Why one must feel sorry for Kapil Sibal/Education system
One must feel
sorry for Union Human Resource
Development Minister Kapil Sibal.
When Sibal
became Union HRD minister, he brought a new thrust to the ministry at least on
the outset. He talked of expanding the number of education-providers, improving
the quality of education, giving autonomy to colleges/universities. But before
he could bring in that
much-needed change in the education scenario of the country, the party high
command thought Sibal’s calculation skills could be better utilised to
challenge (even if vaguely) the proficiency of the CAG in the infamous 2G
spectrum scam. So, he was given additional charge of Telecom Ministry by Prime
Minister manmohan singh (read SONIA GANDHI).
The next we
heard from Sibal was not on the issue of providing interest subsidy on educational loans
or abolition of Class X board exams. But on how the Comptroller and
Auditor-General (CAG) had been ‘utterly
erroneous’ in his estimation of a loss of Rs. 1.76 lakh
crore in the 2G spectrum allocation.
However, by
this time the 2G scam was being investigated by CBI under the supervision of
the apex court and A Raja’s involvement in the lapses was almost certain.
Reacting to
Sibal’s comment, Supreme Court
reprimanded him and asked the Minister to behave with ‘some sense of
responsibility’. Sibal’s reply could well have been: I am behaving responsibly.
After all, this is the responsibility that I have been assigned – to save
Congress’ face in the 2G spectrum scam.
But, Sibal cannot
not even do that. That is why we should feel sorry for him.
When CBI
arrested A Raja and Kapil Sibal was reminded of his comment that ‘2G allocation
had not caused any loss to the country’, the Telecom Minister had nothing to
say. He told media persons to ‘go and ask CBI’.
Now when he is
asked if he is a reluctant telecom minister, Sibal replies – If the prime minister (read SONIA
GANDHI) wants me to do a job, I do it.
Meanwhile,
public education system continues to languish. Statistics, that only half the
children of Class V can read Class II textbooks, is a shame for any government.
We cannot but feel sorry for the public education system.
REMINISCENT NOTE: Excerpts from Rahul Gandhi’s maiden speech in Parliament in 2006 that spun higher education dreams: “I walked to the children in village schools "Beta bade hokar kya bano ge?" The silent stare I got in reply disturbed me. In school after school, I have asked this question and got no answer.
Well.. Mr
Rahul Gandhi will go to villages and find out about the rotten education
system, only to use the anecdotes to pepper his speech in the Parliament.
Mr Gandhi, may
we tell you – your silence is more disturbing than the child who could not
answer: Beta bada hokar kya banoge?
Facebook Vs Wikileaks
Pick the odd man out - Vladimir Putin,
Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Mark Zuckerberg.
The answer may not be difficult to
guess: Mark Zuckerberg.
Now the similarity. All of them
including the facebook creator have been TIME persons of the year - 2007, 2008,
2009, and 2010 respectively.
Vladimir Putin, the man responsible for
bringing Russia back to the great game of geopolitics after it was almost
on the verge of becoming a failed state.
Barack Obama, who won a historic
American election to become the 44th President of the United States and
the first African American to do this. A year later he won the Nobel Peace
Prize (2009) "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen
international diplomacy and cooperation between people.”
Ben Bernanke, the Chairman
of Federal Reserve (the central bank of the U.S) who prevented an
economic catastrophe. In 2009, Bernanke hurled unprecedented amounts of
money into the banking system in different ways, which lay the groundwork for the
Fed's eventual return to normality.
It is here that one is forced to stop
and think before moving on to the next candidate in the list. Mark Zukerberg’s
online directory ‘Facebook’ that connects people through social network may
have blossomed beyond 500 million in 2010 with a movie, The Social
Network, made about the early days of Facebook. And it may be true that one
out of every dozen people on planet now has a Facebook account.
But, when seen in the light of
Zukerberg’s predecessors that the esteemed TIME magazine has honoured, his
contribution seems insignificant.
TIME Magazine's Person of the Year, is
the award given since 1927 to the most influential person in the world in that
year.
2010 was a year when Julian Assange
founder of whistleblower website WikiLeaks captured headlines of almost all
mainstream dailies around the world and his revelations were debated in
Parliaments of most democracies.
According to a report in the Canada
based The Gazette (Montreal) Julian Assange was voted top newsmaker of the year
2010 by senior editors at Postmedia Network newspapers and canada.com.
The social networking business
Facebook's core business is social networking – something that has
already been tasted and enjoyed by other players in the field.
Take the examples of AOL, Tripod,
Friendster, Orkut, MySpace or LinkedIn. You might have believed the same thing
about any one of those social networks as you do now about Facebook.
AOL was considered ubiquitous and invincible. And yet it saw its
downfall just like the other aforementioned social networks did. MySpace was
described as one of the most wildly successful sites in 2006 when it had
amassed 124 million profiles in its two and a half years of existence.
So it is wrong if we say AOL, Orkut or MySpace lost and Facebook
won. The more appropriate statement will be MySpace won first and Facebook won
next. And something else will follow.
Interestingly, Julian Assange won the most votes in TIME
magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year poll. While Assange was148,383 votes over
the silver medalist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
came in 10th.
TIME’s
editor played safe by picking a less-controversial figure. However, the choice
itself became a controversy with numerous journalists and commentators alleging
that the magazine went with the safer choice, opting
for the 26-year-old billionaire over the
Australian hacker-turned-anti-secrecy advocate now
targeted by the U.S. Justice Department.
A TIME reader comments on TIME’s cover story of its Person of the
Year 2010 issue: “Guys, I’ve got a guy here working at TIME, who tells me that
Zuckerberg paid to get his face on the cover. He also tells me, things like
this are not unusual.”
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