Saneeya Hussain (1954 - 2005)Exactly five years ago today, journalist and activist Saneeya Hussain left us. Hers was a needless death that left a deep impression in numerous friends she had around the world. We still remember.
We remember Saneeya as a journalist who took a special interest in environment and human rights issues. All her working life, she campaigned tirelessly for a cleaner, safer and more equitable society for everyone, everywhere.
We remember Saneeya as one who supported pluralism – not just in her own country Pakistan, but everywhere. She hated autocrats and military dictators. She spoke out and wrote against unfair domination and agenda setting by a handful of (usually graying) men. She had the courage to suggest re-naming her country as Absurdistan!
We remember Saneeya as a fun-loving, easy-going if slightly absent-minded friend. She wasn’t the most organised person, but was diligent and relentless on causes and issues that she passionately believed in.
Saneeya’s worldwide network of friends have keep her flame alive, and this blog post is as much a tribute to them as it is for Saneeya. Officially, the Saneeya Hussain Trustcontinues her vision and mission.
In fact, the chairperson of the trust (and Saneeya’s mother) Najma Hussain just wrote us a group email, saying: “Let’s share happy memories of Saneeya and celebrate her life.”
Our mutual friend Beena Sarwar has made a 14-minute documentary called Celebrating Saneeya. Here’s the shorter version available on YouTube:
Celebrating Saneeya (August 2005; 14 mins; language: English; Filmed in Karachi, Pakistan, with archives and footage from Brazil, South Africa and Nepal)
Synopsis: Saneeya, with her joyful laugh, lightness of spirit, striking height and long hair, embodied “feminism” and “women’s rights” in the most un-dogmatic way. Living life on her own terms, she countered the trends that militate against women’s individual freedoms in Pakistan. During the repressive years of military dictator General Ziaul Haq she worked as a journalist and was active in the women’s movement that defied the military rule. She also pioneered environmental journalism in Pakistan. Later, while working with the World Commission on Dams in South Africa she met a Brazilian geographer eleven years her junior. Their love story transcended age, culture, religion and nationalities.
In 2004, a severe allergic reaction stopped Saneeya’s breathing and her breathing stopped during a traffic jam in Sao Paulo, preventing her from reaching the hospital in time and sending her into a coma. This documentary is a celebration of her life and all that she stood for, through interviews with her husband, family and friends, and archive material. Sticker on Saneeya’s fridge: “Life is uncertain, eat dessert first”.
Eyjaffjalljokull erupting away in IcelandCall it the cough heard around the world.
And boy, what a cough – and with what consequences!
A week ago, most of us had never heard of Eyjaffjalljokull (a glacial volcano in Iceland) — and we’re still struggling to pronounce its name even as it keeps tens of millions of people completely grounded and held ‘hostage’ with its incessant and powerful coughing.
My daughter Dhara and I are currently ‘trapped’ in London: a volcanic ash cloud from Iceland shut down all flights in and over the British Isles on Thursday 15 April 2010. The siege has continued on to the fifth day now, disrupting travel plans of so many people, and causing massive losses to the travel industry. With over 150,000 Britons stranded abroad unable to fly back, the UK is now going into emergency mode to deal with the crisis.
It’s annoying to have an unknown – and unpronounceable! – natural factor crop up and change our carefully laid plans. But things could have been much worse. As I tweeted earlier, as natural disasters go, volcanic ash has been highly disruptive but with no casualties except economic (at least so far).
Life goes on in London: Regent's Park, 17 April 2010Life in London goes on with no visible signs of concern. Dhara and I walked around absorbing the sights, sounds and smells of London, and people were going about with life – and welcoming Spring. Joggers in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park, babies being strolled around, and weekend revelers at Camden Town and Trafalgar Square.
We mixed into all these crowds – it’s Dhara’s first time, so she’s wondering what the fuss is all about! (If you’ve traveled with an energetic teenager, you know what I’m coping with.) Yes, we are being ‘held hostage’, but by an ever-so-gentle force that’s invisible to the naked eye: as if in compensation, London has rolled out sunny blue skies (long may they last!). On balance, I’d rather be caught in this kind of situation than in a devastating earthquake or tsunami…
The British media are covering the unfolding situation in great detail, but I haven’t yet seen an estimate of the number of visitors to the UK forced to stay on as there is no current escape from these islands, at least by air. But that number must be significant – and each one has his or her story to tell, some more desperate than others.
Nadia is being adventurous (or just taking her chances). She is planning to take train or ferry or any other means to France, and then catch a train to southern Europe whose airspace is not yet affected by volcanic ash. Her determination is admirable – she just won’t allow this remote volcano to keep her hostage (she call it Eyja: “Do not expect me to ever know its full name. What kind of parent names their son Eyjafjallajoekull?”).
Dhara at Trafalgar Square, 18 April 2010Meanwhile, Dhara and I will hold out for a couple of days more to see if the skies will clear up and the aviation regulators will ease up. As time passes and the flight suspension begins to bite hard, more and more aviation industry professionals are questioning the complete no-fly ban. Some are calling it a regulatory over-reaction.
He adds: “The blanket ban under clear blue skies and glorious sunshine is making some wonder whether this ‘one-size-fits-all’ regulation is appropriate to a situation that the regulations did not foresee…In the final analysis, despite the scares, no one has actually been killed in a volcano incident – something which cannot be said for the much more hazardous drive to the airport.”
Meanwhile, the journal Science has unearthed (no pun intended) from its archives an article published in November 2004 about an enormous volcanic eruption from Iceland’s past — and what it means for the country’s future. It looks at researchers studying one of the largest and least appreciated eruptions in recorded history: volcano Laki that killed 10,000 Icelanders in 1783, and according to recent studies, its billowing plumes led to extreme weather and extensive illness that may have claimed thousands more lives in Britain and on the European continent.
An image made available by NEODAAS/University of Dundee which shows the volcanic ash plume from Iceland, top left, to northern France as pictured by Nasa\'s Terra Satellite on 17 April 2010. Photo courtesy NEODAAS/University of Dundee/APIt’s not exactly a comforting thought to read how much worse a volcanic eruption could be. The piece was written by science writer Richard Stone (currently their Asia News Editor, and my fellow panelist at the science journalists conference last Summer in London). Interestingly, the headline I gave to that blog post was: Reporting disasters: How to keep a cool head when all hell breaks loose.
Well, easier said than done! It’s challenging for us journalists to keep a level head and report or comment on a mega-disaster for our media. But it’s even harder being caught up and personally affected by forces of Nature (and according Richard North, regulatory over-reaction). I’ve had my house flooded out, and was close enough to ground zero of the 2004 Asian Tsunami. On both occasions, the impact was brutal and immediate.
Eyja’s persistent coughing is different. It’s a distributed, slowly unfolding phenomenon with zero casualties so far, yet affecting millions. At one level, local residents can continue life’s routines with no threat of basic amenities of life being shattered. We travelers can grumble and remain nervous when we can get home, but at the streets of London are nothing like what the doomsday scenario shows in The Children of Men, placed in a near-future London of 2027.
But as Eyja’s strangely gentle yet firm siege continues – succeeding in closing down Britain’s air space in a way that Hitler and Bin Laden couldn’t – we are reminded of who is really in charge.
James Cameron in the Amazon - Photo by André Vieira for The New York Times
This encounter was bound to happen: Hollywood movie director James Cameron, creator of the blockbuster movie Avatar, meets a group of indigenous tribes in the Brazilian Amazon.
But this wasn’t part of a movie plot or promotional stunt: Cameron took time off to make his first ever visit to the Amazon because of a real world environmental cause.
He was visiting Volta Grande Do Xingu last week to discuss the Belo Monte dam being planned by the Brazilian government. According to The New York times: “It would be the third largest in the world, and environmentalists say it would flood hundreds of square miles of the Amazon and dry up a 60-mile stretch of the Xingu River, devastating the indigenous communities that live along it. For years the project was on the shelf, but the government now plans to hold an April 20 auction to award contracts for its construction.”
Map courtesy The New York TimesThe dam is a “quintessential example of the type of thing we are showing in ‘Avatar’ — the collision of a technological civilization’s vision for progress at the expense of the natural world and the cultures of the indigenous people that live there,” the newspaper quotes Cameron as saying.
Cameron had derived inspiration from decades long struggles to save the Amazon, but he didn’t know of this specific project until recently. Apparently he first became aware of the issue in February 2010, when he was presented with a letter from advocacy organizations and Native American groups saying they wanted Mr. Cameron to highlight “the real Pandoras in the world”.
As I noted in my first comments on Avatar in January 2010: “It looks as if Cameron has made the ultimate DIY allegory movie: he gives us the template into which any one of us can add our favourite injustice or underdog tale — and stir well. Then sit back and enjoy while good triumphs over evil, and the military-industrial complex is beaten by ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives brandishing little more than bows and arrows (and with a little help from Ma Nature). If only it works that way in real life…”
A few days later, I followed up with another post I titled Avatar unfolds in the Amazon – a comparison with an investigative documentary, Crude: The Real Price of Oil, made by Joe Berlinger, which chronicles the epic battle to hold oil giant Chevron (formerly Texaco) accountable for its systematic contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon – an environmental tragedy that experts call “the Rainforest Chernobyl.”
And now, within weeks, the Avatar-maker and Amazon-savers have joined hands!
To melancholic Hamlet, death was an undiscovered country. In Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy, the Prince of Denmark hesitates in his consideration of suicide not because of an absolute Christian belief in divine retribution, but because he is afraid of an afterlife of which he cannot be sure.
For the more cheerful among us, the Future is the great Undiscovered Country. It’s a notion that has been used widely by science fiction writers, and in 1991, it was popularised by Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is the sixth feature film in the Star Trek science fiction franchise.
In the movie, Klingon Chancellor Gorkon – talking peace with the Earth Federation – gives a toast to “the undiscovered country — the future”. Spock recognizes the line from Hamlet, and Gorkon tells Spock that one has never read Shakespeare properly until reading the text in “the original Klingon”…
All this forms the backdrop (well, sort of!) to my latest op ed essay, just published by Groundviews citizen journalism website. Titled Voting for the ‘Undiscovered Country’?, and timed for Sri Lanka’s general election 2010, it takes a look at the most important common element discussed and debated during the election campaigns by all parties: Sri Lanka’s future prosperity.
As I note: “Our endlessly bickering political parties rarely agree on anything, so it’s refreshing to see a broad consensus on what this election is fundamentally about: future prosperity.
“That’s no coincidence. This is the first time we elect our law makers since the long drawn and brutal civil war ended in May 2009. We have been looking back — or nervously looking around — for much of the past three decades. It’s about time we finally looked forward.”
I go on to say: “How we wish Sir Arthur C Clarke was still with us at this crucial juncture in our history! For half a century up to his death in March 2008, the author, explorer and visionary was Sri Lanka’s amiable ‘tour guide’ to that ‘Undiscovered Country’ called the Future.
“Whoever wins this week’s election, shaping a better future will need clarity of purpose, hard work and persistence. Those looking for long term vision can start with the substantial volume of essays, interviews and speeches that Clarke has left behind…”
The rest of the essay is a concise exploration of Sir Arthur Clarke’s advice offered to his adopted homeland over several decades, and covering different areas of public policy and public interest such as education, technology, environmental conservation and managing human diversity.
Winners of the Asia Pacific Rice Film Award 2008-2009 were announced this week. The award was established ‘to recognise excellence in audio-visual creations on rice-related issues in Asia, where most of the world’s rice is grown and consumed’.
I found it a well-focused, positive story compellingly told, with an unhurried script — just enough information, not bombarding the viewer with facts and figures. It’s about a new, more efficient way of growing rice called System of Rice Intensification (SRI).
But this is far from a boring instructional film. It focuses on lives of farmers on and off the field (e.g. SRI’s benefits to women farmers – such as less labour and time intensive). The visual experience is completed by the excellent camera work, sound track and seamless editing – altogether a highly professional production that is also a persuasive advocacy film.
Here’s the official synopsis for the film, taken from Vatavaran 2009 film festival website:
A revolutionary method, System of Rice Intensification (SRI) requires almost no standing water for paddy to grow and is fast transforming the rice cultivation. Developed by a French priest Henri De Launi in the 1980’s in Madagascar, SRI not only uses almost half of the water required but drastically reduces the physical labor associated with rice farming besides increasing the yield by almost one and a half times. For a country like India rice is more than just a mere crop.
There are myths attached to its cultivation. While SRI offers an alternate and a very sustainable method of growing rice it also battles hard with the age-old traditional approach of growing rice. The perils of global warming, the drying up of perennial rivers and the excessive use of fertilizers pose numerous threats to rice cultivation; making life very hard for the humble farmer. SRI offers a workable solution to all problems related to traditional rice cultivation.
SRI- Challenging Tradition, Transforming Lives looks at how SRI is helping the modern farmer cultivate India’s traditional crop without the burden that it had become. In addition the film highlights the transformation in the lives of millions of women who toil the hardest in Indian farmers thanks to SRI reducing the need for manual labor. To its critics the System of Rice Intensification might not be the greatest thing but the fact that SRI significantly reduces the demand for water for rice cultivation makes it worthwhile in the current scenario of the world.
Starting out in 2001-02, Gautam Chintamani worked in the capacity of Associate Producer on India’s first daily news spoof show Khabarein Khabardar. There on he did freelance writing for numerous shows for MTV, Sony and Zee amongst others. He has written and directed an 18 min short film, Alterations. In addition to writing for television Gautam Chintamani regualraly writes for the print and electronic media. He has extensively written for Man’s World, Hard News, Media Trans-Asia and MidDay, rediff.com and Buzz in Town. Gautam also worked in the capacity of Associate Director and Executive Producer of the Hindi feature film, Amavas. Of his television work the law drama, Siddhanth (Star One) was nominated for an Emmy in the International Drama section. Gautam’s episode dealing with an HIV positive college student who fights for her basic right to education was selected as a case study for a Writers workshop conducted by Hero’s Group in Hyderabad & Chennai.
This year’s Earth Hour was observed around the globe this weekend. On Saturday 27 March 2010, millions of businesses and households switched off some or most night lights from 8:30 to 9:30 pm local time.
An estimated one billion people, along with thousands of cities and hundreds of globally famous monuments, switched off their lights according to the organisers, WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature). I couldn’t participate personally, as I was flying through that night from Amsterdam to Singapore.
Originating in Australia in 2007, Earth Hour has become a global event held on the last Saturday of March every year. It asks households and businesses everywhere to voluntarily turn off their non-essential lights and other electrical appliances for one hour (60 minutes) as a way to raise awareness on the need to act on climate change.
For sure, Earth Hour is mostly symbolic – we can’t save enough electricity in just an hour to make any dent in our planetary energy consumption. But it reminds us of the need to conserve energy whenever and wherever we can — and reinforces the fact that the climate crisis is very closely linked to how we generate and use energy.
Indeed, night lights are one of the most visible indicators of energy use. In my writing and talks, I keep using this composite NASA image of the Earth at night shows, energy use is also proportionate to the level of economic activity and social development. Asia accounts for a good deal of the world’s lights at night.
There is a better way to involve everyone, everywhere in an on-going way to save significant amounts of electricity: tackle the growing concern about Standby power.
A large number of electronic and electrical products — from TVs and microwave ovens to air-conditioners — cannot be switched off completely without being unplugged. These consume power 24 hours a day, often without the knowledge of the consumer. This is called ‘standby power’, also known variously as vampire power, vampire draw, phantom load, or leaking electricity. (These vampires draw electricity!).
Standing by, costing us -- and warming the planet...A very common “electricity vampire” is a power adapter which has no power-off switch. Some such devices offer remote controls and digital clock features to the user, while other devices, such as power adapters for laptop computers and other electronic devices, consume power without offering any features.
Another example is the typical microwave oven. Over its lifespan, it consumes more electricity powering its digital clock than it does heating food. Yes, heating food requires more than 100 times as much power as running the clock, but then, most microwave ovens stand idle —in “standby” mode – more than 99% of the time.
It’s the cumulative effect that matters here. The wasted standby power (vampire energy loss) of an individual household is typically very small, but the sum of all such devices within the household becomes significant. When we add up millions of such households, it suddenly becomes a whopping number.
Here’s a short video made by Good Magazine, in association with Nigel Holmes, explaining everything about standby power:
In fact, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that standby power accounts for 1% of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions. For context, all the world’s air travel contributes around 2.5% of global CO2 emissions. But airlines, airports and flights have drawn much more attention – and considerable flak – than this widely distributed energy leakage happening right under most of our roofs…
Standby power consumed by different devices - courtesy Geeks Are Sexy website
Industrialised countries are now more aware of this situation. “An individual product draws relatively little standby power (see here for examples), but a typical American home has forty products constantly drawing power. Together these amount to almost 10% of residential electricity use,” says an entire website dedicated to this topicby the US government’s top-ranked Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
A similar study in France in 2000 found that standby power accounted for 7% of total residential consumption. Further studies have since come to similar conclusions in other developed countries, including the Netherlands, Australia and Japan. Some estimates put the proportion of consumption due to standby power as high as 13%.
In helpful tips to consumers on saving electricity, the US Department of Energy says: “Many appliances continue to draw a small amount of power when they are switched off. These ‘phantom’ loads occur in most appliances that use electricity, such as VCRs, televisions, stereos, computers and kitchen appliances. These phantom loads can be avoided by unplugging the appliance or using a power strip and using the switch on the power strip to cut all power to the appliance.”
It also advises consumers to unplug battery chargers when the batteries are fully charged or the chargers are not in use. Technical solutions to the problem of standby power exist in the form of a new generation of power transformers that use only 100 milliwatts in standby mode and thus can reduce standby consumption by up to 90%. Another solution is the ‘smart’ electronic switch that cuts power when there is no load and restores it immediately when required.
LBNL also offers advice on how to reduce standby power consumption in our households and offices.
Standby power is receiving more attention at the supply end too, with manufacturers and regulators getting into the act. The One Watt Initiative is an energy saving proposal by the IEA to reduce standby power use in all appliances to just one watt.
The initiative, launched in 1999, aimed to ensure that by 2010 all new appliances sold in the world only use one watt of electricity in their standby mode. The IEA estimates that this can help reduce CO2 emissions by 50 million tons in the OECD countries alone by 2010 — the equivalent to removing 18 million cars from the roads.
‘Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen,’ said the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change that the UK government published in November 2006. This 579-page assessment on the economics of climate change was headed by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank. The report warned that the world economy will suffer a serious blow if action to slow down climate change was not taken soon. According to Stern,’There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we take strong action now.’
Though not in the same league, this interesting call to action just caught my eye – it reminds us of a slogan that rode Bill Clinton to office in the 1990s, but takes on a whole new meaning now on a warming planet.
The reference given, http://www.palebluedot.net, did not have a working website as at today, 27 March 2010.
The Stern Review is the most comprehensive, rigorous and terrifying report published todate by a finance ministry. It points out that carbon emissions have already increased global temperatures by more than 0.5°C and that with no action to cut greenhouse gases, we will warm the planet another 2 to 3°C within the next 50 years. This will transform the physical geography of the planet and the way we live, with floods, disease, storms and water shortages becoming more frequent.
Stern and his team – no crying-wolf greenies, them – cautioned that the effects of climate change could cost the world between 5% and 20% of GDP, prompting the worst recession since the 1920s. Action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the worst of global warming, on the other hand, would cost 1% of global GDP.
A few days ago, commenting on cartoons on climate change, I wrote: “So how do we capture climate change’s multiplicity in visual forms? Photographers go for the evidence and authenticity. Film makers work on both current impacts and future scenarios…”
Now here comes a chance for photographers everywhere to bear witness to the climate crisis slowly unfolding all around us.
As the website says, “Hot Shots is…designed to create a visual record of these personal impressions by and for people around the world. The focus is not only on spectacular events, but also on climate change from people’s own, personal perspective.”
This is one of my favourite photos in media and development. It was taken by Reza Deghati, the renowned Iranian-French photojournalist (who works under the name Reza). I don’t know the story behind this photo, but even without a single word of annotation, it says a great deal.
I like this photo partly because it symobolises the enduring appeal of broadcast television in much of the developing world. For long years, the old-fashioned, boxy TV set used to be the top-selling consumer electronic item in the world — until the mobile phone came along. But even now, the much-maligned idiot box hasn’t lost its appeal to a significant section of humanity, never mind what the jaded academics and geeks might say.
So I was intrigued to read, in the latest issue of TIME Magazine, development economist Charles Kenny, reminding us that television is still the most influential medium around. In this gizmo-ridden new media age, it takes much courage to say so in public.
In a powerful short essay titled ‘TV Will Save the World’, he writes: “Forget Twitter and Facebook, Google and the Kindle. Forget the latest sleek iGadget. Television is still the most influential medium around. Indeed, for many of the poorest regions of the world, it remains the next big thing — poised, finally, to attain truly global ubiquity. And that is a good thing, because the TV revolution is changing lives for the better.”
Across the developing world, he says, some 60% of the households had their own TV set in 2005 — up from 45% in 1995. He adds: “Five million more households in sub-Saharan Africa will get a TV over the next five years. In 2005, after the fall of the Taliban, which had outlawed TV, 1 in 5 Afghans had one. The global total is another 150 million by 2013 — pushing the numbers to well beyond two-thirds of households.”
He ends his essay with these words that strongly resonate with me: “Too much TV has been associated with violence, obesity and social isolation. But TV is having a positive impact on the lives of billions worldwide, and as the spread of mobile TV, video cameras and YouTube democratize both access and content, it will become an even greater force for humbling tyrannical governments and tyrannical husbands alike.”
As Sir Arthur C Clarke, inventor of the communications satellie whose second death anniversary we mark this week, told me in a 2003 interview: “I’m not impressed by the attacks on television because of some truly dreadful programmes. I believe that every TV programme has some educational content. The cathode ray tube – and now the plasma screen – is a window to the world. Often it may be a very murky window, but I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that, on balance, even bad TV is preferable to no TV at all.”
Image courtesy Foreign PolicyThe TIME essay is a much compacted version of what he wrote in November 2009 issue of Foreign Policy magazine, titled Revolution in a Box. That article noted the continuing global spread of television sets and an explosion of viewer choice driven by cable, satellite and digital technologies. It suggested this is a good thing, pointing to evidence that access to competitive television can improve womens’ standing in the home, increase girls schooling, reduce fertility rates, lower drug use, improve governance and (possibly) help foster global peace.
The editors of Foreign Policy ran the following blurb: “It’s not Twitter or Facebook that’s reinventing the planet. Eighty years after the first commercial broadcast crackled to life, television still rules our world. And let’s hear it for the growing legions of couch potatoes: All those soap operas might be the ticket to a better future after all.”
The full essay is well worth a careful read. At a time when I have been questioning many of the founding premises of my own work at TVE Asia Pacific, he has provided conceptual clarity and sharper focus.
I gave an illustrated talk titled ‘Sir Arthur C Clarke: Man Who Lived in the Future’. We had an eager audience of 65 – 70 persons. Here are some photos from the occasion – a more detailed blog post will follow.
Nalaka Gunawardene giving Sir Arthur C Clarke memorial talk (photos above & below), 17 Marc 2010, British Councl Colombo
Thilina Heeatigala, General Secretary of SLAA, introducing the programmeMichael Snowden asking a question
The talk will be followed by the screening of feature film 2010: The Year We Make Contact(116 mins, 1984). Directed by Peter Hyams on a screenplay co-written by Peter Hyams and Arthur C Clarke, the film starred Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren and Keir Dullea. This is the movie adaptation of the best selling science fiction novel 2010: Odyssey Two that Arthur C Clarke wrote in 1982.
Open Minds! 