Saturday, September 08, 2007

Whither change?

The Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) lets out a rant on decline in social science research in a recent editorial in the journal. Read it here.

At the outset, the editorial lays out a sound argument which caught my attention and interest:
It is an irony of sorts that at a time when far-reaching changes are taking place in India’s society, economy and politics, we have an inadequate understanding of the underlying processes and larger trends. The unseating of the established order of things over the past two decades as evidenced in, for example, the assertion of the backward castes and dalits, the rise of the market economy and the jettisoning of single party rule, are a few of the many changes that should have excited social science research in India.
In a nutshell, three things seem to carry the blame for the condition- the deteriorating level of higher education, the rise of private and international funding, and a lack of funds.

The editor seems to carry a vendetta for privately funded research, often going overboard on its criticism. For instance, competitive bidding for research funds is projected as an "unhealthy practice...which has naturally contributed to the dilution of quality". I would like to understand how a merit-based distribution of funds would affect the quality of research.

A recent set of recommendations from the ICSSR (Indian Council of Social Science Research) seems to fall in the editor's favor. However, I cant help notice that all the three main proposals (increased funding, restructuring the bureaucracy, and promoting research) are staid and cannot be, I imagine, much different than what the recommendations would have been in the 1980s or the 1960s. While the field of social science research is, by its very nature, likely to stay a largely publicly-funded phenomenon in the future, that is no justification for a fixation on a singular bureaucracy and dismissal of alternative routes towards the goal of better research products.

To paraphrase a line from the editorial itself: I find it ironical that at a time when far-reaching changes are taking place in India's society, economy and politics, the editor of EPW and his friends at ICSSR seem to be caught in a time-wrap.

Sunday, September 02, 2007

And that's how we're gonna straighten out the Middle East

Opus is a syndicated comic strip that runs in many American newspapers. The comic is based on Opus, an anthropogenized penguin, and is often based on a political theme (like Doonesbury).

Today's edition of the strip offers a very accurate and insightful commentary on the US' policy in Iraq. Here it is [click image to enlarge]:













www.salon.com // Click picture to enlarge


Without wanting to take away attention from the message of this cartoon, there is an interesting affair behind its publication. The Opus website claims that this edition of the strip has been withheld from publication by a number of newspapers across the country, including the strip's home paper, The Washington Post. Apparently, editors at the newspapers were upset with the portrayal of Lola a.k.a "Fatima Struggle", a woman who decides to become a strict Muslim. Fox News rightly points out that Washington Post felt no qualms about printing a story in the strip poking fun at the late Rev Jerry Falwell (a very successful fundamentalist Christian evangelist).

Other newspaper carried the strip, but with editions. My local newspaper edited the word "middle east" in the last panel to read "world". The strip you see above is the unedited version downloaded from Salon.com, which might be the only place where the original strip has been published.

Coming back to the central idea of today's strip: Whatever the reasons for newspapers blocking/editing the strip might be, this affair only serves to starkly highlight the fact that most of them have completely failed to identify the lack of sincerity on the Iraqis' part (an attitude that the Fatima portrays), instead choosing to underplay it. Taking a cue from the administration, much of the mainstream media continues to treat Iraqi leaders as errant schoolboys rather than independent-minded individuals whose vision for their country is vastly different than America's.

Like Opus' Fatima, Nouri Al-Maliki may say "Got it!" to America's pep-talk, but has no desire to don the yellow polka dot bikini. Maliki is no Allawi, and it is unlikely that Iraqis will ever vote in another Allawi. The sooner American come to terms with this, the better off they will be.
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