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Where have good manners gone?
http://www.catholicregister.org/content/view/2880/858/
Written by Sheila Dabu, The Catholic Register,

TORONTO - From the catwalk to the classroom, former fashion model Judi Vankevich is a role model of good manners for kids. Vankevich, a.k.a. the Manners Lady, is a mother of three and former beauty pageant contestant who says learning manners was a staple in her family when she was growing up in Mississauga.

“I realize that Canadians have a worldwide reputation for having good manners,” she said.

“I want to help Canadians re-earn that reputation and pass it on to the next generation.”

But it could be a losing battle as several etiquette experts say traditional manners and civility seem to be going out of fashion.

Prof. Pier Massimo Forni, who co-founded the Civility Project at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore 12 years ago, said there is a general perception that society is less well-mannered today.

So how did this happen? Many experts believe an increasingly busy world wired into TV, online social networking, iPods and BlackBerries has been causing a decline in social skills. What follows, they argue, is a decline in manners and civility. “We don’t communicate face to face any more and have sort of lost that ability to communicate effectively,” said Louise Fox, etiquette coach for the TV show Style by Jury. At the Williams household in Cobourg, Ont., web surfing and TV watching are infrequent past times for 10-year-old Sam and 12-year-old Emmy. Their mother, Helen, said turning off the television or computer means tuning into family.

According to several studies, the Williams family experience is increasingly rare.

In a February 2009 study in the British journal Biologist, Prof. Aric Sigman reported that children now spend more time at home in front of a computer or TV, to the point where TV is “displacing the parental role” and eclipsing “by a factor of five or 10 the time parents spend actively engaging with their children.” With increased social networking among younger children, direct virtual interaction is replacing many forms of direct social interaction, the study suggested.

It also pointed to a trend of sparse family time.

“Couples now spend less time in each other’s company, more time at work, commuting or in the same house but in separate rooms using different electronic media devices.” The study also noted an irony: as electronic media spreads and makes the private sphere “available in almost every sphere of the individual’s life,” it’s also leading to our physical and social disengagement from one another. We’re tuned into our iPods, but tuning out of the world around us. Williams, a senior producer at CanadianParents.com , said limiting her kids’ onscreen and online time helps her and her husband answer their children’s inquiries about questionable behaviour on TV.

Add into the mix of our technological toys more stress in today’s world of deadlines, debt, corporate ladders and busy family schedules and there doesn’t seem to be any time to even consider social graces.

“As we rush in what is often a mad rush towards the attainment of our professional goals, we don’t have the luxury to slow down,” Forni said from Baltimore. It also doesn’t help that in this “age of self,” there isn’t much value put into the idea of self restraint, he said. In addition, the technological revolution has led to the norm of anonymity. Forni said people are becoming less inhibited, saying or doing things in e-mails or cyberspace that they normally wouldn’t do in person.

Now, some say it’s time to return to basics and good old-fashioned family time.

“People don’t even have family dinners any more. (Kids) don’t learn about manners around the dinner table,” said Fox, owner of Etiquette Ladies in Toronto, which hosts etiquette seminars. Cindy Post Senning, great granddaughter of 20th-century etiquette guru Emily Post and director of the Vermont-based Emily Post Institute , said the home is the best place to start learning about social skills.

“Like any skill, you have to practise them and learn them,” she said.

Having good manners can be good for you on many levels. For starters, Senning said in today’s economy, good manners can give a job applicant an edge over an equally qualified competitor. And tuning out technology, learning more social skills and building closer family ties and social support can also have health benefits.

According to Sigman, too much time spent online can lead to social isolation, lack of social support and loneliness which, in turn, has been linked to diabetes, strokes, cancer and dementia.

On the Indian Elections –Essay by Slumdog Millionaire Author
From the BBC World Service

As voting gets underway in the Indian elections, The Strand has commissioned some of the country's most important writers, Vikas Swarup and others, to tell us what they think about India today.

Vikas Swarup is the man behind the novel that became the multi-award winning film Slumdog Millionaire. In this essay written especially for The Strand, he expresses his opinions on the strengths and challenges he believes India faces in the 21st century.

Click to listen on your computer

Does anyone really know what’s going on in Pakistan?
Failed policy or failed state?
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/
Excerpts from www.dawn.com - Karachi | By Cyril Almeida | Friday, 01 May, 2009

Does anyone really know what’s going on in Pakistan? Like, really know? One week, the dominant narrative is that we’re a nuclear power about to be overrun by hordes of militants, a country on the verge of catastrophic failure.

The next week, the army pounds Lower Dir and Buner and suddenly the Taliban vanish and suddenly it seems that the state does in fact have some teeth left and that we may see out the threat from militancy after all.

So which is it? Apocalypse or sunny blue skies? Well, neither. We’re not at the point at which Pakistan will disappear six or 12 or 18 months down the road. Nor have we turned the corner and are on our way to wiping out the militants. What is being contested though is the shape Pakistan will take in the next five to 10 years.

Will we sink to a low-level equilibrium, one where security is tenuous, the daily grind grows progressively more difficult and we face the prospect of a ‘lost’ generation, or will we rise to a higher-level equilibrium, one where Pakistan is no more asphyxiated by its security-obsessed world view and knuckles down to becoming a middle-income country which offers its people real economic and social opportunities?

The only thing that’s clear at the moment is that the status quo cannot continue much longer. There is a rising tide of militancy and it’s quantitatively and qualitatively a bigger problem than it was five, seven or 10 years ago. Cutting through all the complexities and difficulties though, at the root of that growing strength lies the security establishment’s continuing distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ militants.

Ultimately, that’s what is causing the great national uncertainty. The politicians may be inept, the state’s resources inadequate, the army’s counterinsurgency capabilities suspect, but until the security establishment decides to abandon its policy of distinguishing between good and bad, white and black, ‘our’ problem and ‘their’ problem, we will never be able to get out of this mess.

So if the security establishment does not change course, a low-level equilibrium is all but guaranteed, the only question being how bad it will get. And since the calculations of how far the security establishment will go in crushing which groups of militants are shrouded in secrecy, it is not difficult to see why doomsday scenarios have increasingly gained currency. But the real question is whether it ever made sense in the first place to put the militants in different categories. Did it make sense to say that the Haqqanis and the Hekmatyars — the militants oriented towards Afghanistan — were not our problem, while the Al Qaedas and its affiliates — the ones inclined to stir up trouble inside Pakistan — were our problem?

Frankly, the evidence of cross pollination, of good turning bad, of white turning black, has been available since very early on into what was then known as the ‘war on terror’. The security establishment didn’t even need to go out and look for the evidence; the militants themselves brought it to the highest ranks of the Pakistan Army.

On Dec 25, 2003, two suicide bombers struck Musharraf’s motorcade in Pindi. One of the attackers, Muhammad Jameel, hit the car carrying Nadeem Taj, who went from being Musharraf’s military secretary to DG Military Intelligence and finally DG ISI. Muhammad Jameel’s case makes nonsense of the distinction between good and bad militants. From Ismail Khan’s report in this paper on Dec 29, 2003:

'Dawn’s investigation revealed that Muhammad Jameel, 23, was affiliated with the banned Jaish-i-Mohammad, a militant organisation that had training camps in Rishkore near Kabul in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and was actively involved in the occupied Kashmir….'

'Investigations revealed that Muhammad Jameel, resident of Androot, Police Station, Torarh in Poonch district, Azad Kashmir, had received only primary-level education and was a Hafizul Quran (memorised the Holy Book by heart).' 'Fired by fiery speeches by jihadi leaders, Jameel went to Jalalabad via Torkham in eastern Nangrahar province in January 2001 through an Afghan cloth merchant in A J&K. Soon afterwards, he moved to Kabul and lived in Darul Aman area on the outskirts of the Afghan capital.'

'Jameel, however, was wounded and captured when the US-backed Northern Alliance attacked Kabul later that year. He was shifted to a hospital and remained under treatment for 15 days. The transitional government in Afghanistan led by President Hamid Karzai handed him over to Pakistani authorities along with 29 other militants that same month and they were flown to Peshawar in a military aircraft.' 'They were re-arrested by the Pakistani authorities and charged with entering Pakistan without travel documents.

'Significantly, though, Jameel was declared ‘white’ by security agencies when interrogated by a Joint Interrogation Team in April last year. The JIT had concluded that the suspect was not involved in any anti-state activities and since nothing adverse had been found against him, the JIT had unanimously declared him ‘white’ implying that his custody was not required by the agencies.'

In April 2002, Muhammad Jameel was the quintessential ‘good’ militant, one fighting in Afghanistan, not ‘our’ problem and of such little concern to the security establishment that they actually let him walk free. Twenty months later, Jameel blew himself up while trying to kill Musharraf. Now imagine the ramifications of the good versus bad distinction that has held firm for nearly a decade. How many more Muhammad Jameels are out there today? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? Twenty or thirty thousand? Does anyone really know, even in the security establishment?

What is extremely unlikely is that they have already reached a critical mass. Even if they number in the tens of thousands, the militants today can’t really overrun the country and knock over the state. What they can do though is push us into a low-level equilibrium, where violence is endemic, security scarce, the economy is in the doldrums and quality of life is on the wane. And from there, if the security establishment still doesn’t budge, the distance to becoming a truly failed state may be uncomfortably short.

cyril.a@gmail.com
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists