RONALDINHO

The other day AC Milan coach, Leonardo, said of the twenty nine year old Ronaldinho that today he is no more the player he was. Two days after, the great footballer said that was not thinking of retirement at the end of this season. All this is sad, very sad indeed; just about three or four years back he was the darling of the connoisseurs of "the beautiful game” all over the world.

I took note of this Brazilian genius in Brazil’s quarterfinal match against England in 2002 World Cup. What a creative pass he gave Rivaldo to score the equalizer for Brazil! And what a spectacular goal he himself scored soon after from a free kick from about forty yards! The winning goal! Let football experts debate whether Ronaldinho’s hit his target or the ball just happened to land in the net. For us, the goal remains imprinted in our memory. That World Cup did not see a better free kick.

He was red-carded soon after, perhaps a bit too harshly. In any case, he had already won the match for Brazil. The English football scribes still haven’t gotten over the fact that England could not beat the ten men Brazilian squad in that quarter final match.

The two times World Footballer of the Year played such artistic, masterly football for Barcelona. He was the happy face of football then; there was always a cheerful grin on his face as he played. His energy seemed to be endless. When he played, the whole field was his territory. On the eve of a crucial Barcelona-Chelsea Champions League match, the redoubtable Chelsea coach, Jose Mourinho, not known for complimenting the opposition, said of a not-fully fit Ronaldinho that he could be dangerous even if he was only seventy percent fit!

Brazil, for ever the favourite to win the World Cup, was expected to walk away with the Cup in 2006, with such attacking players as Ronaldinho, Kaka, Adriano, Ronaldo, Robinho, and Roberto Carlos in the team. But it was going to be Ronaldinho’s World Cup. That under-prepared and overconfident team under an overconfident coach played unattractive football and were out of the World Cup in the quarterfinals. For the first time in twelve years Brazil was not playing a World Cup final match. The one who disappointed most was Ronaldinho. His passes were abortive and awful, and his free kicks sailed well over the bar. He did not score a goal, but more importantly, he played unimaginative and unappealing football.

World Cup finals create and destroy reputations. In the more recent years, his two headers in the 1998 World Cup final made Zinadane Zidane. World Cup 2006 harmed Ronaldinho’s reputation, and probably undermined his self-confidence. He of course had a successful 2006-2007 season with Barcelona, but Dunga, the new coach of Brazil, was not impressed. Ronaldinho has played for Brazil under him only a few times, and when he did, he hardly figured in the starting eleven. He was not picked for the Confederations Cup. It looks like 2006 was his last World Cup.

One heard of his injury, his late night parties, his petulance, absence during training, indiscipline, differences with the Barcelona coach Rijkaard, and his colleague Eto’o. Some held him responsible to an extent for Barcelona’s poor performance in 2008. There wasn’t much sympathy for him when he was virtually shown the door.

It is always sad when not merely a great footballer, but a supreme artist like Ronaldinho fades into the background too suddenly, and so quickly. I for one would like to think that his unexpected and inexplicable decline is due, to a considerable extent, to his feeling responsible for Brazil’s poor show in the World Cup 2006. It looks like I will miss – sorely miss - his endearing grin in the football stadiums of South Africa next year.

THE “ENGLISH DIVIDE”

New situations, sometimes engineered, may bring about new divides among people, marginalizing many who cannot benefit from them. It is difficult to anticipate what might cause a serious social divide: people’s body weight or height or complexion, the body language they use, or the cultural practices they follow. Or the language they speak!

One often tends to ignore that like religion, race, caste, etc., language too could give rise to exclusion. It is generally viewed as a harmless, innocent thing, just a medium of communication. So, despite evidence from time to time in the form of language-based violence, etc., one is not always alert about its negative potential.

Alongside so many divides in our country, there has been, for sometime, the “English divide”. It has intensified now, with computer having entered the society as the main instrument with which to gain best access to the resources of what has been called the “knowledge society”. Literacy stands redefined, and has now come to mean computer literacy. And computer literacy is not just about knowing how to operate the computer; it is about knowing English as well. The computer has bolstered the English divide considerably.

There is yet another social phenomenon that has contributed to strengthening the said divide. In the recent years there has emerged in our country a parallel educational system for a host of reasons. The so-called tutorial colleges constitute one of its most visible institutions. These non-degree awarding institutions aim to offer quality training so that their students qualify for admission to the best institutions in the country or get attractive jobs. These being expensive institutions, many cannot join these, and stay excluded from these opportunities. The dominant language of instruction here is English.

The way English is taught at school complicates the problem. The traditional method of teaching the language by the so-called “grammar-translation” method was discredited some years ago as being unscientific. Its success was ignored. The method that was recommended in its place emphasizes the idea that a language must not be taught with the help of some other language, except perhaps very minimally; so English must be taught almost exclusively through English. The expensive English medium schools are better equipped to adopt this method than the government schools. The latter cannot also go back to the earlier grammar-translation method, thanks to the prevalent negative attitude to it which is reflected in the present policy of English language teaching. The result is that in the non-English medium schools learners hardly have the opportunity to learn English reasonably well.

Our response to the English divide has been emotional and inadequate. Many tend to hold English responsible too for the neglect the Indian languages have suffered. Some still think that the solution lies in doing away with English, and developing the Indian languages, the scheduled ones, to start with, so that they successfully substitute English. Apart from the fact that it is easily said than done, this leads to exclusion – speakers of the non-scheduled languages get excluded. Besides, substituting English by the Indian languages does not eliminate the need for a link language for interstate interaction, and a global language for international communication. Our refusal to learn English would lead to our exclusion from the rest of the world, and making English available to only those who would need it for international communication would amount to promoting a small section of our population.

THE MULTILINGUAL LANDCSAPE OF INDIA: WHAT FUTURE?

The rich linguistic diversity in India has been generally viewed as a national treasure. However it has never been free from threat; ironically but not unexpectedly, helpful environment for it hardly exists in multilingual societies. Especially when such a society is hierarchical.

Some education in the mother tongue, as recommended in the “three language formula”, can ensure that the language remains functional, and thus the linguistic diversity protected. But in India the languages are many, and the speakers of some are too few. Demands are made from time to time to recognize one dialect or the other as language. Some languages are still oral. In such a scenario, mother tongue education in practice has become education in some scheduled language. What has happened is that every individual, who has studied in an institution where the three-language formula has been implemented, has become multilingual. However, more and more Indians becoming multilingual for reasons of education or compulsions of day-to-day life is one thing, and the preservation of the linguistic landscape of the country is quite another.

Preserving our rich linguistic diversity basically amounts to ensuring that there is no language death. According to a recent UNESCO Report many Indian languages are under threat. The central government has recognized the need for affirmative action in this regard, and has initiated a programme of action. But what can be realistically achieved, under existing circumstances, for a language more likely to become extinct than survive, is the documentation of its lexicon and the grammar, its proverbs, folk songs and folktales, etc., and the knowledge of its speakers in terms of which they lived their daily life. This would ensure that an extinct language (and the related knowledge system) remains in the archives and is not lost to the world. A language (or dialect) need not die when all its speakers die, or when all its speakers shift to another language (or dialect). But such an archival approach to the preservation of language derives from the acceptance that language death cannot always be successfully fought.

But doesn’t it amount to compromising with the goal of preserving the multilingual reality of our country? In the present circumstances this goal does appear to be rather idealistic. We live in the age of “information”, and in a world made small by technology. For everyone to have access to the opportunities the world offers, the role of language cannot be underestimated; after all, it is through language that knowledge is created, disseminated and acquired. Now languages under threat are those that do not (or have ceased to) function in the domains of education, governance, and economic activities. The knowledge available in these languages, in terms of which the speakers of the same had once negotiated with the world, has become unhelpful for them to deal successfully with a different world. This creates a compelling situation for speakers of such a “disadvantaged” language to shift to the language of education, opportunity and privilege in their own context. It comes as no surprise, then, that so many languages are endangered.

A social or cultural practice is safe as long as its practitioners attach some value to it; even symbolic, but the same does not hold for language. Language must have a much more significant role in day-to-day life. Therefore it might be easier for a community to preserve its cultural practices under unfavourable conditions than its language. An aggressive cultural localism may not be the best solution to the problem of language (or cultural) endangerment. Exclusivist in nature, and it would create more problems than it might solve.

A language is safe if it has a function in day-to-day life. An organism would not survive if its habitat were destroyed. Mother tongue education would give a language its habitat, but it is no simple task. It appears that India can protect its linguistic landscape only if its commitment to it becomes as strong as it is to equality, democracy, secularism, and similar other socio-political values. Is this a likely scenario?

MANMOHAN SINGH'S PROPOSAL FOR WORLD CLASS UNIVERSITIES IN INDIA

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently announced a number of major projects in science and technology education and research: to be set up are five Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research, twenty IIITs, and ten NITs. Six new IITs have started functioning and two more are to be set up. Institute for Space Technology has already been set up. The second campus of TIEFR is coming up in Hyderabad. He also talked about his government’s plans to set up thirty new Central Universities as part of institution building programme during the 11th plan period. All these might sound good to many.

He had earlier proposed the setting up of world-class universities in India. Going by newspaper reports, he didn’t give many details about the proposed universities; for example, are non-Indians going to be on the faculty? Would a member of the faculty get a permanent position after a year’s probation at the university?, etc. In any case, this proposal reportedly didn’t get support from UGC, Central Higher Education Review Committee, and Deputy Chairperson of the Planning Commission, among others. As reported in Deccan Herald (November 26, 2008), UGC is unsympathetic to it because it would set up a hierarchy among universities. This appears surprising – by assigning grade to universities and colleges, isn’t National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) already doing it? As for the views of the university academics, if at all they had deliberated on this proposal of the Prime Minister, there is no mention of these - in the national media at least.

In recent years no generally held credible ranking system has shown that there are world-class universities in India. However, quite a few university teachers in our country express skepticism about the objectivity of these rankings, but these critics haven’t developed a more reasonable and more acceptable ranking system that would show that our universities really rank much higher than what the existing ranking systems assign to them. The Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Ahluwalia is right that it would take about 15 or 20 years for a newly set-up university to acquire the world-class status, assuming of course the usual things: high quality students and faculty, healthy academic environment, commitment to excellence in research and teaching, etc.

Surely no major central university in India was set up with the aim of being among the best in the country alone. But the best of them can be said to have achieved not more than that. Dr. Singh’s proposal amounts to his saying that none of them inspires general confidence that it can grow into a world-class university if provided with additional resources. So if India must have a world-class university, then such a one must be set up; no “upgrading” of an existing university would serve the purpose.

Setting up of special institutions almost always means diverting of resources to these, as a result of which the existing institutions, divested of resources would suffer. Circumspection is needed even if the allocation to the existing institutions remains unaffected. Helping them to modernize and improve standards would require additional financial support for them. It may not be in the best interests of higher education in our country if there are one or two great universities, but dozens and dozens of them failing to offer quality education.

Some years ago at least a couple of our universities were among the top hundred universities in the world. One wonders whether ours have declined or whether others have progressed. Success stories of the relevant universities in our neighbourhood at least - Japan, China, and South Korea – and stories of our own failure together can help us understand what steps we need to take to raise the standard of teaching and research in our universities. Mere setting up of new universities with global aspirations may not take us very far.

“IF AMERICA IS SO BAD,

why doesn’t Chomsky leave America?” This is the question I have been asked whenever I presented Chomsky’s political writings, whether in a classroom or at a seminar. The same happened in the recent seminar on Chosmky in Pondicherry too. I had never any problem in answering it, because Chomsky has answered it himself. What he has said is essentially the following: there is space for dissent in America, and it is still a great country as far as freedom of expression is concerned. Terry Eagleton writes that Chomsky is “offered a bodyguard when he speaks on US campuses”. The article does not say anything about whether security is provided to him at his request, or it is a State initiative, etc. Of course more often than not, bodyguards mean hardly anything more than symbolic. Not that symbols do not matter. In this case it clearly does. There may not be many countries in the world where an intellectual dissenter is provided security to disseminate his views - the one who has been relentlessly criticizing the State policy, especially its foreign policy, for about four decades. In any case, some delegates in the Pondicherry seminar were dissatisfied with Chomsky’s answer. They felt that he was somewhat cynically exploiting the decency and generosity of the State.

Actually it is not why Chomsky lives where he does, that is of interest to me here, it is the attitude of those who ask this question that does, which is this: if you think this place is so bad, leave!

There is arguably nothing very unusual about it. Sometimes one dissociates oneself from one’s family when one finds the atmosphere unbearable. Many support this attitude; they think that instead of constantly finding fault with others in the family, even with the best of intentions, one should leave. It is better to part in peace than stay and create an unhappy environment. Whatever merit there may be to this attitude, there is a problem when one has the same attitude towards a dissenter in the larger context of the State.

There are well known intellectuals in our country who criticize the policies of the State and the Union government. Should we ask them to leave the state or the country, as the case may be, I asked those delegates in Pondicherry. They didn’t say “no”, neither of course did they say “yes”; they just didn’t answer, and that’s something that I find worrisome.

India is the best example of a plural country; no country in the world shows so much variety as does India. Here it is not at all unexpected that the interests of two groups would sometimes clash. Exclusion of someone for his views because some others find them unacceptable is something that our country cannot just afford.

However, whatever they may say in private, I do not know of anyone in India who in public has demanded that a critic of the Indian state should leave the country. Americans may ask that question to Chomsky, but why must we accord legitimacy to that question here by raising it, even at a seminar?

RECENT TERRORIST ATTACKS ON MUMBAI

The recent terrorist attacks on the CST railway station, Taj Hotel, Oberoi-Trident hotel, and Nariman House a week ago have visibly upset the metropolitan population of India; they are “angry and hurt as never before”, as the headline of The Hindu of December 6, 2008 puts it, reporting the Prime Minister’s words. In the meantime, the Union home minister, the Maharashtra chief minister and the deputy chief minister, all resigned on “moral” grounds. Such moral upsurge in our leaders was awe-inspiring. But the cynics felt all this was mere whimper. If there was any noise, it was in the Minister of external affairs’ and the Congress President’s tough talk against the hostile neighbour from where, it was strongly believed, had come those terrible people who created havoc in Mumbai.

Anyway, all the talk about steps to be taken to prevent such occurrences increase the safety that we heard on television during those terrible hours could hardly leave an ordinary old Indian like me reassured. Thanks to the Internet, one has access these days to information disseminated elsewhere. According to a report in The New York Times of December 2, 2008, US had warned India in mid-October about the possibility of terror attacks on tourist places in Mumbai which attract foreigners. Apparently it was too general for our security agencies at some high level to act on, although the likes of me fail to see how. In any case, the local Mumbai police top brass seemed to have alerted the five star hotels, who do not seem to have taken all this seriously either. After all, isn’t it only trains and crowded markets that interest the terrorists, they might have thought. In course of the sixty plus hour non-stop electronic media coverage we got to know that in addition to the all-too familiar intelligence failure, there were such complications as the coastline being unguarded, the police hopelessly under-equipped, the bulletproof jackets given to them of very poor quality, the terrorists more well informed than the police in every relevant way, NSG personnel arriving too late, and they being poorly informed about the layout of the buildings under seize, and much else. Considering their severe limitations, what the police and the NSG did was simply remarkable.

After a terrorist attack there is almost a routine demand for tough laws to deal with terrorists. But this time, the demand was for hot pursuit, since the terrorists were believed to be Pakistanis. But what laws can protect the citizens if the coastline is unguarded or the police is ill trained and under-equipped? Is hot pursuit really a solution when new training camps can be set up elsewhere? International diplomatic pressure can help, but it has its limitations. For ordinary citizens, naive about the diplomatic discourse, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, came and assured her government’s support for India, and on the following day, went to Pakistan, and reportedly felt pleased with the anti-terrorist steps that the Pakistani government assured her of taking.

India has known terrorist attacks for more than fifteen years now. But this has not lead to improvement in the functioning of the intelligence network to the required level. This has not lead to a better-trained police force to deal with this particular menace. This has not lead to shunning corruption at least in buying arms and ammunitions for our police. What a shame that our policemen went to fight terrorists not knowing that their bulletproof jackets were fake. During the 60 odd hour media engagement with terrorists, one hardly noted any strong demand that corruption in buying ammunition be probed and the guilty be exposed. No one asked why the coastline was left unguarded.

We are intensely aware that India is a soft state. We know that the problem is complicated manifold because of dishonesty, corruption, inefficiency, and lackadaisical approach to things. These have become acceptable part of our public life. Our country, we are afraid, will remain an unsafe place unless there is significant improvement in this area.

HAND OF GOD GOAL

When asked at a meeting with newspersons in Kolkata yesterday which was the best goal he ever scored, Diego Maradona said “Hand of God goal”. Probably it was said rather jocularly, but not all the newspersons present seem to have taken it that way. In any case, this is one of the two goals that have become part of football legend, the other being the one he scored minutes after this goal. The first one was ugly, and the second, sublime. But where the ugly scored over the sublime is the discourse of football, which acquired the phrase “hand of God goal”. In fact, almost fittingly, Maradona is the one responsible for the phrase too – he described it as a goal that was scored “a little with the head of Maradona, and a little with the hand of God”. The phrase has the force of a proper noun - since the great man’s, surely goals have been scored through cheating, and will continue to be, but the phrase will not refer to any other.

I think not many would have cared to remember the first goal if he hadn’t scored within minutes that absolutely unbelievable second goal, which has been voted as the first best goal of the century. Some even said he made amends with this goal. He scored a good goal in the semi-final, but didn’t score in the final of that World Cup, which Argentina won under his captainship. However, had he not scored that great goal, and someone else had scored the team’s second goal, taking Argentina to the semi-final, the infamous goal would have been forgotten amidst the victory celebrations of the World Cup. Who would have really worried about one illegitimate goal of the World Cup winning team, except of course the team that had lost out. Even now, two decades after the incident, there is at least one player of that English team, who is still bitter about that goal and has not forgiven Maradona.

We might like to see the “hand of God” goal in a different context. Just four years before they played that World Cup quarterfinal match, Argentina had suffered humiliation in the hands of England in the Falklands War, and the nation was deeply hurt - some say it still is; it sees UK as having occupied the islands that actually belong to it. Against this background, the football field had become an extension of the battlefield, and the match an opportunity for Argentina to redeem some honour. After 50 minutes of play when Maradona scored with his hand, and the goal was allowed, it was the turning point in that match. With that goal, England sank, as of course did the referee. Before England could recover from the frustration, helpless anger, and distress, Maradona scored his second. One cannot help feeling that the dazzle of that legendary goal was due in part to the psychological state of the English players at that stage. England recovered late and the brilliant Lineker scored and reduced the margin of defeat. It was actually with that “hand of God” goal that Maradona had sealed England’s fate. That goal may not be Maradona’s best, but it was certainly the most effective goal he ever scored.