Journalism is not history

YOU must have read Rabindranath Tagore’s letter to the viceroy, denouncing his title and the reason why had done so. Today, I give you a comment by The Statesman on May 28, 1920. As I have told you often that journalism is not history. The lines you are about to read will prove more than that —- most journalism is bunk. Here is what the paper wrote 83 years ago:

So much has been said regarding the wisdom or unwisdom of the methods adopted by General Dyar at Jallianwala Bagh that people are opt to forget that the real and final responsibility for the fate of those who lost their lives in the Bagh rests not upon General Dyer but upon those who caused unlawful assembly. If there had been no assembly, there would have been no firing by troops. It is apparently the object of the extremist press to concentrate attention on one incident in order to divert observation of the proceedings which led to the Jallianwala Bagh. Those, however, who wish to form a fair judgment on the troubles of Punjab cannot shut their eyes to the origins of these disturbances. The report of the Hunter Committee confirms the opinion that the unrest which culminated in the savage excesses of mob violence arose from the agitation against the Rowlatt Acts and from Mr Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement. Everyone can recall the abominable lies which were circulated regarding the objects of the Rowlatt Acts and the powers which these Acts conferred upon the government of India and the local governments. The committee were not able to investigate the sources of these mendacious reports. All they say is that “the author or authors of these rumours have not been discovered.” On some ground which is not stated, they exonerate the political leaders from any share in their invention and propagation. But it is highly probable that the wild falsehoods which circulated among the people were merely distortions of the baseless and exaggerated attacks made by politicians upon the Rowlatt legislation. Whether the distortions were deliberately concocted by enemies of British rule or grew as the original falsehood passed from mouth it is impossible to say. Probably both methods operated. The unrest, therefore, in all likelihood sprang from the ill-informed and irresponsible criticism of the Rowlatt Acts. But before unrest can become disorder some impulse is needed. This stimulus was supplied by Mr Gandhi’s fatuous and anarchical Satyagraha campaign. Mr Gandhi’s agitation against the Rowlott Acts took the form of “civil disobedience to law.” If he had not been inebriated with conceit in his own influence, Mr Gandhi must have perceived that his process of purification and penance, if adopted by a mob, world infallibly lead to violence.

LAST week, I had picked a story, “what’s in the meat?”, from Eric Schlossers’ book, Fast Food Nation. But I had left it midway through for want of space. You will have the complete story today.

The brief facts of the case so far narrated are:

1) In the summer of 1997, Lee and Stacy Harding, had some chicken at a Mexican restaurant.

2) After eating the chicken Lee Harding fell terribly sick. His condition deteriorated for the next few days until he was obliged to call a nurse from the local health department. The nurse asked him to try and remember what he had eaten during the last five or six days. Harding recalled that he and his wife had eaten burgers from the same box.

The hamburgers he’d bought at a safeway. He remembered because it was the first time he’d ever bought frozen hamburgers. The nurse asked if there were any left, Harding said there just might be and checked the freezer, and found the package. It was a red and white and blue box that said “Hudson Beef Patties.” A Pueblo health official went to Harding’s house, took the remaining hamburgers, and sent one to a USDA laboratory for analysis. State health officials had noticed a spike in the number of people suffering from infections. At the time his was one of only six states with the capability to perform DNA tests on samples of E Coli 0157:H7. The DNA tests showed that at least ten people had been sickened by the strain of the bug. Investigators were searching for a common link between scattered cases reported in Pueblo, Brighton, Loveland, Grand Junction, Colorado Springs. On July 28, the USDA Lab notified that Lee Harding’s hamburger was contaminated with the same strain, E Coli 0157:H7, Here was the common link.

The number on Harding’s package said that the frozen patties had been manufactured on June 5 at the Hudson Foods Plant in Columbus, Nebraska. The plant seemed an unlikely source for an outbreak of food poisoning. Only two years old, it had been built primarily to supply hamburgers for the Burger King Chain. It had used state-of-the-art equipment and appeared to be spotlessly clean. But something had gone wrong. A modern factory designed for the mass production of food had instead become a vector for the spread of deadly disease. The package of hamburger patties in Lee Harding’s freezer and astute investigative work by Colorado health officials soon led to the largest recall of food in the nation’s history. Roughly 35 million pounds of ground beef produced at the Columbus plant was voluntarily recalled by Hudon Foods in August of 1997. Although public health officials did a fine job tracing the outbreak to its source, the recall proved less successful. By the time it was announced, about 25 million pounds of the ground beef had already been eaten.

This is what happens to an unknown man in the United States. Do we have a similar investigative apparatus in our country? You can bet your last penny we haven’t.

And now, a school for ideal wives

MY MOTHER recently showed me an ancestral village well in which she was supposed to jump to her death along with scores of other women, mostly assorted relatives including loved cousins. Taqi Mian, the family patriarch, had instructed them to do so in case the Japanese troops succeeded in their march on India from the northeastern battlefield in Imphal in the closing stages of the Second World War.

This was a Muslim household near Lucknow and the Japanese troops had acquired notoriety as a fiendish lot, a description that recurs in the narratives of many a hapless Korean comfort woman. What would happen to the Indian males in the event of a Japanese takeover however was never mentioned in the mass suicide script. Either they would run away or give a fight or be co-opted into the new system. But their honour per se was never under any threat as long as the women of the household were safely submerged in the village well.

A news report has just flashed in that the courts are going to reopen some of the ‘sati’ cases in the trials suspended for 14 years or more. Sati is the custom of upper caste women jumping into the pyre of their husbands to thwart a perceived threat to their honour. Many women today are forced to commit themselves to this notorious practice in India although these happenings are rarely reported. Acharya Dharamendra and later Vijaye Raje Scindia, the former princess of Gwalior, both leaders of the rightwing Vishwa Hindu Parishad, were seen as campaigners for women’s right to commit suicide in this fashion. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has collected tomes of detailed records of so-called honour killings in their own country.

While targeting of women for no fault of theirs is widespread, there is good news for middle class Indians, as they seem to have found courage to question some of the ancient social axioms. One icon of this newfound courage is a girl who got her bridegroom arrested for demanding dowry from her parents. The story became a media event and brought people like CNN’s Christiane Amanpour to the girl’s modest home in suburban Delhi.

The issue of women battling inhuman social mores seems to be common to all religions. Or is it not? In a discussion on an email circuit, activist journalist Anjali Deshpande discussed a “school for ideal wives” that has sprung up in Madhya Pradesh “to groom young girls for a successful married life.”

She narrates the following story. Deepti, 18, recently cleared her class 12 examination. And that, her parents decided, was enough education for a girl. Four months ago, they fixed up her marriage. “Deepti is now training at the Manju Sanskar Kendra in Bhopal to be an ideal wife to a boy she has only seen once, and with whom she occasionally chats on the telephone with her parents’ permission,” says Anjali.

The three-month course is free and does not follow any fixed calendar schedule. It includes lessons in Gurmukhi, the script for the Punjabi language, recitations from the Granth Sahib and teachings culled from Hindu religious books, including the Puranas and the Bhagvad Gita. It costs community donors Rs 30,000 to Rs 40,000 a month to keep the course going for a handful of girls. The expenses include distributing booklets, cassettes of hymns and light refreshments like nutritious drinks for all devotees who use the prayer hall on Saturdays.

“Men build society and women build homes,” declares the schools founder and spiritual guide. Towards this end, the girls who attend his course are taught to sew, cook and pray — in theory. “We don’t have the facilities for practical training.” More importantly, they are taught how to conduct themselves in their in-laws’ household.

While the author of the story bears a Maharashtrian Hindu name, the reaction to it came from two Muslim women. “Relatively, Hindu women are much better off compared to women in many Muslim countries,” claimed Hamida Bhatt, not without a hint of over- correction. Let us address the issue as women’s issue and not attach a religious bias to it,” she declared.

“I see a contradiction in your statement here,” retorted Seema Hossain. “On one hand you are saying Hindu women are better off than women in many Muslim countries.....the term better indicates a value judgment here on your part, no? Yet on the other hand you are saying that we should not be religiously biased over women’s issue. In other words, you are saying we should not be religiously biased yet you ARE religiously biased (Hindu women better off etc). You are not practising what you preach!”

IT WAS raining heavily in Delhi when the bus from Lahore rolled in on July 11 and the one from Delhi was crossing the Wagah border post. It could form the backdrop to a highly charged emotional scene from a movie about partition.

Take Tamas, for example, an evenhanded cinematic depiction of the hatred that visited all the communities involved in the 1947 mayhem. Bhisham Sahani, who wrote the gripping account of partition in his novel of the same name, would have rejoiced at the arrival of the bus from Lahore. It was ironical that he breathed his last on that fateful day after a brief illness.

Bhisham was the younger brother of the late actor and leftist activist Balraj Sahani. Both had migrated from western Punjab, and both were committed to spreading love and fellowship on both sides of the border.

Key to the ‘Kunda’ catch

THOSE in public services have an unfailing genius to turn the easiest of jobs into virtually undoable ordeals. Take the telephone inquiry. Either the number does not respond or it is eternally busy. Exactly the same is true of the Railway inquiry or the KESC complaints. For the supervisory staff all this is too trivial to merit their attention, not to speak of corrective action. But these seemingly little gaps in the system are more than enough to make an average citizen’s life at times an unbearable burden.

In a city so big as this, and distances being what they are, little irritations can, and do all so often, cause so much of heartaches most of which should be easily avoidable. For example, in Islamabad no place is far away. If the telephone does not respond, you can just walk across or drive down and you are there in a matter of minutes. Not so in a place so spread out at Karachi. A certain minimum of efficiency at every point of public administration is the difference between a relatively tension-free life and one of extreme, unrelieved frustrations.

The line between inefficiency and corruption is not very distinct. Experience would show that the two are siblings, supporting each other. An efficient operator need not be corrupt. And a corrupt functionary would not be efficient because in his scheme of things efficiency does not pay. For most of us the escape from the woes of inefficiency is through ‘greasing the palm’ of the inefficient. Efficiency is at a discount and inefficiency at premium.

What looks very like a classic example of the confluence of corruption and inefficiency is the standing scandal of the ‘Kunda’ problem that the KESC cites to explain away so many of its faults and failings. The other day some local television programme, focusing on the rather exotic ‘Kunda’ phenomenon, showed people angrily explaining the ‘Kunda’ affair by saying that they are obliged to resort to this device because the KESC would not give a regular, above the counter power connection.

For all one knows, that is the true story. Let it be understood quite clearly that there is nothing hidden or concealed about the ‘Kundas.’ The ‘Kundas’ are very much there to see with naked eye.

Some hundreds of thousands of them, if one accepts the number quoted by the KESC people themselves. There is no explanation forthcoming as to why the KESC tolerates and suffers this theft when the easiest way out of this bind is to give regular connections to consumers and bill them for what they consume.

Nobody is going to believe that the KESC field staff is totally unaware of these ‘Kundas’ — where they are, how many they are. It is also inconceivable that the ‘Kunda’ consumer is getting his power supply with the compliments of the KESC. The ‘Kunda’ consumer is no cousin or son-in-law of the KESC. There has to be some explanation about how the ‘Kunda’ user pays for the power he consumes and — to whom.

It is only reasonable to assume that money changes hands. Nothing in life is for free. One should assume that at some stage, in some manner, this money reaches some KESC connections. It would appear that the KESC field staff are not excluded, or keep themselves aloof, from these not so hidden transactions. If the passerby can see these ‘Kundas’ hanging by naked wires, how is one to imagine that what is visible to all and sundry is not visible to the KESC field staff? There is absolutely no escape from the conclusion that this is a league in which the ‘Kunda’ consumer and the KESC (at some level, and for some consideration) are willing associates. If the field staff are players in this racket, the supervisory officers cannot be entirely immune from this virus. Is it possible that the field staff should be a partner in this kind of commerce and the senior officers of the KESC remain unaware and hence also uninvolved? There is no malaise that has no remedy. This ‘Kunda’ affair can be sorted out if there is a will. The will is not there because there is money to be made out of this thoroughly disreputable affair. Once the ‘Kunda’ is replaced by a regular power connection with a meter, those flourishing on the ‘Kunda’ connections would be the losers. In some quarters the excuse offered for not moving to remove this racket is that the ‘Kunda’ consumers will create a ‘law and order situation.’ This fear is misplaced and obviously exaggerated.

Let the KESC seek the support of Law Enforcing Agencies (LEAs) and mobilize public opinion in support of a process to eliminate a scandalous social evil. One should like to believe that if the KESC offered regular power connections and installed proper meters, there would be a positive response from the ‘Kunda’ consumer. We now have elected MNAs, MPAs and the Nazims. These are people who would be willing to support any move that is lawful in itself, and aims to root out a practice that is manifestly anti-social and perilously close to being culpable. The KESC is losing millions, may be billions of rupees because it has chosen to compromise with this open theft of power. It owes an explanation for, first, why this ‘Kunda’ evil was allowed to spread and get out of hand; secondly why it has been unable to enlist the support of the Law Enforcing Agencies? There is an absolutely straightforward strategy. The KESC should say bygones are bygones. All those who are now consuming power through ‘Kunda’ connection will be enabled, without any hassle, to apply for a regular power connection which shall be made available within a reasonable number of days - say a week or a fortnight. The ‘Kunda’ consumers shown in that television programme did not say they had the ‘Kunda’ connection as their first choice. They blamed the KESC for failure to provide them with the above-board connection on normal terms. They insisted they had been simply forced to opt for the ‘Kunda’ by the KESC’s persistent failure to do above the counter business. If this is a fact, and it seems it really is so, then the KESC is in the dock, fit and proper. It has a whole world of explaining to do. The sooner it does, the better.

Adverts on buses

Public transport is perhaps one of the city’s sorest points and has been the subject of many a debate and fiasco. Bus drivers not only have no regard for rules or traffic etiquette (few in Karachi do for that matter) but have also been responsible for taking many lives.

Preying on the public’s helplessness in mobility, Karachi’s public transport system went from bad to worse. Recently however, the city has seen a change in this direction with the newly introduced “Green buses” and CNG powered buses on certain routes around the city. These imported Scandinavian and Chinese buses are spacious and comfortable, run according to a set system and actually obey the rules. They may look out of place and monstrous on Karachi’s congested streets, but then again, so do the regular buses. As a friend also remarked, one actually wants to travel on these buses because they look so good.

As far as looks go however, the novelty and attractiveness of these buses is rapidly declining. Just the way graffiti defaces beautifully painted surfaces, the same way, corporate advertising and branding has replaced the facades of many of these buses, especially the CNG variety, which have become moving publicity vehicles for companies selling suparis and lubricants among others. The likelihood of turning your face sideways at a traffic signal and coming face to face with a larger than life image of a female model next to a tube of hair removal cream has increased tremendously.

For advertisers and multinationals looking for ample opportunities to display their brands, these buses are an answer to their prayers. Likewise, for bus owners, the income being generated through these sponsorships provides financial security. Already Karachi is fast becoming the city of brands with outdoor hoardings and shop signage’s literally taking over the roadsides. It won’t be long before the road surfaces themselves are branded.

The branding of the new green buses should not be taken as a negative point, since the bus system itself seems to be doing quite well. However, it is hoped that in its eagerness to make profits out of corporate sponsorship, the transport management does not compromise on the safety and convenience of its passengers.

Similarly, it is hoped that the companies sponsoring the buses will take on an equal amount of responsibility in maintaining the quality of service provided to passengers.

The following is an account of a resident of a four-storey apartment building in Gulshan-i-Iqbal’s Block 13-E. Situated close to Hasan Square, it has 128 flats out of which 62 are currently occupied. It was built several years ago but this particular gentleman moved there in 2001. He said the flat cost Rs 370,000 but he ended up paying Rs 495,000, partly because he paid in instalments and because the building owner asked for Rs 80,000 as ‘development charges’ and Rs 26,000 for ‘materials’.

The building has no water connection with the water board but the owner has installed some pumps through which brackish water is made available to residents. However, those who live on the upper floors have to go down to the ground floor and fill containers because there is no arrangement to pump water to an overhead tank.

And now for the even more ridiculous part. The building’s owner charges residents Rs 6 per unit for the electricity they use. He has told them that since the building has no proper KESC connection, he has worked out a deal with the utility.

Clearly, the owner has never heard of the KESC’s slab system under which the per unit rate goes up the more you consume electricity. The six rupee slab is a very high one and it is more than likely that had their been a proper KESC connection, the residents would see their power bill halved.

The building has no sweepers so one can imagine what condition it will be in. The owner, who drives a fancy car, has a couple of his guards posted at the building but, according to residents, they are his men and the only person whose security they ensure is the owner’s. One resident who tried to speak out for himself and everyone else says the day he complained the building management cut off his power for several hours. He says that initially many other residents recognized that they all had a common cause and would support him.

However, in true Pakistani fashion, when matters came to a head, all of them deserted him. Now, the resident is scared that the owner, who has connections to a powerful political party, will up the level of harassment.

There must be hundreds of other buildings like this one in Karachi, with thousands of people living in them undergoing torture quite similar to what this man and his family are experiencing.

Last week when the heavens opened in Karachi, the gutters opened too. Concerned citizens think it sensible to remove the manhole covers to help the water, which accumulates on the roads, drain out quicker. But this also lets in the stones, plastic bags and other solid trash into the gutter blocking it completely. Unassuming pedestrians too fall in.

It was unfortunate to see the the city’s infrastructure collapse. Roads were blocked and everyone who was returning home after a busy day in office was stuck in traffic jams, reaching their homes several hours later.

On Nishtar Road, near Shoe Market, brats on balconies of surrounding buildings thought it was funny to fill plastic bags with rainwater and drop them on passing traffic. Several of these formidable bags fell on people travelling on bus-tops. One such water bomb tore through a rickshaw’s roof wetting the driver and passengers. Others dented car roofs. The roads became an obstacle course. One motorist observed that in many places, unnecessarily built speed-breakers acted as mini-dams, preventing the water from draining off.

On the Sharah-i-Quaideen and Khalid Bin Waleed Road intersection, two buses collided. The drivers abandoned their vehicles and fled. Other bus drivers drove their buses on the wrong side of the roads blocking the way for the traffic that was moving in the opposite direction. Ambulance sirens could be heard everywhere. Some bus drivers started following the ambulances.

Only the green buses refused to contribute to the insanity. A traffic constable lost his cool and started punching and banging on the bonnets of the cars that hesitated to move. With no electricity, the streetlights were out too. It was a shame that the city government let all of us down so badly.

How does a mudslide happen in a city thought by many to be a concrete jungle? But that is precisely what happened a day after Monday’s rains. A huge mudslide (or as they say in Khabarnama ‘mitti ka toda’) killed eight people from the same family. Apparently, they were all crushed to death while sleeping in a hut in Gulistan-i-Jauhar, which is at the rear of the Safari Park.

They had come from Rahimyar Khan a couple of years ago, like many thousands who have made Karachi their home from that area in recent years. The head of the family, the father, had just saved enough money to build his own modest dwelling, a hut.

What a tragedy. Just shows what some people do to make a living in Karachi and how the city has grown in so many immeasurable and unimaginable ways.

— By Karachian

email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com