KA should have been ready for IFFI
Undergoing renovation for the past several months, Kala Academy, one of the prominent venues for the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) is reportedly unlikely to re-open for the annual upcoming event to begin from November 20.
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It is pertinent to note that after three years of hybrid format, the annual event, which is in its 53rd edition this year, will be held entirely in the physical mode. It must be said that there was sufficient time to get the Kala Academy ready for the mega international event. There should have been proper planning which would have prevented such a fiasco. IFFI commences on a specific date every year. Hence the infrastructure should have been ready well in advance.
Kala Academy, the premiere venue for the IFFI, has missed the deadline by a few days as it will reportedly be ready for use by December 8 while IFFI commences on November 20.
It is pertinent to note that in the past too Goa was not able to host the National Games as the infrastructure for the multidisciplinary sports event was not in place. The inability to have the infrastructure ready in time for national and international events does not augur well for the State.
It now remains to be seen where the IFFI programmes, which were earlier held at Kala Academy, will now be shifted.
Adelmo Fernandes, Vasco
Climate action is the need of the hour
The current UN Climate Change Summit assumes great significance in the wake of recurring natural disasters like flooding, droughts and much more the world over. The East or the West, countries, world leaders and the media have been talking about climate change crises and related ramifications.
First off, it is clearly evident from recent flooding in countries like Pakistan and the US (Florida) that climate change has been playing havoc with countries and their agricultural activities.
Summits apart, how about action to be taken? Frankly speaking, the world needs strong action against the climate change issues. More than anything else, it is every single step that most matters. For instance, there should be a positive shift in human attitude to Mother Nature. After all, climate change is something created by human activities on Mother Earth in a nutshell.
Added to this, humans have been strongly reliant on natural resources and they have been eating food made from agricultural produce. Just imagine, what would happen to the world and humanity if farming activities were completely killed by climate change? Of course, it is going to be Armageddon any time in the future.
Therefore UN Climate Change Summit parleys should be more of strong action than anything else.
P Senthil Saravana Durai, Mumbai
Unable to punish the corrupt in our system
Corruption remains part and parcel of daily life in India. It’s particularly widespread in local-level citizen services, which are ridden with bribery and kickbacks. The basic cause for corruption is that our government is not designed for accountability and delivering services to its citizens. The culture of corruption, weak anti-corruption institutions and delay in justice delivery creates the platform for corruption.
The corruption is cancerous and a serious obstacle to the growth of the nation. If there is a deficiency on the part of opposition members and fear of counter-attack, they cannot effectively expose the misdeeds of ruling party members.
People talk of corruption and show no shame in indulging in corruption. Public servants are being corrupted by private institutions and corporates to get their work done. The Anti-graft agencies should adopt a policy of “Zero Tolerance” towards corruption in various fields of governance.
Strengthen the anti-corruption institutions by making provision for skill-upgradation, technology-upgradation and staffing them commensurate to their workload expectations, increasing the autonomy of these institutions, making them independent of the whims and fancies of the incumbent Executive machinery.
KG Vilop, Chorao
Who to blame for Cyrus Mistry accident
The Maharashtra police is understood to have filed a case of rash driving against the lady gynaecologist Pandole who was at the wheel of the Mercedes Benz car which met an accident and in which Cyrus Mistry and one other person died. This is the correct way to go. There has been a lot of spin attempted about the accident ranging from problems with the car to the design of the highway at the point where the accident happened.
On the latter even our Central Minister of Road Transport, Nitin Gadkari has joined issue claiming that the highway at that point indeed narrowed and he would in the future have foreign experts design our highways, in contrast of his present stand to support local highway engineering experts.
All this is being clearly done because the Pandoles are well-off and one would assume well connected. The system clearly is out to protect them and transfer blame to other entities so that they get off scot-free in this incident. This should not be allowed.
One has all the sympathies for those involved in the accident but the driver should take responsibility. Here we need to state that highway driving is not easy and one needs to be used to it. It is also far removed from city driving and that is where lady driver lapsed into error which led to the accident.
If it were not for the death of Cyrus Mistry in this accident and the hi-profile nature of the other occupants of the car, this incident would just have been written off as yet another highway accident adding to the rising statistics of such cases.
Srinivas Kamat, Alto St Cruz
Humanity has gone for a toss
This has reference to the report ‘Cruelty knows no bounds’ and article ‘Let humanity be accorded utmost priority’ (Herald, November 8, 2022).
You couldn’t have put it better; yes it seems cruelty knows no bounds. This case of a man throwing a woman into a well with a stone tied to her waist is absolutely disgusting.
What has happened to humanity, one wonders. Judging from other similar case of murder, it seems man has lost his sanity. There is no other way to explain the situation.
In the meanwhile, according to another report in your newspaper, a woman in labour was denied admission to a hospital in Karnataka because she was unable to produce her Aadhaar card, leading to her death and her twin new-borns. Again, absolutely disgusting. Sniffing off a life even before it could come into the world. Humanity has gone for a toss.
Needless to say, we ought to take hold of our senses. Those find guilty for these deaths must be severely punished in order to deter others from committing such barbaric, inhuman acts in future.
Melville X D’Souza, Mumbai
Get environment savvy
At negotiations on halting global warming recently in Egypt, UN chief Antonio Guterre’s sentence that humanity must “cooperate or perish” in the face of escalating climate change repercussions was a truly an environment savvy. It’s true that globe is currently engaged in the struggle of our life, amid a barrage of geopolitical catastrophes, including the Covid pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and weather extremes that are destroying economies and upending international relations.
It’s imperative that the deal between rich countries and emerging economies that would aim to reduce emissions and keep the temperature rise to the more ambitious as per Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius in this era. We are definitely on a highway to climatic hell with our foot still on the accelerator.
Vijaykumar H K, Raichur
