the review
Peeling the freefall onion After going through Freefall, one can feel enlightened about the reasons of the meltdown and also the solutions By Mazhar Farid Chishti
J
oseph Stiglitz, currently on the faculty of the Colombia Business School, is a distinguished economist. He owes his fame not just to being the 2001 Economics Noble Laureate but due to his criticism of modern-day economic and political policies. His books are deemed to be massively important economic as well as political document. His books one after another like, Globalization and its Discontents, The Roaring Nineties, Making Globalization Work and the Three Trillion Dollar War, were all critically acclaimed. Freefall was no exception. This latest Stiglitz offering is an extremely important book after the great crash of 2008. No book covers the inbuilt reasons for the meltdown, the political drama, the ignorance and greed of a powerful group, the invisible hands, its aftermath, and where to go from there. After going through Freefall, one can feel enlightened about the reasons of the meltdown and also the solutions. “When the world economy went into freefall in 2008, so did our beliefs. Long-standing views about economics, about America, and about heroes have also been in freefall”. On February 15, 1999 Time magazine ran pictures of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Sectary Robert Rubin on its cover, giving the duo credit for
the boom of the 1990s. In popular perception, they were super gods. In 2000, the best-selling investigative journalist Bob Woodward wrote Maestro, a hagiography of Greenspan. To see the link between the crisis and these beliefs, one has to unknot what happened. How did the largest economy in the world go into freefall? What policies and what events triggered the great downturn of 2008? If we can’t agree on the answers to these questions, we can’t agree on what to do, either to get out of the crisis or to prevent the next one. This book argues that the problems are more deep-seated. Over the last twenty-five years this is supposedly self-regulating apparatus. Financial
Our modern society requires that government takes on a large role: from setting the rules and enforcing them, to providing infrastructure, to financing research, providing education, health and a variety of forms of social protection
Title: Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy Author: Joseph Stiglitz Publisher: ALLEN LANE an imprint of PENGUIN BOOKS Price: Rs1500; Year of Publication: 2010
system has repeatedly been rescued by the government. From the system survival we draw the wrong lessons that it was working on its own. Indeed, economic system hadn’t been
Of fiction and poetry
02 - 03
Sunday, 26 June, 2011
Living on the ’periphery’, writers like Shafi Hamdam and Syed Qasim Jalal don’t seem to receive their d recognized literary circles as well as the media
By Syed Afsar Sajid
S
hafi Hamdam’s collection of short stories Insan Aur Parinday and Syed Qasim Jalal’s verse collection Soore-Israfil are the subject of this review. Both are seasoned writers in their own right but living on the ’periphery’ of major literary centres like Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, such writers don’t seem to receive their due share of attention from the recognized literary circles, as also the media, of these centres.
Insan Aur Parinday Shafi Hamdam is a versatile writer.
He is basically a fiction writer of both Urdu and Punjabi but over the years he has also diverted himself to writing poetry, inshaiya, pen-sketches and literary criticism in Urdu. Insan Aur Parinday is his latest collection of Urdu short stories numbering twenty-two. Noted short story writer Mansha Yad has written its ‘foreword’ while distinguished litterateurs Dr. Anwar Sadeed and Hanif Bawa have contributed to its flap. They are unanimous in their appreciation of Shafi Hamdam’s art as a short story writer. Mansha Yad thinks that Hamdam he is a realist in fiction while Dr. Sadeed is of the view that Hamdam’s fiction is focused on the contemporary human environment. Fiction writer Hanif Bawa opines that Hamdam writes in a homely style with little pretence to philosophizing and that his themes revolve around the pleasures and pains of the common man. As a fiction writer, Hamdam’s art rests on his intimate knowledge of and insight into the human psyche coupled with an embracing imagination. The
symbolic interpretation of the title of the collection is compatible with the general theme of his stories signifying the ironic paradox of the modern human progress viz., man’s capacity to ‘fly’ into and explore the space but his tragic failure to secure and ameliorate his lot on this earth. In fact the birds in his stories symbolize the author’s yearning for a life of pristine freedom, hope and love. Pyasi Rooh, Kitni Pukki, Kitna Katcha, Daldal May Phansa Hua Admi, Qabl Az Waqt, Qabr, Aurat Aur Ansoo, Baba Bohrwala, Raushni Ka Daira and Insan Aur Parinday are Hamdam’s representative stories fully reflective of the expanse of his art. At times, however, there is a tendency in him to overstretch the artistic bounds of what is termed as the ‘suspension of disbelief’ in the literary jargon. By and large he seems to stand on a tangible footing as a short story writer vis-a-vis his peers and contemporaries.
Soor-e-Israfil It is a collection of Syed Qasim
Jalal’s poetry (nazm and ghazal). Prof. Fida-e-Athar has written its preface tracing the poet’s biography and the fundaments of his poetic art. He has dwelt at length on the didactic aspect of his poetry, with a tinge, as it were, of hyperbole. In his ‘foreword’, Dr. Najib Jamal too harps on the same theme but in a more studied and balanced strain. In his ‘introduction’, however, Gohar Malsiyani has thoughtfully reviewed qat’at and rubaiyat included in the book elucidating their technique and context. Qasim Jalal’s tone is mostly hortative in the work being reviewed whence the symbolistic identity of its title. No doubt, life is a fact and its transposition in literature, fictive but this does not invest the literary writer with a licence to fabricate its truth beyond the reader’s recognition or distort its aesthetics beyond his apprehension. The truisms that the book espouses are likely to move all categories of readers but the aesthete, who would look to Faiz, Majeed Amjad and Faraz for his catharsis.