A Monument To Preservation

Kuldip Singh

As has happened with a great deal of environmental legislation in India, 'ineffective' would perhaps be the most accurate way of describing the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958, and its subsequent amendments. Its failure is partly because of the casual exercise of the ill-defined powers of the Act by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). It also has a great deal to do with "rapid urbanization, construction of multi-storeyed residential and commercial buildings and implementation of development projects", as stated in 2005 by the Minister of Culture in Parliament.

For the first time in 1992, the Act was amended to define a 100 metres prohibited zone and 200 metres regulated zone around protected monuments. These were naturally seen as stumbling blocks to the greed of property developers and insensitive local authorities. In order to ward off mounting criticism by such lobbies that the 1992 notification was too rigid, in 2006 the ASI obligingly convened an advisory committee and empowered it to transgress the 100 metres prohibited and 200 metres regulated zones. Over 3 years, this committee considered a few hundred cases and gave about a couple of hundred questionable decisions on heritage issues.

Particularly ill-conceived were the decisions to allow the construction of an elevated road right over the 400-year-old Barapulla Bridge in Delhi as also its alignment within 104 metres of the Mughal period Khan-i-Khana's tomb. Matters came to a head in October 2009 when the Delhi high court, in an unrelated case, declared the ASI's advisory committee illegal. Obviously, a committee convened by a Central Ministry's administrative order had no powers to amend an Act passed by Parliament. Under the circumstances, the Government backtracked. An appeal against the High Court's order would have been embarrassingly fruitless.

Faced with the prospect of having to demolish structures considered essential for the success of the Commonwealth Games 2010, a nervous Ministry of Culture hastily drafted an ordinance to legalize the ASI's moves. This was ratified by the President on January 23, 2010. The ordinance, while attempting to save the Government's face, was so unskillfully drafted that it may well have paved the way to large-scale degradation of heritage all over India. Alarmed at this dismal prospect facing heritage sites, concerned historians and intellectuals immediately brought the possible damaging consequences of the ordinance to the government's attention.

It is to the Government's credit that it immediately appointed a high-powered committee to recast the January 23 ordinance before it could be brought to Parliament as a Bill for ratification. The committee, under the chairmanship of Law Minister Veerappa Moily and with 2 other members, completed its mandate and comprehensively reviewed the earlier legislation of 1958 in light of emerging realities. The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (Amendment and Validation) Act, 2010, which came into effect from March 29, is a major departure from the earlier legislation. Faithfully implemented, the amended Act's bold and innovative approach could catalyze conservation efforts, helping to reverse the alarming decline of heritage all over the country.

The Act's most important feature is the creation of a national monuments authority (NMA) charged with the responsibility of, first, overseeing the preparation of comprehensive maps of 3,675 centrally protected monuments and their environs; second, placing all monuments in appropriate categories; and, finally, freezing heritage bylaws which will override building bylaws and extend 300 metres or more around monuments apart from being site specific. The maps and details of the bylaws being electronically available will go a long way in ensuring transparency in the grant of permissions.

The repair and renovation of structures built prior to 1992 and of those sanctioned by the director-general of the ASI subsequently within the prohibited zone would be permissible. The same goes for construction of buildings according to heritage bylaws, or reconstruction of existing structures to their existing horizontal and vertical limits within the regulated zone. These people-friendly measures substantially allay the fears of numerous property owners living in the proximity of monuments.

INTACH, an NGO with a network of 150 chapters all over India, has been specifically named to play a pivotal role in the documentation of monuments and assist in formulation of heritage bylaws. Private agencies and consultants would be hired to complete the exercise in a time-bound frame.

The amended Act, with its path-breaking approach to heritage conservation, explicitly defines the NMA's status and powers. Appointments of bureaucrats and ex-bureaucrats are excluded whereas membership of architects and town planners is specifically ensured. Selection of NMA members would be in the hands of a 3-member government committee headed by the Cabinet Secretary. The Government's seriousness of intent is abundantly reflected in clause 20(o) of the Act, which debars civil courts from granting injunctions or interfering in the enforcement of the Act. Besides, defiance of the Act can result in up to 3 years in prison.

The distinction between the powers and functions of the ASI and those of the newly created NMA has now been made clear. While the NMA is to proactively safeguard the environment around monuments, the ASI will be free to pursue archaeology. The Act needs speedy implementation.

(The writer is an architect.)

(Courtesy: TOI)

Former inmate recalls daring escape from Auschwitz

With every step toward the gate, Jerzy Bielecki was certain he would be shot.

The day was July 21, 1944. Bielecki was walking in broad daylight down a pathway at Auschwitz, wearing a stolen SS uniform with his Jewish sweetheart Cyla Cybulska by his side.

His knees buckling with fear, he tried to keep a stern bearing on the long stretch of gravel to the sentry post.

The German guard frowned at his forged pass and eyed the 2 for a period that seemed like an eternity - then uttered the miraculous words: "Ja, danke" - yes, thank you - and let Jerzy and Cyla out of the death camp and into freedom.

It was a common saying among Auschwitz inmates that the only way out was through the crematorium chimneys. These were among the few ever to escape through the side door.

The 23-year-old Bielecki used his relatively privileged position as a German-speaking Catholic Pole to orchestrate the daring rescue of his Jewish girlfriend who was doomed to die.

"It was great love," Bielecki, now 89, recalled in an interview at his home in this small southern town 55 miles (85 kilometers) from Auschwitz.

"We were making plans that we would get married and would live together forever."

Bielecki was 19 when the Germans seized him on the false suspicion he was a resistance fighter, and brought to the camp in April 1940 in the first transport of inmates, all Poles.

He was given number 243 and was sent to work in warehouses, where occasional access to additional food offered some chance of survival.

It was 2 years before the first mass transports of Jews started arriving in 1942. Most of the Jews were taken straight to the gas chambers of neighboring Birkenau, while a few were designated to be forced laborers amid horrific conditions, allowing them to postpone death.

In September 1943 Bielecki was assigned to a grain storage warehouse. Another inmate was showing him around when suddenly a door opened and a group of girls walked in.

"It seemed to me that one of them, a pretty dark-haired one, winked at me," Bielecki said with a broad smile as he recalled the scene. It was Cyla - who had just been assigned to repair grain sacks.

Their friendship grew into love, as the warehouse offered brief chances for more face-to-face meetings.

In a report she wrote for the Auschwitz memorial in 1983, Cybulska recalled that during the meetings they told each other their life stories and "every meeting was a truly important event for both of us."

Cybulska, her parents, 2 brothers and a younger sister were rounded up in January 1943 in the Lomza ghetto in northern Poland and taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her parents and sister were immediately killed in the gas chambers, but she and her brothers were sent to work.

By September, 22-year-old Cybulska was the only one left alive, with inmate number 29558 tattooed on her left forearm.

As their love blossomed, Bielecki began working on the daring plan for escape.

From a fellow Polish inmate working at a uniform warehouse he secretly got a complete SS uniform and a pass. Using an eraser and a pencil, he changed the officer's name in the pass from Rottenfuehrer Helmut Stehler to Steiner just in case the guard knew the real Stehler, and filled it in to say an inmate was being led out of the camp for police interrogation at a nearby station. He secured some food, a razor for himself and a sweater and boots for Cybulska.

He briefed her on his plan: "Tomorrow an SS-man will come to take you for an interrogation. The SS-man will be me."

The next afternoon, Bielecki, dressed in the stolen uniform, came to the laundry barrack where Cybulska had been moved for work duty. Sweating with fear, he demanded the German supervisor release the woman.

Bielecki led her out of the barrack and onto a long path leading to a side gate guarded by the sleepy SS-man who let them go through.

The fear of being gunned down remained with him in his first steps of freedom: "I felt pain in my backbone, where I was expecting to be shot," Bielecki said.

But when he eventually looked back, the guard was in his booth. They walked on to a road, then into fields where they hid in dense bushes until dark, when they started to march.

"Marching across fields and woods was very exhausting, especially for me, not used to such intensive walks," Cybulska said in her report to Auschwitz as quoted in a Polish-language book Bielecki has written, He Who Saves One Life ...

"Far from any settlements, we had to cross rivers," she wrote. "When water was high ... Jurek carried me to the other side."

At one point she was too tired to walk and asked him to leave her.

"Jurek did not want to hear that and kept repeating: 'we fled together and will walk on together,'" she reported, referring to Jerzy by his Polish diminutive.

For 9 nights they moved under the cover of darkness toward Bielecki's uncle's home in a village not far from Krakow.

His mother, who was living at the house, was overjoyed to see him alive, though wasted-away after 4 years at Auschwitz. A devout Catholic, however, she was dead-set against him marrying a Jewish girl.

"How will you live? How will you raise your children?" Bielecki recalls her asking.

To keep her away from possible Nazi patrols, Cybulska was hidden on a nearby farm. Bielecki decided to go into hiding in Krakow - a fateful choice they believed would improve their chances of avoiding capture by the Nazis. The couple spent their last night together under a pear tree in an orchard, saying their goodbyes and making plans to meet right after the war.

After the Soviet army rolled through Krakow in January 1945, Bielecki left the city where he had been hiding from Nazi pursuit and walked 25-miles (40-kilometers) along snow-covered roads to meet Cybulska at the farmhouse.

But he was 4 days too late.

Cybulska, not aware that the area where she had been hiding had been liberated 3 weeks before Krakow, gave up waiting for him, concluding her "Juracek" either was dead or had abandoned their plans.

She got on a train to Warsaw, planning to find an uncle in the United States. On the train she met a Jewish man, David Zacharowitz, and the 2 began a relationship and eventually married. They headed to Sweden, then to Cybulska's uncle in New York, who helped them start a jewelry business. Zacharowitz died in 1975.

In Poland, Bielecki eventually started a family of his own and worked as the director of a school for car mechanics. He had no news of Cybulska and had no way of finding her.

In her report Cybulska said that she was haunted in the years after she left Poland by a wish to see her hometown and to find Jurek, if he was alive.

Sheer chance made her wish come true.

While talking to her Polish cleaning woman in 1982, Cybulska related her Auschwitz escape story.

The woman was stunned.

"I know the story, I saw a man on Polish TV saying he had led his Jewish girlfriend out of Auschwitz," the cleaning lady told Cybulska, according to Bielecki.

She tracked down his phone number and one early morning in May 1983 the telephone rang in Bielecki's apartment in Nowy Targ.

"I heard someone laughing - or crying - on the phone and then a female voice said "Juracku, this is me, your little Cyla," Bielecki recalls.

A few weeks later they met at Krakow airport. He brought 39 red roses, one for each year they spent apart. She visited him in Poland many times, and they jointly visited the Auschwitz memorial, the farmer family that hid her and many other places, staying together in hotels.

"The love started to come back," Bielecki said.

"Cyla was telling me: leave your wife, come with me to America," he recalls. "She cried a lot when I told her: Look, I have such fine children, I have a son, how could I do that?"

She returned to New York and wrote to him: "Jurek I will not come again," Bielecki recalled.

They never met again and she did not reply to his letters.

Cybulska died a few years later in New York in 2002.

In 1985, the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem awarded Bielecki the Righteous Among the Nations title for saving Cybulska. The institute's website account of the escape and its aftermath is consistent with Bielecki's account to The Associated Press.

"I was very much in love with Cyla, very much," Bielecki said. "Sometimes I cried after the war, that she was not with me. I dreamed of her at night and woke up crying."

"Fate decided for us, but I would do the same again." (AP)

The World's Happiest Countries

By and large, rich countries are happier - and that's no coincidence

Francesca Levy

In the wake of their World Cup loss, residents of the Netherlands may be feeling depressed. But there's reason to believe they won't be done in by the agony of defeat: According to a recent poll, the country is one of the happiest in the world.

Championship-winning Spain, on the other hand, was swept with euphoria and national pride, but that may have been an unfamiliar feeling. The country ranks No. 17 of 21 European countries in terms of happiness.

The fact is good times probably have more to do with the size of your wallet than the size of your trophy shelf. The 5 happiest countries in the world - Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands - are all clustered in the same region, and all enjoy high levels of prosperity.

Behind the Numbers

Quantifying happiness isn't an easy task. Researchers at the Gallup World Poll went about it by surveying thousands of respondents in 155 countries, between 2005 and 2009, in order to measure 2 types of well-being.

First they asked subjects to reflect on their overall satisfaction with their lives, and ranked their answers using a "life evaluation" score between 1 and 10. Then they asked questions about how each subject had felt the previous day. Those answers allowed researchers to score their "daily experiences" - things like whether they felt well-rested, respected, free of pain and intellectually engaged.

Subjects that reported high scores were considered "thriving." The percentage of thriving individuals in each country determined our rankings.

Money Matters

The Gallup researchers found evidence of what many have long suspected: money does buy happiness - at least a certain kind of it. In a related report, they studied the reasons why countries with high gross domestic products won out for well-being, and found an association between life satisfaction and income.

"Money is an object that many or most people desire, and pursue during the majority of their waking hours," researchers wrote in the report. "It would be surprising if success at this pursuit had no influence whatsoever when people were asked to evaluate their lives."

Indeed, Denmark, the world's happiest country, had a per-capita GDP of $36,000 in 2009, according to the Central Intelligence Agency. That's higher than 196 of the 227 countries for which the CIA collects statistics.

But there's more to happiness than riches. The Gallup study showed that while income undoubtedly influenced happiness, it did so for a particular kind of well-being - the kind one feels when reflecting on his or her own successes and prospects for the future. Day-to-day happiness is more likely to be associated with how well one's psychological and social needs are being met, and that's harder to achieve with a paycheck.

Take Costa Rica. The 6th-happiest country in the world, and the happiest country in the Americas, it beat out richer countries like the United States. That's because social networks in Costa Rica are tight, allowing individuals to feel happy with their lot, regardless of financial success.

"Costa Rica ranks really high on social and psychological prosperity," says Harter. "It's probably things systemic to the society that make people over time develop better relationships, and put more value on relationships. Daily positive feelings rank really high there."

Inhabitants of some rich countries are bound to feel happier. But happiness is elusive to define, and money isn't the only thing that influences it. Harter explains that the more abstract sense of happiness to which wealth contributes has a different effect on one's life than daily happiness.

"Each of us is 2 different people. We evaluate our lives periodically; we sit back and reflect and summarize things that have gone on in our lives to date," Harter says. "Another side is how you experience things daily. Daily experience affects your stress and your psychology. How you evaluate your life affects your decisions. It's important to think about how you can leverage that well-being."

(Courtesy: Forbes)