Do we remember our mistakes? Do we remember our failures?

Muslims are losing in another way yet they hardly pay notice to it. Wherever natural or man-made calamities strike a large number of Christian missionaries and other NGOs, especially from the West, would swoop down to take up relief and rehabilitation works. This happened even in tsunami-struck Indonesia and other South-East Asian countries. They would take thousands of orphans and keep them in orphanages run by them. Many parents would turn up to adopt them.Why will they bring up these children as Muslim? They have taken away orphans from war-torn Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq or many other countries.

Muslim community leaders would just adopt ostrich-like approach. But is not it the fact that US Presidential candidate for 2008 John McCain has an adopted daughter, who is originally from Bangladesh. She is 20 year old Bridget McCain. In fact McCain’s wife Cindy brought two ailing new born girls from a Bangladesh orphanage about two decades back and gave one to her friends.

After all the sparsely populated rich Arabian Sheikhdoms are not giving refuge to people in distress of the Muslim Ummah, not to speak of humanity in general. At most they would ‘help’ Islam by building palatial mosques, which is against the very spirit of Islam as the mosque built by Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) in Madinah then was a very simple structure even by the standard of seventh century. There are several traditions (Ahadith) of Prophet which prohibit Muslims from adoring and decorating mosques.

A healthy nation learns from its mistakes; the sick one tends to hide them. The West may be on decline but the people there still have the urge to learn from the past. As a nation Muslims are not doing so, though at some places signs of change are visible. However, the need of the hour is to rein in windbags, who are innocently and ignorantly playing into the hands of someone else.

Soroor Ahmed in Indian Muslims. More Here.

The success story of Twocircles.net

It’s a news website that runs on insufficient funds. It has no ads, no office and a handful of reporters, many of whom are not trained. It’s not a competitive news organisation, and shares content and ideas with other news organisations for free. Yet twocircles.net (TCN) attracts 10,000 unique visitors daily, and is read by politicians, policy planners, journalists of major newspapers and television channels, and, rumour has it, investigators too. For something located on as clamorous a place as the internet, TCN has managed to make its voice heard — in the most unlikely places.

In June last year, TCN’s news editor spotted a picture he had taken of Muslim students in Azamgarh, UP, which the BJP was attempting to pass off in an ad campaign as an image of progressive Muslims in Gujarat. He alerted the mainstream media, and the BJP was roundly panned. About a year ago, in response to the website’s comprehensive performance report of Muslim MPs, one of the MPs called the TCN office to inform them that they had missed two questions he had asked in the Parliament. 

When Kashif ul-Huda began twocircles.net from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, in 2007, he would have hardly expected it to make such an impact. For the 36-year-old biotechnologist from Muzaffarpur, Bihar, what ended up as a website that reports on news about Indian Muslims, from their perspective, began as just a feeling of “needing to do something” in 2002, when riots broke out in Gujarat.

As someone who’d witnessed riots as a child in Jamshedpur in 1979, and later in Lucknow in 1992, he thought he had left such traumas behind when he moved to the US in 2001. But he couldn’t sit silent as “uninformed and hateful comments about Muslims” spread across the internet, such as those which claimed “their population growth was so rapid that they’d take over India in 2050”.

To help put out “the real facts”, in 2005, Huda launched IndianMuslims.info. A near-comprehensive website on socio-economic data related to Muslims, it included information on riots, family planning, bank borrowings, which Huda collected over three years from books and reports.

The launch of IndianMuslims.info coincided with the infamous Imrana rape case, in which a young girl was allegedly raped by her father-in-law in Muzaffarnagar, UP, after which the local elders declared her marriage null under Sharia law. Huda was appalled at “how Indian Muslims became a spectacle, a drama, a tamasha”. “I realised that Muslims could either not articulate their opinion or were not being given space by the mainstream media. It was important to get the Muslim perspective — not regulated by major media gatekeepers —out there as soon as possible,” he says. So, a year later, he started a news section on IndianMuslims.info.

In July 2006, a series of bomb blasts hit Mumbai trains, after which he says the website “got many statements from Muslim organisations and individuals, which we combined in one news story. It was read and shared by many”. None of these opinions were sought out, Huda says; they all came from Muslims who wished to speak for themselves. With this, came the realisation that there was a need and a market for Muslim news through a Muslim perspective. So, in 2007, the news section became a distinct domain, twocircles.net.

Speaking for themselves helps put out Muslim realities more diverse and representative than those that make it to mainstream newspapers and TV channels, “which only talk of Muslims in the context of terrorism, communal riots, and some weird fatwa.” Huda seeks to redress the balance by producing stories “that are not in such negative context.” While they find nothing to inspire them in the “mainstream English-Hindi media”, neither do they take any cues from the Urdu press. Mumtaz Alam Falahi, TCN’s Patna-based news editor, says, “Urdu newspapers are only busy flattering leaders of the community. They give little or no space to news about the socio-economic condition of Muslims, or even information about the Union ministry of minority affairs. An Urdu paper in Patna recently carried a huge picture of Nitish Kumar at a mazaar. We ask, why don't they find out why the Bihar government hasn't released the Central Government's scholarship funds for pre-high school Muslim students in the state?”

Questioning the establishmentarian stance towards Muslims is at the heart of most TCN stories, including those on people accused in terror-related cases. For instance, TCN had interviewed Rayeesuddin, a 2007 Mecca Masjid blast suspect in Hyderabad, who was later acquitted, and who recounted the torture inflicted on him, and the social ostracism and police harassment he continues to face. They had also brought attention to the case of Muhammad Haneef, a Noida tailor who was detained and allegedly tortured by police in 2005 for being a suspected ISI agent. TCN reporters sometimes feel that their boldly contrarian stance might risk leaving them vulnerable to threats or scrutiny. “Whenever you go against the mainstream, you are isolated and watched,” agrees Falahi.

Yet that’s the direction which TCN wants to soldier on in, because, Huda says, the “major media is either afraid of covering Muslim issues or doesn’t know how to do it properly”. Describing a meeting with the editor of a national Hindi daily, he says, “I asked him what sort of Muslim stories he did. He said, ‘We’re scared to go beyond Ramzan and Eid.’ I was shocked that we’re 15 per cent of the population, and have been living in India for a thousand years, and yet people have no idea what Muslims are.” So TCN, he says, aims to “help journalists report on a complex socio-religious community that is as diverse as India itself”.

They also try to lead by example, in representing diversity; focussing not just on Muslim Victims, but Muslim Achievers. On the site, there is a series of articles on three young Muslim techie entrepreneurs, and stories on Muslim candidates who cleared the civil service exams. The TCN also, on occasion, questions the credentials of Muslim institutions, such as their series of reports which exposed corruption within the Maharashtra Wakf Board in its land deals with builders, or a story detailing AMU’s high-handed treatment of students protesting against the dissolution of the students’ union. Or a comprehensive performance report of Muslim MPs in both Houses across three sessions.

TCN isn’t an Islamic website; it has no section which discusses religion. Huda says that the site has deliberately kept away from religious discourse “so that it is accessible to all Indians — Muslims or not-Muslims.” Neither is it based on a profit-driven model, says Huda, whose only source of income is his day job as a biotechnologist. The Indian American Muslim community funds the website — a challenge, says Huda, “because Muslims easily donate for a masjid or a madarsa but not for a website”. The only ads the website gets are those by Google.

Currently, there are 15 staffers across India — full-time, part-time and freelancing — and have varied backgrounds. Muhammad Ali, who wrote the Haneef story, has an MA in English Literature and worked with an English-language television news channel before he “quit to do more meaningful stories for a lesser salary”, and Falahi is a madrasa graduate, who “never applied to a mainstream media organisation because he would not have been able to adjust to their working environment”.

The one thing all his staffers do have in common, says Huda, is a “dedication and passion related to Muslim issues”, not to justify or assert, but help non-Muslims “see beyond the stereotype”. “We only want to invite you over to hear our side of the story,” says Huda. 

Irena Akbar in Indian Express. More Here.

Procrastination : Facts, myths and remedies

Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States. The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send the box off. But there was a problem. The combination of Indian bureaucracy and what Akerlof called “my own ineptitude in such matters” meant that doing so was going to be a hassle—indeed, he estimated that it would take an entire workday. So he put off dealing with it, week after week. This went on for more than eight months, and it was only shortly before Akerlof himself returned home that he managed to solve his problem: another friend happened to be sending some things back to the U.S., and Akerlof was able to add Stiglitz’s clothes to the shipment. Given the vagaries of intercontinental mail, it’s possible that Akerlof made it back to the States before Stiglitz’s shirts did.

There’s something comforting about this story: even Nobel-winning economists procrastinate! Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience. But Akerlof saw the experience, for all its familiarity, as mysterious. He genuinely intended to send the box to his friend, yet, as he wrote, in a paper called “Procrastination and Obedience” (1991), “each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box.” He was always about to send the box, but the moment to act never arrived. Akerlof, who became one of the central figures in behavioral economics, came to the realization that procrastination might be more than just a bad habit. He argued that it revealed something important about the limits of rational thinking and that it could teach useful lessons about phenomena as diverse as substance abuse and savings habits. Since his essay was published, the study of procrastination has become a significant field in academia, with philosophers, psychologists, and economists all weighing in.

Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn’t just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness. As various scholars argue in “The Thief of Time,” edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White (Oxford; $65)—a collection of essays on procrastination, ranging from the resolutely theoretical to the surprisingly practical—the tendency raises fundamental philosophical and psychological issues. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”

James Surowiecki in the New Yorker. More Here

Do we need nuclear power in India? At what cost?

The nuclear power emergency in Japan has raised two major questions regarding nuclear power.

First, can a disaster comparable to the one in Japan happen here? The answer, of course, is yes — whether caused by an earthquake or some other event or series of events. Nature is unpredictable and human beings are fallible. It could happen.

So the second question is whether it makes sense to follow through on plans to increase our reliance on nuclear power, thus heightening the risk of a terrible problem occurring here. Is that a risk worth taking?

There has been a persistent tendency to ignore the toughest questions posed by nuclear power: What should be done with the waste? What are the consequences of a catastrophic accident in a populated area? How safe are the plants, really? Why would taxpayers have to shoulder so much of the financial risk of expanding the nation’s nuclear power capacity, an effort that would be wildly expensive?

A big part of the problem at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power station are the highly radioactive spent fuel rods kept in storage pools at the plant. What to do, ultimately, with such dangerous waste material is the nuclear power question without an answer. Nuclear advocates and public officials don’t talk about it much. Denial is the default position when it comes to nuclear waste.

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said again this week that the 40-year-old Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County, 35 miles north of New York City, should be closed. Try to imagine the difficulty, in the event of an emergency, of evacuating such an area with its millions of residents. “This plant in this proximity to New York City was never a good risk,” said the governor.

There are, blessedly, very few catastrophic accidents at nuclear power plants. And there have not been many deaths associated with them. The rarity of such accidents provides a comfort zone. We can look at the low probabilities and declare, “It can’t happen here.”

But what if it did happen here? What would the consequences be?

If Indian Point blew, how wide an area and how many people would be affected, and what would the cleanup costs be? 

Rigorously answering such questions is the only way to determine whether the potential risk to life and property is worthwhile.

The 104 commercial nuclear plants in the U.S. are getting old, and many have had serious problems over the years. There have been dozens of instances since 1979, the year of the Three Mile Island accident, in which nuclear reactors have had to be shut down for more than a year for safety reasons.

Building new plants can be breathtakingly expensive and requires government loan guarantees. Banks are not lining up to lend money on their own for construction of the newest generation of Indian Points.

In addition to the inherent risks with regard to safety and security, the nuclear industry has long been notorious for sky-high construction costs, feverish cost-overruns and projects that eventually are abandoned.

Nuclear power is hardly the pristine, economical, unambiguous answer to the nation’s energy needs and global warming concerns. It offers benefits and big-time shortcomings. Ultimately, the price may be much too high.

Bob Herbert in The New York Times. More Here.

Say NO to nuclear power. It is simply dangerous.

Let’s get this straight. The Fukushima crisis is the world’s worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. The earlier (partial, largely contained) meltdown at Three Mile Island (1979) pales beside it. The Fukushima reactors have spewed large amounts of radioactivity into the air. The vessel containing the core of Reactor 2, which fully lost water cover for hours, has been damaged. The fire in Reactor 4 released yet more radiotoxins. At the time of writing, only a miracle can prevent further radiation release.

The Fukushima disaster is the world’s first multi-reactor crisis; controlling it is more difficult. It also poses three special problems. Large quantities of spent fuel, containing extremely radioactive nuclear wastes, are stored in pools in the reactor building, following General Electric’s design. These are no longer being cooled. A spent fuel leak, spreading due to the flooding, could have unspeakably lethal effects.

Second, Fukushima reactors’ primary containment—similar to India’s Tarapur reactors, also GE-designed—has been found by a US laboratory to be vulnerable to molten fuel burning through the reactor vessel, eventually breaking out. Third, Reactor 3 burns a mix of uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX). Researchers say mox generally increases the consequences of severe accidents with large radioactivity releases, resulting in a five-fold increase in latent cancer fatalities.

Even if the Fukushima crisis doesn’t worsen further, it highlights the inherent hazards of nuclear power, in which small individual mishaps can precipitate a runaway crisis. The reactors were shut down by the earthquake; and their still-hot cores were no longer cooled. The diesel back-up came on, but went out in an hour. The loss of coolant led to the explosions and radioactivity releases.

That this happened in industrially advanced Japan, with high nuclear safety standards, underscores the gravity of the generic problem with nuclear reactors. They are all vulnerable to a catastrophic accident irrespective of safety measures. Nuclear power generation is also bound up with radiation exposure, harmful in all doses, and radioactive waste streams, which remain hazardous for thousands of years.

India’s nucleocrats have been in denial of these problems and suppressed their abysmal safety record. The list of failures is long: a serious fire at Narora, which moved from the turbine to the reactor room amidst panic-driven abandonment of fire-fighting procedures; collapse of a containment-dome safety system at Kaiga; frequent radiation exposure of workers and lay public to doses above the permissible; and the spiking of drinking water with deadly tritium in Kaiga. India has the distinction of running two of the world’s most contaminated reactors.

This necessitates a radical reform of the DAE, the government’s worst-performing department, which has never completed a project on time and within budget. We must have an independent, credible nuclear safety audit, with outside experts and civil society representatives. We must review our nuclear power policy for appropriateness, safety, costs, and public acceptance, based on a holistic view of the best ways of meeting our energy needs. If nuclear power emerges as the least desirable option, we should discard it. The environment ministry must also revoke all conditional clearances granted to nuclear projects, including Jaitapur.

Nuclear power has subjugated our energy policy and budgets to an unaccountable, self-perpetuating, pampered technocracy, imposed unacceptable hazards upon unwilling populations, and degraded our democracy. The juggernaut must be halted.

Praful Bidwai in Outlook. More Here.