Feedback from far quarters

I received some positive feedback about this blog in quick succession.

Einat, from Haifa, Israel wrote:

"What an incredible place your blog is. A space of contemplation, meandering and getting lost. The pictures of your city and its people, your thoughts... I find it a remarkable experience to be able to have these versatile journeys. Thank you. I enjoy it a lot."

Clarence Fisher from Snow Lake, Manitoba, Canada wrote:

"I enjoy your photoblog scenes of daily life in Calcutta. I live in a very small (1,000 people) town in Northern Canada, so our lives probably cannot be much more different. Yet every time you post pictures of the lives that you see, it completely pulls me in. I am a teacher of 13-14 year old students and I constantly use your blog pictures... We are a very connected class. We blog and have RSS networks of students around the globe and we love to see how people live in other parts of the world. So please know that I am a subscriber, I appreciate your posts and photos, and that they are being used in a Northern Canadian classroom!"

Dr Vijay, from Salem, Tamil Nadu, India wrote that Cuckoo’s Call is:

“… a blog that is so eclectic, erudite and secular.”

Flitzy, Kathy, Dave, Yves, Dan, Don, Mark, Irving, Sadiq, Isaiah, Deb, Shirazi, Le Magnifique, Gaelin, Kozi, Abhay, Krystyna, Ghetu, Rose, – are some fellow bloggers who have consistently encouraged me.

Thank you friends, you are most kind and generous with your appreciation.

This positive feedback encourages me to keep at whatever I’ve been trying to do through this blog, and view that with some appreciation, rather than my habitual cynical view that it’s terribly vain and self-indulgent.

Calcutta photoblog: scenes from daily life 2

Some more images from everyday life in Calcutta.

All the pictures I have been posting on my Calcutta photoblog were taken by teachers of the Talimi Haq School in Howrah.

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Girls at a road-side temple.

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A bidi-maker at work. Bidis are hand-made leaf cigarettes.

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A monkey-man solicits custom.

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At a neighbourhood public newspaper board, of the CPI(M)'s Bengali daily Ganashakti.

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Out for a day together.

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Every bit of public space means space for the poor to survive. Street railings serve to hang clothes to dry.

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Prachi cinema in the busy Sealdah area in central Calcutta.

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At a CPI(M) poet martyr's memorial gathering.

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Street-side card game.

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Savouring a guava while negotiating a busy street crossing.

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Water-polo club.

Points to ponder

1. If man evolved from monkeys and apes, why do we still have monkeys and apes ?

2. I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section ?". She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

3. If a mute swears, does his mother wash his hands with soap ?

4. If a man is standing in the middle of the forest speaking and there is no woman around to hear him...is he still wrong ?

5. If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation ?

6. Is there another word for synonym ?

7. Where do forest rangers go to "get away from it all ?"

8. What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant ?

9. Would a fly without wings be called a walk ?

10. If a turtle doesn't have a shell, is he homeless or naked ?

11. Why don't sheep shrink when it rains ?

12. If the police arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent ?

13. Is it true that cannibals don't eat clowns because they taste funny ?

14. One nice thing about egotists - they don't talk about other people.

15. Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

16. The older you get, the better you realize you were.

17. Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

18. Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.

19. Women like silent men - they think they're listening.

20. Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.

21. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

22. Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to ?

23. If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting ?

24. If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest have to drown too ?

25. If you try to fail, but you succeed, then have you failed or succeeded ?

Calcutta photoblog: scenes from daily life 1

"Scenes from daily" life is the next theme for my Calcutta photoblog.

There is a languid grace in the life of the city.

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A man prays after his bath in the river.

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A sadhu (ascetic) meditating with a mirror.

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Washing clothes at a roadside tap.

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Rural pilgrim visitors pause for rest during a sight-seeing tour.

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A patch of peace in the heart of the city.

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Watching a water-polo match.

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Keeping abreast.

Parochial habits of a hectoring majority

This morning I read historian and writer Mukul Kesavan’s article in The Telegraph on the burqa / veil controversy in the UK. He had also written on this subject last week, and the week before.

In his article today, “Parochial Freedoms - How much difference can European pluralism digest?”, Kesavan takes issues with an article in this week’s Economist, where Charlemagne (a columnist) has opined:

“It is hard to integrate Muslims into European society. Restricting free speech makes it even harder."

Kesavan writes:

"From militant Islam as an awkward political tendency we have moved in the space of a magazine page to Muslims in general as the problem.

... Politicians and writers who make universalist claims for liberal democracy shouldn’t make noises about integration. The only mainstream a free citizen should be asked to join is the mainstream of secular law. The freedoms of liberal democracy are tested by its accommodation of mores that the mainstream doesn’t like. The pluralism of these democracies should be judged not by the tame diversity of tandoori restaurants and kebab shops, but by their ability to live with more indigestible difference, such as halal meat and burqas. If the American Civil Liberties Union can defend the right of Ku Klux Klan to make speeches (white men in white hoods who once specialized in lynching black men), shouldn’t the British Labour party be upholding the right of peaceful brown women in burqas to dress as they please?

... British democracy doesn't value diversity and pluralism in the way that republican democracy in India does. ... the freedom of speech enshrined in English democracy grows out of a protestant tradition of religious dissent. This may well be true: but free speech became a universal value when it was set free of its protestant roots. Unlike Indians, the English have never tried to construct a definition of citizenship that was universal, abstracted from culture, not anchored to it. Till they do, Charlemagne and company will continue to aggravate the problems of a plural society by calling for minorities to assimilate themselves not to universal freedoms but to the parochial habits of a hectoring majority."

Mukul Kesavan’s recent articles (in chronological order) may be found here, here and here.

The latest article (of 2 November) is here.

He had also written last year about the hijab controversy in France. That article is here.

Like Kesavan, I too deeply value the fragile but unique and rich, pluralist, multicultural heritage of India. Anti-Muslim prejudice, expressed in myriad, trivial, everyday ways – I cannot, will not and do not tolerate it.

Indians Best Husbands for Russian Women

Two years ago I had the opportunity to visit Japan, to attend a 2-week course. Returning home, I felt the purpose of this life of mine had been attained: of visiting Japan, and having the aspiration to be born there in my next life.

But today I read the following PTI report in The Statesman which might make me reconsider my rebirth plans.

Among the foreigners, Indians make the best husbands for Russian women as they are “more open” and share an emotional relationship with family, says the country’s leading feminist intellectual Maria Arbatova.

“In my view, out of all the foreigners, the Indian men are the best husbands for Russian women since they are brought up in a different way,” famous Russian playwright and poetess Arbatova said. “The western culture worships the superman and for an Indian male it is not a shame to cry. They are more emotional and have a more open and emotional relationship with the family,” she said in an interview to Russian Agrarian Gazeta.

Arbatova, a living symbol of feminist movement of post-Communist Russia, had married twice and is living with an Indian. She became a household name in 1990s in Russia with her feminist TV Programme I Can Do It Myself. Since 1996, she heads the club of Women Meddling in Politics to seek a greater role for the Russian women in the country’s politics. She had also won many international prizes including the Cambridge gold medal.

Russian women can adjust better with an Indian husband and “moreover the Indian cinema has showed us that we have a lot in common”, she said adding that no other nation except Indians is more like Russians in terms of character. “They are as open, lazy and dreamy as we. We were destroyed by socialism and India by colonialism,” she said.

Image: From www.gillyworld.com

Tending water buffaloes: Buddha

Photo: Copyright Allan Montaine, 1998

Today I wish to tell you about the work of tending water buffaloes – what a good buffalo boy must know and what he must be able to do. A boy who cares well for water buffaloes is a boy who easily recognises each buffalo under his care, knows the characteristics and tendencies of each one, knows how to scrub them, care for their wounds, chase mosquitoes away with smoke, find safe paths for them to walk, love them, find safe and shallow places for them to cross the river, seek fresh grass and water for them, preserve the grazing meadows, and let the older buffaloes serve as good models for the younger ones.

Listen monks, just as a buffalo boy recognises each of his own buffaloes, a monk recognises each of the essential elements of his own body. Just as a buffalo boy knows the characteristics and tendencies of each buffalo, a monk knows which actions of body, speech, and mind are worthy and knows which are not. Just as a buffalo boy scrubs his animals clean, a monk must cleanse his mind and body of desires, attachments, anger and aversions.

Just as a buffalo boy cares for his buffaloes’ wounds, a monk watches over his six sense organs – eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind – so that they do not become lost in dispersion. Just as a buffalo boy protects his buffaloes from mosquito bites by building fires to create smoke the monk uses the teaching of becoming awake to show those around him how to avoid the afflictions of body and mind. Just as the boy finds a safe path for the buffaloes to walk, the monk avoids those paths that lead to desire for fame, wealth and sexual pleasure – places such as taverns and theatres. Just as a buffalo boy loves his buffaloes, the monk cherishes the joy and peace of meditation. As the boy finds a safe, shallow place in the river for the buffaloes to cross, the monk relies on the Four Noble Truths to negotiate his life. As the boy find fresh grass and water for his buffaloes, the monk knows that the Four Establishments of Mindfulness are the nourishment leading to liberation. As the boy reserves the field by not overgrazing them, the monk is careful to preserve the relationship with the nearby community as he begs offerings. As the boy lets the older buffaloes serve as models for the younger ones, the monk depends on the wisdom and experience of their elders.

O monks, a monk who follows these eleven points will attain liberation in the span of six years of practice.

From: Old Paths White Clouds - Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha, by Thich Nhat Hanh.

Four Noble Truths: suffering; the cause of suffering; the cessation of suffering; and the eight-fold path that leads to the cessation of suffering.

Eight-fold path: right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

The four establishments of mindfulness: the establishment of mindfulness of body as body; the establishment of consciousness as consciousness; the establishment of feelings as feelings; the establishment of mental objects as mental objects.

Mindless and Uncouth

Malvika Singh writes a weekly column “Mala Fide” in The Telegraph of Calcutta.

Today she has written something which I am always fulminating about. I’m glad to see someone else saying this for a change!


Sadly, the traditional way of celebrating festivals has given way to uncouth lighting of firecrackers that make deafening noise rather than beautiful sparkles. The bangs carry on even after Diwali, making a complete mockery of happy enjoyment. This selfish and perverse public spirit has made living in our cities and towns devoid of dignity. Clearly there is a brutish and crass band of citizens who can only assert themselves and show bravado because they have nothing else to show.

Often this is due to anarchic growth that happens outside of civilised norms of functioning and without stringent rules that enforce integrity of operation. This belief that money can buy all moral values and ethics, that it can overrule all laws that govern civilised society, that it is the final power, has made modern, middle class India into an ugly monster that has begun to feed on itself and is running riot destroying every semblance of gracious human activity.

Ostentation, this great over-riding need to show off in public spaces, has overwhelmed our urban, fast-becoming-rich society. Aesthetic sensibilities have changed radically as people try and follow the style of the international middle class. Quiet elegance, the like of which you see across rural India despite its economic deprivation, is lost in the bustling urban areas where a wild and robust all-over-the-place manner has taken root. It too will pass, but after having done its damage. For a country like India, where style, design, skill and aesthetics has been an intrinsic part of life and living, to have to go through these tiresome contortions is a waste of energy and time. If only our public institutions and educational systems had recognised the real and true strengths of this varied and dynamic culture, we would have emerged as a solid and secure nation sixty years after having got our political independence.

Calcutta photoblog: rest

The theme for today's Calcutta photoblog is "rest".

"It is useless for you to work so hard from early morning until late at night, anxiously working for food to eat; for God gives rest to his loved ones."

Book of Psalms, 127:2

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Calcutta photoblog: children must play

The theme for today’s photoblog is: “children must play”.

Irrespective of the surroundings, irrespective of their plight, children are after all children, and they will play, come what may.

Watching children play, amidst a blighted, squalid environment – yields clues about the child’s imagination.


"The child in sunshine sees the violet shadows upon the dusty road just as the impressionist paints them: it is only the mis-educated grown up, who has been trained from old pictures, or perhaps still more from printed descriptions of them, who persuades himself that the same shadow is brown. To escape from common literary epithets and to be encouraged to observe how often earth is purple, grass gold, and the sea all possible colours is a training which most of the older generation have missed and which the younger are not by any means sufficiently receiving."

Patrick Geddes

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Hindu-Muslim

In one of my early posts, I had written about “Hari + Ali = Hariyali".

On Bengali tv, there’s a comedy / humour show anchored by Mir. He is intelligent, funny, irreverent and endearing. At the end of each show, he delivers a pseudo-poetic punch line in Hindi. Last night, referring to the coincidence this year of the Hindu festival of light, Diwali, and the imminent Muslim festival of Eid (at the end of Ramadan), Mir recited this one, which increased my admiration for him by several notches:

Agar Diwali mein ho Ali
Aur Ramzaan mein Ram ka naam
To Hindu aur Mussalman ke beech
Nafrat ka kya hai kaam?

If Diwali includes Ali
And Ramadan the name of Ram
Then what purpose has hatred
Between Hindu and Mussalman?

Calcutta photoblog: the future of my city

The theme for today’s photoblog is “the future of my city”.

I present some images of children and young persons from Calcutta.

Some of the images I posted earlier could also have come here – for instance:
Calcutta 15, Calcutta 16, Calcutta 35 & Calcutta 40.

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A pavement dweller’s children play at the riverside.

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Towards a new dawn …

The sight of children from poor households going to school – is one that never fails to cheer me and give hope.

But tragically, the reality of the apartheid system in India is that the govt schools play a cruel fraud on the children. Though the aspiration for education is strong among the poor and low-income, and though the bias against educating girls is dissolving, the condition of the schools is quite abysmal. One would find as many as 150 children packed into a poorly-ventilated, dimly-lit room, sitting on each others’ laps. (Read Adil Najam's essay on educational apartheid in Pakistan here.)

And when they finish their secondary education – the economy and society is unable to offer them any employment, except as manual labourers. Hence boys drop out of school, and begin working, while girls complete their schooling.

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On the road again …

Cycle-rickshaw pullers are among the most vulnerable section of the urban poor. The ramshackle physical condition of the cycle-rickshaw in Calcutta – is a good indicator of the state of West Bengal under CPI(M)’s rule. Social attitudes among the Bengali middle-class can also be discerned in their interactions with rickshaw-pullers: he is spoken to as “tui” (the second person intimate, which one uses with children), as opposed to the more common “apni” (second person respectful) with which anyone, even a stranger, is addressed.

The work is very arduous and debilitating. Though the daily earning of the puller would be about Rs 100-150 ($ 2-3), they are typically addicted to gutka (tobacco), alcohol and gambling. That is the culture of the profession. It is a tough and violent life. The puller’s wife would typically be a maid-servant in a middle-class home, washing utensils and clothes, sweeping and mopping. Quite often, she is abandoned after bearing a few children. The life expectancy of a puller would be less than 50. A puller’s son – would, typically, also become a puller.

The girls / women: in this domain, at the age of 13, their whole life may be seen by an outsider as lying ahead of them. Often, by the age of 19, their whole life is actually behind them. Born to an under-nourished, under-age mother; under-nourished; married early; by 19, they may have had 2-3 children, and been left by their husbands. With little or no education or marketable skills, she is consigned to a gruelling life on the edge of penury, perpetually sickly, in low-waged servitude, merely to survive and raise her children. Her daughters - would also enter this life.

And so it goes on ...

This is the story of hundreds of thousands in the city. Adolescent girls from poor households are extremely vulnerable. But that is not something on anyone's radar, its not an issue for anyone. We see it all around us, and yet are blind to it. But actually we benefit from what exists. Its not a concern of public policy. I'm sorry, there's no 'public policy' in the first place, in this ancient civilisation. I mean where civilisation was left behind in ancient times. The Indus valley civilisation was distinguished by its focus on public matters, such as water & sanitation, hygiene, food storage, association. Now there's no "public domain".

But you would'nt know all this when you first meet them. They are up-standing human beings, with a sense of self, with a sense of dignity, aware of their equality with anybody else in a democratic society, articulate; being crushed relentlessly by life, but miraculously struggling on, waging a million tiny ineffectual mutinies to live on. Man does not live by bread alone, they say. Yes. Here, as important as bread is dignity. In big ways is that dignity assaulted. In tiny ways do they seek to salvage it.

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A little boy, selling tobacco.

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There, but for chance ...

Boys on their way to school, passing by other boys their age who are picking recyclables from a road-side garbage heap. The city’s poorest work from an early age as waste pickers, subsidising the city’s waste management system.

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Mother and child.

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To sleep, perchance a dream …

A homeless boy sleeps at the narrow sill of the ticket counter at the ferry station.

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India shining.

A shoe-shine boy – but he’s different: he knows to read.

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Marching to a new horizon.

Lewis Mumford

Today, 19 October, is the 111th birth anniversary of Lewis Mumford, American social philosopher, and one of the leading thinkers and writers of the 20th century.

Born in Flushing, New York, Mumford assiduously and single-mindedly devoted himself to writing. Over a period of 60 years, Mumford wrote some thirty books, covering subjects as diverse as the history of cities, the history of machine technology, art and architectural criticism, and literary criticism. He is most widely known for the books The City in History and The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power. He passed away on 26 January 1990.

Though widely honoured during his lifetime, with fellowships, professorships, awards and honorary doctorates, he remains largely unknown in his native America. Mumford may be seen as one of those who have enabled today’s environmental consciousness. Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha has referred to him as ‘the patron saint of environmentalism’. Mumford's ‘organicist’ philosophy was deeply ecological. His varied concerns converge on the problem of defining an ethic which would fuse the classical socialist values of justice and community with what we would today call environmental values. As early as 1930, we find him writing that the three main threats to modern civilisation were the destruction of forest cover, the depletion of non-renewable resources, and the awesome destructive power of modern weaponry. His first major work, Technics and Civilisation (1934), underlined the links between industrialisation, the increasing intensity of energy use, and pollution.

Mumford recognised that ecological degradation was, at least in part, the outcome of a flawed value system which had “missed the great lesson that both ecology and medicine teach - that man’s great mission is not to conquer Nature by main force but to co-operate with her intelligently and lovingly for his own purposes.” Ecological degradation, he believed, is inescapable in an economic system driven by the belief that quantitative production had no natural limits. Indeed modern technology is profoundly anti-ecological - “driven by the desire to displace the organic with the synthetic and the pre-fabricated”, it exhibits a “barely concealed hostility to living organisms, vital functions, organic associations.”

Mumford anticipated the alternate theorists of today. He was a critic of both capitalism and communism, holding them to be but two variants of a centralising, destructive and violent system of production. But he did not wholly turn his back on modern technology, seeking instead to bend it to serve human and environmental needs.

In an age of specialisation, Mumford was a sociologist, philosopher, cultural historian, art and literary critic, and authority on architecture and city planning, a true Renaissance man. In 1923, Mumford was a founding member of the Regional Planning Association of America, an experimental group that paved the way for several projects in regional development, including the Tennessee Valley Authority. In 1932 Mumford began to write a column of architectural criticism, ‘The Sky Line’, for the New Yorker.

Mumford was deeply influenced in his youth by the work and thought of Patrick Geddes, the eccentric Scottish biologist, town planner, educator and peace activist (1854-1932). For Mumford, Geddes’ work provided the basic direction and the skeleton which he then added flesh to. In 1938, as consultant to the City and County Park Board in Honolulu, Hawaii, the follower of the ‘garden city’ Master prepared a booklet Whither Honolulu? based on his study of the parks and playgrounds of that city. Again, recalling Geddes’ efforts at organising ‘cities exhibitions’, in 1939, Mumford worked on a documentary film The City which was shown at the city planning exhibit at the New York World’s Fair.

Geddes’ young son Alisdair was killed in the First World War. He saw Alisdair in Mumford and wanted him to assist him in his work. Mumford was very oppressed with Geddes seeing in him the return of his dead son. Later, after his own son, who was named Geddes, was killed in the 2nd World War, by which time Patrick Geddes was no more, Mumford became a leading propogator of Geddes’ thinking and diligently assisted his biographers.

Mumford was deeply interested in India. He studied Indian history and religion and closely followed Geddes’ town planning work in India. Mumford was personally acquainted with Radhakamal Mukherjee, the Indian professor of sociology and disciple of Geddes, whose work dwelt on human interactions with nature - which he called ‘social ecology’. Mukherjee has written extensively on the ecological basis of civilisation in Gangetic Bengal, culminating in the emergence of Calcutta as a metropolis - but one that makes a dysfunctional break from its ecological and social roots.

Read the Time magazine cover story on Lewis Mumford (18 April 1938) here.

Commemorating Mumford centenary

It was in the American library in Calcutta that, quite by chance, I came across Lewis Mumford's books and ultimately read all that I could get.

As a university student I had actively used the Library and this fuelled my love of literature and acquaintance with American writers. Calcutta is known for its radical leftist, anti-imperialist political ideology, and the American Library has often had to suffer protest demonstrations and even vandalism, for instance during the Vietnam and the Gulf War.

Later in my life, though not disassociated with some of these perspectives, my love of literature took me again to the Libarary, and it was my preoccupation with Calcutta that led me to Mumford’s work. This profoundly influenced my thinking about cities, about society. Through his work I was able to begin understanding my own society, culture and civilisation. My own discovery of his work confirms his thinking about the immense power of cities as civilising centres.

1995 was Mumford's centenary year. It became a mission for me to organise a centenary commemoration as a befitting homage and tribute to this great thinker. But I found that virtually no one was familiar with his name and work, including the people in the American Centre. I had to show them his books and micro-fiches of his articles from their own Library!

Anyway, on 19 October 1995, I wrote out and photo-copied a one-page note together with Mumford's picture, about this man and the significance of his work, got a box of Indian sweets, and had an assistant distribute the note and sweets to all the people at the office of the Calcutta environmental planning project that I was then working in.

However, in December 1995, after much pestering, a panel discussion was organised by the American Centre to commemorate the Mumford centenary, and I was able to deliver my personal homage.

Mumford's moment of epiphany

Mumford was, in his own words, a child of the city. Beginning from the time of his childhood walks in the city with his grandfather, his ‘Manhatta’, in all its resources, was his true university.

I am reproducing below an extract from his autobiographical volume Sketches from Life.


“I loved the great bridges and walked back and forth over them, year after year. ... One twilight hour in early spring, starting from the Brooklyn end, I faced into the west wind sweeping over the rivers from New Jersey. The ragged, slate-blue cumulus clouds that gathered over the horizon left open patches for the light of the waning sun to shine through, and finally, as I reached the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, the sunlight spread across the sky, forming a halo around the jagged mountain of skyscrapers, with the darkened loft buildings and warehouses huddling below in the foreground. The towers, topped by the golden pinnacles of the new Woolworth building, still caught the light even as it began to ebb away. Three-quarters of the way across the Bridge I saw the skyscrapers in the deepening darkness become slowly honeycombed with lights until, before I reached the Manhattan end, these buildings piled up in a dazzling mass against the indigo sky. Here was my city, immense overpowering, flooded with energy and light; there below lay the river and the harbour, catching the last flakes of gold on their water ... And there was I, breasting the March wind, drinking in the city and the sky, both vast, yet both contained in me, transmitting through me the great mysterious will that had made them and the promise of the new day that was still to come. The world at that moment, opened before me, challenging me, beckoning me, demanding something of me that it would take more than a lifetime to give, but raising all my energies by its own vivid promise to a higher pitch. In that sudden revelation of power and beauty, all the confusions of adolescence dropped from me, and I trod the narrow, resilient boards of the footway with a new confidence that came, not from my isolated self alone but from the collective energies I had confronted and risen to.”

Problems ...

JP wrote in his blog today:

For most of my adult life, I’ve been bemused, perplexed, sometimes irritated and occasionally completely taken aback by the error messages spewed out by the applications we build and use. Over the last twenty-five years or so, I’ve watched them improve, but at speeds that make glaciers look agile.

Today, while looking at technorati, I saw this:

Something is wrong! We know about it, and are working furiously to fix it. Please check back later and probably everything will be back up and running.


Problems!

So many problems!

9-11 happened. The space shuttle crashed. The war in Iraq. Laptop batteries exploded. North Korea conducted a nuclear test. The list could go on and on.

Why are we living amidst so many problems today? Was it different earlier?

In the precision instruments manufacturing enterprise I am managing on behalf of my family, we are facing several problems. Some of them are daunting, and produce dismay and despair. But when I read about things like exploding laptop batteries, with companies like Sony involved – it does help to bring a sense of balance.

I guess, with the business of life getting more complex, problems too multiply. But it’s also the case that with the advance of democratic, human rights and social justice consciousness, and a large section of humanity connected and communicating, things are now more transparent than they used to be.

Equally, the notion that life is meant to be free of problems – is childish. Life will be full of problems. And living through this life means confronting and addressing the problems, and learning thereby.

I also wish one’s own problems, and the awareness of problems all around, makes people more understanding and tolerant of others.

I am reminded of the last words of the Buddha (recorded in the Pali texts):

Vaya-dhamma sankhara
Appamadena sampadetha.

“All created things are impermanent .
Strive diligently."

Or as the Lord of Death taught Nachiket in the Katha Upanishad:

"Get up! Wake up! Seek the guidance of an illumined teacher and realize the Self. Sharp like a razor's edge is the path, the sages say, difficult to traverse."

Canada's aboriginal policy

Reading the current issue of The Economist last night, I came across two Letters to the Editor which caught my attention. One angered me. And the other pleased me.

First the anger. Readers of this blog from Canada might like to respond to this letter, at letters@economist.com.


Minority status

SIR – The principal reason why Canada's aboriginal policy has failed is the unrealistic and unreasonable basis of aboriginal rights (“This land is my land”, September 16th). These are special rights ceded to native minorities simply for having arrived here earlier, but they are rights which are also incompatible with existing federal and provincial legislation on issues such as resource development. Moreover, natives have no moral claim to these rights. The group of First Nations are demanding rights that they denied each other historically. Elaborate warrior cultures attest that conflict and conquest were rampant in pre-Columbian times and there certainly was no conception of dominant newcomers respecting the rights of people who were already there. This does not imply that Canada's First Nations have no legitimate grievances, but settlements should be based on need, common sense and fairness to all Canadians, not on special rights for the few or to right historical wrongs.

Joseph Bako
Vancouver

Economic power in the world

Here's the second letter from The Economist. It reminded me of my own awakening to reality when I was a student in London in the early 80s.


Captured markets

SIR – How can your leader on the changing balance of economic power in the world claim that “technology and a spirit of freedom enabled the West to leap ahead” of India and China in the mid-19th century (“Surprise!”, September 16th)? In reality, it was the West's imperial, and often violent, interventions and controls on these two countries that were instrumental in stultifying their economic development. India, for example, had the most advanced steel and textile industries at the beginning of the 19th century. Britain pirated India's technology, shut much of its advanced industries and forbade its exports, forcing it to buy second-rate British products in a closed market. Fertile land was stolen from Indian food farmers and converted to growing opium, which was then forced on the Chinese. Similar situations were repeated in other Asian, African and Latin American countries. In telling the whole story of the West's success, one must talk of stolen resources, forced foreign labour, and suppressed competition from the colonies.

Hendrik Weiler
Cairo

Cuckoo's call!

I was searching on the net yesterday evening - for bird songs.

I found there are quite a few resources on this, and was I delighted!

Check this out.

And this.

And this.

What an awesome work of devotion, to record bird songs, and then make this available to people across the world, free, through the internet.

Life is beautiful!

So I am able to attach a sound clip of the cuckoo (Asian koel) here. Do hear this dear friends!

Ramzaan buffet in Calcutta

The area around Zakaria Street, the Nakhoda Mosque (Chitpur Road), Colootola Street, Bolai Dutta Street, Phears Lane (Calcutta 73) - is THE place to visit in Calcutta during Ramzaan, for gastronomic delight.

This locality used to be the hub of the Urdu-speaking Muslim elite of Calcutta. There are other important centres of the Muslim community in Calcutta, but they are predominantly of a working-class character. So the food available there would tend to cater to the low-income consumer, rather than a gastronome.

Ramzaan is a time when food becomes very significant, and various items (quite rich) are available only during this time. The whole locality becomes a public exhibition of food.

Note: strong digestive system needed!

The cuisine is derived from north India, but has acquired its own distinctive style and flavour; referred to as "Calcutta Mughlai". One of the important influencers (but not the only one) was Awadh's Nawab Wajid Ali Shah's exile in Metiabruz, Calcutta.

The visit can begin from Zakaria Street (opposite Mohd. Ali Park on Chittaranjan Avenue), which leads to Chitpur Road, near the Nakhoda Mosque. Colootola Street is parallel to (north of) Zakaria Street. Bolai Dutta Street is off Chitpur Road (going west).

Bolai Dutta Street is also a centre of fruit wholesaling. Ramzaan is a very important time for the city's fruit trade.

On Zakaria Street: murg changazi and mahi akbari (fish), and special fish fry. These are road side items around the mosque.

Besides we have renowned restaurants like Sufia and Aminia which sells special halims - Arbi Halim, Maghaz / Kofta zaban halim / Gosht halim. All quite heavy (filling), so its best to buy and take home.

Delectable special breads and buns are available on the roadside.

Aminia and the nearby Royal both offer special Ramzaan menus.

In Bolai Dutta Street there is the famous Adam's kebab shop, its specialities being sutli kebab or boti kebab, and niri kebab.

In Colootola, roasted chicken items are available on the roadside.

Biryanis are available all around.

Nearby is the famous Haji Allauddin sweets shop - important sweets items being khajla / laccha / dudiya / Mansoor pak / Malai barfi / special laddu.

Visit, check out what's available, try a few things, take things home. And come again with family and friends.

People interested in kurtas and lungis / dhotis would find a lot on offer, at attractive prices, on Zakaria Street. There are also shops selling itr (fragrance) and surma. So many shops, selling so many interesting things! I once bought an old-style iron (istri), the kind where burning coal is put inside. I gave this as a gift to a friend, who uses it as a paper-weight cum odds-and-ends repository on his desk! I was also pleasantly surprised to find a Tamil shop selling lungis / dhotis. I had bought a white dhoti there, which I still use.

There are also several bookshops in this area selling Urdu books, so if anyone wants to get Iqbal, Faiz, Manto, dictionaries, primers etc, this is the place to go to.

After this one can walk southwards towards Poddar Court and going down along Bentick Street reach the Tipu Sultan mosque in front of the Statesman office. Behind the mosque is an old and famous faluda shop which offers nargisi faluda.

The best time for the gastronomic stroll would be 7 to 8.30 pm. Note: the best halim runs out by 7 pm.

While the "Right to Information" is important in a democracy, equally important in a pluralist society is the "Desire to Know & Share"!

Microcredit, Macro Problems

by Walden Bello

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus, regarded as the father of microcredit, comes at a time when microcredit has become something like a religion to many of the powerful, rich and famous. Hillary Clinton regularly speaks about going to Bangladesh, Yunus's homeland, and being "inspired by the power of these loans to enable even the poorest of women to start businesses, lifting their families - and their communities - out of poverty."

Like the liberal Clinton, the neocon Paul Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, has also gotten religion, after a recent trip to the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. With the fervor of the convert, he talks about the "transforming power" of microfinance: "I thought maybe this was just one successful project in one village, but then I went to the next village and it was the same story. That evening, I met with more than a hundred women leaders from self-help groups, and I realized this program was opening opportunities for poor women and their families in an entire state of 75 million people."

There is no doubt that Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, came up with a winning idea that has transformed the lives of many millions of poor women, and perhaps for that alone, he deserves the Nobel Prize. But Yunus - at least the young Yunus, who did not have the support of global institutions when he started out - did not see his Grameen Bank as a panacea. Others, like the World Bank and the United Nations, elevated it to that status (and, some say, convinced Yunus it was a panacea), and microcredit is now presented as a relatively painless approach to development. Through its dynamics of collective responsibility for repayment by a group of women borrowers, microcredit has indeed allowed many poor women to roll back pervasive poverty. However, it is mainly the moderately poor rather than the very poor who benefit, and not very many can claim they have permanently left the instability of poverty.

Likewise, not many would claim that the degree of self- sufficiency and the ability to send children to school afforded by microcredit are indicators of their graduating to middle-class prosperity. As economic journalist Gina Neff notes, "after 8 years of borrowing, 55% of Grameen households still aren't able to meet their basic nutritional needs - so many women are using their loans to buy food rather than invest in business."

Indeed, one of those who have thoroughly studied the phenomenon, Thomas Dichter, says that the idea that microfinance allows its recipients to graduate from poverty to entrepreneurship is inflated. He sketches out the dynamics of microcredit: "It emerges that the clients with the most experience got started using their own resources, and though they have not progressed very far - they cannot because the market is just too limited - they have enough turnover to keep buying and selling, and probably would have with or without the microcredit. For them the loans are often diverted to consumption since they can use the relatively large lump sum of the loan, a luxury they do not come by in their daily turnover." He concludes: "Definitely, microcredit has not done what the majority of microcredit enthusiasts claim it can do - function as capital aimed at increasing the returns to a business activity."

And so the great microcredit paradox that, as Dichter puts it, "the poorest people can do little productive with the credit, and the ones who can do the most with it are those who don't really need microcredit, but larger amounts with different (often longer) credit terms."

In other words, microcredit is a great tool as a survival strategy, but it is not the key to development, which involves not only massive capital-intensive, state-directed investments to build industries but also an assault on the structures of inequality such as concentrated land ownership that systematically deprive the poor of resources to escape poverty. Microcredit schemes end up coexisting with these entrenched structures, serving as a safety net for people excluded and marginalized by them, but not transforming them. No, Paul Wolfowitz, microcredit is not the key to ending poverty among the 75 million people in Andhra Pradesh. Dream on.

Perhaps one of the reasons there is such enthusiasm for microcredit in establishment circles these days is that it is a market-based mechanism that has enjoyed some success where other market-based programs have crashed. Structural-adjustment programs promoting trade liberalization, deregulation and privatization have brought greater poverty and inequality to most parts of the developing world over the last quarter century, and have made economic stagnation a permanent condition. Many of the same institutions that pushed and are continuing to push these failed macro programs (sometimes under new labels like "Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers"), like the World Bank, are often the same institutions pushing microcredit programs. Viewed broadly, microcredit can be seen as the safety net for millions of people destabilized by the large-scale macro- failures engendered by structural adjustment.

There have been gains in poverty reduction in a few places - like China, where, contrary to the myth, state-directed macro policies, not microcredit, have been central to lifting an estimated 120 million Chinese from poverty.

So probably the best way we can honor Muhammad Yunus is to say, Yes, he deserves the Nobel Prize for helping so many women cope with poverty. His boosters discredit this great honor and engage in hyperbole when they claim he has invented a new compassionate form of capitalism - social capitalism or "social entrepreneurship" - that will be the magic bullet to end poverty and promote development.

The author is professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines and executive director of Focus on the Global South.

Back home!

My sons Rituraj and Rishiraj (aka Chotu) arrived home this morning, on (6 weeks) vacation from Rishi Valley School.

Life again in a desolate house!