| July 21, 2003 | Monday | Jumadi-ul-Awwal 20, 1424 |
A clever card trick called Indian democracy
A stitch in time saves nine
Selling public spaces
KHALID HASAN who is now in the United States has proved more than once that he is a friend indeed. Among the many interests we share is cricket. The latest piece on the game I have received from him was written for an American paper by one Sarah Lyall.
Khalid Hasan knows, of course, that Lyla was a lady though what he thinks of this Lyall thing, I don’t know. But I can make a pretty shrewd guess but I am not going to let you in on it. And I am not going to pre judge her. You must first read what she had to say, in an article, Cricket for our time: It’s Highly Condensed, she wrote:
Fiona Boddy believes herself to be a woman of unusual patience. Yet, years after the fact, she still remembers the paint-drying tedium of the cricket match she attended in which nothing appeared to happen for hours on end.
Cricket lovers acclaimed the day of play — part of a match that lasted five days and ended in a draw — as a masterly example of the sport at its tactical best (even with the breaks for rain), but not Ms. Boddy, 30, a public relations executive.
“I just sat there all day, and it was the most excruciating thing ever,” she said.
It was the promise of nonexcruciating cricket that brought Ms. Boddy and several thousand others to Richmond, West London, last week to watch the Middlesex Crusaders play the Kent Spitfires in a new, speeded-up kind of cricket that organizers hope will give this quintessentially old-fashioned sport a jolt of 21st-century excitement.
The new game, a shorter, snazzier version of traditional cricket (motto: “Twice the action, half the time!”), is being played in a monthlong tournament this summer by England’s 18 professional teams. While organizers are already praising its potential for attracting the disaffected masses, purists — and there are still many left — are horrified at what they consider the defilement of a sacred tradition.
“It’s sad to contemplate what’s happening,” said David Frith, former editor of the Wisden Cricket Monthly. “Cricket is meant to attract people who are said to be dreamy and poetic, liking the subtleties and depth of the game, but this is attracting people on the fringe who want something else.”
In the new version, the length of play has been drastically reduced, to a mere three hours, with strict limits on many times the ball can be thrown, or bowled, at the batters, who are known as batsmen. Players wait in baseball-style dugouts instead of lolling about in the nearby cricket pavilion and are required to jog, not amble, into position.
Some teams are luring spectators with clowns, pop singers, face-painting booths and even Jacuzzis; at the Middlesex game, thwarted batters were sent off, scandalously, to the strains of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.”
“This is not decent cricket; it’s smash-grab cricket,” said Roger Jay, feeling increasingly dismayed as the game went on.
In 75 years as a cricket fan (he is 83), Mr. Jay has already weathered numerous destabilizing changes. First, there was the horror of one-day cricket, introduced in the early 1970’s as an acknowledgement that the traditional five-day international match, while still the Platonic ideal, was not practical (or even, strictly speaking, enjoyable) for most people.
Then there was the decision to replace classic cricket whites with coloured uniforms for some games, a radical development Mr. Jay still derides as ‘pajama cricket.’
Cricket, which appears to resemble baseball but actually doesn’t, is undeniably an acquired taste. Its terminology is eccentric — the people standing in the field, for instance, are known by names like ‘fine leg’ and ‘silly mid-off’ — and its customs are taxing to the average sports fan. For instance, a batsman can bat for hours, sometimes scoring more than a hundred runs, sometimes scoring no runs at all. A match can last for five days, with one team scoring dozens more times than the other, and still end in a draw.
“You have to love the game to be able to stand it at all,” said Vasant Bhatt, 46, a florist in London, watching the Middlesex game.
In a recent survey, the England and Wales Cricket Board found that only 500,000 people here regularly go to cricket games. From 1997 to 2001, total attendance in county cricket matches declined by 17 per cent, to 1,030,000. Last year, the shortest county match lasted a long time: 6 hours and 10 minutes.
“The whole theory was to offer a cricket product that people could come and watch who didn’t want to watch a 6-hour-10-minute game,” said Mark Hodgson, a spokesman for the cricket board.
“We’ve condensed it into a shorter and more action-packed game, and hopefully some people will come along who haven’t wanted to come before.”
So far, so good. According to Vinny Codrington, chief executive of the Middlesex team, the take at the box office is generally about 2,000 — about $3,300 — for regular games. For the new, souped-up version, receipts were 20,000, not counting food and merchandise sales inside the gates.
Young women came, and so did young children, two groups that cricket is desperate to attract.
Even non-fans were hooked.
Karl Burgess, 34, is the sort of person, he said, who believes that “the best way to be involved with cricket is to flick the radio on every now and then and check the score. “Yet he loves the game, admires (in the abstract) its character-building tendency to delay gratification and came with his father and a friend to check out the new version. Eating his packet of potato chips and drinking his pint of lager, he said he was greatly enjoying revved-up cricket, even when things looked pretty slow, at least to the untrained eye.
“You have to talk in degrees of excitement,” he said. “In cricket terms, this is exciting.”
Fiona Boddy, it is clear, nobody’s friends she should just be at base ball matches (here read base as in base metal). It is obvious also that she can’t feel the pleasure of a batsman playing down the line to a bowler or hitting him over the top. If she is a fast food girl, she should remain a fast food girl. Cricket is not for her and thank the Good Lord for that.
THE Chronology, The Statesman (1875 - 1975), made the following comment on the passing of a great-mathematician on April 30, 1920:
The untimely death of Mr S. Ramanujam, FRS at the early age of 32, deprives India and the world of one of the most remarkable mathematicians of his time. His story reads like a romance. His mathematical researches were so profound that some of the most eminent authorities in Europe hailed him as one of the great mathematicians of the day. He went to Cambridge to prosecute his researches, and was made an FRS. Unfortunately his health broke down, and he was compelled to return to India about a year ago, but his working days were numbered, and after lingering for a few months he passed away at his mother’s home.
ON March 1, 1921, the paper wrote:
By the general consent of those capable of forming a judgment the late Sir Rashbehari Ghose was the greatest lawyer that India has produced. In him the mastery of principles of law was united with a vast and sound erudition, and both were combined with a skill in their practical application which gained him a great and lucrative practice. But learning and able advocacy were not his only qualification as a leader of his profession. The tribute paid to his memory by both bench and Bar bear testimony to his honesty as an adviser to the court. As Sir John Woodroffe finely said, “in him the court has lost a great counsellor to whom for his profound knowledge of the law and his integrity, it could always look for assistance, for such assistance is the function of the Bar.”
ON May 11, 1921, The Statesman wrote:
Mr Gandhi in response to a request from a friend, has given his ‘considered opinion’ of the place which English holds in the Indian educational system. His view is that “English education, in the manner it has been given, has emasculated the English-educated Indian; it has put a severe strain upon the Indian student’s nervous energy and has made of us imitators.”
Mr Gandhi adds that the “process of displacing the vernaculars has been one of the saddest chapters in the British connection.” He holds that “Rammohan Roy would have been a greater reformer and Lokmanya Tilak would have been a great scholar. If they had not to start with the handicap of having to think in English, and to transmit their thought chiefly in English.”
He scouts the idea that the study of English has fostered aspirations for liberty and self-government. “Of all the superstitions that affect India,” he writes, “none is so great as that a knowledge of the English language is necessary for imbibing ideas of liberty and developing accuracy of thought.”
Mr Gandhi, on the contrary thinks that the system of education is the ‘most defective part’ of the Satanic Government. The first comment which is suggested by Mr Gandhi’s interesting disquisition is that for a ‘considered opinion’ his pronouncement is singularly inaccurate.
IT’S ELECTION time in India and every party eying victory is reaching for the ubiquitous deck of cards all powdered and ready to be dealt to gullible voters. The Bharatiya Janata Party will probably play the “Sonia card”, or will it be the “Musharraf card” again, after its phenomenal success in Gujarat? The two, it seems, are interchangeable by some obscurantist logic, a BJP specialty.
The party is debating the options in its pre-election conclave in Congress-ruled Raipur. A decision should be known before this column is out. The BJP already has the highly emotive issue of Ayodhya in its quiver. Will it be used, if so when, in the ensuing state elections or later in the general polls?
The Congress will weigh the Muslim card where the community has a strong presence, but only as long as there is no major compromise on the high yield and less cumbersome “soft-Hindutva”, something most of its satraps have become accustomed to exploiting on a turf made fertile by the BJP’s communal juggernaut. In a nutshell, this whole business of “card politics” has become so brazenly and cynically integrated in our democracy that there is hardly any space left for serious debate on issues that should matter.
There is no “poverty card” or a “woman and child card”, “healthcare card” or “potable water card”. Probably all those cards have been overused or rendered outdated by a kind of consensual demonetization involving the consent of nearly all the major groups in parliament.
On the other hand, the temple-mosque issue looks set to hang fire till eternity, and promises to remain as invaluable as any hard currency for as long as it is politically expedient to keep stoking the issue, a real ace. No one wants it out of the way or behind us. For if the mosque row is resolved by some miracle, many a politician and their religious proteges would be rendered jobless.
To continue to mesmerize its audiences, Indian democracy has evolved its own obscurantist Morse code, its own abracadabra. The AJGAR card pertains to Ahir, Jat, Gujar, Adivasi, Rajput castes/groups rolled into a vote bank, a very valid idiom in much of Rajasthan and parts of Gujarat. Add Muslims to the acronym, and it becomes MAJGAR. Similarly the inimitable Laloo Yadav has been ruling the impoverished state of Bihar with the help of the MY card. Spelt out, it means a combination of Muslims and the upwardly mobile Yadav Hindus, formerly the impoverished cowherds.
Until recently, BIMARU used to connote, close to its literal Hindi meaning, the most backward states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. With the creation of Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh and Uttaranchal Pradesh, from three of the BIMARU states the acronym would need to be altered accordingly.
Three of these states are in the fray in state polls later this year, along with the elections due in Delhi. These are all states the BJP had lost to the Congress in the aftermath of the May 1998 nuclear tests. In other words the BJP was not able to exploit the ultra-nationalist card despite the intended muscle flexing behind the Pokharan explosions. Could this verdict have been a factor leading up to the February 1999 bus diplomacy with Pakistan? Did Prime Minister Vajpayee embark on his peace mission because the “macho card” did not deliver the right results for his party?
If so, how do we explain Kargil soon after? Is it possible that the Indian establishment was aware of Pakistan’s incursions in Kargil but ignored them when Mr Vajpayee was riding the bus to Lahore on a peace mission? In any case they must have been aware of the killings of 16 Hindus in Kashmir on the eve of the visit allowing it to go ahead so smoothly. Is it true that despite the cross-border heat in that sector, the Indian army did not know what was happening in Kargil? Or is it possible that Kargil became an issue — a “card” — because Mr Vajpayee lost the parliamentary majority by one vote and he needed an issue badly? That his party upped the ante on the goings on at Point Pedro to fox and outwit the opposition in the impending polls?
And if the “Kargil card” was successful in bringing back a wobbly coalition to power, what can stop the ruling National Democratic Alliance from sending half a dozen TV reporters to a current hotspot like Hill Kaka or any other perennially active front in Kashmir, from where they could transmit images that resemble the ones dispatched during the Kargil operations? BJP President Venkaiah Naidu, who opened his party conclave in Raipur, signalled on the very first day that President Pervez Musharraf had not responded favourably to Mr Vajpayee’s peace overture from Srinagar. Draw your own conclusions about the options ahead.
By the time the Saarc summit is held in Islamabad, the four state assembly elections would be over. The results would spur the strategy for the general elections due by around this time next year. But going by the U-turns from Kargil, to Agra, to Kathmandu and Srinagar, President Musharraf will remain a card in the hand that Mr Vajpayee would be dealing out until the next general elections are over and done with.
A TWO year-old girl from Lahore has shown that friendship between India and Pakistan is really child’s play if adults are kept out of the frame. Noor Fatima will live to tell the tale of her tryst with a serious heart ailment and the millions of Indians who prayed for her and the Bangalore doctors who performed the surgery.
Noor was fortunate to have travelled with her parents on the first Lahore-Delhi bus on July 11. Six month-old Babbar who arrived in Bangalore from Pakistan had to take a circuitous route through Dubai. He could not be saved. Reports said the stress of the journey could be responsible for Babbar’s tragedy, who died before his operation was due.
ONE engaging aspect of life in Karachi is that we are never short of reasons, excuses, pretexts or some genuine grounds to grumble about. Until the other day the whole city, or for the most part, Karachi was grumbling about water scarcity, shortage, indeed in some places even famine of water. City reporters had plenty to write about, there being such a variety of heartaches the water problem was causing, including a scuffle here and some fisticuffs there. Playful street urchins did not forget burning a few tyres and pelting stones at moving traffic.
Then there was the very real scare about water pollution and contamination. More than a score of people actually died and thousands took ill, hundreds had to be hospitalized. In many places make-shift hospitals were set up while many established hospitals made special arrangements to provide extra beds to cope with the rush of the victims of contaminated water.
The past week has given us another water problem, no less serious but of a different kind. Now we have more water coming down from the heavens than we can cope with. The cloudbursts have been preceded by, accompanied by and also followed by strong winds that have felled trees, electric poles and dilapidated structures. Fallen trees blocked roads but the fallen power poles posed lethal danger. Several deaths occurred as a result of electrocution.
If we are persuaded to take the KESC’s word for it, some thousands of electric lines were disturbed, disrupted, at many places the lines just fell off their poles. More than half of this huge city remained inundated with unmanageable excess of water and unbearable absence of power. Those who have not gone through these twin torments are no doubt lucky but they would lack the extraordinary experience of what it is to be closest to an unendurable double-trauma.
Now we are told by the City Nazim he has ordered that necessary steps be taken pronto to drain out the rivers of water that most of our roads are at present. In praise of this initiative it can be said that he is being wiser after the event. They say: better late than never. We agree because there is little else we can do. After the season’s first shower it was pointed out in this column that almost all of the drains in Karachi were choked, mostly with plastic packing materials, thrown carelessly away into the streets.
In our part of the earth, the cycle of the seasons has been fairly clearly set for some centuries. We know almost precisely when summer would set in and, after it has had its run, rains would follow as surely as daybreak follows night. If we prepare for the wet season well before it is due to commence, we should be able to minimize rain-related problems. The kind of discomfort that has been our ordeal is largely avoidable. In the context of water, we seem to be destined to suffer double-trouble: famine of water as well as floods.
It is hard to see why the wise gentlemen inside the KESC are unable to take timely precautions against the possible disruption that rain and storm are bound to bring in their train. It has been claimed, with a touch of bravado that the KESC staff worked on war footing and repaired hundreds of broken lines within 24 hours. That’s wonderful. But would it not have been much better had the lines been checked before the arrival of the rains and the storms? Millions of people could have been saved from so much of inconvenience and pain. Added that has been the sorrow over so many deaths.
There are audible hints that the city Nazims and the officialdom in the Sindh government, spearheaded by the minister concerned, are getting ready to exchange hot words over the public anger and dismay in the wake of the rain-wrought havoc. It would be better if this kind of pointing accusing fingers and exchange of intemperate words is avoided. Any rumpus, if it is created, would be neither good politics, nor good manners. For the minister it would be wise and more graceful if he chooses to offer his cooperation, instead of controversy, in the enormous repair work that has to be undertaken.
Let us learn from our horrors if we cannot from our errors. We know our seasons. We ought to know the demand of each season. Sensible public administrators would not wait for trouble to strike and then try to take remedial measures. In our part of the country, late June and almost whole of July may receive sporadic rains. Common sense would demand that we start checking out the state of our drainage system in April and continue this work through May. If this is done, we should be assured of escaping the worst impact, should the rainfall be above the annual average.
For a properly maintained drainage network, rains would be a blessing as faster flow of rainwater would leave the drains doubly cleaned and cleared of any lurking obstructions. The same discipline should hold good for the KESC. Let them commence their checking up of the power lines well before the fall of the first raindrop of the monsoon season. After all, we in Karachi are not exposed to excessive rainfall. If we cannot manage the meagre monsoon, we have to blame ourselves, not the heavens above.
Now we have elected city government and we have an elected provincial government. The two should be in constant touch with the people, the public sentiments and the needs of the citizens. Let us give serious thought to the need to reduce the use of plastic material for packing of daily family shopping. This process should start without wasting any more time and the idea should be a gradual process aimed at total elimination of this nuisance. It poses dangers to the sewerage system and is a proven hazard to public health. Here is a matter to which the provincial ministers of health and local government should give serious thought. The city governments all over the country would need a genuinely helping hand from their respective provincial governments.
The city government placed an advertisement this week in major newspapers detailing its new billboard policy. According to the ad, the right to install a hoarding or a billboard will be sold to the highest bidder.
The announcement covered 11 locations in the city. These include Clifton (Schon circle roundabout, Teen Talwar, Clifton Playland roundabout, Boat Basin and the Clifton flyover); Sharea Faisal (all of it from Metropole Hotel to Star Gate but no area within the jurisdiction of the cantonment boards); Shahrah-i-Quaideen; Stadium Road (all of it), Hasan Square; NIPA flyover; the Board office roundabout in North Nazimabad; Hyderi Market; Gulshan roundabout; Numaish roundabout and the Guru Mandir roundabout.
This pretty much covers about all the major places where anyone would want to put up a billboard. The new policy puts the city government in charge of this very lucrative business, as opposed to the individual towns who used to sell the space previously.
Well, before selling these spots to the highest bidder in open auction, shouldn’t the city government first open the list of locations to public scrutiny and debate? There are many taxpayers in this city who think that we have got far too many billboards and would probably want their numbers to be reduced. But, as things normally happen anywhere in Pakistan, citizens hardly get to have any say whatsoever and it’s the same here. The city government has told the
residents of this city, for example, that the whole of Sharea Faisal (except of course the cantonment areas) and the whole of Stadium Road is up for grabs. And that’s a lot of road, several dozen kilometres at least.
Which means that the next time you go to the airport be prepared to be bombarded with an unending assault on your eyes, thanks mainly to the many multinationals for whom Karachi is a prime consumer market.
Shoddy bridges
Each time it rains, Karachiites get further proof that something is truly wrong with their city’s infrastructure. Over the past couple of weeks, it has taken quite a beating.
In two bouts of moderately heavy rain, 26 people were killed, many by collapsing walls, flying sheets of metal, tumbling billboards or fallen electricity wires. The city’s roads and bridges have perhaps taken the worst thrashing of all. One particular case warrants special attention.
According to a newspaper report, the Rashid Minhas Road/Sharea Faisal flyover has developed a sizeable crater following the rains. The story said that the portion of the flyover leading from the airport and turning right on to Rashid Minhas road had been closed to traffic for two days.
This must have come as news to many. A crater on this flyover — so soon? It was only built a couple of years back. One would like to ask the authorities concerned that what kind of building materials were used to construct the flyover because the result is far from satisfactory. This smacks of gross negligence and could have easily led to a major traffic accident had the crater suddenly developed with heavy traffic on the flyover. Besides, what about the inconvenience to motorists and commuters of the two-day closure of the flyover?
Unfortunately, incidents like these — of roads and other structures collapsing soon after their construction — are quite common in Karachi. Obviously, it suits many of those involved: especially the contractor who carries out the shoddy construction in the first place and the government officials who repeatedly award building contracts to those who deliberately use substandard material, so that they can get the contract again when the road needs to be re-carpeted.
And, in all of this, no one cares two hoots for the ordinary road user.
A bad school
People tend to trash private schools every now and then, especially parents who have to cough up the high fees charged. However, the hard reality is that perhaps the only institutions that provide some semblance of a good education are all in the private sector.
But a resident of Defence Phase V has sent in a mail saying she had a major complaint against a well-known private school, in a neighbourhood with many schools (how’s that for being vague?).
According to her, the schools teachers are “constantly watched by cameras” (probably security cameras). These are situated everywhere in the school, from the corridors and libraries to the canteen and staff rooms.
Teachers are underpaid and of course untrained (nothing new about that). According to her, they are not allowed to wear jeans, T-shirts or short shirts (no surprise there either — and indeed why should they be?). The school discourages teachers of one floor or level from interacting with those from other floors or levels. In other words, “floor-crossing” is not allowed. The teachers get a very raw deal from the school’s management with the institution having a very high teacher turnover rate. Parents are not allowed to enter the school at will and are always stopped and checked by security guards positioned at the gate. And, there are no parent teacher meetings.
To be fair, Not all private schools are this bad, some are quite good and contribute much to society by helping educate those who might have a major role in shaping and influencing the country’s future.
However, what is disturbing is that if this can happen in a private school, imagine the state and condition of our government schools. It’s a pity that those who especially deserve a decent education have no hope of getting one.
Plant a tree
In a city where one’s lungs are constantly bombarded by all kinds of filth — dirt, dust, diesel — it is heartbreaking to see trees chopped down so mercilessly. Recently, a colleague observed a fresh onslaught of tree-cutting in Saddar, arguably the city’s most polluted area.
Close to Regal Chowk, reckless hands were at work tearing away at the timber. A few days earlier, he says he witnessed the same gory ritual close to the Seventh Day Hospital on the main M A Jinnah Road. One doesn’t quite know the exact reason for this wanton destruction of the trees, other then the fact that it could make someone a quick buck or two selling the wood. Whatever the reason, these anti-tree rampages happen every now and then, probably on the whim of some nature-hating bureaucrat.
If this sort of tomfoolery is allowed to continue unchecked pretty sooon we will have no trees. Those government officials who think that the solution to every solution lies in cutting trees need to be told to find alternative ways of satsifying the whims of their bosses. Even a child knows that trees absorb carbon dioxide (found in abundance on Karachi’s roads) and release oxygen. Without trees, not only does the landscape look barren, the air that we breath feels less sweeter. So, to cut trees in a place like Karachi, where the smog seems to be everywhere, is downright criminal.
In the absence of legislation to protect the environment — or should we say in the absence of enforcement of this supposed legislation — trees are our only hope of keeping a balance in the city’s fragile environment. Though this destruction of trees will fail to generate any kind of response from the authorities concerned, maybe you, as a citizen who actually cares enough about the metropolis, can do a little to reverse the damage and plant a tree of your own.
— By Karachian
email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com