From ONE RANK, ONE PENSION to NO RANK, NO PENSION

 A friend of mine who I respect a lot has written on Facebook: “I think the Agneepath recruitment scheme is excellent. One retires young with about 12 lakhs in his/her bank account. At 25 the retired Agniveer remains eligible for a wide range of jobs.”

For those unfamiliar with the beautifully named scheme, Agnipath is a plan is to recruit men between 17 ½ and 21 years in the armed forces. The recruits, called Agniveers, will be a distinct rank, different from all other existing military ranks. So far so good, but the catch is they will serve for 4 years and no more, although 25% of them will get the opportunity to join the regular forces. After drawing a fixed salary for 4 years, they will go home with Rupees 11.71 lakhs. No gratuity, no pension.

Moving back to my friend’s post, I do not know if he has lost his mind or is being deliberately provocative. His opinion is grossly untenable for the following reasons:

(1) The 25-year-old will be ready for jobs, as my friend says, but jobs won’t be ready for him, particularly in the current economic scenario.

(2) Hand over 11-12 lakhs in cash to 10 twenty-five-year-olds, 9 of them will either blow it away in months or invest in assets like a house, which unfortunately cannot be eaten. People with much better experience with managing funds find it tough to manage a corpus to yield enough for their monthly expenses, particularly when interest rates are falling steadily. Ask any retired person except the blessed government pensioners, you know how the cookie crumbles. Do you seriously expect a moderately educated 25-year–old with natural cravings for the good things in life—fast bikes and fancy clothes, not to mention wine and women—learn to invest astutely or begin a successful business in a decaying economy? You must be kidding!

(3) The Agnipath scheme is also called “Tour of Duty.” Does it allow us a Freudian peep into the minds of the Gujju idiots who consider the army a “tour”? Last night, I was hearing a retired Colonel’s opinion that the Indian Army needs 5 to 6 years to make a jawan battle-ready. Therefore, this bizarre four-year “tour” will not only make the armed forces weaker, it will also destroy the ironclad discipline and efficiency of the Indian army, which is one of the finest in the world. The traditions and discipline built over centuries of blood and sweat will be destroyed in a stroke of a failing government which doesn’t have money to pay pension. But has money for projects like the Bullet Train, the tallest statue in the world, PM’s fancy residence, and a subway for him to drive to office, and so on.

(4) When they are out of the army, how will these unemployed young men with incomplete military training (and discipline) be used by a religious fascist government? Will the Brown / Black Shirts from Europe in the 1930s come back? I don’t see any other way to deploy them given the shrinking economy, ever decreasing job opportunities, and our relentless journey on the fascist path.

(5) According to Yogendra Yadav, a rare politician who talks sense, the vacancies in the army at the jawan’s level was 16,500 eight years ago, but now it has ballooned up to 97,000. So, the government that blabbers ceaselessly on national security has neglected what matters most. 

(6) Yogendra Yadav also said Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar and a few other states with a martial tradition contribute a large percentage to our armed forces. Personally, I have seen, many from Kerala and Tamil Nadu join the army. However, unlike them, the North Indian states have little job opportunities outside the army. Therefore, from the teenage, boys there work hard, exercise, run miles and miles to prepare for the military. The new scheme has also made recruitment uniform all over India. Therefore, if a Haryanvi youth could look at say, 1000 vacancies in the past, now will find much fewer, perhaps 250. We can understand why young people have burst in anger in North India. And why young men are committing suicide.

I do hope there won’t be another suicide and the protests will be peaceful. Neither will another train be burned or any other property destroyed.

Finally, this is the latest of a number of disastrous steps taken by the current government which began with demonetization. Hopefully, this will be the last and one hopes the government will have the wisdom to shelve the bizarre plan immediately.

PS: I have copied the caption of the story from Facebook. I will acknowledge the author as soon as I see the post again.

17 June 2022

California Diary 1: From Pacifica to Morro Bay

Last month, when Arundhati and I spent a few weeks in California, our son Ritwik hired an eight-seater Toyota Sienna and took us on a drive along the California coastline. I have been fortunate to travel to many beautiful places and I’d say that the 450-kilometre drive was one of the loveliest I have ever experienced. We drove along California State Route 1 which connects San Francisco with Los Angeles and runs almost entirely along the coast. As we were driving south, on our right was the deep blue Pacific, colossal, awe-inspiring, and unvarying. On our left was the coastal mountains of California, which for some reason, has no given name unlike her cousins with well-known names, Sierra Nevada and the Rockies. She’s just called the Coastal Mountain Range.

As we drove, landforms on our left kept changing every 20 miles or so: from rugged mountains to dark forests, to open land with millions of flowers blooming in the spring, to huge tracts of agricultural land on the slopes of hills on which cows were grazing. If you have found the previous sentence little heavy and difficult to follow, then I have been able to convey what I had felt during the journey. It was a bit too much of captivating sights! I have had similar feeling in large art museums. After a few hours, the brain refuses to absorb anymore.

We began at a place called Pacifica, a picture of which you see above, and ended at Morro Bay. The unvaried sea and the widely varying landscape were punctuated with quaint little towns that were straight from Western movies. Let me digress for a moment here. My Oxford dictionary defines the word “city” as “a large town”. Americans however apparently call every human settlement a city. For example, Carmel-by-the-Sea or simply Carmel, is a city with an area of 2.75 kilometre and a population of 3,220! I will come back to this place in the course of this travelogue. The cities on the way that were somewhat bigger were Salinas (population 163,000) and Monterey (30,000). Incidentally, the American author John Steinbeck was born in Salinas and Monterey has a named after one of his novels, The Cannery Row.

I guess the introduction has been long enough! Let’s see some pictures.

Wild flowers on the way

The Pacific Ocean seen from the Pigeon Point Lighthouse. The lighthouse, built in 1871, is one of the two tallest lighthouses on the west coast of North America and is still functional. 

"Research published 2022 by the San Mateo County Office of Sustainability found that the lighthouse was vulnerable to erosion caused by sea level rise." [Wikipedia].

What you see below are not dead fish. They are female and young elephant seals. Ninety miles south of Monterey, we came across the stretch where 25,000 elephant seals come and relax during different times of the year. The place is called Piedras Blancas Rookery, rookery being the term for the breeding ground for sea mammals.

April-May is the moulting season, when female elephant seals shed their skin. They eat nothing for months during their sojourn on the beach. However, it was not the season when males come ashore in search of mates. Adult male elephant seals, which can be as long as 4-5 m and weigh up to 2,300 kg, would be something to watch. The females in comparison are much smaller at 2.5-4 m long and weigh 400-800 kg. 

We passed by Carmel-by-the-Sea, or Carmel. It is a tiny but wealthy city in Monterey County which has beautiful plush homes right on the beach front. Many of them apparently are owned by actors and artists who obviously have deep pockets. Movie star Clint Eastwood was elected the mayor of the city in 1986.

Our hotel was away from the beach. It was a quiet place in the lap of nature. Nishaant is carrying a crutch as he broke his leg while playing a few weeks ago.

The Riverside Inn is beside a river which was narrower than the sign you see in the picture below.

The sun sets in Carmel-by-the-Sea, but a little away from the sea

This is how the place looked next morning. 

Spanish colonialists from Mexico invaded and captured California in the 18th century and called the province Alta California. (Alta means upper and baja means lower in Spanish, Baja California is a state in Mexico just south of the US California.) As everywhere else, missionaries were the soft power used by Spanish imperialists too, who set up their first mission in San Diego in southern tip of present-day California in 1769, and followed it up with a slew of missions along the coast up to San Francisco. In these missions, padres made every effort to bring native Americans to civilization, using temptations and brute force. But it was not smooth sailing for theme, the San Diego mission was burnt down by rebellious locals in 1775. 

In the background of this picture is Carmel Mission Basilica, founded in 1771 by Saint Junipero Serra.

I wish I could tell you the name of the river on which the bridge is. 

The pictures below however, do not need labels. 

 

Our journey ended at Morro Bay, the main feature of the place being volcanic mound Morro Rock. Morro Bay, a city of 10,000 people looked desolate after sundown. 

In the morning that followed

The marina. In the whale country, this is how the weather cock looks.

Finally, the route, courtesy Mr. Google

Three questions in the time of cholera

I was born in a middleclass Bengali family in the early 1950s. “Middleclass” those days meant the glass was always half full. But the more important aspect of my family was the modifier “Bengali”. We spoke Bangla at home and everywhere. Listened to Bangla songs and watched Bangla films. We read Bangla alone, with the exception of an English newspaper, The Statesman. Being Indian was important, but it was in the background; the everyday reality of our life revolved around Bengaliness.

Gentle reader, you would have noticed that I have described the time of my childhood without a religious marker, without telling you what religion we belonged to. Such was the time. My parents didn’t care much for religion either. My father never participated in the somewhat perfunctory pujas offered by mother—without the aid of a priest—to the goddess of learning Saraswati and to her older sister Laxmi, the deity of wealth, once a year. Besides, every Thursday, Ma would read a hymn before the framed picture of Laxmi. (The picture was a bit worn out, like the financial state of our family.) But I believe these acts were less about religion and more about culture, like the community Durga pujas, or making pithe with powdered rice, jaggery, and cocoanut, a practice that continues to this day as a trace of the harvesting festival in the distant past when most people depended directly on farming.

The Hindu religion played little role in our life. Religion was never discussed at home. However, my parents were not irreligious. In fact, both of them deeply believed in, ignoring every evidence to the contrary, a supreme power somewhere above that worked relentlessly for the good of humanity. Anyway, the bottom line was that our religious identity didn’t matter.

Also, although my parents had lived through the violent Hindu-Muslim riots of 1946, never ever did I hear them say a word against Muslims. They knew neither community was holier than the other, and more importantly, an-eye-for-an-eye could only lead us to a kingdom of the blind.

Seventy years later, I am not only being constantly reminded that I am a Hindu, I am also told that “my” religion is in danger: “Hindu khatre me hai.” Hindus of India, 80% of the population, are destined to be overwhelmed by the other 20%, in particular, by Muslims who are under 15% of the population.

Looking around, I don’t see any truth in the bizarre yarn. No Muslim has attacked another community in recent memory, barring isolated incidents like the Mumbai train bombings in 2006 in which 209 innocent people were killed in a most brutal manner. (What happened in the same city on 26/11/08 was a barefaced undercover operation by the Pakistani state; it had nothing to do with Indian Muslims.) Secondly, there is absolutely no evidence that the Muslim population has been increasing as percentage of the population of India. Finally, in every significant profession under the sky, from the judiciary to the academia, from the armed forces to the medical profession, clearly there are very few Muslims. Far fewer than the percentage of the community in India.

How on earth are the 15% threatening the 80%? I would request you to stop and ponder over the question. And there are other questions too.

Since the BJP government came to power in 2014, there have been relentless attacks on Muslims, both physically and otherwise. The Wikipedia lists 22 incidents across North India between 2015 and June 2017 in which 28 Muslims were lynched by cow vigilante mobs. The situation continued to worsen. On 2 September 2021, the BBC summed up a report* with these words: “Unprovoked attacks on Muslims by Hindu mobs have become routine in India, but they seem to evoke little condemnation from the government.”

Since then, the process has taken a more insidious turn as the entire Muslim community is targeted through a range of laws and communal messaging that spread like wildfire in the time of a cholera called the social media. For example, it is bizarre to contemplate that Indian Muslims have collectively decided to somehow make Hindu girls fall in love with Muslim boys, but our ruling dispensation would like us to believe so through the “Love Jihad Laws” passed by several BJP state governments. The powers that be do not want Muslim vendors to come anywhere near Hindu festivals or temples. As the discourse in TV channels revolve around hijab and halal, communal riots are planned meticulously, intensifying the relentless effort to corner and marginalise the Muslim community both socially and economically.

In April 2022, there have been multiple communal clashes in mostly BJP ruled states like Delhi, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh. These riots followed an exact template. On the festival of Ram Navami, processions led by Hindutwawadis would pass by mosques and through Muslim areas. There would be aggressive slogans and abuses against Muslims until there was protest or retaliation from the other side. Then the Muslims would be beaten up and their homes and businesses would be burned.

The central government and BJP-ruled states used to be silent spectators to similar violence in the past, but now, the state has become a major actor in the hate project. Destroying Muslim lives and livelihood is no longer left only to the indoctrinated thugs. Following the violence, the state sends bulldozers as in Jahangirpuri in Delhi to Khargaon in Madhya Pradesh, to demolish homes and businesses in Muslim areas giving no notice, claiming those were “unauthorised structures”.  

A bulldozer during a demolition drive in Delhi's Jahangirpuri area on Wednesday (20 April 2022) | Shahbaz Khan / PTI | from the Scroll

While this goes on unchecked, there is carpet bombing of anti-Muslim propaganda. BJP leaders, including ministers, publicly call to shoot Muslims. The most widely articulated political sentence since 2020 is possibly “Deshki gaddaro ko, goli maaro saloko.” A bunch of saints—rather, thugs in saffron—believe India is an Islamic state and call for “genocide against Muslims and other minorities in the name of name of protecting Hinduism.” [Wikipedia, accessed on 30 April 2022] The government cares not, the courts turn their head away, and the media spreads the lies peddled the government and ruling party.

All this is bound to have an impact. Many Hindus, who were impeccably balanced and open minded all these years are nowadays heard to say, “I agree, but about Muslims, …”

That brings us to the second question. What does India gain through this insane project to marginalise and torment a section of our own citizens?

The third and final question that comes to my mind is: Can you name a country that has progressed by attacking and marginalising its own citizens? If you need any clue, please think of Pakistan in 1971 and Sri Lanka between 1983 and 2009.

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-58406194

Sexual dimorphism

The header above is a phrase I have come across recently. This little note is surely an attempt to show off my newly-acquired knowledge, but I guess you will enjoy if you read on, particularly if you are interested in evolution of life forms.

The adjective “dimorphic” means “representing two distinct forms”. Sexual dimorphism means the differences in size, strength, and behaviour patterns between the two sexes of the same species. For example, among wild mammals, males are often bigger and more aggressive than females. Females, on the other hand, take care of their infants. Among birds, males not only have attractive plumes and colours, usually, they are the ones that sing! The male deer has antlers, a cumbersome attachment, but it adds to his visual appeal, besides being useful during fights with other males.

Males and females are different because the struggle for reproductive success takes each of them along different evolutionary trajectories. Male birds / mammals have to win sexual contests with other males. To put it simply, they must impress females, a situation you come across in college campuses and elsewhere.

Interestingly, sexual dimorphism is much less pronounced among domesticated animals because they don’t have the same evolutionary pressures as wild animals! Their survival (and usually, suffering) is ensured by their human masters. Among humans, in the so-called civilized societies, physical strength has taken a back seat in personal contacts. Even if a man has a contest with another to win the favours of a woman, they don’t try to beat each other to pulp. Usually!

Sexual dimorphism is therefore less pronounced among humans. According to an estimate, in the US, 10% of men have less weight than the average weight of a woman. Men don’t need a bigger body or stronger muscles to impress women these days. Instead, they try to enrol in IITs.

However, certain forms of dimorphism, like bright colours for birds and antlers for deer should be a disadvantage for their survival. These make them more visible and easier targets for predators. But the paradox is resolved if you consider that the reproductive success of an animal is often more important than his/her life span. For example, a wild male pheasant lives half as long as a female. (Nature is perhaps not as partial to males as it might seem at the first glance!) A male pheasant’s reproductive success depends not on how long he lives, but on how many females he can mate with. Bright plumage improves his chances. On the other hand, among insects, females are often bigger than males as they need volume to produce a large number of eggs.

I got interested in the topic while reading some books. Of these, one I read at a stretch over the last two days: a beautiful Bangla novel around the evolutionary success of migratory birds in particular and birds in general. The book has been written by a relatively unknown author, Debashis Moitra, who besides writing, teaches civil engineering. Humans are no less intriguing than birds, it seems.

More about the book later. Please watch this space!

20 March 2022

Picture of male and female orioles from Marin Independent Journal, e-edition