Nervousness over new passports

With barely two months to go before many countries start refusing to accept old handwritten passports as valid travel document the preparations in our country is a matter of deep concern. From whatever little has appeared in the national Press it seems the work of issuing new electronic ( machine readable) passports will begin from April 1 although the ICAO ( International Civil Aviation Organization) deadline, after which old passports would become invalid, is April 30. Naturally there is nervousness all around with people wondering how long it might take to get a new passport.  
The inordinate delay in launching the project looks inexplicable. There was no earthly reason why the project could not be launched at least six months ago thus giving people some relief. Now that there will be a rush there would be hundreds of dalals who would make millions by making arrangements with passport officials. Passport is a sensitive and important document. Most people would like to handle everything themselves but in the situation that has been created there will be hardly any alternative to find a dependable dalal.  The question is: why the project could not be launched well in time? Are we to believe that in just 30 days it will be possible to replace the millions of passports?  
As it is our passport offices are overcrowded all round the year. In the vicinity of these offices thousands of dalals operate. What a passport holder can do in one month these dalals can do in minutes. But at a price. Now this rush is a wonderful opportunity for these to earn extra millions. If there was accountability the Home ministry would have to explain the delay. But who cares? 
We would urge the Directorate of Passport of Immigration to advertise in national dailies detailing how a person can get a new passport. We have not seen any such ad so far but this is the minimum the Home Ministry can do cover up its failure. Let people know clearly haw they can get the new passports without any hassles. Yes, we demand this from the Home Ministry.

Editorial-II

Advanced technology

One of the main reasons of our poverty is that the people, particularly the poor, have not advanced technologies within their reach. Noble laureate Dr Muhammad Yunus has therefore urged students to work on problems of the nation and to solve them through innovative technology. Dr Yunus said the rapid advance in technology could be used to spread students’ ideas across every nook and cranny and help the poor. Moral qualities, information technology (IT)-based education, and skills in English language are urgently needed in Bangladesh.
We have many degree-holders. But a large number of them are unemployed. They cannot find suitable jobs for their own deficiencies. Many of them lack moral qualities. Then their education is not IT-based. Besides, their command of spoken and written English, an International language, is very poor. These prevent them from securing foreign jobs. Unemployed degree-holders are burden to their families, the nation, and to themselves. To turn them into welcome manpower, we must give them the scope to learn IT and English.
Our age is an age of Information Age. Most of our works are done with the help of computers. Computers also ensure our access to knowledge. We can acquire all sorts of information from the Internet. We therefore cannot make ourselves fit for the modern world without proficiency in IT. A society becomes developed when everyone performs his or her duties with conscience and the spirit of serving greater national interest. We have to perform our responsibilities rightly for flourishing our spiritual and moral qualities. We should also learn the English language and acquire competence in IT for survival in this competitive global context. We should encourage our children to learn social and moral values so that they can go ahead to serve the nation.
The government should introduce IT-based education for the progress of the country. The money spent for this will be a profitable investment. So the government must manage to introduce IT-based education in the country without any delay.

Post-I

Marriage online

Nowadays, more Indians are making matches themselves - leading to a rise in so-called love marriages. But increasingly, the internet is also playing a part in the way couples meet, writes
Rajini Vaidyanathan

Marriages in India are traditionally arranged by parents searching for a partner from the same caste, community and profession as their child. Nowadays, more Indians are making matches themselves - leading to a rise in so-called love marriages. But increasingly, the internet is also playing a part in the way couples meet.
It all seems so easy in the Bollywood films. The characters fall in love at first sight, and despite some initial resistance from their family, it all ends happily ever after.
The reality, of course, is very different.
Sitting in a crowded cafe packed with young Mumbaiites, is Nik Talreja. He is, in many ways, the archetypal Bollywood hero: good looking and charming, but missing one thing - a woman by his side.
“I would love to meet someone, but this is India and it’s not that easy to just walk over to someone and say, ‘Hi would you want to have coffee with me?’” he says.
Nik explains that he has approached girls at airports, cafes, and in the office, in his attempt to meet Miss Right.
He has also tried the more traditional route of allowing his parents to introduce him to prospective partners. None of these options worked, so he turned to the internet.
Nik is just one of 15 million people in the country using the web to meet a life partner. Internet matrimonial sites are big business in India. The world’s largest, Shaadi.com, was created 13 years ago, and now boasts an extra 10,000 new users every day.
On his internet profile, Nik describes himself as witty and smart, with an athletic build. He is looking for a girl who is intelligent, rooted in tradition, and is happy to live with him at his parents’ house.
The last criteria, getting family approval, remains a big part of the marriage process in India, even with the rise in internet marriages.
“It’s not only her who needs to be convinced, it’s the parents, so it’s very difficult and why online is the best measure to save on time,” explains Nik.
In fact, a key distinction between Indian matrimonial sites and those in the West is that, in India, it is often the parents who are going online to find a match for their child.
“We give freedom to our own children, they are well educated, they are brought up in a good culture,” says Arun Joshi, who is searching for a son-in-law.
“The only thing we desire would be that they get married within a restricted caste and community,” he adds.
His 29-year-old daughter is too busy climbing up the career ladder to find herself husband, so Mr Joshi has decided to help things along by submitting a profile for her online.
In the tradition of arranged marriage, it is standard for parents and relatives to search for a match that meets a certain set of criteria. Those specifications can vary from family to family, but often include looking for someone from a similar caste, community, salary bracket and even skin colour.
Mr Joshi hopes to find a match for his daughter within six months, such can be the speed of this process. He says the internet has given him a wider pool of suitable matches from which to choose from.
Targeting parents appears to be a key strategy for the companies behind these sites. In recent years, there has a been a rise in so-called “off-line centres” designed to bring internet marriage to those who are rarely online.
Resembling internet cafes, with banks of computers lining the room, there are advisers on hand to help guide people through the process of creating a profile and selecting matches.
For the young couples who place themselves on these sites, internet matrimonials offer a choice which simply didn’t exist before.
Nikhil and Jueli, from Mumbai, married after meeting online. Both had been introduced to potential partners the traditional way, but failed to meet anyone they liked.
Nikhil explains that he had seen a few girls through his relatives but felt they were “very limited”.
For him, the internet was a “better choice, the easiest way and the best way”. For his wife Jueli, meeting Nikhil was a breath of fresh air.
“When I used to get any proposal through my family, they were very typical and I didn’t want any typical, typical boy,” she says.
The pair got engaged after three months. For Jueli it was love at first sight. “When I saw him, I was just - I want him,” she says.
While there are many other happy stories of matches made in cyberspace, there are some people who question how progressive it is.
“I don’t think it’s breaking down barriers to tell you the truth,” says Bandhana Tewari, the fashion feature editor of Vogue, India.
For Bandhana, new technology is not changing the old values, where meeting a partner by caste and background is so important.
Meanwhile, she predicts that it will be a long time before people use the internet simply for dating, rather than searching for a specific type of marriage partner.
“I don’t think India has reached that level,” she says. “They still will not give up their moral stand”.
But Gaurav Rakshit from Shaadi.com argues that these sites are breaking down social barriers. One example he cites is that more than half of the people using the site do not search for a match by caste, a sign, he argues, that things are changing.
“If we found those numbers were trending the other way round, we would probably have to take a very hard call saying that we’re exacerbating such things.
“But right now we see them trending very nicely for us in the same way that India is evolving”.
There are, of course, large parts of rural India where there is no internet. But Mr Rakshit hopes to reach these parts as a long-term strategy.
He says, one in 10 of all registered marriages in India can be attributed to the internet, but in five years’ time he believes this could number could rise to as many as one in two.
But he might have a job on his hands. In the village of Wana, a three hour drive from Mumbai, where there is no internet connection, Rathina Surjivadhi is celebrating the marriage of his daughter Anita.
He found her her husband Jagdish with the help of local matchmakers. He is yet to be convinced that the internet way is better.
“You need to make sure you don’t ruin the girl’s life,” he says. “If they drink or have had affairs, the internet can’t tell you that kind of thing”.

Post-II

Reality of Climate Change

We appear to have been battered to a submissive intellectual pulp by the pro climate change lobby, writes Jonathan Power

We appear to have been battered to a submissive intellectual pulp by the pro climate change lobby, although it was only 35 years ago, when I interviewed the world’s principal climate experts for the Washington Post, the consensus was that the earth was cooling.
Today some of these same scientists rubbish those who hold the previous hypothesis.
Within as short space of twenty years they had fundamentally changed their minds. But 20 years is nothing compared with the very slow evolution that they were looking at. How could they argue the reverse of what they thought it was such a short time before?
When has scientific discovery moved so fast? The climate warming lobby started with a handful of then maverick scientists and in a few years gathered speed as the media hyped their research and funding agencies, who rarely know a lot about what they are giving money to, were intrigued by the new “evidence”. The proponents had their tail up and within five years if you wanted to get a research grant to examine global cooling you had little chance.
Has everyone already forgotten how at the turn of the century the computer boffins told us that at midnight at the start of the year 2000 the world’s computers would crash? Apparently they had been programmed long before these clever people thought there might be a year 2000. The prediction led to a re-building of the world’s computer industry. Businesses, hospitals, universities, airlines etc spent a fortune on retooling with new computers. On the dot of midnight of the new millennium nothing happened. The old computers worked. Alas, all too quickly the false hype and panic were forgotten.
Now it seems that some of the evidence on global warming has been tampered with. An Indian government study has shown that the Himalayan glaciers are not melting at as significant a rate as previous “research” suggested. Evidence for a number of changes documented by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change has been shown to be misleading in important aspects. Where were the organisation’s top scientists who were supposed to toothcomb what junior researchers said was the truth? Statistics have been simplified to the point of being misleading, whether it was on the evidence of melting glaciers or on the state of the Amazon forest, and doubtless many other things that have yet to see the light of day.
Worst of all we now know, thanks to leaks to the press, that the supposedly high flying, climate research department at the UK’s
University of East Anglia, was manipulating the evidence. Can these things happen? Of course they can.
When Prime Minister Tony Blair wanted to lead Britain to war with Iraq his government published a paper to set out to prove Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It turned out that a lot of the evidence presented in the paper had been lifted verbatim from a PhD student’s thesis, including his misspellings and typing errors, not to say his facts. Is it a coincidence that Blair’s next great cause became global warming? Do we want to find, like we did after Iraq had been invaded and tens of thousands killed, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, no climate missile racing towards us?
I am not arguing that there is definitely no global warming but that in the seven and a half thousands of years that civilised man has walked the earth there have been ups and downs in the climate. There have been ice ages and periods of warming, as every school child knows, but they came and went and happened almost imperceptibly slowly.
Time is on humanity’s side.
Let’s wait for a couple of decades to see if the evidence holds up. If there is global warming we have time to measure its speed and amount. Twenty years is nothing for an in-depth scientific research project. Meanwhile, any part of the earth facing flooding, which has always happened since the time of Noah, can be helped.
No one doubts there is terrible pollution and that the conventional car and lorry should see their last day or that factories should stop belching toxins. But that is an argument in its own ?right and should
be tackled urgently irrespective of the global warming debate. The global warmers have been adept at muddling that debate by wrapping the two distinct issues around each other and trying to pull the wool over the eyes of public opinion, the press and governments. And now the press and governments do the same. All the money planned to avert global warming should be spent on big problems that affect us right today, especially the poor of the Third World — abolishing malaria, polio, the tsetse fly, finding a vaccine for AIDS, upgrading education and providing wells and clean drinking water.
Within a decade or two all these problems could be solved for relatively small amounts of money. These should be the world’s priorities in 2010.

Off The Track

Where no one knows your name

Bill Mehlman

I am graying. A young man says, “Sir,’’ holding a door for me, a condescending, if well-intentioned, memento mori.
Solace eludes me, since I can no longer find a proper old man’s bar in which to sulk and lick my wounds. These saloons opened early, closed late and didn’t exude any bogus camaraderie. No “Cheers’’ salutations. I wasn’t up for having everybody knowing my name in those grim, aimless days. Going to that little bar in the mornings gave a semblance of structure to jobless days. No one asked impertinent questions about why you were drinking in the morning. Everyone did.
I’d stroll in just after eight, carrying two coffees, light and sweet—one for the bartender — my cigarettes, a tabloid, and the Racing Form, and claim the last, sunlit, stool. Switch from coffee to beer around nine o’clock. Dope out action at Belmont. Do the crossword in ?imperial solitude.
Lunch began at 11. Hot pastrami, grilled cheese, kielbasa and kraut, peppers and eggs, burgers. No vegetables except coleslaw or pickles. You could, when lunch was over, bring in a sandwich to eat at the bar. Nick’s deli sold Polish meatloaf - veal, finely ground, juicy and homogenous, with enough garlic to qualify it as a weapon of mass destruction—served with mustard. On Friday mornings you could get a dozen potato pierogi, dripping with butter, from the nice Ukrainian women who made them in the community ?room at St. Mary’s.
On my turf near the Lower East Side, those joints had a boozy, ecumenical patina. An owner might be Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, or of unknown origin, but usually, if you could hold your liquor, you were accepted, if not effusively welcomed. I frequented Stanley’s, Freddy’s, Pete’s, Peewee’s, Dinty’s, and, when I owed a lot of money around the neighbourhood, Mousey’s, way over toward the East River. You were wise to mind your manners.
Many grizzled regulars had fought in Monte Cassino, or Okinawa, or Inchon, and they defended their territory against boors and fools promptly and vigorously. And many had taught their kid sisters how to throw a nice right cross; a wise man would know when to call off his overzealous pursuit ?of companionship.
Men drank a “ball and a beer.’’ You learned to sip. No gulping, since you probably planned on spending most of the day there. You wanted to hang with the boys, you developed a nice pace. You took your reputation, and your liver, in hand if you ordered wine in these joints.Buy-backs weren’t optional. You got every third or fourth drink on the house. Less scrupulous saloons compensated for this largess by serving a “hash,’’ a cheap whiskey that had some of the “terroir,’’ if you will, of a popular brand, with deceptively similar names and packaging. A night drinking those potions left you with a brutal headache.

Letters to the Editor

Baby feeding

Pediatricians and other experts have said that breastfeeding acts as the first live vaccine for the baby’s body. So it should be exclusively given to the newborn until six months from birth as it certainly helps strengthen their immune system. Mothers should accept this remarks for the health and survival of their babies.
The rate of child mortality is very high in Bangladesh. Some 150,000 babies die within the first month of their birth. The staggering number could be significantly cut down if the newborns were breastfeed in the first hour of their birth. The milk that babies can get from their mothers’ breasts is like a magic potion. It contains all the ingredients necessary for the proper growth and protection of the baby. No powdered or liquid animal milk can be equivalent to it.
Though breastfeeding a newborn baby is considered a sacred duty of every mother, the rate has significantly decreased in recent years. But in developed countries, the rate is increasing. The reason behind the decline in Bangladesh is campaign by manufacturers and sellers of supplemental food and the wrong notion of mothers that breastfeeding would damage their physical beauty.
Babies are the future citizens of the country. Breastfeeding can grow them healthy and intelligent. In that case they become our assets. If we deprive them of mother’s milk, they become our liabilities. Every mother should therefore breastfeed her babies. This is also the only way of keeping child mortality at bay.
The government should immediately launch a campaign to promote breastfeeding. The mothers must be made aware that breast milk is the only natural food for the babies. It is a gift from nature. It has no alternative at all. Babies get all necessary food values from breast milk. Besides, they cannot properly digest any supplemental food. So they get almost no food value from it. The subsequent result is dangerous. Most of the babies die within a month or two. Others live with ill health and are mentally undeveloped. We must bring an end to this. We must ensure breastfeeding for every newborn. Nobody has any right to deprive them of their right for breast milk.
Rekha Chowdhury
Banagram, Dhaka

Death of rivers

We note with alarm that the mighty Brahmaputra, like many other rivers of the country, has dried up.
Almost no water currently remains on the riverbed. This has been caused by unilateral withdrawal of water by upstream India. This has caused serious ecological imbalance in Bangladesh.
India is mainly responsible for water crisis and also floods in Bangladesh. Almost all the rivers that flow through Bangladesh have come from India. India has constructed dams and barrages on most of these 54 international rivers without consultation with Bangladesh. This is depriving Bangladesh of the right shares of water of the common rivers. In the dry season, India releases water from these common rivers so frugally that the Bangladesh parts of the rivers almost dry up. Again, heavy rains in the Indian mountains in the rainy season cause floods in Bangladesh every year.
The Indian action has been hitting Bangladesh very hard. The Bangladesh parts of the common rivers do not have normal level of water in the dry season. This causes loss of navigability in the Bangladesh parts of the rivers. Farmers do not get adequate water for irrigation. Salinity in the rivers also rises.
India should refrain from this type of selfish withdrawal of water of the common rivers. International laws do not allow any upstream country to control the flow of common rivers unitarily. Bangla-desh has to resist this type of hostile activity by India.
Shekhar Imtiaz
Mymensingh

A Dowry-free village

It is highly encouraging that a village has been totally freed from the curse of dowry.
According to a News Report, the village of Kahetora in Comilla district has been fully successful in saying no to dowry. Dowry is a very big curse in our social life. Despite a legal ban, it is very much common in our country. Almost no marriage can be settled in Bangladesh if the guardians of the bride do not agree to pay dowry in form of cash, ornaments and other valuables to the bridegroom. Many parents of the bride fulfill this unjust obligation by selling their property or borrowing. Still many others cannot manage to do that. In such case, the unfortunate girl remains unmarried for years and despair compels them to commit suicide. Many girls become the victims of extreme mental and physical tortures often causing death if their guardians fail to give sufficient dowry. Thanks to Kazi Abdul Malek, a retired engineer who formed a private service organization at his Kahetora village to launch an anti-dowry campaign. The campaign has been fully successful in the village.
We hope each and every village of the country would follow the example of Kahetora and become dowry-free. To eliminate the dowry system from the country, also is necessary to ensure gender equality. It extremely shocking to mention here that women have been kept almost outside the mainstream development activities. Sustainable development of the country is not possible keeping the women in such pitiable condition. In Bangladesh more than a half of the population are women. They must be freed from the curse of dowry and allowed to join their hands in development activities. They must be freed from all kinds of disparities. We must ensure their freedom of choice. This will work as a very effective deterrent against dowry and the whole country would become totally dowry-free.
Rowshan Ara
Bashabo, Dhaka

Nissan launches first eco-car

BANGKOK, Mar 12: Nissan Motor launched its much-awaited, low-cost compact car on Friday, aiming to become a major force in the fast-growing segment with a global sales target of one million units a year by 2013, reports Reuters.
Nissan executives said the company would produce 90,000 of the five-door hatchbacks, built on new “versatile platform” vehicle underpinnings, at its suburban Bangkok plant in the year starting April 1, of which 70,000 would be for export.
The 1,200-cc engine compact, called March in Thailand, China and Japan, and Micra in India, Europe and other markets, is being sold in a price range of 375,000-537,000 baht ($11,500-$16,500), about 20 percent cheaper than similar cars from rivals.
Chief Operating Officer Toshiyuki Shiga said at the global launch that the compact would be sold in more than 160 countries, with Thailand one of four main manufacturing and export hubs along with China, India and Mexico.
He expected production in China to begin in the second half of this year, but declined to provide other details, including its pricing in key Asian markets.
Shiga did not say when his firm would introduce the vehicle in India, where Nissan is looking to take on market leaders Maruti Suzuki India Ltd and Hyundai Motor Co.
Production of the March model would nearly double Nissan’s Thai car output to 200,000 units a year.
The Micra/March is the Japanese car maker’s most important model in years, the culmination of extensive experimenting with new materials and component designs for production in low-cost countries, Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn said at its unveiling at the Geneva car show in early March.