Seven things men do that drive women nuts

Seven things men do that drive women nuts

I believe it was Socrates who said, “Women are insane, and men are dumb.” Then again, it might’ve been Anaïs Nin. Or maybe Simone de Beauvoir. In any event, if women are indeed insane – which I’m not convinced of – it’s only because us men are dumb. I’m not talking dumb in the I.Q. sense, but rather dumb in the clueless sense, especially when it comes to certain aspects of dating and mating.

Be it logistical or emotional, there are things us guys do or don’t do that justifiably raise the collective dander of our girlfriends and/or wives. Here are seven ways to keep your significant other’s blood pressure at a healthy level:

Put the toilet seat down
Guaranteed if you’re not a conscientious seat-putter-downer, you hear this complaint so often that it flies in one ear and out the other. Well, boys, there’s a very valid reason this is a common kvetch: WOMEN DON’T LIKE FALLING INTO THE TOILET WHEN THEY GET UP TO USE THE BATHROOM AT 3:30 A.M.! I mean, would you want to end up with your butt in the toilet at 3:30 A.M.? Didn’t think so.

Clean up
Men are neat, while women are clean. To elaborate: A guy’s place may look perfect; for example, all of his “art” is in its place on the shelves, and the floor is empty of shoes, remote controls, and various other dude detritus. But when your girl examines the shelf area under that aforementioned “art,” there’s a 75% chance she’ll come upon a half-inch coating of dust. Girls, on the other hand, may have a pile of to-be-put-away clean clothes on her bedroom floor, but at least their space is clean. Get it? Good.

Be emotionally available
Another frequent complaint, which isn’t as easy to alleviate as the toilet situation. Many of my male brethren have spent a lifetime bottling up their feelings, and it’s hard to open up just like that. You can’t become a totally communicative guy overnight, but she’ll appreciate if you put forth a legitimate effort.

If you tell her you’ll call her on Thursday, call her on Thursday
You’re not in high school anymore. Quit playing head games, and get dialing.

Groom yourself
Based on personal experience, I know women dislike walking down the street with a guy who doesn’t keep his fingernails clipped, or his shirt and pants relatively wrinkle- and hole-free, or his armpits un-stinky.

Put together an original night out
Dinner and a movie? C’mon, you did that last week. And the week before. And the week before that. One more week, and you’ve officially entered Dullsville. Take her bowling, or to a museum… or any place other than to dinner and a movie.

Be romantic
If your girlfriend finds out one of her girlfriend’s boyfriend gave her a dozen “just because” roses – and the only “just because” gift you’ve ever given your girl is a ticket to a Cleveland Indians game – she’ll want to throttle you. And if that’s the case, you’ll deserve a throttling.

De-ideologisation of politics is the tragedy of Tamil Nadu

De-ideologisation of politics is the tragedy of Tamil Nadu

Interview with Karthigesu Sivathamby.

C.K. GOVINDARAJULU

The Dravidian movement, which has dominated politics in Tamil Nadu for about four decades, faces an identity crisis. Nothing signifies this crisis better than the competition among the Dravidian parties — the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam — to forge an electoral alliance and share power with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-driven Bharatiya Janata Party, which stands for whatever the Dravidian movement set out to fight against. The Dravidian parties, which miss no opportunity to describe themselves as the true inheritors of the legacy of E.V. Ramaswamy Periyar, whose rationalist world-view rejected the Vedas and the ``revealed truth'' of the scriptures, do not hesitate to find common cause with the BJP, which has declared that ``the guiding principles of Bharat will come from the great teachings of Vedas, ancient Hindu and Indian scriptures".

Social justice, the birth cry of the Dravidian movement, is a concept that has not been accepted by a major section of the upper castes that form the social base of the BJP. The Sangh Parivar's world-view, based on the principle of ``one nation, one culture'', is essentially opposed to linguistic nationalism and social reformism, the two major currents that converged to make the Dravidian movement a powerful political force in Tamil Nadu. In fact, the BJP stands for the division of States into smaller units for ``administrative convenience'', much against the principle of linguistic reorganisation of States — a principle that flows from the democratic need to reflect the pluralistic character of Indian society and which forms the basis of the federalist political arrangement envisaged by the founding fathers of the Constitution. In recent times, the demand of some States for greater financial devolution has not found resonance from the parties of the Dravidian movement, which was the champion of State autonomy.

The deviation of these parties from the tenets of Dravidianism is not just a matter of political opportunism. According to Karthigesu Sivathamby, a prominent Tamil scholar from Sri Lanka who has closely studied the evolution of the Dravidian movement, it is the culmination of a process that started in the 1940s. Ideological shifts took place at different periods in the history of the Dravidian movement, he says. The crucial one, according to him, was the break between Periyar and C.N. Annadurai, who founded the DMK. After the split, the movement saw major deviations — from atheism to universal theism (`one god, one community'); social reformism to electoral politics; separatism to national integration. These deviations were the result of, among other things, the changes that took place in the post-Independence politics of India and the limitation of the Dravidian ideology itself in that it lacked an economic perspective. ``There was no ideological coming of age,'' in the Dravidian movement, says Sivathamby, who has done two insightful studies on the Dravidian movement — Understanding the Dravidian Movement: Problems and Perspectives (in English) and The Relevance of the Dravidian Ideology Today: A Historical Perspective (in Tamil). The ideological shifts culminated in the deideologisation of politics, he says in this interview he gave R. Vijaya Sankar in Chennai recently. (The interview was done as part of a study on ``The post-1967 phase of the Dravidian movement'' under the Appan Menon Memorial Award).

An Emeritus Professor of Tamil in the University of Jaffna, Sivathamby, along with the late K. Kailasapathy, is considered as an outstanding Tamil scholar from Sri Lanka. His areas of study include social and cultural history of Tamils, culture and communication among Tamils, Tamil drama, Sri Lankan and Tamil Nadu politics, and so on. He has published about 50 monographs and books on these subjects. His research on the Sangam period in Tamil history is considered a pioneering work. In recognition of his scholarly achievements in Tamil studies, the Tamil Nadu government conferred on him in 2000 the Thiru V. Kalyanasundara Mudaliar Award. Sivathamby is a Visiting Professor of Tamil to universities in India (the University of Madras and the Jawaharlal Nehru University), England (Cambridge), Finland and Norway. Excerpts from the interview:

In what historical context did Dravidianism emerge as an ideology?

THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY

E. V. Ramaswamy Periyar, founder of the Self-Respect Movement and the Dravidar Kazhagam.

When one retraces the steps of the Dravidian movement, the first and the more important one was the emergence of a new `class' conglomeration of various non-Brahmin castes of the then Madras Province — the Pillais, the Nairs, the Kammas, the Kapus and the Reddys. Their emerging interest was such that they would have invented some glue to stick them all together. An ideological glue was a socio-political or an ideological necessity at that time. And the emerging concept of Dravidianism — from its original, and acknowledged, meaning of a section of a group of languages — provided that glue.

The other crucial factor is the impact of the British rule and the type of social dislocations it had created. In British India, in the ideological need to bring India into one cultural concept, the role played by, or the role ascribed to, Hinduism, the Sanskrit texts and the great revelational books, from Max Mueller to the Theosophical Society, especially Annie Besant, creates a new awareness which all historians have recorded.

And there were two responses to that. One was the Thani Thamizh (Pure Tamil) Movement. It was a sort of an elaboration of the Aryan-Dravidian ideology because Maraimalai Adigal, its founder, was never against translations. He wrote long English prefaces for his Tamil works.

But the more important response was the so-called rationalism, starting from people like Iyothee Thaas. In fact, except for a few people, no one has taken this seriously at the level of modern Indian historians. This question has not been tackled properly. There was a growing movement of rationalism, especially coming from the underprivileged classes. There were a number of caste groups, associations of the so-called lower castes — early Tamilians... the Pariars, the Pallars, or the Adi Dravidas. The new life, the new encouragement given, to the so-called Brahmanism was a reaction to this.

Now we come to the crux of the problem — the inability of the Congress leadership in Madras to relate social problems to political demands. So the social contradictions were swept under the carpet. So much so, as one leading non-Brahmin Congressite told me, Gandhi himself was responsible for the political launching of the Self-Respect Movement in Madras because he did not understand the sort of inner desperations, the inner workings of the mind of the people during the Vaikom struggle. Leaders like Thiru Vi Ka (V. Kalyanasundara Mudaliar) on the other hand were trying to relate the entire Tamilian history to the question of socio-political liberation. So the lid was off with the Vaikom satyagraha.

By this time the rationalist movement, through its association with the world socialist movement, was becoming more scientific. It was not merely rationalism in the Ingersolian sense. It was becoming more and more scientific... promotion of socialism, and so on. And this is seen in the immediate tie-up of M. Singaravelu Chettiar and Periyar.

The moment the major political victory of the freedom fighters was achieved, the social contradictions in Tamil Nadu came to the fore. In 1944 the Dravidar Kazhagam was formed. In 1949 it broke up and the DMK came.

THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY

C.N. Annadurai, founder of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.

There was a sort of social ferment. There was a sort of unfelt, unheard of, unrecognised strength of this whole movement. Nehru dismissed the movement. But within four years it became an important force.

Does it mean that it was the nationalist response to the social question or the lack of it that mainly contributed to the growth of the Dravidian movement?

Nehru was being idealistic. The southern leaders of the Congress failed to bring up this question. Some of the Congress leaders themselves were very progressive in their political views but were not so progressive on the social issues.

After India won Independence and embarked on the path of development, the hegemony of the Congress was questioned and provincialism came to the fore for the first time, in the Madras Province. In the context of the Congress' failure to take into account the traditional social differences and social oppression prevailing in Tamil Nadu and give importance to the perspectives on social differences, the Dravidian movement emerged as an expression of the socio-cultural grievances of some sections of society. This expression was fully politicised with the emergence of the DMK. It brought about a change, new styles of leadership and new forms of recruitment and political mobilisation in the political trajectory of Tamil Nadu. It created a new political vocabulary in Tamil Nadu.

Was there a kind of duality in the Congress' approach... politically progressive and socially conservative?

S. MAHINSHA

DMK president M. Karunanidhi.

Yes. So the explosion in the Dravidian movement has to be understood in these terms. It emerged basically as a movement of grievances. It can now be recorded that these grievances were the result of, one, caste inequalities and, two, the problem of sharing of the government positions that the British rule was prepared to give because of these inequalities. The second aspect is the politics of the Justice Party. The Justice Party only wanted a share in government jobs and education. And Periyar gave an ideological dimension to the Justice movement. Looking retrospectively at Periyarism per se, when it is worked down to its basics, it speaks for the honour of the individual or the respect for individual rights. These questions should have been accommodated within the Congress or elsewhere without any problem. But that is where I think the class distinctions that arose out of the process of modernisation in Tamil Nadu or in Madras came into play. The professionals who came from these classes confused caste and class. So the Dravidian movement grew as a movement of grievances.

Where did the movement flounder?

It floundered when it rejected religion as a whole in the course of its fight against Brahmanism. Religion has a social necessity — religion in a traditional, unequal, hierarchical society which Marx himself accepts.

Religion is ``the sigh of the oppressed...''

``...the sigh of the oppressed... the heart of a heartless world... the soul of a soulless environment..'' If you take the topography of Hinduism in Tamil Nadu, there is a sharp distinction between the stone-built temples with high walls and high gopurams (towers) and those that lie outside them — the Karumari Amman temples, the Grama Devathas where you find clay-made structures. When there was this total rejection of all these higher forms of religion what happened was one of the things that complicated the whole notion of Sanskritisation which (M.N.) Srinivas speaks of. When that was rejected people went in for Karumari Amman and other local gods. The Dravidian movement could not do anything with that. The very same force or medium which went against religion was responsible for bringing up the Amman temples and local gods.

The second problem was that the socio-political grievances for which the Dravidian movement gave expression were not cemented with a basic economic perspective. The grievances were not given an economic orientation in as much as they were given a political orientation. This became evident during the period in which the Dravidian movement wielded political power. One can notice that with the acquisition of political power, differences among the leaders acquired more importance. Owing to its inability to forge a politico-economic outlook, the leadership took the path of populism.

Thirdly, when the questions of marriage registration, the question of increasing the quotas were neglected, they naturally affected the mobility of the lower groups, which included Dalits. But the Dravidian movement stood for the upward social mobility of the middle groups, whereas it should have, in terms of its own ideology of rejection of religion and going in for the fundamental rights of all the people, included Dalits also.

Periyar strived for shudra-Dalit unity.

But it never happened. In fact the Mandal Commission Report refers to this. It said Tamil Nadu will be the last place (where) the whole issue of Dalit-Other Backward Class conflict will come up. But when the conflict came it exposed various things.

The Mandal Commission talked about this. It observed that as long as Tamil Nadu remained in the grip of Tamil cultural revival, a real movement of backward classes would not emerge there and that as in other States, the conflict between Dalits and Other Backward Classes would not hide the Brahmin-non-Brahmin divide. This, according to the Mandal Commission, was because Dalits in Tamil Nadu had readily accepted the Self-Respect Movement. But the Mandal Commission's perspective was proved wrong within ten years of its implementation. The question is whether the Dravidian movement's attempts at cultural revival has created a commonness among the non-Brahmin castes of Tamil Nadu.

M.G. Ramachandran, founder of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.

Where exactly did the Dravidian movement fail?

When all that has been written on C.N. Annadurai is now put together, one could detect a major problem he faced. He was able to gather all these social grievances into one major political demand but was not able to resolve them internally, in terms of organising the party. I've quoted (P.) Ramamurthy in my book. He (Annadurai) tells Ramamurthy: "We have come to power much earlier than we expected.''

The break between Periyar and the DMK was crucial in this.

A major shift took place in the Dravidian movement with the formation of the DMK in 1949. It was at this stage that the Dravidian movement emerged as a movement that gave full expression to Tamil national consciousness. It underwent the following important ideological shifts: 1. The decision to take part in electoral politics (1956); 2. Moving away from atheism and advocating the principle of `one god, one community'; 3. The abandoning of the demand for a separate Dravida homeland (1963).

As a result of this, there was no — for want of a better term I would say — ideological coming of age.

At this point, looking back, with my Marxist background, I feel that Periyar knew that going beyond social reform into political action demanded something more for which he was not ready. Because political demand has its own trajectory. In that sense Periyar was a Gandhian.

Gandhi, as assessed by E.M.S. Namboodiripad in his The Mahatma and the Ism? What was Periyar's limitation? Why did he not travel that extra mile?

I had earlier thought, from a Marxist point of view, that he should have immediately politicised the whole thing. But the problem was that the politics of Tamil Nadu had undergone change in the post-colonial period. This is where I think post-colonialism as a concept has to be seen. All those forces which in colonial India promised relief or salvation from British rule now turned themselves into political parties and groups. As we got rid of colonialism the only radical force that was with us, Netajism, shot itself out or kicked itself out of India. There were various sections within the Congress. Rajaji himself had a group. The Congress (O) and (I) came. Politics was turning inwardly. And the Communist movement was banned.

I now think that — I don't know to what extent this caught the imagination of Periyar — the type of social grievances that he articulated could not have been done politically at the time. So Periyar kept out of politics.

It was an irony. The man who should have demanded political action did not do it. The others who wanted political action, politicised culture.

What does it mean and imply — the idea of politicisation of culture?

You cannot understand the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, its rise, its strength and its weaknesses without understanding the whole idea of politicisation of culture. It is basically a communication strategy — the platform speech, the rhetoric, the theatre, the newspaper and the film.

The issues that were neglected because of social contradictions earlier, now came to the forefront in free India. And these issues were politicised — the Tamil pandit not getting recognition, Tamil Pongal being considered Maha Sankranthi, and Tamil not getting a place, and so on. The DMK did not intend to revive Tamil religion. They did not want to revive religion but Tamil culture — the reification of the Sangam period... the reification of Silappadhikaram. Silappadhikaram is full of magic. I don't think there is any other work of that period which is so full of magic, wonders and miracle. But a political reading was done into the text... that it symbolised the glory of the three kingdoms — Chera, Chola and Pandya.

And in this process of politicisation of culture and looking into individual grievances without an economic concept, ideology slipped. As long as you had a man who understood the whole thing it was okay. Annadurai died. And once MGR (M.G. Ramachandran) came to power, or had come to command power, ideology was in the back seat.

The emergence of the Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam led by M.G. Ramachandran brings about some major ideological shifts in the Dravidian movement. First, though a tactical one, was the AIADMK taking itself into the larger national circle. It marked the beginning of a break from the DMK's stand on State autonomy. It also marked a major shift from the basic atheistic aspect of the Dravidian ideology. Although measures such as the enhancement of reservation in jobs and the nutritious mid-day meal scheme for schoolchildren made a major social impact, the distinct socio-religious perspective of the Dravidian ideology was eroded.

What about DMK president M. Karunanidhi?

The problem is, Karunanidhi symbolises Tamil, the rhetoric. The tragedy of Tamil Nadu is, as I look at it as a student of Tamil literature and as a Marxist, there has been a de-ideologisation of politics. As a Marxist I would say that the basic problem was that the whole Dravidian ideology was not shaped in terms of economics.

And there all-India politics matters. It is very interesting — in spite of all these things, West Bengal continues to thrive, and Kerala has a common sense of purpose. The question is this: What was the Bengali spirit that the Communists could tap? What was the Malayalam spirit that they could work on. What was the Bengali spring on which Jyoti Basu stood? And what was the Kerala spring on which EMS (Namboodiripad) stood? And what happened in Tamil Nadu? Dravidianism is no more a coherent ideology. It has been deideologised. And the tragedy is, without another proper ideology taking its place.

There is another aspect. The beginning is not within Tamil Nadu. The emergence of provincialism. The glue that the British government and the Indian intellectuals gave for India, the great Indian culture and all that, was not able to hold this country together. Provinicialisation or regionalisation of politics and the politics of ruling India leads to all sorts of alliances. Now provincialism has become a part of Indian polity. So now there must be some lowest common factor, highest common factor, or lowest common multiple to bind them together.

What will be this new binding factor and when will it emerge, if at all?

That is an all-India problem, not a Tamil Nadu problem. Because Tamil Nadu is now in India and India has Tamil Nadu as a part. So will you have a movement which will sort of make its appeal on the basis of a common pool of grievances — a common pool that will make Indians alive to socio-political debates and at the same time stay within India? This is the real challenge that awaits India's politics.

Anti-Brahmanism and later anti-casteism was the bedrock of the Dravidian movement, especially when Periyar was actively in the field. More than half a century later, Tamil Nadu has been witness to the most vicious kind of clashes between Dalits and backward communities such as Thevars and Vanniars. Does this signify the Dravidan movement's failure? Has the Tamil national identity failed to transcend caste identities?

When you look at the way the policy of reservation in jobs and education has worked in Tamil Nadu (as at the all-India level), it has strongly reinforced the permanence of caste groups and caste consciousness. This has created a historical contradiction. That is, the movement that sought to reject the socio-cultural hegemony of a particular caste has strengthened the caste consciousness of the low and middle castes among which it should have maintained equality. This is why caste clashes have become a persistent phenomenon in the contemporary history of Tamil Nadu.

Despite the struggle against the caste system, the system was reinforced owing to the absence of a change in the basic socio-economic system and to the persistence of certain ``relations'' in sectors that have seen change. This will complicate the process of democratisation in the long run. But we should not forget the fact that such a situation has arisen as a result of the process of democratisation. Had the Dravidian movement taken the process of ``democratisation'' of the non-Brahmin communities to its logical conclusion, the process would have reached the oppressed sections of Tamil society.

When you look back, it is clear that the process of democratisation is not complete. The historical task remains incomplete. In its efforts to get rid of castes, ironically, the Dravidian movement has only strengthened castes. Caste identity has become one's second self in Tamil Nadu.

Despite the process of de-ideologisation, the Dravidian parties put together still constitute a strong force in electoral terms.

The social grievances that the Dravidian movement gave expression to are real. The raison d'etre of Dravidian consciousness has been the insurmountability of these grievances. Also the movement has shown the possibilities of upward social mobility for the middle caste groups and the Dravidian parties still command support from these sections.

If the grievances are real, is there a possibility of the grievances being channelled into a separatist path again?

I rule out the possibility of Tamil Nadu going back to separatism. History will not permit it. Tamil consciousness emerged when it could not express itself within India. It took about 10 years for independent India to recognise the importance of regional languages and reorganise the States on a linguistic basis.

Now one sees oneself not just as a Tamil but as an Indian Tamil. Young students and their parents see themselves and their upward mobility in terms of entire India. Employability is no longer confined to Tamil Nadu. Also in matters of demand and supply, the all-India market is a major consideration.

As things stand, the average enterprising non-Brahmin Tamil (Nadu) parents feel that education in the English medium is, ironically, the only deterrent against Brahmanism, which would give them a place in the all-India market; in such a situation, separatism cannot find a place.

A new world order?

A new world order?

By Harold A. Gould

What now appears to be the case is that George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden have become rival fanatics.

THE ADJUSTMENTS George W. Bush has and has not made in his circle of advisors and Cabinet members following re-election to his second term as President of the United States, as well as the tenor of his inaugural address, have set Washington and the world abuzz as to what it all means. The prevailing wisdom has it that together they constitute a potentially dangerous cocktail fraught with many perils for an already deeply divided America and an anxiety-ridden international community.

It is a case of a President who won a second term by the narrowest vote-percentage margin in a century enunciating a messianic vision, which would be out of all proportion to contemporary political reality even if he had won by acclamation. If he can have his way, he says he intends to make the world safe for America by compelling all nations through persuasion, coercion and force, to become mirror-images of America; by adopting his neo-conservative concept of shopping-mall democracy wedded to radical, laissez-faire global economics.

In one of his climactic utterances, Mr. Bush declared that "it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." To him this means: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

What gives pause to outside observers, of course, is the spectacle of how the U.S. under President Bush and his cohorts has set out to accomplish this lofty aim. If the fate of Iraq is the criterion of what their salvation means, then the international community has every right to tremble at the perils inherent in this grandiose strategic design.

What, ironically, now appears to be the case is that Mr. Bush and Osama bin Laden have become rival fanatics. This is the point that critics of Mr. Bush's inaugural address have failed to sufficiently note. American Jihad is now pitted against Islamic Jihad.

Osama bin Laden has from the outset mobilised his jihadist, quasi-state to wage `holy war' against the `infidels,' the `Crusaders,' who would sully the hallowed principles of Sharia Law, and prevent a restoration of the medieval Caliphate. By pronouncing a jihad of his own, Mr. Bush, has in spirit, at least, now placed America in the ranks of the political fundamentalists.

By doing so, even if his stated scenario is, in the words of Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, more an "advertising slogan" than a plausible scenario, he has surely confirmed and reinforced Osama's nightmare fantasies about Judeo-Christian Crusaders determined to sweep away all vestiges of society and government that diverge from the Westminster ideal. Clearly, victory by either side would be bad for the silent majority who prefer to live quiet, productive lives untrammelled by the political rantings and religiously sanctified atrocities perpetrated by true-believing fanatics, no matter what their sectarian affiliation.

There may be, then, no need to take Mr. Bush's declared doctrine too literally. Apart from the sloganeering, there is no evidence that the President and his neocon entourage are either clear enough or competent enough to carry off their quixotic `100-percent-American jihad'. Also, the American public is insufficiently united behind him to support any further Iraq-like adventures such as a real `jihad-for-democracy' would obviously entail.

Mr. Bush, to reiterate, won by a bare majority of 51 per cent, and his performance ratings are even lower than his share of the popular vote. Moreover, there are many potential candidates for jihad out there that are too formidable to tackle, either because of political expediency (like Russia and China) or military prowess (like North Korea).

All rhetoric to the contrary, Mr. Bush lacks a credible political mandate for conducting what Dionne calls a "Freedom Shuffle." The thing that makes the Bush administration so dangerous, however, is the threat its bombastic rhetoric and blundering attempts to carry it out in practice represent to what is left of international stability.

It is certainly true that Mr. Bush's Cabinet changes appear to have considerably tightened the ship. Secretary of State Colin Powell and like doubters and dissenters were unceremoniously tossed overboard. Among the survivors, the one to watch is Condoleezza Rice who replaced Mr. Powell at the State Department. Walter Andersen, recently a State Department official who is now Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins University South Asian Studies Program, has some interesting things to say about this move.

While Ms. Rice is considered an implacable Bush loyalist, Dr. Anderson foresees a possible clash with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other members of the palace guard if she remains true to her words. Dr. Anderson believes she has indicated that, "her policy line will be less unilateral than [Rumsfeld's]." He points out, for example, that Ms. Rice has told "the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the State Department would be the `primary instrument' of foreign relations."

This could forebode cleavage between State and both the Defense Department and the National Security Council, the latter which she herself chaired until her promotion.

In the light of this potential chink in the Bush administration's armour, one is tempted to speculate whether a "Becket drama" might be brewing in the wings. Ms. Rice's shift from the Royal Court (many parallels between the characters of King Henry and President Bush) to the Hallowed Cathedral (the proud and venerable Department of State where eternal verities of Statecraft repose) might indeed raise the question, as it did in ancient England, and has many times before and since then, of how much the Role make the Person. Should Ms. Rice as Secretary of State conform to Dr. Andersen's prognostications, and make a `Becket-shift' in the name of High Principle, we might witness an order of political disarray that could plunge what there is of the great counter-crusade into political disarray.

For those who fret about the destructive implications of jihadism, from whatever quarter it emanates, this indeed could be an outcome devoutly to be wished, if indeed it eventually compels the Bush administration to tone down its jihadist rhetoric and strive for less extremist, more consensual approaches to the world's problems. Ms. Rice would have to avoid being "Murdered in the Cathedral," so to speak, by the political enemies she would inevitably accumulate, as her predecessor, Mr. Powell, could not. Should she find ways to survive as an independent force for moderation and flexibility, if indeed this lurks in a hidden corner of her inner character, then perhaps American diplomacy ultimately might be saved from itself.

For, the principal danger facing the Bush Doctrine is that as things currently stand, it matches Osama Bin Laden's political creed in single-mindedness and militant ferocity, and consequently represents in spirit and intent the same type of threat to humankind as he does.

(Harold Gould is a Visiting Scholar in the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Virginia.)

Fidgeting Fights Obesity, Researchers Say

Fidgeting Fights Obesity, Researchers Say
Small Motions Add Up to Burn 10 to 20 Pounds a Year

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 27, 2005; 2:46 PM

Strolling to the bus stop, fidgeting during a meeting, standing up to stretch, jumping off the couch to change channels and other seemingly minor physical activity can make the difference between being lean and obese, researchers reported today.

The most detailed study ever conducted of mundane bodily movements found that obese people tend to be much less fidgety than lean people and spend at least two hours more each day just sitting still. The extra motion by lean people is enough to burn about 350 extra calories a day, which could add up to 10 to 20 pounds a year, the researchers found.

"There are these absolutely staggering differences between people who are lean and people who are obese," said James A. Levine of the Mayo Clinic, who led the research being published in Friday's issue of the journal Science. "The amount of this low-grade activity is so substantial that it could, in and of itself, could account for obesity quite easily."

Perhaps more importantly, Levine and his colleagues also discovered that people appear to be born with a propensity to be either fidgety or listless, indicating that it will take special measures to convert the naturally sedentary into the restless -- especially in a society geared toward a couch-potato existence.

"Some may say this is a story of doom and gloom -- that people with obesity have no choice. It's all over. I would argue exactly the opposite," Levine said. "There's a massive beacon of hope here. But it's going to take a massive, top-down approach to change the environment in which we live to get us up and be lean again."

Other researchers agreed, saying the new study, while small, provides powerful new evidence that a major cause of the obesity epidemic is the pattern of desk jobs, car pools, suburban sprawl and other environmental and lifestyle factors that discourage physical activity. And despite generations of parents' admonitions to the contrary, people should be encouraged to be fidgety.

"Figuring out ways to increase physical activity -- not necessarily getting people jogging every day but just building physical activity into a person's day -- are reasonable strategies that have the promise to combat this epidemic of obesity," said William Dietz of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The number of Americans who are overweight has risen dramatically in recent years, with more than two-thirds now overweight or obese, raising the prospect of an epidemic of heart disease, diabetes and other weight-related ills. The reason for this is a subject of intense debate, with many experts blaming a combination of too much junk food and too little exercise.

Levine and others have done earlier studies suggesting a dearth of routine activity may be part of the problem, but the new study is the most exhaustive to date.

"We all know people who can't seem to stand still and others who hardly move," said Eric Ravussin of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., who wrote a commentary on the study. "This is really the first time this has been assessed in this level of detail."

For the study, Levine and his colleagues developed a system that can detect even the smallest tap of a toe -- essentially high-tech underwear resembling bicycle pants and sports bras or t-shirts embedded with sensors, originally designed for fighter jets, that take measurements every half-second.

Ten men and 10 women, half of them lean and the other half mildly obese, wore the garments 24 hours a day for 10 days as they went about their usual routines. They came to the Mayo Clinic every morning to get weighed, get new undergarments so researchers could download the data from the previous day and get their meals for the day, so the researchers knew exactly what they were eating. All considered themselves "couch potatoes" because they eschewed regular exercise.

Based on millions of bits of data, the researchers determined that each day, the lean subjects spent at least 150 more minutes moving in some way than the obese subjects.

"If the obese people were to adopt the same activities they have the potential to burn an extra 350 calories a day," Levine said. "It's huge."

Next, the researchers over-fed nine of the lean subjects and put seven of the obese subjects on diets to see if losing weight would make the obese more fidgety, or gaining weight would make the lean less active. They then monitored them for another 10 days.

"It could be the obesity was making the difference -- not the other way around. We thought, 'Well, in that case if they lost weight they'd start standing more, and surely then if they got heavier they'd gravitate to their chairs more,'" Levine said. "Nether of these things happened. The obese person remained a sitter, and the lean person remained a stander."

Other research has indicated that some people may be born with a predisposition to move while others are born the opposite.

"There may be brain chemicals driving obese people into their chairs or driving lean people out of them," Levine said.

As society and technology have made it easier for sitters to sit and harder for them to move, that inclination has been exaggerated, which could help explain a large part of the obesity problem, Levine and others said.

"We all know what it's like to like and dislike different things . . . Since the environment has become more and more friendly to being sedentary, people with that predisposition to respond to those cues are likely to become obese," Levine said.

The findings should encourage efforts to create an environment that makes it easier for people to get moving, he said. In the meantime, individuals should be encouraged to move more on their own.

"We can begin to say to people, 'Yes it would be good if you went jogging and it would be good if you went to the gym. But it's also good to keep getting up, moving around.' Fidgeting and doing all those small things will make a difference," said Paul Trayhurn of the University of Liverpool in England.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Nixon Secretary Rose Mary Woods, 87, Dies

Nixon Secretary Rose Mary Woods, 87, Dies

COLUMBUS, Ohio Jan 23, 2005 — Rose Mary Woods, the devoted secretary to President Nixon who said she inadvertently erased part of a crucial Watergate tape, has died. She was 87.

Woods died Saturday night at a nursing home in Alliance, Roger Ruzek, owner of a funeral home in Sebring, said Sunday. He did not know the cause of death.

The 18 1/2-minute gap in the tape of a June 20, 1972, conversation between Richard Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman was critical to the question of what Nixon knew about the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex three days earlier and when he knew it.

Woods, who moved to northeastern Ohio after leaving the disgraced president's staff in 1976, never talked much about her years with the only American president to resign the office.

But Nixon considered her a member of the family. He wrote in his memoirs that it was Woods he asked to inform first lady Pat Nixon and his daughters in 1974 that he had decided to resign on Aug. 9.

"My decision was irrevocable, and I asked her to suggest that we not talk about it anymore when I went over for dinner," Nixon said.

When the time came for the family to privately say goodbye to Nixon before he climbed aboard the helicopter headed for Air Force One, Woods stood by with Mrs. Nixon, daughters Tricia and Julie, and their husbands.

"Rose … is as close to us as family," Nixon said.

Woods, the granddaughter of an Irish stowaway, was born in Sebring, 20 miles southwest of Youngstown, on Dec. 26, 1917, and was raised in a strict Roman Catholic family.

She worked as a pottery company secretary in Sebring, then moved to Washington to become a typist on Capitol Hill, where she caught the eye of a rising Republican star, Congressman Richard Nixon of California.

Nixon biographer Jonathan Aitken said the two hit it off immediately. Nixon, elected to the Senate in 1950, hired Woods as his secretary.

"She was intelligent, literate, clamlike in her discretion. Technically superb, she possessed the high-speed skills of shorthand and typing necessary to keep up with her boss's often frantic and always demanding schedule," Aitken wrote.

"One of the reasons why Woods struck up such a good rapport with her boss was that their characters were similar. Disciplined in her emotions yet passionate in her convictions, Woods was intuitive, protective and obsessive about privacy."

Nixon defended his loyal employee when fingers pointed at Woods, who had spent weeks transcribing subpoenaed White House tapes.

"I know I did not do it," Nixon said. "And I completely believe Rose when she says that she did not do it."

She denied she caused the full 18 1/2-minute gap, testifying later that she inadvertently erased four or five minutes. The phone rang while she was transcribing the tape, she said.

She accidentally hit the record button. A picture in which she demonstrated her action stretching one foot forward while reaching back to get the phone became one of the most famous images of the era.

A panel of experts set up in the 1970s by federal judge John Sirica, who presided over the Watergate criminal trials, concluded that the erasures were done in at least five and perhaps as many as nine separate and contiguous segments. The panel never figured out what was erased.

Who erased the rest of the tape? No one knows.

Alexander Haig, who succeeded Haldeman as chief of staff, blamed the gap on "sinister forces." Experts later examined the tape and found as many as nine deliberate erasures. They said Woods could not have done the whole thing.

In an interview on the 25th anniversary of the 1972 break-in, Woods said she was rarely asked about Watergate anymore.

"Every once in a while I get notes and things from some of the people who were with us, but not much," she said.

"Everybody gets sort of separated."

Gray Matter and Sexes: A Gray Area Scientifically

Gray Matter and Sexes: A Gray Area Scientifically

By NATALIE ANGIER
and KENNETH CHANG

hen Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested this month that one factor in women's lagging progress in science and mathematics might be innate differences between the sexes, he slapped a bit of brimstone into a debate that has simmered for decades. And though his comments elicited so many fierce reactions that he quickly apologized, many were left to wonder: Did he have a point?

Has science found compelling evidence of inherent sex disparities in the relevant skills, or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs, that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science generally, and at the upper tiers of the profession in particular?

Researchers who have explored the subject of sex differences from every conceivable angle and organ say that yes, there are a host of discrepancies between men and women - in their average scores on tests of quantitative skills, in their attitudes toward math and science, in the architecture of their brains, in the way they metabolize medications, including those that affect the brain.

Yet despite the desire for tidy and definitive answers to complex questions, researchers warn that the mere finding of a difference in form does not mean a difference in function or output inevitably follows.

"We can't get anywhere denying that there are neurological and hormonal differences between males and females, because there clearly are," said Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College who wrote the 1998 book "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women." "The trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to real-life performance."

For example, neuroscientists have shown that women's brains are about 10 percent smaller than men's, on average, even after accounting for women's comparatively smaller body size.

But throughout history, people have cited anatomical distinctions in support of overarching hypotheses that turn out merely to reflect the societal and cultural prejudices of the time.

A century ago, the French scientist Gustav Le Bon pointed to the smaller brains of women - closer in size to gorillas', he said - and said that explained the "fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason" in women.

Overall size aside, some evidence suggests that female brains are relatively more endowed with gray matter - the prized neurons thought to do the bulk of the brain's thinking - while men's brains are packed with more white matter, the tissue between neurons.

To further complicate the portrait of cerebral diversity, new brain imaging studies from the University of California, Irvine, suggest that men and women with equal I.Q. scores use different proportions of their gray and white matter when solving problems like those on intelligence tests.

Men, they said, appear to devote 6.5 times as much of their gray matter to intelligence-related tasks as do women, while women rely far more heavily on white matter to pull them through a ponder.

What such discrepancies may or may not mean is anyone's conjecture.

"It is cognition that counts, not the physical matter that does the cognition," argued Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When they do study sheer cognitive prowess, many researchers have been impressed with how similarly young boys and girls master new tasks.

"We adults may think very different things about boys and girls, and treat them accordingly, but when we measure their capacities, they're remarkably alike," said Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. She and her colleagues study basic spatial, quantitative and numerical abilities in children ranging from 5 months through 7 years.

"In that age span, you see a considerable number of the pieces of our mature capacities for spatial and numerical reasoning coming together," Dr. Spelke said. "But while we always test for gender differences in our studies, we never find them."

In adolescence, though, some differences in aptitude begin to emerge, especially when it comes to performance on standardized tests like the SAT. While average verbal scores are very similar, boys have outscored girls on the math half of the dreaded exam by about 30 to 35 points for the past three decades or so.

Nor is the masculine edge in math unique to the United States. In an international standardized test administered in 2003 by the international research group Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to 250,000 15-year-olds in 41 countries, boys did moderately better on the math portion in just over half the nations. For nearly all the other countries, there were no significant sex differences.

But average scores varied wildly from place to place and from one subcategory of math to the next. Japanese girls, for example, were on par with Japanese boys on every math section save that of "uncertainty," which measures probabilistic skills, and Japanese girls scored higher over all than did the boys of many other nations, including the United States.

In Iceland, girls broke the mold completely and outshone Icelandic boys by a significant margin on all parts of the test, as they habitually do on their national math exams. "We have no idea why this should be so," said Almar Midvik Halldorsson, project manager for the Educational Testing Institute in Iceland.

Interestingly, in Iceland and everywhere else, girls participating in the survey expressed far more negative attitudes toward math.

The modest size and regional variability of the sex differences in math scores, as well as an attitudinal handicap that girls apparently pack into their No. 2 pencil case, convince many researchers that neither sex has a monopoly on basic math ability, and that culture rather than chromosomes explains findings like the gap in math SAT scores.

Yet Dr. Summers, who said he intended his remarks to be provocative, and other scientists have observed that while average math skillfulness may be remarkably analogous between the sexes, men tend to display comparatively greater range in aptitude. Males are much likelier than females to be found on the tail ends of the bell curve, among the superhigh scorers and the very bottom performers.

Among college-bound seniors who took the math SAT's in 2001, for example, nearly twice as many boys as girls scored over 700, and the ratio skews ever more male the closer one gets to the top tally of 800. Boys are also likelier than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong.

For Dr. Summers and others, the overwhelmingly male tails of the bell curve may be telling. Such results, taken together with assorted other neuro-curiosities like the comparatively greater number of boys with learning disorders, autism and attention deficit disorder, suggest to them that the male brain is a delicate object, inherently prone to extremes, both of incompetence and of genius.

But few researchers who have analyzed the data believe that men's greater representation among the high-tail scores can explain more than a small fraction of the sex disparities in career success among scientists.

For one thing, said Kimberlee A. Shauman, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, getting a high score on a math aptitude test turns out to be a poor predictor of who opts for a scientific career, but it is an especially poor gauge for girls. Catherine Weinberger, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that top-scoring girls are only about 60 percent as likely as top-scoring boys to pursue science or engineering careers, for reasons that remain unclear.

Moreover, men seem perfectly capable of becoming scientists without a math board score of 790. Surveying a representative population of working scientists and engineers, Dr. Weinberger has discovered that the women were likelier than the men to have very high test scores. "Women are more cautious about entering these professions unless they have very high scores to begin with," she said.

And this remains true even though a given score on standardized math tests is less significant for women than for men. Dr. Valian, of Hunter, observes that among women and men taking the same advanced math courses in college, women with somewhat lower SAT scores often do better than men with higher scores. "The SAT's turn out to underpredict female and overpredict male performance," she said. Again, the reasons remain mysterious.

Dr. Summers also proposed that perhaps women did not go into science because they found it too abstract and cold-blooded, offering as anecdotal evidence the fact that his young daughter, when given toy trucks, had treated them as dolls, naming them "Daddy truck" and "baby truck."

But critics dryly observed that men had a longstanding tradition of naming their vehicles, and babying them as though they were humans.

Yu Xie, a sociologist at the University of Michigan and a co-author with Dr. Shauman of "Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes" (2003), said he wished there was less emphasis on biological explanations for success or failure, and more on effort and hard work.

Among Asians, he said, people rarely talk about having a gift or a knack or a gene for math or anything else. If a student comes home with a poor grade in math, he said, the parents push the child to work harder.

"There is good survey data showing that this disbelief in innate ability, and the conviction that math achievement can be improved through practice," Dr. Xie said, "is a tremendous cultural asset in Asian society and among Asian-Americans."

In many formerly male-dominated fields like medicine and law, women have already reached parity, at least at the entry levels. At the undergraduate level, women outnumber men in some sciences like biology.

Thus, many argue that it is unnecessary to invoke "innate differences" to explain the gap that persists in fields like physics, engineering, mathematics and chemistry. Might scientists just be slower in letting go of baseless sexism?

C. Megan Urry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Yale who led the American delegation to an international conference on women in physics in 2002, said there was clear evidence that societal and cultural factors still hindered women in science.

Dr. Urry cited a 1983 study in which 360 people - half men, half women - rated mathematics papers on a five-point scale. On average, the men rated them a full point higher when the author was "John T. McKay" than when the author was "Joan T. McKay." There was a similar, but smaller disparity in the scores the women gave.

Dr. Spelke, of Harvard, said, "It's hard for me to get excited about small differences in biology when the evidence shows that women in science are still discriminated against every stage of the way."

A recent experiment showed that when Princeton students were asked to evaluate two highly qualified candidates for an engineering job - one with more education, the other with more work experience - they picked the more educated candidate 75 percent of the time. But when the candidates were designated as male or female, and the educated candidate bore a female name, suddenly she was preferred only 48 percent of the time.

The debate is sure to go on.

Sandra F. Witelson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said biology might yet be found to play some role in women's careers in the sciences.

"People have to have an open mind," Dr. Witelson said.

Looking to Apply Lessons Learned

Looking to Apply Lessons Learned

By Dan Balz and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 20, 2005; Page A01

President Bush is a politician with large ambitions and few doubts, someone not easily given to mea culpas. But in the run-up to today's inauguration, he has at least hinted at some of the lessons learned in office. From his relations with Democrats in Congress to his approach to the rest of the world, Bush has suggested he will try to strike a different tone -- without abandoning principles or policies.

Balancing those objectives could be one of the biggest challenges in a second term already facing difficult problems. His agenda includes turning Iraq into a success story, repairing relations with other nations, tackling the restructuring of Social Security and the tax code, and revising immigration policy. The question is whether he can aggressively pursue that agenda and still achieve a more accommodating climate here and abroad.

His inaugural address, aides say, will offer a broad vision of American idealism and his belief that it is the duty of this generation to spread freedom and democracy around the globe. After that will come governing, the real test to see how well he adapts the experiences of a searing first term to the battles of the second.

Presidential historian Fred I. Greenstein of Princeton University said that Bush appears to have a greater capacity for self-correction than he likes to advertise and that he has gradually grown more confident in exercising the powers of the presidency while shedding some of what Greenstein called a frat-boy style before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "I was struck on the campaign with his whole persona and his capacity to project a personality and a style," he said. "I just think he has come to fill that space."

White House senior adviser Karl Rove said of Bush: "The clearest and biggest way is he's grown to have a comfort with exercising the levers available to him. He understands the office better, he's comfortable with it. Second, he now has a series of relationships, internationally with [foreign leaders]. He knows them, understands them, he has taken the measure of them in a way you can only do if you're up close. Third, he is more acutely aware that while a president can set an agenda -- and it's vital you do so -- that history has a way of intruding on you. Things happen."

The physical signs of change are most evident in the president. His hair is grayer, and, by his admission, he is a few pounds heavier. But is he different in other, deeper ways? That is more difficult to answer, with considerable evidence that his presidency and agenda have changed more than he has. While cognizant of how others see him, Bush rejects some of the criticisms as more partisan than valid, advisers say.

Still, he has tried to project a willingness to make some changes, if his opponents are prepared to do the same. In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Bush said he regretted his inability to change the tone in Washington, saying he will try in his second term to work more successfully with Democrats in Congress but knows that now he is dealing with a different political culture than he enjoyed when he was governor of Texas.

Washington, "is tough," he said. "It's different from Austin. . . . I'm mindful of my rhetoric when it comes to the Democrats. I've really checked back." Bush paused to acknowledge he had not checked his rhetoric during the campaign, calling it a matter of political survival. He continued: "I think all of us, all of us, have got to work to set the right kind of tone. I will continue to do so."

Bush's Democratic critics will dismiss those statements as cosmetic at best, disingenuous at worst. They say it was Bush who did not make good on his 2000 campaign pledge to change the tone in Washington with polarizing policies and scorched-earth campaigns. No amount of soothing rhetoric, they argue, can overcome an ideologically driven agenda at home or unilateralist impulses abroad.

Nor is Bush saying he has softened on the principles behind his policies. When asked by CNN's John King whether his formulation that in the war against terrorism other nations are either "for us or against us" was too blunt or too black-and-white, he replied: "Not at all. We've got to win, and we've got to make it clear that people have to make a choice. I'll continue to be straightforward and plainspoken about my view that freedom is necessary for peace and that everyone deserves to be free."

When Bush takes the oath of office at noon today, his inauguration will mark a moment of renewal for his presidency, and if anything Bush's second-term agenda will be bolder and more provocative than the first. Whatever lessons Bush applies to governing in the second term, the reality is that his presidency was fundamentally transformed during his first term, reshaped by the worst terrorist attacks in the nation's history and by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he was transformed by the experience.

"You can't look that many people in the eye, the victims' mothers and dads from that day and then the family members . . . without it fundamentally altering who you are as a person and how you do the job," a senior administration official said.

Those who have worked with the White House say one of the most significant lessons Bush learned was that he was wrong in believing that he could easily transport the Texas model of bipartisan cooperation between a GOP chief executive and Democratic lawmakers.

Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said Bush and his advisers may not have appreciated the differences between Washington and Austin. "I think he now realizes the realities of Washington, D.C., which is that it's hard to forge bipartisan compromises, particularly with narrow margins," he said.

Former senator John Breaux (D-La.), whom Bush courted early in his first term and who has been selected as co-chairman of a presidential panel that will recommend changes in the tax system, blames the White House and congressional Democrats for the deep freeze in relations. "Both sides were trying to blame the other side for failure," he said.

There is deep suspicion on both sides of the relationship, with White House officials saying they have consistently tried to avoid inflammatory rhetoric without getting any credit from Democrats, who say the administration remains so ideologically driven that it diminishes any chance of real cooperation.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who broke ranks with many in his party to support all three of Bush's tax cuts, said Bush must be more flexible. "If he is able to reach out to Democrats in the development of policy rather than having his staff present it as a take-it-or-leave-it basis, it would foster more support," he said. "Last term it seemed like a lot of the time his policy people would work with me and his political people would work on me."

A White House official said Bush would try to encourage cooperation. Asked how, he replied: "You say there's a seat at the table if you want to help write the bill."

Neither side thinks the relationship can be repaired easily, but there are signs that Bush may try to start anew with some Democrats. During his first term, he had a strained relationship with the Congressional Black Caucus. Bush met with the caucus in his first two weeks as president, but the relationship deteriorated quickly.

In the summer of 2003, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), then the caucus's chairman, declined an invitation to meet with Bush after the president's trip to Africa, miffed that Bush had rebuffed the caucus. A few weeks later, at a National Urban League meeting in Pittsburgh, Bush had Cummings brought backstage. "Why did you dis me?" he recalled Bush as saying, laughing but still serious.

Cummings said he asked Bush why he had declined to meet with the caucus and said Bush replied that he was worried the members would leave the meeting and "then turn around and bad-mouth him." Since his reelection, Bush has invited the caucus to meet with him. "I have a feeling that we are going to see a Bush that is a little warmer this time," Cummings said. "But the jury is still out as to whether or not there has been a change of attitude."

Bush's most explicit statement about lessons learned came in an interview with ABC-TV's Barbara Walters when he acknowledged that his taunting challenge to the Iraqi insurgents -- "Bring 'em on" -- and his comment that he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" were at best ill-chosen.

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer recalled in an interview that he had suggested to Bush at the time that the words "bring 'em on" were "kind of blunt." Bush defended himself, saying he was only trying to make it clear that U.S. troops would not be intimidated. Now Bush says he has a different view. "I'll be more disciplined in how I say things," he told Walters, adding: "I do have to be cautious about, you know, conveying thoughts in a way maybe that doesn't send wrong impressions about our country."

Personnel changes offer another clue to Bush's thinking about a second term. After going through his first term with just one change in his Cabinet -- the dismissal of Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill -- Bush has replaced nine of 15 Cabinet heads since the election, the biggest second-term shakeup in any postwar presidency.

One interpretation is that by surrounding himself with loyalists, Bush's second administration will be more insular than the first, less open to frank advice or fresh ideas. But at least four officials with White House ties said they see the changes differently, as evidence that Bush wants to move quickly and efficiently on his agenda.

"The cohesiveness of the second-term team is even greater than the cohesiveness of the first-term team," a former administration official said. "This will sharpen the focus on the big issues and reduce the chances of a Paul O'Neill distraction. . . . If you want to get some things done, [you] want everybody on the same page of music."

Martha Joynt Kumar, a professor of political science at Towson University, noted that much of Bush's senior White House team remains intact, including Rove and Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and White House counselor Dan Bartlett, even if some have changed jobs.

"You have people there who have a memory of why they're there and what they came there to do," she said. "In Reagan's second term, you lost that. People left government or, like [James A.] Baker [III], who went to Treasury. So you had people like Oliver North [a central figure in the Iran-contra scandal] able to take advantage of a vacuum. That's not a problem you're going to have."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

'There Is No Justice Without Freedom'

'There Is No Justice Without Freedom'

Federal News Service
Friday, January 21, 2005; Page A24

The full text of President Bush's second inaugural address:

Vice President Cheney, Mr. Chief Justice, President Carter, President Bush, President Clinton, members of the United States Congress, reverend clergy, distinguished guests, fellow citizens:

On this day, prescribed by law and marked by ceremony, we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution and recall the deep commitments that unite our country. I am grateful for the honor of this hour, mindful of the consequential times in which we live and determined to fulfill the oath that I have sworn and you have witnessed.

At this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use but by the history we have seen together. For a half a century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical. And then there came a day of fire.

We have seen our vulnerability, and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny -- prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights and dignity and matchless value because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.

Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary. Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own.

America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal, instead, is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom and make their own way.

The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America's influence is not unlimited, but, fortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause.

My most solemn duty is to protect this nation and its people from further attacks and emerging threats. Some have unwisely chosen to test America's resolve and have found it firm.

We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.

America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies. We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people.

America's belief in human dignity will guide our policies. Yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators. They are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.

Some I know have questioned the global appeal of liberty, though this time in history -- four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen -- is an odd time for doubt.

Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals.

Eventually the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Liberty will come to those who love it.

Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world. All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.

Democratic reformers facing repression, prison or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country. The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did, "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it."

The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know to serve your people, you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice, and America will walk at your side.

And all the allies of the United States can know we honor your friendship, we rely on your counsel and we depend on your help. Division among free nations is a primary goal of freedom's enemies. The concerted effort of free nations to promote democracy is a prelude to our enemies defeat.

Today, I also speak anew to my fellow citizens. From all of you, I have asked patience in the hard task of securing America, which you have granted in good measure. Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet, because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well as a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power; it burns those who fight its progress. And one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.

A few Americans have accepted the hardest duties in this cause -- in the quiet work of intelligence and diplomacy, the idealistic work of helping raise up free governments, the dangerous and necessary work of fighting our enemies.

Some have shown their devotion to our country in deaths that honored their whole lives, and we will always honor their names and their sacrifice.

All Americans have witnessed this idealism, and some for the first time. I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself, and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country but to its character.

America has need of idealism and courage, because we have essential work at home -- the unfinished work of American freedom.

In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.

In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence, instead of laboring on the edge of subsistence. This is the broader definition of liberty that motivated the Homestead Act, the Social Security Act and the G.I. Bill of Rights. And now we will extend this vision by reforming great institutions to serve the needs of our time.

To give every American a stake in the promise and future of our country, we will bring the highest standards to our schools and build an ownership society. We will widen the ownership of homes and businesses, retirement savings and health insurance, preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society.

By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear and make our society more prosperous and just and equal.

In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character, on integrity and tolerance toward others and the rule of conscience in our own lives.

Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.

In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak. Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another. Our nation relies on men and women who look after a neighbor and surround the lost with love. Americans, at our best, value the life we see in one another and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth.

And our country must abandon all the habits of racism because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.

From the perspective of a single day, including this day of dedication, the issues and questions before our country are many. From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few. Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?

These questions that judge us also unite us, because Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth, are bound to one another in the cause of freedom.

We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes. And I will strive in good faith to heal them. Yet those divisions do not define America. We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.

We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.

When our founders declared a new order of the ages, when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty, when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now," they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled.

History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of liberty.

When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength, tested but not weary, we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.

May God bless you, and may He watch over the United States of America.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Drink Beer Or Wine And Be Sharper?

Drink Beer Or Wine And Be Sharper?
NEW YORK, Jan. 20, 2005


A study published in the Jan. 20, 2005 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine found that women who have a drink of beer or wine daily have sharper minds into old age than women who abstain.

The report, based on a study of nearly 12,500 nurses, adds to the apparent benefits of light-to-moderate drinking, which can also prevent heart disease and stroke.

The Early Show medical correspondent Dr. Emily Senay tells co-anchor Rene Syler the large group of elderly women, ages 70 to 81, were monitored for both their alcohol intake and mental fitness.

What they found was that the women who drank moderately stayed sharper than non-drinkers; they lowered their risk of memory loss and senility by about 20 percent, Senay explains. On average, the women who drank a beer or a glass of wine each day tended to have the mental agility of someone a year-and-a-half younger than those who abstained.

The good news is it didn't matter which type of liquor it was, Senay notes. The bad news is that it's not a lot.

Researchers saw the best results in the women who consistently drank one half to one drink a day; the women consumed between 1.0 and 14.9 grams of alcohol per day. That translates into about 12 ounces of beer, 4 ounces of wine (about the amount that would be in an average wine glass), or an ounce of liquor in a shot glass. That's not a lot of alcohol; you only get to drink one of those glasses per day. You shouldn't have all of them, Senay exclaims.

So does that mean that people who don't drink should add a daily cocktail to their routines?

Absolutely not, Senay says. This doesn't mean you should dust off those wine glasses and start stocking beer in the fridge. There are some benefits to drinking alcohol, but there are also a lot of risks associated with alcohol consumption.

There are a lot of common medications that shouldn't be taken with alcohol; drinking dehydrates you, and if you don't drink enough water, that can lead to serious problems. Heavy drinking has been linked to increased risk of heart disease and stroke.

Also, there's always the risk that you might be susceptible to alcoholism. While not everyone is going to become an alcoholic, once you've opened the liquor cabinet, it's way too easy to have more than just one drink. This study is reassuring to people who already drink up to one drink a day, but it is not license to start drinking.

For those people who are already moderate drinkers, this isn't the only benefit. Senay explains there is a lot of evidence that shows moderate alcohol consumption actually helps prevent heart disease and stroke. And red wine specifically has biochemical effects that make it good for the heart, such as making the blood thinner and less likely to clot and cause a blockage.

So the bottom line is: Yes, if you enjoy a glass of wine with dinner or a beer with your pizza, you should feel good about yourself, and if you're drinking three or four glasses with dinner, this study is another good reason to cut it back to just one.

A Prince’s wardrobe malfunction

A Prince’s wardrobe malfunction

Andres Gumbel

It has been a while since the word ‘‘Nazi’’ was associated with a member of the British royal family. But obviously it has not been long enough. Thursday, London’s best-selling newspaper The Sun splashed a photograph of 20-year-old Prince Harry at a costume party wearing the uniform of Nazi Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, complete with the swastika armband. ‘‘Complete idiot’’ was the epithet bandied about by one anti-Fascist group, and nobody seemed to think it remotely inappropriate. The president of Britain’s Holocaust Trust called the Prince’s actions ‘‘stupid and evil’’. A former armed forces minister suggested that Harry was now unfit to enter Sandhurst, Britain’s elite officer training school, where he is due to start later this year. And the former commander of British forces in Bosnia, Col Bob Stewart, said that if one of his men had gone to a party dressed as a Nazi he would have put him on toilet-cleaning duty for two weeks. It’s hardly news that a British royal has, once again, made a prize twit of himself. But this is in a whole different category. Even a 20-year-old (and particularly one in line to the throne) should know that the world is still understandably sensitive about the Nazis. After all, the Third Reich came close to ripping apart the fabric of the British monarchy in the 1930s. Had history jogged just a few degrees one way or the other, Britain could have found itself either allied with Adolf Hitler or overrun by his Wehrmacht and turned into a Fascist state. Nobody represented the flirtation with totalitarianism more than Harry’s great-grand-uncle, Edward VIII, the ultimate black sheep of the family, who openly sympathised with the Nazis and might have pushed Britain into an anti-Stalinist alliance with Hitler had it not been for his insistence on marrying the American divorcee—and equally ardent Nazi apologist—Wallis Simpson, an insistence that precipitated his abdication in 1936. For a long time, conventional wisdom had it that the objection to Simpson was religious and moral: that there was no tolerance of divorce in Anglican belief Recently released official papers have shown, however, that the establishment was greatly exercised by Simpson’s fondness for the Nazis (she was believed to have been Joachim von Ribbentrop’s lover when he was ambassador to London), even more vexed about Edward’s openly pro-Nazi leanings and anxious to see him stripped of the crown. The reverberations from the abdication crisis are still palpable among today’s royals. Three of Prince Philip’s sisters married Nazi sympathisers, and the Windsors who succeeded Edward VIII—his brother George VI and George’s daughter Elizabeth II—had to live it down. Edward himself continued to be a severe embarrassment, dining in Germany with Hitler and Rudolph Hess in 1937 and very possibly plotting with the Nazis to return to the throne in the event of invasion of Britain. This is the history that Harry just brought roaring back to life. The costume party was on a ‘‘native and colonial’’ theme, so, to add insult to injury, Harry’s costume also revived Britain’s own imperial past—like using poison gas on the Kurds, shooting Independence protesters in India and so on. Nostalgia still abounds in certain upper-class circles for those days. Harry has been a mild cause for concern before—accused by his art teacher at Eton of cheating, caught in a bust-up with a photographer outside a London club. He spent part of his year before Sandhurst working as a ranch hand in Australia. His father and grandmother must be regretting he didn’t stay longer. Gumbel is the Los Angeles correspondent for The Independent of London

Protector of the democratic citizen

Analysis

for the record

Pre-requisites of freedom, Part-I

Protector of the democratic citizen

At the height of Emergency, when the Opposition was in jail, the Government pushed through the notorious 42nd amendment, sought to widen the ambit of Article 31(C) and to substantially curb individual freedom. In the darkest hour of Indian democracy, constitutional lawyer Nani A Palkhivala rode to the rescue of the citizen, arguing that Parliament had no power to override the basic structure of the Constitution. The Government backed down and Palkhivala saved the liberty of all Indians. In his Nani Palkhivala Memorial Lecture, 2005—reproduced here in four parts—Arun Shourie shows how Palkhivala rose time and again to guard the rights of the citizen and how the strength of individual character can often stand as a bulwark against a rampaging state:

Arun Shourie

Nani Palkhivala’s life was marked by total commitment to our country, to the public weal. In the first lecture in this series, Mr Fali S Nariman recalled what we owe him: the dyke of Basic Structure, no less: in Golaknath; in Keshavananda; in the absolutely unparalleled, and yet unequalled achievement of getting the Chief Justice to dissolve the Bench he had constituted during the Emergency to overturn the Keshavananda decision; in getting the Court to strike down in Minerva Mills the provision introduced into Article 31(C) during Emergency that no legislation passed either by Parliament or a state legislature could be challenged so long as it said, it merely said that the law had been enacted to implement a basic principle of state policy. Dark times, times when ‘a word is a deed’ Each of us could add a number of instances to Mr Nariman’s list of the debts we owe Mr Palkhivala. I would recall just two or three—to illustrate the deep commitment that Mr Palkhivala had to first principles, to fundamentals, a commitment we must imbibe. Mr Palkhivala was to defend Mrs Gandhi against the verdict of Justice Sinha. Literally on the eve of the hearing before the Supreme Court, the Constitution was changed by the 39th Amendment. The designations of the President, Vice-President and Speaker were thrown in—but the target was only the case against Mrs Gandhi. We really should recall what was done to see what gets done in the name of principle and the people. The 39th Amendment provided: 1. The election of a person who at the time of the election or thereafter is appointed Prime Minister shall not be called in question ‘‘except before such authority...or body and in such manner as may be provided for by or under any law made by Parliament and any such law may provide for all other matters relating to doubts and disputes in relation to such election including the grounds on which such election may be questioned’’. 2. ‘‘The validity of any such law...and the decision of any authority or body under such law shall not be called in question in any court’’. 3. ‘‘Where any person is appointed as Prime Minister...while an election petition...in respect of his election to either House of Parliament or, as the case may be, to the House of the People is pending, such election petition shall abate upon such person being appointed as Prime Minister...’’. The diabolic and conclusive clause 4. ‘‘No law made by Parliament before the commencement of the Constitution (Thirty-Ninth Amendment) Act, 1975, in so far as it relates to election petitions and matters connected therewith, shall apply or shall be deemed ever to have applied to or in relation to the election of any such person...and such election shall not be deemed to be void or ever to have become void on any ground on which such election could be declared void or has, before such commencement, been declared to be void under any such law and notwithstanding any order made by any court, before such commencement, declaring such election to be void, such election shall continue to be valid in all respects and any such order and any finding on which such order is based shall be and shall be deemed always to have been void and of no effect’’. 5. ‘‘Any appeal or cross-appeal against any such order of any court as is referred to in clause (4) (the preceding sub-para) pending immediately before the commencement of the Constitution (Thirty-Ninth Amendment) Act, 1975, before the Supreme Court shall be disposed of in conformity with the provisions of clause (4)’’. Mr Palkhivala returned the brief. Then followed the notorious Swaran Singh Committee’s proposals to recast the Constitution. In an article marked by his trademark reasoning and courage, Mr Palkhivala took the so-called report of this so-called Committee apart—proposal by proposal. In particular, he demolished the claim on the basis of which everything was being done...‘‘This theme constitutes not only defiance of the law laid down by the Supreme Court but is insupportable on first principles,’’ Mr Palkhivala argued. If Parliament has the power to destroy the fundamental principles of our polity, he wrote, it would cease to be a creature of the Constitution, it would become supreme over the Constitution. As so much is even today claimed on behalf of legislatures—to say nothing of individual legislators, and also because the passage contains a seed to which I shall return, permit me to recall what Mr Palkhivala wrote in this regard, and please remember that this was at the height of Emergency when everything was being justified on the ground that it had been sanctioned by Parliament: ‘‘As regards constitutional amendments, Parliament’s will is certainly not the people’s will. To equate Parliament with the people is to betray complete confusion of thought. In choosing their representatives, the electorate takes into account a number of factors which have nothing to do with constitutional amendments. This has been proved time and again in countries where the people’s will is ascertained on a referendum held upon Parliament’s proposal to alter the Constitution.’’ The nefarious 42nd Amendment was enacted nonetheless. Again, at the height of oppression, Mr Palkhivala articulated a devastating critique of the provisions. In particular, he showed how the new provisions fell afoul of the Basic Structure doctrine that the Supreme Court had laid down. He argued against the axe that had been wielded to cut the powers of the judiciary. Mrs Gandhi told the Lok Sabha that the power of Parliament to change the Constitution is an ‘‘unfettered, unqualified and unabridgeable right’’. She declared that the Basic Structure doctrine is an invention of judges. ‘‘What is the Basic Structure?’’ asked one of her acolytes of that time, Siddhartha Shankar Ray. ‘‘What are its contents, ingredients? Has the Constitution defined what is basic and what is not? Is there any part of the Constitution that is so sacrosanct that it cannot be taken away? There is not a single authority throughout the country’’—please pause and consider what he is saying, ‘‘There is not a single authority throughout the country’’; the Supreme Court is thus no authority at all—‘‘who has suggested that there are certain basic features in a Constitution.’’ The new provisions were advocated in the name of the people, of course—on the ground that they were necessary for upliftment of the downtrodden. But there is no socio-economic policy that is impeded by the human freedoms that are enshrined in our Constitution, Mr Palkhivala argued. In particular, Mr Palkhivala argued against the provisions which pared down the judiciary. The new provisions, Mrs Gandhi declared, are merely going to ‘‘re-establish harmony between the legislature, executive and the judiciary as originally provided in the Constitution’’ which had been disturbed by that ‘‘invention of judges’’, the Basic Structure doctrine. ‘‘We are removing the cobwebs created by some recent attempts of the judiciary to encroach into policies and legislative spheres. We are reasserting—(note the words that follow)—the sovereignty of the people and pointing out that everything else, including the Constitution, is for the people. We are trying to end, once and for all, some needless controversies which stood in the way of quicker progress.’’ Words whose echoes we hear today, as we shall soon see. During discussion of the 42nd Amendment itself, the Government told the Rajya Sabha that it would undertake a review of the entire judicial system and recast it. The reason? Because, the Law Minister told Parliament, the present judicial system is neither ‘‘in tune with our national genius nor with the aspirations and expectations of our people’’. He developed Mrs Gandhi’s theme about restoring harmony, and declared, ‘‘It will be a bad day for the judiciary if this’’—the ‘‘confrontation’’ that the judiciary had engineered by laying a limit to the power to mutilate the Constitution—‘‘It will be a bad day for the judiciary if this recurred now after this Amendment.’’ Of course, he had no intention to denigrate judges, the Law Minister told the Lok Sabha. ‘‘All that I was trying to do was to emphasise that the judges have to be in tune with the movement of the times and with the felt necessities of the times. If that does not happen, it is not that the people can be held back, but the judiciary would come into disrepute. It is to prevent that thing from happening’’—how touching: he and the Government are cutting the judiciary down only for the sake of the judiciary itself—‘‘that I and many of us emphasised in our speeches that we wanted the judges to understand what the people demand and keep in tune with what the people want.’’ In the Rajya Sabha the Law Minister embellished this concern for the judiciary. He declared that it cannot be that ‘‘the Constitution is what the court says it is’’. The records show, he said, that in every important matter the judiciary has ‘‘transgressed’’ its limits. It is against such dangerous drivel that Mr Palkhivala raised his voice. It is from the ruinous consequences of such pernicious claims that Mr Palkhivala’s erudition and courage saved us. And the episodes, and Mr Palkhivala’s conduct through them illustrate the first prerequisite of freedom. In the end, everything turns on the individual. And in the individual, there is no substitute for character. For at that critical moment—that moment when you are to appear in the Supreme Court, and the previous day the law has been changed by and in favour of your client—all will be lost if at that critical moment we relapse into thinking, into calculating ratios, into weighing pros and cons. Instinct, character alone will determine whether we will use the new law to win the case and thus notch up another ‘‘victory’’, or, as Mr Palkhivala did, return the brief. Camus put the point well in The Fall: ‘‘...Without slavery, as a matter of fact, there is no definitive solution. I very soon realised that. Once upon a time, I was always talking of freedom: At breakfast I used to spread it on my toast, I used to chew it all day long, and in company my breath was delightfully redolent of freedom. With that key word I would bludgeon whoever contradicted me; I made it serve my desires and my power. I used to whisper it in bed in the ear of my sleeping mates and it helped me to drop them. I would slip it...Tchk! Tchk! I am getting excited and losing all sense of proportion. After all, I did on occasion make a more disinterested use of freedom and even—just imagine my naivete—defended it two or three times without of course going so far as to die for it, but nevertheless taking a few risks. I must be forgiven such rash acts; I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It’s a choice, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. No champagne. No friends raising their glasses as they look at you affectionately. Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner’s box before the judges, and alone to decide in face of oneself or in the face of others’ judgment....’’