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The New Bang As the world’s largest particle collider — the $3.8-billion Large Hadron Collider — passed its first major tests on Wednesday by firing two beams of proton in opposite directions around a 27-km underground ring in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the make-up of the universe, people across the world sat up and marvelled at man’s unrelenting quest for more insight into the mystery of matter. Described as the biggest physics experiment in history, conducted by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), it involved sending proton beam in clockwise and counterclockwise directions — one following the other. The Hadron Collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel. Eventually two beams would be fired at the same time in opposite directions with the aim of recreating conditions a split second after the Big Bang — which, according to scientists, was the massive explosion that created the universe. The CERN experiments may reveal more about dark matter, antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of the space-time continuum. They might even lead to evidence as to the existence of the hypothetical Higgs boson, called the ‘‘God particle’’ because it is believed to give mass to all other particles and thus to the matter that makes up this universe. Before the start of the CERN experiments, sceptics had raised fears that the ambitious venture involving collision of protons — subatomic particles that constitute the nucleus of an atom along with neutrons — could imperil earth by creating micro-black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravitational force is so strong that they can suck in other stars. These fears have now been proved to be unfounded. In fact the CERN, backed by celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking who has spent most of his life doing research on black holes and addressed to the layman as to what that research means in his bestseller A Brief History of Time, had dismissed the micro-black hole fears and declared the experiments to be absolutely safe. Physicists today are trying to decode matter in its entirety to understand why the universe behaves as one sees and feels it, and why it should or what drives it to behave so. A complete knowledge of the very initial phases of the universe — say after a millionth or a billionth of a second of the Big Bang — is what they believe will empower human intelligence, with the technology in hand, to theorize better and follow the truth behind the evolution of the universe and our place in it. The CERN experiments are a unique endeavour in the sense that here is man revisiting the Big Bang — now his own laboratory creation — to master the forces of nature, the least understood of all, ironically, is gravity with which even schoolchildren otherwise get familiar as they come across the famous Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, but much of whose interpretation has changed right from Einstein’s revolutionary theory of general relativity — treating gravity not as force as such, but as manifestation of the curvature of space and time — to its later quantum mechanical treatment. It is reassuring that physicists are moving in the right direction, and confidently at that. God must be happy about their activities to know his mind! The question now is not whether that is possible. The question, and the challenge, is when that will happen. And this informs, as it should, all modern science.

Instil Fear It has come to light that as many as 60 per cent of rape victims in Guwahati are minors, including even babies as old as mere seven months! The heinousness of the crime can be gauged from what the rapist deliberately does to cater to his pervert libido and his knowledge of the vulnerability and absolute helplessness of the innocent victim. But what sustain that criminality are instances of rapists either going scot-free or having to be punished with lesser sentences or being tried in the long cycle of delayed justice without timely and meaningful punishment. While psychologists would point to the perverted sexuality of rapists, it is all the more imperative and pragmatic that the fear of punishment — harshest and exemplary — be instilled in the minds of those who move around to inflict savagery on tender, innocent lives. It is this fear alone that will arrest the tendencies of the psyche of a rapist in the making. In other words, the police-investigation-judiciary combine should set examples by apprehending the guilty and awarding them with sentences matching their crime. Let it help create a safe and civilized society.

The Lost Sense of History THE REALITY MIRROR Bikash Sarmah A nation — or a people — stands enfeebled and exhausted of ideas to power its future in the absence of a sense of history. You do not need to be a historian to have a sense of history. All it needs is common sense and the ability to identify points of time that have given rise to different societal loci, with their unique paradigms of culture, economics and politics. I would call it historical temperament. Like scientific temperament which is founded on the best use of the faculty of reason, historical temperament too would invoke that faculty to analyse past events and their continuity into the future in myriad forms. They say history is repeated. What it points to is one’s ability, or lack of it, to appreciate the tendency of past events to manifest themselves in the future, in new settings, provoked by new conditionings. History is repeated because people are a continuum, who cannot delink themselves completely from the past. To realize it all, one needs historical temperament. Historical temperament consists of an attitudinal predisposition to the past and appreciation of its times and events. We are all children of history, and we create history by our collective action. Therefore, historical temperament must obviously be a realization of that fact. The ability to discern what was staged long back — stories of struggles, revolutions, ideologies, failures, blunders, and of course whatever vision that has led us to the present — and analyse as to what could have made a better future or how the aberrations of the past could have been done away with, defines historical temperament. This is terribly missing in today’s Assam. If it has to do with the neglect of history as a subject in school curriculum, I would also say it has much to do with our tendency to either demonize history or simply underrate it in the face of the new and glamorous present; we would either blame our past for the situations we are confronted with in the present or treat the past with disdain because our impression is that we do not need to relate to the past which is dead or cannot fit in the present, given its newness and a perceived total divorce from the past. This is a kind of make-believe world then. We seem to be forcing ourselves into believing that we are empowered enough to create a future without the aid of past events and recourse to their analysis. It is this attitude that has school students treat history contemptuously and believe that it cannot enlighten anyone. At best, history is studied merely to know who existed when, and not who existed why and how. There is no attempt to recreate history so that it entertains us towards a rigorous and enlightening course of relating to the past to make a meaning of the present. We have failed to realize that the present has an unerasable stamp of historicity. Assam has its own history. Therefore, it must have a sense of that history. The advent of Ahoms had had its own charm, which is legendary. That flow of people, their settlement, their assimilation and spread, their socio-cultural metamorphosis, and the concomitant social engineering that went on to secure a new foundation for the Assamese society and give it a new identity — all seem to have eluded the Assamese youth, despite his education, as a result of which he suffers from an acute poverty of imagination and insight into the intricacies of his own time. Ahom history is legendary because it is about a people who made a new home by identifying themselves with what they saw and eventually accepted — to redefine it more beautifully. That is why history bans the use of ‘‘invasion’’ to describe the Ahom surge, spread and assimilation. Those who think they have nothing to do with history will now be asking: What use is that history? To which the answer is: To appreciate the beauty of evolution of a people who adopted a homeland to nourish and enrich it, who became one with it, and then who fought the aggressors valiantly to create a history of triumph; and to understand a narrative whose resonance in the present would help us realize the gravity of today’s calamitous moment brought about by Bangladeshi designs of aggression and derive inspiration to stand out as a patriotic people committed to the cause of the motherland. Then come to the Independence movement of which Assam was essentially a part. It produced martyrs who fought for the liberation of their motherland from the yoke of British imperialism and who thought it was their privilege to be born at that time to lay down their lives in the service of the motherland. There was absolutely no mismatch between what they were seeking and what the rest of the freedom fighters in other parts of the country had set out to achieve. The struggle for freedom as Assam’s gallant souls had embarked upon, would eventually be an exemplary element of the nationalistic discourse of the time; it was a wonderful manifestation of an aspiration to be in Free India, to enjoy the free nationality and contribute to it for the making of a greater nation-state. However, with the rise of ULFA and the kind of violence inflicted on that history, there has been an attempt to disown the history and historicity of the freedom movement in Assam during the British colonial era. T he ULFA’s has been an attempt to militate against Assam’s contribution to the freedom movement to flourish as part of Free India. In that sense the ULFA’s own ‘freedom movement’ is a violence on a sense of history — whatever was left till 1979, the year of ULFA’s birth — that would have the Assamese community prosper in a free society and, more significantly, in a setting that would spontaneously make every subnationalistic move a part of the process to evolve into a greater and all-encompassing Indian nationality. Today, this ULFA negation of shared history — and sense of history — has another dimension: the choice of its top leaders to go to Bangladesh and the subsequent hijacking of their ‘freedom movement’ by Pakistan’s ISI. All this would not have been so difficult to tackle had our sense of history guided us in our tryst with changing times and had we worked on that sense of history to enlighten the citizenry in rural areas on the hogwash called ‘freedom movement’ in an already free society — realized as a result of sacrifices made by our real freedom fighters to oust the colonial British regime. Ideals never die; we choose of them to our own advantage. It is history that sources ideals and outsources them, too, to other areas of study or intellectual activity. However, when we take history only as a descriptive undertaking — of people and events — we fail to respond to how history would have us interpret and analyse its crux. There may be distortion in our interpretation and analysis, but the fact remains that our attempt to interpret and analyse past events would have helped build a debating ground for intense intellectual exercises to decode the past in different ways. And one still would have the right to accept any of the interpretations or take them all for a holistic discourse without any violence on history, because every truth must have an interpretation too. Only, it is the undiluted sense of history that must dictate the approach to truths. Let us learn to have that sense for the sake of our own future. Azadi to Terrorize India Wilson john The pro-azadi slogans we hear and the Pakistani flags we see in the Kashmir Valley are self-contradictory. Or are they? What Farooq, Malik and Shah dream of is no different from what Geelani hopes for: Kashmir becoming Pakistani territory. A lot has been written about the protests and the cry for azadi in the Kashmir Valley in the national and international media. The arguments and counter-arguments have been loud, often raucous, and almost rabidly emotional, clouding in the process certain important facts which the people of Jammu & Kashmir, and India, should know. Of great urgency is to understand the conspiracy behind the violence and pro-Pakistani voices in the Kashmir Valley. The loud calls for azadi and more shrill pro-Pakistan slogans are contradictory in their very nature, and therefore betray the conflicting stands taken by the various self-appointed leaders of Kashmiris and the helping hand of Pakistani terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyeba which have been the ISI’s key instruments in propagating anti-India sentiments and violence. Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the key proponent of azadi, is a Pakistani stooge and has been playing the Islamabad tune for quite some time despite his secessionist rhetoric, which should have put any ordinary Indian behind bars without bail under the National Security Act. He wants Kashmir to become another ‘federally administered’ colony of Pakistan like FATA or Pak-occupied Kashmir where people do not even have the fundamental right of expression — if someone dares to do so, as Mr Geelani and his acolytes indulge in with abundance on this side, they would be summarily shot or stand trial for treason. So should be the case of All-Party Hurriyat Conference leaders Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, former Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front leader Yasin Malik and Shabbir Shah who have been misleading the people over the issue of Sri Amarnath Shrine Board land allotment and inciting them to protest and indulge in violence against India. Umar Farooq, Yasin Malik and Shabbir Shah have been quick to scamper on to the Geelani bandwagon but espouse a different agenda of independence. As in the past, they are leading the gullible people of Kashmir on a path of violence, instigated by forces which are inimical to India. One such potent force is the LeT, created by Osama bin Laden during the Afghan jihad and supported by the Pakistani Army and the ISI since then. All the Kashmiri leaders have been in constant touch with the LeT leadership during the past two months. Geelani, in fact, has been a frequent visitor to Islamabad and other cities in Pakistan, taking part in bogus conferences on Kashmir. He has been particularly active in the ISI-LeT network before and during the renewed violence in Kashmir. The LeT has been working, assiduously for several years now in Kashmir, marginalizing local militant outfits like Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, taking over the responsibility of training and funding of terrorist activities, particularly after 2003, and making deeper inroads into the civil society by establishing mosques and madarsas in the area and front organizations like Kashmir Elder Council. It is well-known that the LeT has been instigating and leading protests over power breakdowns and security operations. Kashmir is the core agenda of the LeT and it has, in its manifesto called ‘‘Why Are We Doing Jihad’’, justified violent means to achieve its objective of ‘liberating’ ‘Muslim’ land from ‘kafir’ India. The group has been consistently holding rallies and conferences on jihad in Kashmir, increasing the rhetoric and actions since early-2007. In February 2007, for instance, the LeT (see www.jamatdawah.org) organized a huge rally in Lahore where LeT chief Hafiz Saeed said: “India does not have any moral right to keep on occupying Kashmir. Pakistan firmly stands with their Kashmiri brethren in their legitimate struggle for the right of self-determination.” He said Kashmir could be India’s atoot ang (inseparable part) but it is Pakistan’s jugular vein. A message was read out at this rally from Syed Ali Shah Geelani, in which he said: “We will continue our struggle and achieve our freedom even if the whole world decides to oppose us.” In February 2008, the group organized ‘‘Kashmir Solidarity’’ rallies in 32 towns of PoK. Shabbir Shah and Geelani addressed some of the rallies via phone. The 11-point resolution adopted at the biggest of the rallies, addressed by Geelani, declared that “Pakistan will remain insecure as long as its jugular vein is in the clutches of its arch enemy”. The evidence of the terrorist group’s close coordination with elements on the Indian side of Kashmir was betrayed by the LeT’s elaborate plans to welcome the ‘‘Muzaffarabad Chalo’’ march. While a large section of the media projected the march, led by pro-Pakistani Kashmiri leaders, as a ‘‘spontaneous protest’’, the LeT was clearly preparing for such an event. It is also quite obvious that the renewed violence in Jammu & Kashmir and the repeated attempts to push in terrorists, trained in camps of Swat and Dir in North-West Frontier Province, are part of a script written by the LeT, often called an Al Qaeda clone, supported and sustained by the Pakistan Army ever since its creation in 1993. (ADNI)

source: sentinel assam