A CLASH OF CULTURES

 

 

Our differences are not religious, political, economic or ideological, they are cultural. After 9/11 Americans for the first time believed that terrorism was real and not just a law and order problem or border skirmishes of the developing world, but for the want of true understanding they blamed it on a primitive mindset and called it a civilizational fight.

 

As if hell bent to prove that their civilization can be far more primitive, if it chooses it be, it led its allies into 'a war on terror'. There were preemptive strikes on the target civilization and soon it had the first trophy - Saddam Husein. Did Saddam sent those jihadists to crash into the twin towers and the Pentagon? That seemed to be a silly question, too unimportant to answer. Did he possess the dreaded weapons of mass destruction, the WMDs? Again a silly question and hence no answers...........because after all it was the superior civilization teaching an inferior and primitive one to modernize and lead a better life! 

 

So what happened next? Even those moderate Muslim nations, which castigated the Al Qaeda and the Taliban for 9/11, now had second thoughts and developed sympathy for those who never deserved it. Even a substantial part of liberal America started believing that invasion of Iraq was a criminal act based on colossal lie and monumental deceit and only aimed at regimen change. What is worse the Iraq invasion became a propaganda tool for the beleaguered Taliban and Al Qaeda to attract more money and more recruits. Osama made the Arabs believe that the Americans were after their land and their oil and the only answer could be to fight for a pious Islamic Caliphate free of infidels. 

 

A good general know when the chips are down and stays out of trouble, waiting for an opportune moment to strike. The Americans got one such God sent moment when they understood the Pakistani duplicity and eliminated Osama in Abbottabad cantonment. This was a good time to leave - the Arab Spring had started and the villain of the piece was taken care of. But that was not to be.

 

They planned a second war on terror, this time in Afghanistan, caused a regime change and established a system of governance totally alien to the feudal society comprising of ever fighting warlords. So naturally a few came with them and a few were against them and kept the Taliban, hiding in the caves of Tora Bora fully informed and assisted them in occasional terrorist attacks. In this interesting game of diplomatic cards Pakistan was the joker of the pack. It assured the Americans of complete cooperation and provided the Taliban complete protection with utmost dedication! Not only that, it introduced Taliban to another American enemy, China and when the American stamina of overseas occupation ran out this trio took no time to overthrow the Kabul government which was lame duck without American crutches.

 

So you will now appreciate why I insist on calling it a cultural warfare. The Taliban from their Madarsa days, were brought up in a different cultural environment. If you choose to call it primitive and oppressive it is your interpretation and they have, by their acts and deeds, told the world that they care two hoots. Remember the destruction of the world famous Bamian Buddhas! Remember the horror stories narrated by the Taliban brides and women of Afghanistan? Remember the sexual exploitation of children and the drug economy growing in the poppy fields of the countryside? Have they ever apologized for all this? Have they ever said that they will do course correction? No, because that is the Taliban culture.

 

Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon have similarly faced Western sanctions. Some major Muslim countries as Iran and Syria are facing Western threat due to fundamentalism and interference into the Western affairs and benefits according to the Western point of view. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are particularly dangerous as the former is a nuclear power with a doubtful command control system and the latter is rich and exports hard-line Islamist ideas on one hand and remains a U.S ally on the other having mastered the art of running with the hare and hunting with the hound. The Western World thinks the Muslim fundamentalism, extremism, illiteracy and uncivilized manners the causes of conflicts and the disturbance of peace and threat in the western world. But I urge you to just pause here and think about the role of the most developed country in the world, the U.S so far. Since 1945 they have been bombing their adversaries right, left and centre. They have bombed Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen! It seems they have but only one tool, the hammer and so every problem in the world looks like a nail! Is it not time to stop and think how many problems have they succeeded in solving by this wonder drug, the bomb?

 

The issue of Pan-Islamism

There is an unresolved tension among Muslim populations and nations between nationalism and pan-nationalism. This arises from the concept of Ummah — that all Muslims of the world are one supra-national entity. This makes them put religion before the nation, which Muslims attribute to their faith and Westerners blame it on their communalism.

The notion is pan-Islamism is in itself very strange. You would expect Muslims to fight the non-Muslims for this but many more wars are fought between Muslims and Muslim states than with others. The Iran-Iraq war was the longest, a large number of Islamic states joined the coalition against Saddam under the US, and, closer home, in the Af-Pak region, Muslims only kill Muslims and not all of them in Friday bombings at Shia mosques. The Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Aimaq, Turkmen, Baloch, Pashai, Nuristani, Gujjar, Arab, Brahui, Qizilbash, Pamiri, Kyrgyz, Sadat etc. are all Muslims but find themselves insecure in Afghanistan. Similarly Ahmadis, Bahais and Parsis have never felt safe in Pakistan just as the Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Jains and Sikhs could never find it secure.

 

Ironies galore

There is however a brutal irony with pan-Islamism. If pan-Islamism, the Ummah spirit, has worked on the ground, it is with multi-national terror groups. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are truly pan-Islamic organisations, which mostly target settled Islamic states. ISIS actually says that if you believe that all Muslims are part of the same Ummah, then they must also have a Caliphate subsuming international boundaries and enforcing the common Shariat. So you see, if Pakistan and China are celebrating today with the defeat and retreat of the Americans in Afghanistan, their happy days may not actually last for a very long time! For the Ummah this is a small victory and not the ultimate target. India knows this and is preparing for the worst.

 

There is another strange irony in the Muslim world which is ever so glaring. There are sharp national boundaries dividing Muslim populations and wealth. A bulk of the populations, in Asia and Africa, lives in poor economies. Whereas the world’s wealthiest nations, the Gulf Arabs, have relatively minuscule populations. They won’t distribute their wealth equally to the rest in the spirit of pan-Islamism. They won’t even accept Muslim refugees and they are instead pushed into Western nations, which are peaceful today but may ferment fundamentalism in days to come as we have see in France very recently. Following beheading of an unfortunate teacher Samuel Paty the French President Emmanuel Macron merely dared to say Islam is in crisis, and got himself into big trouble. Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked him to get his head examined. Pakistan’s Imran Khan wrote a two-page sermon to fellow Muslim nations calling for a re-education of the West about Islam and the nonagenarian Malaysian President Mahatir Mahamad nearly justified the teacher’s beheading!

 

But Western assumption that theirs is a superior culture does not give them the right to bomb their enemies to Stone Age. Then how are they we proving to be superior? How can the extent of opposition destruction decide the superiority of a culture? Isn’t superiority in the evolutionary ladder all about construction, achievement and aspiration? So, what should be our response? We can confront them diplomatically, and help only when asked to do so. The real casualty are two - the Afghan people, particularly women and children and a sense of worldwide insecurity with fellow Muslims who, till the other day, were fellow citizens and not objects of Islamophobia. 

 

The Islamist rejection of progressive values and their love for medieval Islamist dogma will only open up large cultural fault lines not only with other religions but among their own as well. A large section of Muslims have the holy Quran in one hand and computer in another. Tracing a path back to the dark ages is not an option for them. But do they have the strength of character and the vision of a better future to stand against the spread of primitive thinking in their midst? Can they nudge the pan-Islamists to give up their Utopian dream of a world-wide Islamic Caliphate governed by Sharia? That is the million dollar question. The change has to come from within; non-Muslims cannot fight wars to bring this change.

 

 

WHO GETS 99.75% MARKS IN BOARD EXAMINATIONS?

Last week a friend of mine posted in his Facebook page that their darling daughter passed her Board examinations with flying colours and managed to score 99.75%! The first thing that occurred to me was who was the miserly fellow who pinched 0.25% and why? Really, 99.75%, is that humanly possible? Being from the era when the Board topper scored around 85% in Science stream and around 78% in Arts stream, 99.75% seemed astronomical. As neither of my two sons were exactly Albert Einstein so I was quite unfamiliar with these high scores but the fact that some colleges in Delhi University had cut-off score of around 98% was not unknown to me. So I knew this species exists, but it forced me to do some research.

 

Now hold your breath as I reveal to you the results of my research! The number of students who have scored above 95% in this year’s CBSE Class 12 Board Examinations is over 70,000! This is when the regular classes have gone for a toss this academic year because of the pandemic and the children were forced into the relatively new concept of Distance Learning. What is even more surprising is that that in 2019 i.e. before the pandemic this figure of 95% plus scores was around 17,000 and in 2020 it was 38,000. So as the days are going by the children are getting more and more comfortable with Distance Learning.

 

If you think that it is only the good students who are being benefited by Distance Learning and getting better and better marks, you are sadly mistaken; it seems everybody is doing well because nobody is failing! This year’s CBSE Class 12 pass percentage is 99.4%! The State Education Boards were equally generous – All 8 lakh children passed in Tamil Nadu Board (100%). Similarly Maharashtra Board passed 99.6% and U.P. Board was strict with only 98% pass percentage. What is going on? Should we be closing down the schools? Marks and pass percentages seem to suggest that real time schools have no role left and they do not matter. It also makes me wonder if marks have any value attached to them. The deluge of 90-plus scores makes it difficult to judge students, and hurts the truly deserving.

 

When we know that a very large section of the society from the lower socioeconomic strata did not possess either internet connection or a smart phone, this benevolence in marking exhibited by both CBSE and the State Boards is truly baffling. And it is not something we are seeing this year only; boards have been doling out marks rather generously for many years now. In the last five years, the pass percentage for Class XII exams conducted by the Council for the Indian School Certificate (ISC) has never dropped below 95%, while that of Tamil Nadu State Board has been above 90% since 2014. Other boards that consistently notch 80% and above in pass percentage are the Uttar Pradesh Board, Kerala Board and Central Board of Secondary Education, with West Bengal joining the league in 2015. Over the years, overzealous boards have decided to give an edge to their students, either for entrance examinations or for merit-based admissions.

 

So has the quality of learning really improved from the eighties and nineties? The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) in 2018 i.e. before the pandemic when children were going to school, showed that 24% in the 14-18 age group could not count currency correctly, 44% could not add weights correctly in kilograms as they were asked to add weights, 14% could not recognize a map of India and some 36% couldn’t name the capital of India. Similarly, while 79% could name the state they lived in, 58% could not locate it on a map. So how can this deluge of marks and these generous pass percentages be justified?

 

Marks are not for boasting, they have a very important purpose – admission to premier institutions for college education. A percentage is derived from the aggregate of top 4 subjects to bring out a merit list, and this obviously will be higher than the percentage scored in CBSE or Board exams. So how high do you think will the cut-off marks go for college admission? Delhi University has 69,554 seats sans reservation and only from CBSE Board this year there are more than 70,000 students with more than 95% marks! So now our children, even after scoring 95%, will have to grapple with uncertainty for their future and if they do not succeed to get admission to a decent college will be labelled as ‘a failure’! How can this be the future of brilliant students?

 

I am of the opinion that Board Examinations and Competitive examinations cannot replace one another. They have very different purposes. The board exam is used to assess how good a student is at the curriculum prescribed for the relevant classes; it is an achievement test. On the contrary, competitive examinations are a test for the elimination of weaker students. It has been seen in the past that many students who have done well in the board examinations may not do well in competitive examinations and vice versa. Therefore, using board exams alone as a means for admitting students to Delhi University or other colleges may not be ideal, since the exam is not designed for that objective. And for every course the students opt for, how can marks be the only criteria? If he/she does not have the aptitude for the course then even after acquiring the degree will they succeed in life? Or are we only interested in creating an army of unemployables?

 

This system of examination and marking desperately needs a second look. It is time to push the reset button and go back to the factory setting. The ‘marks’ must have an inherent value attached to them and they should reflect the quality of merit. Otherwise the list for college admission that is being prepared cannot be called a ‘merit list’. These Board examination results are, at best, bizarre and cannot be passed off as normal. When everybody passes, passing becomes irrelevant and when there are too many climbers reaching the summit, reaching the top loses its value.

 

Unlike what the results of this year’s Board examinations depict the truth is that young children have not just failed to learn for over 500 days now, but have forgotten what they knew earlier, and many of them have lapsed back into the darkness of illiteracy. The situation is even worse among the poors, rurals, Dalits and tribals. Whom are we kidding by doling out these marks? Why are we jeopardizing the future of our children and our country? A little ‘feel good’ today is not only unnecessary but downright harmful.  The National Education Council should step in to address the issue. Uniformity in marking among State Boards is essential. It is very important to have the concept of ‘one nation, one education board’ implemented in the country along with defined evaluation criteria to bring uniformity in the system. Only then can education be truly inclusive.

  

While I congratulate all those children who have succeeded in their Board examinations and scored heavily, I remain very concerned about their future. If we do not mend our ways these very children who are feeling good today will not pardon us for our act of benevolence in days to come.

 

COVID RESTRICTIONS – A BOON TO ADDRESS OVER-TOURISM

 

 

Tourists have not returned to most of the trendy tourist spots after the COVID-19 lockdown but Venice is different. After being mauled brutally by the pandemic Italy is opening up and Venice is perhaps the first plac

e to attract maximum crowds of rebound tourism. The gondoliers in their straw hats and striped shirts are doing brisk business, St Mark's Square is thronged with crowds, and pavement cafes are packed with tourists sipping glasses of chilled prosecco.

After a difficult two years, which started with devastating acqua alta floods in late 2019, tourism is returning to Venice with a vengeance, with hotels reporting healthy occupancy rates, the narrow streets pulsing with visitors and the city celebrating the 1,600th anniversary of its founding in AD421.

But Venice does not want to suffer the curse of over-tourism and so is fighting back. Venice's leaders believe that they have come up with a solution: to build airport-style turnstiles that will enable the authorities, for the first time ever, to close the city to visitors when the numbers become overwhelming. Venetians feel that their city cannot continue to have such huge numbers of tourists. Venice is a small and very delicate city. The number of visitors must be compatible with Venice's size. If there is no room, you won't be able to come in. As the planet recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic, the Venetians are of the opinion that destinations like Venice need to forge a new model of tourism and so installing turnstiles at six major entry points to the city is planned. The fact that Venice is surrounded by water will help with implementing the system.

To come to Venice, you will have to make a booking. Visitors who stay at least one night in a hotel in Venice will be granted the QR code automatically on the basis that they will already have shelled out for the overnight tariff that is levied by the city. Only tourists with this special app and a QR code will be able to pass through the turnstiles. But anyone wanting to visit Venice just for the day - as millions of people from all over the world have done over the years - will have to have the app and the QR code on their phone and this will cost €3 per person during the low season but €10 per person during busy periods such as Easter and summer months.

Though it will cost much more to implement this system that they hope of earning from it but it will save the city of over-crowding and disappoint many tourists whose shoestring budget does not allow them to book a hotel in the city! Based on the flow of tourists during normal times, before the pandemic, the turnstiles will be in operation for around 90 days a year.

With the turnstiles and cap on numbers, Venice is delivering a clear message - in place of day trippers who spend little during their lightning visits, the World Heritage destination wants people to stay a while. The Venetians would like to see tourists who want to experience Venice and not just dash to St Mark's Square and leave. The message is loud and clear - come to Venice, but take your time, slow down and enjoy the intoxicating experience. Don’t just tick destinations in your travel list, feel the city, enjoy the culture and the cuisine, the sights and the sounds, the narrow lanes and the wide lagoons.

Venice is not the only place which has fallen victim to over-tourism in the past, i.e. in the good old pre-COVID days. Hallstatt in Austria, Santorini in Greece, Dubrovnik in Croatia, Barcelona in Spain, Kyoto in Japan, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, certain touristy places in Iceland, Thailand and Peru and even the Mount Everest were severely threatened by bulging tourist numbers.

Hallsatt, Austria

The village, tucked beside a lake and in the shadows of the Salzkammergut mountains, saw its first spike in popularity back in 2006 when it featured in the South Korean show Spring Watch. Soon after, it was marketed across Asia as one of Europe's top tourist destinations. With a population of 780, Hallstatt saw a steep rise in visitors from China, Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong and South Korea after this. Ten years ago it received just 100 visitors a day but in pre-COVID hay days Hallstatt receives over 1 million visitors per year! What is worse is that many visitors seriously think it to be a theme park and not a village where real people live, much to the annoyance of the locals.

The village has also become prohibitively expensive for locals, as supermarkets and convenience stores prioritize souvenirs over fresh fruit and vegetables. Others have complained that tourists have entered their homes without permission.

The village earned UNESCO World Heritage status back in 1997, at a time when it was visited by a manageable stream of walkers and enthusiasts of Bronze Age history; Halstatt is home to a 7000-year-old salt mine, the oldest in the world, but just before the Covid outbreak the popular tourist destination was simply sick of over-tourism.

Machu Picchu, Peru

This iconic ruin is beginning to fall victim to its own success, as are so many heritage-listed sites around the world. Tourist numbers have been capped on the Inca Trail for some time now, but recently measures were put in place to limit overcrowding at Machu Picchu itself, with visitors forced to stick to strict time slots. Still, this place is heaving.

Barcelona, Spain

One of Europe's great destinations is also overrun with tourists, as visitors pour in from cruise ships and tour buses and every other mode of transport daily. The city is struggling to cope: hotel accommodation is full, Airbnb is affecting rental prices for locals, traffic is clogged and pavements are packed. Time to give the city a chance to recover and Covid gave just that. Now when tourists return the city has to plan controlling their numbers.

Dubrovnik, Croatia

The insane popularity of Game of Thrones the series has translated into insane popularity for Game of Thrones the locations. The most popular sites in Croatia, Iceland and Spain are battling with the sheer number of people arriving thanks to their on-screen stardom.,557 people live in the Old Town, down from 5,000 in 1991. Dubrovnik in Croatia benefitted maximally from this popularity. Cruise ships are another key cause of over-tourism in Dubrovnik, disgorging thousands of tourists each day. In 2017, the city received 742,000 passengers on 538 ships!  Over-tourism alienates and drives out local people. In Dubrovnik today, just 1,577 people live in the old town, down from 5,000

Kyoto, Japan

Kyoto is a relatively small city, with only 1.5 million inhabitants, and yet it plays host to more than 50 million domestic and international visitors annually. That, clearly, is going to have an effect, and already the city has had to introduce measures to stop littering and prevent tourists from hassling geikos (the local term for geishas). Restaurants and bars are also struggling to look after their regular customers while dealing with the tourist influx.

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Amsterdam has a population of around 800,000, and yet receives nearly 20 million visitors a year. Again, that has an effect: in 2019 the last florist at the city's famed Bloemenmarkt shut up shop, blaming tourist groups for crowding out his customers. The Dutch tourist board has also now stopped actively promoting the Netherlands as a destination, turning its focus instead to managing the tourists already coming. 

Santorini, Greece

The statistics bear this out: the Greek islands are among the world's top 10 destinations to post on Instagram - up there with Marrakesh, Tulum in Mexico, Amsterdam, Positano and Bali. You will find yourself trapped on an island full of Instagrammers, intent on spoiling all that is sacred about the summer holiday in the pursuit of social media "likes". The problem is magnified in the iconic caldera-view villages of Oia and Imerovigli, where residents have erected signs asking people not to use drones and reminding them that, "This is our home". But who is listening? Farmers in the lavender fields of Provence resorting to putting up banners reading "Please respect our work" to deter the selfie-tourists (it did not). Beautiful places like this, and Santorini, are victims of their own success

The romance of travel has been eroded by the pandemic. It is no longer easy, no longer cheap, and no longer carefree. There's little fanfare or excitement involved in going to the airport to catch a flight but if you have to fit into a PPE kit and sit in the middle seat even that little excitement vanishes in thin air and you are sweating profusely inside the stupid kit with your face shield in front of your mask getting fogged again and again. Now it's a chore, something you have put yourself through to get to where you're going, a battle of overhead space and over-zealous seat reclining and barging at the carousel. If on top of all this you reach your dream destination only to find that your dream is shared by millions of others and you are left jostling for space to catch a glimpse of your picture postcard location, that is bad news!

Let us hope that when the tourism industry eventually opens up post COVID, it succeeds in restricting tourist numbers not only to protect the delicate destinations from overcrowding but also to make tourism safe for tourists!  While tourism is a source of livelihood for many, over-tourism is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.