bold lettering on the blackboard some very important rules of the exam.
It read...
i) Students found copying will be shot on the spot.
ii) Any student coming in late after 10 minutes after the exam starts will be shot on the leg (wounds will be tended to, after the exam is over).
iii) AK-47s and Automatic Grenade Launchers are not allowed in the exam hall and its considered bad manners to ask permission for the same.
I am told it was not all harsh though. There were some concessions too. The exam proctor announced to loud cheers that students could keep their personal items like daggers, grenades, revolvers and the bombs they were carrying, as long as they postponed their use till the exams got over!
There were about fifty students taking the exam. You could tell they were amongst the brightest - you could feel the warmth of a dazzle that had the promise to set alight a house even without a matchstick!
My friend was given a copy of the question paper as the bright young fellows set about their task. As he rummaged through the questions, there were a few facts that caught the eye.
The Dean came forward and gave some solid figures about the stats they were targeting. "We have tied up with a company named Albert Qeda Kidnapping & Endgame Bajao Private Limited. They have a good record of threatening 100000 people per month over Telephone. 10% of the people they threaten are cinema stars in Mumbai (this also includes stars that have retired after 1 film and are earning their pension in Malad), 30% are Israeli businessman settled across the world (of which 29.6% worked for Mossad at some time in their lives), 20% are American tourists (in which 1.9% voted for the winning candidate in the last elections), 0.3% are Danes (which constitutes the total population in that country, including cartoonists and expat Danes), 5% are Brits (4% of which are celebrities who are protesting against landmines), 15% are in the Pakistani government (4% of which have been photographed with the current President), the rest include ex-communists, Hollywood guys, Chennai shopkeepers, judges and innocents."
There were those ones that tested your knowledge of international relations. This one, for instance. Question: If Israeli installations are attacked, there’s a 5% chance of success. On top of it, there’s a 100% chance of Israeli retaliation on our bases. If US installations are attacked, there’s a 100% chance of success but then there’s a 100% chance of our base being accidentally retaliated upon. What were the figures for India? This question had the maximum marks. The examiner told the answer to my friend. If Indian installations are attacked, there’s a 60% chance of success, 40% chance of getting caught, 0% chance of our base being attacked but 100% chances of Indians arguing amongst themselves and writing books about what caused such a terrorist attack in the first place. And of course, 100% increase in prison maintenance costs for India if these terror professionals were ever caught, smiled the Dean.
(As imagined by the author)
Career opportunities have risen sharply since terrorism as a profession has made some stupendous strides in the last few years. Earlier you could be a terrorist by just signing up with one of those lunatic organizations and agreeing to blow up some obscure building in Beirut. However, most of the times you ended up neither blowing the building nor yourself, but ended up having your picture on the front pages of newspapers - peering out from the pages like a lousy idiot who had bungled! Things became more specialized since the 1990s as the profession began to become more corporatised and better funded. A terror grad could now travel to better places worldwide and get televised coverage flying over Wall Street.
Endowment guarantees from that other Buffet: Bin Laid-on, the Oracle of Osama from the Bin Laid-on Terror Monger Associates brought in the money that could hire eminent Pyongyang trained professors like AQ (AQ for Albert Qaida) Khan who were otherwise consigned to becoming dangerous ‘nuclear wastes’. You could specialize in fudging facts, snuffing lives, distorting facts as well as lives. As the money came in, career placements became more assured and internships at crucial ‘hedge’ funds like the Lash-e-Toybar and with relocation industry experts like the Deadwood Ibrahim’s D (D for Democratic) Company Associates helped serious aspirants. Afghanistan soon replaced US as a popular student destination where bren drain (from the word bren gun) helped research on how to create market explosions, how to make skyscrapers out of oil prices and make rubble pieces out of existing skyscrapers.
When my friend along with a career counseling team visited the other IIT - International Institute of Terrorism in West Pakistan (run by the Taliban, ISI fogies and out-of office generals), they were astonished to see that there were indeed innovative education themes to ‘inculcate’ a real learning experience. They met with the Dean of the International Institute of Terrorism (IIT). The Dean was a well-traveled professional who specialized in altering flight paths of airplanes, even while traveling as a passenger! He suggested they take a look at the mathematics and international relations exams for the school that was taking place the same day.
As they walked into the class where the exam was being held, they found in bold lettering on the blackboard some very important rules of the exam.
It read...
i) Students found copying will be shot on the spot.
ii) Any student coming in late after 10 minutes after the exam starts will be shot on the leg (wounds will be tended to, after the exam is over).
iii) AK-47s and Automatic Grenade Launchers are not allowed in the exam hall and its considered bad manners to ask permission for the same.
I am told it was not all harsh though. There were some concessions too. The exam proctor announced to loud cheers that students could keep their personal items like daggers, grenades, revolvers and the bombs they were carrying, as long as they postponed their use till the exams got over!
There were about fifty students taking the exam. You could tell they were amongst the brightest - you could feel the warmth of a dazzle that had the promise to set alight a house even without a matchstick!
My friend was given a copy of the question paper as the bright young fellows set about their task. As he rummaged through the questions, there were a few facts that caught the eye.
The Dean came forward and gave some solid figures about the stats they were targeting. "We have tied up with a company named Albert Qeda Kidnapping & Endgame Bajao Private Limited. They have a good record of threatening 100000 people per month over Telephone. 10% of the people they threaten are cinema stars in Mumbai (this also includes stars that have retired after 1 film and are earning their pension in Malad), 30% are Israeli businessman settled across the world (of which 29.6% worked for Mossad at some time in their lives), 20% are American tourists (in which 1.9% voted for the winning candidate in the last elections), 0.3% are Danes (which constitutes the total population in that country, including cartoonists and expat Danes), 5% are Brits (4% of which are celebrities who are protesting against landmines), 15% are in the Pakistani government (4% of which have been photographed with the current President), the rest include ex-communists, Hollywood guys, Chennai shopkeepers, judges and innocents."
There were those ones that tested your knowledge of international relations. This one, for instance. Question: If Israeli installations are attacked, there’s a 5% chance of success. On top of it, there’s a 100% chance of Israeli retaliation on our bases. If US installations are attacked, there’s a 100% chance of success but then there’s a 100% chance of our base being accidentally retaliated upon. What were the figures for India? This question had the maximum marks. The examiner told the answer to my friend. If Indian installations are attacked, there’s a 60% chance of success, 40% chance of getting caught, 0% chance of our base being attacked but 100% chances of Indians arguing amongst themselves and writing books about what caused such a terrorist attack in the first place. And of course, 100% increase in prison maintenance costs for India if these terror professionals were ever caught, smiled the Dean.
(As imagined by the author)
Loins and Tigers
Have you ever noticed that we as a people, in the subcontinent, always seem to liken ourselves, in many metaphorical ways, to the family of big cats. Nothing less. There is the happy phenomenon of humans preferring to choose tigers as companions closer to themselves, more than with their predecessor monkeys, in a case of self-styled kinship.
History and the anthropological sciences have firmly established the connection between the simian family and the transformation to its current avatar. Therefore it is impossible to see what lies in common between a four-legged, roaring, 400 pound symbol of fearsome terror and a two legged, cringing, 120-plus pound, double-talking, social-climbing symbol of unpredictability! Perhaps, its a proud yearning to be compared to the big cat that prompts humans to convert a tiger or a lion into a facebook friend.
So, when Gurcharan Das proceeded to compare India with a giant, lumbering elephant than an aggressive, stalking tiger in his book –The Elephant Paradigm, he may have had hit the bull’s eye in terms of the right description but I have known people who didn’t quite seem impressed when told that India is like an elephant.
“Do you know India is not like a tiger”
“Yeah? Really? Whats India like, then?”
“Ëlephant …because it is big, moves slowly but surely.”
The expression that exploded on their faces was similar to the one big stars have when given a rear seat in an important cine awards ceremony.
What is this fetish for tigers that we are so quick to label people who we like as tigers or shers. I have often wondered why it can’t be horses or giraffes! Or, why not elephants, since we are trying to examine whether we, as a nation are more like elephants. Lets see this. You would sometimes pat your friend on the back praising his tough qualities (especially if you are from northern India) and exclaim, “ Oe ye toh sher hai.” Instead, try saying “Oe ye toh hathi hai,” and brace up for his response which I can assure you will be unsavoury at worst and unpleasant at best (depending upon his mood and body mass index), despite your well intentioned and creative praise! And to rub salt into your wounds, people will tell you how wrong you were in insulting a friend, despite your logic that you were merely replacing one regal species of the animal kingdom with another – an elephant at that, which is bigger, wiser and definitely more appropriate in this case.
I once noticed how a friend, who is gifted with a towering height, felt deeply offended when someone referred, in another such well meaning moment, to his young son as having the potential to be a giraffe like his father. Taking severe offence to such a reference to the spotted animal, he recounted how he pejoratively thought of the person making the remark as nothing short of a hippopotamus (given the similarity of physical frame). I fully appreciate the concerns of a father who wants the best of the animal world for his son, However, isn’t it strange how we feel for the big cat as if it was waiting to be compared to us.
Remember the none-too-pleasant comparisons we hear about people. An owl is said to be wise but ulloo ki tarah is not exactly how you would like your wisdom to be assessed. A dog is a man’s best friend but the phrase kutte jaisa doesn’t necessarily gift you with a certificate of a close pal. A donkey carries heavy load but let me know whether you found any tireless, hardworking homo sapien remotely willing to be associated with our braying hero. A lot has already been said about the monkey and the elephant. Bandar jaisa will mean you haven’t as yet graduated from your tree dwelling. But sher jaisa will almost certainly split your mouth wide open, as if you are too modest to be compared with our regal, carnivorous friend. Perhaps the reason lies in our overwhelming fondness for the majesty of kings and dynasties!
Surely its not something that we believe has come up overnight. What about our past? Remember the people whom we praised, admired and were enamoured of, ones we referred to as tigers or lions. Mansur Pataudi, the Indian cricket captain of the 60s with one eye and a brave heart was a rare tiger – an endangered species in the sport in India even today, Sheikh Abdullah, the lion of Kashmir was made out to be the only sher that survived the snow in the valley, in the days when tourists (later substituted by terrorists) trekked Gulmarg and AK47 was just an innocuous number plate on cars. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and Lala Lajpat Rai were all big cats who bearded the British lions in their den. Even the silver screen had a loin (never mind the mispronounced, ungainly, cringe worthy physiological reference)– Ajit , whose bristling dialogues were the stuff that inspires modern corporate lingo to this day – especially useful in issuing severe reprimands during performance assessment (Raabert , isko microprocessor me daal do, bit by bit pink-slip mil jayega) and tough takeover deals (Peter, yeh takeover nahi chahta toh ise overtake kar lo). Imagine this entire obsession with the big cats despite the warnings of one Jim Corbett in Man-eaters of Kumaon.
People and structures of all hues have received the epithet – be it terror types like the Tamil Tigers and Tiger Memon (of the Bombay blasts) or dhabas on way from Delhi to Chandigarh, most of them bearing that ubiquitous name - Shere e Punjab! This leads me to believe the word sher has a more imposing ring to it than the word tiger or lion (unless you pronounced it like Ajit). It is more daunting, commanding and has a directness to it.
A friend once told me a story of two Shers in a village near Lahore during the pre-partition era. The village had a direct battle to elect its chief and there were two contenders to it - Sher Singh and Sher Khan. When the debate ensued, Sher Singh sold the line to the villagers that he was mightier since he was blessed with two big cats in his name – sher and singh. Which meant he was equal to two shers! The people bought the line. He won and was duly elected the chief of the village - Sheron Wali Gali. And his grandson, who narrated the story to me, carries the mane. Shamsher Singh – that’s the name! Some Sher this!
History and the anthropological sciences have firmly established the connection between the simian family and the transformation to its current avatar. Therefore it is impossible to see what lies in common between a four-legged, roaring, 400 pound symbol of fearsome terror and a two legged, cringing, 120-plus pound, double-talking, social-climbing symbol of unpredictability! Perhaps, its a proud yearning to be compared to the big cat that prompts humans to convert a tiger or a lion into a facebook friend.
So, when Gurcharan Das proceeded to compare India with a giant, lumbering elephant than an aggressive, stalking tiger in his book –The Elephant Paradigm, he may have had hit the bull’s eye in terms of the right description but I have known people who didn’t quite seem impressed when told that India is like an elephant.
“Do you know India is not like a tiger”
“Yeah? Really? Whats India like, then?”
“Ëlephant …because it is big, moves slowly but surely.”
The expression that exploded on their faces was similar to the one big stars have when given a rear seat in an important cine awards ceremony.
What is this fetish for tigers that we are so quick to label people who we like as tigers or shers. I have often wondered why it can’t be horses or giraffes! Or, why not elephants, since we are trying to examine whether we, as a nation are more like elephants. Lets see this. You would sometimes pat your friend on the back praising his tough qualities (especially if you are from northern India) and exclaim, “ Oe ye toh sher hai.” Instead, try saying “Oe ye toh hathi hai,” and brace up for his response which I can assure you will be unsavoury at worst and unpleasant at best (depending upon his mood and body mass index), despite your well intentioned and creative praise! And to rub salt into your wounds, people will tell you how wrong you were in insulting a friend, despite your logic that you were merely replacing one regal species of the animal kingdom with another – an elephant at that, which is bigger, wiser and definitely more appropriate in this case.
I once noticed how a friend, who is gifted with a towering height, felt deeply offended when someone referred, in another such well meaning moment, to his young son as having the potential to be a giraffe like his father. Taking severe offence to such a reference to the spotted animal, he recounted how he pejoratively thought of the person making the remark as nothing short of a hippopotamus (given the similarity of physical frame). I fully appreciate the concerns of a father who wants the best of the animal world for his son, However, isn’t it strange how we feel for the big cat as if it was waiting to be compared to us.
Remember the none-too-pleasant comparisons we hear about people. An owl is said to be wise but ulloo ki tarah is not exactly how you would like your wisdom to be assessed. A dog is a man’s best friend but the phrase kutte jaisa doesn’t necessarily gift you with a certificate of a close pal. A donkey carries heavy load but let me know whether you found any tireless, hardworking homo sapien remotely willing to be associated with our braying hero. A lot has already been said about the monkey and the elephant. Bandar jaisa will mean you haven’t as yet graduated from your tree dwelling. But sher jaisa will almost certainly split your mouth wide open, as if you are too modest to be compared with our regal, carnivorous friend. Perhaps the reason lies in our overwhelming fondness for the majesty of kings and dynasties!
Surely its not something that we believe has come up overnight. What about our past? Remember the people whom we praised, admired and were enamoured of, ones we referred to as tigers or lions. Mansur Pataudi, the Indian cricket captain of the 60s with one eye and a brave heart was a rare tiger – an endangered species in the sport in India even today, Sheikh Abdullah, the lion of Kashmir was made out to be the only sher that survived the snow in the valley, in the days when tourists (later substituted by terrorists) trekked Gulmarg and AK47 was just an innocuous number plate on cars. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and Lala Lajpat Rai were all big cats who bearded the British lions in their den. Even the silver screen had a loin (never mind the mispronounced, ungainly, cringe worthy physiological reference)– Ajit , whose bristling dialogues were the stuff that inspires modern corporate lingo to this day – especially useful in issuing severe reprimands during performance assessment (Raabert , isko microprocessor me daal do, bit by bit pink-slip mil jayega) and tough takeover deals (Peter, yeh takeover nahi chahta toh ise overtake kar lo). Imagine this entire obsession with the big cats despite the warnings of one Jim Corbett in Man-eaters of Kumaon.
People and structures of all hues have received the epithet – be it terror types like the Tamil Tigers and Tiger Memon (of the Bombay blasts) or dhabas on way from Delhi to Chandigarh, most of them bearing that ubiquitous name - Shere e Punjab! This leads me to believe the word sher has a more imposing ring to it than the word tiger or lion (unless you pronounced it like Ajit). It is more daunting, commanding and has a directness to it.
A friend once told me a story of two Shers in a village near Lahore during the pre-partition era. The village had a direct battle to elect its chief and there were two contenders to it - Sher Singh and Sher Khan. When the debate ensued, Sher Singh sold the line to the villagers that he was mightier since he was blessed with two big cats in his name – sher and singh. Which meant he was equal to two shers! The people bought the line. He won and was duly elected the chief of the village - Sheron Wali Gali. And his grandson, who narrated the story to me, carries the mane. Shamsher Singh – that’s the name! Some Sher this!
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Pain in the Asphalt
Two years ago, while walking by a street in New Delhi, I came across a Swedish family huddled at a zebra crossing before a malfunctioning traffic junction, waiting interminably for the mass of speeding cars to give them the right of pedestrian way. Sensing that such a wait could only be successful once the cows came home by evening, or if a cat happened to scamper across the road, I suggested that they eye the approaching cars, judge their speeds, maintain a good safety space and tactfully dodge past them. Much like the casual, artful manner by which we Indians do it, without the cars needing to either apply brakes or lower their speeds.
The zebra crossing, once an indication of the area of pedestrian passage, is now a colonial relic converted into a street art of wildlife conservation representing the striped quadruped in its abstract form. Its diminishing utility is indicative of the chaos that describes roads and traffic in the country.
Adaptation of traffic rules across the country is perhaps one common bond in a sea of chaos. The pedestrian rules too are inked with the same pen. Here, cows and buffaloes have a greater right of ambling, loitering, strolling along or across roads or even sunbathing at busy junctions, a right of passage and occupancy that all vehicles accord them under a mutually acceptable and universally unstated code.
This phenomenon of a flourishing animal life on all motorable roads is a particularly true in north and central India. It is not entirely out of place to use buffalo-stations as landmarks – “Take the main road. You will reach a herd of buffaloes basking in afternoon siesta; take a left from there…”. In places like Mathura, Jabalpur, Kanpur etc you can often see an entire traffic use a masticating, pensive cow as a roundabout at a tri-junction crossing. The cat may be a less preferred domesticated pet than a dog but is a sure traffic-stopper! While stray dogs face the wrath of onrushing vehicles, the crossing of a road by a cat forces the reverse gear (otherwise a rarely applied poor cousin of the fourth gear) to come to life.
Traffic rules have versatile interpretations, ranging from the subtly wayward ways in Mumbai to the downright unabashed transgressions in UP, Andhra et al. In smaller towns, you will be surprised to find a whole convoy of uncomplaining, slow moving traffic led by a bored, creaking ox-cart or a herd of frolicking goats. You will probably be misled by such methods of enforced speed limits into believing that time is perhaps not an entirely important consideration. That’s when you will find the motorbikes and other two-wheelers dancing, weaving and dribbling their contraptions past all kinds of obstacles (which includes other vehicles, large animals on an after-meal stroll or sunbathing, smaller ones like stray-dogs, unmindful pedestrians, potholes, manholes, , beggars, hawkers and any other impediment on the road) with a speed, daredevilry and dexterity that can only be matched by the samba rhythm of Brazilian soccer stars. Or by a Lionel Messi.
The traffic congestion has inspired the noisy legacy of the Great Indian Horny Traffic. The horn in this respect has stimulated memorable graffiti to adorn the rears of trucks and lorries. Reading stuff like ‘Honk before you make a pass’ may originally seem like a chronicle in reverse! ‘Use dipper at night’ obviously assumes your awareness of the presence of a dipper on your car! There are those ludicrous ones too, like the one I once saw - ‘Clap if you don’t have a horn.’ Or the aggressively prophetic –‘Buri nazar wala tera muh kala.’ Or the ubiquitous ‘hum do, hamare do.’ Which can perhaps also mean it takes two of us to tango on the road!
The sight of waiting vehicles at a signal playing a cacophony of beeps and toots reminds you of the music of Viva, the former all-girl band. It’s a novel, aggregated imploration through sounds meant to persuade a change in the traffic signal. The signal lights have little relevance except for some places like Mumbai. Red means to drive slowly, orange indicates the need to change gear and green stands for 60kmph. In some places like Raipur in Chattisgarh and Ahmedabad, cycle-rickshaw drivers use legs to indicate the direction they wish to turn. So if you are trailing behind a cycle-rickshaw there and you see a leg jutting out, know there are humans in there and don’t be fooled.
Most of the driving that we do on roads is dictated by other people. You may be happily zipping on a one-way lane till forced into an unprepared pit-stop upon seeing the bumbling figure of a clumsy rider, having stumbled into a wrong lane, making his way on your windscreen. You may find an auto-rickshaw attempting to overtake your car, making you wonder whether you were actually a Minardi up against a Ferrari in disguise. To not overtake or be easily overtaken is to surrender the gender supremacy of your automobile, never mind the flouting of some irrelevant road rules. One visit to the RTO to see how the driving licenses are doled out will enlighten you on the need to disbelieve in the assumption of invincibility bequeathed to you by your driving license.
Safety has never been a concept on our roads. Speed breakers are more designed to break your bones. I have been on a cab in Calcutta where the driver had a seatbelt in the form of an old piece of sari-cloth. Seatbelts are a must, even on ponderously slow Calcutta roads. Considering the speed and smoothness of ride that roads permit there, the seat-belt protects your head more from the knocks it is likely to receive through regular bumps against the roof of the car rather than from a high-voltage crash. About the autorikshaws all over the country, the less said the better. Their presence has often been likened to cockroaches, but unlike the domestic insect that can survive a nuclear holocaust; this three-wheeled demon can cause one by breathing clouds of smoke, causing traffic snarls and generally negotiating roads as if playing a videogame. The roadies that surpass them are the Delhi buses – inoffensively named blueline and redline - with unstoppable speedometers, unscheduled stops and carrying unapologetic threats to mortals all around.
In cities like Mumbai, the traffic gets worse in the suburbs with the onset of monsoons. India’s commercial capital appears squalid on the roads and the difference between potholes and manholes gets reduced more to one of spelling than depth! The non-existent sidewalks reappear in the form of frighteningly open gutters that spew unmentionables. Every year I get the feeling that the bored authorities love drilling holes into roads. Digging for oil or for fun (as an advertisement hoarding says)? The Western Express highway, originally meant to allow for quick, hassle-free travel, often resembles the world’s largest garage from an aerial view– with a frozen pilgrimage of bored automobiles. It heads west alright but the middle name express is a criminal misnomer. The road signs require you to be a winner of one of those ‘spot the ball contests’ in order to spot and read them. To figure out a no-parking area from a parking lot becomes tricky. Traffic junctions look like the rush and charge of Jewish vehicles out of Palestine.
The Mumbai-Pune highway, the Delhi-Jaipur highway and the Golden Quadrangle may be a few silver linings on the tarmac, but it is the state of inner city roads and traffic that needs attention. Till then, we may end up spending most of our time seeing red and cursing the scars around the bends and curves that make for a backbreaking roller-coaster ride.
The zebra crossing, once an indication of the area of pedestrian passage, is now a colonial relic converted into a street art of wildlife conservation representing the striped quadruped in its abstract form. Its diminishing utility is indicative of the chaos that describes roads and traffic in the country.
Adaptation of traffic rules across the country is perhaps one common bond in a sea of chaos. The pedestrian rules too are inked with the same pen. Here, cows and buffaloes have a greater right of ambling, loitering, strolling along or across roads or even sunbathing at busy junctions, a right of passage and occupancy that all vehicles accord them under a mutually acceptable and universally unstated code.
This phenomenon of a flourishing animal life on all motorable roads is a particularly true in north and central India. It is not entirely out of place to use buffalo-stations as landmarks – “Take the main road. You will reach a herd of buffaloes basking in afternoon siesta; take a left from there…”. In places like Mathura, Jabalpur, Kanpur etc you can often see an entire traffic use a masticating, pensive cow as a roundabout at a tri-junction crossing. The cat may be a less preferred domesticated pet than a dog but is a sure traffic-stopper! While stray dogs face the wrath of onrushing vehicles, the crossing of a road by a cat forces the reverse gear (otherwise a rarely applied poor cousin of the fourth gear) to come to life.
Traffic rules have versatile interpretations, ranging from the subtly wayward ways in Mumbai to the downright unabashed transgressions in UP, Andhra et al. In smaller towns, you will be surprised to find a whole convoy of uncomplaining, slow moving traffic led by a bored, creaking ox-cart or a herd of frolicking goats. You will probably be misled by such methods of enforced speed limits into believing that time is perhaps not an entirely important consideration. That’s when you will find the motorbikes and other two-wheelers dancing, weaving and dribbling their contraptions past all kinds of obstacles (which includes other vehicles, large animals on an after-meal stroll or sunbathing, smaller ones like stray-dogs, unmindful pedestrians, potholes, manholes, , beggars, hawkers and any other impediment on the road) with a speed, daredevilry and dexterity that can only be matched by the samba rhythm of Brazilian soccer stars. Or by a Lionel Messi.
The traffic congestion has inspired the noisy legacy of the Great Indian Horny Traffic. The horn in this respect has stimulated memorable graffiti to adorn the rears of trucks and lorries. Reading stuff like ‘Honk before you make a pass’ may originally seem like a chronicle in reverse! ‘Use dipper at night’ obviously assumes your awareness of the presence of a dipper on your car! There are those ludicrous ones too, like the one I once saw - ‘Clap if you don’t have a horn.’ Or the aggressively prophetic –‘Buri nazar wala tera muh kala.’ Or the ubiquitous ‘hum do, hamare do.’ Which can perhaps also mean it takes two of us to tango on the road!
The sight of waiting vehicles at a signal playing a cacophony of beeps and toots reminds you of the music of Viva, the former all-girl band. It’s a novel, aggregated imploration through sounds meant to persuade a change in the traffic signal. The signal lights have little relevance except for some places like Mumbai. Red means to drive slowly, orange indicates the need to change gear and green stands for 60kmph. In some places like Raipur in Chattisgarh and Ahmedabad, cycle-rickshaw drivers use legs to indicate the direction they wish to turn. So if you are trailing behind a cycle-rickshaw there and you see a leg jutting out, know there are humans in there and don’t be fooled.
Most of the driving that we do on roads is dictated by other people. You may be happily zipping on a one-way lane till forced into an unprepared pit-stop upon seeing the bumbling figure of a clumsy rider, having stumbled into a wrong lane, making his way on your windscreen. You may find an auto-rickshaw attempting to overtake your car, making you wonder whether you were actually a Minardi up against a Ferrari in disguise. To not overtake or be easily overtaken is to surrender the gender supremacy of your automobile, never mind the flouting of some irrelevant road rules. One visit to the RTO to see how the driving licenses are doled out will enlighten you on the need to disbelieve in the assumption of invincibility bequeathed to you by your driving license.
Safety has never been a concept on our roads. Speed breakers are more designed to break your bones. I have been on a cab in Calcutta where the driver had a seatbelt in the form of an old piece of sari-cloth. Seatbelts are a must, even on ponderously slow Calcutta roads. Considering the speed and smoothness of ride that roads permit there, the seat-belt protects your head more from the knocks it is likely to receive through regular bumps against the roof of the car rather than from a high-voltage crash. About the autorikshaws all over the country, the less said the better. Their presence has often been likened to cockroaches, but unlike the domestic insect that can survive a nuclear holocaust; this three-wheeled demon can cause one by breathing clouds of smoke, causing traffic snarls and generally negotiating roads as if playing a videogame. The roadies that surpass them are the Delhi buses – inoffensively named blueline and redline - with unstoppable speedometers, unscheduled stops and carrying unapologetic threats to mortals all around.
In cities like Mumbai, the traffic gets worse in the suburbs with the onset of monsoons. India’s commercial capital appears squalid on the roads and the difference between potholes and manholes gets reduced more to one of spelling than depth! The non-existent sidewalks reappear in the form of frighteningly open gutters that spew unmentionables. Every year I get the feeling that the bored authorities love drilling holes into roads. Digging for oil or for fun (as an advertisement hoarding says)? The Western Express highway, originally meant to allow for quick, hassle-free travel, often resembles the world’s largest garage from an aerial view– with a frozen pilgrimage of bored automobiles. It heads west alright but the middle name express is a criminal misnomer. The road signs require you to be a winner of one of those ‘spot the ball contests’ in order to spot and read them. To figure out a no-parking area from a parking lot becomes tricky. Traffic junctions look like the rush and charge of Jewish vehicles out of Palestine.
The Mumbai-Pune highway, the Delhi-Jaipur highway and the Golden Quadrangle may be a few silver linings on the tarmac, but it is the state of inner city roads and traffic that needs attention. Till then, we may end up spending most of our time seeing red and cursing the scars around the bends and curves that make for a backbreaking roller-coaster ride.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
No exit from Pakistani nukes - Dangers from the Pakistani nuclear arsenal
No exit from Pakistani nukes
In the movie Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), based on the US role in the Soviet-Afghan war, the protagonist fears about the consequences of abandoning a post-war role in Afghanistan. Fact pursued history, because in the years that followed, the Taliban stepped in to impose a beastly medieval society, mentored terrorist outfits and played midwife to attacks such as the 2001 Kandahar hijack and 9/11.
Eight years after the Taliban were driven out, a deadlier history might repeat itself, if not handled properly. A hazy withdrawal plan from Afghanistan, alongside talks of engaging a “moderate Taliban”, appears potentially catastrophic. Today, the Taliban have supporters in the Pakistani army, prop up the Al Qaeda and have a subcontinental presence across two countries. Consequently, the terror network is disturbingly closer to a vulnerable Pakistani nuclear arsenal, with serious consequences for India.
Al Qaeda has never hidden its desire for nuclear weapons. In 1993, it tried to purchase highly enriched uranium in Sudan. Five years later, Osama bin Laden declared that Muslims had a religious duty to acquire a bomb. He and his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri met two Pakistani nuclear scientists and explored A.Q. Khan’s supermarket. Given the collusion between terrorists and state representatives, accessibility to sites and key geographical factors, nuclear sites in Pakistan pose a dangerous global terrorist threat.
In the 1980s, Pakistan built its nuclear sites in the north and west to prevent India from overrunning them. Ironically, these sites lie in Wah, Fatehjang, Golra, Sharif, Kahuta—places now dominated by the Pakistani Taliban. So, can terrorists attack a nuclear complex here and seize control? Not theoretically, since Pakistan adopts security measures where components are kept separated under dual control to prevent sabotage. Its Strategic Plans Division, which guards the sites, has traditionally inducted personnel from Punjab instead of the radicalized Pashtun belt.
What changes equations, however, is the unholy nexus amid a fragile political structure. Shuja Nawaz notes in his Crossed Swords (2009) that recruitment of soldiers from Punjab declined from 64% in 1991 to 43% in 2005. During Zia-ul-Haq’s reign, radical elements began penetrating the army. Young officers grew up hobnobbing with fundamentalist mullahs and terror outfits. These officers—who have now risen to occupy sensitive, senior positions in the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—look up to people such as Hamid Gul, former ISI chief and confidant of the Jamaat-ud-Dawah.
Terrorist groups may not have direct expertise to mount a nuclear strike or even make a gun-assembled bomb. That’s where collusion with establishment insiders becomes important for acquiring lighter weapons and dirty bombs. The Khushab production centre aims to make plutonium-based weapons with high explosive yield that are easily deliverable. Situated on the Punjab border with North-West Frontier Provinces, Khushab is vulnerable to heavy fighting between the army and the Taliban. There have been three strikes on nuclear sites across Pakistan till now. In 2008, suicide bombers even blew up the gates to one of Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons assembly sites at Wah in north Pakistan.
Security analyst Shaun Gregory thinks Pakistan’s safeguard of separating nuclear components may be compromised while trying to assemble them quickly in need. A feeble government could be blackmailed to shift weapons to terrorists.
A nuclear Iran disconcerts the West, but nuclear terrorism in Pakistan holds the more real and immediate threat. An international presence that polices nuclear installations on the Af-Pak border may not sound utopian, but then Afghanistan has never been a Utopia either. An exit without securing such threats will give space to terrorists to unleash an event that surpasses 9/11.
(courtesy: Mint edition dated Posted: Thu, Feb 18 2010. 9:32 PM IST )http://www.livemint.com/2010/02/18213240/No-exit-from-Pakistani-nukes.html)
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