A Letter From Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy

(A slightly dated article, but nevertheless one of my perennial favourites)

Below is a thought-provoking report by Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy of his impressions of India, while there on a month-long lecture tour, in connection with his UNESCO’s Kalinga Prize in 2003.

Dear Friends,

A full four weeks ago I began my UNESCO 2003 Kalinga Prize visit to India. Although delayed, improved Pakistan-India relations eventually made this possible. It has been a relentless schedule from day one, with 2, 3, 4 lectures every day at schools, colleges, universities, research institutions, and NGOs. This trip has taken me all around India: Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bhubhaneswar, Cuttack, Calcutta, and finally back here in Delhi again. This has been an extraordinary visit. I interacted with children from excellent schools as well as those from pretty ordinary ones; had long sessions with students and teachers from colleges and universities; met with the "junta" (cooks, taxi drivers, and rickshawallas); and was invited to see ministers and chief ministers in several states, as well as the president of India. This extended tour of the so-called "enemy country" has been an enormous learning experience for me. I am not aware of any Indian who has made a similar kind of journey to academic institutions in Pakistan.


The events of the last four weeks could really fill a book. Let me instead quickly record a few of my observations and experiences that you might find interesting.

• Many Indian universities have a cosmopolitan character. Their social culture is modern and similar to that in universities located in free societies across the world. (In Pakistan, AKU and LUMS would be the closest approximations.) Male and female students freely intermingle, library and laboratory facilities are good, seminars and colloquia are frequent, and the faculty is intensively engaged in research. Entrance exams are tough and competition for grades is intense. The research institutes I visited (TIFR, IISC, the IIT's, IMSc, IICT, IUCAA, JNCASR, Raman Institute, Swaminathan Institute,.....) are world class.

• The rural-urban divide in India is strong. Schools and colleges in small towns have a culture steeped in religion. Here one sees hierarchy, obedience, and even servility. The national anthem is sung in schools and religious symbols are given much prominence. Some students I met were bright, but many appeared rather dull. Although most Indian colleges are coeducational (unlike in Pakistan where only some are), male and female students sit separately and are not encouraged to intermingle. It is sometimes difficult to understand the English spoken there. Where possible, I spoke in Hindi/Urdu. This enhanced my ability to communicate and also created a special kind of bonding. There is an evident desire to improve, however, and at least some college principals go out of their way to organize events and invite guest speakers. My lecture at the Basavanagudi National College, a fairly ordinary college, was the 1978th lecture over a period of 30 years!

• Independent thought in India's better universities is alive and well. Office bearers of the Jawaharlal Nehru University students union in Delhi were requested by the university's administration to present flowers to President Abdul Kalam at the annual convocation. They flatly refused, saying that he is a nuclear hawk and an appointee of a fundamentalist party. Moreover, as young women of dignity they could not agree to act as mere flower girls presenting bouquets to a man. Eventually the head of the physics department, also a woman, somewhat reluctantly presented flowers to Dr. Kalam but said that she was doing so as a scientist honoring another scientist, not because she was a woman. Bravo! I have not seen comparable boldness and intellectual courage in Pakistani students. Student unions in Pakistan have been banned for two decades and so it is a moot question if any union there could have mustered similar independence of thought.

• Taking science to the masses has become a kind of mantra all over India. My columnist friend Praful Bidwai - a powerful critic of the Indian state and its militaristic policies - counts among India's greatest achievements the energisation of its democracy and refers to "our social movements, with their rich traditions of people's self-organisation, innovative protest and daring questioning of power". These movements have ensured that, unlike in Pakistan, land grabbers in Indian cities have found fierce resistance when they try to gobble up public spaces - parks, zoos, playgrounds, historical sites, etc. Praful should also include in his list the huge number of science popularization movements, sometimes supported by the state but often spontaneous. These are sweeping through India's towns and villages, seeking to bring about an understanding of natural phenomena, teach simple health care, and introduce technology appropriate to a rural environment. There is not even one comparable Pakistani counterpart. I watched some science communicators, such as Arvind Gupta at IUCAA in Pune, whose infectious enthusiasm leaves children thrilled and desirous of pursuing careers in science. Individual Indian states have funded and created numerous impressive planetariums and science museums, and local organizations are putting out a huge volume of written and audio-visual science materials in the local languages.

• Attitudes of Indian scientists towards science are conservative. Progress through science is an immensely popular notion in India, stressed both by past and present leaders. But what is science understood to be? I was a little jolted upon reading Nehru's words, written in stone at the entrance to the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Research in Bangalore: "I too have worshipped at the shrine of scienc". The notion of "worship" and "shrine of science" do not go well with the modern science and the scientific temper. Science is about challenging - not worshipping. But science in India is largely seen as an instrument that enhances productive capabilities, and not as a transformational tool for producing an informed, rational society. Most Indian scientists are techno-nationalists - they put their science at the service of the state rather than the people. In this respect, Pakistan is no different.

• India's nuclear and space programs are nationally venerated as symbols of high achievement. This led to India's nuclear hero, Dr. Abdul Kalam, becoming the country's president. When Dr. Kalam received me in his office, after the usual pleasantries, I expressed my regret at India having gone nuclear and causing Pakistan to follow suit. Shouldn't India now reduce dangers by initiating a process of nuclear disarmament? Dr. Kalam gave me a well-practiced response: India would get rid of its nuclear weapons the very minute that America agreed to do the same. He displayed little enthusiasm for an agreement to cut off fissile material production. However, he did agree to my suggestion that exchange of academics could be an important way to build good relations between
Pakistan and India.

• Indian society remains deeply superstitious, caste divisions are important, and women still have a long way to go. While I found myself admiring the energetic popular science movements, I was disappointed that they pay relatively little attention to anti-scientific superstitions that pervade Indian society. The jyoti[sh] (astrologer) dictates the dates when a marriage is possible, and even whether a couple can marry at all. After I gave a strong pitch for fighting superstition, a young woman asked me what to do if "koi devi aap pay utr jayai" (if a spirit should descend upon you). Inter-caste marriages are still frowned upon, and usually forbidden. In local newspapers one typically reads of tragic accounts such as that of a boy and girl from different castes who commit suicide together after their families forbid the match. Although Indian women are freer, more visible, and more confident than their Pakistani counterparts, India is still a strongly male dominated society. However, the rapidly increasing number of well-educated young women gives hope for the future.

• Muslims in India remain at the margins of scientific research and higher education. Hamdard University in Delhi is distinctly better than the university bearing the same name on the Pakistani side. Jamia Millia, a largely Muslim university, appears to be doing well and a bit better than any Pakistani university in the field of physics. But, although Muslims form 12% of India's population, I met only a few Muslim scientists in leading Indian research institutes and universities. Discrimination against Muslims does not appear to be the dominant cause. A professor at Jamia told me that an overwhelming number of Muslim students were inclined towards seeking easier (and more lucrative) professions in spite of special incentives offered to them at his university. In general, Muslims in India appear more modern and secular than in Pakistan. However, Hyderabad surprised me. In the lecture that I gave at a government women's college, there was only one young woman without a burqa in an audience of about a hundred. The women there were astonished to learn that Pakistan is, at least in most places, more liberal than Hyderabad. The extreme conservatism in the Muslim part of Hyderabad city reminds one of Peshawar.

• There was a remarkable lack of hostility towards Pakistan. Indeed a desire for friendly relations was repeatedly expressed in every forum I went to. This is not to be taken lightly: many of my public lectures were either about (or on) science, but others dealt with deeply contentious issues - nuclear weapons, India-Pakistan relations, and the Kashmir conflict. Various Indian peace groups and NGOs organized public discussions and screenings of the two documentaries that I had made (with Zia Mian): "Pakistan and India under the Nuclear Shadow", and "Crossing the Lines - Kashmir, Pakistan, India". To be sure, my views on Indian policies and actions in Kashmir occasionally provoked knee-jerk nationalistic responses, but these were infrequent and exchanges always remained within the bounds of civility.

• Ignorance about Pakistan is widespread. In most public gatherings, and certainly in every school that I spoke at, people had never seen a Pakistani. Many Indians have a misconception of Pakistan as a medieval, theocratic state. In fact, only some parts of Pakistan can be so characterized. Many Indians think that Pakistanis have been totally muzzled and live in a police state. This is also untrue - articles in the Pakistani press are often blunter and more critical than in the Indian press. An Indian friend hypothesized that knowledge of the other country is inversely proportional to the geographical distance between countries. Unfortunately this will remain true unless there is a substantial exchange of visitors between the two countries.

• Indians are deeply nationalistic and may dislike particular governments but they only rarely criticize the Indian state. This is easy to understand: the democratic process has given a strong sense of participation to most citizens and successfully forged an Indian national identity (except in Kashmir, and parts of the North East) that transcends the immense diversity of cultures across the country. But this has an important downside: nationalism is easy to mobilize and highly dangerous in matters of war and conflict. I found the smugness of the Indian elite (especially the heads of nuclear, space, and technology programs) to be rather irritating. Even if India has done well in some respects, in most others it is still behind the rest of the world. Fortunately, Pakistani intellectuals are less attached to their state and therefore more forthright. The reason is rather clear: three decades of military rule have dealt a serious blow to nation building and firming up the Pakistani identity.

• Similarities between the two countries exceed the differences. Cities in both countries are poisoned with thick car fumes (Delhi is the exception) and grid-locks are frequent; megaslums and exploding populations threaten to swallow up the countryside; electricity supplies are intermittent; and water is fast disappearing from rivers and aquifers. The rural poor are fleeing to the cities, and wretched beggars with amputated limbs are casually accepted as part of the urban scenery. The absence of long-term planning is manifest. Obsessive militarization and reckless spending on defense shows no sign of abating in either country.


So much for all that.


As I head back home to Islamabad, I want to thank the many friends and organizations in India who made elaborate logistical travel and accommodation arrangements for my wife Hajra and myself. Others arranged my talks and public meetings, sometimes on subjects normally considered as deeply controversial and divisive. They worked hard to make each event a success. This letter is also addressed to those who I met for the first time but who I would like to keep in contact with. It would take much too long to write to scores of people individually, and so I ask for forgiveness in sending this one letter to all.

With best regards,
Pervez Hoodbhoy

Dr. Hoodbhoy received Ph.D in nuclear physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been a faculty member at the Department of Physics, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad since 1973. Besides making the two widely acclaimed documentaries ("Pakistan and India under the Nuclear Shadow", and "Crossing the Lines - Kashmir, Pakistan, India"), he has authored a number of publications and lectured widely to promote science education, better environmental policies, women's rights and education.

HP Labs India shows off tech goodies

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- What do subcompact cars and PCs have in common?

Forty million people in India. At least that's Hewlett-Packard's perspective. Company executives say the 40 million consumers in India who can afford a subcompact car will be the future buyers of new HP technologies that make computing easier and less expensive.



HP Labs India showed off the Gesture Keyboard (GKB), which uses handwriting-recognition software to allow users to write with a pen. The keyboard is developed specifically for users who speak Hindi and/or the state language Kannada--people can write on the keyboard the way they learned to write as a child, and for this reason, training time on the board takes only 10 minutes. Credit: Stefanie Olsen

On a special trip to the states, the 3-year-old HP Labs India team demonstrated five of its innovations here Thursday at Hewlett-Packard's R&D headquarters.

"This opens up the lid" to more PC literacy in India, Ajay Gupta, lab director for HP Labs India, said, referring to a technology on display called a Gesture Board.

The demonstration comes shortly after HP disbanded a group dedicated to creating technology for emerging nations such as India, China and Africa. In these regions, the penetration of PCs and other IT technologies is low, but the potential demand is high.

Despite the dissolution of the group, called the Emerging Markets Solutions Group, HP turned its eye to labs to develop products for these markets.

One of the biggest barriers to tech adoption in India is language. While many people in India speak English, less than 10 percent of the population can transact or write in English and only 50 million are PC literate, according to HP executives.

So the labs team, which is comprised of roughly 15 engineers, developed a special keyboard to cater to the 14 different national languages of India. (Right now, the product only specializes in two languages--Hindi and Kannada, the state language--but the company said it will develop for all the dialects.)

Called the Gesture Keyboard (GKB), the keyboard uses handwriting recognition software to let users write with a pen, which can also change from writing mode to mouse mode. The keyboard digitizes gestures made to consonants on the keyboard, separating base consonants from phonetic modifiers. Users can write on the keyboard the way they learned to as a child, and for this reason, training time on the board takes only 10 minutes, according to Gupta.

The product launched two weeks ago in India and sells for about $50. Gupta said he believes this technology will lower the barriers for many people to get access to the vast amount of data online that the government and universities have contributed.

Right now in the country, only 15 million people have access to the Internet, as opposed to the 600 million with access to TVs.

Aiming to bridge this gap farther, HP Labs developed Printcast, a technology for porting encoded content files alongside broadcasts so that viewers can print material they've seen on TV. Many kids and adults get an education through distance learning TV programs developed by the government, and HP's Printcast would allow teachers, homemakers or community organizations to print supplemental transcripts of TV programs.

The technology, which is in field trials in India, embeds content into an MPEG 2 file, which is delivered to a device that can unwrap the data and send it to an attached printer.

Another novel technology was HP's Coffei, which is an internal name for its Pen-based Interface for Filling Out Forms. The technology is designed to do away with the process of a human being inputting data from printed forms. (India processes about 150 billion forms annually.)

The device essentially looks like a high-tech clipboard, with real paper forms attached. The $100 device recognizes the motions of a special pen, tracking it as it moves and taking in a stream of data. That data is stored on the device, which can hold information on up to 100 forms. Once the device is docked, the information is uploaded into HP's backend software.

Field trials on the technology, which is not yet commercially available, are set to be completed in the coming weeks, according to HP. The company envisions the device to be useful for anyone from the village school teacher to a railway ticker seller.

Other technologies from HP Labs India included Educenter, a digital library compiled through the broadcast-channel files on educational programming that the company is already working on. For the Educenter, the labs are working with the open-source software developed by DSpace, a digital library project between HP and MIT.

A solution for secure digital documents was also on tap Thursday. The company developed a paper scanner and software that can encode the text of a document into a six-square-inch, 2D barcode, which can't be tampered with on the paper. Would-be readers need special decryption software to uncover the original text.

Still, these products are only a fraction of HP's budget.

HP spends about $3.5 billion on research and development annually, according to Dick Lampman, senior vice president of research for HP Labs. Five percent of that amount is allotted to research on products that "look to the future," he said.

"If you're in tech, you better be looking ahead, because the ball keeps moving," said Lampmann.

- Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com

Gandhi evoked for all manner of causes

NEW DELHI – She lies on the sidewalk, fanned by supporters, surrounded by TV cameras, fasting to death to protest the displacement of some 35,000 peasant families by a major dam project.

HUNGER STRIKE: Medha Patkar (center), an activist fighting for farmers displaced by a dam, meets with a minister.

He leads a march of Hindu nationalists across northern India to protest the government's "appeasement" of minorities, especially Muslims.

Their causes couldn't be more ideologically different. Medha Patkar is a left-leaning activist who has spent 20 years trying to prevent construction of India's largest dam project. L.K. Advani is a former Indian deputy prime minister who led a mob that tore down a 500-year-old mosque in 1992, an act that set off riots that killed thousands.

But their common technique of nonviolent protest - seen this week in a Delhi hunger strike and a protest march starting in the western state of Gujarat respectively - serves as a reminder that the trappings of the Gandhian freedom movement, and occasionally the spirit, are alive and well.

Even as India grows into a 21st-century power - striking nuclear deals with America and wooing the world's biggest corporations - the nation still is often judged against the spirit of Mohandas Gandhi, its colonial-era founding father. And if critics are often quick to point out where modern India falls short in that comparison, they might put some of the blame on Mr. Gandhi himself.

"The weakness of Gandhi was that he never thought of institutions," says Pratap Bhanu Mehta, director of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. "His interest was the condition of the conscience" and to establish a link between the individual conscience and the policies of society.

It is difficult for a nonviolent resistance movement to maintain momentum over time, Mr. Mehta says, particularly in a country like India that has established its own native systems of law and government. Nobody likes to fight against himself.

Yet since the mid-1980s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Committee to Save the Narmada) has fought an Olympian struggle against four state governments to halt the construction of dams along the Narmada River. The dam was intended to bring electricity and water to four states.

Andolan founder Medha Patkar, backed by celebrities such as novelist Arundhati Roy, have marched the length of the Narmada River and succeeded in forcing the government to focus on the plight of displaced farmers, many of them members of India's disadvantaged tribes. It was the Andolan's protests that forced the World Bank to withdraw support for the Narmada project, in part because of the human cost of displacement.

In 100-degree heat, Ms. Patkar began her eighth day of fasting on Wednesday, visited by former Prime Minister V.P. Singh, who begged her to end her fast as her health deteriorated. Patkar says she will continue her strike until the government publishes its plan to rehabilitate displaced families in the Narmada region.

"Villages have been submerged, a lot of the discussion is happening [ex] post-facto," admits Ananya Vajpeyi, a fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum in New Delhi, who sat on a sidewalk near the hunger strikers to show solidarity. "But what Medha is saying is, 'Let's minimize the damage.'

"It's not hopeless. That is the nature of dissent. You have to keep going. The people here," she says, pointing to villagers from the Narmada region sitting nearby, "for them, any house saved, any livelihood saved is better than nothing."

In another part of the capital, former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee saw off fellow members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Advani and party president Rajnath Singh, in their twin protest marches. Mr. Advani's march will begin Thursday in Gujarat; Mr. Singh's march will begin in the eastern state of Orissa - the two marches will converge in Delhi on May 10.

Called a national integration pilgrimage, the marches are aimed to protest at the Congress government's policies to increase the number of Muslims in the Indian armed forces, and its supposed "soft approach" toward jihadi terrorist groups, including the group that set off blasts in the city of Varanasi, a site revered by Hindus.

"The politics of 'minorityism,' if unchecked, will prove a disaster for the Indian Nation," Advani said at a Tuesday press conference in Delhi. "Far from helping the minorities, it actually undermines their development and well-being."

Prakash Upadhaya, a fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum, warns that Advani's protest march could set off violence from Indians angry over other matters, such as the lack of economic growth in rural areas. "People have anger, and anger does not have an alternative," he says. "If the BJP fills a vacuum, that is a great danger." Previous marches, coupled by rhetoric against minorities, have sparked deadly rioting in the past from elements of the Hindu majority against minorities like Muslims.

Gandhians like Patkar say that seeing other parties adopt the trappings of Gandhianism is frustrating, and seeing a government built on nonviolence work against the cause of the Narmada region's displaced poor is depressing.

Activists say the best judge of whether a project is worthwhile is the Mahatma himself. "Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him," Gandhi wrote in his memoirs. "Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? Then you will find your doubts and your self melting away."

"This matter is not going to succeed in this environment, but we will go on fighting," says N.K. Afandi of the Jamaat-e Islami Hind, an Islamic political party. "We, especially in the Islamic movement, have to join [Patkar], because we see her struggling for the destitute, for the weak."

- Scott Baldauf, Christian Science Monitor