'Bardo'

Chemical Warfare in Kerala!

2011-04-29T18:41:00.017+05:30

V.S.Achuthanandan, Chief Minister of Kerala, leads a day's fast, at Martyrs Column, Trivandrum, seeking nation wide ban on Endosulfan.

Endosulfan is an effective pesticide used by farmers against pests likely to destroy their crops. It is said to be cheap and affordable to farmers belonging to marginal and low income groups owning small and medium farm holdings. It also comes in dirt cheap for big farmers owning large tracts of land where economies of scale are in operation.
The use of Endosulfan is found to cause harmful effects to humans and biodiversity and hence many countries prohibit its production and use.Perhaps the absence of a cheap and effective alternative made India overlook these hazards and continue with the use of Endosulfan. Today, one of the major producers of Endosulfan is the Government of India owned Hindustan Insecticides Limited.
The Plantation Corporation of Kerala is a state government owned undertaking formed to accelerate agro-economic development. Cashew farming is one of their major occupations and the Company owns and manages cashew farms in Kasargode, the northern most district of Kerala. To protect its cashew crops the Company decided to opt for aerial spraying of Endosulfan using helicopters. It was to be supplemented with manual pumping. This practice started in the 1970's and continued up to the early years of this century.
The sudden appearance of deformities in many new born babies and disorders in their central nervous system puzzled doctors and the public. Concern on this count led investigators to the presence of high levels of Endosulfan in soil, air and water in the area. Levels of Endosulfan in human blood were found to be many times higher than the maximum residue level of Endosulfan in water.
Indiscriminate aero spraying of Endosulfan over long peiods of time led to this situation. Chemcals got mixed with water bodies and were consumed by humans. Even if one accepts the Industry's side of no evidence being available regarding occurrence of genetic diseases from other parts of India where Endosulfan is used, it cannot be denied that aerial spraying is vastly different from manual application .
This aerial spraying which can be compared to chemical warfare resulted in large quantities of Endosulfan being deposited in the water bodies, soil and atmosphere of the area. Humans and animals were affected by this contaminated water and air and the rich biodiversity of the area disappeared.
It took years for the conscience of the public of this politically active state to be shaken and help and succour to reach the afflicted. NGO's working in the field of environment and health were responsible for this awakening. Sri.V.S.Achuthanandan as Chief Minister and earlier as Leader of the Opposition was deeply concerned about this issue and sympathetic to the plight of the victims.
Today it is the focus of attention at the national and international level. Demands are made that India support Endosulfan ban at the Stockholm conference on Persistent Organic Pollutants. The government has resisted this. It is also suggested that Tribunals be set up to decide on the quantum of compensation to be paid to the victims.
The 'polluter pays' principle is the cornerstone to determine legal liability in such situations. It is not denied that aerial spraying through helicopters and manual pumping caused damage to plant and animal life, killed hundreds and to thousands being born with genetic problems which has led to their leading lives of untold misery.
The Plantation Corporation of Kerala is the polluter and they should bear the costs of compensation to the families of those who died and rehabilitation and treatment of the unfortunate surviviors. The entire assets of the Corporation should be utilised for this.
In such a grave offence it is important that criminal liability be established. The officers and directors of the Company who conducted aerial spraying whould be made to stand criminal trial.They are guilty of 'culpable homicide not amounting to murder', a charge the CBI is now trying to invoke against the accused in the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Case.
The Officials of the Plantation Corporation can only be compared to Nazis who killed Jews in gas chambers. They deserve no mercy or repreive. To facilitate payment of compensation and fixing of criminal liability, the Government should enact a special legislation.
To let the guilty go scot free is to render meaningless the values and ideals that the people of this country hold dear to their heart.

Dr.Jayaprakash Narayan on electoral reforms!

2010-07-12T19:01:00.021+05:30

Dr.Jayaprakash Narayan M.L.A releases the journal 'Social Science in Perspective' giving a copy to Survaram Sudhakar Reddy, veteran CPI leader at C.Achutha Menon Centre, Trivandrum!
When Dr.Jayaprakash Narayan talks about India's electoral mechanisms and the reforms it needs he never beats around the bush. He is damn serious and straight. Indeed, JP, scrupulously follows Gandhiji's dictum on being the change you want to see in the world. Speaking at Trivandrum's C.Achutha Menon Study Centre on an 'Agenda for Electoral Reform' he never minced his words. JP, a medical doctor and an ex-IAS officer now turned leader of LokSatta party and legislator in Andhra Pradesh refuses to buy the fashonable middle class argument that India's electoral system is hopeless and beyond reform. Instead, he corrects the popular myth that the Election Commission can provide a panacea for free and fair elections. The Commission, to JP, is a 'overglorified institution'. Something I too agree with. The Election Commission's rightful place in an election drama is the green room.It's not to be seen on stage. Unfortunately, many Electon Commissioners beginning from T.N. Seshan have been tempted to exhibit a larger than life role before the public encouraged by mass media.

Giving the Election Commission its due place, JP remarked that one of the few powers vested in rhis body during intervals between elections is to register voters and prepare voters list. This falls solely in the Commission's jurisdiction and it is a job they are doing shabbily. The country needs a dynamic list which can be maintained by and updated in the Post Offices and though this sensible suggestion is being raised from many quarters,the Commission has obstinately refrained from implementing it.

Donning the contrarian's cap, JP said that the danger facing us is not of people wth money entering politics but the reverse of people joining politics to make money. Their success at it proves the system can be hijacked to serve vested interests.

JP demolishes the myth that money is needed for election campaign. He cites his personal example of winning the Legislative Assembly elections from Hyderabad in 2009 spending a paltry Rs.4,50,000/- while his opponents spend tens of crores. In this age of fast and rapid communication, JP mentioned, you don't need much money to send your message across to voters. If so, why do candidates and political parties spend enormous sums of money in elections, whether to parliament the assembly or local councils. The reason , to JP , lies in the operation of the first past the post system of representation we borrowed from Great Britain. At a time when the merits of continuing with it are being seriously debated in their country of origin, JP, points out that in a land of India's complexity and diversity, the ill effects are more visible than its advantages. The winning candidate in elections, often wins with less that the absolute majority of the votes polled. This manner of winning makes the marginal vote of crucial importance. A cabdidate who wins with a few hundred or thousand votes never knows from where these votes will come. This uncertainty induces candidates and parties to cast their net wide to ensure that all the votes they can get ultimately land up in their kitty. To this end they are forced to yield and cater to all sorts of demands and needs put forth by various sections. Money becomes all important to wrest control of votes and the controllers of votes. Another reason JP cited for the readiness to spend such astronomical sums was that our elected representatives see themselves part of the executive, directing and controlling administration, and never restrain themselves to law making and shaping of policies. Exercising control over the executive affords ample opportunity to make money.

JP is optimistic that a shift to alternative forms of represenation may cure some of our major electoral malpractices. He told me in personal conversation of his efforts to convince the top leaders of India's polity to efffect changes in our system of representation, how close to success he was at it and how that opportunity was missed due to inaction shown from certain quarters. He doesn't despair over the missed chance but is confident that the convergence of a younger generation of voters receptive to new ideas, rapid expansion of communication and stable economic growth will soon make inevitable what he then proposed.

JP is so modest that he acknowledges before the audience that recent changes in our election system like making candidates disclose assets and recording of criminal antecedents which got implemented after a legal battle he led are only symbolic in nature and should'nt be taken for anything radical. The real work is yet to begin, he confesses.

JP suggests that changes he recommends cannot be brought about by swimming against the current. He is for a more zen like approach, going with the flow. It is not by treating political parties as enemies that change is to be striven for. On the contrary, it is by aligning the changes and reforms required with the interests of political parties that smooth tranformation occurs. JP is all for change in this fashion which explains why he is President of a political party which contests elections and is himself aa legislator. JP, unlike many politicians is on the side of system reformers and unlike most system reformers, is on the side of politicians and political parties.

Therein lies the significance of the role he is to play in contemporary India.

Shashi Tharoor - Run Out!

2010-04-19T00:42:00.005+05:30

Shashi Tharoor's resignation from the Council of Ministers closes an innings in Indian politics. Tharoor was a poor batsman. His performance fell short of his promise. His stay in a 5 star hotel in Delhi, albeit with own funds to the tune of Rs.50 lakhs, wasn't ideal for a Minister who claims tall to be the change he wants in the world. His tweets attracted attention and controversy but they didn't end to his advantage.

The proverbial last straw was the latest round of auctions for IPL Cricket teams.

Tharoor shouted from rooftops of his role in binging IPL cricket to Kerala and a team for his home state. He was proud of his association with the Kochi team as 'Mentor' and all was well. The beans started spilling when Lalit Modi, the IPL Commissioner, revealed in a tweet that a certain Sunanda Pushkar held sweat equity worth Rs.70 crores in the team Tharoor happened to be mentoring.

All hell broke loose in media and Parliament while Tharoor failed to convincingly explain his association with the Kochi team as 'Mentor', his association with Sunanda Pushkar as fiancee and sweat equity being awarded to her. Even at the time of his resignation, many things remain a mystery.

Were Tharoor more transparent, this ignoble exit could have been averted. That he couldn't, confirms suspicions, there is more than meets the eye!

Free Anand Jon!

2010-03-14T08:57:00.008+05:30

'Out of sight,Out of mind', the adage pierced my senses last evening when a call came from Shashi Abraham, mother of Anand Jon. In the last many months, attending to the routine, unimportant bsuiness of life, Anand Jon receded from my consiousness and I felt a prick of conscience talking to his mother. I was one of the early birds to express my solidarity with Anand Jon for it was clear he was on trial for charges that were false and trumped up. I hoped the trial court would see this and declare him 'not guilty'. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Anand's trial got vitiated by many external factors and ended in his being sentenced to 59 years in jail. Not having read the judgment of the trial court, I won't comment on it. Judicial veridcts, in civil society, are sacrosanct and our earnest belief is that they are pronounced by the Judge in a fair and independent manner. However, even without reading the judgement, from familiarity with the facts of the case and the events connected with it, I am sure, the verdict indicting Anand Jon leaves a lot of questions unanswered and issues unexplained. Anand was a victim of racial prejudice and of his own professional success, to say the least. The judgement does not succeed in allaying these suspicions which is why the movement to free Anand Jon remains vibrant, growing and active. The people associated with it are fair and honourable citizens who don't want to be identified as supporting a sex offender or criminal. That they risk their reputation in continuting to lend support to Anand is a testament to their faith in in his innocence and protest at a free and fair trial being denied to him. I hope the Judiciary and the Government of the United States of America will heed demands arising from civil society the world over and ensure justice to Anand Jon. The Indian Government should sincerely do whatever it can in this matter.

Micro-level Conflicts

2010-01-15T21:45:00.004+05:30

Scanning Page 11 of New Indian Express dated Jan 11th, Monday, brought these news items to my notice:

a)Strained relations between Malays and ethnic Chinese and Indians that the country is being Islamised resulted in firebombs being thrown at many Christian churches. Authorities described these as pranks and not organized attacks for they caused only minimal damage.

b)The town of Rosarno in Southern Calabria region of Italy witnessed clashes between immigrant labourers from Sub-Saharan Africa and locals. The immigrants, mostly fruit pickers, were protesting about the appalling living conditions and low wages, while the locals wanted them thrown out of the country.

c)Analyzing data of survey conducted in Britain, David Voas, Prof of Population Studies, Manchester University pointed out that majority believed the multi-cultural experiment had failed, there was increasing opposition to Islam than to any other religion and those surveyed were even willing to limit the freedom of speech to contain religious extremism.

These news items makes me aware that many micro-level conflicts are happening around the world.They centre around geographically small areas and small populations. Unfortunately, they don’t receive the notice they deserve. Our entire attention is captured by major conflicts like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and so on. Is it a conspiracy of big media and big governments to entrench themselves?. Ultimately, our maturity in tackling and resolving micro-level conflicts will go to determine how safe the world will be for future generations.

Read Seneca - Prithvi Theatre!

2009-11-04T13:07:00.006+05:30

While in Mumbai last week, I couldn't resist checking out Prithvi Theatre. 'ART' by Poor-box productions was on in the evening. It's a play that won wide acclaim and enjoyed watching it. Followed up with Irish Coffee at Prithvi Cafe.

Buzzintown published my jottings on the play and its link is provided here:

http://www.buzzintown.com/mumbai/article-review_arguing-the-sake-arguing--id_936.html

Kovalam Literary Festival

2009-10-25T11:02:00.004+05:30

The third day of the Kovalam Literary Festival turned out to be one of those occasions when performance falls short of the promise. The organizers though are not to be blamed. Perhaps situations beyond their control caused it. Shobha De failed to turn up and the first session of reading and questions by her became a cropper. The South African writer Rozena Mart who was to speak on Apartheid Literature couldn’t make it to the festival. Amitabh Kant, a senior bureaucrat in the Tourism Ministry also didn’t turn up to make readings and presentation on tourism in India. All this was disappointing but it was partially made up by the other speakers and through the endearing presence of Nanditha and Om Puri making the discussions vibrant and humorous .

Sunny weather makes blue seas off Kovalam a feast for the eyes. The festival was blessed with clear blue skies and the view of the sky and the sea from the conference hall of Taj Green Cove was magnificent, keeping you on high. The third day’s session began with rendering of poetry by Chandrakanta Muratsingh, Korobok poet from Tripura. The poems were rendered in Korobok with translation in English. It was nice to hear a poet from the North-Eastern corner of India reciting his poems in the South-West tip of the country. It gave a glimpse of the vastness and variety India truly boasts of.

Following it were readings by young Indian writers. Ira Trivedi, pretty and smart, full of energy and vivacity that took her to the reckoning in the finals of the Miss India contest read out from her book ‘The Great Love Story’. The excerpt on the life of an Indian girl in the United States and her partying and meetings with boy friends were marked by the cultural shock that happens when two traditions encounter .. The moment when the doctor informs her of her pregnancy and her tremendous effort to comes to terms with it are portrayed by Ira in graphic detail. Passages from the book she is writing are about the experiences of an 18 year old girl dying of pancreatic cancer. Ira writes this from personal experience, having spend time with the girl and seen her come to terms with her death which is imminent. Her description of the ‘divergent cell’ that causes cancer in the body and the thousands of healthy cells that fight this wayward cell are told in the form of a battle. Ira took questions from the audience and when asked as to choose between commercial success which her books have been and critical acclaim she replied in a lighter vein that it will be nice to have them together. Becoming more serious, Ira said that in life, grass appears greener on the other side and it is normal to yearn for what you do not have.

Ira was followed by Mathew Menacherry, a Keralite born and brought up in Mumbai. Mathew who is the grandson of the eminent Malayalam
writer and critic, the late M.P.Paul read out passages from his book ‘Arrack in the Afternoon’. It is the story of life in the setting of Mumbai and Mathew surprisingly describes the bar dancers and their approach and outlook towards their customers with great scientific precision. Mathew remarked that a lot of research had gone in to the writing . His descriptions of a Malayali Christian couple and their failed attempts at copulation on the first night bordered on the hilarious. This he said, emphatically, was not autobiographical. Mathew was candid enough to admit of a hangover from bacchanalian revels of the previous night and this lead to comments on dangerously rising levels of liquor consumption in Kerala.

Anuja Chauhan, author of ‘The Zoya Factor’ is an advertising professional and she brought all the charm and fizz of her profession on stage. Dimunitive, dressed casually with a beautiful necklace, she sat cross-legged on a chair, comfortable and at ease with herself and read passages from her book as though she were reading out bedtime stories to her children. The film rights of Zoya Factor, she announced, is brought by Red Chilies Entertainment. Anuja tells the story of life in a world of glitz and glamour, of cricket, advertising, movies, of astrology and luck It’s a make believe world Anuja has seen at close quarters. Anuja narrated her efforts at writing, caught between the demands of a high profile job in JWT and her responsibilities as a wife and a mother.

Palash Mehrotra author of ‘Eunuch Park’, sub-tittled ‘Stories of Love and Destruction’ made a sober difference. Deeply read and with fine intellectual tastes he is a product of Doon School, St.Stephen’s College and Balliol College, Oxford. In Palash’s stories, the protagonist is a distant figure, reflecting on events and incidents. One of the stories he read out was of life in a small –town and its Christian missionary school. The moralistic position one is forced to assume by life in small towns is vividly described in his stories. To my question, Palash pointed out that life in small towns is claustrophobic and there is very little space to dissipate one’s energies, something available in abundance in big cities.

Anita Jain breezed on stage brimming with confidence that literary success and fame brought her. Dressed in black top and skirt she seemed business-like in an American sense and proceeded to read out from her book ‘Marrying Anita’ which describes her and her parent’s search for a groom in India. Anita said it was a confessional book though her confessions were timid by American standards but shocking in India. Anita did her schooling and college in the United States and lives in India while her parents continue to reside in the United States. She read out passages describing her visit along with her parents to her maternal aunt’s house in Meerut and meeting her married first cousins after a gap of 18 years and exchanging notes . She also read out another passage where she invites a Sikh friend to her apartment and their first kiss. .Anita stated that her intention was to portray the fast changes in metropolitan India in the course of her search for a husband. Anita was told from the audience that parts of her book could be exaggerated as in urban and semi-urban India, women are free to go out, search for partners, find them and enter in to matrimony with the consent of parents and the larger family.

The post-lunch session was a talk by Prof. Sanjay Srivastava on ‘Streets, Footpaths, Gated Communities – The Cultures of Indian Pornography’. Prof. Srivastava teaches Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi. The well-researched talk was aided by slide presentations. Sanjay pointed out that pornography creates in the mind of millions of Indian males, images of the sensual woman they like to aspire for but is unattainable and unavailable. There are also ideas of a true sexuality which has to be found and failing which a man’s life remains unfulfilled. The sensual woman is white, upper class and represents in their minds, modernity. Sanjay dwelt on the explicit sexual discussions held in the columns of women’s magazines, both English and Hindi. He also referred to the badly printed magazines with pornographic tales sold on streets by small time vendors along with other magazines which exhort readers to lead ideal lives. He also spoke of gated communities where women could swing between modernity and tradition. He narrated how Karva Chauth would be observed along with drinking and dancing for Diwali parties. Prof. Srivastava has done a lot of research in his topic from a sociological viewpoint and his findings and conclusions need to be discussed more seriously.

Suresh Kohli the veteran documentary film maker was present to show his documentary on Kamala Das, the eminent writer who died recently. The women writers who read their works in the morning session stayed away from viewing it. I would say it was disrespect on their part. Kamala was an endearing person and I still cherish the moments spend in her company. Though Kamala was a bi-lingual writer, the film was restricted to her writing in English. The film was shot in the last years of her life, when she embraced Islam and started wearing Muslim dress. The frail Kamala had stopped moving out of her apartment and the entire shooting had to be done indoors. It was a poignant moment when Kamala says that she made a dinner of her past and invited all to come and share in its food and wine . It was perhaps an understatement of the anguish and suffocation she had gone through. Kamala ‘s literary life beginning with her first collection ‘Summer in Calcutta’ and comments of othe r poets like Keki Daruwalla are included in the documentary. Suresh Kohli has done a wonderful job and his work deserves a far wider audience.

With this curtains fell on the second Kovalam Literary Festival and a word of appreciation is due to Binoo John and his wife Rebecca who worked untiringly to make it a success. They did a wonderful job and in my view they should continue to organize the Third Festival in similar manner and in the same venue that the first two were held..

Kovalam Literary Festival

2009-10-21T11:29:00.003+05:30

The Second Kovalam Literary Festival was held at the Taj Green Cove, Kovalam from Oct 7 to Oct 9. The organisers aim to make it a very prestigious event in the years to come. Taj Green Cove where the festival was held provides an ideal ambience to the whole event. The inaugural session of Oct 7th was a brief meeting in the evening while a splendid sun set against the backdrop of the Arabian Sea! Buzzintown.com published my account of it and here's the link : http://www.buzzintown.com/bangalore/article-review_great-poetry-needs-good-readers--id_873.html

My write up of day two of the litfest also got published on the same site and the link is being provided: http://www.buzzintown.com/bangalore/article-review_voices--dissent-myanmar--id_874.html

'Bharat' Murali and the aesthetic experience!

2009-08-07T23:13:00.007+05:30

Bharat Murali, the gifted Malaylam cine actor and stage personality died last night. He left us at his prime , 55 years, and rightly had many more years to live . He was Chairman of Kerala Sangeet Natak Akademi at the time of his death. In 2002, his acting in the film 'Neyythukaran' won him the National Award for the best actor in India. My last meeting with Murali was in the Senate Hall in Trivandrum when we were there to pay our last respects to the writer Kamala Das. Little did I imagine that my next visit to Senate Hall will be to pay my last respects to him. Some months ago, while chatting on a cosy evening ,he made me recite Macbeth:
To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale,
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
The theatre actor in him loved Shakespeare and these lines moved him. Murali was deeply touched when I told him of my mother's remarks about an article he had written. On every occassion we met after that, he would inquire of her and ask me what she was reading .
Murali was not merely an actor who gave his best performance. He went beyond the performance to unveil the basics of the aesthetic experience that makes art so appealing to the human mind. This led him to the Kashmiri thinkers who lived and thought over this many centuries ago. He was astounded at how they could reach such solid conclusions and was always inquiring about the processes that enabled them. Abhinavagupta was, according to him, the most prominent of the lot. He read them seriously and often would ask me to spend time to read and understand their works.
The recent advances in neurosciences which led to path-breaking research on the neural basis of aesthetics attracted his attention. Murali would affirm this research was only a confirmation of what these great Kashmiri thinkers on aesthetics intuited centuries ago. 'Phantoms in the Brain' the wonderful book by Dr.Vilayannur Ramachandran, the famous Indian neuroscientst who lives and works in the United States influenced him deeply. He was confident that neuroscience would soon read out to us the workings of the human mind as it appreciated all forms of art. Murali drew parallels between the writings of the great Kashmiri thinkers on aesthetics and Dr.Ramachandran. He felt it was the continuance of a great Indian tradition. This led him to invite Dr.Ramachandran to visit Trivandrum and deliver a talk on the subject. The picture of Murali, on the podium, welcoming the great neuroscientist and explaining to a rapt audience on how and why the human mind gets drawn to all forms of art is deeply etched in my memory. Not even his greatest characters on stage or screen can surpass that image!

Thoughts on a Suicide!

2009-07-25T14:25:00.006+05:30

A colleague commited suicide last Tuesday, the 21st of July. He hanged himself in his office late that evening. It was a holiday for in our part of the world Hindus perform rituals by the sea and rivers to honour their ancestors. He did all the rituals for his ancestors in the morning and returned to his office where he remained all alone through out the day. In a note he has mentioned that he's taking his life and no one else is responsible for it.

A lawyer known for his integrity he was the District Government Pleader and Public Prosecutor at the time of his death. Under India's Civil and Criminal Procedure Code's it is a vital position in the administration of justice at the district level.

Though my senior in age and experience we enjoyed a comfortable relationship as a host of incidents and circumstances brought us close, personally and professionally. From that vantage point, I can see no reason why he should commit suicide. Yet, he did! Why? One can only speculate!

Is a person's decision to take his life an act on the spur of the moment, done abruptly and without forethought? Or is it done after deep thought and reflection? Does the situation, more important than the disposition of the person , trigger it?

I would link this incident to what happiness researchers like Martin Seligman and his colleagues say about the mental health of lawyers. Though their research was done in an American context, its findings can be applied in all countries. The study found that lawyers were the most highly paid professionals in the United States but the rates of depressive disorders, illegal drug abuse, alcoholism and divorce (even in women) were disproportionately higher than in any other profession or occupation. Lawyers are trained to foresee what might go wrong for their clients in every situation and defend them from it. This pessimistic outlook is a great professional asset but the danger is it seeps in to personal life and wreaks havoc. Along with it, the shift in emphasis on legal practice from good counsel about justice and fairness being the primary good to making it a big business turns lawyers more and more unhappy.

An Evening at Prithvi Theatre!

2009-07-05T00:10:00.004+05:30

Prithvi Theatre in Juhu, Mumbai, is a place of pilgrimage to drama lovers the world over. A love of theatre makes me check out Prithvi whenever I am in Mumbai. Prithivi Cafe and Samovar are my favourite haunts as it is to many. Last week, while in Mumbai, I took time off to watch the late evening show of 'Grey Elephants in Denmark' at Prithvi. The play in English on the lfe of Vinay Iyengar, the youngest of the Palangad Iyengars, a traditonal family of magicians is well scripted and acted out. It depicts the transformation of young Vinay at different stages of life and as he travels the world and encounters others of his tribe. His monologues, his discussions, his cousin Anita, herself a magician, describing him, are all quite fascinating to keep the audience spell bound. Vinay is frustrated when he discovers the 'willing suspension of disbelief' of the audience that enables a magician's stage performances to be successful. From 'sleight of hand to sleight of mind' is how he describes his transformation and growth. Vinay's realisation of his limits as a magician and the attempts to overcome them are the 'mis-theme' of this play and they are depicted through him and through people close to him. Whether they are futile or successful is left to the the viewer. Leaving the final question unanswered and to the viewer to interpret is ultimate achievement in art and the playwright has 'mis-directed' it with great skill.
After the play I went backstage and congragulated the actors.Without their tremendous effort and hardwork the play could not have been acted out so well. They even had to master some magic. May 'Out of Context' present us with more such gems.

Trivandrum Golf Club and an encounter with Shashi Tharoor!

2009-03-25T13:30:00.007+05:30

Pic - An emergency ambulance at the trivandrum golf club - signs of troubled times?

I wrote in this blog, two years ago, (http://shajikrishnan.blogspot.com/2007/06/in-greens.html) , of my introduction, to the lovely game of golf. In May 2007, I became a Member Elect of the Trivandrum Golf Club. In 2008 December, I was made a Member. The guidance of expert coaches helped me grasp the fundamentals of the game. I am regular in my golf and enjoy it.
The Trivandrum Golf Club found itself in the eye of a storm in 2008, when on May 30th, the Government of Kerala decided to resume ownership of the 25 acres of land and buildings in its possession. . The obvious reason cited was that the 25 acres of prime land and facilities within it were being enjoyed by a handful of people for their private pleasure and the public at large are denied access. The incidents connected with this action of the Government became subject of a legal and political controversy, the ripples of which are yet to die down . The High Court of Kerala quashed the orders of the Government on procedural infirmities but permitted appropriate action to be taken in compliance with the rules. Government is going ahead with taking over the land of the golf club and a protracted litigation is in place. Unfortunately, the public perception of clubs as places of exclusivity where the elite rub shoulders is yet to change and the Trivandrum Golf Club found very little support even when the government’s actions were arbitrary and heavy handed.
The above narration is only to give the reader a better understanding of the events of 22nd March 2009. The Extraordinary General Meting of the golf club was held at the club house that evening to consider two alterations to be made to the bye-laws and approve of the budget for 2009-10. The President, Mr.P..M. Abraham, was in the chair and the items on the agenda unanimously approved by the 36 members in attendance. Pity that in a club with 600 members, hardly a handful turn up .
Immediately after the meting was adjourned, a gentleman took the stage and mentioned that members of the Club should exercise their franchise in the Parliament Elections of 2009 to register their protest at the state government’s action towards the golf club. A second person ,in more explicit terms, said that members should use their clout to defeat the candidate of a particular political party bent on taking over the lands of the club The President of the Club was a voice of sanity when he stated that voting should be left to the individual choice and Club should seek recourse to legal remedies. . Unfortunately, many members refused to tow this line. I was in a minority when I said that though the actions of government were arbitrary and illegal, it is improper to use the club, even informally, to plan and discuss political action or retaliation. As responsible citizens of this country, club members ought to focus on graver issues facing the nation and not be myopic.. My comments invited a harsh reaction from the Secretary who categorised me a ‘new comer’. I still don’t get its implications.. Is a new comer not supposed to dissent.? Or is he not allowed to express his views in a meeting? Over the last two years, I went through the metamorphosis of being a Member-Elect, a Candidate member and finally a Member. Karl Marx's insights on the bourgeois patterns of thought are relevant in many contexts.
In the midst of all this it was announced that Shashi Tharoor, the Congress candidate from the Trivandrum Parliamentary Consitutency will be reaching the Club. The Congress Party is in the Opposition in Kerala where the Communists are at the helm of government. Mr Tharoor, who is a Honorary Member of the Golf Club, . arrived and spoke of the need for Trivandrum to grow in to a global city and secure recognition internationally. Some listeners were impatient and couldn’t wait to hear him out. They interrupted to ask his views on the Government’s resumption of ownership of the lands of the Club. Dampening their enthusiasm, Mr.Tharoor stated that the Club is regarded in the surrounding community as a exclusive zone with facilites being monopolized by a few hundred members. There must be a attitude change on the part of the members too, he said.. Mr. Tharoor agreed that in a city, facilities for leisure and recreation, like golf courses are necessary and what exists should be preserved. . Mr. Tharoor minced no words when he said ‘there is an egalitarian streak in Kerala society and you are on the wrong side of it’. Thanks, Mr. Tharoor for a sober response.
It’s often said ‘a politician thinks of the next election, a statesman thinks of the next generation.’ Mr.Tharoor displayed statesmanship during the few minutes he spend at the golf club. Sorry, Mr.Tharoor, that I can’t help you in this election.. The ‘egalitarian streak’ you mentioned in passing, is a contribution of the Left movement in Kerala, built through heroic struggles spanning many decades of the last century and I trace my roots to it.
But my respect for you as an individual has been built by our first encounter in the golf club and it will always be there. If the people of Trivandrum, elect you, I will only be happy to welcome you as our Member of Parliament .
Wish you all Success!

Is the Indian State anti-people?

2008-06-21T23:27:00.002+05:30

Neerja Chowdhury in an edit page article titled ‘The decline of democracy’ published in the New Indian Express dated June 16, 2008 refers to two observations of a German student visiting India .

The first observation, ‘Delhi is not India’ ,though often repeated as to become cliché, is but a truth. In most countries, the national capital holds in a gist, the character and characteristics of the whole. But, in India, a foreign visitor who sees Delhi first and thinks it as India is in for a shock when he travels to other regions. So amazing and unbelievable is India’s diversity on all counts.

The second and more important observation made by our German visitor, says Neerja, is that while there is much hype of we being the world’s largest democracy, there is little evidence of democratic functioning in many parts of the country ------- be it in the police, local authorities, political parties and even families. Neerja cites numerous happenings in the week prior to her article as proof.

Excepting the fact that elections in India are conducted, by and large, in a free and fair manner, the ordinary Indian has been at the receiving end in the hands of the state apparatus. Large sections of Indian officialdom still consider it their birthright to lord over their subjects and put them to trouble and misery. The state is unresponsive and unyielding. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar bemoaned this in his writings when he stated that individual rights and personal freedom were alien concepts in India’s civilisational history. The Emergency of 1975 is a fine example.

The observation of the German student, confirmed by our experience, indicates that sixty years of being a Republic has not led to any attitudinal shift in the rulers over the ruled. Their mentality is fossilized in the colonial era with little prospects of change.

'Survival Mode'

2008-06-10T08:48:00.005+05:30

This blog has been dormant for quite some time. My inspiration or creativity had died down. The feeling was nagging me that whatever I write may be imperfect, stupid or simply fail to reach up to the standard of my previous entries. I was in the dark on ways to escape from this dead-end till I read of a similar situation faced by my friend Katie in http://www.getfreshminds.com/2008/05/get-out-of-that.html. Like for her, blogging ,became for me 'just another thing that cluttered my already - lengthy to do list'. And from her blog I have learnt the way to bypass the overpowering feeling of being blocked or exhausted. Let me start writing again. Thanks a lot, Katie!

Justice J.M.L.Sinha - A Tribute

2008-03-22T10:33:00.002+05:30

Justice Jag Mohan Lal Sinha, former Judge of the Allahabad High Court, died on Thursday at the age of 87. Many may not even have heard that name or might vaguely recollect it. But Justice Sinha goes down in history as one of the few judges who with a single judgement radically and dramatically altered the course of a nation or a people’s destiny. His judgement, delivered on June 12,1975, in the Rae Bareilly election case, where he declared as void the election of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to Parliament on the ground that she indulged in corrupt electoral practices, set off a train of events, political and social, beginning with the Emergency , the reverberations of which continue even today in the lives of generations born much later. Justice Sinha remains in my mind as a hero. So do two other people associated with that case, Raj Narain, the Socialist Party opponent of Indira Gandhi who filed the election petition and the redoubtable Shanti Bhushan, the lawyer appearing for the petitioner.
Yahoo contains an interesting report of Justice Sinha’s demise and I am providing the link : http://in.news.yahoo.com/indianexpress/20080322/r_t_ie_nl_politics/tnl-justice-sinha-who-set-aside-indira-g-0058794_1.htm
One more point must be stated. The rise of India’s opposition parties to political power after more than 30 years of unbroken Congress rule, in the Union and in many States, owes a lot to Justice Sinha’s judgement. Justice Sinha never attempted to cash in on this, something he could have easily done. He preferred life incognito after retirement. No further evidence is needed for his personal integrity and judicial urprightness.

N.B: In this context I should also pay my tributes to another fearless judge of those troubled times, Justice H.R.Khanna of the Supreme Court, who wrote the dissenting judgement in the preventive detention case which arose during the Emergency and was superseded for Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Court by Mrs. Indira Gandhi. He died hardly two months ago. The ‘New York Times; hailed Justice Khanna’s judgement in an editorial soon after it was delivered.

faceless Facebook?

2008-01-28T07:35:00.000+05:30

The Goddess of Justice is blindfolded. This symbolizes Justice as strictly impersonal, unmoved by individual preferences. Facebook, the social networking site, is faceless when it comes to deciding on the fates of its users. Any user is free to report any other user and such reports are eagerly accepted at face value. The user against whom a report is made sees his account disabled forthwith. Any further inquiry with Facebook only elicits the mechanical response that Terms of Use agreed upon has been violated and the decision is final. No information is given on the nature of the complaint or the specific violation alleged as committed by the user. It is a harsh judgement, without trial, instantly dispensed, similar to that among Bedouin tribes. The guilty find themselves deprived of their contacts , the graffiti they draw, the pictures and messages they post, and the mails they receive with no access whatsoever. A trauma, barbaric in social terms, is inflicted on the hapless Facebook user. And the helpless individual user is left with no means to challenge Facebook. One patiently waits for a David who will match this Goliath. And going by the plenty of messages posted on the web alleging harshness, arbitrariness and unfair treatment from Facebook , I am sure the day is not far off when a David’s stone will fell this Goliath.

Disabled users of Facebook should’nt silently sit through the tyranny unleashed on them. They should network, share thoughts, discuss among themselves, and devise creative and innovative ways to face this injustice and expose the undemocratic and high-handed methods of Facebook. How about mounting a legal challenge to Facebook’s arbitrariness in US or European courts?

Michael O Leavitt

2008-01-27T11:44:00.000+05:30

Michael O Leavitt, the US Secretary of Health, was in India to see for himself recent advancements in health care and the product facilities being developed. In an interview with ‘The Hindu’ he made two points worth pondering over.

Referring to the unsustainably high costs of health care in US ( in India too health care costs in the private sector is no different) he called for developing techniques to measure their quality and value. People should have access to information which enables them to compare the quality of health care they receive against its costs. In health care as in every other sector, says Mr.Leavitt, if people have information about the cost and quality, they will make choices that will drive the quality up and the costs down. A market based on value will emerge.

The second point he makes is on validating treatments and formulations from alternative and complementary systems of medicine. He says that the US National Institutes of Health have a centre that focuses on them. How different from India where there is very little interaction between modern medicine and the traditional systems, both of which occupy separate spheres and where the experts in each field encounter each other as adversaries in a battle!. Mr. Leavitt says that US policy is to take traditional systems of healing, understand it better, apply good science to it and apply it or use it. Mr. Leavitt mentions of the considerable time he spend in China looking at their traditional systems of medicine and his meeting with Mr.Chim, renowned in treating leukaemia , who successfully introduced arsenic in its treatment based on traditional practices.

The thrust on providing full information to users of health care and the positive approach to traditional systems of medicine being practiced the world over for centuries is proof that a change in approach, qualitative in nature, is taking place in health care in USA. The pace of change may be slow, yet the shift in emphasis is a welcome development. The United States should take the lead in integrating traditional healing practices with modern systems of medicine so that we gain the best of both. India's health administrators(and there's a surfeit of them) too should make sensible use of these suggestions of Mr.Leavitt.

An Yen for Narendra Modi

2007-12-28T18:36:00.000+05:30

Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party has emerged victorious in the Gujarat state legislature elections. Their commanding majority proves that large sections of the voting population still repose trust in Modi and his party.

The print and visual media which loses no opportunity to highlight the Gujarat riots of 2002 holds Modi as the villain of the piece. The secular parties, Courts, Election Commission, intellectuals , artists, all of them, for various reasons, joined the Modi hunt in the last six years.
That their efforts have not yielded the desired fruits is evident from this result. If the people of Gujarat want Modi and the BJP and do not buy stories of the Modi baiters, it is time for them to introspect why they and their campaign did not impact on people’s minds.

It is not my case to prove that the Gujart riots were lesser in degree when compared with many other riots. The responsibility of the government to maintain law and order and protect the lives of its citizens is paramount. The Gujarat government of the day was found wanting in this respect. But haven’t many governments in India been so? To hound Modi using a specific incident is now a trend but doesn’t it turn out to be counter-productive over the long run?

The anti-Modi campaign has been shrill. The media helped its leaders bask in the limelight. They received support from a wide cross-section of the elite of Indian society. But they failed to build an organization, however clumsy it may be, to carry their message across to the millions of homes. The Gujarat results show that in a democracy, whatever may be the clout and prestige of the media, the elite and non-elected institutions, without an organizational network, doom awaits you. And building an organization demands much toil away from the glare of publicity.

Suhas Gopinath and the Missing Indian Entrepreneur

2007-12-10T14:30:00.000+05:30

Suhas Gopinath from India earned fame as a young entrepreneur founding Globals Inc. in California in 2000 at the age of 14. Today, at 21, he continues to lead the forward growth of his company. Suhas is celebrated by the media as the youngest entrepreneur and for success of Globals. He deserves his laurels.

But to me Suhas represents something more and something different. Suhas was born in a middle-class or upper middle-class family that accorded pride of place to formal academic attainments. Son of a defense scientist, Suhas got the education and training considered appropriate to the social environment of his family and the times. What signifies this environment is the high-value accorded to university degrees and employment in government or corporate. Entrepreneurship is treated with ridicule as reserved for those who either fail to make the grades or find a plush corporate job.

To become an entrepreneur in a culture that is markedly anti-entrepreneurial demands defiance, drive and daring. Suhas Gopinath has them and .his ideas on entrepreneurship are revealed in a recent interview. He admits that even today our youth have little freedom in career decision making which is heavily influenced by parents and social trends. Our youth, he laments, turn in to job seekers and never job creators. The stigma of financial gambling attached to entrepreneurship by an older generation still prevails and what is more surprising, Indian youth, otherwise proud to flaunt western influence in their music or dress or food shy away when it comes to inculcating an entrepreneurial attitude. They are happy to remain job seekers and never job creators.

India, a country of a billion people, needs many more entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are the risk-takers, who innovate, who experiment with new processes, new products and new methods and make them work. In the modern capitalist world to which we belong, it is the entrepreneur who is the harbinger of change, much more than the wage-earner, the financier or the bureaucrat.

Suhas Gopinath – May his tribe incease!

Blood in Baghdad

2007-11-02T10:29:00.000+05:30

The spectre of bomb explosions, shootings, terrorist attacks, deaths, killings, destruction continues to repeat itself in Iraq. Increase in either the numbers or spread of US military forces will not correct the situation. It’s sad the cradle of Mesopotamian civilization, also the land from where Caliphs reigned, has been brought to this pass. To blame George Bush or Saddam Hussein is to inflate the power of individuals over historical processes.

Madeline Albright, former US Secretary of State, while noting that the US invasion of Iraq was misplaced makes a sublime comment worth pondering over. She writes ‘while our troops face death every day, the least the President can do is to face the truth’.

Ms. Albright claims that if President Bush admits the pre-war criticism of military intervention in Iraq was right, countries in Europe, Arab world and elsewhere will come forward to assist in ensuring peace and stability in Iraq as continued anarchy in that country could lead to chaos elsewhere. This could reduce the pressure on US troops as also limit American casualties. She cites the example of the Balkans where the US, EU and UN aided by international opinion was able to convert a war-torn region in to a zone of peace.

Ms.Albright who understands the divisive nature of politics and society in Iraq suggests that the only workable option here as in similar situations elsewhere is to develop a political power sharing arrangement that recognizes majority rule while protecting minority rights. This is not simple; it requires a psychological transformation that prepares people to compete for power peacefully instead of plotting how to survive amidst anarchy.

Ms.Albright as Secretary of State justified the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Kuwait war forgtting such sanctions cause hardship only to the innocent and the poor who were in no way responsible for Saddam Hussein's excesses. But being away from the centres of power and decision making for a few years, and spending time to reflect and ponder in the light of experience, she suggests a sensible exit for the United States while ensuring peace in Iraq.

Hoping her ideas will have many listeners!

Blogging Again!

2007-10-30T17:50:00.000+05:30

My blogmate, Lynn DeSouza, the talented advertising professional, ex-tennis champion, animal lover, in short, a passionate human, is temporarily quitting the blogging world but not without giving us this meaningful message :

‘A dear friend once described himself to me as a comma. The strategic pause before the next important phase in the lives of all his key relationships. The mark that makes sense out of disconnected phrases, that glues together connected thoughts, that allows for that most important of all needs - time to stop and ponder.

It's comma time for me, folks. Time to leave a phrase behind while I go in search of the next one. Time to answer some internal questions, erase some full stops and add a few exclamation marks to my already oh-so-interesting life. But not before taking full advantage of the comma.
I will be back here someday soon. Till then, may the good Lord bless you with love, joy, peace, security, and success. Boa Sorte.’

Today, I, re-enter the blogging world after a gap of almost two months, an enforced absence, caused partly by repeated repairs to my laptop which also helps explain away my lack of ideas and topics to blog about. ( Doesn’t a bad workman always quarrel with his tools?)

But the comma in my life convinces me how indispensable writing is to create, explore, develop and publish my ideas and views. Not to write is a sin! So, with renewed vigour and added personal responsibility I reach out , to share with and and to learn from all my friends.

As dear Lynn so correctly points out, we need ‘comma time’. But if we are not alert, comma time may turn in to full stops!

Jesuit Alumni Congress - 2007

2007-09-12T05:08:00.000+05:30

A side view of the Laurie Baker designed Loyola School auditorium where the Congress was held .

(Top) - A Panel discussion in progress.

(Below) - Mr.Alphonse Kannamthanam speaking at the inaugural function. Seen on the dais are Mr.T.P.Srinivasan, senior diplomat and Fr.Hector D'Souza S.J., Provincial of the Jesuit Order for South Asia.

'Chilanka', The Vth National Congress of the 'Jesuit Alumni Associations of India'- 2007, was held at my alma mater, Loyola School, Trivandrum, from 7-9th,September. The Jesuits are an order of Catholic priests founded by St.Ignatius Loyola in 1534. Their wordwide renown is for the high standards in the educational institutions they have established and which they manage successfully. In India, Jesuits manage 38 colleges, 5 business schools and 155 secondary Schools in places as far off as Kohima and Surat. Some of the Jesuit insiituions like XLRI jamshedpur, XIM Bhubaneswar have won international recognition. Jesuit colleges like the St.Xavier's colleges at Mumbai, Calcutta, Ahmedabad,Jaipur, and Trivandrum, the St.Joseph's colleges at Bangalore, Trichy and Tirunelveli, St Aloysius College at Mangalore and Loyola College in Chennai have a rich tradition behind them. Equally, if not more famous are the Jesuit run secondary schools of St.Xaviers at Calcutta, Mumbai and Delhi, St.Stanislaus at Bandra, Campion in Colaba, St.Vincent in Pune,North Point in Darjeeling and Loyola schools in Jamshedpur and Trivandrum.

The theme of the Vth Congress was 'The role of Jesuit alumni in resurgent India'. The concept paper, circulated in advance among alumni associations, referred to the current status of education,ecology,good governanace,economy,health care and culture in the country and the responsibility of jesuit alumni in enabling their progress and meeting its challenges. The resurgence in India, its commencement and the direction it is taking were also to be discussed.
Almost 500 delegates, representing various Jesuit alumni associations, were present on the evening of Sep 7th at the Loyola school auditorium, renamed the Fr.Joe Lawrence Hall, to witness the inaugural function. The auditorium, a simple red brick building, was designed in 1971, by the world renowned architect, Laurie Baker. The Congress was inaugurated by Fr.Hector D'Souza S.J. the provincial of the Jesuit order in South Asia. Mr.T.P.Srinivasan IFS, formerly India's permanent representative to the United Nations and a senior diplomat spoke on 'Can India make an impact in the global arena?' Referring to contemporary debates, he pointed out that India had been the victim of nuclear apartheid ever since it conducted atomic tests in 1974 and the 123 agreement with USA is the only opportunity for us to escape from this situation. He said that USA represented all nuclear states that had signed the NPT and were members of the Nuclear suppliers group. This agreement enables India to enter in to nuclear collaboration with all these countries.

Mr.Alphonse Kannamthanam, an IAS officer turned MLA, spoke on 'Clean Public Life, Can we dream of it in India'. He drew examples from his personal experiences as a bureaucrat. Politicans are produced by the society of which they are a part and the decadence affecting society has affected political processes too, was his contention. The seeds of change lie inside us and not elsewhere, he stated. Mr.Srinivasan and Mr.Alphonse referred to their early education in government run schools and childhood in villages were electricity hadn't yet reached.

The first session on Sep 8th was a talk on 'Women in Resurgent India' by Mrs. Lyda Jacob IAS. She pointed out that South India had achieved remarkable levels of social develoment which were not visible in other parts of the country. This, she said, was due to effective implementation of various programmes in health care, child care, nutrition and primary education. Mrs. Jacob referred to the high levels of female infancticide in many parts of India and warned of the effects of a decline in the sex ration. When questioned as to how she felt being in an audience consisting overwhelmingly of men, she replied that she was comfortable as four generations of men in her family, from her grandfather to her son, were jesuit alumni.

The next session on 'Science and technology in a resurgent India' had two different points of view,both eloquently stated by Fr.Vincent Braganza S.J., a P.hd in biotechnology from Loyola University, Chicago, now working at St.Xavier's, Ahmedabad and Prof.Joe Peter, ex- Director of Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and alumnus of XLRI, Jamshedpur. Fr.Vincent spoke of the two India's existing within one nation and drew attention to the problems of the villages. He also pointed out to the dangers of the haphazard urbanisation taking place. Fr.Vincent was of the view that science and technology was now capable of finding a solution to most problems of scarcity and want facing us but lamented that the political will was lacking. Prof.Joe Peter requested the audience to see the glass as half-full, not half-empty. He said that globalisation had been made inevitiable by the massive developments in communications, information technology and transport. The 9% growth in India, to him, was going to be a sustained one and only two other countries, China and Vietnam were growing at this rate. This could lead to India emerging as a world power in a few decades. Prof.Peter also wondered as to what was in the Jesuits that led them to command the ferocious loyalty of their alumni.

Mr.K.Jayakumar IAS, spoke on 'In a fast changing world, can moral values erode'. The speed of change, he said, was relative from one generation to the other. Erosion in moral values, to him, was the result of man's crazy and reckless drive to succed at any cost. In this mad race, we don't mind our success being at the cost of another's failure. All problems, he said, are ultimately moral problems and an education distanced from moral values fails the individual in his moment of reckoning.

'Role of Jesuit Institutions in a resurgent India' saw open dissent between two Jesuit priests, Fr.Casmir Raj S.J., Director, XLRI, Jamshedpur and Fr.P.C. Mathew S.J., Principal, St.Xavier's College, Kolkatta. Fr.Casmir Raj regretted the fact that Jesuits had refrained from entering the field of technical education. The Jesuits do not manage engineering or medical colleges in an age when utmost importance is being accorded to professional education. With their credentials and institution building experience it was easy for Jesuits to make a mark in this sector, said Fr.Raj. He blamed this on a refusal to think out of the box. Rebutting this Fr.P.C. Mathew emphasised that most of the Jesuit run arts and science colleges had introduced new graduate and post graduate programmes with an emphasis on technology.

The speeches were carefully listened to by the delegates who asked questions and actively participated in the discussions. It was never a one-way affair. The different alumni associations also made power point presentations on their activities.

Justice M.C.Chagla, jurist, diplomat, statesman and a jesuit alumnus once spoke of the 'aristocracy of the mind'. This was evident at the Congress. I felt proud to be a jesuit alumnus.

Independent India - Three Score Years

2007-08-17T07:22:00.000+05:30

The pics taken within a span of a few minutes on the morning of August 15th.

August 15th marked the 60th year of India's Independence. The print and visual media, beginning with Time (which featured India on its cover page) considered this of monumental importance to be celebrated unlike an annual birthday. Completing 60 years in an individual's life has religious significance among Hindus. In Kerala, it is called 'shashtibdapoorthi'. When one reaches 60, the major portion of one's years on earth have passed and it is time to look back.
In a nation-state's life, 60 years is not a significant passage of time. For India, one of the world's two longest surviving civilisations with recorded history going back to 5000 years, it is only a miniscule amount of time for major transformations to appear. The Hindus are a civilisation with yugas and kalpas referring to millions of years around which human and divine destiny unfurls.
The articles, endless tele- discussions, speeches, all seen in plenty this season played on the same set of tunes which one has oft heard. India was portrayed as an emerging power, charting out its righful place on the world stage. Few mentioned that the secret of India's strength and resilence, which enabled it to survive for 5000 years when other civlisations which began along with it or after it were reduced to dust, lay in its diversity. In no other land can you find such magnificent diversity exisiting with so much harmony and with little of civilisational angst. A diversity which ranges from clothes to food to languages to rituals....the list is endless. Globalisation and Capitalism endanger our diversity and replaces it with homogenity, even when they claim to defend democracy and freedom of choice.
The civilisational crisis facing India is the destruction of its diversity. The forces unleashed by capitalism and globalisation can never co-exist with diversity and need homogenity and uniformity for their growth. In various ways, Indian's have begun to respond to this crisis. How we resolve it will be interesting.
To conclude in a personal note, on August 15th, I hoisted the national flag (see pic) in the gardens of the historic Saraswati Vilas Palace in Trivandrum where a play school, kindergarten and primary school function. The little children sang patriotic songs and we distributed sweets to mark the gaiety of the ocassion. Speeches were dispensed with.
But when I emerged out of the Palace on to the road, this sight of an haggard old man fast asleep on the pavement, all his wordly belongings filled in two sacks, touched me. What does 60 years of Independence and India's emergence as a global power mean for him? Dear reader, can you tell me, please!

Mirror(s) in Our Brain

2007-08-11T21:40:00.000+05:30

The Italian scientist Giacamo Rizzolati was the first to observe a special set of neurons in macaque monkey brains, an observation neuroscientist Vilayannur Ramachandran hails as of revolutionary implication to humanity. When a monkey performs an action these neurons show activity . But when the same monkey watches another of his tribe do the same action, the neuronal activity mentioned above is repeated. This quality led to these neurons being termed 'mirror neurons'.
Further research revealed the fact that the human brain was well-endowed with mirror neurons. The mirror neuron system in the human brain seems to be more highly developed, sophisticated and specialised. They possess the capacity not merely to understand and respond to the motor actions of others but also to their intentions, sensations, behaviour and emotions.The current knowledge of mirror neuron system is skeletal but sufficient to prove that they play a pivotal role in organising our ersonal and social life.
Scientists studying the mirror neuron system point out a marked difference. In the monkeys, individual neurons fire as specific motor actions are performed or witnessed. In human beings, on the other hand, scientists have not been able to pinpoint single neurons but mark out an area in the brain which witnesses activity. Scientists now aim to go beyond mapping out motor neuron activity to understand how mirror neuron system acts when human beings have or percieve emotions or tactile or olfactory sensations etc. They are also researching into whether the system responds only to to perceived emotions or also to intentions of others. It as also to be found as to whether mirror neurons are restricted to a single specific area of the brain or whether their presence is diffused throught the entire cortex.
Vittorio Gallese who was Rizzollati's colleague at the University of Parma when this discovery was made says it is now 'clear that mirror neurons are one key to understanding how human beings survive and thrive in a complex social world. This neural mechanism is involuntary and automatic, with it we don't have to think about what other people are doing or feeling, we simply know. It seems we are wired to see other people as similar to us, rather than different. At the root, as humans we identify the person we are facing as someone like ourselves'.
That brain structure is innate and that we are born with these special cells that allow us to connect with other people is vehemently opposed by those who believe that everything about the brain including the tuning of individual neurons is shaped by experience. They regard mirror neurons as a 21st century scientific myth. The imaging studies, they say do not measure electrical activity in single neurons but only the oxygen suply to large areas of the brain. From this incomplete record we cannot even assumea the existence of mirror neurons, goes their argument. They deny that mirror neurons constitute the fundamental neural basis of human social cognition.
But Ramachandran asserts mirror neurons will dissolve the barrier between 'self vs others'. Will he be proved right or will mirror neurons become another mirage?

Age of Irreverence!

2007-07-24T12:58:00.000+05:30

The 'New Indian Express' in its editorial comment of July 19,2007 refers to the Presidential poll campaign of July, 2007 as marked by unprecedented acrimony witnessed in no earlier election for that office. The nomination of UPA candidate Prathbha Patil led to media exposure of the illegal and criminal activities indulged in by her close relatives and in which her connivance is difficult to disprove. There may be exaggerations but most of the details revealed by Indian Express and other print and visual media will stand the test of scrutiny. The Congress and UPA constituents remain silent about the blemished record of their candidate and Indian Express cautions that Prathiba's elevation to the highest office of the country will not lead to allegations being discarded on that count alone . It's reason, the editorial says, is because what is being demonstrated as the temper of these times is 'that the relationship between the people and power, or the people and their institutions is changing in dramatic ways.... The change is not all due to coming of new technologies and wider access to them. The new ways of seeing have also to do with a waning of deference and the establishment of a more intimate -- and a more irreverent -- equation with our institutions'.
This is a radical, even revolutionary departure from time and tradition worn practices. Indians always genuflect before authority; political,hierarchichal, social, religious or cultural. They seldom dare to challenge individuals or institutions which demand their implicit obedience. .One reason for this, pointed out by Dr.B.R. Ambedkar in many of his writings, is that our society has evolved in ways which show scant regard for the individual, for his rights and his autonomy. The individual was destined to fit into a collective unit, be it of the village or joint family or caste or occupation. The transformation, placing the individual at the centre, has been slow in arriving but is now an inevitability from which there is no return. In India, social change doesn't come in the Western manner through revolutions that shake the earth but at snail's pace,unfolding so slowly, one never knows it is there. Could this be because our concept of Time is different, not the Western linear time, advancing irreversibly in a straight line and against which man races but a cyclical movement where everything repeats itself?
The signs of the current change could be discerned by any one who read V.S. Naipaul's 'India - A Million Mutinies Now'(1990), which graphically pointed out new trends being initialized by individuals in this land of continental proportions and now acquiring a momentum and strength of their own that cannot be supressed. The individual, transcending caste,religion,language,gender,position is beginning to assert his self. In this assertion the awe for persons in power will decline. His Excellency, The President of India will become Mr.President of the Americans. Mr. Prime Minister will have to rise from his Honourable seat and get ready to be questioned by the commoner.

Dance,dance,dance!

2007-07-14T22:34:00.000+05:30

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters!

Dance,dance,dance till you drop! - W.H.Auden.
India is a country with diverse physical traditions and dance forms. You can number them by the hundreds. But most of us feel threatened by movement. Trapped in rigid body attitudes we rarely use our bodies to create, express or communicate. The body has a language and a wisdom of its own and those who never discover or apply them are the poorer for it. This is the message, Tripura Kashyap, an accomplished dancer, choreographer and trainer, conveys in her book 'My Body,My Wisdom' published by Penguin Books, India. Reading the book brought realisation of my limited patterns of movement and deep inhibitions in moving the body beyond its functional requirements. It dawned on me that the doors had been closed tight to a whole universe of experience and drastic action should be taken to to kick it open. An email to Tripura wailing of my situation was promptly replied to and some time later she wrote suggesting I attend one of her movement training sessions in Hyderabad, where she lives. The sessions were organised by Rainbow Inc. and its Secretary, the indomitable Vaneeta Bhattacharya who was a significant presence through out the programme . The sessions were spread over two days and held in the pleasant surroundings of the Vidyaranya School, more of a garden than a school, in Saifabad, the heart of Hyderabad. Reaching there, I longed to go back to childhood, only to study in Vidyaranya.
The participants were a diverse lot and included quite a few educators for special needs children who had prior exposure to dance and movement. Nithin, a radiologist, Nirupam, a farmer from Haryana as he chose to describe himself, Sherin, a software engineer, Alina who works for the Nandi Foundation, Aparna, an architect and interior designer, Priti Anand, an editor for Penguin and myself were among those who were in it for the movement experience. But there was perfect rapport between these distinct groups. Nalini Praksh, an accomplished dancer in her own right had come down from Coonoor to understand Tripura's ideas.
It was pure dance that we practiced, creating and choreographing our own movements, individually and in groups, based on themes of our choice in place of traditional dance instruction where one is taught movements structured by others with performance as the goal. In the initial period of body preparation we were made to sit, stand, balance and lie down, to paint brush which is exploring space with hands and fingers and exercise legs by moving it in various positions in space. We expressed our names through a movement sequence. This was my first brief experience of choreography and dancing. Every participant had to go solo from one end of the hall to the other, moving the body in any sequence of movements of his choice. We had to imagine an animal or bird of our choice and then imitate its movements. We were divided into two groups and each group had to carry its members from one end of the hall to the other, one by one till only two remained, and one of them had to carry the other. So, the strongest and the tiniest amongst us had to be the last two to remain for the entire exercise to end in a success. The intensive sessions, spread over two days, helped us in sqarely facing our inhibitions on body movement and body expression and gave us the courage and confidence to explore and understand the world using our bodies and our senses.
In well-written and convincing passages of her book, Tripura destroys the myth that only dancers can dance. She states that the natural instinct for movement that all of us had as children became task-oriented and restricted as we grew up. Dance was a communal activity in ancient societies and denoted social interaction without distinction between the audience and performers.They knew no forms or styles of dancing and it was the natural movements of the body in its many daily activities like hunting, fishing, cooking, that were their source. Today, dancing is a formalized, technique bound and performance oriented activity requiring years of specialized training. Four elements combine in any dance - bodies, space, time and force.
Creative dance therapy on which Tripura devotes a few chapters removes our misapprehensions on the subject. Dance therapy is not meant for the physcially disabled or the mentally ill. It deals with the intimate connections between our bodies, our movements and the workings of our mind. The body can and does influence the mind and reflect the mind. An heightened awareness of the body, eye contact and spatial awareness are the qualities that this therapy can impart to us. Her collaboration with Santha Kumar, a psychotherapist in Bangalore and their successful efforts to conduct programmes that help normal functioning adults to explore the body and its potential and experience an unstructured, personalized form of movement expression make interesting reading.
Tripura writes of her collaboration with Aanand Chabukeshwar, a drama therapist and Zubin Balsara who uses music as therapy and how they combined dance, drama and music as therapeutic intervention in mentally challenged children at Sadhana Village in Pune.. What was of significance to me was Zubin's idea that music is not to be merely listened to but a process in which we should actively participate. Sounds being the vocabulary of music, Zubin helps us to discover and vocalize our personal vocabulary of sounds. To feel one's music physically pulsate through one's body is energizing, notes Tripura.
The days spend with Tripura and the other participants were wonderful. We shared a lot of ideas, overcame the inhibitions of our bodies and delighted ourselves in the joy of unrestrained movement. It is an experience I cherish and which I hope will recur many more times in this life.

A 'Crezendo' and After

2007-06-27T23:30:00.000+05:30

The Puritans of his time, British poet John Milton wrote, prohibited bear fighting, not for causing pain to the bear but for giving pleasure to the viewer. The upholders of public morality in contemporary India seem to spring from the same gene pool. Their latest contribution in the crusade to contain public morals from contamination is the strident demand to ban sale of the Condom pack, Crezendo, manufactured by the state owned Hindustan Latex, for containing a vibrating ring, which they allege is a sex toy. What astounds me is that leaders of all political parties, spanning a wide ideological spectrum, from militant right to extreme left have come out publicly in support of the demand.
This camaderie crossing party lines was visible on earlier ocasions. The closure of dance bars in Mumbai, the response to actress Khusboo's comments approving pre-marital sex, the controversy over Richard Gere kissing Shilpa Shetty at a public venue, all drove home the point that Indian politicians speak in one voice, though with varying degrees of intensity. There is no point in blaming the political class for holding retrograde views. They only reflect the conservative values and mores prevailing in the society of which they are a part.
The challenge facing Indian liberals, men and women, is to transform the old and establish a new order wherein sexual freedom is an article of faith and sexual relations between consenting adults remain the sole concern of the people involved. A sexually open society can never be against Indian traditions. The civilisational heritage of India is of sexual openness and experimentation. Sexual repression was never its agenda. The erotic sculptures in Hindu temples, the serious study of Kama Shastra, the practice of Tantra which says union with the divine can achieved through sexual ecstasy, all prove that our civilsation was never prudish.
Somewhere along the line, attitudes changed and we began to associate sex with guilt and secrecy. Society imposed restrictions we meekly accepted. The regimentation of sexual behaviour gained legitimacy. The need of the time is to write the liberal testament on matters sexual. But we must ensure the freedom doesn't degenerate into licentiousness. To allow so, would be to play into the enemy's hands.

June 26, 1975

2007-06-26T15:09:00.000+05:30

Thirty two years ago, on this day, and to be precise, at mid-night on June 25-26, a murder took place in the darkness and foreboding silence of Raisina Hill in New Delhi. A spineless Rashtrapati (as India's President is known), Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, signed the proclamation declaring a State of Emergency in the country, blindly putting his signature on the piece of paper send by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Democracy and Individual freedom had been murdered and their corpse buried. The young Indian Republic was facing the first major challenge to its existence, not from external enemies but from inside.
Day break saw prominent leaders of India's Opposition like Jayapraksh Narayan , Morarji Desai and many others put behind bars. Fundamental Rights guaranteed by the Constitution were suspended and Censorship imposed on the press. The ruling Congress party and its leader Indira Gandhi trampled on the democratic traditions carefully nurutured by the stalwarts of the freedom struggle, many of whom were also the founding fathers of India's Republic. What the British once did to their Indian subjects, Congress was repeating on citizens of free india. 'Indira is India and India is Indira' was the Congress slogan.
Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka's 'The Man Died' is about a similar situation in Nigeria. It's opening line ' The man dies who remains silent in the face of tyranny' echoes in me as I write this. Thousands of Indians, civil servants, judges, professors, journalists, doctors, technocrats, writers, all remained silent, before the ruthless might of the Establishment. They had died to ther conscience.
This blog entry is a tribute to those Indians who dared to fight the Emergency regime and stood up to the powers that be. It is not proper to list names, for all cannot be included. 'Indian Express' was the only English newspaper to challenge the dictatorship of Indira Gandhi. A 'Journalism of Courage' marked its presence. Justice H.R.Khanna boldly wrote a dissenting judgement allowing Habeas Corpus which led the New York Times to comment editorially 'If ever freedom and democracy returns to India, a grateful nation will erect a monument to Justice H.R.Khanna of the Supreme Court'.
This entry also salutes the rustic,illiterate, and simple people of the Indo-Gangetic plain, who in their millions, hit back through the ballot box in 1977, defeating Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party. They alone helped restore the democratic freedoms of the Republic . If they had done the reverse, perhaps, I would not be writing this entry today.

Ramachandra Gandhi - A Tribute

2007-06-22T22:52:00.000+05:30

I confess that I never heard of Ramachandra Gandhi till reading newspaper reports announcing his death on June 13th at India International Centre, New Delhi. Of course, I had heard of his more famous brothers, Rajmohan Gandhi and Gopal Krishna Gandhi. The three are the grand children of two illustrious Indians, Mahatma Gandhi, on their paternal side and C.Rajagopalachari,India's last Governor-General, on their maternal side. Of course, it is not lineage that is on focus here but that Ramachandra Gandhi was a Professor of Philospohy with a Phd. from Oxford and an exponent of Advaita-Vedanta with a few erudite works to his credit.
Articles written about Ramachandra Gandhi in the Hindustan Times and New Indian Express, immediately after his demise, have convinced me to find and read his books and understand his ideas.
In the Hindustan Times, Sanjay Baru, now media advisor to the Prime Minister of India, has written of how he first met Ramu ( as Ramachandra is affectionately called),in 1979, immediately after joining the teaching faculty of the University of Hyderabad. Ramu was Prof. of Philosphy there. Ramu would jokingly say that his office was in the bathroom of Sarojin Naidu's Hyderabad home, 'Golden Threshold', (which the Nightingale of India had gifted to the University) while the Prof. of English sat in the bedroom. This, Ramu would say signified the status of Philosophy in modern University life in India. Sanjay is first introduced to Ramu at a seedy bar where he is enjoying his beer and listening to Hindi film tunes. Sanjay describes himself as being thrown off his feet when told that his fellow drinking companion was a Prof of Philospohy and the grandson of the Mahatma. Sanjay narrates how Ramu had launched a mini-chipko movement, with the support of students, against the cutting of a huge neem tree planted by Sarojini Naidu to build classrooms. And how the University authorities did chop it a few days later in the dead of night leading to Ramu resigning his job in protest. Sanjay shares more of his personal encounters which bring out the warm human being that the late Prof. was.
Chandan Gowda, writing in the New Indian Express devotes more attention to Ramu's philospohical inquiries, his deep understanding of Advaita and other Hindu scriptures and how he drew their connections with modern life from which they have been banished in the name of progress. Ramu was concerned that modern day politics had freed itself from trancendental concerns with the meaning of life and death to dwell in exlusive identities of caste,class,race,nation and religion. He warned that such identities wouuld only give false answers to the question of 'Who am I' or ' Who are We'. This reminds me of reading Raja Rao's book, 'The Meaning of India', where he quotes the French writer Andre Malraux telling Jawaharlal Nehru in Paris in 1936 'keep India from duality... let the great Sankaracharya, let him guide India. such my prayer'. Ten years later, Malraux confronts the Indian Socialist leader Jayapraksh Narayan in Paris with the question 'What influence has Sankara on the government of modern India? to which a startled JP could only smile . Ramu, Gowda points out, was very conscious of the fact that while economic domination of the West was widely criticised, there was little concern about the domination of the Western intellectual framework over the rest of the world. He considered the second as dangerous as the first and wanted to ensure that India's civilisational autonomy (svaraj) was preserved amidst the wild charge of globalisation.
Ramu's interest in Hindu names led him to discover that the word gandhi is a derivative of the word 'gandha' meaning perfume and that the gandhis are traditionally perfume sellers.
'Svaraj - A Journey with Tyeb Mehta's Shantiniketan Tryptych', 'Sita's Kitchen',
'I am Thou; Meditations on the Truth of India' and the novel 'Muniya's Light' are among his famous books.

How Reason's Work

2007-06-18T18:29:00.000+05:30

We give reasons and receive them from others each day of our lives. But have we, for a moment, paused to inquire into the how of these reasons. Charles Tilly did!
Charle's Tilly is a social scientist, a Professor at Columbia University, who spends the major part of his professional life analysing large-scale political processes like revolutions and democratization. During this he discovered two patterns that forced him to think in different terms. One, that fellow-social scientists, mass media amd students explained complex social phenomena as the decision-making of a few influential actors, neglecting the unanticipated consequences, incremental effects and the subtle negotiation of social interaction. It is obvious that people rarely accomplish what they set out to achieve and events unroll differently than planned for. Yet in explaining social and political processes, conscious deliberation is emphasised to the exclusion of all else.
Second, that social processes resemble an intense conversation rather than soliloquies or a grandmaster's planning of chess moves. But few stood convinced of what he said.
Addressing this double challenge led him into the world of reasons, how people give reasons, how people receive reasons and how the relations between givers and receivers are negotiated, established, denied or repaired by the social process of reason giving. And the search resulted in his writing a very excellent book with one of the shortest titles a book could have 'Why?'
The author does not lay bare his theory of reason for he sees no need to have one for his purposes. Nor does he depend on anyone's theory. It is not his lot to worry as to whether the reasons people give are right or wrong or good or bad. Nor is he concerned about how individual nervous systems process new information as it comes in or in intellectual discussions of why things occur as they do. He does not question their significance; only, they are not the subject matter of this book, which concentrates on the social process of reason giving at the person - to - person scale.
Reasons, according to Tilly, fall in four broad but overlapping categories. They are:
1. Conventions
2. Stories
3. Codes
4. Technical Accounts
The four varieties of reasons differ significantly in form and content. Reasons match relationships. Reasons also justify practices that would not be compatible with other reasons and/or definitions of relationships. Reasons, Relationships and Practices are aligned.
The types of reasons are explained in detail by Tilly, devoting a chapter to each. They must be read carefully to get a proper grasp of what the author is aiming at. Stories are reasons which interpret events in terms of cause and effect. They are circumscribed in space and time and have a limited number of actors and actions. They re-work complex social processes and simplify them. They are grounded in commonly accessible every-day knowledge and throw hints of justification or condemnation. Conventions are bound by the logic of appropriateness and can be recognised by their simplicity and by the absence of further discussion. Conventions follow widely recognisable formulas. Codes, like Conventions, gain their credibility from the criteria of appropriateness rather than from cause-effect validity that prevails in stories and technical accounts. Of course, codes serve a variety of purposes in addition to justifying reasons and are made up of specialised sets of categories, procedures for ordering evidence and rules of interpretation. Technical accounts, like stories, combine cause-effect explanations but they are based on a systematic specialised discipline.
The author engages in vivid descriptions to make the reader understand the issues of the book. In the process, he also introduces the reader to new ideas and writers. Tilly refers to frames, first introduced by Erving Goffman. It shows how the very structure of organisations establish frames that focus attention on some kinds of information while screening out a great deal of other information that could, in principle, significantly affect their operation. He quotes Russell Hardin on street-level epistemology, Aristotle on Rhetoric, Anatole Broyard on Illness, Jessica Stern on terrorism and Thane Rosenbaum on legal theory, to name a few.
If it is believed that people give reasons based on their upbringing, fundamental beliefs, group membership or deep down character, then they must give the same reasons across a wide range of social circumstances. Do they? In contrast, some may claim that people give reasons at two levels - deep,authentic reasons for intimate acquaintances and quick, superficial, convenient reasons for the others. Reading this book would distance you from such beliefs, which to the author, are erroneous . The book's arguments and evidence prove that the reasons you give match your relations with those to whom they are given. Or in reverse, the reasons people give you reflect their relation with you.

Why? - Charles Tilly.
Princeton University Press.

In the Greens!

2007-06-04T22:14:00.000+05:30

I play tennis. I am doing so for many years. It has been the only game in which I have been involved. Cricket has flown over my head like a sixer. Near the tennis courts, where I have been playing for the last few years, tucked away is a Golf Club. I have always been curious about Golf but never toyed with the idea of learning it. All of a sudden, I decided to give it a try and submitted an application to the Golf Club, (www.trivandrumgolfclub.com ). The Executive Committee has accepted my application, made me a member-elect, and today I started training under an able coach. The first day on the practice greens was not without its difficulties and minor struggles, but under proper guidance I hope to catch on to all nuances of the game and become a seasoned golfer in the days ahead. I am bound to learn the game within six months and play with the Captain who will assess as to how far I have picked up the essentials.
Well, I look forward to happy golfing days and will share with you my experiences as a budding golfer.

Time Out!

2007-05-30T13:58:00.001+05:30

The smallest unit of Time in ancient India was Prana (time-span of one breath) which approximated to 4 seconds. Modern medical research confirms normal breathing frequency as 15 breaths/minute. How amazing! It was the coming of Railways that first made British think about unified time for all regions of India . The current Indian Standard Time, 5.30 hrs ahead of GMT, was fixed as the single time zone for the whole of India by the British in January,1906 with the meridian passing east of Allahabad at 82.5 E longitude as the central meridian . In recent times, it's been a pressing demand that the East and North East of India must have a separate time zone as the sun rises earlier than in the other areas of India. For a country of India's width, from Tripura to Gujarat, which distance is almost 2000kms, it is only fair that two time zones be put into operation so that daylight can be better used in the East. The sun rises and sets in the country's Eastern border two hours before it does in the Rann of Kutch in the deep West. Even Bangla Desh has set its time half an hour ahead of IST.
The official thinking, controlled by a bureaucracy and a political leadership that is North centric has still not responded favourably to this demand of the East. It has traditionally been a neglected area of India but is increasing in importance as it becomes India's gateway to the Pacific.

Post Script:
The Assamese film maker and Scientist Jahanu Barua, after 20 years of research in to time-zones in India, finds a strong case for a separate time zone for North-East India. As reported in the New Indian Express of Jan 24th, 2009 Jahanu Barua points out that the time difference between the eastern and western extremes of the country is more than 2 hrs. The Sun rises in the North-East at a longitude of 105 degrees east and hence north-east time is 7 hrs ahead of GMT. In the present situation the Eastern parts of India lose two to three hrs of daylight while the West gains time. This loss can easily be remedied by the country adopting two time zones, says Barua.

India's Spring Thunder!

2007-05-24T23:34:00.000+05:30

Exactly 40 years ago, on May 24th, 1967, landless labourers in the remote West Bengal village of Naxalbari rose in arms against feudal landlords oppressing them. They were guided by Charu Majumdar, then a CPI(M) leader and the father of Naxalism , the name given to India's extreme left wing movement, borrowed from the village where it began. 'Chairman Mao is our Chairman' was their slogan. The movement soon spread to other regions where the mainstream Communist parties were traditionally strong like Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. The Naxalites organised acts of violence against security forces and the feudal classes and their ultimate aim was to destroy the State.
Innocents being easy targets quickly fell prey to Naxalite weapons. This violence caused widespread revulsion and it was used by the Indian State to crush the movement with all its might. Means, not necessarily fair were taken recourse to by the State. This was aided by ideological splits within the Naxalite movement as to how the Indian Revolution should be conducted. The Naxalites were fragmented and by the mid-seventies their resistance crumbled under the force of counter-attack by the State . The movement did leave its mark on literature, art, polemics ,and political discourse. Many intelligent young men and women were attracted to it.
In recent years, Naxalites overcame their differences and various factions like the People's War Group, Maoist Co-ordination Centre and CPI(ML) Red Flag have united under one banner and one leadership. This, aided by the increasingly fragile internal and external situation have led to a resurgence of left extremism in India. The Government today considers it the biggest threat to India's internal security. The Government has admitted the existence of a 'Red Corridor' in India starting from Pashpuati in Nepal to Tirupati in India. The LTTE and Islamic terrorist groups are supposed to have contact with them. Their writ runs in many inaccessible parts of the Corridor.
Left extremist ideology of the Naxalites has a romantic touch associated with jungles and the chase, but it is one of the most reactionary and orthodox thought forms. Individual liberty is scarcely respected and dissent prohibited. Winds of change, influenced by human freedom, democracy and developments in technology is accepted by most Communist parties the world over who now strive to be part of the democratic mainstream. The collapse of the Soviet experiment, the economic and social reforms adopted by the Chinese Communist party and the changes in Eastern Europe have not convinced the Naxalites that an Indian Revolution is an impossibility. A civilisation, one of the oldest in the world, which has withstood the shocks and upheavals of thousands of years, has the strength and the resilence to bear and outlive Naxalism. India of the Buddha and the Chaitanya is not a land fertile for revolution. History will judge it a wise option if the Naxalites decide to end their self-imposed isolation and guerilla warfare and enter the democratic mainstream for Indian society will definitely accord a honourable place to them.

V.S. Achuthanandan - 'Smart' Moves

2007-05-20T14:47:00.000+05:30

This blog has an entry dated May 15, 2006 welcoming V.S. Achuthanandan as the new Chief Minister of Kerala. On May 18th, he completes one year in office and it is time to take a bird's eyeview of what's been happening. The Chief Ministerial post had been eluding VS, as he is affectionately called, right from 1991. In 2006 at 83, with the party apparatus controlled by leaders who have no love lost for him, few expected VS to become CM even though his health was perfect, walk brisk and intellect razor-sharp, thanks to yoga, naturopathy and spartan dietary habits. Yet, he overcame insurmountable odds with persistence, patience and the support of the masses.
Leaders who occupy political office amidst high expectations soon fall with a thud. M.Karunanidhi of Tamil Nadu and Buddhadev Bhattachrjea of West Bengal who assumed office in the same week as VS are sliding down, thanks to the attack on the Dinakaran office in Madurai and the violence at Nandigram. But in Kerala, as he completes his first year in office, VS is riding the crest of a popularity wave, the common people swooning over him in admiration for his integrity and boldness while his enemies in the party and vested interests run for cover.
During the initial months VS was in an euphoria, settling down so to say, as it was the first time in his long political life that he was savouring the privileges of office. But he soon made it clear that it's business when he summoned the Director-General of Police and ordered him to immediately cancel the transfer orders issued to an upright, senior IPS officer while he was raidng the recording studios owned by the wife of a fellow IPS officer on receiving genuine complaints of copyright violations. This send a message to the people that the government stood by rule of law and would not bow before the high and the mighty. The entertainment industry which had been bearing the brunt of copyright piracy was thankful to him. Here was an intrepid leader, who would call a spade, a spade.
It was in Smart City that VS proved his long-term commitments to the development of the state. Smart City was a knowledge-based industry township, the icon of a new Kerala, that would be developed by Teecom Investments, promoters of the Dubai Internet City. The previous government which invited them finalised a deal which was a virtual throwaway of public assets that would have cost the exchequer dear. VS, as Opposition Leader checkmated the same and during the elections he was accused as anti-development on this count. VS stood his ground, renegotiated the agreement and on May 13th, Sunday, Teecom and the State government inked a pact which is widely appreciated as it is sober, balanced and on no account a sell-out of public interest. The investment will create 90,000 new jobs in the IT/ITES sector in the next 10 years. The State Government has 16% equity in the project which can be enhanced to 26%.
Munnar, often described as the Kashmir of the South with its misty peaks, rolling tea gardens, hill streams, grasslands and wooded forests was once an inaccessible part of Kerala, nestling in the Western ghats, its high culture and life style directed by English tea estate managers and a sublatern culture of near illiterate tamil plantation workers. The ambience, traditions and dress rules of the High Range Club in Munnar bear testimony to a bygone era. The departure of the English tea garden owners and managers led to the real estate and building mafia laying hands on this pristine land in the name of tourism promotion. Forests were encroached upon, bogus sale documents registered, revenue records forged, building permits sanctioned, all with the connivance of corrupt officals. Tata Tea which took over the British owned tea estates in Munnar was a willing collaborator and a habitual offender. They also appropriated thousands of acres of public lands. Their policy was to run with the hare and to hunt with the hound. Concrete monstrosities called resorts, totally out of sync with the natural setting began to mar the skyscape of Munnar. Tourists started descending in hordes and the accompnaying vehicular pollution, garbage and noise began to endanger the undisturbed habitats of precious wild life and choke natural resources . It was only a matter of time before Munnar would lose its charm to become an urban jungle. VS, as Leader of the Oposition visited Munnar to bring to light these illegal operations but the government turned a blind eye to it. The mafia was so powerful. When VS became Chief Minster, every one believed that his party would not allow him to touch these land-grabbers as all politicans and officials were dependent on them for funds and free vacations . VS, a seasoned political tactician bided his time for the final blow. Technology had developed beyond the imagination of land-grabbers. Remote Sensing by which lands could be digitally mapped and surveyed by satellites from space came to aid the government. With all its might and in full resolve, government moved ahead and started demolishing resorts and illegal construction on forest lands. No one has dared to come forward with title deeds and revenue records which are the only way of proving ownership, for they know these are fictitious and challenging the government in court with forged records would lead to perjury. The operation is continuing and the land mafia are on the run.

VS has distinguished himself in 365 days. His enemies are lying low, but it is early to write them off. Let us hope they don't have the last laugh.

Fete De La Tennis!

2007-05-14T21:56:00.000+05:30

'Kerala Open - 2007', a $25,000/- WTA Professional Circuit Tournament conducted by the Trivandrum Tennis Club got off to a start today. As an active member of the Organising Committee I worked for the success of the tournament. Players from Australia,USA, Europe and Japan joined Indian girls in aiming for the laurels. Trivandrum Tennis Club with nine tennis courts, seven of them clay, and with spectator galleries on two sides of each court is one of the finest tennis facilities in India. This was vouchsafed for by many players and their coaches who came from abroad and expressed surprise at the existence of such excellent infrastructure,lying largely unused. It is unfortunate that these resources were never promoted by the country's tennis associations. Also because the club members preferred to keep it as a very exclusive place with only 200 playing members.
The club signed an agreement with StumpVision, a sports management company based in Bangalore to arrange sponsors for the tournament. It turned out to be a cropper,thanks to a series of tactical errors on the part of the company's executives. The day was saved for us at the eleventh hour by Life Insurance Corporation of India which gave a substantial sum for sponsorship, more because its present Chairman hails from Trivandrum.
The Chief Minister of Kerala, V.S. Achuthanandan inaugarated the tournament, amidst tight security, consequent to a death threat against him, made in the early hours of the morning. However the Club Office as usual botched up things by hiring a sub-standard group to instal and operate the microphones, leading to an electrical short circuit which disrupted the function for a few minutes. This does not behove of a club with illustrious traditions. The people in charge of ceremonies ought to have given more attention to these, though they are minor matters. This is bound to cause us a lot of embarassment, if ever the truth comes out.
Well, I am looking forward to a few days of excellent tennis.

Let the Others too Speak!

2007-05-13T23:29:00.000+05:30

Some recent incidents are a matter of deep concern to men and women wedded to liberal modes of thought and action. These include the attack on the office of Dinakaran and Sun TV in Madurai, acts of vandalism against an exhibition of paintings in the Department of Fine Arts of MS University, Baroda, a campaign of calumny against Leela Samson in Kalakshetra, Chennai. I do not desire to go into the details of the same.
All these point to a growing tendency among many vocal sections of the population to deny to individuals and groups who hold views different from theirs, the right to express them in any manner they feel like, even when such expressions cross the limits of acceptability. In a free, democratic society, such limits should be set very high so that all forms of opinion can enjoy undisturbed existence within such limits.

Great Brahmin Takeover

2007-05-11T23:30:00.000+05:30

The Great Brahmin Takeover is one of India's mysteries over the flow of centuries. Brahmins are at the top of India's caste hierarchy. Being assured of this position by virtue of birth Brahmins have always lorded it over.
This doesn't mean those below them in the hierarchy have taken it lying down. Time and again over the centuries they have made bold and daring attempts to break this stranglehold only to find the Brahmin back in the ascendant quickly recovering from any temporary reverses.
Buddhism is perhaps the first major assault on Brahmin supremacy and it was successful. It spread all over the country aided by a band of dedicated missionaries and the caste hierarchy seemed to have been smashed into bits. The wily Brahmin bided his time, patiently waited for centuries and hit back with ruthlessness, uprooting Buddhism from its home turf. Today Buddhism is practiced only in foreign lands.
In South India, especially in Tamil Nadu the challenge to Brahmin supremacy was led by Periyar E.V. Ramaswami Naicker and his Dravida Kazhagam. But now, one of the major Dravida Kazhagam parties accepts J.Jayalalitha, a Tamil Iyyengar as its supreme leader.
The Bahujan Samaj Party in North India was formed because Dalits could not expect justice from the Manuvadi parties. Today as the Uttar Pradesh election results indicate an absolute majority for Mayawati, the only explanation is that her winning over Brahmins by giving them senior positions in the party and almost 100 seats to contest has yelded rich dividends.
The Brahmin always seems to have the last laugh!

Two Kisses

2007-05-10T12:02:00.001+05:30

When two kisses are the focus of attention there is a crisis in the air. One, of Richard Gere kissing Shilpa Shetty at an AIDS awareness event in Delhi. The other is Mohamoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran kissing the gloved hand of his old school teacher at the national teachers day ceremony . The kisses are vocally condemned by religous bigots in the two countries, one predominantly Hindu and the other Muslim. They are in a rage desribing them as an affront to religious sensitivity, custom and moral well being. In India things went to the ludicrous extent of a magistrate in Jaipur issuing warrants for the arrest of Shilpa and Gere. Being a committed liberal I cannot concede the argument that public kissing endangers morality . They should be viewed as displaying natural feelings of affection or liking between the people involved.
After stating the liberal position i should also point out that religious fundamentalists are emblodened to act in this manner due to the support they receive from unexpected quarters. Such support is not out of any sympathy for their religious extremism but only because they are the folks who howl and protest against certain unhealthy trends which are not acceptable to many sections of society who would otherwise fully back liberal causes. This is caused by the indiscriminate mingling of the sexual in all aspects of life, indeed even in matters which have no remote connection with sex. Modern means of communication are used to circulate intimate sexual information widely. Britney's exit from a limo with skirt upflowing to expose her pubic regions and Paris Hilton's videos of her having sex, both posted on the net and seen by millions are instances . Graphic accounts of sexual relations ordinarily not approved by society like that between teacher-student, adult male-teenage girl or which are near-incestous or encourage perversions like pederasty are vividly recounted to their minutest detail in the print media.
Openness and freedom in matters sexual form one of the sheet anchors of a liberal society. But breaking sexual customs or taboos on which there exists a wide consensus merely for the sake of exhibitionism and drama or to proclaim the freedom of artistic expression do not help liberal causes, especially when the freedom to declare and publish one's expression is available to millions and not just to a privileged few as in earlier times. When the borders separating liberal attitudes from licentiousness and excesses gets blurred , the orthodox and the fundamentalist gain a bonus opportunity to suppress the liberal in the garb of saving society from sexual perverts .
We who are left with protecting and enhancing the liberal foundations of society have to be on alert against two dangers. One, of the religious right or the orthodox who hanker to pull back society to purtian ways of thought and action. The second, of the licentious who in their frenzy attempt to destroy the foundations of liberalism to unleash anarchy. When the second acts in ways that elicit oppostion and reaction from the first, maximum damage falls on the true liberals who are unluckily caught in the cross-fire.

1857 - Sepoy Mutiny or War of Independence

2007-05-08T08:12:00.000+05:30

What began 150 years ago in the month of May in Meerut still exercises the Indian psyche. British historians dismiss it as a mere rebellion among soldiers which erupted from their being forced to bite cartridges laced with animal fat. Nationalist historians describe it as a War of Independence when large sections of people determinedly rose up to resist british oppression. Yes,an apparent cause could have been the cartridges but deeper reasons lay behind it. The changes in land revenue settlement, the displacement of many kings and nobles which led to local discontent and the subtle aim to maximise the economic returns of the East India Company at the cost of indigenous trade and commerce could be some of them.

Contemporary interpretations of those events are influenced by the need to rewrite them to suit the current context and the interests of the present ruling classes. I did come across some of them, one by the Director of the Nehru Museum and another by Mani Shanker Aiyer. In their fervour to interpret those events to suit today's political compulsions, they forget the fact that many powerful groups like the Sikhs had kept away for very valid reasons.

But even after 150 years one thing stand out: namely, these incidents led to the termination of the rule of East India Company and the take over of administration by the British government. It should also be noted that rapid change of events globally led to the departure of the British within 90 years of this event.

When all is said and done,it is only befitting that the country celebrate the heroes of 1857 and bow before their bold defiance of authority and the determination to militarily challenge a more organised and superior army.

Surface Battles!

2007-05-05T20:31:00.000+05:30

The right royal tennis encounter between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer at Palma de Mallorca in Spain on May 3rd stands out for its split court. This novel method was tested for the first time in the history of tennis. The court was split into two halves, partly clay and partly grass and the players changed sides at regular intervals. The mixed surface demanded the players get accustomed to a variety of movements as different muscles get exercised on different surfaces. The innovation of using mixed surfaces could become popular and give a new face to tennis. Presently different tournaments are identified by their surfaces, Wimbledon for grass courts, Roland Garros for clay and synthetic courts for US Open. A novelty has been introduced and we must wait and see how the players, tennis federations and spectators will take it. Perhaps the sponsors of major tournaments could lead the way.

Eternal Riddle

2007-05-04T13:00:00.000+05:30

A highly thought provoking observation by Dr.Vilayannur Ramachandran, the famous neuroscientist has cleared the prevailing confusion in my mind. Western science denies the existence of our personal self. Our personal point of view doesnt have any privileged status . Western science says it is all trivial, a non-question. Eastern philospohy is perpetually obsessed with it. The personal self is the only reality we know directly. This is the atman-brahman, dvaitam-advaitam connundrum.
It has been an eternal riddle and we have to find ways to reconcile these approaches. But most scientists are not even aware of it.

N.R.Narayana Murthy - Jaya he!

2007-04-14T23:06:00.000+05:30

The needless controversy over Mr.N.R.Narayana Murthy's comments on the playing of the instrumental version of the National Anthem at a function in the Infosys campus at Mysore is more the creation of a media starved of sensationalism and the itch of the political class to settle scores with an entrepreneur who has grown without much need of state support or patronage. Even an FIR has been registered. The Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act contains Section-3 which refers to intentional prevention of the singing of the national anthem. In Narayana Murthy's case there is no evidence to prove that he intentionally prevented the singing of the National Anthem. What has led this controversy to erupt is an explanation given by Murthy at a press conference. Howsoever feeble that explanation may be, it is no reason for charging Murthy under the Act. It is clear that Section-3 is being misused to unfairly crucify Murthy. Playing an instrumental version of the National Anthem is no insult to national honour.

Laurie Baker, Architect Extraordinaire!

2007-04-02T22:02:00.000+05:30

Laurie Baker passed away in Trivandrum on Sunday, April 1st and today morning I attended his funeral. The funeral services were most appropriately held at the Christ Church which is one of the oldest churches in Trivandrum which has preserved its architectural tradition without being swallowed up by modernity. My first impressions of Mr.Baker were when he started constructing the chapel and auditorium in Loyola School when I was studying in 4th or 5th class. Every afternoon I used to walk up to the area where the new structure was coming up and would watch the very energetic Baker totally involved in the construction and giving directions to labourers. The auditorium and chapel were in one building but in two separate parts. The auditorium was well lighted and never gave any problems from an acoustic angle. All this was done at a minimal cost using local materials.

The instinctive understanding of Baker's concepts as to building did influence me and I can discern it even in the very distincitve style in which I renovated my ancestral home in Pattom, Trivandrum. It was from Baker that I got the firm belief that as far as renovation of my home is concerned there is no better person to decide it than me who had lived in it for decades. Baker once wrote that whenever he constructed a house he didnt want passers by to tell that the house was built by baker and insted wanted them to tell the name of the occupant of the house. He believed that the personality of the architect should be separated from his creations which should stand on their own. It was something similar to what Anand Coomarasamy used to say.

Baker's public buildings like the Centre for Development Studies, Indian Coffee House, Lenin Balavadi as also the private homes he built for Dr.K.N. Raj, Dr. I.S. Gulati, Abu Abraham as also his own haven, "The Hamlet" are standing testimony to his vision of architecture. Here was a Britisher who made this city his home and identified himself with the needs of the common man and tried his best to respond positively to them at least in the field in which he had specialised.

Gerard da Cunha, Eugene Pandala, Benny Kuriakose all famous as architects in their own right but who do acknowledge the influence of Baker in their work were in attendance at the funeral. Tilak, Baker's son was my classmate and good friend at school and his daughter Vidya and her husband Radhakrishnan too are well known to me.

U.G.Krishnamurti, 1918-2007.

2007-03-25T23:42:00.000+05:30

The Sunday morning newspapers announced the death of UG at Vallecrossia in Italy on March 22nd. Along with Rajneesh and J.Krishnamurti, UG occupied a special place in my heart and thoughts. I first heard about him in the beginning of 1990 when i read an article in 'The Week'. It was only in 2002 that I learnt more of UG reading his biography written by filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt. Since then I have read much more and did hope to meet him once.

UG was very clear in his disagreement with J.Krishnamurti though both of them in a way shared the heritage of the Theospohical Society. Rajneesh too has made a bitter attack on him.
UG was very emphatic on the wisdom of the body as supreme and considered the mind a myth. He did not believe there is anything permanent which will surive our death.

In a letter written to a monk in the Ramakrishna Ashram in London UG wrote ' one has to haul oneself out of one's own swamps by one's own bootstraps'.

In another context UG remarks 'Insights mean nothing. In a living situation the man with insight behaves just like anybody else. Has the psychologist solved for himself the problem that he is trying to analyze?'

UG had a very sober view of death as marking the end of our physical existence. And since he did not believe in a soul or atman or a dot that outlives death to sail in a sea of eternity, He saw death a a final ending.

Adieu UG!

Of Gods and Nudity!

2007-03-18T22:13:00.000+05:30

The reference by a Minister on the floor of the Kerala Assembly to nude Hindu Gods raised a furore leading to boycott of the House by the Opposition who allege that the Minister offended the sensibilities of believers in the Hindu faith. The Minister immeidately withdrew his remarks but the Opposition has decided to continue its boycott of the Minister till he apologises for the same. The Minister has since clarified that he was referring to the sculptures in many Hindu temples.
Debates have started in the language newspapers as to whether it is proper for Gods to be in the nude or as to what respectful attire they should be draped in. The Minister's comment and consequent debates reflect the offcial culture of India that has been influenced by the British administrators and missionaries who managed to impose on this country the prudishness and puritan morality of the Victorian era. This influence was so extreme that no less a person than Mohandas Gandhi wanted the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho to be defaced.
What the Minister, the Opposition and others have failed to acknowledge or understand is that these sculptures where created to enable 'drishti-shuddhi' whereby the worshipper who feasts his eyes on these and other scenes of social life enters the garbha-griha with his mind emptied of all wordly thoughts and prepared for communion with the divine. The position of these sculptures, their numbers and size would readily lend themselves to this interpretation.

Death and the exhaustion of Telomeres!

2007-02-15T18:14:00.000+05:30

Cell biology has discovered cell division, the constant process of division and renewal of cells ceases when telomeres, which are the ends of chromosomes progressively shortened and finally exhausted making further cell division impossible. The cell's dividing limit is the natural end of life. Prolonging life depends on genetic engineering finding ways to extend this dividing limit by spending less and less of telomeres on each cell division.

Creative Life Cycles!

2007-02-12T22:27:00.000+05:30

I was reading David Galenson and Joshua Kotkin's interesting article in LAT-WP on the two types into which creativity or innovation can be broadly divided into. One is 'Conceptual Innovation' and the second is 'Experimental Innovation'. They differ in their goals and methods.

Conceptual Innovators aim to express new ideas or particular emotions. Their confidence and certainty allow them to achieve this quickly, often by radically breaking rules of disciplines they have just entered.

Experimental Innovators try to describe what they see or hear. Their careers are quests for styles that capture the complexity and richness of the world they live in.

Our society prefers the simplicity and clarity of conceptual innovation in scholarship and business. Yet the conceptual Bill Gateses of the business world do not make the experimental Warren Buffets less important. Recognising important experimental work can be diffcult, these contributions don't always come all at once.

Curtains Fall on High Technology Denial

2006-12-19T20:33:00.000+05:30

The nuclear agreement that is to be signed between India and US will allow India to access technologies which have been denied till now on the ground that it can also be used to manufacture nuclear weapons. India's political parties do not understand the momentous importance of this development as they are still imprisoned in cold-war rhetoric in a world that is evolving into a polycentric balance of power system. Access to these technologies can help India develop fast into a world economic power.

Subaltern Politicians!

2006-12-01T13:10:00.000+05:30

The new tribe of political leaders who emerged and still are emerging in various parts of India stand outside the ambit of mainstream political parties and is a phenomenon to be watched carefully. They rightly claim an autonomous following, are autocratic in their ways and enjoy electoral clout though restricted to specific regions or castes or interests. They stand for the voiceless millions whose demands and needs have not been listened to or attended to actively by India's mainstream parties. Their despotic and oligarchic ways of functioning lead to the emergence of many corrupt practices but the same do not dent their popularity.

Why don't India's mainstream political parties include or nurture leaders with mass following. The mainstream parties seem to be too centralised, systematic and policy oriented. Though there are limits to the corrupt practices and illicit dealings that leaders in mainsteam political parties can indulge in, the fractured polity has led to mainstream parties knocking at the doors of these charismatic leaders to help them form governments. The coalition government at the centre comprises of such parties.

'Failure of Invariance'

2006-11-29T11:12:00.000+05:30

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman together are the architects of 'Prospect Theory'. The word Prospect was used not because it had anything to do with their ideas but because they believed that the word was catch and could immediately draw the attention of the reader. They have studied in detail the failure of invariance which refers to the inconsistent choices people make when they encounter the same set of problems in different situations. Choices though inconsistent need not necessarily have to be incorrect.

Je deteste la pluie!

2006-11-17T10:36:00.000+05:30

The rains began in late May and show no signs of subsiding even in mid-November. My tennis sessions have gone for a toss as rains muddy up clay courts in which i am used to playing. It's been depressing as one's activities get obstructed and the morning sky appears dark and cloudy. The long monsoons and rainy days are persuading me to search for a change of habitat. Ideally, I shoud migrate to one of those Meditterranean climes where the days are sunny and the nights cool, the clear blue sky during day and the starry heavens gazing at me in the night. But pending such a transition, I should immediately find a second home in that part of India where it doesnt rain during much.

Another Vijayadasami!

2006-10-02T09:04:00.000+05:30

On Vijayadasami day last year, I wrote in this blog that indolence is what kept me away from blogging and promised to correct myself. One year has passed and Vijayadasami is again with us. I freeze as I understand that my promise remained largely unfulfilled for almost an year.

Local Indian, Global Indian!

2006-09-17T21:58:00.000+05:30

India has always been in close contact with the rest of the world.Right from the dawn of civilisation India established limks with the then known parts of the world. We were a nation of great seafarers and our ships sailed to many directions. We had the famous 'Silk Route' and land routes to China. India had a great entrepreneurial and business tradition and commerce flourished. The first fifty years of Independence saw us adopt the wrong economic policies which capped our abilities and talents. Of course, it is hindsight bias which makes us say so. We were cocooned and many controls put on foreign travel. Now with Indian software companies going places, Indians have begun to travel extensively to many different parts of the world. The Continent, Far East, South America which were all places that our Anglo-Saxon education never taught us as in existence. Our professionals or techies do find it difficult to comprehend those cultures and life styles. Modern day business being 75% people skills and 25% technical knowledge. Sotware companies have begun to invest heavily in imparting soft skills or cross cultural training to their employees. Other industries are to follow suit. Soon we shall see the Global Indian, suave, sophisticated, polished and at home in any clime and culture. May that day dawn soon.

Mrydul Mitra - She De(signs) the World for us!

2006-05-18T00:39:00.000+05:30

I was overjoyed when Mrydul rang up to inform she'd been selected for the post-graduate programme at the world renowned National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Mrydul completed her degree in fashion technology from NIFT,Chennai and came down to organise Kerala's first graduate programme in fashion studies at the Assumption College, Changanacherry. She is intensely devoted to her work and won the adulation of her students.

Mrydul organised Kerala's first professionally conducted fashion show at Cochin last year to display fashions designed by her students as part of their course requirements. Even while teaching Mrydul was secretly nurturing hopes for higher studies and decided to attempt the tough entrance exams of NID. It was roses all the way for her. When she crosses the portals of NID on June 19th, the day her course commences, I'm sure she stands at the threshold of a great career in her chosen field. Good Luck, Mrydul!

V.S. Achuthanandan - The Virtue of Persistence

2006-05-15T22:41:00.000+05:30

The elevation of Sri.V.S.Achuthanandan as Chief minister of Kerala is a saga in persistence, hard work and courage. At 83, when others of his age are either retired,inert or enfeebled he travelled the length and breadth of Kerala inspiring the masses and lead the Communist movement to victory in the state legislature elections. The Chief Ministership which eluded him in 1991, from which he was treacherously excluded in 1996 and which the misrule of his comrades denied him in 2001 is finally his in 2006. What an achievement for a man in his eighties! And the greater honour is the hope and trust that the voters of Kerala,especially its women and youth reposed in him. In the last five years, 'VS' as he is endearingly addressed by millions was the symbol of integrity, uprightness and the fight against corruption and misrule. The people took him for his word for they felt his sincerity to be childlike and transparent.

In the last five years as Leader of the Opposition in the State Legislature, VS did not merely spend his time in quick repartees, witticisms or making fiery speeches on the floor of the House. Instead he learnt quickly that his success lay in reaching directly to the people and alerting them to the nepotism of their rulers and the dangers facing them from the mafia that their policies were encouraging. The reach of the electronic media in Kerala with a dozen channels took the struggles and views of VS to the drawing rooms and the burgeoning middle class and upper middle class who are the opinion makers of society began to admire of this man whom they once saw as unschooled and whom some mainstream media once derisively portrayed as a tailor, a job he did in his struggle to earn a repreive from poverty and a cruel fate that beset him with the death of both his parents before he was 11yrs old.

The image of VS as a rigid, ideological puritan who would oppose any development agenda seemed misplaced when people watched him deliver in flawless English a speech in the presence of Prime Minister A.B.Vajpayee at the inaugural session of 'GIM', Global Investors Meet, the showpiece of the A.K.Antony government which promised to open the flood gates of investment into kerala. Though it turned out to be a flop, it was not because of VS who in his speech offered to welcome with open arms any investment with honourable intentions of capital creation and not a ruse to plunder the state of its natural resources or to live off state sponsored subsidies.

The sand mafia and the sandalwood mafia, the plantation companies encroaching on public land, the tourist resort operators who ravaged the environment of 'God's Own Country' to fill their private coffers, the Sex lords who considered it their divine right to abuse women and minor girls, the private hospital owners who surreptiously built up a business of trading in human organs, all met their match in this dimunitive man clad in traditional attire. He would not be cowed down by their threats or trapped by their inducements. Political leaders of all parties who compromised with these elements for their personal safety and political growth cynically described VS as a fool who rushed in where angels feared to tread. They privately chuckled for they saw this man committing political harakiri and noted it was only a matter of time before the combined might of this mafia would lead him to the exit door of kerala politics.

They nearly succeeded for they found friends in unexpected quarters ready to oblige them. The names of the dramatis personae in the conspiracy to deny VS an opportunity to contest these elections need no mention for it is known to all. The surge of protest that enveloped the state following this decision of the CPI(M) state committee were unparalleled in recent history. Never before have so many naturally joined a protest on behalf of a political leader. The profuse outpouring of support for VS and moral indignation at the CPM decision showed the place in which VS in held in the hearts of the common people of kerala. The crafty manipulators and ruthless terminators who had managed this decison inside the CPM beat a hasty retreat once the Politbureau reversed it on becoming aware of the plummeting reputation of the party consequent to it.

The political line which VS put forth has been proved right by the turn of events. There was considerable pressure within the CPM to enter into an alliance with the DIC(K) which had split from the parent Congress party. VS oppposed it on the ground that to enter into such an alliance would smack of political opportunism. He was sure that the CPM and the LDF could return to power on their own strength and mass support which was clearly indicated in the 2004 parliamentary elections. There was no need to enter into a marriage of convenience with a new born political group for temporary ends. Today after the election results, DIC(K) has become a shattered myth in Kerala politics and is likely to sink into oblivion in a short time. VS was right when he warned against such political adjustments mortgaging one's principles.

Though VS has become the Chief Minister his enemies who have been thwarted are not going to take things lying down. They are alert, ready to strike at the next available oportunity. They know that the ocassion to politically finish VS slipped past due to their miscalculations. This would make them more vigorous in their efforts. Let us pray they don't meet with success.

disease of perfectionism

2006-05-05T19:15:00.000+05:30

''Anything worth doing is worth doing badly'', this line from the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon came to my notice a few days ago. What a sound advice. Most of us fall prey to the disease of perfectionism and this prevents us or obstructs us from producing our output. We measure our performance against lofty or distal yardticks and find ourselves wanting. It is a vicious circle. And Simon's words are an escape route. Anyone who takes it to heart is freed from the yoke of being a perfectionist.

South Asians - Eat Less

2006-04-19T20:25:00.000+05:30

A very interesting conversation with my friend Dr.Roy who told me that the South Asian has been on the starvation mode for centuries. The lands have been ravaged by famines since time immemorial and this has forced people to consume less and hoard grains for the lean season. As a group we have got accustomed to frugal diet for generations with the result that our pancreas secrete minimal insulin to maintain blood sugar levels. But in the last two or three generations the dietary habits of the population has undergone a radical change as the threat of famine receded. South Asians have become gluttonous, consuming large quantities of food as compared to earlier generations. Today their bodies do not secrete enough insulin to maintain normal glucose levels. Combined with the sedentary lives most of them lead, diabetes has assumed the proportions of a pandemic both in South Asia and particularly among the expatriate community living in Europe and US. It would be ideal for the South Asian to return to the frugal dietary habits of his ancestors.

Unshakeable Truth

2005-11-10T02:50:00.000+05:30

Unshakeable truth is that we are One. We, playful entities of life decided that we are separate from the Infinite Is, that incandescent Love that is us and unites us, that existed before the idea of time ever existed. We, being free creatures pretended a world of space and time for the adventures of birth and death.

''I am absolutely convinced that this is a world of apearances, not reality. When some say, we create our own reality, i always demur and say, Please, would you mind adjusting that a little bit? We create our own appearances. We become master of appearances and as we change our thought, we will see the appearances around us change. That gives us this huge sense of dominion and control and power over the world. If what I hold in my thought comes true in my experience, I'm a lovely master and our opportunities everyday with our life and our consciousness demonstrate that and show it forth as we play with this intriguing idea, then we see all these things that we thought were coincidences, our meetings with people, our unusual connection of our networks with other people's networks''

''How many of us can look back at our lives and say that the most important events were not brought about by coincidence?. So often the most important things: intimate relationships, romantic relationships where we are expressing love day to day,those meetings were almost wildly coincidental and our lives are radically changed and elevated by those people we just so-called 'happened to meet'.....''

''I am absolutely convinced that the world around us is a world of appearances and anyone who wants to can practice it. Change your thought and your environment will change. It's not instantaneous and sometimes we have to work very hard to make what we want happen. Working hard and holding that thought, it will change''
Richard Bach.

Focus on Weaknesses

2005-11-09T08:08:00.000+05:30

When people were asked 'What will improve you the most, knowing your strengths or knowing your weaknesses?', the answer of the majority indicated that they were more inclined to waste their time and energy in investigation of their weaknesses.Why are people so mesmerised with their weaknesses? For most of us the fear of our weaknesses seem to overshadow the confidence in our strengths.

Fear of Failure

2005-11-08T08:45:00.000+05:30

Most of us never know what strong living is. The fear of failure keeps us away and restricts the growth of our natural talents into strengths.
We cannot bear with failures where we alone are held responsibe. When the causes for failure do not affect our self-esteem, we are at ease.
When we identify our natural talents, fashion them into strengths only to find them wanting in the hour of reckoning, the anguish is boundless. Such strength based failures and the consequent ridicule makes us settle for the second-best option - we avoid the exposure of building on our strengths,we stay in the workroom patching up our weaknesses. It is humble, diligent and society respects us for doing so.
The most challenging goal is to face up to the strength potential in your talents and live them boldly. Building a strong life means that you allow performance to be the final judge. Though your claims of strength may be judged unfavourably,unforgivingly and harshly.
Strong living means that you do not surrender to but overcome such judgements , yet not fall prey to delusion and denial.

Albert Bandura and Self-efficacy

2005-10-26T11:28:00.000+05:30

It's been enlightening reading for the last few days as I strive to understand Albert Bandura, the founder of social cognitive theory and his writings on self-efficay. It has opened for me a new window to perceive the world and myself.

Bandura advances a theory of human functioning in which people are viewed as self-organising,proactive,self-reflecting and self-regulating rather than as reactive organisms shaped and sheperded by environmental forces or driven by concealed inner impulses.The key arch of his theory are self-efficacy beliefs,'people's judgements of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performance'. self-efficacy beliefs provide the foundation of all motivation and accomplishment and touch every aspect of our lives. One of the main findings of Bandura is that people are guided by what they believe than what is objectively true. belief and reality are seldom matched and individuals are guided by their beliefs when they encounter the world.

experiencing self / remembering self

2005-10-15T11:48:00.000+05:30

What makes us? are we made by our experiences from moment to moment or are we the sum total of our memories. daniel kahneman says that what we remember of our experiences are only its emotional highs and lows and its endings which have little connection with our actual experiences from moment to moment. seligman in contrast puts his emphasis on the remembering self. to him, we are our memories rather than the sum total of our experiences. only advances in neurosciences can throw more light on these varying approaches.

Vijayadasami - an auspicious day for beginnings

2005-10-13T11:14:00.000+05:30

i have not been into blogging for months. forgot even my username and password. indolence is the cause and i assume responsibility. today, is vijayadasami, celebrated in most parts of india as the day of victory when the Goddess slayed the demon and in other places as signifying the victory of ram over ravan. what is amazing is that these celebrations have been continuing in this land for many centuries. this morning is also the time to make new beginnings by offering prayers before goddess saraswathi who is the goddess of learning and knowledge.

on this auspicious day i shall resume blogging and share myself with the millions of this virutal world.

a train of moments.

2005-04-21T18:14:00.000+05:30

Life is a train of moments. daniel kahneman states that we experience on an average 20,000 waking moments every day. each moment consists of 3 seconds on an average. it is in these moments that we exist and it is our responsibility to realize and live in them. try to enjoy more moments of whatever u want to be. if u are intelligent it only means you have more intelligent moments in life. if u are stupid, it only means there are more stupid moments in life.

the stream of words

2005-04-20T23:02:00.000+05:30

The stream of words that pour into my blog are a feeble attempt to present the predicament i face like all of u to come to terms with Life and its meaning and purpose. It is a puzzle that has haunted humanity for centuries and will continue to do so even after u the reader and this author vanish from earth failing to find an answer. I appeal to u the reader to understand with sympathy the efforts of the author to unravel before u his longings, his achievements and his failures and disapointments. May the entries of the days the to come illumine the comprehension of u, its reader as also of me, the writer.