Shockwaves

The other day I was watching a rather interesting interview of Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy the particle physicist from Pakistan. The noble doctor has been hammering away for nuclear disarmament for many years. However I was a little puzzled by his argument against India's nuclear program. His contention is that the nuclear explosion at Pokhran in 1974 was a disaster for India! How so? Hoodbhoy argues that it was this explosion that got Pakistan to work on theirs and go nuclear. He further argues that it was this explosion that eventually lead Pakistan to have the nuclear bomb and get military parity with India. While this may be true it is worth remembering that while Pakistan may be India centric, India is not. India's nuclear program was aimed not at Pakistan which has always been considered to be an irritant rather than a threat. The bigger threat was China and that too in a neighborhood that was hostile after successive wars were fought. Let us hark back to 1974 for a moment. Pakistan and China were an alliance, to whom the American's were cosying up under a Richard Nixon who disliked India. The Russian's were our only ally and China was a nuclear power that could always arm twist a non nuclear India.I do not see what other choice India had but to catch up with the Chinese

. Hoodbhoy goes on say that since Pakistan now has a nuclear bomb that country can harbor terrorists, who can strike at India with impunity and India will not be able to respond for fear of provoking a nuclear war. Kargil proved otherwise, didn't it? India used conventional weapons to smash occupying troops. I do not think that the equation is as simple as Hoodbhoy makes it out to be. India need not fight a war to choke Pakistan off. It can be done by diplomatic and economic means, which even the Pakistanis seem to now recognize. The People's Republic of China has developed and possessed weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and nuclear weapons. China's first nuclear test took place in 1964 and first hydrogen bomb test occurred in 1967. This was a full ten years before India's. China has been implicated in the development of the Pakistani nuclear program. In the early 1980s, China is also believed to have given Pakistan a "package" including uranium enrichment technology, high-enriched uranium, and the design for a compact nuclear weapon. Chinese complicity is what worries and should worry India and not Pakistan as Hoodbhoy erroneously believes.

On violence and other things......

As Mumbai braces itself and waits with bated breath, it is said that Balasaheb Thackeray battles for his life in what is a deserted city. The state administration has moved in a large number of reserve police and the Rapid Action Force as well to counter violence that might erupt should the Shiv Sena chief pass away. There has been a prelude with Sainiks attacking media persons a couple of days ago. Why and how violence can be justified by grieving political party workers is a question that has troubled many in our young country? While the Sikh riots of 1984, post Indira Gandhi's assassination might be qualitatively different it falls into the same genre. In more recent time the mayhem that was caused by the death of M.G.Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu and that of Cinema star and legend Rajkumar in Karnataka are a case in point.In both cases entire cities were shut down and millions of rupees and some lives lost due to looting and senseless violence by so called grieving supporters.Does this behavior have a place in a mature country? There is a pattern which plays itself out time and again and in order to protect innocent citizens administrations need to break it ( the pattern ). What does this mean? Lets look at a similar situation. The occupying American forces in Iraq had their hands full. While they expected a grateful local populace to treat them like liberators all they got was abuse and violent riots.A young American Major who viewed video footage of the riots saw a pattern after many sightings. What did he see? 1. A small crowd would first assemble. 2. The congregation would gradually grow larger with time. 3. Food hawkers would appear and set up shop as if on cue to feed the crowd. 4. The tension would grow and soon somebody would hurl a rock and all hell would break loose. The Major had a brilliant idea and requested the local administration to prevent food hawkers from setting up shop near a potentially riotous situation. Next time a crowd gathered there were no food hawkers to feed them, the restless crowd soon melted away in apparent hunger and frustration.What had the Major done? He had simply changed the pattern or changed the rules of the game? Indian administrators need to do this too. We simply cannot afford to allow lumpen elements driven by suicidal tendencies to take control of our cities.We need better strategies for crowd control.Violence is not an option anymore.

Great leaps that end in disaster.....

A glossed over and poorly reported disaster of the modern age has to be Mao's- Great Leap Forward. Mao was so inspired by Nikita Khrushchev's call that the USSR would overtake the United States in industrial production in just fifteen years. The Chinese leader promised that the Chinese nation would overtake the British in the same fifteen years and so was launched a program, that would eventually kill close to thirty six million Chinese peasants who died of starvation while members of the communist party lived fairly well fed lives. How did this come to be? When you have a cocktail of lies, stupidity and bravado disasters are not too far away and lurk at every turn. Mao began by 'collectivizing' all private land holding in China, which was very unpopular with the peasants. This was done to improve productivity. He next said that steel production must go up substantially and encouraged and then ordered people to set up backyard steel furnaces to produce steel at home.Neither Mao nor the peasants understood steel making technology and the upshot was that most peasants melted their tools- shovels, rakes, pikes, axes in the smelting furnaces of their homes. The end result was that the tools were gone without any steel. The communist party was too afraid to tell Mao that his plan was an unmitigated disaster and that food production across China was dropping. What they kept telling him was that food ( rice ) production had gone up and that people were singing paeans in his praise! Mao like all megalomaniacs was so full of himself that he believed the lie. The story has interesting take away's for all of us: 1.Science leave alone the rocket science kind is not common sense and its planning and execution is best left to experts. 2. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. 3. Eventually it is the famous 'aam admi' that gets the short end of the stick, however else you plan it, simply because the rich did not become so by being daft and swallowing patriotic propoganda! Did this have a bearing on India? I think it did, as by 1961 starvation deaths had reached a peak and Mao was desperate for a way out. In 1962 the Chinese fought us in a short war...................a timely diversion!

Stinking Bengaluru

I'm glad I live in the outskirts of Bengaluru, a reason being that I do not wake up to see mounds of garbage staring at me or worse have to smell it every time the wind comes my way. The dreaded problem of garbage has come to Bengaluru before other cities and this does not mean that it will not come to them. Many many years ago I made a train journey with a British lady and her boyfriend from Gujarat to Bengaluru. The lady kept making jokes centered around Garbage that I found difficult to fathom leave alone laugh at. Now I do, at least the fathom part. Garbage is a problem simply because the general population thinks it is not an issue that concerns them, that is till they see the garbage heap growing at their doorstep.That is the moment the finger pointing starts. Most households neither segregate or process their wet and dry wastes. Many a busy denizen just dumps his garbage at the street corner while on his/her morning walk and expects the garbage to disappear from his/her sight. This is a piece of magic that is not going to happen. Hapless villagers around Bengaluru who were absorbing our trash for years have woken up and cried a halt to dumping of waste around their villages even as we behave and live as if we are from an alien land living in Bengaluru and the issues of this city does not concern us. The garbage has raised serious questions on the spread of disease particularly dengue which is life threatening.While we can keep pointing fingers it is important to ask how the problem can be addressed as a normal citizen. Even while there are charges of corruption and neglect, the BBMP and state government claims to be looking at long term solutions in processing waste and thus reducing the need for landfills.While Bengaluru stinks we need proactive solutions and effort even at the cost of spending time away from regular work to avoid shooting ourselves in the foot!