How to foil the identity thieves

Buying a shredder isn't enough in the battle against laptop criminals

"TECHNOLOGY BREEDS crime. Crime is getting easier, faster and harder to detect. There are no conmen anymore dressed in debonair suits with a briefcase and salesman's patter. Now anyone with a laptop can take your money. It's impersonal and easy to do," says Frank Abagnale.

And he should know. Between the ages of 16 and 21 Abagnale cashed $2.5 million worth of fraudulent cheques in every U.S. State and 26 other countries, successfully posing as an airline pilot, a lawyer, a college professor, and a paediatrician before being tracked down by the French authorities and incarcerated in various international prison systems.

These days he is a respected consultant and lecturer on fraud and embezzlement, continuing to work with the FBI.

A recent visit to London could not have been more timely. Financial fraudsters have hit the headlines again after card number readers in 600 Shell service stations were tampered with, resulting in the theft of more than £1 million.

"What I did 40 years ago is 4,000 times easier to do today," says Mr. Abagnale. "For me to have replicated a cheque 40 years ago I needed a $1 million printing press. Now I can do it on my laptop in minutes."

"Consumers have to take a position of being proactive. You can't rely on the government, the police or your bank."

Monitor your credit records regularly with credit reference agencies. By far the cheapest way to keep up to date with your credit records is to apply for them regularly by post.

You might have heard the one about buying a paper shredder a few times before. Mr. Abagnale has a word of warning: "If you use a straight shredder I can put back together the strips, and read word for word, a front page of the FT. This is what thieves can do to your documents. The way to prevent this is to use a cross-cut shredder, which is the same price as a straight one. Unfortunately everybody goes out and buys the straight ones without knowing any different."
Close any unused accounts.

Don't waste money on expensive identity theft insurance policies. These don't stop you becoming a victim; nor do they prevent you from having to do some work to help sort out the mess if you do fall prey to the fraudsters.

Even after you have deleted files on your PC or laptop, they can still be found and used. Cifas, the U.K.'s fraud prevention service, recommends that you obtain a clean-up tool to overwrite deleted files.

Microsoft's problem bringing Vista online

IT WILL not have escaped your attention that Microsoft is labouring to finish the next version of its Windows operating system, Vista. A version aimed at the corporate market is supposed to be ready for Christmas, with the consumer edition following some time later (missing the Christmas market, which has irritated computer manufacturers and retailers more than somewhat). This month, Gartner, a leading IT consultancy, predicted that Microsoft would miss those shipping dates.

"Microsoft's track record is clear: it consistently misses target dates for major operating system releases," the firm wrote. "We don't expect broad availability of Windows Vista until at least the second quarter of 2007, which is nine to 12 months after Beta 2." Microsoft challenged this. A company spokesman told CNET News: "We remain on track to deliver the final product to volume-licence customers in November 2006 and to other businesses and consumers in January 2007."

So there! The significant thing about Vista, however, is not the shipping date but the fact that it has been an unconscionable time in the making. And while all this has been going on, Apple has released several major upgrades of its OS X operating system, and the programmers behind Open Source Linux have significant upgrades over the same period.

The difference between Microsoft and Apple can be largely explained by two factors. One is structural: Apple's OS X is based on Unix, which has a different architecture from Windows, and may be inherently easier to upgrade. The other is that Microsoft is a victim of its past monopolistic success: any new version of Windows has to be "backwards compatible" with the thousands of programmes and hardware devices built to work on earlier versions of the operating system. Apple has much less of a "legacy" problem in this sense.

The really interesting comparison is with Linux, a product of comparable complexity developed by an independent, dispersed community of programmers who communicate mainly over the net.

How come they can outperform a stupendously rich company that can afford to employ very smart people and give them all the resources they need?
Here is a possible answer: complexity.

Microsoft's problems with Windows may be an indicator that operating systems are getting beyond the capacity of any single organisation to handle them.

Therein may lie the real significance of Open Source. Open Source is not a piece of software, and it is not unique to a group of hackers. It is a way of building complex things.

Microsoft's struggles with Vista suggest it may be the only way to do operating systems in future.

Homemade helicopter for Rs. one lakh

A vegetable seller in an Uttar Pradesh village has developed a two-seater "Homemade Helicopter"

A vegetable seller in an Uttar Pradesh village has developed a two-seater "homemade helicopter", which if approved will be made available for just Rs.100,000, claims an association of innovators here.

According to the National Innovation Foundation (NIF), 24-year-old Mustaqeem Ali from Ratool village in Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh, has made the helicopter with help from friends and other vegetable sellers.

The 3.5 metre craft, which weighs 200 kg, was made using parts from a tractor, scooter and auto rickshaw at a cost of Rs.100,000, Anil Gupta, an NIF official, told.

After a hard day's work, Mustaqeem would spend the evenings working on his model. He developed it after more than a thousand nights of labour, said Gupta.

However, on May 2 when he was about to test the copter, Mustaqeem was arrested by Uttar Pradesh police for not having taken permission.

"He was made to sit in the police station for four hours and allowed to go only after the villagers requested that he be released. Police also wanted to seize his helicopter but the villagers didn't let them do so. They have kept the model safe," said Gupta.

The Ahmedabad-based NIF learnt about the innovation from local news reports and sent a team to visit Mustaqeem. It inspected the helicopter on Sunday.

Mustaqeem, after completing his school studies, went to New Delhi and did a short-term Cabin Crew Course and a computer course. He got inspired to make a helicopter when he visited a trade fair in New Delhi's Pragati Maidan a few years ago, said Gupta.

He didn't get a job and began selling vegetables for a living. NIF plans to approach the National Aerospace Laboratories in Bangalore for expert opinion on whether the helicopter is actually airworthy.

"The helicopter is made with crude technology," said Gupta. Mustaqeem and his friend Arif cannot fly the helicopter as they don't have a pilot's licence, said Gupta.

The NIF plans to call professional pilots only after the Bangalore-based laboratory verifies the machine. A letter has already been dashed off to the laboratory, said Gupta.

"The Pen is mightier than the Sword"

Please Vote My Blog:

Babur's prowess as a General is well known. His felicity with words, however, is a refreshing discovery.

He was also an outstanding man of letters, equally at home with prose and poetry in both Turkish, his mother tongue, and Persian.


THE pen is mightier than the sword". The saying has been with us for ages, and remains by and large unchallenged in most civilised societies. It is based on the either/ or premise. It assumes that the person who is adept at wielding a sword is hopeless when it comes to handling words.

But, as always, there are exceptions. History provides us with personalities who were equally at ease with words and lethal weapons. Such is the case with Zahir Uddin Muhammad Babur.

Wide variety of subjects

Like those familiar with Indian history, I was aware of Babur as an outstanding general and the founder of the Mughal dynasty. But it was only when I read his monumental journal, the Babur Nama, that I realised that he was also an outstanding man of letters, equally at home with prose and poetry — in both Turkish, his mother tongue, and Persian.

Babur deploys his writing skill to a wide variety of subjects — astronomy, battles, biographies and family chronicles, flora and fauna, geography, hand-to-hand fights, historical monuments, literary criticism, pen portraits, poetry, royal decrees, and social gatherings. Each time his performance is impeccable because he activates different aspects of his complex personality. Quite uniquely, he was endowed with boundless curiosity, an acute eye for detail, self-knowledge, logical thinking, and candour that is both disarming and moving.

Equally varied is his style, which ranges from the Pinteresque to the Bollywood script. Little wonder that some parts of his memoirs read like a novel, others a history, and still others an action-packed drama.

In every instance, he performs flawlessly. Almost invariably, he is economical with words. His sinewy and lucid prose is on a par with the best writing of Ernest Hemingway or Scott F. Fitzgerald. He writes simply and logically, and every so often he peppers his prose with a telling idiom redolent of the agrarian society in which he was born and raised. "Banana is another [Indian fruit]," he writes in the Babur Nama. "Its tree is not very tall. Indeed it is not tall enough to be called a tree. Its leaf is a little like that of the aman qara, (peace under shade), but grows about two yards long and one yard broad. Out of the middle of its leaves rises, heart-like, a bud which resembles a sheep's heart."

The logic with which he proceeds in the above paragraph is very much at work in his description of the Domain of Fergana, now in Uzbekistan, where he started his career as a ruler. "The Domain of Fergana has seven towns, five on the south and two on the north of Syr River," he notes. "Of those on the south, one is Andijan. It has a central position and is the capital of the Fergana Domain. It produces much grain, abundant fruits and melons."

Now compare that sort of prose with the wording of the royal decree Emperor Babur issued late in his life renouncing wine. Following a quotation from the Quran, it reads, "On the mirrors of the glorious congregation, to wit, the Masters of Wisdom who are treasure houses of the pearls of purity and who bear the impress of the sparkling jewels of this purport."

Babur is equally at ease with the descriptions of his personal experiences, which are remarkable as much for their lack of exaggeration or self-aggrandisement as they are for their vividness and precision. "A man took aim at Ibrahim Beg," Babur writes. "But then Ibrahim Beg yelled, `Hai! Hai!'; and he let him pass, and by mistake shot me in an armpit from as near as a man on guard at the Gate stands from another. Two plates of my armour cracked. I shot at a man running away along the ramparts, adjusting his cap against the battlements. He abandoned his cap, nailed to the wall and went off, gathering his turban sash together in his hand."

Expression of love

No feeling can be more intimate or moving than being in love. "Until then I had no inclination of love and desire for anyone, by hearsay or experience," Babur wrote when he was 17. "At that time I composed Persian couplets, one or two at a time. This is one of them:

May none be as I, humbled and wretched and lovelorn;/Not beloved as you are to me, you cruel being, full of scorn.

In that maelstrom of desire and passion, and under the stress of youthful folly, I used to wander, bareheaded and barefoot, through streets and lanes, orchards and vineyards... Sometimes, like mad men I used to wander alone over hill and plain; sometimes I wandered in gardens and suburbs, lane after lane. My roaming was not of my choice; nor could I decide whether to go or stay.

Nor power to stay was mine, nor strength to part;/I became what you made of me, oh thief of my heart."

Anybody who has been in love would identify with the prose and poetry of Babur. That in short is the greatness of Babur, an accomplished wielder of both pen and sword.


Aftab Ahmad
Aftab@airtelbroadband.in

Unreal paradigm

What was being put to the test in the cartoon affair was the willingness of a minority group to conform to majority assumptions.

It is impossible not to be dismayed by the spiral of events. A witless racist cartoon is elevated into a totem of Western democracy and holocaust denial becomes a symbol of resistance to imperialism.

The message contained in the Danish cartoon was blunt: it drew an equation between Muslims and terrorists, between Islam and murderous violence. It was devoid of humour, irony, artistic or social merit, yet editors across Europe took it upon themselves to publish it. They did so, they claimed, as a "test" of free speech. Now, more often than not, the Western media is cautious about testing free speech, especially when it comes to exposing government secrets or embarrassing rich people who enjoy recourse to libel lawyers. There are a wide range of offensive images — racist, pornographic — that they routinely refuse to publish. But when it came to the Danish cartoon, the usual inhibitions were cast aside. What's apparent from statements made by the editors and their supporters is that what they were eager to put to the "test" was not an abstract principle but the willingness of a minority group to conform to majority assumptions.

Selective memory
Listening to Western commentators exercise themselves over whether "we" have made too many concessions to "cultural differences" and to what extent "cultural diversity" is compatible with "our democratic values", I wonder what history books these people have read. Did they miss the 100-odd years during which non-Western peoples fought for elementary democratic rights against Western colonial powers? Did they miss "our" slave trade, "our" genocides, "our" use of weapons of mass destruction? Have they missed the "culture wars" that have ravaged the United States for two decades, in the course of which a well-funded right-wing religious movement has mounted successful attacks on science and personal freedom? The current relative openness of Western society has had to be extracted from recalcitrant elites inch by inch, and is today threatened first and foremost by its own governments.

Coming from British commentators, members of a notoriously mono-lingual majority whose knowledge of other cultures is often limited to the menu at an "Indian" restaurant (usually run by a Bangladeshi or Pakistani), the complaint that Muslims have cut themselves off from the wider world is rich. Not as rich, of course, as lectures on democracy and tolerance coming from those who breach international law, inflict violence on civilian populations and abuse human rights. The mythology crudely expressed in the cartoon acquires a daily deadly impact in Iraq, Palestine, Guantanamo and on the streets of Europe, where innocent Muslims are treated and punished as "terrorists".

Many of those who proclaim the right to offend seem shocked and outraged when offence is duly taken. Surely, the same principle that protects the cartoonist protects the idiot dressed as a suicide bomber. But while the Muslim response to the cartoon is presented as pathological, the Western mentality that begat the cartoon escapes scrutiny.
The affair has been driven in part by media sensationalism. Ethnic polarisation — real or imagined — provides drama, stirs emotions. Crucially, across Europe, the market the media aim to capture is overwhelmingly white and non-Muslim. In this market, coverage of jihadi extremism takes on a prurient tinge. It's exotic, it's threatening and it makes the white European feel smug and superior. Producers and editors are reluctant to admit it, even to themselves, but the ingrained assumptions and festering resentments of white supremacy make the story resonant for readers and viewers and shape the way it is constructed.

The debate about whether, where and when it might be acceptable to restrict freedom of speech is both difficult and necessary. But that's not the terrain that's being explored or "tested" here. Instead, discussion has been imprisoned in two related paradigms, both of them unreal and distorting. One counterposes "multi-culturalism" to "integration" and the other sets "Islam" against "the West". The first does not remotely reflect the way people live, the multiplicity and fluidity of actual social relations. The choices it offers are unreal. The second offers a clash of incommensurable abstractions, in which so much is left out, not least the authoritarian and hierarchical strands in Western thinking and the humanist and egalitarian strands in Islamic thinking.

Tragic irony
The grim perversity of the paradigm has been highlighted by the tit-for-tat commissioning of holocaust cartoons by an Iranian newspaper, following President Ahmadinejad's public embrace of holocaust denial. That Jews should come to be so widely perceived as a proxy for the West is a fact brimming with tragic ironies. Holocaust denial is not only a denial of common humanity and an assault on human memory, it also lets Europe off the hook for a crime that makes a mockery of its claims to civilisational superiority. The preachers of anti-Semitism in Muslim societies are importing a very European ideology, one that was always inseparable from the broader discourse of Western colonialism and racial superiority. Indeed, anti-Semitism provides a template for Islamophobia. The Danish cartoon, as has been widely noted, eerily recalls the Nazi cartoons that demonised Jews (as well as English cartoons depicting bomb-throwing Irishmen).

For those many Muslims and indeed non-Muslims who reject the false paradigms, recent weeks have been painfully frustrating. The realities of social injustice, economic inequality and U.S.-British militarism that lie behind the spectacle of the culture clash seem to have been obscured, for the moment, by its media-mesmerising flash and thunder.

Aftab Ahmad

The Hindu

Caricature of Muhammad (SAW)

Uncivilized Act of So Called Civilized Peoples

“We have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance.”

Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (quoted in the London Telegraph)

When the ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan were criminally destroyed by the Talibaan, the Europeans screamed murder the loudest. What was that protest for? So destruction of history is blasphemous but the attempted destruction of a people's faith and deeply treasured symbols is not?

If the freedom of expression is so sacred how many European papers have dared to support what the Iranian president said about questioning the reality of the holocaust?

Leaving the politics of it aside, the issue is a fairly straight forward one. It is simply about values. The Danes who published the cartoons ridiculing the Prophet of my faith, degrading and attacking my religion also claim they merely exercised their right of expression-of freedom of speech. Then there were others in Europe who rose to the defense of the Danish act of insulting the prophet. They did so by also publishing the blasphemous cartoons of the prophet. As far as I can see they undermined a fundamental value of humanity; the value that calls for sensitivity towards another, the value to not hurt another person.

There is no battle to be fought with those who indulged in the ugly act of deliberately insulting my Prophet. I am numbed with outrage over this uncivilized act they have committed. I would simply say to them yours are no civilized ways. Whatever your claims to the contrary, they actually betray a people with a reactionary mindset.

Those who become possessed by anger when confronted with difficult and challenging situations. Anger halts our ability to probe and to reflect. Instead, depending on our location in life, if we are advantageously placed, we self-righteously give ourselves the license to pronounce verdict and take action to right a wrong. As many European publications have done. This is their crass response to the growing post 9/11 anti-Islamic sentiment. And for people in the business of opinion-making to indulge in such reactive acts, is extremely dangerous. It is highly irresponsible. These are people who must play the role of promoting greater understanding-pulling people away from extremist thought and action. Not join the vanguard of anger-prompted extremism .

Policy-makers and opinion-making community in the West has opted to conduct the discourse on terrorism using a terminology that has unwittingly but dangerously indicted the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Terms like Muslim terrorists , Islamic terrorists and Islamic terrorism has led to the demonization of the Muslims and of Islam. Whatever the European papers may claim they are upholding by ridiculing the Holy Prophet they would have not contemplated doing so in a pre-9/11 environment.

Social tensions may have existed in pre-9/11 Europe but in post 9/11 the tensions have vastly augmented. Muslims make for easy targets. So does their faith. This is how a section of the Europeans have opted to express their resentment against the terrorist attacks; as is evident from the contents of the cartoon itself.

This is a season of acute polarization. For example if the on-line responses of the public are any guide, this act of insulting the prophet has unfortunately received widespread public support in many European countries. The thrust mostly is that there is no reason to compromise on our value of freedom of expression, that if Muslims can’t deal with this they must leave, that Muslims are hypocrites because they show no tolerance towards minorities but expect to be shown tolerance. In some cases individuals have argued that such cartoons should often be printed to get the Muslims to ultimately be more accepting of freedom of expression! They say this is what we do to our own. Sadly so, we would say. But everyone to their own- but please do not drag our revered ones, those who we believe was the Messenger of God, in your messy notion of the freedom of speech. You have evolved into a culture of which licenses unlimited permissiveness. In spite of our own mistakes, our many shortcomings, our morally and intellectually anemic leadership, there are some touch-stones of our civilization. It includes the respect of religion and our faith in God Almighty.

Deliberately defiling the Prophet is a highly irresponsible act. It is bound to have negative social and political fall-out. It exacerbates the existing social tensions among the locals and the Muslim population. Within the Muslims it is bound to create more alienation and resentment towards the westerners who, have chosen to be completely indifferent towards the faith and feelings of the Muslims across the world. It is the arrogance of these westerners they will resent. Like millions of westerners who have opted to not view terrorists as a fringe phenomenon within the Muslims and instead referred to terrorism as Islamic terrorism, many Muslims too will wrongly implicate the westerners across the board for this blasphemous act against the Prophet.

At the popular level we require a roll-back of the school that promotes the dangerous talk of clash of civilizations. For now the cartoon incident will merely serve to reinforce the worst of what many Muslims may believe of a growing intolerant Europe.

The framing and the discussion of the issue of terrorism has created a permissive environment which is responsible for this caricaturing of the Prophet; of hurting the feelings and ridicule the faith of a huge section of the entire human race. They paid no head to the protests. Instead they resented and condemned the nature of the protests. True the protests should have been calmer. Frenzied outrage was unnecessary and as were threats to kill. But nothing justified the reprinting of those insulting cartoons across many European countries including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Switzerland.

The leadership in most of these countries has not been willing to contest the wisdom of publishing cartoons which is highly disrespectful to another peoples’ faith. In fact the degree if insensitivity of the Danish Prime Minster can be gauged from the fact that when after the September publication the Muslims in Denmark sent repeated requests to meet with the Prime Minister. He repeatedly ignored their request. Essentially conveying ‘I really don’t give a damn. The Muslim leaders then went to the Middle East and other Muslim countries and showed them what the Danish papers had done. Subsequently the reaction acquired these proportions.

In Denmark the anti-Muslim sentiment has been growing at a rapid pace. The Fogh Rasmussen government has actively sought to dispel and block Muslim residents from Denmark. The cartoon is just the tip of the iceberg.

However that the notion of freedom of expression cannot be translated into unlimited freedom to abuse another’s faith is basic common sense. But also the way many Europeans have selectively applied the principle of freedom of expression is intriguing. When the ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan were criminally destroyed by the Talibaan, the Europeans screamed murder the loudest. We all did too in the Muslim world.

What was that protest for? So destruction of history is blasphemous but the attempted destruction of a people's faith and deeply treasured symbols is not? This is the perversity of post-modernism which seeks the right to destroy and deconstruct selectively-and give that right a sacred status. Also if the freedom of expression is so sacred how many European papers have dared to support what the Iranian president said about questioning the reality of the holocaust?

Clearly the principle of freedom has to be practiced within some rationale and egalitarian framework. It cannot be an elitest concept which a special color or creed will have more right to excercise. Why does this right not respect another’s right to chose what is sacred to them-since that what is sacred is not at the cost of undermining another’s interests. Islam abhors suicide bombings and terrorism. Increasingly Muslim leaders are condemning this openly.

Why are the Europeans so generous in applying their concept of freedom of expression at the cost of causing great pain and injury to Muslim world? Is it because their bohemianism has a method to it? The method is to attack and disrespect those who, are generally viewed as the politically, scientifically and economically the down-trodden of the human race-the weak and the lambasted-the violated and the angry-the reactive and seething?

These are not the ways of a civilized people. These are ways pushing for a grand and mad conflict of civilizations. Will the European media see wisdom is stepping back and reviewing their dangerous notion of freedom of expression? For now the limited apologies that have come were perhaps prompted by the widespread anger and protests emanating from the Muslim world. But wisdom and true civilized behavior demands that we internalize the limits of our own freedoms where it begins to undermine the freedom of another.

Otherwise a free-for-all world would best be described by William Butler Yeat’s perennially poignant poem “The Second Coming”;

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all convictions, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.
(http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/780/)

Clearly if it moves ahead unchecked, this unguided or self-righteous “passionate intensity” will ultimately become the undoing of the human race. We need to reflect on our ways of being especially those preaching wildly damaging forms of freedom of expression.


Aftab Ahmad

aftab@airtelbroadband.in

Democracy, modernity, and the Indian child

At present, our schools act like factories, forcing children into a fixed, preconceived mould. They stifle natural curiosity and creativity. The fruits of democracy and modernity will remain elusive if education is not structurally adjusted to the needs of the rural poor.


ROSA PARKS, who died at 92 a few weeks ago, belonged to a tradition that runs through modern history but is seldom celebrated as an aspect of modernism. In India, we associate it with Gandhi whose refusal to swallow humiliation in a South African train shaped the history of the British Empire.

In a remarkably similar event, Rosa Parks gave the civil rights movement in the United States a sharpened edge when she defied an Alabama bus driver who asked her to vacate her seat because she was black. That happened on the evening of December 1, 1955, in a town called Montgomery. The driver threatened her with arrest, and she asked him to go ahead with his plans. Four days later, after her arrest, a young preacher called Martin Luther King said at a gathering of thousands of black people that Rosa was "one of the finest citizens of Montgomery." The bus boycott ensuing from that assembly lasted 381 days. It led to 100 arrests and a Supreme Court judgment a year later outlawing segregation in buses.

Parks, King, and Gandhi had a common intellectual ancestor in the American philosopher and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau. His 1859 essay, Civil Disobedience, presents a political theory justifying his refusal to pay tax in order to protest America's war against Mexico. Thoreau's essay inspired Gandhi to invent and apply Satyagraha: a non-violent weapon against institutionalised subjugation. The same essay elicited Martin Luther's King famous remark that "non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good."

Gandhi's legacy, both as a mass leader and as a political thinker, continues to challenge our analytical abilities and imagination. It is obviously convenient to enclose Gandhi in a colonial context and leave him there. The lifeless listing of his salient traits and achievements given in school texts transforms Gandhi into an exam byte. The question of what Gandhi means for citizenship today is simply not attempted. To the mill of cramming and regurgitation, marks and merit lists, Gandhi supplies indistinct fodder. In a system of education that ignores the child's part in the construction of knowledge, Gandhi loses meaning. But then, Gandhi is no exception. The concept of curriculum entrenched in our system overlooks the child's role in constructing knowledge; hence, no topic transcends the status of information. Certain topics and questions acquire importance for the final examination, but nothing gains significance or inspirational value. Tools of analysis, such as classification of ideas and information, and the steps involved in judging evidence are ignored. Syllabus and textbook designers assume that it is the teacher's job to impart interactive life to the long, continuous narratives given in the text.

Why shouldn't the text writer share this responsibility? This question is one of those we seldom ask in curricular deliberations. Any discussion of the numerous ills of our system of education inevitably slips into a versatile blame game. Teachers say the syllabus is too long to cover with progressive pedagogic methods, that the textbooks are too fat and dull, and that the examination system is too rigid. Syllabus designers and textbook writers blame the teacher for not working hard. Principals blame the parents for arousing unrealistic expectations in children, and parents blame the government for not paying sufficient attention to education. Social activists blame the state for succumbing to commercial forces and globalisation. And finally, the media awaken everyone to blame whoever can be found to blame before sunset.

The education of Rosa Parks led her to becoming a seamstress. She was married to a barber. In India, such details about a great life surprise us, accustomed as we are to dissociating manual work and dexterity from school and college education. Linking education and work, especially manual work, was Gandhi's favourite idea.

The National Curriculum Framework (NCF), which was approved by the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) in September, shows renewed interest in this linkage. The recommended strategies given in the NCF are spelt out in the report of the National Focus Group on this subject. Its report treats work as a nucleus of creative engagement with knowledge, social values, and personal fulfilment. As you read the report, you realise that the idea of enlightened citizenship is incompatible with bookish education, howsoever great a success it may bring to someone individually. Work implies an activity that fulfils a genuine need. It also implies the development of an attitude capable of sustaining self-reliance, initiative, and a questioning spirit.

Opportunities to infuse work into routine school life constantly arise but are seldom utilised in our sedentary system. Many private schools, for instance, prevent children from looking after plants by assigning this task exclusively to salaried gardeners. That is why their lawns look so beautiful, signalling the school's status and high fees. How easy it is to mistake modernity with convenience became apparent to me at a recent discussion on a mathematics text. We were debating the merits of perforating a page with stickers that children might use to learn about different shapes. The logistics involved in perforation suddenly reminded us that it would mean a lot more activity if children were asked to cut the page with scissors or trace the shapes given on it, and then cut and paste them on cardboard. This kind of work covers a wide range of skills and desirable behaviours, including pleasant readiness to help with cleaning up the room after the lesson is over. Such training would form the right ethos to imbibe the qualities of citizenship Gandhi might have approved. It would also enable children to produce knowledge out of experience rather than simply receive it as information.

Teaching as relational activity
The legacy of pedagogic modernism symbolised by Gandhi and Tagore implies the cultivation of a questioning spirit and tolerance for differences. Neither goal can be achieved without viewing teaching as a relational, rather than a transmission, activity. It is only when the teacher engages with the child with love and patience, and the textbook encourages interaction, that values like originality, self-reliance, and tolerance take shape. The idea that the teacher should build on the knowledge that the child brings to school, enabling the child to critically examine this knowledge wherever necessary, poses a significant challenge to entrenched pedagogic concepts and practices. A similar challenge comes from the idea that the curriculum should address children's concerns and anxieties about the world they live in, rather than bypass them in the name of academic distance.

Children, who are otherwise inarticulate at school, open up when they are asked to talk about things they know. Village girls start talking and taking an active interest in the curriculum if the textbook and the teacher touch upon their everyday life issues. True, many such issues offer no immediate or clear answers, but that hardly matters. The role of education is to make the child reflective and articulate, and to achieve this goal education does not have to start from scratch. Children are endowed to think: our job is to build on their innate capacity by giving it an opportunity to flourish. This view continues to invite criticism in our society where negative assumptions about the child's nature are still popular and any plea for children being given the opportunity to think for themselves is perceived with suspicion.

At the inauguration of Delhi University's Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, Salman Akhtar cited the acceptance of uncertainty as one of the key symptoms of mental health. Other symptoms are the realisation that the world is a complex place in which a number of decisions are made without the predictability of outcomes. Dr. Akhtar said the appeal of fundamentalism comes from its promise of certainty. His speech indicates the role of education in strengthening a rational and liberal outlook that implies acceptance of differences.

To realise any such vision of society, we must give children's education a high priority and regard no expenditure as being excessive for enriching the school. Not only must every child go to school, but the school too should have the capacity to receive every child, irrespective of background, gender or ability.

At present, our schools act like factories, forcing children into a fixed, preconceived mould. Drastic reforms are needed to provide room for creativity and independent thought. Present-day schooling stifles the natural curiosity and creativity children possess.

The system is especially cruel to rural children. Village children belonging to the lower socio-economic strata fall prey to the system's predisposition favouring the upwardly mobile sections of urban India. Our democratic order urgently needs the support of a universally accessible and sensibly organised system of education. The fruits of democracy and modernity will remain elusive if education is not structurally adjusted to the needs of the rural poor.



Aftab Ahmad

aftab@touchtelindia.net