QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave."
-- Patrick Henry

To Our Readers 

Your views are of interest to us. They help us balance the argument in the correct perspective. We welcome you to draw our attention to anything or opinion expressed in the Mauritius Times (or any national or international event of interest) with which you agree from your own angle or disagree due to a different appreciation of facts.

We will gratefully receive your communications at the email address:

mtimes@intnet.mu

Raida: Remember The Name

On 27 April 08, Week-End carried a nice feature on an outstanding 14-year-old girl. Her name is Raida Peer Mohamed. The accompanying colour photograph depicts a fresh, smiling face with almond-shaped eyes shining behind a pair of trendy specs. With her tussled hair cascading over her shoulders, this could easily be a picture of next door neighbour’s daughter. But, make no mistake; this is no ordinary girl next door.

Born in London of (modest) Mauritian parents, young Raida has often come on holiday to Mauritius, a country with which she has forged very strong links over the years. On every visit, it would seem she stays at the family home in Camp Levieux, at the foot of the Corps-de-Garde Mountain. It is little wonder, then, that the young girl has grown to have a special attachment to this outstanding relic of our volcanic past. So much so that she now considers it to be her mountain. When you look at the majesty with which this impressive rock rises out of the flat terrain surrounding it, you can easily understand young Raida’s love of it.

But, as I said, Raida is no ordinary girl. She sweetly describes herself as “environment friendly” and her concern for matters environmental is self-evident. During her last visit to these shores, she learnt of the project to build a garbage incinerating plant at La Chaumière to produce electricity, right at the foot of her beloved mountain. She also learnt that the plant will produce, among other toxic by-products, Dioxin which is a known carcinogenic. Horrified, the young girl immediately set about working on a project which, with the help of her classmates back home, she intends to publish on the internet in order to broadcast the dangers to a maximum audience.  

As to the future, she says she fully intends to come to live in Mauritius after her studies. This partly explains her strong objection to the project at la Chaumière which, as she says, will not only demolish Rose-Hill in no time but also adversely affect the region surrounding this town forever. Raida, like all of us, wants to live in a healthy environment. But, unlike her Mauritian counterparts, she has the temerity to do something about it. At the same time, she exhibits a disarming empathy for our passive, apathetic youth. She reckons they would have done the same but for the lack of time.

In her view, the fault lies with the education system in which the school miserably fails to teach awareness of environmental matters and private tuition does not leave enough time for reflection on these issues. I would like to add that, if our youth do not seem to care, we need look no further than the home -- life’s first school -- to find the primary guilty party. As for time, young men (some still in uniform) have enough of it but waste it all loitering at street corners, drinking cans of beer and using obscene language even as elders and young ladies pass by; some of the girls are no better!

But, if Raida’s observation holds partly true for schoolchildren of the primary and secondary cycle, what of the tertiary level? And, the adults amongst us, why are we so deluged by apathy? Where are those champions of the environment who campaigned so vigorously and successfully to stop dead a much needed transit road in the South East, thus preventing the hoi polloi access to the beauty of the Ferney Valley as well as much needed development that the highway would have brought to the villages lying in its path? I find it utterly shameful that a 14-year-old from distant shores has more gumption than all of us put together to do something about a project which, as has been learnt by bitter experience in Europe and elsewhere, is a danger to all things mineral, vegetal and animal, even poisoning the very air we breathe. 

If the rest of us are ignorant, it is extremely difficult to understand the reasoning of the wise men at Government House. Are the hordes of advisers they keep at great expense to the taxpayer there just to faire boukou? What of the technical team of the Department of Environment: doesn’t anyone take notice of what they say? Why go for an inherently dangerous system when we have a safe, workable alternative in abundance? Yes, you’ve guessed it right; I am talking of solar power. Just by installing a low-tech solar heater on every available rooftop, we would considerably reduce our dependence on electricity, the production cost of which by any existing method is set to continue climbing and adding to our carbon footprint ad infinitum. Eventually, we may be able to find a buyer for the carbon credit that solar energy would generate and use the revenue to switch to hi-tech. This would further reduce our dependence on electricity produced with dangerous, polluting technologies. But then, maybe our political masters have seen benefits from the incinerator project that the mere mortals amongst us are unable to grasp.

How I wish for the day to dawn when this country would be inhabited by a thousand Raida’s, young and old.  I wish for the day when we -- as one people, one nation -- would wake up from our collective lethargy to the folly of our decision makers and ensure a better, cleaner and safer environment for future generations. I wish for the day when we would be rid of the pervasive corruption in our society and have justice for all under an Electrocratic* system of government. I, too, have a dream!

T. Del Fuego

Quatre Bornes 

*cf. Herman Dahl’s Legacy by Raj Balkee

Of Paul and Sonia

In an interview given to Weekend newspaper (issue of 27 April 08), Cassam Uteem addresses the electoral reform problem of distorted parliamentary representation by chiseling-out, with the virtual lancet of his incisive insights into the scientific resolution of collective-choice puzzles, the cancerous cells that have invaded the body politic, while simultaneously offering healing advice about the Cornellian-dilemma-like prime ministerial ambitions of Paul and Sonia by adroitly re-casting them in the mold of the deeply humane issues evoked in the title of John Steinbeck’s famous novel Of Mice and Men.

Direct as Cassam Uteem’s argumentation is, it contains dimensions that could fruitfully be teased out more explicitly, most notably the question of whether, in 2010 or even in 2015, a non-Hindu can, with reasonable chances of winning, present himself as candidate for the position of Prime Minister of Mauritius. Cassam Uteem draws a parallel between Sonia Gandhi’s renunciation (tyaag) of the prime ministership of India after the heart-warming victory of Congress in the 2004 elections and a possible free choice by Paul Bérenger not to present himself as the MMM’s candidate as Prime Minister of Mauritius in elections due in 2010 (President Uteem emphasizes that he is NOT offering advice to that effect either to the MMM or to Paul Berenger).

The cases are not parallel. Sonia Gandhi had acquired her Indian citizenship not when she got married to Rajiv Gandhi, but only a few years (numbering in a single digit) before she led Congress to its stunning electoral victory. By contrast, Bérenger’s citizenship of Mauritius dates from his birth and that of his ancestors predates that of even the earliest citizen of Mauritius who is of Indian origin. There had been believable rumours of plots to assassinate Sonia as extremist rage spread like wildfire at the enormous success of her campaigning that culminated in her electoral victory.

No such extremism exists in Mauritius. On the contrary, as Cassam Uteem takes care to spell out, a large proportion of Mauritians, cutting across racial, religious and class divides, think that Paul Berenger has amply deserved to be Prime Minister of Mauritius. As I just said, however, direct as Cassam Uteem’s argumentation is, it falls short of 100 percent candidness by its failure to attribute blame for the humiliating prejudices that Mauritian society still suffers at the beginning of this third millennium. Cassam Uteem is willing to go as far as to attribute blame for the Mauritian malaise about the identity of the person who can pretend to be Prime Minister of Mauritius to all our leaders of political parties; he goes further and points to the autonomous, revealed-preferences antipathy demonstrated by the population following Paul Bérenger’s stint as Prime Minister during 2003-05. But, maybe because he was not fully conscious, at the time of the interview, of highly-publicized events that he surely had already noted in Bérenger’s and Sonia Gandhi’s differing public reactions in very tricky political situations, he did not spell out how Bérenger’s inability, so far and by a tragically small margin, to fully win over the confidence of the Mauritian people is of his own making.

I’ll highlight Paul Berenger’s omissions by recalling Sonia’s spontaneous actions which won her praise and uncovered her detractors’ ill-will. During a Kumbh-Mela gathering at Allahabad a few years ago and in any case before she had decided to throw herself fully into active politics, she had, as widow of Rajiv and inspiring figure within the Congress Party, been participating in the celebrations. Suddenly, without any visible prodding by any party activists that any journalist present at the event could report or capture on camera, Sonia decided to take a solemn ritual plunge in the Ganges River, just as would do any good Hindu aurat. Tens, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims thereupon rushed to her and cheered her, and this could not but be captured on camera and relayed to all newsmedia all around the world.

Contrast that with the derision with which was greeted, in the independent press, Paul Berenger’s visibly-affected donning of an Indian achkan when he welcomed Manmohan Singh during his first visit to Mauritius and brought together his hands in an awkward namaste while Manmohan had his hand extended in a western-style greeting (or, for that matter, his donning of a Chinese kimono during a Spring festival occasion), and you will understand my reservations when Cassam Uteem draws a parallel between Sonia and Bérenger.

Remember that Sonia never renounced the Catholic faith she was born into to embrace her husband’s religion of Hinduism; far from it: at the time of the kumbh mela, she had not even taken up Indian citizenship! What the hundreds of thousands who flocked to her saw in the spontaneity of her act was where her heart was – who cares about the appearance, the external paraphernalia?

S.M. Malleck Amode

Canada

O Telecom ! 

A familiar-sounding voice said tersely

in MBC-tailored English and French:

‘The number you’ve dialled does not exist!’

The world falls flat around your feet, wobbly

from deep shock, body trembling, face blenched:

Cyclone? Earthquake? Volcano? Tsunami? 

Wait a minute! How can Telecom say

that number ‘n’existe pas’? And the bills, pray?

Frustrated, you keep trying: come on, phone!

And hey! – Voice fades; there goes a ringing tone:

new ploy to make seconds pay even more?

‘Hullo!’ - ‘Oh, Hi! Are you OK? – ‘Very !

Why not’? You explain.  MT’s orangey!

MOH, Min-Vits down! Stress zooms crazy! 

*  *  * 

The ‘Law’ of ‘Rule’ – Mesopotamia 

An eye for an eye;

A tooth for a tooth!

Sounds familiar, eh!

Biblical, surely!

Yes, yet e’en before:

Hammurabi’s Code

had those core notions

In survival mode;

And earlier still,

when King Gilgamesh

and the Sumers strode

Civilisation’s

way tween the Tigris

and the Euphrates! 

Jagadish Manrakhan

May 2008 

End notes
(i) Mesopotamia, literally land between two rivers lies essentially in present-day Iraq

(ii) The Bible, St. Mathew, 5: 38.

(iii) Hammurabi (1792 – 1750 BCE) 6^th King of Babylonia is famed for his Code of 282 articles, partly based on laws prevailing as early as 2250 BCE, the Code written in the language of the people, regulated both private life and public affairs; and meant to promote ‘the welfare of the people, cause justice to prevail in the land, destroy the wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak’; Women, commoners and slaves rated lower than gentlemen’, who in turn paled in comparison with Hammurabi himself.  The first 2 lines (italics) in the poem relate to articles 196 and 197.  Farmer grievances were taken care of in Articles 48 and 49, agriculture being a vital concern.