Friday 29 May 2015
Children used to be scared of the dark – now they fear failure
Tim Lott in The Guardian
Many facets distinguish the minds of children from those of adults, among them imaginative capacity, the repression of reason and the mysterious condition of innocence. But perhaps one of the most telling divisions is between the things adults fear and those that worry children.
Many facets distinguish the minds of children from those of adults, among them imaginative capacity, the repression of reason and the mysterious condition of innocence. But perhaps one of the most telling divisions is between the things adults fear and those that worry children.
I recently asked one of my youngest daughters what she feared most. She answered without hesitation: failure. This disturbed and surprised me. I had always thought of fear of failure as an adult preoccupation, but it seems that one of the effects of the climate of the times (and the media saturation that expresses it) is the importation of adult fears to childish minds. The fear of ghosts is being replaced by the terror of underperformance.
This “adultisation” of fear is underlined by a survey I came across on the internet suggesting that children’s fears had changed considerably over the past few generations. In this survey, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the top five fears 30 years ago were animals, being in a dark room, high places, strangers and loud noises. In the updated survey, kids were afraid of divorce, nuclear war, cancer, pollution, and being mugged.
A more recent poll, carried out in the UK a little over a year ago, points up some enduring traditional fears, including spiders and bugs, witches, the dark and clowns. However, being bullied, being approached by strangers and school performance all featured.
Children’s fears are a litmus test of the society we live in and they are clearly changing – becoming more concrete – as society becomes more performance-driven, insecure and saturated with threatening, upsetting facts. Refreshingly, missing from either of the lists was fear of terrorist attack or paedophile abduction – the sort of thing parents have nightmares about – but it is clear that the imaginative arena of anxiety is undergoing a transformation and perhaps an intensification.
I don’t know what to do about fear, given I suffer fair amount of existential fear myself, even knowing, as I do, that fear for the most part is useless. “To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom,” said Bertrand Russell, but unless one is singularly lacking in imagination, one never conquers fear completely.
I was once asked what single piece of advice I would proffer my 17-year-old self and the answer I came up with was, “Don’t be so afraid.” Nevertheless, I spent much of my early years frightened, like my daughter, of failure or rejection. Many of my later years, too.
Fear can be shameful. The film that most recently gave me the chills was Force Majeure in which a father runs away from his wife and children when he is faced with a situation of sudden danger. My secret terror – and I imagine the fear of many men – is that some ignoble primal instinct in such a situation would render me similarly unheroic. How would one live with oneself after that?
I cannot sincerely tell my children there is nothing to be afraid of in life. What I can say with conviction is that fear, for the most part, is useless. It tarnishes your soul, yet does nothing to protect you against the situation you are anxious about. It is the most terrible waste of time. I agree wholeheartedly with Aung San Suu Kyi – “The only real prison is fear and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.”
Courage is not being free from fear, however. Courage is not allowing fear to distort your purposes and cramp your life. We all have secret fears and to deny it is to deny some essential element of our personalities. But if you can do one thing for your children, show them bravery, so that they learn bravery themselves. For courage is the wellspring from which an authentic life flows.
The Rohingyas - The forsaken people
Natasha Shahid in The Friday Times
Who are the Rohingya people and why does everyone disown them? Natasha Shahid attempts to answer these questions
Outsiders in their own country
“The Rohingya come from Burma, but for many years have fled repression there to Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. […] Primarily because the Burmerse government denies them citizenship, most are stateless.” – David Mathieson,Perilous Plight: Burma’s Rohingya Take to the Seas
Of the approximately two million Rohingya alive today, 800,000 live in Burma, 200,000 in Bangladesh, 50,000 in Malaysia and around 500,000 live scattered over the Middle East, where they went looking for work. But can the Rohingya call any of these countries their home? Their treatment by the two proposed countries of their origin – Burma and Bangladesh – does not suggest so: while one has a majority tied up in refugee camps, the other is bent upon killing them to the last man. What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?
Rakhine, the state where most of the Rohingya community is settled
History of the Rohingya People
The origins of the Rohingya people are disputed. Followers of Islam and belonging to the Indo-Aryan stock, they themselves say that they are natives of Rakhine, the south-western Burmese state which shares its northern border with Bangladesh. Others suggest that they are of Bengali origins, and that their language is a derivative of the Bengali language. Alistair D. B. Cook suggests that their movement originated in the Middle East, and brought them to Rakhine after crossing the rest of South Asia.
Whatever their origins, most scholars agree that the Rohingya have been residents of Burma since around the 15th century AD. Archaeological evidence reportedly suggests that the Rohingya have lived in the country since the times of the Kingdom of Mrauk U (1425 AD – 1785 AD). And yet the Burmese government insists that they are not one of their “historical ethnic groups”: the major reason behind their persecution at the hands of the Burmese authorities.
One of the many boats floating on the Indian Ocean, with no country willing to let it anchor
What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?
Under British rule, Bengalis were encouraged to repopulate the fertile region of Arakan (now Rakhine), and the boundaries between Bengal and Arakan were removed. So, in all practicality, Bengal and Arakan became a single state making it easier for the Bengali people – who were majority Muslims – to travel to and from Arakan. This migratory trend resumed at the time of the Bangladesh Liberation Movement in 1971, when many Bengalis fled their country and settled in Arakan, instead. The Burmese government insists that most of the people who form the Rohingya community today belong to this stock: another reason behind their attempts to expel the community from the country.
During the Second World War, Japan successfully captured Burma but the British fought the Japanese invading forces on Burmese soil. After the Japanese were ousted, Burma’s Rohingya formed a political party – Arakan Muslim League – which started a political movement to be absorbed into East Pakistan at the time of the Partition of India. The party sent a request to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, himself, in May 1946 to include Arakan in his partition plan. Jinnah turned the request down, replying that he could not intrude in Burmese affairs.
Apparently Jinnah’s rejection led the Rohingya to abandon their political cause, not seeing any use in pursuing it. They decided to take up arms, instead. The target of this armed movement, termed by the Rohingya as a jihad, was at first the separation of the Mayu region in the north of Arakan – where most of their population resided – and its annexation with East Pakistan. When the Burmese government refused to cater to these demands, the Rohingya mujahideen declared jihad on their own government. There was a time when these armed rebels controlled almost all of northern Arakan, forcing the non-Rohingya inhabitants of the state to flee their homes.
This jihadist movement continued for about a decade before the Rohingya rebels finally laid arms between 1957 and 1961, primarily as a result of a military operation initiated to crush the uprising. This is when the displacement of the Rohingya began, which continues to this day.
Another abandoned boat
The Rohingya’s Current Status
After being crushed by the Burmese government in the 1960s, the Rohingya rebellion re-immerged at the time of the East Pakistani separatist movement. At the moment, it is believed to be receiving aid from Islamic terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Tehrik-i-Taliban, and even from some countries, including Pakistan.
The recently accelerated attempts of the Burmese government at the genocide and expulsion of the Rohingya people has brought the country into the international spotlight – for all the wrong reasons. The persecution of the Rohingya, especially under the nationalist, pan-Buddhist military rule (1962-2011) has had terrible repercussions for the community. General Ne Win, the first military ruler of Burma who assumed control of the country in 1962, expelled Muslims – all Muslims, not just the Rohingya – from the army, and in 1982, under a new citizenship law, the Rohingya were declared as non-nationals.
It didn’t stop with the government: Burma’s citizens – mostly Theravada Buddhists – had an equal share in victimizing the Rohingya people. It was the Buddhist monks who initiated an anti-Muslim movement in 2001, in which pamphlets like Myo Pyauk Hmar Soe Kyauk Sa Yar (“The Fear of Losing One’s Race”) were distributed in the common public. In the same year, 200 Muslims were killed and 11 mosques were burnt down by common Burmese citizens. It is said that this movement was in retaliation to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March, 2001 by the Taliban. The claim is very likely true, as the Burmese government brought down two mosques – Han Tha Mosque and Taungoo Railway Station Mosque – on the demands of angry Buddhist monks, who wanted to “avenge” the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
Clearly Muslims aren’t the only ones who are over-sensitive about their religion.
Since 2012, there have been repeated anti-Muslim riots in Rakhine and elsewhere in Burma that have claimed the lives of hundreds of Muslims. An anti-Muslim riot can be sparked in Burma for a reason as little as a Facebook photograph, or for no reason at all – it’s like a haystack simply waiting to catch fire.
Verbal abuse: a member of the Burmese bureaucracy once termed the Rohingya “ugly as ogres”
Exodus
With the state of their lives in Burma, the Rohingya Muslims have no option but to leave their home country – if they can call it that. But where would they go? At the moment, they don’t seem to care. The Rohingya are fleeing Rakhine by the boatful whenever they can, even though they know their journeys do not have any destination. Many have fled to Bangladesh, where they are being kept in refugee camps. Many have managed to make it to the Middle East and Japan, while some have even reportedly made it to Karachi. These are the lucky ones.
The unlucky ones? They are stranded mid-sea with nowhere to go. We can only imagine what the state of their lives in their native country must have been for them to rather float endlessly in the middle of salty waters with no food to eat and no water to drink.
“The Rohingya come from Burma, but for many years have fled repression there to Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. […] Primarily because the Burmerse government denies them citizenship, most are stateless.” – David Mathieson,Perilous Plight: Burma’s Rohingya Take to the Seas
Of the approximately two million Rohingya alive today, 800,000 live in Burma, 200,000 in Bangladesh, 50,000 in Malaysia and around 500,000 live scattered over the Middle East, where they went looking for work. But can the Rohingya call any of these countries their home? Their treatment by the two proposed countries of their origin – Burma and Bangladesh – does not suggest so: while one has a majority tied up in refugee camps, the other is bent upon killing them to the last man. What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?
Rakhine, the state where most of the Rohingya community is settled
History of the Rohingya People
The origins of the Rohingya people are disputed. Followers of Islam and belonging to the Indo-Aryan stock, they themselves say that they are natives of Rakhine, the south-western Burmese state which shares its northern border with Bangladesh. Others suggest that they are of Bengali origins, and that their language is a derivative of the Bengali language. Alistair D. B. Cook suggests that their movement originated in the Middle East, and brought them to Rakhine after crossing the rest of South Asia.
Whatever their origins, most scholars agree that the Rohingya have been residents of Burma since around the 15th century AD. Archaeological evidence reportedly suggests that the Rohingya have lived in the country since the times of the Kingdom of Mrauk U (1425 AD – 1785 AD). And yet the Burmese government insists that they are not one of their “historical ethnic groups”: the major reason behind their persecution at the hands of the Burmese authorities.
One of the many boats floating on the Indian Ocean, with no country willing to let it anchor
What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?
Under British rule, Bengalis were encouraged to repopulate the fertile region of Arakan (now Rakhine), and the boundaries between Bengal and Arakan were removed. So, in all practicality, Bengal and Arakan became a single state making it easier for the Bengali people – who were majority Muslims – to travel to and from Arakan. This migratory trend resumed at the time of the Bangladesh Liberation Movement in 1971, when many Bengalis fled their country and settled in Arakan, instead. The Burmese government insists that most of the people who form the Rohingya community today belong to this stock: another reason behind their attempts to expel the community from the country.
During the Second World War, Japan successfully captured Burma but the British fought the Japanese invading forces on Burmese soil. After the Japanese were ousted, Burma’s Rohingya formed a political party – Arakan Muslim League – which started a political movement to be absorbed into East Pakistan at the time of the Partition of India. The party sent a request to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, himself, in May 1946 to include Arakan in his partition plan. Jinnah turned the request down, replying that he could not intrude in Burmese affairs.
Apparently Jinnah’s rejection led the Rohingya to abandon their political cause, not seeing any use in pursuing it. They decided to take up arms, instead. The target of this armed movement, termed by the Rohingya as a jihad, was at first the separation of the Mayu region in the north of Arakan – where most of their population resided – and its annexation with East Pakistan. When the Burmese government refused to cater to these demands, the Rohingya mujahideen declared jihad on their own government. There was a time when these armed rebels controlled almost all of northern Arakan, forcing the non-Rohingya inhabitants of the state to flee their homes.
This jihadist movement continued for about a decade before the Rohingya rebels finally laid arms between 1957 and 1961, primarily as a result of a military operation initiated to crush the uprising. This is when the displacement of the Rohingya began, which continues to this day.
Another abandoned boat
The Rohingya’s Current Status
After being crushed by the Burmese government in the 1960s, the Rohingya rebellion re-immerged at the time of the East Pakistani separatist movement. At the moment, it is believed to be receiving aid from Islamic terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Tehrik-i-Taliban, and even from some countries, including Pakistan.
The recently accelerated attempts of the Burmese government at the genocide and expulsion of the Rohingya people has brought the country into the international spotlight – for all the wrong reasons. The persecution of the Rohingya, especially under the nationalist, pan-Buddhist military rule (1962-2011) has had terrible repercussions for the community. General Ne Win, the first military ruler of Burma who assumed control of the country in 1962, expelled Muslims – all Muslims, not just the Rohingya – from the army, and in 1982, under a new citizenship law, the Rohingya were declared as non-nationals.
It didn’t stop with the government: Burma’s citizens – mostly Theravada Buddhists – had an equal share in victimizing the Rohingya people. It was the Buddhist monks who initiated an anti-Muslim movement in 2001, in which pamphlets like Myo Pyauk Hmar Soe Kyauk Sa Yar (“The Fear of Losing One’s Race”) were distributed in the common public. In the same year, 200 Muslims were killed and 11 mosques were burnt down by common Burmese citizens. It is said that this movement was in retaliation to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March, 2001 by the Taliban. The claim is very likely true, as the Burmese government brought down two mosques – Han Tha Mosque and Taungoo Railway Station Mosque – on the demands of angry Buddhist monks, who wanted to “avenge” the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
Clearly Muslims aren’t the only ones who are over-sensitive about their religion.
Since 2012, there have been repeated anti-Muslim riots in Rakhine and elsewhere in Burma that have claimed the lives of hundreds of Muslims. An anti-Muslim riot can be sparked in Burma for a reason as little as a Facebook photograph, or for no reason at all – it’s like a haystack simply waiting to catch fire.
Verbal abuse: a member of the Burmese bureaucracy once termed the Rohingya “ugly as ogres”
Exodus
With the state of their lives in Burma, the Rohingya Muslims have no option but to leave their home country – if they can call it that. But where would they go? At the moment, they don’t seem to care. The Rohingya are fleeing Rakhine by the boatful whenever they can, even though they know their journeys do not have any destination. Many have fled to Bangladesh, where they are being kept in refugee camps. Many have managed to make it to the Middle East and Japan, while some have even reportedly made it to Karachi. These are the lucky ones.
The unlucky ones? They are stranded mid-sea with nowhere to go. We can only imagine what the state of their lives in their native country must have been for them to rather float endlessly in the middle of salty waters with no food to eat and no water to drink.
Shoddy Science - Study showing that chocolate can help with weight loss was a trick
Posing as Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D, the research director of the fabricated Institute of Diet and Health, biologist and science journalist John Bohannon ran what he called a “fairly typical study” used in the field of diet research.
German broadcast journalists Peter Onneken and Diana Löbl asked Bohannon to conduct a clinical trial into the effects of dark chocolate, as part of a documentary exposing how simple it is for bad science to make headlines.
“It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded,” Bohannon wrote of his in an article for io9.com.
To collate their data, the team asked 5 men and 11 women aged between 19 to 67 to follow either a low-carbohydrate diet, or the same diet but with an added 1.5oz of dark chocolate. Meanwhile, a control group were asked to eat as normal.
While the data showed that the group which ate a low-carb diet while indulging in dark chocolate lost weight 10 per cent faster and had better cholesterol readings, Bohannon stressed that the study was set up for failure.
“Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result.”Bohannon explained that thanks to a method known as "p-hacking", the study could have just as likely shown that chocolate helped sleep or lowered blood pressure as the threshold for data being classed as "significant" is just 0.05 per cent.
THE STUDY COULD HAVE JUST AS LIKELY SHOWN A POSITIVE EFFECT ON BLOOD PRESSURE THAN WEIGHT LOSS, SAYS BOHANNON (PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES)
After a journal was duped into accepting the shoddy study for money, Bohannon and his colleagues then put together a press release which would be irresistible to journalists and editors looking for a story.
The research was splashed across newspapers and websites across 20 countries in half a dozen languages, seemingly proving how easily dodgy science can circulate across the world’s media.
However, some have questioned the ethic behind the study, with one commenter writing below the piece:
"Going out of their way to court media coverage (that was going to repeat the story but never, ever follow up on the hoax once it was revealed — and this is a hoax) was ethically problematic,” one commenter said.
"If you want to uncover the shady workings, that didn’t really help. It seems like only the people who were already aware of the problems are going to be reached by this reveal."
The stunt came after Bohannon exposed how “open access”science journals were willing to publish deeply flawed research claiming that a drug had anti-cancer properties.
In the investigation for the prestigious journal Science, he revealed the dangers of abandoning the peer-review process expected in science publishing.
Tuesday 26 May 2015
A Canadian's views on India
Tarek Fatah chats about his four-months visit to Hindustan - Bilatakalluf with Tahir Gora Ep10
Bilatakaluf with Tahir Gora TAGTV EP 07 - Is MQM victim or part of establishment?
Missing Virender Sehwag?
I think I am missing Virender Sehwag. To be fair, this is a wonderful bunch of young players and they are carrying the baton delivered to them by an extraordinary group. I find Ajinkya Rahane most pleasing to the eye, Rohit Sharma’s 264 was an audacious innings that stretched our imagination, the fielding is better than it has been and there are fast bowlers out there who don’t aspire to be medium-pacers. And I will tell people when I am old that I saw Virat Kohli bat. Cricket is still great fun but I am missing Sehwag.
Sehwag had me sitting on the edge of my seat. Always. It was like watching a thriller except that when you watched it the next time, you still didn’t know what was coming next. He was jaw-dropping, he was hair-wrenching. You rolled your eyes and you threw your head back. You looked at the scoreboard and it always showed you a different number. He could be exhilarating, he could be frustrating. He took you on a joyride and he laughed while you held on to your seat in fright.
I always thought Sehwag played cricket the way it was originally meant to be played. The numbers happened. 8586 runs in Test cricket @ 49.34 with 23 centuries. Those were brilliant numbers but we don’t need them to explain Sehwag. Or to fight his case in an argument. In cricket’s most native form, the bowler bowls to get a batsman out and the batsman plays to hit the ball. You got the feeling Sehwag didn’t worry beyond that. Only if he couldn’t hit the ball, he blocked it. You hardly ever analysed Sehwag’s innings, you just enjoyed them.
But he wasn’t a blind basher. Talking to him about cricket, and sadly those moments were too rare, you always came away thinking you had spoken to someone with an uncluttered, confident mind. “The batsman is always scared,” he once said, “but the bowler must be too. He must also think, if I bowl a bad ball where will Sehwag hit me!” The thinking behind that is clear and it has the simplicity that is disarming. If the bowler knows the batsman isn’t going to hit him, he isn’t afraid of bowling a bad ball. But he is most likely to bowl a bad ball when he is afraid of the consequences of bowling one.
We often talk, in sport, of playing to the fear in the enemy camp. Often we never get that far because of the fear in our own mind. A tense cricket match is as much about managing skill as it is about managing fear. There is scarcely a calm mind on a big day. Maybe that is why Sehwag was the most feared man in an India-Pakistan match. He played with a smile, with a song on his lips but also with a calm mind, letting fear brew within the opposition. In 9 Test matches, he made 1276 runs @91.14. It would have been interesting to have measured his pulse, especially in relation to everyone else’s!
He told us, too, that it was okay to hit in the air, to hit over the top and in doing so, he recalibrated risk for all of us. We were always told, from club cricketers to Test players, that hitting in the air was inviting another mode of dismissal. For years we accepted that as the gospel, like good boys we didn’t challenge it.
But Sehwag happily hit over the top, he played into the gap over the fielder’s head where everyone confined themselves to seeking the gap between fielders. Yes, it was still risky but with new bats, it was nowhere near as threatening as everyone believed it was.
And so he has left behind a treasure of good cheer. Which among those was his best? 201* out of only 329 against Sri Lanka when everyone else was playing on a minefield and he was on the highway? 319 against South Africa from only 304 balls while chasing 540? 309 at Multan? 254 at Lahore? That ridiculous 293 from 254 balls in Mumbai when he ended day 2 at 284 not out while still in the field at the start of play? Or was it that 83 from 68 balls with India chasing 387 to win a Test? Would anyone in the world hit eleven 4s and four 6s against a target that had only so rarely been achieved in cricket history? Sehwag often talks about facing the ball, not the bowler or the situation. Surely it had to be that way that day!
I don’t know how much I am going to see of him. I absolutely enjoyed seeing him play for the Kings XI in the IPL but what of India? Maybe the eyes aren’t seeing the ball the same way, maybe the feet are heavier, maybe the bat isn’t as charged with freedom. Maybe there isn’t the same fear in the mind of the bowler running in.
The runs are drying. You wonder if you are listening to the last bars of a lilting melody. You wonder if it is time to leave the theatre. I don’t know but if it is, it’s been an unforgettable ride.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)