The Hindu

Exorcising 1984

1, 13-Apr-2009, Page : 008

Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar might want to attribute their current miseries to a shoe hurled by an attention-seeking Sikh journalist. But the protests by large sections of the Sikh community against the allotment of Lok Sabha tickets to the two Congress leaders have their genesis in an atrocious official cover-up that reflects very poorly on the Indian criminal justice system. A sloppy and non-serious process of investigation and prosecution meant that the perpetrators of the genocidal violence against thousands of innocent Sikhs in the wake of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination, on October 31, 1984, by her Sikh bodyguards have gone scot-free. The killing spree by Congress activists and supporters, allegedly orchestrated and led by some party leaders, left 2,733 people dead in Delhi alone. But after two Commissions of Inquiry and eight committees set up to probe various aspects of the horrific violence, and prolonged trials, only 13 persons have been convicted (and one declared a proclaimed offender). As during Gujarat's genocidal anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002, there were clear indications of complicity by the police and the official machinery in the terror unleashed. The Congress as a party has also found it difficult to live down Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's notorious rationalisation of what happened: "there are always tremors when a great tree falls." The Indian experience is that law enforcers and investigating agencies almost invariably incline towards the ruling establishment. This meant that with a Congress government in power for 10 of the next 12 years, the victims of 1984 never got within smelling distance of justice. Actually, several of the committees indicted Congress leader H.K.L. Bhagat and Messrs Tytler and Sajjan Kumar for their alleged roles in the 1984 massacre. The Nanavati Commission concluded that there was "credible evidence" against Mr. Tytler and that "very probably" he had a hand in organising the attacks. However, in its Action Taken Report, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government took the stand that a person could not be prosecuted merely on the basis of "probability." Quite predictably, the Central Bureau of Investigation - India's premier but patently non-independent criminal investigation agency - has concluded that it did not have sufficient evidence to prosecute Mr. Tytler. But after the controversy erupted, the CBI, which did not raise any jurisdictional issues when it filed a charge sheet in 2006 and a closure report in 2007, suddenly challenged the Metropolitan Magistrate's power to hear the case. Such clumsy efforts to help the ruling party wriggle out of messy situations have further eroded the agency's credibility. By dumping Messrs Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, the Congress has done some damage control but what it needs to realise is that the ghosts of 1984 cannot be exorcised unless the victims get full justice.

The Hindu
Codifying social obligations

1, 13-Apr-2009, Page : 008

The United Nations initiative to evaluate national corporate laws and practices in terms of their consistency with human rights norms follows in a long series of steps to ensure transparency and accountability of multi-national corporations. This is critical to achieving equitable growth in today's globalised world where competition to attract capital inflows among developing countries exerts a downward pressure on corporate governance standards. The duties of directors, standards of reporting, and shareholder engagement in 40 jurisdictions - in advanced industrial countries and emerging economies such as India and China - would be evaluated under a move led by the U.N. Secretary General's Special Representative on business and human rights, John Ruggie. The extent to which the courts reflect environmental and human rights concerns, as well as access to remedies for the victims of abuses, would also be assessed by 15 cross-regional corporate law firms.

The complicity of firms in violations of rights by governments in the world's conflict zones, particularly in Africa, has come under intense scrutiny among others by the International Commission of Jurists. But the United Kingdom's 2006 Companies Act is by far the most audacious attempt to give a statutory basis to the corporates' obligations to promote sustainable development. While recognising the primary duty of directors to advance the interests of companies, the law requires them to consider issues relating to employees, suppliers, customers, the community, and the environment insofar as failure on these fronts can entail financial risks. The European Union is considering ambitious proposals to guarantee legal remedies for the victims of violations by E.U.-based enterprises and their global subsidiaries. Corporations in the 30 constituent countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development are also governed by a non-enforceable code of conduct; not to mention the 2000 U.N. Compact that brings together over 5,000 companies in pursuit of the same objectives. Underlying all these is a wider recognition that the ethical, environmental, and social imperatives of entrepreneurship are not incompatible with the creation of value in the long-term. The current momentum to accord formal recognition to normative standards is but a logical next step. Venturesome, vainglorious'Dual' loneliness "Dual" loneliness

SHARING SOLITUDE: It's a solitary world of shrill calls causing ripples across silence, peopled by just two mynas in sync, spotted at M.A. Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai recently. It could have been passed off as an All Fools' Day's joke. But The Hindu is not known for levity or frivolity. Or for pulling readers' legs. So when a picture appeared on Page 2 of the Chennai City edition on April 1, 2009, the readers who reacted to it sounded indignant - "We did not expect this from a standard newspaper like The Hindu." "I deeply regret the paper has gone down on ethics." "Even a novice can spot this and TheHindu readers are not gullible." "It is a shoddy job and we are aghast." So went the comments. Only one reader mentioned April Fool's Day. (The picture is reproduced here for those who see the other editions of the paper).

Unfortunately, this was no gag. It was planned, deliberate dishonesty by a senior staff photographer. Whatever the perpetrator intended, damage was done to a venerable institution. The Editor-in-Chief had to apologise. That it was pulled off also revealed a weakness in the system. The photographer, confronted with the reactions, first maintained that what he submitted was an original picture. It was then examined by the chief of the graphics department of the paper and also by an outside expert. Their finding: it was a manipulated picture. Their conclusion, after studying a 200 times enlargement of the picture, was that photo editing software had been used to mirror and flip the image and create a pair of birds where there had been only one. Crudely finished cut-out or selection marks were seen around the edges of one bird. The photographer finally confessed it was a 2008 picture that had been doctored, and apologised profusely. (The caption said it was a "recent" photo.) This was the second time I had to deal with such an issue. In December 2006, the Madurai edition carried the picture of a pigeon with its image reflected in a pool of rainwater. One reader made the charge that it was a manipulated image as the reflection was sharp with no shaky lines.

A detailed study showed there was no tampering at all. I concluded my column then (December 18, 2006) with the Photo Editor's comment that The Hindu did not indulge in such practices. I cannot say that again even though the paper itself is not at fault but was let down. The photographer, by his action, has left a permanent scar. He has been punished, his otherwise excellent service record of 24 years mitigating the severity of the action taken. That he could get his "creation" into the paper revealed a weakness in the system. A very large number of pictures comes into the system every day. And a selection has to be made. This is the job of the Photo Editor who judges their quality. The news desk comes in after a first list has been made. When so many readers could spot the fake (from the reproduction in newsprint), how did a veteran photographer, technically highly qualified, miss it in the original? He told me the picture came during the rush hour, from a senior photographer. It is always rush hour in a newspaper and that can be no excuse for letting your guard down. Inquisitiveness and a questioning mind are essential traits for a journalist when handling any input, whoever be its author. In this case there was no urgency either.

This is not my first experience of a journalist with a creditable record venturing to do something foolish and getting caught. What drives them to this? It cannot be for recognition, for their quality is known. A gambling spirit? Vaulting ambition? Overconfidence? I keep wondering as I see them fall. readerseditor@thehindu.co.in SHARING SOLITUDE: It's a solitary world of shrill calls causing ripples across silence, peopled by just two mynas in sync, spotted at M.A. Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai recently.

The Hindu
The blurred line between stress and anxiety

1, 13-Apr-2009, Page : 009

Molly Belmont Worried about your job? Stressed about meeting new people? Maybe you're feeling anxious about your finances or health? Has it gotten so bad that it's interfering with your sleep? Are you avoiding situations that make you uncomfortable? Everyone experiences stress in their day-to-day lives, but more than 30 million Americans suffer from something more intense than that. Anxiety disorders are the second-most-common mental health problem in the country, and they can be paralysing. More pervasive worry Sometimes day-to-day stress and anxiety are hard to tell apart, but the easiest way to distinguish them is that stress is brought on by actual events, and then dissipates, whereas anxiety is a more pervasive worry, that often attaches itself to specific areas of your life, like your relationship, job or health, says psychologist Terry Mooney. This anxiety does not dissipate, and in fact, it can

increase to the level where it begins to change your behaviour, Mooney said. That's when it's characterised as an anxiety disorder. Anxiety can keep you safe, helping you recognise danger, and cope with it, says Mooney. But if you begin to see danger lurking around every corner, or worry over and over again about the same events, then you might be dealing with something more substantial, like an anxiety disorder. People with anxiety disorders often begin to avoid activities or circumstances that make them anxious, said John Forsyth, associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany and director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Programme at the university. People may stop driving, or stop going to parties. They may stop travelling or even avoid leaving the house. It's this curtailing of activities that causes the suffering, Forsyth said, making you feel that "life is shrinking around you." Anxiety disorders come in a variety of forms and manifest themselves in different ways. Generalised anxiety disorder is characterised by ongoing worry about everyday tasks, even when there's no clear reason to worry. People with social anxiety disorder experience intense worry over social interactions, and often feel judged by people or worry that they will embarrass themselves. Post-traumatic stress disorder, which is characterised by people reliving a frightening event over and over again, is also considered an anxiety disorder. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is when people take on obsessive rituals that help them maintain the illusion of control. Often repetitive in nature, obsessive compulsive rituals can include cleaning, checking and rechecking something, counting or endlessly reviewing conversations in their mind. Treatment is available for anxiety disorders. People can use a variety of approaches, including therapy, medication and exercise. Cognitive behavioural therapy has been found to be as effective as medication, Mooney says. This approach involves retraining yourself to deal with anxiety: "Control your behaviour and your feelings will follow,'' he says. Exercise has also been proven very effective for helping people ward off excess anxiety, he said. Forsyth is the author of a new workbook, The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety, and he is running clinical trials based on a new treatment, acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT. This is a form of cognitive behavioural therapy that teaches people to separate the disorder from how they think about themselves, he said. - 2009 The New York Times News Service

The Hindu
In Kalahandi, battle for livelihood trumps war for votes

1, 13-Apr-2009, Page : 009

An open challenge to those who speak of development as an inclusive process.

Siddharth Varadarajan
Of all the disconnects between the economic 'base' and political 'superstructure' of Indian electoral alliances, none is more glaring than the tie-up between the Biju Janata Dal of Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and the Left-inspired Third Front. For even as the Left has made the anti-people neo-liberal policies of the Manmohan Singh government at the Centre the target of its nationwide campaign, Mr. Patnaik remains firmly wedded to one of the most predatory forms of extractive capitalism anywhere in India.

Three-cornered fight Here in Kalahandi, all the promises and pitfalls of this model are on open display, dividing its victims and hope-filled beneficiaries, suborning the institutions of the state and throwing an open challenge to those who speak of development as an inclusive process. Lanjigarh is today frontier country and what happens here tomorrow, after the elections and beyond, will likely determine the direction India takes. The election is essentially a three-cornered fight between the sitting BJP MP, Bikram Keshari Deo, Congress stalwart and former MP Bhakta Charan Das and Subhas Chandra Nayak of the BJD. But the polls mask a more bitter and fundamental contest. On one side is the political clout and financial muscle of a powerful business house - the Indian-owned MNC, Vedanta - which established a massive aluminum refinery here in 2006 and is pushing for the immediate commencement of bauxite mining in the picturesque and ecologically-fragile Niyamgiri hills which ring this small town. And on the other, thousands of local tribals and nontribals, who say the mining project will completely destroy their lives. In Chhatarpur and Bandiguda right next to the refinery, and villages elsewhere, local residents openly express their preference for the 'haath' of the Congress. Mr. Das has been vocal in his opposition to Vedanta and his supporters have actively taken part in the struggles of the villagers and were also involved in a major case against the mining project in the Supreme Court. Despite the court-mandated Centrally Empowered Commission coming out against the Niyamgiri project on environmental grounds, the SC gave the green signal last year, overturning a plea by the Dongria Kondhas who live on the hill that their livelihood and religious rights would be destroyed once mining begins. It is not just the Dongrias who say the hill is sacred. "Niyamgiri belongs to Niyam raja," Bhima Majhi of Turiguda, a Kondha, told The Hindu. "We worship him up there and in our village. And because of him, the hill gives all of us everything we need - food, water, forest products." These sentiments appear to be shared by virtually everyone cutting across caste, tribe and even class lines. "Niyamgiri is our life", Niranjan Acharya, an Ayurvedic doctor and activist said. Once it is gone, we will have nothing". With both the BJD and BJP strongly defending Vedanta, the fight, at least around Lanjigarh, seems to favour Congress. But Kalahandi is a large constituency. In the district headquarters of Bhawanipatna, opinion is divided on the bauxite project but most people this reporter spoke to said they expected the region to benefit in the long run. Local traders said sales had increased since the refinery was set up but also said the endless stream of trucks running into and out of Lanjigarh had ruined the local highway. Even in town, though, many seemed inclined to vote for Bhakta Charan Das in spite of his opposition to Vedanta, mostly out of fatigue towards having the same MP representing them since 1998. But for the Assembly, urban residents spoke highly of Mr. Patnaik and the BJD. Vedanta claims that its project will bring benefits to the population around Lanjigarh, a claim belied by the absence of employment for locals and mounting environment-related problems the refinery itself has generated. As part of its contribution to local welfare, the company built a 20bed ward for the local government hospital. When this correspondent visited it, the ward seemed unused. Dr. Debashish Ray said Vedanta had built the ward but neither it nor the government had provided any extra staff or facilities like quarters. "I would say Vedanta has made no contribution here," said Dr. Nagendra Rajsamukh, another resident physician. Both doctors said the refinery had led to an increase in the incidence of skin and respiratory diseases because of water and dust pollution. "From afar, everything seems OK," said Dr. Ray. "But only those who live here know what it is like." Even before the mining has started - a process the locals say will lead to water streams from the hill getting choked - the large red mud pond Vedanta has built near its plant has already cut off water to dozens of acres of farm land. And in village after village, this reporter saw residents with skin ailments and heard of an increase in TB. Govind Majhi, a 15-year-old boy in Bandiguda, held

out a blistered hand that he said was caused by bathing in a polluted nali. "If a neta's son falls ill, Vedanta will even fly him by helicopter," said a villager. "But for us, there is nothing." Asked about the promised jobs, Mukta Harijan, a wisened but sprightly Dalit woman in Chhatrapur pointed to the scores of young men standing around. "Most of the work is being done by people from outside. When our youth ask for work, the security guards demand a gate-pass and turn them away." Villagers said that whenever they try to protest, the police quickly move in. In Bellamba, locals said three villagers - Manglu Majhi, Hari Majhi and Dhanurjay Patra - were still in jail three months after being arrested for taking part in a peaceful dharna. "Vedanta tells people in Delhi, 'we have given everything - electricity, roads clinics,' but they have done nothing," said Doisingh Majhi of Bellamba. In Kendu Bardia, Kumti Majhi, a local leader of the anti-Vedanta movement, told me about how villagers last week managed to stop the construction of a conveyor belt that will be used to bring bauxite down from Niyamgiri once the mining starts. "They will try again after the elections and the police and administration will back them," he said, "but we will continue to resist." Niyamgiri, he said, was not the property of the government and the courts had no power to hand it over to Vedanta. "The hills belong to the adivasis and we are not going to let go."

The Hindu
Limits of photography/video

1, 13-Apr-2009, Page : 009

Despite their power, one thing photographs and video can never do is give us the full picture. Ian Jack The protests during the G-20 summit were a carnival of photography. If they achieved nothing else - and that seems likely - they showed how the camera has become startlingly ubiquitous, as ordinary a recording instrument as the ballpoint pen but infinitely more believed than any words in a notebook. Most people over 50 can remember a time when normal life stopped for a photograph. My father had an old box Brownie, the Model T Ford of photography, unchanged in its basics since the first one came out of the Kodak factory in 1901. When it appeared from the sideboard drawer, certain self-conscious postures were assumed; we were in the presence of a camera. Hold still! The shutter speed was one 25th of a second - more ''swish'' than ''click'' - and each roll of film held eight or 12 frames. Film was expensive. By a rough reckoning, I may have had my picture taken a couple of dozen times a year with the family camera. Add one or two for weddings, add another for the day when we were ranked by size on benches in the school playground. Perhaps, at a very generous estimate, a total of 40 images of myself set in chemicals every year. Today, just by the act of leaving the house and travelling and shopping in London, I might be photographed 200 times in a few hours. Digitally, of course: darkrooms, fixing solutions, prints hung to dry - the old slow crafts of photography have largely vanished. This year, for the first time, a new American president had his official White House portrait taken by a digital camera. The social impact of this revolution has still to be fully understood. Usually its consequences have been written about rather darkly, in terms of CCTV cameras and the surveillance state, but recent events in Britain offer a different verdict. The digital camera is an egalitarian piece of technology - cheap (most mobile phones have them), easy to use, convenient to carry and quick to produce images that can be spread throughout cyberspace in seconds. What we are

witnessing, as any professional photojournalist will tell you, is the unstoppable rise of the citizenphotographer. Last Thursday (April 2), at the demonstration outside the G20 summit in east London, I saw them at work. A small war of cameras. Police were stopping, searching and photographing demonstrators at Canning Town tube station; the demonstrators photographed the police as they took their photographs; sometimes - a third viewpoint - a video maker turned up to get both sides in the same shot. It seemed to me then that the camera, so often accused of spreading violence by its fixation with physical aggression, could also be one of violent behaviour's great restraints. There is nothing at all original about this thought. In 2007, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg declared that he wanted people to use their mobiles to record crimes in progress and to send the images directly to the police. And which of us hasn't speculated, however pointlessly, about the different course history might have taken if the first world war had been covered by live television broadcast from a Flanders trench? Or, better still, if every soldier advancing at the Somme had a mobile in his hand and sent home pictures of so many broken bodies in so many shell holes, until of course his phone went quiet and all his relatives could hear was the advice to leave a message. It would surely have been a shorter war. In this way, it can be argued that the new cornucopia of visual information is a boon; to see more is to know more, and perhaps to understand, prevent and correct more. This week offered three outstanding instances of digital photography's effect on public knowledge, beginning with the video footage of a policeman knocking Ian Tomlinson to the ground and ending with a BBC team's concealed-camera investigation into how visiting care workers look after the frail and old at home in the U.K.. The first was shot by an American fund manager, the second by some reporters who went to the trouble and expense of actually training some carers (rather more than the care firms themselves managed to do) before equipping them with tiny cameras and sending them off to find jobs. The first was accidental - the American just happened to be there - while the second involved complicated subterfuge. The result in each case was shocking. In this week's third example, however, the benefits of digital technology are not so clear-cut. Bob Quick, Scotland Yard's counterterrorism chief, enters Downing Street with a secret paper open to view. The information on it quickly finds a life in cyberspace, or that's the risk, and Quick resigns. In the old days all that would have happened was a D-Notice (official request in the U.K. to news editors not to publish or broadcast items on specified subjects for reasons of national security) and the confiscation of several rolls of film. One question arising from Quick's case is, do people have the right not to be photographed? Or do we demand the freedom to take and publish pictures of everything and anybody all the time? Japan and Korea have insisted that all mobiles give a warning bleep when their cameras go off, to alert possible subjects. French law prevents publication of portraits taken in a public space without their subjects' permission. As a consequence, the art of street photography - Brassai and Cartier-Bresson among its famous former practitioners - has migrated to London and New York. And even New York has right-toprivacy laws that prohibit the ''unauthorised use of a person's likeness for commercial purposes;" when Erno Nussenzweig, an orthodox Jew who didn't believe in graven images, discovered his picture in an exhibition and sued for $2m in 2006, it was the legal pleading that it was "art" that got the photographer off the hook. These arguments are sure to grow because most of us in some incoherent but fundamental way believe we own the visual rights to ourselves. An even bigger argument, devolving from writers such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, concerns our predisposition to think of photography as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It isn't. In 1968 in Saigon, Eddie Adams took one of the most famous pictures from the Vietnam war, of a general with a pistol shooting an

unarmed man in the head. It won a Pulitzer. It seems incomprehensibly barbaric. General Nguyen Ngoc Loan was reviled ever after, unsuccessfully sought anonymity as pizza restaurateur in Virginia and died in 1998. The identity of the man he shot is less certain, but he is widely believed to be Nguyen Van Lem, a Vietcong partisan who that morning had killed several policemen and their families. Adams later befriended the general and apologised for the damage his picture had caused him. "People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation," Adams wrote in Time magazine. "They are only half-truths ... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'" We've still to discover why a British policeman knocked Tomlinson to the ground and why he died a few minutes later. If and when we do, it will be words and not pictures that tell us. - Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2009

The Hindu
Where recruiting clashes with immigration limits Matt Richtel Where's Sanjay?

1, 13-Apr-2009, Page : 009

The question comes from one of dozens of engineers around a crowded conference table at Google. They have gathered to discuss how to build easy-to-use maps that could turn hundreds of millions of mobile phones into digital Sherpas - guiding travellers to businesses, restaurants and landmarks. "His plane gets in at 9:30," the group's manager responds. Google is based in Silicon Valley. But Sanjay G. Mavinkurve, one of the key engineers on this project, is not. Mavinkurve, a 28-year-old Indian immigrant who helped lay the foundation for Facebook while a student at Harvard, instead works out of a Google sales office in Toronto, a lone engineer among marketers. He has a visa to work in the United States, but his wife, Samvita Padukone, also born in India, does not. So he moved to Canada. "Every American I've talked to says: 'Dude, it's ridiculous that we're not doing everything we can to keep you in the country. We need people like you!'" he said. "The people of America get it," he added. "And in a matter of time, I think current lawmakers are going to realise how dumb they're being." Immigrants like Mavinkurve are the lifeblood of Google and Silicon Valley, where half the engineers were born overseas, up from 10 per cent in 1970. Google and other big companies say the Chinese, Indian, Russian and other immigrant technologists have transformed the industry, creating wealth and jobs. Just over half the companies founded in Silicon Valley from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s had founders born abroad, according to Vivek Wadhwa, an immigration scholar working at Duke and Harvard.

The foreign-born elite dating back even further includes Andrew S. Grove, the Hungarian-born cofounder of Intel; Jerry Yang, the Chinese-born co-founder of Yahoo; Vinod Khosla of India and Andreas von Bechtolsheim of Germany, the co-founders of Sun Microsystems; and Google's Russian-born co-founder, Sergey Brin. But technology executives say that byzantine and increasingly restrictive visa and immigration rules have imperilled their ability to hire more of the world's best engineers. While it could be said that Mavinkurve's case is one of a self-entitled immigrant refusing to live in the United States because his wife would not be able to work, he exemplifies how immigration policies can chase away a potential entrepreneur who aspires to create wealth and jobs in the U.S. His case highlights the technology industry's argument that the United States will struggle to compete if it cannot more easily hire foreign-born engineers. "We are watching the decline and fall of the United States as an economic power - not hypothetically, but as we speak," said Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of Intel. Barrett blames a slouching education system that cannot be easily fixed, but he says a stopgap measure would be to let companies hire more foreign engineers. "With a snap of the fingers, you can say, 'I'm going to make it such that those smart kids - and as many of them as want to - can stay in the United States.' They're here today, they're graduating today - and they're going home today." The idea is opposed by staunch foes of liberalised immigration and by advocates for Americanborn engineers. "There are probably two billion people in the world who would like to live in California and work, but not everyone in the world can live here," said Kim Berry, an engineer who operates a nonprofit advocacy group for American-born technologists. "There are plenty of Americans to do these jobs." The debate has only sharpened as the country's economic downturn has deepened. Advocates for American-born workers are criticising companies that lay off employees even as they retain engineers living here on visas. But the technology industry counters that innovations from highly skilled workers are central to American long-term growth. It is a debate well known to Google, and it is a deeply personal one to Mavinkurve. - 2009 The New York Times News Service