The making of a global villain

While repeating itself, history does leave foot-marks of discerning patterns often ignored by the forces that coerce, invade, or conquer other societies.

There are no laws in history, and nor is history merely a string of facts. While repeating itself, history does leave footmarks of discerning patterns often ignored by the forces that coerce, invade, or conquer other societies. No wonder, each war surprises the invader as the society being attacked responds in unexpected ways. Clearly, power over people stretches beyond technological prowess and territorial control. The scars of humiliation it inflicts on the invaded societies resurface in unimaginable forms, often shocking the invader. Borne out of such pattern is the unexpected rise of the dreadful killers who have been indoctrinated to fight for the creation of an Islamic State. 

The Pulitzer Prize winning author Joby Warrick traces the roots of the leader who was a petty criminal in his early days in Jordon’s al-Jafr prison. Were it not for a general amnesty given to more than twenty-five hundred prisoners following the demise of King Hussein in 1999, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi would not have gained notoriety as the dreaded founding father of what is now known as the Islamic State or the ISIS. Returning home in 1993 after fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, Zarqawi had found a sense of purpose in confronting the perceived enemies of Islam, first in Jordon which had an uneasy alliance with the religious fundamentalists and later in Iraq where jihadist were at the receiving end of the powers that be.   

Black Flags offers a gripping narrative on a jihadist movement that emerged out from a concoction of political instability, sectarian conflict and armed intrusion in the middle east, and seeks to establish a caliphate whose zone of influence is projected to cover vast swathe of land across Northern Africa, Southern Europe and West Asia. Though prepared to start small, Zarqawi viewed himself as a modern incarnation of Nur ad-Din Zengi, the 12th Century warrior-prince, who had destroyed the imperialist forces in establishing a single sultanate extending from southern Turkey to the Nile River. By erroneously anointing him as the high priest of terrorism in 2003, identifying him as a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the US had only served Zarqawi’s cause by launching his career as one of the century’s great terrorist. 

Zarqawi didn’t let the US down, unleashing a reign of terror with his signature act of beheading the American hostage Nick Berg in 2004. The images he posted in the cyber space made him an icon and hero to many thousands of young men and women who saw him as avenging the Muslim nation for centuries of perceived humiliations and defeats. At one time, hard-core jihadist had streamed into Iraq at a rate of 100 to 150 a month to join ‘the sheikh of the slaughterers’. So persisting has been his charisma that years after Zarqawi’s death in the US air strike in 2006, support has continued to pour in from as many as 86 countries in support of the cause. As much a blow by blow account of the unleashed savagery, Black Flags is a study of the multiple-personality disorder afflicting this terrorist mastermind. 

Could deep personal insecurities and shattering religious guilt lead an ordinary convict on an arduous journey of death and destruction? Could the combination of American jets and the Arab jails be the fertile grounds for the jihadist to germinate? Could it be the strategic failure of the ruling elites and the invading forces that helped raise the black banners of violent dissent? Using his reporting skills, Warrick creates a revealing portrait of the man and his enduring legacy. In doing so, he draws heavily on Zarqawi’s personal immediacy with three important persons: Basel al-Sabha, the doctor who had treated Zarqawi in prison; Abu Haytham, the Jordan’s intelligence service officer who had trailed Zarqawi in his early years; and Nada Bakos, a young CIA officer who was the agency’s top expert on Zarqawi.  

There are many what-if moments in the absorbing thriller that lends credence to the widespread impression that by corralling Islamist radicals and ordinary Iraqis in the lawless desert pen, US officials have inadvertently created a ‘jihadi university’ that allows the Islamist ideas to pass from one generation of fighters to the next.  Had it not been for the US invasion of Iraq, the Islamic State’s current butcher, Dr. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, would likely to have lived out his years as a college professor. Instead, he joined the ‘jihadi university’ to keep Zarqawi’s black flags fluttering with a current monetary worth of over half a billion dollars. 

While many believe that the idea of the Islamic state has as much chance of survival as an ice cream cone in the desert, Baghdadi instead believes that raising the caliphate’s ancient banner would make righteous Muslims fall into line. Will they or will they not, the world is at the cross-roads of its most defining moment in history.   

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS
by Joby Warrick
Bantam Books, London
Extent: 344, Price: Rs 699 

This review was first published in Deccan Herald on November 27, 2016.

Is cash a monetary curse?

A tax regime is incompatible with peoples’ perception of living in a truly democratic society, posing a challenge to balance an individual’s right to privacy with society’s need to enforce regulations!

Cash has undoubtedly proven a curse, irrespective of its color, for those who have been queuing up at the bank counters following the recent currency demonetization in India. The unprecedented cash crunch has made many wonder if cashless is the better way to the future? It may indeed be but despite the proliferation of alternate payment mechanisms – plastic currency and electronic cash transfer – unprecedented amount of paper currency is floating around worldwide. Most people like cash, holding Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead words ‘Money is coined liberty.’

If going paperless was the best option, developed economies would have phased out paper currency several years ago. Instead, citizens across both developed and developing economies have yet to give up fascination for cash-in-hand. In contrast to per capita holding of $4,200 in the US, average Indian holds an equivalent of $171 in cash. Half of this cash remains unaccounted for, beyond the purview of regular tax reporting. No surprise, therefore, that even the US looses $500 billion annually by way of tax evasion despite a well-developed tax regime.

Since information on the ‘underground economy’ remains obscure, efforts to dig it out have not been successful either. Across the world as a percentage of GDP the underground economy continues to garner a significant share. If it is a low of 7.1 per cent in the US, it is as high as 17.9 per cent in Belgium. Worldwide, underground economy averages 14 percent of GDP. Even a country like Sweden, which has witnessed a dramatic drop in cash usage, has not been able to cut down on its underground economy from the present 15 per cent of its GDP. Underground economy has remained an unresolved global phenomenon.

Making a case for going cashless to address the malaise, Harvard University Professor Kenneth Rogoff argues that there is need to have a hard look at its implications before taking a plunge. While maintaining privacy of paper currency in small transactions is critical for a large population, phasing out large-denomination notes can pave the way towards a cashless society in future. For this reason, the European Central Bank has stopped printing the 500-euro note.

To reduce mountains of cash floating all around, many European countries including Germany and Belgium have proposed a cap on the size of retail cash payments. But they have learnt that tax evasion is a much larger issue since 25 percent or more of all cash never gets tendered in any tax swoop. Is going cashless the answer? It may indeed be unless it gets demonstrated at a scale. Rogoff wonders if smaller advanced economies like Japan, whose currency is not used internationally, would take a lead in going cashless! Regulatory challenges would need to be addressed upfront before pulling paper currency out from circulation, though.

While governments’ aim is to recover tax, people tend to avoid falling into the tax-trap. Since the general notion is that ‘big fish’ evade tax nets, even law-abiding citizens see opportunity in evading paying tax. Come to think of it, no one wants to live in a society where rules are rigidly enforced. At a socio-psychological level, however, a tax regime is incompatible with peoples’ perception of living in a truly democratic society. Therefore, the mounting challenge is to balance an individual’s right to privacy with society’s need to enforce its laws and regulations.

Rogoff is seized of the prevailing fascination for cash, and yet makes a convincing case for advanced economies to start phasing out paper currency. Though the world is still far from creating a cashless regime, the fact that cash fuels crime and corruption is at the core of the argument. It is, however, another matter that crime syndicates often circumvent the legal economy, and corruption has ways of reinventing itself because it predates paper currency.        

Putting cashless system into operation poses formidable challenges. The Curse of Cash takes a hard look at multiple implications of phasing out currency notes. How can something as antiquated as paper currency really matter when the total value of all financial assets dwarfs the total value of cash? After all, paper currency is but a zero-interest rate bond. Therefore phasing out paper currency, or charging negative interest rates on cash, remains an emotionally charged issue. On top, will the central banks surrender their monopoly over cash supplies without missing out on their key role to deliver growth and financial stability?

Phasing out paper currency may seem the simplest approach to clearing the path for tax regime to account for every penny in circulation, but the task is to first bring informal economy under the purview of the formal system. Further, any plan to drastically scale back the use of cash needs to provide heavily subsidized, basic debit card accounts for low-income individuals belonging to the informal economy. Raising challenging questions, this book provides thoughtful insights on a subject that is likely to engage monetary policy arena for time to come.

The Curse of Cash 
by Kenneth S. Rogoff
Princeton University Press, UK
Extent: 283. Price: US$17.49

Behind the curves

With gender stereotyping deeply embedded in our society, women’s self-esteem is traditionally assumed to be determined by how they perceive themselves in the eyes of others.

It may be an adult mind’s preoccupation and a voyeuristic notion that ‘women take more time to dress because they have to slow down on curves’, but for Cambridge University’s reproductive biologist David Bainbridge, the female curve is a work of evolution and biology. Women are the only females in the animal kingdom to have curvaceous bodies. Were it not so, the modern society’s obsession with the female form would not have adorned billboards, magazine covers and museum artefacts.

Being curvaceous adds to women’s public image and societal performance, and a heavy price is often paid to keep the curves in desired shape. With gender stereotyping deeply embedded in our society, women’s self-esteem is traditionally assumed to be determined by how they perceive themselves in the eyes of others.

In an entertaining analysis, superimposing cutting-edge behavioural science over evolutionary biology, Bainbridge lays the foundation of ‘curvology’, which has yet to gain recognition as an exact science. Yet, he draws some compelling inferences. Why are women locked in a prison of self-surveillance, enchained by the idea that they must view their bodies as others view them? Why do women experience body-dissatisfaction as reflected in their innate desire to alter their curves? Not only gender psychology but women’s biology conspires against them, argues Bainbridge, which keeps their body shape and body image under consistent change. Trapped in this biological reality, women often feel torn between the body they live in and the body they must aspire for. After all, physical attractiveness determines women’s social dominance.

Opinions are likely to be divided on this matter, as not every woman will subscribe to such analogy. However, studies indicate that some 60 per cent women experience increased body-dissatisfaction — and are ever-eager to reshape their curves. Added to this is the most confusing question: Why do some women volunteer to suffer bouts of starvation to have a specific body weight and shape? Curvology provides multiple insights to this conundrum: how the female form evolved, how human mind views it, and how the world at large influences the body-mind dichotomy.

The female body is a biological marvel. Even after evolving over several million years, the woman’s body has yet to gain a definitive shape as it keeps reconstructing. Research indicates that not only girls accumulate fat twice as fast as boys; averaging 27 per cent adipose tissue compared to 14 per cent in boys, they continue to keep it unevenly distributed across distinct storage spots in the body. That this is done to negotiate specific requirements during puberty, reproduction and post-natal period is evident, but it isn’t yet clear why these storage spots become curvaceous hotspots for the probing eyes.

It is here that the author enters a contentious territory. Says he, “Male visual fixation on female form seems to have contributed to evolution of curves, meaning thereby that sexual selection has worked hands-in-glove with natural selection.” It may sound politically incorrect but Darwin too had found that his theory of natural selection was inadequate to explain the reason for peacocks to carry the inordinate weight of feathers on their tails. He had thus stumbled upon the idea of sexual selection, which posits that despite outweighed disadvantage, colourful feathers provided an advantage in the competition for mates.

Loaded with complex and unnerving facts, Curvology is a study of one of the most complex species on this planet. We seem to know enough about women, and yet remain adequately ignorant. For instance, why do the breasts of women remain swollen throughout whereas in other mammals, like chimpanzees and gorillas, the mammary glands only swell with pregnancy?

Some of this trivia cries out for further explanation. While an unsubstantiated case for male desire sculpting women’s bodies has been made, it is surprising that, for women, it does not seem to matter as much. Surveys indicate that women apply their cosmetic war-paint to impress other women, and not men. Some feminist writers have even argued that society’s body-chauvinism is the woman’s own creation. Yet, there cannot be two opinions that the age-old power of female body shape continues to be stronger than ever before.

The book leaves the reader craving for more: why women love and hate those curves, desire them and reject them, feel valued and devalued because of them? At the end, it is clear that there is no perfect female body shape, except the one that doesn’t exist.

Curvology
by David Bainbridge
Portobello Books, UK
Extent: 227, Price: £9.99 

This review was first published in the Hindu BusinessLine on Nov 12, 2016.

The Ways of Healing in India

For a country that spends less than 4% of its GDP on healthcare, even war-torn Afghanistan spends 8%, its financially-constrained healthcare system has left millions of people to fend for their own healthy survival.

‘India is everything they say it is,’ and still, ‘has nothing’. Its billion plus population may have only one medical doctor per 100,000, but there are varied prescriptions for disease prevention and control to choose from.  From folk, spiritual, herbal or ritual approaches to ayurveda, yoga, siddha, homeopathy and naturopathy techniques, there is one for every pocket and faith. How people get treated is as much a reflection of their social and economic status as their unstinted faith in the chosen system of health care. Why people are drawn to such alternatives is the leading question Aarthi Prasad, whose maternal grandfather was an Ayurvedic doctor and secretary to the Chopra Committee set up shortly after Independence in 1946-48 to chart the way forward for Indian healthcare, seeks to explore the many faces of medicine in her journey across modern India. 

For a country that spends less than 4% of its GDP on healthcare, even war-torn Afghanistan spends 8%, its financially-constrained healthcare system has left millions of people to fend for their own healthy survival. It is quite simply economic folly for a country to sacrifice its people, and leave them vulnerable to exploitation by quacks and fake doctors who dispense medicines, antibiotics and steroids in a grossly unregulated health sector. Reports of people dying at the hands of such untrained practitioners with dubious qualifications are a common occurrence. On the other extreme, there are social entrepreneurs who have seized the situation to create modules of effective healthcare delivery for the poor that the state and many overseas governments have begun to emulate. That there exists a range of possibilities amidst the healthcare gloom, other than just increasing the number of trained medical doctors, is the central message emanating from In the Bonesetter’s Waiting Room.   

In eight well-written chapters, Prasad takes the reader through the maze of health care challenges that are being confronted on a daily basis by a range of health innovators. From a traditional healer who knows the medicinal value of every plant he finds to a group of women who are working together to address mental illness in country’s mega-slum, and from an asthma healer who prescribes swallowing a live fish to a group of doctors who are taking community health system to tribal living in remote jungle, the author treks the length and breadth of the country to provide a unique perspective on health and survival in one of the most fascinating country in the world. The author, however, concludes that capturing the breadth and diversity of the practice of medicine in India is immense in its scope, as the provision of generating such knowledge dates back to several millennia in the country.

But can such good Samaritan efforts be enough to transform the inadequately resourced and underfunded state health sector? Nagging as the question may be, the answer lies in the realization that ‘people have to be the actors and advocates in order to make a difference’. Each of the health innovators featured in the book are optimistic about connecting with right people to influence government resources in the right direction. Though adoption of learning from non-state actors’ initiatives is often frustratingly slow, the trickle-down effect is being observed in few isolated cases. Drs Abhay and Rani Bang’s community-care initiative, called SEARCH, in the jungle of naxalite-infested Gadchiroli in Maharashtra caught the attention of the Indian government only after it was taken up in Nepal, Bangladesh, Malawi, Zambia and Ethiopia. 

The message that comes across from the initiative is loud and clear: reduce unnecessary pressure on the beleaguered health infrastructure albeit government hospitals and take health-care instead to the people by targeting areas that have least of such facilities. Else, reaching out to nearly 800 million people with poor access to healthcare, given that India’s doctor-patient ration is 1:2000, will remain a distant dream. Nothing could be more evident than the plight of 700,000 people confined within 535 acres in world’s second largest slum Dharavi in Mumbai, which is home to a random assortment of skin, mental and venereal diseases. 

What’s more, learnt Prasad, while sick men are taken to a hospital, woman in the same situation is just given a dose of simple painkillers and allowed to suffer in the most inhospitable slum dwelling. Gender discrimination is shocking feature of life in slums, wife-beating, abandonment and divorce are common. Were it not for the timely counseling by the dedicated team of SNEHA, an initiative set-up by social psychology Nayreen Daruwala, women would have been bereft of much needed psychological therapy which is often reserved for upward mobile urban population.

With a PhD in molecular genetics and an interdisciplinary research engagement at London’s University College, Prasad delves into the technological divide afflicting country’s health sector to reveal how a strategic merging the traditional with the modern system of medicine can help credible healthcare reach out to the culturally and economically diverse population of the country. The pluralist culture of medicine is both a bane and boon, she argues. It is, however, another matter that it has taken decades for the government to harness synergy between different systems of medicine. The Chopra Committee had long recommended ‘synthesis of Indian and western medicines is not only possible but practicable’, but at that time modern medicine was considered the basis for development in the new India. 

It took nearly six decades before the government could create the Ministry of AYUSH, which covers the practice of Ayurveda, Yoga, Siddha, Unani, Homeopathy and Naturopathy, to bring these practices in the mainstream of health care in the country that has long practiced all these form in one way or the other. Need it be said in a country where, according to the World Health Organization, seventy per cent of the population still accesses traditional treatments. And, it is no less revealing that AYUSH hospitals now offer 62,000 beds backed an army of 785,000 health workers. Without doubt, traditional medicine could be most desirable add-on to modern medicine in reaching out to teeming millions with affordable health care.

Full of interesting revelations and intriguing insights, In the Bonesetter’s Waiting Room captures the sound bites from the by-lanes of healthcare have-nots. It is country where unflinching faith in magic and medicine flows in an unholy alliance, leading to unsubstantiated assertions like: ‘I prayed to goddess and my wife was cured of TB’. While the cause-effect relationship of such claim may concern a doctor, it matters least to the person whose wife eventually got cured. Such cultural diversity beseeches a system of medicine that is as close to the skin as it is to the soul of its people. 

Aarthi Prasad deserves credit for bringing selected stories from the country’s vast healthcare landscape to life. The writing is superb; the non-fiction story telling format doesn’t miss out on the minutest of details. A reader can’t escape the disgusting stench as the author wades through the filthy water in slums of Dharavi and nor can one miss the exquisite ambiance of the up-market cosmetic surgery clinic as the author engages in discussion on the emerging market of plastic surgery in the country. The author rightly concludes that the challenges and solutions to the health of this great nation are not as diaphanous as it may seem. It calls for a pluralistic understanding of the society and its people. 

In The Bonesetters’s Waiting Room
by Aarthi Prasad
Hachette. New Delhi, 2016
Extent 214 pp, Price: Rs 499 

First published in Biblio: A Review of Books, Sept-Nov 2016