A belated honour for writer Jayakanthan

A belated honour for writer Jayakanthan

The writer believed that in the lives of rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, pickpockets and rag pickers there is a flaming passion, a liveliness and truth.

FROM S MURARI

DH NEWS SERVICE CHENNAI:

There is a touch of irony in the selection of maverick Tamil writer D Jayakanthan for the Jnanpith award for 2002 for his “outstanding contribution to the shaping of Indian literature through his authentic and vivid portrayal of Indian reality.” For Mr Jayakanthan (71), who has written over 40 novels, nearly 200 short stories and 15 collection of essays, the honour has come rather late in the day, 20 years after he stopped writing.

Jayakanthan is the second Tamil writer to receive the nation’s highest literary award, the first being Akilan. While Akilan, who got the award way back in 1975, was an epitome of Tamil orthodoxy, Jayakanthan is its very antithesis, for he shot into fame by writing about the slum culture in Chennai in a way that shocked middle class values.

Though Jayakanthan’s maiden short story was probably Vazhkai Azhaikkirathu (Life is calling-1957) and Kaivilangu (Handcuff-1961), it was Yarukkaka Azhuthan (For whom did he cry - 1962) and Unnaipol Oruvan (Someone like you -1962) which brought him to limelight. Written in earthy prose, they highlighted the life of the downtrodden in Chennai slums. His writings had an authentic touch, for he lived among the slum dwllers in his early years of struggle when he worked as a compositor in a printing press.

Early life
Born in 1934 in a family of agriculturists in Cuddalore, Jayakanthan dropped out of school after the fifth grade. He ran away from home at the age of 12, unable to bear the harsh treatment meted out to him. Later, his uncle looked after him and it was from him that Jayakanthan imbibed the Communist ideology. He then married a Dalit woman and lived in the slums.

The 1960s could be called the `Jayakanthan era’ when he wrote a series of short stories in Ananda Vikatan, a family magazine. Some of his stories, outrageously ahead of times, found a place in this magazine. For example, Agni Parikshai (Ordeal by fire). It is the story of a Brahmin mother, shocked by the rape of her teenage daughter by a stranger. She nevertheless tells her to forget it like a bad dream, and get on with life. The story ends with the mother giving the traumatised daughter an oil bath, a symbolic gesture of purification.

It shocked the middle class conscience, but emboldened Jayakanthan to expand it into a full-length novel, Sila Nerangalil Sila Manithargal (Certain people at certain times). Later, based on this story, a movie was made and it won critical acclaim.
Some of his other literally acclaimed works are Oru Nadigai Nadagam Parkiral (An actress is watching a drama) This also served as a base for another movie. Parisukku Po (Go to Paris), was about cross-cultural pulls written in the early 1970s.

Though Jayakanthan has moved away from the centre stage, he still remains an iconoclast who ridicules social anomalies, a ridicule bordering on cynicism. Typical is his reaction to the honour conferred on him, he told All India Radio, “It is a reflection of how Hindiwallahs look upon people speaking other languages.”

Copyright: 2004 The Printers (Mysore) Private Ltd., 75, M.G. Road, Post Box No 5331, Bangalore - 560001

X-celling Over Men

X-celling Over Men

By MAUREEN DOWD

en are always telling me not to generalize about them.

But a startling new study shows that science is backing me up here.

Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear.

"Alas," said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, "genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew. It's not Mars or Venus. It's Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets."

Women are not only more different from men than we knew. Women are more different from each other than we knew - creatures of "infinite variety," as Shakespeare wrote.

"We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our 46th is the pathetic Y that has only a few genes which operate below the waist and above the knees," Dr. Willard observed. "In contrast, we now know that women have the full 46 chromosomes that they're getting work from and the 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater than we knew."

Dr. Willard and his co-author, Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, think that their discovery may help explain why the behavior and traits of men and women are so different; they may be hard-wired in the brain, in addition to being hormonal or cultural.

So is Lawrence Summers right after all? "Only time will tell," Dr. Willard laughs.

The researchers learned that a whopping 15 percent - 200 to 300 - of the genes on the second X chromosome in women, thought to be submissive and inert, lolling about on an evolutionary Victorian fainting couch, are active, giving women a significant increase in gene expression over men.

As the Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, who is writing a book about human evolution and genetics, explained it to me: "Women are mosaics, one could even say chimeras, in the sense that they are made up of two different kinds of cell. Whereas men are pure and uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout."

This means men's generalizations about women are correct, too. Women are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic, a different species.

"Women's chromosomes have more complexity, which men view as unpredictability," said David Page, a molecular biologist and expert on sex evolution at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.

Known as Mr. Y, Dr. P calls himself "the defender of the rotting Y chromosome." He's referring to studies showing that the Y chromosome has been shedding genes willy-nilly for millions of years and is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. "The Y married up," he notes. "The X married down."

Size matters, so some experts have suggested that in 10 million years or even much sooner - 100,000 years - men could disappear, taking Maxim magazine, March Madness and cold pizza in the morning with them.

Dr. Page drolly conjures up a picture of the Y chromosome as "a slovenly beast," sitting in his favorite armchair, surrounded by the litter of old fast food takeout boxes.

"The Y wants to maintain himself but doesn't know how," he said. "He's falling apart, like the guy who can't manage to get a doctor's appointment or can't clean up the house or apartment unless his wife does it.

"I prefer to think of the Y as persevering and noble, not as the Rodney Dangerfield of the human genome."

Dr. Page says the Y - a refuge throughout evolution for any gene that is good for males and/or bad for females - has become "a mirror, a metaphor, a blank slate on which you can write anything you want to think about males." It has inspired cartoon gene maps that show the belching gene, the inability-to-remember-birthdays-and-anniversaries gene, the fascination-with-spiders-and-reptiles gene, the selective-hearing-loss-"Huh" gene, the inability-to-express-affection-on-the-phone gene.

The discovery about women's superior gene expression may answer the age-old question about why men have trouble expressing themselves: because their genes do.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

Rare sight: Rekha and her five sisters!

Rare sight: Rekha and her five sisters!

To see six of Gemini Ganesan's seven daughters together is a rare sight.

In December 2004, when he was very ill, they made it a point to come down to Chennai and nurse their father.

They met again in February 2005, at Chennai's Apollo Hospital. Rekha was to inaugurate the Apollo Wellness Clinic, and all the sisters except Rekha's own sister, Radha, made it a point to attend the function.

The eldest among the six sisters is Dr Revathi Swaminathan, a radiation oncologist practising in Illinois, USA. Dr Kamala Selvaraj, Gemini Ganesan's second daughter, runs the G G Hospital in Chennai. Narayani Ganesan is a journalist with The Times Of India in Delhi. The youngest is Dr Jaya Shreedhar, a health advisor with Inter News Network.

Rekha and Radha are Gemini Ganesan's daughters from actress Pushpavalli, and Vijaya Chamundeswari, daughter of actress Savithri, is a fitness expert working at the G G Hospital.

"The only one missing is Rekha's sister Radha who is in the US," says Dr Jaya Shreedhar. "She is elder to both Viji [Vijaya] and me.

"Though Appa was unwell, we had some good moments when we met in December. People may assume that there are strained relationships because we don't share the same mother but there is nothing like that," she adds.

"We are professional women, and over the years, have learnt to appreciate each sister for what she is. We did not have the pleasure of growing up together. In fact, between my own elder sister Revathi and me, there is a 20 year age difference. Appa was very happy to have all of us together. This was a kind of pleasure he never had when we were young."

Jaya was the only daughter who saw her father at home when she was young. "By the time I was born, he was a senior star and had moved out of those relationships, and was with my mother. It is really strange but the upbringing was in a way that there was never any ill-will. You are born into it," she says.

"Suppose we were brought up in a middle class, rigid culture, I might have found it unusual and emotionally challenging. When we sisters met this time, it was more like six 'wild' cousins meeting and talking non-stop. It was lots of fun!"

From left to right: Dr Revathi Swaminathan, Narayani Ganesan, Dr Kamala Selvaraj, Rekha, Vijaya Chamundeswari and Dr Jaya Shreedhar.

The stillness at PM House

The stillness at PM House

Manmohan Singh seems curiously absent when key decisions are made

T.V.R. Shenoy

An acquaintance of Dr Manmohan Singh once asked me: “Why do you think there are so many guards around Race Course Road?” I mumbled something about security, slightly annoyed over the flippancy of the question. “Wrong!” came the triumphant response, “They are there to keep the poor man from running away!”
Is there any prime minister to whom the adjective ‘poor’ has been applied so frequently? Nobody pretended Manmohan Sing possessed any political authority when he was asked to move into Race Course Road, but there was a general consensus that he was an essentially decent man who could also keep the machinery of government oiled. The past five weeks have cast a question mark over even that claim.

When King Gyanendra dismissed the Deuba ministry our prime minister and his external affairs minister were, by Manmohan Singh’s own admission, taken unaware. Even as New Delhi was digesting the news reports, arrived of another unconstitutional coup — this time in Panaji. Governor Jamir had kept the prime minister and the home minister out of the loop. Next, it was Ranchi’s turn to grab the headlines thanks to its enterprising — if not mathematically blessed — governor, Syed Sibtey Razi. The Opposition had alerted Manmohan Singh and Shivraj Patil that mischief was afoot; their helplessness was evident despite the 48-hour advance warning.

Everyone agrees that neither Manmohan Singh nor Shivraj Patil planned the smash-and-grab raid in Jharkhand. They are honourable men, and they have tried — albeit after a nudge from the president — to repair the damage. It is not their personal honour, however, which is the issue here but the fact that they are political lightweights, mere minnows in a sea ruled by sharks. Why would any politician worth the name bother with a prime minister who has never made it to the Lok Sabha, or with a home minister who lost his own seat in the last General Election?

It is a short step from polite indifference to brutal contempt. The home minister assured the Opposition last Thursday — March 3 — that Syed Sibtey Razi was all set to ask Arjun Munda to form a ministry. The governor of Jharkhand invited Shibu Soren barely two hours later. I do not believe Shivraj Patil was trying to mislead the BJP leaders who spoke to him (what would he gain by doing so?). The only possibility, then, is that someone else had fed the home minister a piece of rubbish, and he fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Just as the prime minister reputedly fell for King Gyanendra’s bald declaration that he had no intention of dumping the Deuba ministry...

The foreign policy establishment’s latest excuse is that the new Research & Analysis Wing chief took charge even as the royal coup in Kathmandu was taking place. Yet there had been no dearth of warnings, not least reports in the foreign and Indian media. Delhi’s being taken by surprise was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of common sense.

India can survive a malicious prime minister and home minister. We came through the Emergency, didn’t we? But I am not so certain that we can sail through if important ministers are weak or easily manipulated. That is what I call the administrative case against Manmohan Singh, but there is also a moral charge to be laid at his door.

The prime minister’s only political asset is his reputation for probity. The Prime Minister’s Office under Manmohan Singh is, arguably, cleaner than ever before. (I say nothing about its being efficient or effective!) Yet events in Goa and in Jharkhand have succeeded in doing the impossible, they have cast a shadow on Manmohan Singh’s ethics.

Whether or not the prime minister had inside information on the attempted coups in Panaji and in Ranchi is actually a secondary issue. (Although he could have had no illusions about why Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi and Subodh Kant Sahay flew to Ranchi after the antics in Goa.) I want to raise a more fundamental question: why didn’t Manmohan Singh publicly condemn the attempted coup in Ranchi after the news broke?

A symbolic gesture would have sufficed. All the president did was to summon Syed Sibtey Razi to Delhi. Everyone got the message without the president having to say a single word. Why didn’t the honourable Manmohan Singh and the decent Shivraj Patil have the moral courage to take the same step?

Ultimately, it is for Manmohan Singh to justify Syed Sibtey Razi’s and S.C. Jamir’s conduct to Parliament, in fact to India at large. I have no idea how he proposes to do so. We would not accept it as an excuse if a chowkidar told us, “Please don’t sack me, after all I didn’t commit the robbery!” Should we expect a lesser standard of a prime minister?

This is a prime minister who seems to be curiously absent when important decisions are being made or defended. His ministry ignored reports from Nepal until it was too late. He wrung his hands over Goa. When the Prime Minister’s Office reportedly rebuked the Intelligence Bureau for its ‘failure’ to track the five independent Jharkhand MLAs, it may have been the only response taken independent of Rashtrapati Bhavan’s hints. (I say nothing of the morality of using the Intelligence Bureau to hound the Opposition.)

Weep, if you will, for Nepal’s deposed Sher Bahadur Deuba and Sariska’s vanished tigers, yet spare a thought too for Race Course Road’s dismal Singh!



URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=66138

Caste republics hurt

Caste republics hurt

H D Deve Gowda has served both as Karnataka Chief Minister and Prime Minister. But he chose Hasan over Gulbarga to contest elections. Is it because Hasan has a sizeable Vokkaliga presence - around 35 per cent - and Gowda belongs to this caste?

Also, why does his politics centre around southern Karnataka? Is it because southern Karnataka is dominated by Vokkaligas and Lingayats form a majority in the northern part of the State.

Let's talk about a north Indian leader. Chaudhary Charan Singh has served both as UP Chief Minister and Prime Minister. He chose Bagpat over Azamgarh and his influence was centred around western up? Is it because Bagpat/ western UP is a Jat-dominated land?

Turn to west India. Sharad Pawar has served as Maharashtra Chief Minister. A potential Prime Ministerial candidate, he contests only from Baramati. His brand of politics works only in western Maharashtra? Is it because Baramati has a high concentration of Maratha voters.

In the East, S Jaipal Reddy contests from Miryalgudu, and Renuka Chaudhary from Khamam? Is it because Miryalgudu is a Reddy land, and Khamam a Kamma land?

I K Gujral has lived in Delhi all his life. But when he became Prime Minister, he chose Jalandhar to enter Lok Sabha. Is it because Jalandhar has 59 per cent non-Sikh Punjabi population? Why should Dharmendra contest from Bikaner, a Jat stronghold.

Barring a few exceptions, most politicians contest from constituencies where their caste members are in majority. Most local parties are 'regional' more in terms of caste-demography and less in geography. This means that parties depend more on caste than ideology to garner votes. Four decades back, these caste-republics were non-existent, at best, invisible. Atal Bihari Vajpayee won from a Muslim-dominated Balrampur in 1957 and 1967. It may not be possible now. He is more popular than in 1957.

Raj Narayan's 1977 victory over Indira Gandhi, a Bhumihar, seems unthinkable today. Her descendants can hardly think of filing papers from Rai Bareli where Bhumihars are non-existent. But why are these caste republics becoming increasing violent?

Till August 15, 1947, it were the dwijas, led by Brahmans, who had ruled India and controlled assets and institutions. Their decline began as soon as the zamindari system was abolished. The situation reached became critical when On August 7, 1990, the V P Singh announced that his Government would implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission. The caste republics had got political sanctity.

Power slipped out of the dwijas' hands and went to a bunch of castes. For instance, Kapus in Andhra Pradesh or Lodhs in UP are similarly placed in hierarchy and have similar occupations, but they can hardly relate to each other.

In UP, Lodhs are 2.2 per cent and Jats 1.6 percent of the population. In constituencies like Hamirpur or Farrukhabad, Lodhs constitute 12 per cent. This region is a Lodh republic. Jats constitute 18.0 per cent in Mathura or 14.0 per cent in Bagpat. Kapus may be insignificant at the state level, but may be as high as 16.0 per cent in Rajamundry.

In each State, there may be as many as half a dozen castes with areas of dominance. To them, India is a booty which must be plundered.

To that end, the State power must be captured, but, given their local existence and numerical weaknesses, they cannot capture power through traditional democratic methods.

The rivalry develops into a gang-war, with violence as a necessary ingredient. Situations arise when cast republics form cartels, and rally behind two bigger republics. Kamma or Reddy become rallying point in Andhra Pradesh and Vokkaliggas and Lingayats in Karnataka. The pattern follows all over India.

Localised in nature, and agriculturists in profession, these castes can't be loyal to a nation and give respect to democratic governance. The Constitution must conform to the value systems of caste republics, and not vice versa.

Violence becomes a tool to protect their territories. Things achievable through non-violent methods are achieved by violent methods.

The gang wars of the caste republics is hurting India the most, making electoral process a mockery