Mending differences

Two weeks after Dashain, the country gears up for another great festival, Tihar. Dashain did not bring much "happiness" to many of us as a result of the last June royal massacre, besides pressing problems. The shortage of sugar, frequent road accidents, mostly during Dashain, deaths of many from preventable diseases, the sorry state of the tourism industry and sagging economy and sporadic incidents of Maoist violence affected the mood of festival of many. Most people in the country have not overcome the June 1, 2001 Royal tragedy. On the occasion of Dashain, King Gyanendra declared Paras Shah, his only son, the Crown Prince of Nepal. However, only time will tell whether this has been a wise move. Sher Bahadur Deuba, who succeeded former Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala, has been able to restore peace to some extent. The government has held three rounds of dialogue with the Maoist insurgents since Deuba came to power. The recent one, though it ended inconclusively, has given some glimmer of hope for peace. If the government and the Maoists are really determined to restore peace and bring about economic prosperity, then they should try not to distance themselves from the reality. The six year-old Maoist Movement has not only claimed over two thousand people but also dislocated thousands of people.

Tihar is the festival of lights and colours that symbolises that age-old culture of country which teaches us to vanquish ingorance that subdues humanity and to drive away darkeness that engulfs the light of knowledge. Tihar even today projects the rich and glorious past of our country and teaches us to uphold the pluralistic values. This festival dates back to that period when, perhaps, history was not written and in its progress through centuries, it lighted path of thousands to attain the ultimate good and complete ecstasy. Let us hope that this festival will restore peace to this country by resolving the Maoist insurgency once and for all. It is also true that any festival, especially in oriental society, brings a happy and festive occasion when we join together to celebrate and strengthen our social, political and economic relationships. Such occasion also provides us an opportunity to express love and share what we have. And those who celebrate it must be careful of the adulterated food items and dangerous firecrackers sold in the market. Many shops may not hesitate to sell adulterated food items at cost to health and hygiene. With this, we wish our readers, both at home and abroad, happy Tihar and prosperity.

Are smart cards really smart?

By Rajesh Rauniar

The world has evolved with the Information Technology (IT) revolution, and with it the need for processing tremendous information in our daily lives has emerged. Computers are no longer a tool that only a few fortunate companies can afford to use to shape their future. Over the years, computers have influenced our lives as never before. Computers, and to be more precise, the microprocessors behind them, have delivered the ability to control, process and access information. The smart card can now provide this power and versatility of the microprocessor in our own wallet.

On inspection a smart card may look like a regular sized credit card. However, the similarity ends with the physical appearance. Simply speaking, a regular credit card is a magnetic stripe card that is widely employed mainly by the banking sector. These magnetic stripe cards simply act as a token, which the owner of the card possesses to identify himself in a financial transaction. However, a smart card is smart in the sense that it can make decisions during a transaction. The power of smart cards lie in their ability to store and manipulate data, to perform secure transactions and to handle multiple applications on one card. A single smart card can be configured to access a bank account, to pay bills, to access various public utilities as well as to store personal information, including high-level medical information.

A smart card can basically be defined as a plastic card conforming to the same size, thickness and other physical standards as regular plastic credit cards do, which additionally houses an IC chip. Technically speaking, as far as the IC chip is concerned, a variety of options exist depending upon the nature of an application. At one extreme, the IC chip may simply contain memory controlled by some hardwired logic, while at the other extreme, smart cards with an embedded microprocessor and arithmetic co-processors are becoming increasingly popular.

Smart cards can provide a strong level of security. This is not possible with magnetic stripe cards. With their embedded microprocessor, these cards possess the power to apply both symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, a powerful tool for any security system, to enhance security. Some of these cards also contain an arithmetic coprocessor to enhance their overall computing power, and hence, to support advanced public cryptographic algorithms, thereby providing better security with minimum delay.

Given the overall flexibility and versatility offered by smart cards, their popularity is on the rise to make lives more manageable and better. Over the past few years, more and more service providers offering smart card based services have started to emerge. They see smart cards as a means of enhancing their quality of service, while at the same time minimizing the risk due to card fraud. In France alone, already 22 million bank cardholders also possess smart cards. It is expected that overall smart card production will increase, from 688 million in 1995, to two billion by 2002. In short, in the near future smart cards are bound to influence daily lives as never before, and they will become one of the most important and indispensable constituents of our purse.

Smart cards come in several forms. Needless to say, the more complex a card the more expensive it is likely to be. However, with the recent advances in IT as well as the fall in the prices of computer hardware, cards with quite sophisticated capabilities are becoming sufficiently cheap for mass distribution.

Smart cards can be broadly divided into two categories: contact Cards and contactless cards. Contact cards have well defined interfaces in the form of pins connected to the I/O unit of the card to communicate with the outside world. In order for the card to communicate with the outside world, physical contact between the circuitry of the card and the terminal is required. Hence these cards are generally inserted into a slot in the terminal where the physical contact electrically connects the internal circuitry of these cards with the outside world. Once contact is made, the terminal provides power to the card and performs the read/write operations to communicate with it. The current ISO standard for these types of cards specify a serial half-duplex system, with six connectors, plus two reserved for future use. Contact smart cards can be further classified into the following three types: Unprotected Memory Cards, Wired-logic Memory Cards and

Microprocessor Cards: Contactless cards provide an optimal solution to applications requiring high throughput, for example, in mass transit where people pass by a smart card reader. These types of cards have an embedded antenna, which picks up an electromagnetic signal emanating from the reader. The signal powers the card and transmits the data. Loose-coupled cards can work with distance of up to 1 mm, while proximity smart cards accept distances of 1-10 cm. Contactless cards add an analog front end to the smart card’s logic and memory components. This is possible due to current semiconductor technology, which enables digital and analog components to reside on a single chip without electromagnetic interference. Since these cards don’t need to be inserted into a terminal, they provide great benefits to elderly and disabled people.

Smart cards can store large volumes of data, which can be structured/altered in much the same way as data held in a computer. However, the real power of a smart card lies in its ability to perform secure transactions. With their capacity of undertaking computationally intensive algorithms such as DES, RSA or biometric human identification online during a transaction, smart cards possess the ability to control who can access the information they contain. Hence, these cards provide a strong level of security and can improve the overall security requirements of any card-based system. It has been found that the increase in the use of smart cards has helped to bring about a massive reduction in card fraud.

In contrast, magnetic stripe cards store only readable information and do not possess the power to process it. These types of cards simply act as a token that the owner of the card possesses to identify himself in a transaction. The advantages that magnetic stripe cards enjoy are the simplicity of the concept, universal acceptance and low cost of production. However, owing to the overall simplicity of the technology, magnetic stripe cards are also relatively easy to forge, and have been a cause of financial fraud on a massive scale. Some of the advantages that smart cards enjoy over traditional magnetic stripe cards are: ability to access more information, more data storage capacity, transparency in service,

increase in security, speedier transactions, decreased fraud, greater reliability and total flexibility.

Frustrating state of our sports

By Purushottam Kattel

Nepalis are bullet fast to mimic anything and everything they see, hear or find. We rush after almost every fad that invades the capital, provided it is capable of making a shattering impact. Otherwise we cannot.

Sporting events in this country are suffering from negligence on the part of government. Officials and politicians are also exploiting it. The players’ morale reaches breaking point after the announcement of every budget allocated for sports, because they take it for sure that the lumpsum undoubtedly goes into the pockets of staff members of the National Sports Council (NSC).

Sporting events are adversely affected not only by officials and politicians but also by the audience. It is more disgusting that our audience too behave awkwardly that distracts and frustrates every player. Take, for instance, the recently held Under-19 Youth Asia Cup cricket tournament. Some Nepali fans threw mineral water bottles on to the ground while the final match between Nepal and Malaysia was going on. Not only that, almost all the spectators jumped on to the ground when Nepal scored the final run.

Understandably, sports emanate sentiments and passion. But it does not mean that the spectators and players can go wild. They littered the ground with mineral water bottles and other stuff after the match. Even the police had to resort to laathi charge to control the mass. The incident clearly reflected the Eden Garden situation of the 1996 World Cup cricket semi-final between India and Sri Lanka, when the umpire declared Sri Lanka the winner due to the misbehaviour of the audience. The remarkable thing is that the Indian fans threw the bottles when India was inching towards defeat, but Nepalis did the same thing when the players (Nepali) were gaining ground.

Another awful behaviour of our audience I have found recently was at the Inter-school National girl’s football tournament held at the ANFA complex. I saw a few spectators, who were present at almost all the matches played there. They were harassing girl footballers and making vulgar comments.

All the players were nicknamed by them. They frequently perturbed their concentration using the words like ‘bla ..bla..bla..I love You’, ‘fat lady’ and many more other filthy localised Nepali-words. To be precise, the crowd behaved as though they were at a cheap nightclub.

So, NSC, gear up, and do something about our messy sporting business. Or is the thousands of staff members, exceeding the government quota of 350, inadequate?

Celebrating festivals with difference

By Dr Shreedhar Gautam

Almost all societies in the world have their own festivals, which are celebrated in a special way. It is through them that the pleasures and problems of people are revealed. We, Nepalis, are also fond of festivals and gatherings that allow time for recreation. Dashain and Tihar are such occasions when the majority of Nepalis celebrate full-heartedly. These are the days when the whole country, from the most remote village to the largest city, sings, shouts and gets drunk. Why are Dashain and Tihar celebrated in such a big way? Are they equally popular among the poor and rich? Do they give equal pleasure to haves and have-nots? These are the pertinent questions to be pondered over to understand the meaning of festival like Dashain and Tihar in Nepali society.

It is to be noted that unlike wealthy countries, poor countries like Nepal have more festivals. For the former, there is neither the time nor any culture for such festivals. The people of rich countries have other things to do, and when they amuse themselves, they do so in small groups. They do not feel the need and importance of widely participated festivals like Dashain and Tihar. But such small gatherings, whether in Tokyo, London or New York, lack sentiments, intimacy and closeness as seen in Nepal during Dashain and Tihar.

All Nepalis, especially the poor, are excited during these days because they know that these festivals are the only times that give a glimmer of hope and some kind of recreation. They cannot afford going to theatres, vacations or enjoy weekend cocktail parties and receptions, the common features of modern culture in big cities, including Kathmandu.

What Dashain and Tihar means to the rich may not be true for others. Unlike the rich, the poor take the occasion as a full stop of time. During the festival days, they do not push themselves towards a deceptive tomorrow that is always beyond their reach. Instead, they take the festivals as an occasion that offers them a complete and perfect "today" of dancing and revelry. So, the poor while celebrating occasions like Dashain and Tihar form a living community in which the individual is at once dissolved and redeemed. Whereas during the weekend and cocktail parties, there is a perceptible absence of ‘humans’ as every individual is conscious of his or her position, rank and other artificial recognition given by society.

If we go to countryside during festivals, we find simple villagers thoroughly rejoicing in the fervour of festivals, without a trait of shyness. These are the days when otherwise silent Nepalis sing and shout, from the very bottom of their heart. These are the moments when friends, who have not exchanged more than formal courtesies for years, come together and drink. Many of them exchange their experience, and some even confess and confide. They weep together over each other's problems. They talk loudly and exchange jokes without any hesitation and fear.

It is also remarkable that the poor, who enjoy and amuse themselves during Dashain and Tihar, also resort to quarrels and disputes. It shows how these festivals, which provide an opportunity to escape from daily drudgery, are not free from hazards. Whatever the reason, there is a world of differences between the life during the festivals and the rest of the year when most of the poor live through silence, apathy and gloom, and in deprivation. They do not take the festivals just as a formal celebration, but as an opportunity which annihilates the sense or hope of uncertain tomorrow. Its strength lies in that fact that time is transformed to a total present, and people take part in the celebration ignoring all human or social ranks, at least for the moment.

Dashain and Tihar breaks the customary hierarchies at least for some days. Such celebrations are a sign of revolt against the artificial rigidity of life, and unjustified social orders, which separate the haves and have-nots in the name of age-old traditions. By freeing themselves from the rigid norms prescribed by society, the poor are actually ridiculing the restrictions. Though unconsciously, they are expressing their sense of outrage to the existing social set up by way of celebrating festivals in their own way.

With the advancement of technology, the concept of civilization has changed. People define it in a narrow sense, and term the activities of urban people as civilized and the life style of villagers as uncivilized. But these so called uncivilized people, who celebrate their festivals in a typical way, are telling us something important in our life. By getting drunk and frenzy, or by breaking down social structures on the festival day, they are saying that all bonds between rich and poor, hakims and servants are artificial, and they need to be wiped out. They are unconsciously asserting that the present hierarchies are unnatural and unacceptable, and a new one based on equality and justice is to be developed. They want the celebration to be participated by all, irrespective of any caste, colour and religion, as a mark of the highest glorification of human life. It is because of this inherent meaning that whether educated or illiterate, all take the festivals as a social obligation.

Ironically, the poor become happier than rich when the festival days approach. The poor get an opportunity to open up and participate in community with considerable freedom and natural vigour. For the rich, this is a different kind of experience. It is these festivals which have sustained them, despite many hardships and difficulties. They know that they are freeing themselves, though momentarily, from unfulfilled desires, social oppression and agony. Many of them get lost in the celebration, because this is the moment when they forget their sorrows. Their celebration sometimes takes a violent turn, and ends up in a fiasco.