Posted on 11 February 2012 by Tea Server
Why is the drought of Miss World and Miss Universe crowns for Indian women since 2000. Does this mean Indian women are not the most beautiful in the world. Did Indian women win continuously for several years because suddenly a crop of especially beautiful women had appeared? Or was it because the beauty business had [...]
Posted on 26 January 2012 by Tea Server
By: Athar OsamaPublished on SciDev.Net on 12 January 2012
Some Muslim countries’ powerful financial incentives to make quick progress in research could backfire, cautions Athar Osama.
Over a decade ago, several governments in the Islamic world woke up from decades of slumber to begin investing heavily in science and innovation. A funding boost helped set up new universities, enhance research grants, and send thousands of students to do PhDs in the developed world.
The regulators and ministries that rolled out these ambitious efforts cautioned against judging their effectiveness and viability too soon, pointing to the limited scientific capacity in these countries. It was popular to say, ‘let’s build a critical mass (quantity) first and worry about raising the standard (quality) later’.
But there was clearly something amiss: some policies seemed either deficient or simply wrong-minded. And evidence of this is beginning to pile up.
Evidence of misguided priorities
The picture emerging is one of a mindless race to secure international publications and increase university rankings using ‘shopping sprees’ for highly cited academics, plagiarism and even outright academic fraud.
A recent article published in Science highlights a practice, prevalent in at least a couple of Saudi Universities, of engaging prolific academics on so-called part-time contracts that pay handsomely in exchange for spending a couple of weeks on campus — and, critically, on condition that the university name is added to their ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) index profiles. The index is one of the factors included in world university rankings.
This results in an artificially higher number of papers published by that university, and hence a higher ranking.
The article notes that this practice is similar to UK universities ‘shopping’ for prolific scientists just before research quality assessments, in order to ensure a higher evaluation and funding for future research.
But there is a fundamental difference: while one may question the timing of UK universities hiring a prolific scientist, it is not a fraudulent practice in and of itself. But claiming credit for a scientist who does not engage in meaningful research with researchers at the university in question, or using work unaffiliated with the university to bump up rankings, is certainly suspect.
Plagiarism and academic fraud
Seemingly sensible policies — such as encouraging academics to publish more — can also backfire if they are badly designed or implemented.
In Pakistan, a strong emphasis by the country’s Higher Education Commission (HEC) on a “publish and get paid” policy has created a culture of plagiarism and academic fraud, according to preliminary evidence that appeared recently in the Pakistani press.
Writing in a reputed English language national daily, Isa Daudpota, a senior administrator at Air University in Islamabad, alleges to have collected evidence of a fraudulent publishing racket that involves “international” and “peer-reviewed” journals, most of which are electronic. [2]
Although many are based in Africa, among other places, in reality they were created and run by Pakistani academics and their ‘friends’ abroad, says Daudpota.
These fraudulent journals may contain suspect or even fictitious names on their editorial boards, or may use names without permission. And participating academics can publish or even review their own work by nominating a non-existent professor as a reviewer.
Analysing the CVs of HEC-approved professors, Daudpota finds preliminary evidence that some professors (mainly having done their PhDs at local universities with relatively lax standards) are more likely to publish in such journals. But so far, the HEC appears to be treating these revelations as isolated cases rather than a systemic problem.
No shortcuts
Muslim countries are not alone in using financial incentives to increase their publishing performance. China and India — two emerging scientific powers — also struggle with similar challenges. [3-5]
Financial incentives also lead to more publications in the industrialised world. But research by Franzoni and colleagues suggests they encourage submissions regardless of quality, while career incentives improve the quality of scientific papers. [6]
In the developing world, where the norms of quality and integrity have yet to take root, policymakers have a responsibility to enforce scientific integrity and ethics.
First, instances of misguided use of financial incentives, plagiarism, and academic fraud must be tackled with zero tolerance and exemplary punishments to individuals and institutions. This would set a precedent and send a message that it does not pay to cheat.
And rather than being treated as isolated instances, such cases should be probed for systemic problems that may tarnish a country’s academic reputation in the long term.
Second, future policies aimed at promoting scientific research must consider unintended consequences. Quality must come first, even if quantity and speed of reforms are compromised, and intrinsic motivators such as the satisfaction of creating new knowledge must be preferred over financial rewards.
Many aspiring governments in the Muslim world are eager to invest in science, and naturally, expect to reap rewards. But they must realise that there is no shortcut to joining the world’s scientific elite.
There are many things money can buy overnight, but the ability to carry out quality scientific research is not one of them.
Athar Osama is a London-based science and innovation policy consultant. He is the founder and CEO of Technomics International Ltd, a UK-based international technology policy consulting firm, and founder of Muslim-Science.com.
Posted on 13 January 2012 by Tea Server
“I do not think Manto was particularly obsessed with prostitution. It might be more accurate to say that he was part of a broader movement in Modern literature to depict sexuality more honestly and sincerely than earlier generations had done, and writing stories with characters who were prostitutes was one way for him to do that.”
Amardeep Singh and Sadat Hasan Manto have something in common-both come from the same Indian side of Punjab. But that’s 
not the only connection they have.
Dr. Amardeep Singh, who teaches English literature at Lehigh University, is a second-generation Indian raised in the U.S. working on a new book on Sadat Hasan Manto. He is studying the Progressive Writers movement and other movements like Naya Kavita and Nayi Kahani that came after it. In this project he is trying to work with literature written in multiple South Asian languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and English. In some cases he is working with translations, while in other cases he is looking at material in the original languages.
His first book, “Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth Century Fiction,” was based on his Ph.D. dissertation, and was published in 2006. Dr. Amardeep has also written a number of articles on British and contemporary world literature, focusing on authors such as E.M. Forster, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rabindranath Tagore, and G.V. Desani. In 2010 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue research on the new book project, “Modernism and Progressivism in South Asia.”
In this interview he talks candidly about Manto, his work and pedagogical issues in teaching South Asian literature in the U.S.:
1. Sadat Hasan Manto was the product of an era when the subcontinent was going through significant political changes that ultimately ended in dividing the region into two separate countries. He wrote a lot on the impact of these changes on individuals and families. How would you analyze his understanding of the partition as portrayed in his short stories?
Manto, as is well-known came out of what is today the Indian part of Punjab – Ludhiana and Amritsar. He grew up in a pluri-religious environment and felt a very deep sense of loss in the disappearance of that sense of shared community across religious lines. He was also influenced by the emerging Progressive Writers group he encountered at Aligarh Muslim University in 1934; they wrote in Urdu and had a generally secular and reformist outlook. Manto was living in Bombay in 1947, and he did not initially jump to join Pakistan at that time. However, as he found his career in the Bombay film industry suffering, in large part due to the discrimination against Muslims that began to appear in the industry around that time, he did finally decide to relocate to Lahore in 1947. From what I can tell, he did not love Lahore, but he did provisionally accept the idea of himself as a Pakistani during the last few years of his life.
Manto’s short stories about the Partition, particularly “Toba Tek Singh,” “Khol Do!” (Open It), and “Thanda Ghosht” (Cold Meat) are some of his most famous stories. Stories like “Khol Do” and “Thanda Ghosht,” both of which feature shocking scenes of sexual violence, show how disappointed he was in the way people on both sides of the religious divide acted during the Partition. These are stories where people seem to behave like animals, thinking only of revenge and the crudest sort of satisfaction. “Toba Tek Singh,” for its part, is more about the strange sense of dislocation many people felt as the identity of large regions near the border changed status overnight. What was “India” one day became “Pakistan” the next, even if people still spoke the same languages, drank the same chai, and lived the same lifestyle they had the day before. The conceit of “Toba Tek Singh” is to have a mentally ill person attempt to digest the arbitrariness of this sudden transformation.
2. Manto was tried in India and Pakistan for “obscenity” as he used images of women as sex object and prostitute in several of his short stories. How would you compare obscenity and portraying sex as a social reality in literature? Who defines standards of pornography and sex in fine arts and literature in South Asia?
Manto wrote about prostitution because it was a part of life in his era. Once he was asked this same question, and he had the following rejoinder:
“If any mention of a prostitute is obscene then her existence too is obscene. If any mention of her is prohibited, then her profession too should be prohibited. Do away with the prostitute; reference to her would vanish by itself.” (via Harish Narang)
I do not think Manto was particularly obsessed with prostitution. It might be more accurate to say that he was part of a broader movement in Modern literature to depict sexuality more honestly and sincerely than earlier generations had done, and writing stories with characters who were prostitutes was one way for him to do that. Even within Urdu and Hindi literature, Manto was not the only one to push the boundary with regards to explicit sexuality in his writing. The first wave of Progressive Writers, emerging from the Angarey group, also did this. One infamous story by Sajjad Zaheer, for instance, was called “Vision of Paradise” (Jannat ki Basharat) which featured a Maulvi who begins to have erotic dreams while he intends to stay up late praying. The story was controversial at the time because it was seen as blasphemous, and reading it today there’s no doubt that Zaheer intended to be provocative regarding religious piety. But it is no less provocative because of its use of explicit sexuality.
Alongside the Angarey group, Premchand himself was often more direct about matters of sexuality than many people realize. His famous 1936 novel Godaan, for instance, features a cross-caste sexual relationship described quite frankly – though it’s by no means pornographic. Finally, it should be noted that Manto’s friend and rival, Ismat Chughtai, also pushed the line regarding the depiction of sexuality.
That said, there’s no question that Manto takes things a step further. A story like “Bu” (Odour) is significantly more explicit in its depiction of a random sexual encounter than anything written by Zaheer or Chughtai. As a side note, this story, which is one of Manto’s most infamous ones, is not actually about prostitution, but rather a middle-class man’s encounter with a poor woman (a Marathi “Ghatin”) working as a laborer. Other stories do deal directly with prostitution, but often with a focus on the hypocrisy and weakness of men. Manto’s prostitutes are often honest and even noble individuals – trying to survive in a society that treats the exploitation of women’s bodies as merely another kind of financial transaction.
On the question of who sets the standards for obscenity. Here I think there’s no question that by the standards of his time, some of Manto’s stories could be found to be “obscene.” As is well-known, he was tried for obscenity six times during his career, some by the British Indian government before 1947, and some by the independent government of Pakistan. I certainly oppose the censorship, but I think Manto knew what he was doing in writing stories like “Bu,” and I don’t think he or his career suffered greatly because he got in trouble for it; if anything, it may have gotten him more attention and thus helped his career in some ways. That said, with the sexual elements in “Khol Do!” or “Thanda Ghosht,” I do feel these are worth defending, since Manto is referencing sexual violence not for titillation but to make an important ethical point.
3. How would you compare Manto with short story writers of other languages, especially the known English writers of his time?
Manto was actually more influenced by Russian short story writers like Chekhov and French writers like Maupassant than he was by English literature. The Russian influence goes back to his time in college at Amritsar, where his mentor Abdul Bari Alig encouraged him to read the Russian short story writers. In fact, Manto’s very first book was his translation of French writer Victor Hugo’s The Last Days of a Condemned Man. He also published a book of translated short stories from Russia (often translated from translations: English to Urdu rather than Russian to Urdu) called Russi Afsane. In fact I do not think Manto can be usefully compared to any major English writers.
4. For Manto, South Asia and the U.S. had astonishing paradoxes and similarities in 1950. When Manto was being tried in Pakistan for obscenity, for example, writers were also facing similar charges in the U.S. How would you compare these two societies in the 21st century?
Manto was actually highly aware of the obscenity trials taking place in the United States. In one of his Letters to Uncle Sam (in Urdu as “Chacha Sam Ke Nam”), he actually acknowledged the obscenity trial surrounding Erskine Caldwell’s novel God’s Little Acre. At that time (1950) the United States was seen as the source of racy images and scantily dressed starlets within South Asia, so this was especially surprising to Manto. As he put it, “You are the king of bare things so I am at a loss to understand, Chachaji, why you tried brother Erskine Caldwell.” The judge in the Caldwell case, of course, dismissed the obscenity charge with some famous lines: “I am absolutely certain that the author has chosen to write truthfully about a certain segment of American society. It is my opinion that truth is always consistent with literature and should be so declared.” Manto claims he quoted these lines to the judge in his own case, but to no avail: “That is what I told the court that sentenced me, but it went ahead anyway and gave me three months in prison with hard labour and a fine of three hundred rupees. My judge thought that truth and literature should be kept far apart. Everyone has his opinion (‘raee’).”
While Pakistan and the U.S. were not so far apart in 1950, during the time of one of Manto’s obscenity trials and the trial of Erskine Caldwell, I think as time has gone on, they have grown further apart. In the 1960s, the U.S. moved away from the censorship model of the Hayes Code in the film industry, to a “ratings” model, wherein adult material would effectively always be legal as long as it was rated for adults only. Both India and Pakistan have, however, kept the censorship model alive, meaning that many legitimate and important works of art run the risk of censorship sometimes for arbitrary or simply
5. You have been teaching literature in the U.S. for some time. Do you think there are major pedagogical issues in teaching South Asian literature to students of South Asian origin and white Americans?
I should preface by saying that I myself have been raised in the U.S., albeit in a pretty conservative Sikh community with strong and continuing connections to South Asia. One problem with raising issues such as caste or debates about gender roles within Indo-Islamic culture with students who aren’t familiar with the society is that you can very quickly give the students a very negative picture of South Asian society. If you bombard them with the depth of poverty in India, or the repressiveness around gender and sexuality that still pervades in some parts of the society, you can make it less likely that they’ll want to seriously engage with South Asia in the future. In my teaching I strive for a balanced look at the society, pointing at the way some things have improved (for instance, the growing middle class in both India and Pakistan) alongside the things that aren’t improving (growing religious conservatism in Pakistan, extreme disparities of wealth in India). In that respect I may differ from some of my colleagues on the left: I think trends such as globalization have been beneficial at least in some respects in South Asian societies.
6. Urdu and Hindi are spoken by a large South Asian diaspora all over the world. Some say, combined together, it becomes the second largest language after Mandarin Chinese. How do you see the future of teaching South Asian languages and literature in the U.S?
The outlook for teaching South Asian languages in the U.S. is complex. On the one hand, languages like Urdu and Pashto have actually seen somewhat of a boom in recent years, though the boom is entirely due to the post 9/11 “war on terror,” and the source of the interest is the U.S. State Department and intelligence agencies. Languages predominantly spoken in India are not receiving the same kind of interest. That said, even the study of those languages was, during the cold war, supported by the State Department.
Away from the question of official government support, the economic and prestige disparities in the publishing world have been quite detrimental to the study and publication of literature in South Asian languages. Authors know they will get paid more if they write in English, and have broader readership and recognition as well. This does not mean that good literature in Indian languages is not being written (indeed, in my own experience visiting Punjab not long ago I found the state of Punjabi poetry in Chandigarh to be particularly lively – though it’s mainly a live scene, without much in the way of economic support from the publishing world).
I do not teach at the kind of university where I would have a significant number of students interested in reading Hindi, Urdu, or Punjabi literature in the original. However, there is certainly interest among some students in reading literature in translation from Indian languages, perhaps in conjunction with literature written in English.
One interesting development is a growing community of writers working in South Asian languages here in North America. I was at the University of British Columbia for a Punjabi literature conference a few years ago, and I was overwhelmed at the number of students studying Punjabi, often at quite a high level. There is an entire community of diasporic Punjabi writers (novelists and poets), mainly living in Canada, and publishing in their own small publishing houses here in North America (some of those writers also publish their work in Punjabi in India). I do not know if something similar exists with other South Asian languages, though I have seen some collections along those lines.
I should add that I am a person who does not see the choice of language as absolutely determining of authenticity. There are very good, representative novels of South Asian life written in English and very poor ones written in Hindi and Urdu. I have always been inspired by the case of Ahmed Ali, who in mid-career shifted from Urdu to English without really losing much in the way of his ability to describe the Indo-Islamic culture of Old Delhi. I think authors who make a strong attempt to use words from South Asian languages in the midst of their English prose when necessary – and who don’t worry about the possible incomprehension of western readers – can be every bit as “authentic” as their peers writing in South Asian languages.
(From Viewpoint Online)
© 2012, Qaisar Abbas. This article may not be reproduced in any form without providing an active attribution link/ reference to The Pakistan Forum. All attribution links within the article must also be retained.
Posted on 25 December 2011 by Tea Server
Part 1 – Many Barrels of a Gun
South Asia is often described as the most dangerous place on earth and the most promising emerging market – both in the same breath. The year 2011 illustrated in ample measure the implausible irony.
The killing of Osama Bin Laden was described as the biggest international news of the year 2011
The biggest international story of the year, according to The Associated Press’ annual poll of U.S. editors and news directors, was the killing of Osama Bin Laden in his hideout in Pakistan on May 2.
Coming close on the heels of a serious diplomatic row between the US and Pakistan over the issue of Raymond Davis, an alleged CIA operative, killing three men in the busy streets of Pakistan’s second biggest city Lahore in late January, Pakistan brought frequent – and hugely unwelcome – spotlight to the South Asian region during the year.
The year of turmoil, which was preceded by the country losing hosting rights of many sporting events including South Asia’s biggest sporting event, the ICC Cricket World Cup, ended with one of the most public spats in recent history between the democratically elected government and the omnipotent Pakistan military.
In a spat that could spell serious trouble for the fragile democracy of the nation, President Asif Ali Zardari is alleged to have sought US assistance to quell a possible military coup in the aftermath of Osama’s killing. Called the ‘Memogate Scandal’, for the unsigned memo – allegedly crafted by former ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani – that was used to convey the Pakistani request to the US administration, the matter has taken the scalp of Haqqani and dragged both Zardari and chiefs of military and Pakistan’s secret service agency Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to nation’s supreme court.
Conflicts like these have in the past acted as the precursor to military rule in the country, which the nuclear-armed nation has been under for more than half the period of its independence from British rule in 1947. Though the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, decisively denied on December 22 the possibility of any extra-constitutional measure against the democratic system, a cursory glance at the nation’s volatile history informs that the military usually manages to have its way.
Unfortunately, Pakistan was not the only South Asian nation where dead bodies talked the most during the year. Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal grappled with the aftermath of armed conflicts of recent history, even as India played host to a fleeting visit by terror in 2011.
A tribunal, headed by Nizamul Haque Nasim and known as ‘International Crimes Tribunal’, was formed in March 2010 in Bangladesh to hold trial of those accused of their involvement in ‘crimes against humanity’, including genocide, murder and rape during the nine-month ‘Liberation War’ – the period between declaration of Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in March 1971 and attaining freedom with India’s military help against Pakistan in December 1971. Many unofficial accounts put the figure of dead people at three million and those of women raped at 200,000. Hundreds of thousands of other, the then, East Pakistanis ended up as refugees in India.
Following up on the formation of the tribunal, the nation took its first step towards addressing that dark chapter of its young history when the police arrested three top Jamaat-e-Islami leaders in June 2010, two of which were cabinet ministers in the 2001-06 Bangladesh National Party (BNP) administration of the present opposition leader and then prime minister of Bangladesh, Begum Khalida Zia.
Khaleda Zia, in a statement to press, said that the tribunal is “nothing but a servile, rubber-stamp organisation” out to victimise the government’s political opponents.
The tribunal began its first trial in October this year when it charged Delwar Hossain Sayedee, a top authority of Jamaat-e-Islami and allegedly one of the leaders of a pro-Pakistan mercenary group, with involvement in the killing of more than 50 people, torching villages and forcibly converting Hindus to Islam.
Sayedee, who denies the charges, could be given the death penalty if found guilty.
International observers have cautiously welcomed the trials. With neutral researchers noting that about 1800 people collaborated with the Pakistani army in committing the ‘war crimes’, many more arrests in the case are expected.
In another case involving war in the SAARC region, to the south-west of Bangladesh, the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) of Sri Lanka submitted its final report to the government on November 20. Established by President Mahinda Rajapaksa in May 2010 to look into alleged war crimes committed during the final days of the 26-year-old civil war in Sri Lanka that ended with the defeat of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) at the hands of the Sri Lankan army in May 2009, the LLRC – expectedly – exonerated the Sri Lankan government of any wrong doings between 21 February 2002 to 19 May 2009.
The commission is not recognised by most of the international rights groups because of its failure to satisfy the fairness and transparency criteria. But the Sri Lankan government, which has steadfastly resisted vociferous global support for external accountability mechanisms such as the UN Secretary General’s Panel of Expert, said that the LLRC report is impartial and objective, and would be presented verbatim at the next session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in March 2012.
Up north in the Himalayas, the erstwhile monarchy and the presently constitution-less fledgling democracy of Nepal struggled, for another year, to draft a new constitution and pave the way for a stable democracy.
On November 28, members of parliament extended the Nepalese parliament’s term for a fourth and final time to allow the drafting of a new constitution that adheres to a peace accord brokered between political parties and the Maoist rebels, after the civil war ended in 2006.
Formed in 2008 after Nepal relinquished its monarchy, the current 601-member parliament, or Constituent Assembly (CA), was given an initial two-year mandate to write a new constitution for the young republic.
But three years since, the CA has not been able to produce even a first, consolidated draft. The previous three extensions of the assembly – first for a year and then two of three months each – failed to resolve differences between the various political parties on issues like federalism, presidential or prime ministerial formats and election procedures.
But the nation made some progress in what it called the ‘regrouping process’, entailing the re-integration of the cadre of Nepal’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the mainstream Nepalese society. PLA was the military wing of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (UCPN-M) when the party was at civil conflict with the Nepalese monarchy.
19,500 PLA combatants who were living in a total of seven cantonments in different parts of the country after the commencement of the peace process in 2006 began appearing before a committee on November 18 to register their choice of either joining the Nepal army or taking a voluntary retirement.
The process is seen is one of the only successes of Nepalese democracy since the abolition of constitutional monarchy in 2006.
India, the SAARC nation that has the biggest stake in the Nepalese peace process, meanwhile continued to answer its own geo-political needs – supporting the Maoists in Nepal, while going after the group in India and gunning down one of its biggest leaders, Kishenji.
Indian analysts, however, point out that there is no contradiction in the approach, as while the Nepali Maoist are now firmly in the Himalayan nation’s mainstream polity, the Indian rebels are still caught in the time warp of trying to overthrow the government to establish their own ideological republic – through the barrel of a gun.
The South Asian giant, however, faced none of the security-related anxiety of the other SAARC nations mentioned in this year-end wrap; barring a jolting bomb blast outside a court premises in New Delhi. But it was kept on the tenterhooks by another kind of challenge – that of popular anger.
End of Part 1
Posted on 22 November 2011 by Tea Server
Here’s the latest report of the Southasian journey undertaken recently by my friend, civil rights activist, writer and journalist (editor Himal Southasian) Kanak Mani Dixit, his wife Shanta (a teacher) and son Eelum (an actor, and yes, his name derives from ‘ilm’ which means knowledge, named by his dada, Kanak’s father who is a prominent writer).
Eelum, Kanak and Shanta Dixit: A great drive
The family started their 1100-mile odyssey in Kathmandu, Nepal, ending in Peshawar, Pakistan, to raise funds and awareness about the need for spinal injury rehabilitation. Those who have been following this issue would know that Kanak injured his spine in a trekking accident a decade ago. He survived, making a near miraculous recovery, and started the Spinal Centre Nepal in 2002, inaugurated by the late Sir Edmund Hillary. The coverage they’ve got on this journey has helped publicize their drive tremendously but the required funds have not arrived, and they are well short of their target. This is a personal appeal. Please donate what you can for this important cause. And do read this riveting account of their journey, includes important insights and information…
THE ‘GREAT NEPAL-INDIA-PAKISTAN SPINAL BEETLE DRIVE’
Proud Spinal Centre walas pose by the VW Bug about to make the journey on their behalf / SpinalNepal fb page
DATELINE: PESHAWAR, KHYBER PAKHTUNKHWA, PAKISTAN, 17 November 2011: The ‘Great Nepal-India-Pakistan Spinal Beetle Drive’ arrived in Peshawar on 16 November, ending a 1100-mile odyssey that took the 1973 VW Beetle from Kathmandu through Lucknow, Agra, Delhi, Amritsar, Lahore, Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
“It was an exhilarating journey across the friendly landmass of Southasia, and I hope a pointer towards easy land-crossings for people from all our countries. Most of our journey was along the Grand Trunk Road, built originally by Sher Shah Suri in the 16th century. The 21st century demands that we open this highway for the people, commerce and ideas to flow,” says Dixit.
The journey of the sky-blue Beetle was conducted with three goals: promoting ‘land connectivity’ in Southasia, developing links between spinal injury institutions across the Subcontinent, and raising funds for the Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre in Nepal.
Spinal Rally map and car
“The matter of land connectivity is important because airline links can never provide the mass-level contact that our people and economies deserve. One would want to see the same cacophony at the Atari-Wagah border as at the Nepal-India border of Bhairahawa-Sunauli.”
The trip was helpful in developing linkages between organisations such as the Spinal Centre in Nepal, the Indian Spinal Injuries Centre in Delhi (ISIC), the Mayo Hospital in Lahore, the National Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine in Islamabad, the Armed Forces Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine in Rawalpindi, and the Paraplegic Centre in Peshawar.
As for the goal of raising emergency funds for the Spinal Centre-Nepal in order to cope with sudden rise in demand for its services, they raised a little over half of the USD 110,000 goal. “We hope to complete our goal through a retroactive campaign because the spinally injured of Nepal badly need support,” said Dixit.
In the ‘Spinal Beetle’ driven by Dixit, he was accompanied by Shanta Dixit, educator and founding member of the Spinal Centre-Nepal. The back-up car, a Mahindra Bolero, included VW Beetle specialist Naresh Nakarmi, Spinal Centre staff member Suman Khadka and Eelum Dixit, doing videography and photography. Social worker Meera Jyoti is chair of the Spinal Centre-Nepal.
The Nepal President flags off the Beetle / SpinalNepal fb page
H.E. President Ram Baran Yadav of Nepal flagged off the Spinal Beetle drive on 4 November. In New Delhi, it was received by Maj. H.P.S. Ahluwalia, founder of ISIC, as well as journalist Kuldip Nayar and actor Om Puri. The physicist and peace activist A.H. Nayyar received the Spinal Beetle at the Wagah-Atari border. Throughout the Southasian drive, the team was graciously hosted by members of the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD) and other organisations, such as the Indian Doctors for Peace and Development in Agra, and Asha for Education in Lucknow.
Among the many interesting aspects of the trip, from the emotional to the historical, Dixit includes the following:
Kanak collecting the earth from Fatehgarh Sahib outside Sialkot, the childhood village of 96-year-old Barkat Singh 'Pahalwan' of Jalandar, India who especially requested this one 'gift''
• The Spinal Beetle team responded to the request of 96-year-old Barkat Singh ‘Pahalwan’ of Jalandhar (Indian Punjab) that some earth be collected from his childhood village of Fatehgarh near Sialkot (Pakistani Punjab). Taking a detour from the GT Road, the team found the place, which had now become an urban suburb of Sialkot, and collected a jarful of agricultural earth for Barkat Singh.
• The memory of Sher Shah Suri, the Afghan sultan from present-day Bihar who ruled from Agra, followed the team through much of the route, which he had regularised in the mid-16th century as an administrative and commercial artery. His memory was revived by the ‘kos’ markers along the Delhi-Chandigarh stretch, a neglected postal station outside Wazirabad, the great roadside banyans providing shade to travellers then and now, and the Rohtas Fort on the approach to Rawalpindi.
• Having started in the Lumbini region of Nepal, where the Sakyamuni Buddha was born more than 2500 years ago, the Spinal Beetle ended its journey in the Gandhara region around Peshawar, a vast centre for Buddhist learning, art and architecture where the Sakyamuni was first etched in human form a few centuries later. In the Potohar Plateau near Islamabad, the Spinal Beetle visited the gigantic Buddhist stupa at the village of Manikyal.
Spinal Beetle Drive at District Hospital, Bharatpur
• The Bharatpur government hospital in Chitwan District of Nepal was the first stop of the Spinal Beetle out of Kathmandu. The Bharatpur hospital sought help for setting up a spinal injury rehabilitation unit, which is in line with the Spinal Centre’s belief in decentralising rehabilitation. As a gesture of goodwill for the Nepal-India-Pakistan drive, the hospital committee donated NRs 50,000, which was gratefully received
• Arriving in Agra, the Spinal Beetle visited the Taj Mahal on the day of Eid ul-Azha. It arrived in Amritsar and visited Harminder Saheb (the Golden Temple) on the Guru Nanak’s birthday. Passing Gorkha District of Nepal (named after the Gorakhnath temple situated there), the Spinal Beetle traversed Gorakhpur, the base of the Nath sect, and ended its journey in Peshawar where the team visited the Gorakhnath Temple there, opened only a month ago after 60 years of closure. The Delhi-Amritsar leg of the journey was started with a visit to the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia.
• After watching the mock-militarist show at the Wagah-Atari border between the Indian and Pakistani goose-stepping men in khaki, that very evening the team attended a play on Bhagat Singh and his fight for independence, put on by the Ajoka Theatre of Lahore.
Major support: Maj. Ahluwalia and Om Puri with Kanak Dixit in New Delhi
• In New Delhi, Maj. H.P.S. Ahluwalia of ISIC suggested setting up a Southasian network for spinal injury rehabilitation, given the specificity of the need. There was an enthusiastic response to this idea throughout the rest of the trip all the way to the Paraplegic Centre in Peshawar.
• At the Mayo Hospital in Lahore, the Medical Superintendent Dr. Zahid Pervaiz and Head of Rehabilitation Medicine Dr. Waseem Iqbal provided information on spinal injury and trauma response that had been developed in Pakistan. They graciously offered four-year full fellowships for two doctors from the Spinal Centre-Nepal.
• In Islamabad, the Nepal team got specific information on the response to the 2005 earthquake which hit Kashmir and the Hazara division. The team invited Pakistani specialists to Kathmandu to share information on the medical, rescue, social work and humanitarian aspects, so that Nepal would be better able to tackle the mega-tremor that is projected to hit Kathmandu Valley and surrounding areas before long.
• In Islamabad, activist and politician Nafisa Khattak introduced the team to the Melody Theatre, which had served as a staging ground for the sudden rush of victims from the 2005 earthquake. Poignantly, this only cinema hall of the city had been set to torch by a radical mob some years earlier.
• In Agra, members of the Indian Doctors for Peace and Development reminded the team that while there were 8-9 neurosurgeons in the city, there was no rehabilitation centre.
• The Volkswagen Club of Pakistan (VCP) took the Spinal Beetle under its wings in Islamabad and made sure that the car was made ship-shape after the climb up from the Punjab plains. Discussion was started with the club members about organising a VW Beetle rally from Islamabad all the way to Dhaka through India and via Kathmandu, as an exemplary means to develop people-to-people contact in the Subcontinent. This would require cooperation between the VCP, the Association of Nepal’s Beetle Users (ANBUG), the Volkswagen Club of Bangladesh and the Volkswagen Beetle community in India.
• At a meeting organised by the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD) and the Islamabad Cultural Forum, Dixit spoke on the theme of ‘land connectivity’ in Southasia. “If on an old VW Beetle can do the Kathmandu-to-Peshawar trip with ease, imagine how easy it will be for everyone else.” At this time of geopolitical rapprochement between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, a special push must be made for land connectivity, he added. “Let a hundred thousand networks bloom across Southasia, in the spectrum from spinal injury to VW Beetles and beyond, to bring the people together.”
More on the Spinal Beetle drive: The sudden rise of the number of patients over the last year has forced the Spinal Centre-Nepal to raise its service from 39 beds to 51. We seek to raise USD 110,000 from the 1100 mile journey of the Spinal Beetle, at the ‘rate’ of USD 100 per mile from friends and supporters worldwide. By the time the Spinal Beetle arrived at Peshawar on 16 November, a little over half that amount had been raised. The Spinal Beetle Rally is also an effort to raise awareness of spinal injury prevention, rescue, care and rehabilitation in the Subcontinent. The Spinal Beetle has done the Kathmandu-Dhaka stretch twice, in 2002 and 2005, and touched base at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed (CRP) in Bangladesh. The CRP would be a key institution in the networking of spinal injury rehabilitation institutions that is proposed.
PHOTOGRAPHS of the Spinal Beetle’s journey can be viewed and downloaded ‘here or requested from Kanak Mani Dixit or Esha Thapa (below) | Follow them at Twitter: @SpinalNepal | Facebook: SpinalNepal
Kanak Mani Dixit contacts: email: kanakd@himalmag.com, dixitkanak@yahoo.com | Facebook: kanak mani dixit
Nepal Mobile: +977-9851053209 | India Mobile: +91-9560758147 | Pakistan Mobile: +92-3043005089
Kathmandu Contact: Esha Thapa, Director, Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre, Saanga, Kavre District
Tel: +977 11 660847/48 | Mob: +977-98510 | spinalinju@wlink.com.np | eshthapa@hotmail.com
www.sirc.org.np
New Delhi: Dr. H.S. Chabbra, Chief of Spine Service & Medical Director, Indian Spinal Injuries Centre, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi
Ph : +91 11 4225 5225 / Ext 243 / 356 | Cell : + 91 98100 54854 |email: drhschhabra@isiconline.org | www.isiconline.org
Lahore: Dr Waseem Iqbal, Head of Department, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Mayo Hospital, Lahore
Office: +92-42-6699-36174 | Mob: +92-333-5600-504
Peshawar: Ilyas M Syed, CEO, Paraplegic Center, Hayatabad, Peshawar | ilyassyed1@yahoo.com | Ph: 92-919217900-2
Posted on 20 November 2011 by Tea Server
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On Thursday, November 17th, I had the honor of reading parts of my short story at a cultural event held at the Pakistani embassy in Washington DC.
This colorful and heavily attended meeting was organized after His excellency, Mr. Hussain Haqqani found out the recent launch of the creative writing issue of South Asian Review on Pakistani writing. Thus, through a collaboration between the editors of the special issue (Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Dr. Waseem Anwar) and the embassy staff, last Thursday those of us who could make it to DC gathered at the embassy to read excerpts from our works. While we will provide more information about the readings and the whole event in a separate blog, I would like to take a few moments to convey my immediate thoughts after hearing the Ambassador’s vision of Pakistan on Thursday.
First of all, I must point out that I generally do not have a very high opinion of diplomats, especially when it comes to their public statements, as they usually cannot speak their minds because of the policy dictates of their respective governments. I was, therefore, ready for yet another boring prepared speech by yet another diplomat. Needless to say, what the honorable ambassador said to us resonated deeply with the audience and certainly made me think and, furthermore, encouraged me to throw my own support, puny and unimportant as it might be, behind the Ambassador’s vision.
I cannot cite the honorable ambassador verbatim here, but I will try to convey a sense of his passionate plea for a more diverse, progressive, and tolerant Pakistan. The Ambassador started his speech by pointing the obvious dangers to Pakistan, to its democratic institutions, and to its very idea of itself as a nation. He asserted that the role of literati and artists is extremely crucial in defining a more progressive Pakistan and also in challenging the fundamentalist imaginings of the nation. Pakistan, he said “will not be respected by producing fiberglass replicas of its nuclear bombs” but by embracing the democratic and progressive aspects of the current world.
I must say that while the ambassador offered his vision of Pakistan at this gathering, I felt proud to be a part of that crowd, for that progressive and multicultural vision of Pakistan is also the bedrock of my own philosophical take on the future of Pakistan.
The Ambassador also pointed out that there were two competing visions of Pakistan: One that attempts to define Pakistan with a “twelfth century mindset” and the other that articulates a Pakistan in peace with the world and in harmony within its own borders. Needless to say, most of us in the audience found ourselves on the side of the second: the one about the future, about tolerance, peace and dignity for all Pakistanis.
Yes, as the ambassador said, all leaders are flawed human beings, but it is through the combined efforts of these flawed beings and the people of Pakistan that the nation can be reimagined as a nation of the future. I wish the honorable ambassador the best of luck and I also offer him, whatever it is worth, my total support in realizing this vision of a more progressive and liberal Pakistan.
My thanks to you, Mr. Haqqani, for giving us a candid, honest , and daring speech worthy of someone such as you. Please be assured that we the writers, the teachers, and the workers of Pakistan share your hopes and aspirations about Pakistan.
© 2011, Masood Ashraf Raja. This article may not be reproduced in any form without providing an active attribution link/ reference to The Pakistan Forum. All attribution links within the article must also be retained.