Come December, the year-end lists start everywhere and I think they’re great fun. In that spirit, this is the first of a series of posts looking back at the year 2007. First, let me point you to Guardian’s list of 2007’s best films. The list includes Sarah Polley’s poignant drama Away From Her , Clint Eastwood’s war film Letter’s from Iwo Jima and John Curran’s very moving love story The Painted Veil, which is a personal favourite as well. I do have one huge nit to pick though. The list includes Apocalypto, Mel Gibson’s over-the-top period film about the downfall of the Mayan civilisation.
In case, you missed the movie, plot details are here. My beef with Apocalypto was not so much in terms of filmmaking technique. Vivid cinematography, nail-biting action including one exciting chase scene involving Jaguar Paw (the man) and a real jaguar, a hero you care about — it’s all there. And if lots of blood and gore and naked people chanting to the sun or tearing out animal innards is your thing, you probably enjoyed it. Although, the Newsweek review did point out that “the relentless pileup of atrocities becomes self-defeating” and “the harder Apocalypto works to shock and excite you, the less shocked and excited you become”, which I tend to agree with.
But what I was really upset about was the one-dimensional representation of an ancient civilization. By all reports, not all Mayan habits were pleasant but Mel Gibson’s portrayal of them as relentlessly and stupidly savage was off the mark. This article by Traci Arden, a scholar of classic Maya society, pointed out many of the things that were wrong with the film.
The fact that this film was made in Mexico and filmed in the Yucatec Maya language coupled with its visual appeal makes it all the more dangerous. It looks authentic; viewers will be captivated by the crazy, exotic mess of the city and the howler monkeys in the jungle. And who really cares that the Maya were not living in cities when the Spanish arrived?…. The message? The end is near and the savior has come. Gibson’s efforts at authenticity of location and language might, for some viewers, mask his blatantly colonial message that the Maya needed saving because they were rotten at the core. Using the decline of Classic urbanism as his backdrop, Gibson communicates that there was absolutely nothing redeemable about Maya culture, especially elite culture which is depicted as a disgusting feast of blood and excess.
More on this here and here. That they did commit certain brutal acts is not in doubt, but which civilisation including modern ones can escape this accusation? You only need to look at what’s happening in Iraq, Darfur, Burma, Pakistan and some parts of India (and this is just a sampling) to realise that the savage instincts of control and violence are still intact. We’ve just become more sophisticated about the methods. The fact that Gibson chose to showcase the brutality of the Mayans in exaggerated technicolour form without any nuances is problematic.
At the time, many reacted to the accusations saying that they did not see anything overtly racist about the film or that “it was just a film” and people should get off their politically correct high horses. The thing is that a lot of the time, racist messaging is clever, subtle, well-packaged or entertaining. None of this takes away from the long-term impact, unfortunately.
The other issue, of course, is creative freedom. This is a hotly debated topic in many parts of the world today with censorship rules and fatwas zipping around our heads and self-appointed moral guardians brandishing swords at the drop of a pen. I, for one, don’t think that legislation has any place in this arena. Because once you lay down laws about what a person can say, write or show, where do you draw the line? Who decides what is more offensive and what is less? Nor does anyone have the right to burn, beat up or generally act like a savage idiot because they don’t agree with something.
At the same time, it is up to artists to exercise some responsibility while delineating between truth and history, fantasy and fiction, fact and opinion. When these lines blur beyond a point, as they tend to when it comes to genres like historical fiction, it is important to be even more careful. After all, these are the records and documents we are leaving behind for future generations. And over time, the truth may be wiped out altogether and replaced by the imaginations of people like Gibson. It is also important to speak up and voice dissent when someone creates something inauthentic. Just to balance the score or set the record straight.
More on the Mayans here and take a look at this video showing the excavation of an ancient Mayan mural in San Bartolo, Guatemala.
On the night of December 2, 1984, the world’s worst chemical disaster devastated a small town in India. The Bhopal Gas Tragedy has gone down in history and few people are unaware of the facts. Of how 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas came swooping out of a Union Carbide pesticide plant. Of how the lethal fumes engulfed a sleeping town. Of how, by the time, people woke up and realised what was happening, it was too late for many of them. The gas had killed 3800 people and maimed another 11,000. The death toll continues to rise with 15,000 dead and 20 years on, tens of thousands still suffer serious symptoms from contact with the gas.
Twenty-three years later, the people of Bhopal are still battling diseases such as paralysis, partial blindness and impaired immune systems and waiting for justice. Dow Chemicals, the company that merged with Union Carbide, washed its hands off the Bhopal tragedy even though it was clearly proven that negligence had caused the disaster. After much fighting, they finally agreed to give survivors, who have to live with chronic illnesses or brain damage their whole lives, an average of $500 dollars each. In a press release, Dow spokesperson said that “$500 is plenty good for an Indian.” Splendid, isn’t it?
Here is a snapshot of how methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas affects the body.
To date, the abandoned factory continues to pollute the environment. Effluents poison the ground water. Lead and mercury float in the breast milk of mothers. Greenpeace has a detailed timeline. They don’t seem to have updated it after 2003 but it gives a snapshot of events until then. Read and weep.
Meanwhile look at Dow’s tremendous PR efforts here. Frankly, there’s something revolting about the public relations (or ‘crisis management’ as it is called) machinery that kicks into action at such times like a pack of well-trained hyenas. All laughing to the tune of lies.
We are part of an ever-evolving global society - one that values organizations such as Dow not only for our products and services, but also for the distinctive image we present to our world and its people. We don’t want people to think “chemicals” when they hear “Dow” — we want them to hear “Living. Improved Daily.” We don’t want them to think of a corporation striving to maximize profits, we want them to think of a good neighbor.
Therefore, our contributions must extend beyond profit performance. We strongly believe that if we are to be successful in the 21st Century, we must simultaneously excel in all three elements of development: economic prosperity, corporate responsibility and shareholder stewardship. And unless we’re frequently and visibly expressing a deep concern about Sustainable Development, we’re missing opportunities to position Dow as the caring, concerned global citizen our customers must believe us to be.
Yesterday, survivors marked the anniversary by going on protest marches to demand justice and holding a torchlight rally to remember the dead. They need all the voice they can muster because their own government is certainly not going to shout, or even whimper, for them. In October, a news article reported:
The centre is all set to pave the way for Dow Chemicals to invest in India, by removing all “legal hurdles” related to the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, one of the world’s biggest industrial disasters that claimed thousands of lives.
The Department of Industries has moved a Cabinet note asking the government to absolve Dow Chemicals of all legal liabilities.…. The note provides for withdrawal of the affidavit and out-of-court settlement. It is based on the Law Ministry’s opinion that the government can opt to settle out of court with Dow Chemicals as the latter does not own the financial liabilities of Union Carbide, the main accused in the case. The Chemicals Ministry has opposed this view.
When is a good time to start educating children about certain things? This is an ongoing debate in many parenting circles. The more conservative a society is in their attitudes towards ‘morality’, the more likely it is that children will reach adulthood without receiving any coherent information on important topics such as substance abuse or sexuality. Here is an interesting commercial telling people to talk to their children early about things like alcohol abuse. What do you think?
This, of course, brings me to the other big one. World AIDS Day just passed by and there was lots of talk in the print and television media about it. (Unlike a lot of other problems, HIV/AIDS does get its share of public attention and funding.) We had a lot of newspaper coverage on this in India as well but — and this is the part that flummoxes me — there is still no proper sex education offered in schools here. So basically, children can access information on HIV and sex and sexuality from the media, but not formally from the educational system in a structured way. As if doing this would somehow amount to giving them ‘permission’ for things they would otherwise stay away from.
It’s quite clear that educational institutions should include HIV and human rights / non-discrimination issues wherever they can and link it to the more formal subjects that they are relevant to. It’s astounding that some governments around the world still fail to observe this basic measure. For those who think their kids should know more and are looking to take things into their own hands, there’s lots of material available on the Internet. UNAIDS and WHO has a detailed cartoon strip that might help. This is an extract but you can go here for the full thing.
Shifting track slightly, this report by Human Rights Watch caught my attention the other day. It seems that Thailand’s success in dealing with HIV is getting a serious shot in the foot because of discrimination against its highest population of HIV positive people — drug users. Now, it’s obvious that there are severe legal implications here and these are getting entangled with the larger issue of providing treatment and creating a mighty mess. The report says:
In 2004, Thailand rescinded a national policy that explicitly permitted the exclusion of injection drug users from antiretroviral treatment programs.
But drug users still face serious obstacles in accessing needed health care. Many health care providers do not know or do not follow HIV/AIDS treatment guidelines, and continue to deny antiretroviral treatment to drug users, even those in methadone treatment programs.
When drug users do receive treatment, it is under complicated circumstances and often surreptitiously because they are worried about being turned in to the police.
Out of fear of reprisal, drug users who do receive antiretroviral treatment are unlikely to tell their physicians about their drug use, or to seek information about drug dependence treatment from their antiretroviral treatment provider. This fear is not unfounded: the report confirms that many public hospitals and clinics share information about drug use with law enforcement, both as a matter of policy and practice. Some clinicians operated a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward drug users, refusing to inquire about patients’ drug use or drug treatment history, in some cases despite knowledge or suspicion of current drug use or methadone treatment.
The government’s failure to ensure conditions in which safe exchange of information is possible compromises drug users’ access to adequate HIV and other health care services. As a result, drug users face harmful drug interactions without health care workers to consult about the dangerous potential consequences for their health and, ultimately, their lives.
The International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights (PDF), a 120-page document published jointly by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, points to the connection between protection of human rights and effective HIV programmes. The incidence or spread of HIV is disproportionately high among some populations because these groups, being vulnerable in any case, find it harder to access treatment or fight discrimination. Typically, these groups include women, children, those living in poverty, minorities, indigenous people, migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons, people with disabilities, prisoners, sex workers, men having sex with men and injecting drug users. Legally and socially, such groups need to be addressed and included in the battle against HIV. And while this may be easier said than done, it’s important to see that an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ attitude is going to hurt everyone in the end.
The campaign for 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence kicked off yesterday. Coordinated by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, the campaign runs from November 25 to December 10 every year and since 1991, has helped raise awareness about gender violence and has highlighted its effects on women globally. For more, go here.
So here’s what I thought you should know about. UNFPA has a list of the five most under-reported forms of violence against women. Brace yourself. It’s not pretty. The list includes bride-napping, breast-ironing, traumatic fistula, femicide and child marriage. Bride-napping and child marriage are reasonably common terms so here are definitions of the other three.
Breast-ironing, a traditional practice in a number of West African countries that involves crushing the breasts of young girls in order to deter male attention;
The epidemic of traumatic fistula in Africa, which is caused by gang rape and often the forced insertion of foreign objects into the rape victim. This results in the tearing of the delicate tissues separating the birth canal from the bowel and/or the bladder. Seriously injured and psychologically traumatized, the victim is left incontinent, leaking faeces, urine, or both. Too often, her family and community rejects her, to live out the remainder of her life as a pariah—doubly stigmatized—both by the rape itself and its terrible consequences.
The ongoing femicide of women in the Central American country of Guatemala. Unlike the killings of young women in Ciudad Juarez, on the El Paso/Mexico border, the wholesale murder and mutilation of Guatemala’s women continues to be enacted under a cloak of media silence and official neglect.
Sometimes, one may well wonder what the point of knowing such things is. Most of us think we live fairly powerless lives with little ability to move or change anything in the wider world out there, let alone in distant Guatemala, Mexico or Kenya. Well, the 16 Days Action Kit may change your view about how much (or little) you can do. In a nutshell, you can:
I would say that’s quite a few different options and at least a few of them are easy to do even if you’re busy, a man, a “non-feminist”, apolitical, and “not the activist type”. To go a step further, it seems to me that no. 1 is a no-brainer and should be possible to do all year round and not just for these 16 days. What do you think?
Over at The Nation, there’s an article on an interesting new book called The Politics of the Veil by historian Joan Wallach Scott, which examines the French obsession with the Muslim’s woman’s headscarf or foulard islamique. Muslim girls in France often face non-admission or expulsion from school when they choose to wear a headscarf. The Politics of the Veil gives us a history of the controversy and Wallach Scott’s research is apparently “broad and exhaustive.The article is a snapshot of what one can expect from the book and gives a brief history of the controversy. It also talks about some of the different factors involved in this debate — secularism, national identity, the idea of a homogeneous European female identity, and sexual liberation. She makes an interesting point about the last.
In reality, both Islamic Sharia and strict French laïcité produced gender systems that essentially deprived women of the right to dispose of their bodies as they wished. Indeed, in Islamic tradition, women are urged to be modest and to steer clear of tabarruj. This Arabic noun has its roots in the verb baraja, which means “to display” or “to show off,” and the noun can be translated as something like “affectation.” In A Season in Mecca, his narrative book about the pilgrimage, Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi uses the term “ostentation” to translate tabarruj, “the invariable term for a bearing that is deemed immodest or conspicuous, a hieratic stance.” Similarly, the French law born out of strict definitions of laïcité warned schoolgirls about displaying “conspicuous” signs of religious affiliation. In short, the battle between the two modes of thinking was played out in women’s bodies.
As usual, individual freedom is forgotten in the bid to fit people into strict ideological moulds. It is disturbing how even ideologies that originally start on the premise of “freeing” a certain group of people end up being restrictive and determining, and therefore ultimately oppressive, in their own way.
The headscarf issue is complex because it is rooted in several questions. How does one negotiate the path between religious freedom and secularism? What does secularism mean? The absence of religion or the freedom to practice whatever you want. If it is the latter, where do you draw the line when it comes to regulated institutions like schools? The Sikh turban, the Muslim hijab, the sacred thread worn by Hindu Brahmins, the Christian crucifix pendant — all of these are religious symbols. Banning one while allowing others is unfair but the more ‘visible’ ones tend to come under more fire than others.
Also, how realistic is it in this age of global migration to hold on to ‘national idenity’ with steely fingers. As people move around more and there are more migrants in every place, there is bound to be upheaval and redefinition of national identity. Whole masses of people cannot be expected to drop all the habits, customs and affiliations that they have been practicing for centuries. They probably would not be able to even if they tried.
In another incident just last month, British MP Jack Straw sparked off an argument around the niqab because he said it was a “visible statement of separation and of difference” and asked women visiting his surgery to consider removing it. The niqab, unlike the hijab which covers only the head, is a veil that covers most of the face, leaving the space around the eyes open. From the BBC report.
Mr Straw was putting women “into a very awkward position by compromising the faith they believe in and that is ill-placed”, Council of Lancashire Mosques chairman Hamid Kureshi told BBC Radio Five Live.
And a political rival - Liberal Democrat constitutional affairs spokesman Simon Hughes - questioned whether it was Mr Straw’s place to question the way that members of the public dressed.
“I don’t think it’s the job for somebody who represents the whole community to say to somebody who comes through the door, ‘Do you mind if you dress differently in order to talk to me?’,” Mr Hughes said.
With time, European countries will need to loosen their construct of national identity and give up on conventional notions of people looking and behaving tidily similar. Diversity does breed some amount of chaos. And chaos is not always bad. We cannot pay lip service to concepts like racial equality and diversity without making space for what that means in real terms. All people come with baggage. People from different races, religions and sexes come with different kinds of baggage. Asking them to leave that baggage at the door is hardly in keeping with the larger goals of unity and tolerance.
It’s very hard to take a serious issue and convey it in a fun manner without losing some of the seriousness. The makers of Wallace & Gromit have done it astoundingly well. Their new campaign for Leonard Cheshire Disability called Creature Discomforts, which you can view here, manages to be sincere and cute at the same time, without slipping over into sentimentality or trivialising the issues. This is probably largely due to the fact that the voices behind the characters are people with real disabilities.
The biggest messages are about stigma and access. Like Kevin Gillespie who gives voice to Brian the Bull Terrier says:
“We went to have a look at a pub that we were considering visiting on a group day out which calls itself disabled friendly, but when we got there we found there was gravel outside which made it difficult to move our wheelchairs around, an extremely sharp right turn to get into the entrance, and then a step to get to the bar! That’s not what I’d call disabled friendly.”
“It’s things like this that make you feel excluded as there are certain places I’d like to go to but can’t because of access problems”.
These barriers, however, don’t stop Kevin getting out and about locally. “It’s really important for me to actually live in, and feel part of the community. I must admit, I have lived here for five years and I cannot recall anyone looking at me as if to say ‘What planet has he come from?’ Everyone has looked at me as they do able bodied people and forgotten about the chair”.
Here is the Guardian’s opinion on the campaign and here is a video on the making of it.
One of the things that struck me is that the campaign talks about access to bars, restaurants, places like that. In developing countries, we are so far behind on this curve that it doesn’t even bear scrutiny. To begin with, there is little data on disability. When poverty and social marginalisation are added to the cesspool, disabled people are discriminated against in many more ways.It is telling that in my social circle, I seldom meet disabled people. It is a quiet but systematic exclusion that takes place so much below the surface that most of us are not even aware of it.
A recent World Bank report found that disability seriously affects economic prospects in India and “physically challenged children are four to five times less likely to be in school than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes children.” In my own experience, organizations will usually not hire a disabled person. In fact, India’s disabled employment rate seems to be falling. Deprived of economic opportunity (and even before that, education), disabled people seldom earn enough to gain access to more than the basic necessities. You don’t see them in bars or nightclubs, rarely at restaurants or malls. So people forget about the issues of disabled people because it’s easy to.
It’s a vicious cycle and I think schools hold a large piece of the puzzle. If schools sponsored a few classes that were disabled-friendly, it would help bring them into the mainstream besides inculcating awareness from a young age among the other kids, who in turn would hopefully grow up to be less discriminatory as adults. Parents would also possibly understand disabled people better if they were friends with their children, came home, stayed for tea. It would go a long way towards driving up our collective awareness and empathy up a notch. What do you think?
Globally, more than 40 per cent of respondents do not understand that AIDS is always fatal. In India, where rates of HIV are rising, 59% believe that HIV is a curable disease. These are the disturbing findings of this study on what people across nine countries think of AIDS.
In a collusion of opinion and fact, this first-ever perception audit also found that 86 per cent of adults in the United States, U.K., France, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa believe stigma and shame to be a contributor to the spread of HIV. Seventy-six per cent report lack of access to treatment to be a problem as well.
Some astonishing fallacies about access to treatment seem to be in circulation as well. According to the survey, many people mistakenly believe there is currently a cure for HIV. People also believe treatment is more widely available than it is. According to the study, “nearly half of all respondents believe that most people diagnosed with HIV are receiving treatment, when in fact only one in five people who needed treatment received it in 2006.”
The survey also suggests an enduring stigma surrounding HIV. Nearly half of the people surveyed reported being uncomfortable working with those who are HIV positive, while slightly more than half of the respondents did not want to live in the same home as someone infected with HIV.
It seems that a quarter century of AIDS education, public health campaigns and a continuous “mainstreaming” of HIV-positive people in the U.S. and Europe have done little to sort out the public’s confusion. The problem may be that while advances in treatment and prevention have fueled a misguided sense of complacency about the disease, personal prejudices have kept the stigma and shame about HIV alive.
Besides public awareness campaigns, mainstreaming HIV/AIDS awareness into education is imperative. But in many countries, attitudes towards sex and sexuality make it difficult to discuss topics like safe sex. Cultural taboos forbid speaking to children or teenagers about such matters and health becomes a distant lower priority as compared to “morality”. Avert looks at how HIV/AIDS education for young people is commonly approached in some detail here. And UNICEF has some resources that you can download here.
Of course, culture is an important parameter to keep in mind while communicating. But innovation and sensitivity should not hinder honesty or plainspeak when it comes to important, potentially life-and-death impacting factors. For example, look at this MTV commercial for AIDS prevention.
It’s funny but I’m unsure of whether it conveys the seriousness of the issue. People will laugh and even remember the ad, but will they really use a condom because it tells them to? What do you think?
We’ve been repeatedly told that climate change will affect some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. And yet another disaster has come along as hard, cold evidence. Cyclone Sidr swooped down on Bangladesh on Thursday evening, killing around 900 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless or injured. The actual numbers are probably far greater.
“We are expecting that thousands of dead bodies may be found within a few days,” Shekhar Chandra Das, deputy head of the government’s disaster management office, told AFP.
“We have not been able to collect information about casualties in many remote and impassable places due to the disruption to communications,” he said.
The irony , of course, is that these people have very little to do with burning fossil fuels. Never have so many been harmed by so few?
Meanwhile, the United Nations’ top climate change official has warned that the world will be in “deep trouble” if it fails to agree on any solutions at next month’s UN ministerial conference in Bali. Just how bad have the effects of climate change been so far? The UNEP has a factsheet on this here, which also talks about adverse changes in the hydrological cycle:
Rising temperatures are already accelerating the hydrological cycle. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, becomes less stable and produces more precipitation, particularly in the form of heavy rain bursts. Greater heat also speeds up evaporation. The net effect of these changes in the cycling of water will be a decline in the quantity and quality of freshwater supplies in all major regions. Meanwhile, wind patterns and storm tracks are likely to change. The intensity (but not the frequency) of tropical cyclones are expected to increase, with larger peak wind speeds and heavier rains.
I also came across this article which points out that the American media has been (unsurprisingly, in my opinion) quiet about the cyclone. It goes on to talk about a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security, which connects the dots between natural disasters, socio-economic problems and latent extremism to make a compelling case for why the US should be taking cyclones in Bangladesh very seriously.
Meanwhile aid efforts are on and according to an official from the UN World Food Programme the most urgent needs are food, water purification tablets, and medicines. Here is the emergency appeal issued by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which is working in the area. You can also make an online donation towards the relief efforts here.
The World Toilet Summit took place here in New Delhi earlier this month. Delegates racked their brains to come up with ideas for innovative toilets. And if you can’t help a smirk at that, consider this:
Due to the absence of an organised sanitation system, 1.8 million children across the world die of diarrhoea annually, and close to half the population in developing countries suffers health problems caused by water and sanitation defects, at any given time. The World Health Organisation estimates that 200 million people are infected with schistosomiasis — a disease caused by lack of access to hygienic sanitation facilities. Experts say open defection contaminates water and helps the spread of diseases like diarrhoea, which kills at least 4,900 people everyday, worldwide….(more).
Nothing remotely funny there, unfortunately. According to this video report, self-cleaning toilets and a fourteen-year-old inventor who has come up with an idea for preventing sewage disposal from trains at railway stations were part of the annual summit.
This UN report says that lack of sanitation facilities dooms 3 billion people to a life that is primitive and devoid of basic dignity. Apart from causing disease, lack of proper sanitation facilities can have more indirect impact as well — such as on girl’s education. Girls tend to miss school when there are no sanitation facilities because it is difficult for them to go out in the open. When there are no separate facilities for boys and girls, they don’t attend school during menstruation. It’s worse when there are no latrines at home.
In many cultures, girls and women wait until after dark to defecate if they have no latrine in the household, experiencing discomfort and sometimes serious illness as a result. When girls and women have to walk to a place distant from their home for excreta disposal, particularly at night, they are vulnerable to harassment and assault.
It’s hard to imagine people living without latrines — something that so many take for granted in this era of designer bathrooms and spa treatments — but the number of
people without access to latrines and toilets increased by some 400 million over the last decade. And with increasing migration and urbanisation and burgeoning slums, it is likely to keep doing so unless solutions are provided quickly.
On a lighter note, here’s a hilarious CWS commercial via The Bathroom Diaries. Enjoy.
The image used in the post is of Lam Sai Wing’s Golden Toilet via Travel Channel.
I came across this article in Ode Magazine today. It talks about what the West can learn from the rest of the world and highlights some key values, habits and priorities in countries in Africa and Asia. As someone from the ‘rest of the world’, and because India featured more than once, it was interesting to see that some things that one considers rather commonplace in one’s own culture are thought of as worth learning by someone, somewhere else. Undoubtedly, if I put together a similar list, it would reflect things about other cultures that they take for granted.
Anyway, the article talks about learning humility from Sri Lanka, community and raising children from Kenya, democracy from Ghana, work from Nigeria, the village from Tanzania, and ingenuity, non-violence, yoga and food from India. My favourite is happiness from Bhutan:
The king of Bhutan introduced the concept of gross national happiness (GNH), which is based on the idea that true development of society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other. That’s why for the past two decades, happiness has been incorporated as a guiding principle in Bhutan’s policies.
Over the years, we’ve made Bhutan greener than most countries and despite the advent of satellite TV and the Internet, the social fabric is still intact. These policies have also made Bhutan more secure than ever before. To us, these are all indications that our policies are beginning to realize the goal of making people happy. And that’s what all of us want: to find more ways we can engage in the pursuit of happiness.
An entire country which pursues happiness — what can be more fabulous than that? No countries from South East Asia and the Middle East feature. Zen and the art of eating fish from Japan? Martial arts and food from China? Well, I suppose it’s impossible to be really inclusive in any list.
Increasingly, there’s a lot of thrust on cross-cultural learning and the importance of understanding other cultures because of the shrinking world we live in. With the Internet at our disposal, it’s easier than ever before to know about other cultures — at least at a prima facie or superficial level. Whether or not, this fuels more unity is still debatable. In some case, knowledge does equal understanding and better empathy. But in others, a single cultural tradition or habit that you find distasteful or unethical can turn you off a particular culture and prevent you from caring enough to find out about other aspects. Sometimes, there is an uneasy balance of respect of repugnance. On the whole, I would say it’s better to know rather than not. I think one of the measures of the Internet’s success is that there is still a great deal of communication and harmony between individuals in different countries today despite overwhelming counter factors like terrorism and war.
On the night of December 2, 1984, the world’s worst chemical disaster devastated a small town in India. 
The campaign for 
Over at 
Also, how realistic is it in this age of global migration to hold on to ‘national idenity’ with steely fingers. As people move around more and there are more migrants in every place, there is bound to be upheaval and redefinition of national identity. Whole masses of people cannot be expected to drop all the habits, customs and affiliations that they have been practicing for centuries. They probably would not be able to even if they tried.
Globally, more than 40 per cent of respondents do not understand that AIDS is always fatal. In India, where rates of HIV are rising, 59% believe that HIV is a curable disease. These are the disturbing findings of 
The