To live longer

Leafing through the latest statistics, I was struck by the fact that the average life expectancy in the developed world is still about twice that in the developing world. Japan, for example, has an average life expectancy of 82.6 years while Mozambique or Sierra Leone is stuck at 42 years. And it seems that women on average live anywhere from 4-7 years longer than men in the developed world while the difference drops to almost zero in the poorest of the developing countries. India straddles the two worlds—here women, despite conventional wisdom, still live about 3 years longer than men!

Recent studies (http://www.americanvalues.org/Marriage_Brief_1.pdf) have shown that married people live longer those who are single or divorced. Or it may be that it just seems longer to the married man. The protective power of marital status, however, is not small. Overall, nonmarried women have mortality rates about 50 percent higher than wives, and nonmarried men have mortality rates about 250 percent higher than husbands.

In simple terms what does this really mean? Take two middle-aged men with the same race, income and family background, except that one is married and the other is single or divorced. What are the relative odds that either man will live at least to age 65? The answer: Nine out of ten husbands, but only six out of ten single men. In other words, absent remarriage, an extra three out of ten men lose their lives when they lose their wives.

For women, the life-protecting benefits of marriage are also apparent, but not as powerful. Nine out of ten middle-aged wives will make it to age 65, compared to about eight out of ten single and divorced women.

While the above date comes from studies in the US, it is also true for most developed countries, where single, divorced or widowed men of any age are about twice as likely to die as married men, and nonmarried women face risks about one and a half times as great as married women. A study led by Linda Waite, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, confirmed that happily married couples tend to live longer than unwed individuals. Married men were found to live, on average, 10 years longer than non-married men, and married women lived about four years longer than non-married woman.

While the above facts seem to be incontrovertible, the question still remains why?

It seems that the married lifestyle encourages good health habits. Married people are less likely to hang out in bars late at night, get into fights and auto accidents, or become crime victims. Married people remind each other—or nag each other-- about important health habits: eating right, getting enough sleep, wearing seatbelts, cutting back on smoking or alcohol, and visiting the doctor regularly. Married people also seem to behave in healthier ways even when they are not reminded to do so constantly by a spouse. In addition, people behave more responsibly when they know that someone else depends on them than they do when they view themselves as autonomous individuals.

In the US almost half of women over age 65 are widows and will be widows for an average of 14 years. Since women outlive men by nearly six years, there are 4-5 times more widows than widowers but they tend to live longer after the death of a spouse. According to gerontologists, widowers struggle more than widows to live without a spouse. Growing up during an era when men relied on their wives to be housekeeper, caretaker, and their main source of emotional support, an expanding generation of elderly widowers find they've lost both their best friend and their social planner, leaving them isolated. ''For women, it's a seamless thing. For men, it can be a big change,'' said Jan E Mutchler, professor of gerontology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. When men lose a spouse, ''they lose the person they rely on most.''

So to live longer, get married and look after your spouse !

his Brief

The death of newspapers

In the last six months, a large number of newspapers in the US have closed shop pleading lack of advertising money and blaming competition from the free news of the internet as the prime cause. The fact is that today young people chose to get most of their news from the internet rather than the print version. Defenders of the paper newspapers argue that with the death of the industry, there will be no investigative journalism and that foreign news will decline in quality since they will not have funds for foreign correspondents. They also argue that the charm of newspapers is that your eye may often be caught by a news item that you were not looking for but find interesting. All true but unfortunately facts remain facts—the number of readers has declined sharply leading to lower advertising revenues leading to fewer journalists. The NYT now has 1000 while the Washington Post has about 800 staff on their rolls.

Analyzing my own newspaper reading habits, I find that when I read the Washington Post, I skip over more than half of the paper- having no interest in an 8 page section on basketball and baseball, or 4 pages on obituaries, another 4 pages on local gossip and TV trivia and occasional three pages on foreign issues of remote interest. I would imagine that many newspaper readers have had similar reactions in the past but had no alternatives to fall back on. But now with the internet, you can really design your own daily newspaper which focuses on your interests and can also bring the best journalists from around the world to your table.

My internet newspaper thus provides me daily headlines from New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and BBC. This is supplemented by Times of India, Economic Times and The Hindu. I can pull in columnists like David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Eugene Robinson and Frank Rich from the US press, Ed Luce, Clive Crook from UK , Swaminathan Aiyer and Vir Sanghvi from India. The daily newspapers can be supplemented with Newsweek, Time, Outlook and Newsline (Pakistan). By adding feeds from bloggers like Robert Reich, Andrew Sullivan and Joe Klein, you are also able to keep abreast with the latest analysis by the pundits. You can lighten this up with a comic strip from Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts and a crossword from Tribune. If I can do this at no cost, why would I want to contribute to a newspaper that provides so little in comparison to the wealth I can draw upon from around the world on a regular basis?

Clearly the newspaper industry needs to find a different business model when the competition can offer such a wealth of choice and coverage. Perhaps they can offer each one of its readers a custom designed internet newspaper for a fee.

A different view of Modi

It has been almost 7 years since the massacre in Gujarat. It connotes an atrocity that will not die, a sectarian myth-in-the-making that constitutes a hideous rebuke to India's sectarian self image. And at its epicenter stands a much reviled yet charismatic Gujarati, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, an icon of India’s economic growth and development, and a leading force in the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, or BJP. He represents a challenge for he is that rare politician who is both incorruptible and efficient. But his role -- and unwillingness to demonstrate any contrition for his role-- has damned him it seems for ever with the intelligensia in India. There are no moderate views on Modi - either he is reviled as the incarnation of evil or as the new face of India.

It is therefore interesting to hear from an objective outside writer what he thinks of Modi in the piece from the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

India's Energy dilemna

We often spend a great deal of time criticizing the policy makers and operators on their approach to the mounting problems facing the country. There are no shortage of critics but few of them have any alternatives to offer. We see this in the greatest economic crisis facing the world. We also see this in India in crucial sectors of the economy. Having spent almost a lifetime in the energy industry, and being a vehement critic of the shortsighted approaches of the policy makers, I am often asked what I would do differently.

Here is what I would do.

The energy crisis confronting the country needs a completely new integrated energy strategy. This has to be the first step. In formulating this strategy, four issues need to be understood. First, while a major focus in the present days has been on oil imports, the fact is that what India really faces is an energy crisis. Only one third of India’s energy consumption comes from oil – and the domestic Indian oil companies today only provide one third of this consumption. In short, the Indian oil companies, despite their great profits, actually provide less than 10 % of our energy needs. And it seems highly unlikely that this percentage will improve drastically in the next decade thus requiring a different approach to the crisis.

Secondly, any energy strategy needs to be resource based. India has oil reserves at present production levels only for 19 years, gas for 28 years and coal for over 230 years. This distribution of resources in the world is similar – oil reserves have a reserve to production ratio of 41 years while gas is over 67 years. And more interestingly while 78 % of oil reserves lies under OPEC control, gas and coal reserves are more widely distributed with no single country or group of countries likely to acquire OPECs monopoly power on supply and price.

Thirdly, the linkage chain between resources and consumption is poorly understood. For example, almost half of the power produced by burning fossil fuels is lost in distribution effectively negating any gains on resource exploration and exploitation. Electricity losses in India average over 40 % while in most countries electricity losses are kept well under 7-8 %.

And finally, policies of self reliance and self sufficiency are likely to be inadequate policies in today’s globalized world for ensuring the country’s energy security in the future.

So what should the country do given these resource constraints and the new geopolitics of energy that is emerging in the world? Here are five pillars for the new energy policy and strategy:

One, India should move its economy gradually from oil to gas. The resource base within the country and globally argues for this as do the global environmental constraints likely in the future. What does this imply? India should invest in three to four LNG terminals – some of which could be government financed infrastructure with soft loans to kick start the change. Coupled with this would be the development of a national gas transmission grid mirroring the national highway project. All major cities in the close proximity of the national grid should switch from oil and diesel to CNG – a model whose practicality has been demonstrated in Delhi albeit under a court order. Up scaling of gas to diesel technology should be feasible based on the pilot projects in Malaysia and New Zealand. Opening up the gas system as an open access system will stimulate public and private distribution companies to invest and utilize the gas as has been done in Gujarat.

Second, it is clearly time for a New Exploration Policy for Coal to be implemented on the lines similar to NELP for oil and gas. The success of the successive NELPs in mobilizing both technology and finance from the within the country and without should silence the critics of this approach. Coupled with mine mouth based power plants with the new electricity law which allows open access in transmission, it can contribute to a major alleviation of the power situation in the country since coal based power plants can be set up technologically within four years. Clean coal technology can blunt the criticism from the environmentalists regarding pollution.

Increase in energy efficiency has been a chimera in India although a large number of organizations and ministries have struggles valiantly over the years to have an impact. The fact is that in the absence of the right price signals, most of these efforts are more likely to fail than succeed. World experience demonstrates that the most effective means of promoting energy efficiency in production and utilization comes from the introduction of competition and through transfer of ownership of the systems or parts of the system. Thus just as cell phone competition with a strong regulator has stimulated better consumer service at lower prices, a shift of ownership of distribution of electricity and gas through either cooperatives or investor owned utilities or even private companies coupled with the development of a competitive field under a regulator could achieve the same in the power and gas sector.

Fourthly the search for increased resources both within the country and outside should not be given up – just more effectively organized. It should be recognized that stimulating domestic competition between companies both Indian and foreign has been responsible for more resource discoveries in the country – for example the Krishna Godavari gas fields-- than if the sector had been left to the monopoly public sector oil companies alone. Yet it is also clear that the search for overseas contracts is not the most effective if the size of the companies – not financially so much at technologically – does not have the necessary scale and inhouse expertise. The answer thus would be to leave the domestic resource exploration effort to a competitive structure without trying to create a fictitious synergy by merging two or more large oil companies like ONGC and IOC but there is merit in creating two or three companies for foreign ventures outside the country. Two of these could be formed by the merger of the larger oil companies in the public sector while the private sector can also be encouraged to look for economies of scale in their overseas operations.

Finally the issue of energy security needs to be faced squarely.

The first element of an energy security plan would, of course, be to create a strategic petroleum reserve as the primary line of defense against any disruption. While an effort is already underway, the country is nowhere near the IEA recommended target of 90 days of a strategic petroleum reserve. Encouraging other countries in the region –for example by creating an Asian Energy Agency --to similarly develop these strategic reserves and working out arrangements for cooperation during times of individual distress could further mitigate the short term risks of disruption. This can be bolstered by an implicit strategic reserve as well. The country already has a potential reserve in its existing production installations that it is unaware of. The fact is that most oil fields in the world are capable of producing 10-15 % above their optimum production levels for a limited period of time without either damaging the reservoir or reducing the total recovery from the field over its lifetime. What is required is the installation of the additional systems – wells, pipelines etc—which would permit this additional production in an emergency or crisis. A careful inventory of existing fields in the country and a program of additional installation could easily provide this additional strategic petroleum reserve.

A second element lies in diversification- of fuel sources and suppliers. It was Churchill, who took a major risk in converting the British Navy from Welsh coal to imported oil on the eve of the First World War, who said that “safety and certainty in oil lie in variety and variety alone”. But now that variety needs to be sought in sources of energy, rather than sources of oil alone. By shifting the dependence of the economy from oil to other energy sources, its vulnerability to price and interruption shocks can be severely limited. If oil supplies are disrupted, the vulnerable transport sector should be able to switch to compressed natural gas, if gas pipelines are blown up, import of LNG should be able to fill the gap and if there are no hydrocarbons to power the generating stations, import of coal or pumped storage hydro plants should be able to take over the extra loads. However, this requires implementation of an integrated energy development strategy. Further an increase in diversification of fuels, suppliers and sources with a larger number of competing suppliers will not only increase the measure of security but also have an economical benefit. As individual suppliers – of oil, gas, coal or LNG – find that they do not individually control the economic development of the country through control of supplies and that the country has developed a system in which each individual supplier is not a crucial or critical element requiring a payment of risk premium, their negotiating position will become less robust and more amenable to reasonable pricing solutions.

And finally the country needs to think of its energy security in terms of energy rather than only oil and gas. Well over half of oil and gas in the country is used for production of power. A major disruption in industry can be mitigated by a concurrent increase in power supplies from other than hydrocarbon sources transported through the national power grid. This would again require a concerted effort to upgrade the existing transmission systems and sourcing of additional power supplies. An effort to develop power plants in the neighboring countries of the region – Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar - as part of a regional grid could be planned as an important part of the country’s total energy security efforts. The present efforts in sourcing pipeline gas from Iran, Myanmar, Bangladesh etc really needs to be complemented by a similar effort in the development of an Asian regional power grid. Perhaps we need the power minister to follow on the heals of the petroleum minister in visiting neighboring countries to help develop a regional power grid!

The fact is that the increasing globalization of the economy, energy security will lie in diversification of energy sources and of energy supplies. It needs to be noted that diversification of the energy economy will eliminate dependency either on oil or gas supplies, while diversifying fuel suppliers will further reduce any fear of a single supplier cutting off supplies. It is interesting to note that Japan has signed contracts for LNG supplies with 8 different suppliers at different costs as part of its energy security package. Here too diversification of suppliers and creating of supply competition both in fuel type and source will provide the country with a greater measure of energy security than any long term contracts with single suppliers will.”

This is what I would do if…..

Slumdog Oscar Winners

Three Indians won Oscars: A.R. Rahman, Resul Pookutty and Gulzar and not one of them is a Hindu. And thereby hangs a tale.

A.R. Rahman was born Dilip Kumar. He converted to Islam when he was 21. His religious preferences made no difference to his prospects. Even now, his music cuts across all religious boundaries.

Resul Pookutty’s is an even more interesting case. Until you realise that Malayalis tend to put an ‘e’ where the rest of us would put an ‘a,’ (Ravi becomes Revi and sometimes the Gulf becomes the Gelf), you cannot work out that his name derives from Rasool, a fairly obviously Islamic name.

Most interesting of all is the case of Gulzar who many Indians believe is a Muslim. He is not. He is a Sikh. And his real name is Sampooran Singh Kalra. He was born in West Pakistan and came over the border during the bloody days of Partition. He had seen so much hatred and religious violence on both sides, he said, that he was determined never to lose himself to that kind of blind religious prejudice and fanaticism.Rather than blame Muslims for the violence inflicted on his community — after all, Hindus and Sikhs behaved with equal ferocity — he adopted a Muslim pen name to remind himself that his identity was beyond religion.

In a rather interesting and passionate article, Vir Sanghvi writes of the different trajectories that India and Pakistan have followed since independence. As he points out it is nobody’s case that India is a perfect society or that Muslims face no discrimination. But the two countries are completely different in their separation of religion from governance. Pakistan was founded on the basis of Islam. It still defines itself in terms of Islam. And over the next decade as it destroys itself, it will be because of Islamic extremism. India was founded on the basis that religion had no role in determining citizenship or nationhood. An Indian can belong to any religion in the world and face no discrimination in his rights as a citizen in so far as the law of the land is concerned.

Two lifetimes in one

Some years ago Gael Sheehy wrote a book called “New Passages” where she said that our generation was the first one to be blessed with having two lifetimes in one. We retire early and die later giving us the opportunity to live two lives in one lifetime. Previously we retired at 60, played golf for a few years, travelled a bit and then called it a day since life expectancy was then about 65. The old demarcations and descriptions of adulthood, beginning at 21 and ending at 65, are hopelessly out of date. For now we tend to take early retirements at 50 but still have another two or three decades to go before the grim reaper comes a calling. Sheehy calls this an opportunity of a lifetime to do things that we may not have found possible in our early days. Gail Sheehy discovers and maps out a completely new frontier – a Second Adulthood in middle life. "Stop and recalculate," she writes. "Imagine the day you turn 45 as the infancy of another life." Instead of declining, men and women who embrace a Second Adulthood can progress through entirely new passages into lives of deeper meaning, renewed playfulness, and creativity beyond menopause and male menopause.

But every silver lining has a cloud – in this case three clouds- and some darker than others.

Living longer, for one, means that you need to provide adequate money for those extra years of retirement. Unless your pension is inflation adjusted, you can see your nest egg growing smaller by the day. And if you are banking on the stock market investments or hedge funds to bolster your meager savings, you are in for a rude awakening. So providing for a second lifetime is no longer easy.

Most men on verge of retirement dream of lazy vacations and golf during the weeks after they are done with the 9 to 5 rat race. But as the years beyond retirement stretch out, neither the golf nor the international travel seem to quite fill the days anymore. Of course there are a few who take up new occupations- working with NGO’s to promote education for all or village uplift—who seem to be the pathfinders of the new frontier that Sheehy talks about. But these are few and far between. For most the retirement years seem to stretch on too long and the hours are spent on bewailing the past, tending on medical ailments that seem to grow by the minute and obsessing about adequate money for future comforts.

But the bigger and the most unpredictable toll of the second lifetime are emotional. These are the problems of what are called the sandwich generation—a generation that is compelled simultaneously to deal with the problems of their growing children and their aging parents. Sandwiched between the escalating needs of their aging relatives and their own children, today's adults are caught in an intergenerational squeeze. A problem captured most poignantly by friend who said that “In the morning, I tie a bib, mash the vegetables and cajole my three year old to eat. In the evening I do the same thing again but” she said sadly wiping a tear, “now it’s for my mother who is 75 and an Alzheimer’s patient”.

Increasingly, this generation is having to dig deep emotionally to cope with the aging parents while bringing up their own children and developing a professional career. In the Indian tradition, aging parents became the responsibility of the eldest son and his wife. It is, however, the poor daughter in law who is subject to a double whammy—when she came as a bride, she was under the iron hand of the mother in law, and now just when she thought she was free to live her life after the children have left, she is saddled with the responsibility of looking after the ailing mother in law. When she was young, her husband did not protect her from the in law syndrome, now that she is old, he generally refuses to insist that his siblings share fairly in the responsibility of looking after the parents.

The problem of adult children looking after aging parents is creating new tensions particularly for working women. I asked one who was working at a job, bringing up her two teenage children, tending to her aging parents and a mother in law with a stroke, how she coped with all this emotional pressure and why she did not insist that her siblings or her husband’s siblings take some more responsibility for all this work. Her reply was simple “I do it because I want to do it”. Then after a while, she added pensively “Also what choice do I have.”

The fact is that India today has over 81 million old people as the average life expectancy has grown from 30 years in 1947 to over 70 in 2008 and there are almost no social security nets for a majority of them. There are very few institutions in the country for supporting the aged. Delhi, the capital, with almost 1.1 million senior citizens has only 4 governments' run homes with another 31 run by NGOs, private agencies and charitable trusts. Few working people have pensions or insurance and even the 5-6 % government servants that do, exist on paltry amounts that may not even be inflation adjusted. For most the only social security is the family.

Our generation may have two lifetimes in one but our systems and institutions are barely able to cope with one.

The danger next door

I recently read a piece by a prominent Pakistani, Pervez Hoodbhoy who teaches at a university in Islamabad, which seeks to explain the recent developments in Pakistan with some context.It should give us some pause as a rapid descent of our neighbor into chaos will not bode well for us in the future.Of course, it raises the issue whether there is anything we can do to arrest this descent but at the very least, we should be aware of the currents next door.

"“The common belief in Pakistan is that Islamic radicalism is a problem only in FATA, and that madrassas are the only institutions serving as jihad factories. This is a serious misconception. Extremism is breeding at a ferocious rate in public and private schools within Pakistan's towns and cities. Left unchallenged, this education will produce a generation incapable of co-existing with anyone except strictly their own kind. The mindset it creates may eventually lead to Pakistan's demise as a nation state.” warns Pervez Hoodbhoy, who teaches physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad .
“A full-scale war is being fought in FATA, Swat and other "wild" areas of Pakistan, resulting in thousands of deaths. It is only a matter of time before this fighting shifts to Peshawar and Islamabad (which has already been a witness to the Lal Masjid episode) and engulfs Lahore and Karachi as well. The suicide bomber and the masked abductor have crippled Pakistan's urban life and shattered its national economy. Soldiers, policemen, factory and hospital workers, mourners at funerals and ordinary people praying in mosques have all been reduced to globs of flesh and fragments of bones.”
“But” he laments “in spite of the fact that the dead bodies and shattered lives are almost all Muslim ones, few Pakistanis speak out against these atrocities. Nor do they approve of the army operation against the cruel perpetrators of these acts because they believe that they are Islamic warriors fighting for Islam and against American occupation. Political leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have no words of solace for those who have suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists. Their tears are reserved exclusively for the victims of Predator drones, even if they are those who committed grave crimes against their own people. Terrorism, by definition, is an act only the Americans can commit.”

What explains Pakistan's collective masochism?
According to Pervez “To understand this, one needs to study the drastic social and cultural transformations that have rendered this country so completely different from what it was in earlier times. For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Indian subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian peninsula. This continental drift is not physical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its South Asian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. Grain by grain, the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the rich soil that had nurtured a magnificent Muslim culture in India for a thousand years. ….This change is by design. Twenty-five years ago, the Pakistani state used Islam as an instrument of state policy. Prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, floggings were carried out publicly, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast in Ramadan, selection for academic posts in universities required that the candidate demonstrate a knowledge of Islamic teachings and jihad was declared essential for every Muslim. Today, government intervention is no longer needed because of a spontaneous groundswell of Islamic zeal. The notion of an Islamic state – still in an amorphous and diffused form – is more popular now than ever before as people look desperately for miracles to rescue a failing state.”

“Villages have changed drastically; this transformation has been driven, in part, by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other sects, who they do not regard as Muslims. The Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than the Pukhtuns, are now beginning to take a line resembling that of the Taliban. Hanafi law has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law, as is evident from the recent decisions of the Lahore High Court. In Pakistan's lower-middle and middle classes lurks a grim and humourless Saudi-inspired revivalist movement that frowns on any and every expression of joy and pleasure. Lacking any positive connection to culture and knowledge, it seeks to eliminate "corruption" by regulating cultural life and seizing control of the education system.”

"Classical music is on its last legs in Pakistan; the sarangi and vichitraveena are completely dead," laments Mohammad Shehzad, a music aficionado. Indeed, teaching music in public universities is violently opposed by students of the Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba at Punjab University. So the university has been forced to hold its music classes elsewhere. Religious fundamentalists consider music haram or un-Islamic. Kathak dancing, once popular with the Muslim elite of India, has few teachers left. Pakistan produces no feature films of any consequence. Nevertheless, the Pakistani elite, disconnected from the rest of the population, live their lives in comfort through their vicarious proximity to the West. Alcoholism is a chronic problem of the super rich of Lahore – a curious irony for this deeply religious country.

“Islamisation of the state and the polity was supposed to have been in the interest of the ruling class – a classic strategy for preserving it from the wrath of the working class. But the amazing success of the state is turning out to be its own undoing. Today, it is under attack from religious militants, and rival Islamic groups battle each other with heavy weapons. Ironically, the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal and is almost daily targeted by Islamist suicide bombers.
In Pervez’s view “ Pakistan's self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia's system, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere. The world of the Pakistani schoolchild remained largely unchanged, even after September 11, 2001, the event that led to Pakistan's timely desertion of the Taliban and the slackening of the Kashmir jihad. Indeed, for all his hypocritical talk of "enlightened moderation," General Musharraf's educational curriculum was far from enlightening. It was a slightly toned down version of the curriculum that existed under Nawaz Sharif which, in turn, was identical to that under Benazir Bhutto who had inherited it from General Zia-ul-Haq. Fearful of taking on the powerful religious forces, every incumbent government has refused to take a position on the curriculum and thus quietly allowed young minds to be moulded by fanatics. What may happen a generation later has always been a secondary issue for a government challenged on so many fronts.The promotion of militarism in Pakistan's so-called "secular" public schools, colleges and universities had a profound effect upon young minds. Militant jihad became part of the culture on college and university campuses. Armed groups flourished, they invited students for jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, set up offices throughout the country, collected funds at Friday prayers and declared a war which knew no borders……
Still, the primary vehicle for Saudi-ising Pakistan's education has been the madrassa. In earlier times, these had turned out the occasional Islamic scholar, using a curriculum that essentially dates back to the 11th century, with only minor subsequent revisions. But their principal function had been to produce imams and muezzins for mosques, and those who eked out an existence as 'maulvi sahibs' teaching children to read the Quran. But the fact is that “ the Afghan jihad changed everything. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance the cannon fodder they needed to fight a holy war. The Americans and Saudis, helped by a more-than-willing General Zia, funded new madrassas across the length and breadth of Pakistan. … the ministry of education ..estimates that 1.5 million students are acquiring religious education in the 13,000 madrassas.These figures appear to be way off the mark. Commonly quoted figures range between 18,000 and 22,000 madrassas. The number of students could be correspondingly larger. The free boarding and lodging plus provision of books to the students, is a key part of their appeal. Additionally, parents across the country desire that their children be "disciplined" and given a thorough Islamic education. The madrassas serve this purpose, too, exceedingly well.”

Madrassas have deeply impacted the urban environment. Until a few years ago, Islamabad was a quiet, orderly, modern city different from the rest of Pakistan. Also, it had largely been the abode of Pakistan's elite and foreign diplomats. But the rapid transformation of its demography brought with it hundreds of mosques with multi-barrelled audio-cannons mounted on minarets, as well as scores of madrassas illegally constructed in what used to be public parks and green areas. Now, tens of thousands of their students, sporting little prayer caps, dutifully chant the Quran all day. In the evenings they swarm the city, making women minus the hijab increasingly nervous.

“The Saudi-isation of a once-vibrant Pakistani culture continues at a relentless pace. The drive to segregate is now also being found among educated women. .. Two decades back, the fully veiled student was a rarity on Pakistani university and college campuses. The abaya was an unknown word in Urdu. Today, some shops across the country specialise in abayas. At colleges and universities across Pakistan, the female student is seeking the anonymity of the burqa. And in some parts of the country she seems to outnumber her sisters who still "dare" to show their faces.”

Concluding his poignant piece, Parvez notes that “The immediate future does not appear hopeful: increasing numbers of mullahs are creating cults around themselves and seizing control of the minds of worshippers. In the tribal areas, a string of new Islamist leaders have suddenly emerged: Baitullah Mehsud, Maulana Fazlullah and Mangal Bagh. Poverty, deprivation, lack of justice and extreme differences of wealth provide the perfect environment for these demagogues to recruit people to their cause. Their gruesome acts of terror are still being perceived by large numbers of Pakistanis merely as a war against imperialist America. This could not be further from the truth. “In the long term, we will have to see how the larger political battle works out between those Pakistanis who want an Islamic theocratic state and those who want a modern Islamic republic. It may yet be possible to roll back those Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded Pakistani society for over 30 years and to defeat its hate-driven holy warriors. There is no chance of instant success; perhaps things may have to get worse before they get better. … for now, this must be just a matter of faith.”

The value of little things

One never realizes the value of things until there is a prospect of losing them. Even little things assume an importance beyond compare when there is a threat that they will no longer be there on the morrow. And as they say the prospect of hanging on the morrow wonderfully concentrates the mind.

I never realized that the big toe on your foot served any purpose at all well than just being there. But a few months ago, when there was a possibility that I would no longer have my right toe anymore, my whole body recoiled and I instinctively rebelled against the possibility.

It started with a little white boil on my right toe which I ignored till my wife persuaded me into visiting a podiatrist. Dr Ross hummed and hawed and finally poked the boil to determine what was in it. “Aha,” he said triumphantly, “just as I thought. It is an excess of uric acid caused by gout”. He sent me home with instructions to keep washing it with warm water. Three days later, however, the white boil had turned black and swollen and my doctor promptly sent me to the hospital predicting dire consequences in case of delay. According to him, the boil had now been infected, could turn gangrenous which could, in turn, impact my weak heart. Early next morning, an orthopedic surgeon, Dr Cobey, short, shy and speaking in monosyllables, turned up at my bedside, took one look at the toe and pronounced that it needed to be amputated right away. From a little boil to an amputation seemed too drastic to me and I demurred and asked for 24 hours to make up my mind.
I was told that while lacking a big toe may not be aesthetically appealing, it does not impair the ability to walk or run. During the Vietnam War, apparently, one of the drastic measures to dodge the draft that young men considered was to shoot off a big toe. An amputee, according to legionnaire's legend, would be unfit to trudge across rice paddies or move fast to escape enemy fire and so it would disqualify an enlistee from the armed forces. On the other hand. “if you do have your toe amputated, it doesn't mean you'll never run again," I was told. It is true that the big toe carries the most weight of all the toes, bearing about 40 percent of the load, and is also the last part of the foot to push off the ground before taking the next step and a nine-toed gait may be less efficient, slower and shorter, but it is no less effective. Although running on fewer toes takes some getting used to, people can modify their style, train their muscles and practice balance exercises to compensate for a lost toe. Since running a marathon was not on my lists of things to do, all these reassurances were not really necessary. Regardless, the big toe myth has legs – the biggest concern is that, without a toe, you will be confined to a wheelchair. Of course this is not true. Customizing shoes to fit oddly numbered toes helps patients adjust to their imperfect gait and quickly get back on their feet. "We have several patients who have had all toes amputated and they walk fine. You lose some balance, strength and ability to propulse in gait, but they walk fine as long as they are in appropriate shoes with customized inserts and toe fillers." Incidentally it seems that prosthetics for big toes have been around for quite a while. An Egyptian woman was outfitted with wooden toe prosthesis in approximately 1000 B.C., says Andreas Nerlich, a pathologist at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich.
All this I learned as I pondered this decision—to amputate or not to amputate. I was sure, however. that I needed a second opinion from a second expert. Dr Gunther, tall, thin and a Steve McQeen look alike, was brought in, examined the toe and said “ Perhaps we can save it but in any case, even if we fail, we can always amputate it”.

The next few days a number of medicines were tried and the toe seemed to be responding till two other experts turned up to advise me. One determined that I needed insulin injections to control the sugar levels and so prescribed three injections a day and another four to determine the sugar levels. I told her that that any long term regime which required me to prick myself seven times a day would not work and she needed to examine other options. After a heated debate, she left and said would be back the next day. A tropical disease specialist suggested that I could go home but with an intravenous antibiotics tube attached to me for the next two months. Again, I felt that the intravenous system had more perils of contamination at home and asked for an alternative. I later learnt that Dr Cobey was a Nobel Prize winner for his work in Cambodia on dealing with victims of land mines. Clearly there amputation was the best remedy for gangrene in the absence of other medical support. During all these disputes in the best heart hospital in Washington, my family stood by alternatively urging me to be reasonable and encouraging my intransigence.

To cut a long story short, the doctor came back with a regime of a single injection and three pills while the tropical disease specialist agreed to replace the intravenous injection with two strong antibiotic pills. Dr Cobey, too, now agreed to the more measured, alternative regime.

I learnt some important lessons along the way — always distrust instant diagnosis even from the most distinguished doctors, always ask for a second opinion and always ask the doctor for alternative approaches in medicines.

And oh yes, I still have my toe!