Modi:Mitta::The Godhra Incident

Introductions out of the way, early on in the book we get a long awaited confirmation of fact.

Mr. Mitta acknowledges that 59 Hindus were burned alive in a train just outside Godhra railway station on 27 February 2002. He hastens to add that the attack was invited by their chanting provocative slogans like “Jai Shri Ram” and a dispute about payment for tea and snacks they had bought at the station. A "telling" mention of Karsevaks teasing Muslim women at the station is also thrown in.

While Mr. Mitta allows that the response to this provocation was “disproportionate”, he does lament that the trial court held the carnage to be a result of “conspiracy” rather than a “voluntary outburst” provoked by the preceding “skirmishes”, which would have called for gentler punishment.

The fact that the person accused of being the chief conspirator, based on a co-conspirators’ confession, was not convicted for lack of corroborative evidence should tell us that there was in fact no conspiracy or pre-planned mischief.

It must be a common practice in Gujarat villages, at least those abutting railway stations, to buy and store large quantities of petrol of an evening just in case a quarrel breaks out during the night or, if the train is delayed, the next morning. The fact that petrol was bought in advance is neither important nor disputed nor indeed proof of conspiracy.

What is crucial is that the two Hindus who sold the petrol changed their testimony. They lied because they were bribed by the VHP; we knew it all along. They lied at the behest of their employer, a Muslim gentleman; impossible, why would they? What clout did he have, apart from being the giver of their daily bread?

Mr. Mitta, in passing, also quotes the trial court, “For Godhra, this is not the first incident of burning alive innocent persons belonging to Hindu community”. We are not told if previous burnings were also brought on by heavy provocation.

Mr. Mitta follows up on many of the accused in great detail. He suffers for them through their trials and tribulations and regrets the treatment meted out to them by the police and the courts. His heart bleeds right on to the printed page for their kith and kin. There is hope, for appeals to higher courts are under way.

On the 59 burnt to death, he wastes not much of our time except to clarify that this number included 25 women and 15 children; that 58 died on the day, one died later; and that of the dead 59, actually only "52 were Hindus, while nine have remained unidentified till date".

Thank you Mr. Mitta. 

Next: Modi:Mitta::Courier of the Dead
Previously: Modi:Mitta::Fact:Fiction

Modi:Mitta::Fact:Fiction

“The Fiction of Fact Finding - Modi & Godhra” has been floating around the house for some time now.  Enticing with its promise of investigating the investigators and the investigations of Modi 2002.

 “...clear-eyed, unsparing of no one...” is the resounding endorsement of a previous work on the dust jacket of Mr. Mitta’s new book. The endorser is Sagarika Ghosh, one of the shrillest screamers on our journalistic firmament. As with many of her ilk, her linguistic reach exceeds her grasp by a long chalk. That, by itself, does not concern us but it does reflect on the author and his editors.

Finally we pick up the book and get off to a promising start. Mr. Mitta tells us in the very first pages about how he single-handedly stopped the VHP from creating nationwide mayhem shortly after the Godhra incident.

Fact 1: On 13 March 2002, the Supremes rejected a Vajpayee Government request to allow the VHP to conduct a symbolic pooja on the 15th at the Ayodhya site sacred to them.
Fact 2: The rejection order, instead of specifying all 100 odd revenue sites involved in the dispute or using a wider description like “nowhere within 100 miles of  ...”, specified two revenue sites as barred.
Fact 3: VHP chief Ashok Singhal caught on to this error and, interpreting it as permission to pooj away at any adjoining site, proclaimed victory. He was all over the visual media all day.

What followed was remarkable. The whole country heard him. Multiple times. Yet no one understood.  Except, of course, Mr. Mitta, who promptly wrote about it for the Indian Express, to appear the following morning, “pointing out the error and explaining how it had crept in”.

Chief Justice B N Kirpal read Mr. Mitta’s write up and, to his credit, quickly understood that he had slipped. He promptly scheduled a hearing to correct the “ambiguity”.

Mr. Mitta does not share with us how he happens to be privy to CJ Kirpal’s news reading habits. Living as they do in a cloistered world, it is entirely possible that CJ Kirpal, his staff, colleagues, family or friends did not hear, or hear of, Singhal boasting of victory till they heard from Mr. Mitta.

Mr. Mitta does quote jurist A G Noorani who commends Mr. Mitta’s “...mention of an inadvertent error...” for helping the court. Noorani’s early morning or otherwise equation with Justice Kirpal remains unexplored.

Having told us about this singular history shaping act, Mr. Mitta is quick to reassure us that he is not  recounting it “to blow his own trumpet” but that, and get this, he has in the course of his career routinely “sought to expose mistakes, even if by the Supreme Court...” both “inadvertent” and “deliberate”. He has a closetful of trumpets.

To research this book, Mr. Mitta has, apart from poring over thousands of documents, met with a host of lawyers, activists and whistle-blowers all intent on digging up or covering up dirt. His own efforts to assist the whistleblower cop Sanjiv Bhatt are trivial he says in the overall scheme of things, and have been overblown by the investigators.

Mr. Bhatt famously has a clear recollection of some events at a meeting where he was not present according to dozens of other people who were. Mr. Mitta avers that those others do not really count. It is all about credibility and not about numbers. 

We will never know how big a debt of gratitude we owe Mr. Mitta.

Next: Modi:Mitta::The Godhra Incident

Life Insurance - All you need to know to save big bucks

This is for you if you have a life insurance cover. Or have plans to get one.

This blog post emerges from a project I started  to help young professionals with understanding and, I hoped, better management of personal finance affairs. 

I soon realised that countless people of all ages, including hardened finance professionals and clear headed numbers experts, are buying ridiculous life policies which will collectively lose them billions while enriching the insurance companies and their agents.

Insurance is the subject matter of solicitation. This caution mandated by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority leaves me both bemused and amused. I don't understand what they are actually trying to say and I doubt if the author intended to make a tongue-in-cheek allusion to that other profession, dalliance with which also gets you screwed. 

The Simplistic Basics
Everyone who has people dependent upon their earnings needs to get a life cover.

Life insurance works like a mutual support group with the insurer as co-ordinator. Those who survive help pay for those who die early. The cost of such mutual cover plus a reasonable profit for the insurance company is very very small. All in all a brilliant and fair-to-all concept.

Insurers employ actuaries to do precise calculations of what anyone joining the party needs to pay, and they are very good at it.

The Ugly Reality
However, the moment you start talking to an insurance agent, public or private sector, you get bombarded with a sales pitch which has nothing whatsoever to do with life cover. The key words you hear in varying order but without variety are:

• Tax Saving
• Endowment
• Money Back
• Capital Growth
• Profit Sharing
• Unit Linked
• Stock Market Gains
• Bonus
• Insurance Bhi, Investment Bhi

All these are seductive but dangerous ideas. Don't listen. Don't get diverted from your objective, which is life cover in case of pre-mature death. Don't ever think. Their sole purpose is to get you to spend more money than you should. 

 

This is what happens to the premium paid for 90% of the policies:  

• A tiny part goes for covering the risk to your life.
• A largish part goes to agent fees, specially in the first few years. 
• A significant part goes to insurer to cover costs and profit.
• The rest goes to market investments which they are not very good at managing. 

It gets worse when you are sold policies to cover a child's education or marriage. It gets ugly when "life policies for children" are sold.

The fact that very often the person selling the junk to you is your banker makes it contemptible. You trust him. He is out to make a package at your cost, for himself or his bank or both is besides the point. 

The Simple Truth 

• Mixing insurance with savings or investment puts you to great loss.
• Only an earning person with dependants needs a life cover.
• The best life cover is one that pays nothing if you survive. If you want your money back, don't give it in the first place. Insurance companies are no good at managing your money. They are not smart investors on your behalf. They don't know stock markets better than mutual funds, which additionally offer you low or no cost realignment if needed. Plus they have sticky fingers; some of it never comes back.
• If you want full tax savings, get the cheapest life cover and put the rest of your 80C allowance in public provident fund. You will save and earn at least twice as much. Much more than an insurer will pay to cover education or marriage of children.
  
• If you want to get stock market benefits, save money on premium and invest directly into ELSS tax saver funds and realign every three years with advice from a stock market specialist. 
• If you wish to endow anyone, do it directly. Why pay a middleman to do it?
• If you have insured your family members who don’t, in turn, have dependants on their present or potential earnings, cancel such policies, and finally,
• If you have any policy other than a term insurance with nil maturity benefit. Look to get out of it.

What is Term Insurance?

It is a simple contract. You agree to pay the insurance company Rs. X per year for a term of, say, 25 or 30 or so years. In return the insurer agrees to pay your nominee Rs. Y Lakhs if you die before the term is over. If you survive the term you get nothing. The premium for your exact age for different terms should be easy to ascertain.

What Next?

Clean up your insurance act and, using the same amount of money, you have the choice of getting a much larger life cover and  / or putting away the rest into more fruitful savings options.

Get the cheapest and simplest term insurance, or a minor variant, from a reputed private sector life insurer or LIC. Useful add-ons are a. accident cover, b. disability cover and c. life cover to a later age while premium stops with your earning years. Preferably buy online. Update it at least every five years to ensure you have cover for 5 to 8 times your current annual earnings.

~

ps1: For my friends who have public sector / private sector issues, I would like to add that for medical or health insurance I strongly recommend public sector insurers.
ps2: Getting out of an existing policy may involve some costs but in a vast majority of cases is still worth it for the money you start saving immediately. You may need some number crunching. 

ps3: Why the swipe at the Government of India in the title?  While every insurer deceptively mis-sells, the originator, master and the greatest practitioner of the mis-selling art is the LIC. The GOI is the biggest beneficiary of LIC's financial success and muscle. LIC routinely bails out GOI's overpriced share offerings of public sector non-performers. Also invests inefficiently in the private sector. With your money.
ps4: One of key tasks of IRDA, the insurance regulator, is to protect LIC.

Optional Reading:   

1. Actuary
2. Term Insurance 

Madrasis and Other Relations

At a recent family dinner, in response to something said in casual conversation, I made the offhand remark that southern Indian populace was rather more homogeneous than its northern counterpart. This, in the context of serial invasions of northern India from the west and osmotic exchange with the east over the centuries, has been a part of one's subconscious forever.

Alok was appalled by my ignorance and pointed out that the south has had a vibrant maritime exchange of peoples with other geographies and probably hosts as much of a genetic potpourri as the north. What's more, while tandoori chicken may taste the same from Amritsar to Birmingham to New York, sambhar tastes verrry different every few miles if you trouble to go by road from Chennai to Thiruvananthapuram.

His mother-in-law, not to be left behind, weighed in with the observation that for north Indians all southerners are Madrasi and they can't tell one Madrasi from another.

I can't quite recall how we got away from this awkward spot but we must have done for I live to tell the tale. However, I was tempted to look up and see how far wrong I had been.

Way Out West
The genetic make-up of Indians seems to have attracted quite some scholarly interest in the 21st century and some major studies have been carried out during the last decade or so. This write-up is based on my understanding at the time of writing. However, scientific research is an ongoing process and I am sure our understanding will improve as we go along.

Research papers on genetic studies, in keeping with the highest traditions of academia, are awash with jargon and far from unanimous. Most seem to draw conflicting conclusions to suit preconceived hypotheses from similar numbers by massaging them a bit differently.

Hence it is that, in keeping with the lowest traditions of second hand research, one can draw some fairly simple, and simplistic, conclusions:

• There has not been any major influx of Central Asian genes into India for over ten millennia.
• The Indo-European linguistic links are more recent than that and are not explained by conquest or large scale in-migration. 
• Genetically the population of India is fairly heterogeneous and the bulk of it descends from two major genetic groupings which have been assigned the names  
• Ancestral South Indians (ASI), and  
• Ancestral North Indians (ANI).
• The two major streams probably arrived in the sub-continent at different destinations along different routes at different times from Africa.
• There are no pure ASI and ANI lines left on mainland India.

• The ASI line is the older one and has very little presence in north India.
• The purest ASI line is to be found in the Andamans. It is quite possible that the ASI stream landed first in the Andaman islands and 'flew' across to south India.
• The ASI line does not seem to have any linkages beyond the sub-continent and the Andaman islands although some very weak links have been traced to the Australian aborigines.

• The ANI line has a fairly strong presence in south India.
• The ANI line is genetically linked to certain Middle Eastern, Central Asian and  Eastern European populations but not to Western European populations. These links are weak and probably date back to a pre-ice age male ancestor. 

...and Our Relations
The ANI linkages, quite counter-intuitively, do not seem to sit on a continuum but seem to exist at discrete points and at distant locations.

This has created some interesting connections. For example, the R1a1 genetic haplogroup, descendants of a common male ancestor, probably Indian, is strongly marked among Punjabi Khatris of the Indus basin; high-caste brahmins of Bengal and Konkan; certain eastern European populations; and the Chenchu tribes of Andhra.

Who would have thought that

• a certain ageing, Bangalore based golfer; 
• the world's best daughter-in-law,  rooted to a Konkan town better known for sending out terrorists; 
• a certain Illinois based, internationally noted trade economist of Bengali origin; 
• an avatar of Lord Vishnu's consort Mahalaksmi, Chenchu Lakshmi, forever ingrained, in said ageing golfer's mind as the buxom Anjali Devi  from the 1958 movie; 
• and the lithe blonde Lithuanian shaking her booty in a Bollywood number, unknowingly but comfortably ensconced among her kin, as the contemporary take on feminine allure;

are all distant cousins?

Selected Readings:

1. Large Scale Influx from Central Asia?
2. Coancestry of European & Asian Chromosomes
3. Genetic Heritage of Tribal & Caste Indians
4. The Origin of Paternal Haplogroup R1a1   (download)
5. Land of Seven Rivers (Book)

Bhagat Singh

I grew up in the early 1950s in Ferozepur, a small town within walking distance from the Indo-Pak border at Hussainiwala. The border ran along the river Sutlej, the eastern bank being India and the western one Pakistan.

Among the joys of a riverside town are the festivals that involve a dip in the river. On festival days the railways ran a special train for the short journey to an otherwise defunct railway station at Hussainiwala. There the line was blocked and beyond the block lay a barrage over which pre-partition trains used to ply into what was now Pakistan.

The Barrage on the Sutlej

An early childhood spent close temporally to the partition and physically to Pakistan meant that every visit to the river for a festival or for a picnic, incited  speculation among the youngsters about what lay on the other side.

Just across the water, in addition to the sworn enemy of India and all things good, the folklore went, lay what definitely belonged to us, the cremation place of Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru and Sukhdev.

It seemed  like a cruel twist of fate or laziness of Cyril Radcliff's pen which had put it just outside our reach.

Many hangovers from the partition featured regularly in the headlines. But the one closest to the our hearts, never seemed to do. There was heartburn about the apathy of those in Delhi towards, what must have been my first exposure to the phrase, "Punjabi Sentiments".

To our surprise however, it turned out that, away from the public eye, diplomatic negotiations were on. And in 1961, in a low key barter deal, the borders got redrawn. In exchange for a narrow strip of land covering the Bhagat Singh memorial, India ceded some twelve villages elsewhere along the border.

In 1965 and again in 1971, Pakistan tried, unsuccessfully, to  take back by force what had been ceded at the barter table.

My first visit to the cremation point in 1969 was an awe-ispiring moment. Where there was then a rudimentary plaque now stands a massive, if slightly gaudy, monument. I was there in 2011. The pictures can be seen here: The Martyrs' Memorial.

The Man who could make Gold dance

His name was Bobby Randhawa and he was on his way to see me. He had landed that morning in Bombay from Boulder, Colorado. Too late to catch the flight he was booked on, he spoke to me briefly before taking IC605. It crashed that afternoon in February 1990 short of the runway at the Bangalore airport and came to a halt within the Karnataka Golf Course.

Key cause: pilots not fully conversant with the fly-by-wire technology of the recently commissioned Airbus A-320. 

Fellow ISI alumnus Srinivas Bhogle, who was then with National Aerospace Laboratories, recently wrote about the crash in detail here and triggered this memorandum on the events set off by Bobby's death. There are 89 other stories out there.

Around the time of the crash, I was going through the background papers and wondering how to deal with Bobby.

At about 1:30 p.m. the secretary buzzed to say that the flight had been delayed. Two more such calls happened over the next one hour. No official announcements, but rumours of a plane crash had started floating around town and phones had started ringing. 

Background
Bobby was the Technical Director of Vac-Tec, a company working at the cutting edge of thin film technology. I had met him a few weeks earlier when a colleague and I visited Vac-Tec in a four nation sweep to select a 'physical vapour deposition' (PVD) based decorative coating plant for watch cases.

Using this technology expensive gold electroplating is replaced by a coat of gold-lookalike titanium nitrate, a very hard substance. A sparse dusting of actual gold on top creates the illusion of real gold colour much coveted by the human race. PVD thus offers enormous gold savings and phenomenally increased durability.

The alchemy happens in a vacuum chamber where an Argon plasma is created, and in a process reminiscent of sci-fi movies, gold is literally vapourised off a solid gold bar, dances across to the desired object and condenses there in a magically fine and uniform layer.

Worldwide, only four or five equipment manufacturers were then able to achieve the desired results consistently. We adopted an accelerated learning-evaluation-selection cycle by visiting all of them in quick succession. Vac-Tec was our last stop. After a courtesy meetings with top management, Bobby took over for the next two days for a thorough presentation of what they had to offer.

Bobby was from a small village in the Punjab. The only one from his village to have gone to college in a nearby town. He did well and landed in the U.S. on a scholarship for graduate studies. A well built, presentable, cusp-of-thirty young man, he was one of the few Indians then in Boulder. 

And one of the half a dozen acknowledged technology leaders in his field worldwide - he could make gold dance exactly the way it needed to.

By the time we were done in Boulder, though highly impressed by their product and technology, we were convinced that Vac-Tec were not really equipped to provide support and service to a novice customer in far away Bangalore, and we decided to go for one of their competitors.

Back to the crash
Vac-Tec, who had been following up vigorously for the mega-bucks order, were not willing to give up. In spite of our telling them that it was of no use, Bobby embarked on a journey, punctuated by the delayed London-Bombay leg, the missed domestic connection and the not-missed alternate flight that crashed that afternoon.

Around 5 p.m. I was told that the injured, as also the 90 or so who had perished, were being shifted to the Air-force Hospital.

I hauled myself over there. Bobby was not among those injured. Nor among the recognisable bodies, covered in white sheets and lined up on the lawn.

Aftermath
Turned out Bobby had no Indian friends in Boulder. And his family had no phone at home or anyone in the family who spoke english. Our associate Timex, also a Vac-Tec customer, with offices in the U.S. and in Delhi, helped co-ordinate the disposal of his assets and entitlements.

A few months later the phone buzzed and a bewildered secretary announced the unexpected arrival of a Mr.& Mrs. Randhawa. That would be Bobby's brother and sister-in-law. They had come straight from the train station by the simple device of telling the auto driver: Titan office ko le chalo.

They needed some sort of closure by visiting the place where Bobby's life had come to an end. And by talking to the one person they could reach who had last spoken to Bobby. Over the years he had visited them occasionally but they had never gone over and had no idea what he did. They had been surprised to receive a veritable fortune as the proceeds of his estate.

There was not much we could say to each other. They ended up crying inconsolably for what must have been about half an hour but seemed much longer. Later that day we arranged for them to be taken to the very spot where the plane had crashed.

Aftermath
About a couple of years later, Paul, who had been Bobby's deputy in Vac-Tec called out of the blue. The company was liquidating stocks. Would we be interested in buying a coating plant at fire-sale prices?

Our technical people were by now conversant with the technology and felt that if we were getting a great deal we should look at it. I was headed westward on other business anyway, so I landed once again in beautiful Boulder. I was received by the company's Corporate Secretary and taken to the factory.

The empty parking lot had not prepared me for the shock awaiting me in the lobby. What had been a tastefully decorated space abuzz with activity was now bare. Where there used to be an attractive secretary at a glass and steel counter now stood, leaning against the wall and smiling, Bobby Randhawa. It took a couple of moments to register that it was just a life-size, and life-like, portrait.

In the cavernous, dark shop floor stood a number of tall cylindrical systems of different sizes in various stages of completion - looking like a George Lucas movie set. There around a work platform I met Paul and the remaining skeletal technical team.

Over the next couple of hours as Paul tried to sell me a plant, the story of how Bobby's departure had killed a vibrant business unfolded. As he spoke about what they could offer us, Bobby turned up every few minutes in some context, and Paul had to stop to wipe away silent tears. He had lost a boss he admired and a friend he loved; the company an asset it had not been able to replace.

They had tried various people from the academic space but no one could comfortably manage the move from lab scale to production scale. Regular customers, who were used to calling up Bobby directly for help in dealing with problems, or designing jigs and fixtures, or developing new coatings, had peeled off and new ones were hard to come by. Product development had come to a halt. Vac-Tec had gone into liquidation under Chapter 7.

Epilogue
This technology till today remains in a few hands. Out of the ashes of Vac-Tec was later born a new company Vapour-Tec, in Boulder. They do not offer gold coating in their regular line-up.

Filthy Lucre & Indian Media

The invitation, from 'Media Watch', a newly minted penniless outfit of people deeply concerned about the state of media in India, was for a talk on 'MEIDA MATTERS'. (Their spelling.)

The speaker: 
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, left-leaning media maven

A couple of hundred people turned up. Most of them from the host school of mass communications. It turned out to be a master class. In a melodramatic outpouring that lasted about an hour, Paranjoy shared with us some of the things that he said were bothering him and that we should be wary of.

Paranjoy's big concern is the increasing role of money

His erstwhile employer TV18, operator of the channels CNBC-TV18, CNN-IBN, Colours etc., is now controlled by the Mukesh Ambani Reliance group. That is somehow not good for TV18, for media at large and for the country.

The India Today group, operator of the channels Hedlines Today, Aaj Tak etc. is now to a large extent owned by the Aditya Birla group. That is somehow not good...

The ND TV group is independent but highly connected to the establishment - witness Barkha Dutt in the Radia tapes -  and that is somehow not good...

Paranjoy flew business-class to Bangalore

The Pioneer is sponsored by the Sangh Parivar and that is somehow not good...

The Hindustan times is owned by the Birlas and wired deep into the establishment - witness Vir Sanghvi on Radia tapes - and that is somehow not good...

The Times of India is independently owned, but it is also wired deep into the establishment. The fact that Arnab Goswami ceaselessly hounded Suresh Kalmadi and A. Raja, and yells and screams nightly at the hapless Manish Tiwari or the idiotic Digvijay Singh does not fit this hypothesis so we will not go into it. But whatever it is, it's somehow not good...

Paranjoy arrived in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes

The Dainik Jagaran, has succeeded financially beyond anyone's expectations and they are now shamelessly siphoning out money earned in media operations to other businesses and that is somehow not good...

The Deccan Chronicle on the other hand has failed miserably, both in media operations and dumb forays into other ventures, and will now have to be bailed out by injection of funds earned by other people in other businesses and that is somehow also not good...

The list goes on, shareholdings, directorships, matrimonial linkages etc. and finally,

Doordarshan is really the pits for it is a pathetic mouthpiece of the establishment, which controls the purse strings, and dictates content and stance. This can't possibly be good...

Paranjoy stayed at a five-star hotel

Hobbled miserably by success and by failure, and by money - internal, external, too much, too little - Indian media is down in the pits and headed deeper. Unfortunately, and with scarcely hidden glee, even Paranjoy does not have a solution.

Meanwhile, it is all very lucrative for Paranjoy, thank you. A media star, he rakes it in off media twice. First when he makes paid appearances on TV or writes for the press. Second when he makes paid criticism of his paymasters or goes on all-found junkets to do what he does best - talk. 

The problem is real and we do need checks and balances but solutions will probably be found by people who do not feed at the same trough.

The Kudankulam Saga

With frightening ease the establishment has managed to confine the Kudankulam discourse to a local problem that concerns only a few illiterate villagers who have some very personal and trivial concerns. Spiced up a bit by 'foreign' funded NGOs, out to divert us from our shot at greatness and superpowerdom.

Civil society at large, the 'professional' intelligentsia as also the scientific community have been lulled into acceptance of a totally fake assurance that safety is not an issue.

Over the last few years public pronouncements have been of the type where the prime minister says he has full faith in the nuclear scientists of the country. This is followed a few days later by some employee of the Department of Atomic Energy, which controls all activities nuclear, saying he has full faith in the prime minister.

Not to be outdone Abdul Kalam pipes up shortly thereafter to the effect that he has full faith in the prime minister and the nuclear scientists of India, and that he has satisfied himself that all available state-of-the-art safeguards have been built into our nuclear power plants.

Therein lies the rub. State-of-the-art isn't good enough.

As we lathi-charge and fire tear-gas at the Kudankulam villagers, another voice opened up yesterday. In a prime editorial-page piece in the Hindu titled "The Real Questions", one Rahul Siddharthan, employed by a DAE funded outfit, came out strongly against scaremongering and suggesting that 'an independent safety regulator" is needed to reassure misguided, ignorant and ill-informed people.

Siddharthan does not present any personal credentials to show that he knows whereof he speaks. He cites instead an eminent authority on the subject, one George Monbiot, a zoologist, author and journalist. Said George has converted recently from 'neutral' to 'pro-nuclear power' because, hold your breath, no one died as a consequence of the Fukushima disaster.

The fact that radiation fallout forced the evacuation of about 160,000 people surrounding the plant and left about 132 square kilometers as a no-go zone, some of it uninhabitable for decades does not merit mention.

As I finished reading this mischievous work designed to misinform and obfuscate, Sajal Lahiri, the noted International Trade economist and Japophile,  posted a BBC news report that the Japanese have decided to totally phase out nuclear power.

Do we know something they don't or is it vice versa? If we do, we should capitalise on that by selling that knowledge to Germany and Japan.

Snippet: The other expert Rahul Siddharthan cites is Randall Munroe, the creator of the web comic XKCD.

Previous: Nuclear Business Opportunity
First:  The Nuclear Mess

Todd Akin, Crossfire & Arnab

Seeing an effete Pierce Morgan struggling on CNN to moderate a two-woman debate on the Todd Akin instigated "legitimate rape" topic, I wondered if many people remember Crossfire, a faux debate programme that was a keystone of CNN programming for long starting in the nineteen eighties.

The format was very simple. Two loud, fast and ferocious debaters. One liberal the other conservative. One hot political topic of the day. No moderators. No hold barred.

Rather unlike Krishi Darshan

At that time an open debate in a mass medium between extreme schools of thought was unknown in DD land where everything was an extreme grey.

Crossfire ran for over 23 years, with some minor changes, and boasted of a number of eminent hosts, who went on to play key roles in the American political space.

The most striking of these was Pat Buchanan, who later worked with Nixon, Reagan and Ford, as their policy wonk and speech writer.

Others notables were Geraldine Ferraro, the first female VP candidate for a major party and Lynn Cheney, a VP candidate aspirant in 2000 who, in another first, lost the spot to her husband Dick. 

The death of a long distance runner
The 2004 presidential race and its coverage also spelt the death of the 23 year old Crossfire at the hands of comedian Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show.

Invited to the show as a guest, Stewart gently skewered and roasted the show and its hosts mercilessly. The demolition, a TV classic by now, and well worth a watch, can be seen here.

CNN was virtually left with no choice but to cancel the show. Today, American TV is still replete with loud, deeply partisan anchors and speakers, and saner voices are generally drowned.

The birth of Arnab Goswami 
Meanwhile we have landed Arnab Goswami, Barkha Dutt et al who preside nightly over political and social discourse on TV. Louder than early Crossfire, only more shrill.

They are unable to express an informed opinion or take an intelligent stance. Nor are they able to control, far less moderate, their motley crew of often ill-informed, ill-prepared or inarticulate guests.

One wonders how and when they can be laughed out of existence. Also whether we might be better off getting on to a "two able and well-informed debaters with or without an equally competent moderator" format.

Snippet: Krishi Darshan, a DD programme aimed at the farmer marches on as the longest running TV show in India.