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!

Swat valley- a turning point?

Recent events in Pakistan make the need for evaluating our long-term strategic interests with some clarity, crucially important. There seem to be three distinct scenarios for Pakistan’s future emerging that one can discern – first is a descent into chaos where the Swat compromise is the first step which leads to a gradual talibanization of the country with the best and brightest of the civil society leaving the country to the mullahs and the wahabis. This leads to an Islamic state run by mullahs similar to that of Iran or Saudi Arabia and perhaps continues to be funded by them as well for geopolitical advantage. A second scenario has the military coming back to power with another version of Musharaff which continues to foment disorder in Kashmir, support the taliban in destabilizing Afghanistan (basically telling them to work outside the country as a deal much as the Saudis did with their madrassas and mullahs) and continues to hoodwink the international community for financial bailouts. Will it work it is difficult to know but presented a drastic choice of nuclear Armageddon and support them it might. A third scenario – based more on wishful thinking than any real political will – has the Pakistans civil society taking the law in their own hands much as the Philippines did in 1986 when they ousted Marcos and continued with a messy, raucous democratic experiment which has lasted till now. So the three scenarios seem like a choice between Pakistan turning into Afghanistan, Iran or Philippines! As Pakistan faces these choices, what should the Indian strategy be? Do we want a failed state on our doorstep or an Islamic military dictatorship or a stuttering democracy?

During the past few years Pakistan seems to have undergone a slow and bloody meltdown of which the latest compromise in Swat valley could be the beginning of the end of the state. Its president, Asif Zardari said as much stating that Pakistan was in danger of Talibanization if events were not handled well. The fact is that in less than eight months, Asif Ali Zardari's new government has effectively lost control of much of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the Taliban's Pakistani counterparts, a loose confederation of nationalists, Islamists, and angry Pashtun tribesmen under the nominal command of Baitullah Mehsud. Across much of the North-West Frontier Province—around a fifth of Pakistan—women have now been forced to wear the burqa, music has been silenced, barbershops are forbidden to shave beards, and over 140 girls' schools have been blown up or burned down. In the provincial capital of Peshawar, a significant proportion of the city's elite, along with its musicians, have now decamped to the relatively safe and tolerant confines of Lahore and Karachi. The recent deal, struck between the Pakistani government and a key figure in the Taliban, which allows, in exchange for an end to the internal fighting between the army and the rebels, the Taliban to set up a court system of Islamist, or sharia, law in the Swat Valley, an area of 1.3 million people—a majority of whom had voted for secular candidates in the most recent elections—just 100 miles from Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, could become a dangerous portent of things to come.

The defenders of this compromise argue that the key facts are that, at the moment, there is no working judicial system of any sort in the Swat Valley—and that the Taliban militias have routed the numerically superior Pakistani army in their armed confrontations. So the deal imposes national secular authority even more than it legitimizes sharia justice. Also the deal was made not with "the Taliban" as a whole—the term implies a more cohesive entity than actually exists—but rather, specifically, with Maulana Sufi Muhammad, whom the Pakistanis arrested two years ago for leading jihadist raids across the border into Afghanistan. He was released from prison after agreeing to give up the struggle and to work for peace. These defenders of the deal hope that he would strike a deal with his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah, who is the deputy to a much more militant Taliban leader—or that, if he can't come to terms with his son-in-law, a wedge might be driven between various Islamist factions, peeling Sufi Muhammad and his followers away from the radicals and thus strengthening the hand of the central government.

Of course there is nothing wrong in principle with trying to negotiate deals with Taliban factions in order to split them or to set them up against each other. However, it's futile to go down that road with hard-core Taliban and secondly to the extent negotiations succeed with any faction, these need to be negotiated from a position of strength to be successful. The so called deal in Pakistan breaks both rules: Pakistan's political leaders are trying to craft a deal, indirectly, with the hard-core Taliban, and they're entering into it from a position of obvious weakness. This is why the deal is not only ill fated but potentially disastrous: It reveals the severe weakness of the Pakistani state. The politicians pursued the deal only because the state cannot control its own territory. Unless Sufi Muhammad can convince his son-in-law to accept peace and obeisance to secular authority in exchange for a parcel of land where Islamic law carries some weight, the deal is more likely to convince the militant Taliban simply to press on for more favors still, and the war will gradually spread to other parts of the country.

And the reason it will spread is that the two things that feed it – new jihadis and money – are still not under control. “ In order to have terrorists, in order to have supporters for terrorists, in order to have people who are willing to interpret religion in violent ways, in order to have people who are willing to legitimate crashing yourself into a building and killing 5,000 innocent people, you need particular interpretations of Islam. Those interpretations of Islam are being propagated out of schools that receive organizational and financial funding from Saudi Arabia”.( Vali Nasr). In April 2002, the former Pakistani Minister of Religious Affairs, put the number of madrassas at about 10,000, with 1.7 million students. Madrassas in Pakistan are financed either by voluntary charity, foreign entities, or governments. The Saudi Arabian organization, Harmain Islamic Foundation, reportedly has provided substantial financial assistance to the Ahle-Hadith madrassas, which have provided fighters to the banned Kashmiri militant group Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LET). The fact is that there seems to be no clear identification of the number of madrassas or their sources of funding – both of which need to be controlled if there is to be any long term success in combating terrorism.

A critical element in how the chaos scenario plays out in Pakistan will also be the role of the civil society. Will they organize themselves against this Talibanization of their country as they did when Musharaff tried to ram through an unconstitutional effort to perpetuate his hold on the country or will they rationalize away the Swat compromise as a necessary but evil concession? In a recent interview with Farid Zakaria, Imran Khan seemed to suggest the latter, blaming Zardari but never challenging the Jihadi movement or the pernicious underpinnings of the Swat compromise. The role and attitude of the civil society in Pakistan will be the ultimate determinant of the future of the country. The issue is will they have the foresight to recognize the critical role they can play at this juncture in history with a fledgling democracy still struggling to counter internal fundamentalism and in recognizing that in compromising on fundamentals they may have bargained away their fundamental rights as a country.

Of course the critical issue in Pakistan, has always been and still remains, is the role of the military and its relationship with the constitutional head of the country. The problem is that Zardari does not control the military or the ISI who bear much of the burden of Pakistan’s descent into chaos. As Ahmad Rashid points out “ for more than twenty years, the ISI has, for its own purposes, deliberately and consistently funded and incubated a variety of Islamist groups, including in particular Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Since the days of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen, the Pakistani army saw the jihadis as an ingenious and cost-effective means of both dominating Afghanistan—something they finally achieved with the retreat of the Soviets in 1987—and bogging down the Indian army in Kashmir—something they succeeded in achieving from 1990 onward”. Rashid believes that “every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the jihadists by 1999, not from personal Islamic conviction, in most cases, but because the jihadists had proved themselves over many years as the one force able to frighten, flummox, and bog down the Hindu-dominated Indian army. .. many in the army still believe that the jihadis make up a more practical defense against Indian dominance than even nuclear weapons. For them, supporting a range of jihadi groups in Afghanistan and Kashmir is not an ideological or religious whim so much as a practical and patriotic imperative—a vital survival strategy for a Pakistani state that they perceive to be threatened by India's ever-growing power and its alliance with the hostile Karzai regime in Kabul”.

In the long term, according to several observers, the following factors will determine the region’s future: “South and Central Asia will not see stability unless there is a new global compact among the leading players...to help this region solve its problems, which range from settling the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan to funding a massive education and job-creation program in the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan and along their borders with Central Asia…The second factor, of course, has to be reform of the ISI and the Pakistani military. The top Pakistani army officers must end their obsession with bleeding India by using an Islamic strategic doctrine entailing support of jihadists, and realize that such a policy is deeply damaging to Pakistan itself, threatening to turn Pakistan into a clone of Taliban-dominated Afghanistan rather than a potential partner of a future Indian superpower. A third factor is somehow finding a way to stop the madrasa- inspired and Saudi-financed advance of Wahhabi Islam, which is directly linked to the spread of anti-Western radicalization. “ A fourth element will be the role civil society will play in defending the fundamentals of their state.

India today seems to lack a strategy in regard to Pakistan that is clearly enunciated which enjoys broad public acceptance. A public debate on this is long overdue.

Why I blog

Blog contains in its four letters a concise and accurate self-description: it is a log of thoughts and writing posted publicly on the World Wide Web and invites its readers to join in a dialogue with their comments. I am often asked why I started blogging and I was searching for a rationale and explanation till I saw this elegant piece by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan. In a short form, this explains the joys and perils of blogging better than I ever could.

It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy review. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory.We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges. We blog now—as news reaches us, as facts emerge.

You end up writing about yourself, since you are a relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and facts of the exterior world. And in this sense, the historic form closest to blogs is the diary. But with this difference: a diary is almost always a private matter. Its raw honesty, its dedication to marking life as it happens and remembering life as it was, makes it a terrestrial log. A few diaries are meant to be read by others, of course, just as correspondence could be—but usually posthumously, or as a way to compile facts for a more considered autobiographical rendering. But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. Within minutes of posting something, readers respond. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague. Now the feedback is instant, personal, and often brutal.

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea.

The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate. A successful blog therefore has to balance itself between a writer’s own take on the world and others. A blogger will air a variety of thoughts or facts on any subject in no particular order other than that dictated by the passing of time.

It enables writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And that is why I blog.

Talking with your children

One of the great pleasures in life is talking with your children. Even when they don’t listen to you. Actually there are only two times in your lifetime that they actually do really listen to you – once when they are very young and then when you are very old!

When they are young, their world revolves around you. This is the time when dad knows everything and mom can fix anything. If there is a question needing an answer, they always go to the font of all wisdom – their dad- who is always – well not always- ready to share his infinite knowledge with them. The important thing, my uncle once told me, is to make sure that you answer all their questions even if you don’t know the answer! A wrong answer, he said, was better than no answer. When their mother protested that their general knowledge would be extremely defective, he said defensively that (a) that it kept them silent on long journeys and (b) they would forget all this anyway and the school would really earn their fees teaching them the right answers.

But as they move towards teenage, doubts in their voices begins to appear. And this uncertainty in their parent’s omniscient wisdom comes into full flower as they become teenagers. This phase is a painful one because now all your statements are questioned indeed opposed. And your wife does not fair any better. Most arguments tend to end with slamming doors or tears—and let me assure you not all the tears are of the teenager either.

The departure to college brings a respite to this off and on again rebellion in the household. The conversation now, alas, tend to become one sided and short. “ Are you eating enough?” “ Why don’t you call us oftener?” or “ When are you coming home?” The calls, when they do come, are usually to complain about lack of money buttressed invariably by how stressed they are with all the work. First is to let you know how hard they are working to reassure you that your savings for the college are being properly respected and the second a hint that perhaps you did not save enough! It is a lovely period that most empty nesters come finally to enjoy – they love having their children at home talking about their college days and they love the silences when they are gone again for the return home is also a return to their childhood days of tempers and tantrums as they revert back.

As they grow older and find their own mates and settle down, conversations tend to become more about the best menus, dealing with inlaws and wonderment about their mates and their habits. And of course about their unreasonable employers and know nothing bosses. While the father pontificates on all issues in the workplace and the world, the mother now becomes the font of all wisdom regarding the rest. Her knowledge, she claims, comes from her having to deal with their father. Almost any problem the child has in her life, the mother can top since she has lived through it all and survived. She is basically telling her children “ Look if I have lived with your father, then you can jolly well live with your new husband or wife- it cant be any worse. And sometimes it does get better”. But the best times are when your children have their own children. Then you can enjoy them and depart when the tantrums start with a chortle “ We wanted to see the day when your children gave you as much trouble as you gave us “.

Old age is the time that your children decide that the time has come to order their parents around. Somewhere in this period, which begins immediately after your retirement, they decide that you have lost most if not all your marbles, that there are few things you remember and none that you can manage too well. Your children are convinced that you are not aware that life has moved on and that “ things are different now than they were in your time” As if you lived in the past century. Progressively they convince themselves that you cannot really look after yourself anymore, that Alzheimer’s is not too far behind and that they need to make sure that you take your medicines in time and listen to the doctors. Daughters are the worse culprits – I wonder if sometimes they do not confuse their parents with their children. Even the voice changes from the loving and concerned to loving and hectoring. It is a period that I greatly enjoy – it is like being a child surrounded by love and having all your whims satisfied when they are there but knowing that when they leave you can revert to your normal adult self!

The Perils of Criticism

Everybody loves to criticize. From the inconsequential to the portentous, everyone has an opinion just waiting to be expressed. And it is generally to point out things that are wrong and need fixing. Most of us start conversations with bemoaning the weather – about which of course we can do nothing—and progress to lamenting the traffic jams, the smog, the difficulty of finding reliable servants and, of course, these “ damned corrupt politicians”. These criticisms are good conversation starters and help to oil the normal cocktail party discourses with no harm being done. The correct response at these times hence is to pitch in your pet peeves too into the conversation.

But there are other criticisms, which, especially when they proffer suggestions for improvement, have the possibility of either enlightenment or embarrassment. Once I was late for a party and launched into a bitter critique of the transport system, the lack of adequate flyovers and managerial incompetence little realizing that one of the people in the party was a transport expert and on the Delhi Urban Arts Commission responsible for setting precisely these things right. During the next hour, he calmly took me through all that had been done, the problems they faced with the politicians and their plans to solve the issues in the future. It was an educative hour and the next time somebody complained about the traffic snarls, at least I had learnt enough to keep my mouth shut. On another occasion, having just finished a book on our neighboring countries, I lit into the author for its pedantic, pompous and generally uninformative piece and suggested that it could have provided new information and some background on the key personalities. In short the covers of this book were too far apart for what it contained. While the author was not fortunately there, another present took serious umbrage at my swipe and proceeded to explain the restrictions and constriction members of this civil service labored under in writing pieces for the common man. “ Those in the know”, he said, “ would have been able to read between the lines and understood the points being made”. Clearly not being a member of the cognoscenti, it was implied, I had missed the point and so had forfeited my rights to criticize. I demurred saying that a book was for everybody and one should not have to come to it with a specific background or need for a higher degree. Later I realized that he had taken the criticism personally as he too was an author who wrote on similar subjects and my criticism of a specific piece was seen as a denigration of the entire genre including his writing which I had not till then read. So a well-meaning criticism of a simple mole can sometimes be misinterpreted as condemnation of the entire body leading to embarrassment all around. My wife too fell into this trap when she criticized the layout and décor of a hotel room we had recently stayed in. Our hostess, who worked for this hotel chain but was not responsible for either the design failure or the art décor, was most offended and launched into a vigorous defense of the artistic superiority of their entire hotel chains art acquisitions. What was meant as an innocent criticism of a specific hotel room with a mild suggestion for improvement quickly became a personalized issue of artistic import covering the entire hotel industry. The response at these times for the critic is simple—quickly change the subject.

Then there are the professional critics who make their living running down eating establishments, bars or the latest books. In the past, the response to these fulminations of Sunday columnists was generally a good rant over the breakfast table. Sometimes the anger could turn into a furious letter to the editor, which may or may not be published. But now times have changed and these critics can be criticized in turn. Since most newspapers now are being carried on the internet, so are the critics columns with a space for responding with your own comments for all to see. Nowadays the most interesting part of these columns are the responses from angry readers giving the critic a taste of his own medicine. You can of course also write your own blog—as this writer is now doing—to vent your own views on the wrongheaded analysis of the weekly pundits on the Sunday papers. But then the critics may not read your criticism!

So while all of us have the right to criticize, and do we exercise it in spades, we may like to remember Disraeli who said “It is much easier to be critical than to be correct” or that “most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood”.

Of course there is another approach that one might follow, as suggested by Eleanor Roosevelt- “ Don’t curse the darkness, light a candle”. If you can find a candle!