Identity: Choice & Inheritance

The Idea of Justice, a new book by Prof Amartya Sen, economist and prolific writer, has recently been published.

Read the review of the book in The Economist.

I had attended the Netaji Oration by Prof Amartya Sen in Calcutta, on 27 December 2007, where he spoke on "Is Nationalism a Curse or a Boon?". The full-text version of the lecture is available in The Oracle, journal of the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta. (See pages 16-25 of the pdf version of the journal here).

I remember I had written a response to Prof Sen's lecture. That is reproduced below.

...

Dear Prof Sen

I am writing to you after hearing your talk at Netaji Bhavan, Calcutta, yesterday on "Nationalism".

As a student and teacher of economics from Calcutta, it was a privilege to hear you speak.

I have been working among squatters and slum-dwellers in Calcutta since 1984. In 1996, while working as a consultant on a govt of West Bengal planning project, I came upon infant mortality figures from Howrah Municipal Corporation. This showed a significant infant mortality rate differential between Hindus and Muslims. Eventually that led to my working in Priya Manna Basti, a century-old jute workers slum in the Shibpur area of Howrah. This is today home to over 40,000 people, mainly Urdu-speakin Muslims.

That work continues, in an attempt to build grassroots youth capabilities and leadership for slum community development. The work has been akin to a live laboratory, on poverty in the metropolitan Calcutta Muslim slum context. Through the work it was possible to understand that the Hindu-Muslim infant mortality rate differential was a kind of proxy indicator of slum - non-slum differentials in environmental health risks, besides indicating the existence of deep-rooted institutional barriers to securing adequate municipal services in Muslim slums. It is by looking at the disaggregated health statistics of cities that one begins to understand the nature of inequalities and inequities characterising the city, and their impact on the poor. And it is by trying to unearth the causes of differentials that one comes face to face with the meaning, forms and manifestations of prejudice.

Working with the poorest section in the slum, it was also possible to discern the crippling large-scale and long-term impact of the Urdu-medium education system in metropolitan Calcutta. One consequence of this is the phenomenon of "reverse discrimination" in schooling, where boys drop out of school after a meagre amount of schooling and begin working, while girls continue in and often finish school.

I mention all this by way of context, to touch upon the idea that nationalism can also gloss over real differences in power among different religious communities, which persist and make nationalism something devoid of any substantive meaning or even emotive power. With acute segregation of communities and the lack of substantive intercourse between them, the conditions in which the have-nots live is not part of "mainstream" consciousness. And in such a context, raising the issue of these real and persistent differences is seen as "anti-national" or even "communal", depraved and sick, especially in today's "emergent India" situation.

In your talk you spoke about chosen identity in contrast to inherited identity. That struck a very personal chord, since I have long been troubled by the inappropriateness of upholding something that happens to coincide with an identity inherited merely by chance. Professing something which is based on conscious choice always seemed stronger to me. Nationalism cannot be at the cost of anything else, it must be without prejudice to any other identification. For otherwise, it would be devoid of meaning for one possessing that identity. If one had inherited that identity by chance, then such a nationalism would have been something alien.

You must be aware of the work on "Allophilia" by your Harvard colleague Prof Todd Pittinsky. He looks at warm, exuberant feelings towards other people -national, religious, racial or social. That is something coming out of conscious choice, rather than inherited identity. One can think of the feelings towards India, the land of the Buddha, among Buddhists from Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, Japan etc. The feeling about Sri Lanka, the land of the Buddhist canon, among followers of Buddha's teachings. The feelings towards India and West Bengal among a section of people in Bangladesh. The feelings towards the people of Vietnam among people in Calcutta and West Bengal during the Vietnam war.

Perhaps this issue of "Choice & Inheritance" could be the subject of your forthcoming thinking and writing!

Here it would be germane to mention the mystic tradition. In India we have many examples like Kabir, whose own identity (religious) was ambiguous, he was non-denominational as well as multi-denominational. Rather than hold on to one identity inherited by chance, mystics talk of finding one's true identity, unobscured by the veil of illusion cast by the false notion of "self". One must choose one's true inheritance, as a human.

As someone close in so many ways to Rabindranath Tagore, you would be familiar with the name of Evelyn Underhill (with whom Tagore translated Kabir's poems), and her classic work Mysticism. In this 800th anniversary year of the great Persian mystic and poet, Jalaluddin Rumi, I look forward to reading your thinking drawing upon the mystic tradition, and bringing this to the fold of the issues and subjects of your concern.

With my best wishes and respectful regards,

Yours sincerely

Allophilia

It isn't often that one reads something that makes one happy. The Economist carries an article on the subject of "allophilia" - liking for other groups. It gave voice to the peculiar malady I suffer from. Its fulfilling to know I am not alone. In 1994, after touring adivasi (i.e. indigenous peoples') villages in interior Orissa in eastern India on a planning study, I felt one was fortunate and blessed to be able to learn from our adivasi communities what civilisation and refinement means. I had also subsequently been fortunate to be nourished by the sensibility of the poor Muslim slumdwellers in Howrah. And yesterday I came upon my friend Rahul's blog, which is dedicated to the naturalist vision of living of the Bhil.

Positive prejudice: Really loving your neighbour

Why holding off from hatred may not be good enough

“I feel comfortable when I hang out with them.” “I'm truly interested in understanding their point of view.” “I feel I can be myself when I am around them.” “To enrich my life, I would try to make more friends (from that group).”

Such warm, exuberant feelings towards other categories of human being—national, religious, racial or social—are the sort of thing that Todd L. Pittinsky, a social psychologist at Harvard University, spends his time probing and testing. This is not just because he too likes to hang around people who accentuate the positive. Mr Pittinsky's hope is to turn the conventional wisdom of “conflict studies” and “race relations” upside down.

There is a huge body of knowledge, he says, on prejudice against races or other categories. What he wants to promote, both as a scholarly tool and policy goal, is “allophilia”—liking for other groups—and the behaviour it inspires. “So much research aims to understand racist and xenophobic attitudes, so much policy aims to counter such attitudes—but people neglect to look at positive attitudes to other groups,” says Mr Pittinsky, a professor at Harvard's Centre for Public Leadership.

He believes that “allophilia” is a measurable state of mind with hard consequences. For example, the attitude of an American voter towards immigration is determined less accurately by party affiliation or social and economic status than by the degree to which he or she simply likes Latinos. And people's choices in charitable giving, study, voluntary work and travel are guided, not surprisingly, by the sort of groups that make them feel good.

More controversially, allophilia theory holds that efforts to fight racism often err in trying to abolish or minimise the difference between groups—telling people that “we and they are really the same” or “we all belong to a bigger group, and that matters more than any slight difference.”

The experience of Bosnia and Rwanda, where murderous hatreds resurfaced after decades of apparent symbiosis, shows that categories are resilient. That is one reason why Mr Pittinsky thinks that “mere tolerance is inherently unstable.”

He is not the only scholar to stress the limits of tolerance alone as an ideal. Robert Hayden, a social anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh, has coined the term “antagonistic tolerance” to describe the way sacred sites were shared by Christians and Muslims in the Ottoman world, and by Hindus and Muslims in British India. His point? The fact that groups accept a regime or “truce” imposed by an imperial power does not mean they will refrain from competing once they get a chance.

To ex-subjects of the Soviet imperium, talk of officially encouraged admiration for “fraternal” nations, laced with displays of embroidery, cuisine and folk-dancing, sounds cloying. Soviet allophilia finally failed because people saw it was dishonest; it hid the travails of ethnic groups who had suffered deportation and persecution under Stalin. By the end nobody believed in brotherly love.

So by all means, let allophilia be studied, measured and encouraged. Just remember: state-sponsored cultural events may not be the best way to go about it.

Ref:

Pittinsky, T. L., Rosenthal, S. A., & Montoya, R. M. “Moving Beyond Tolerance: Allophilia Theory and Measurement”. Presented to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, January 2007.

Image: Muria Elder, Chhattisgarh, by Marcus Leatherdale.

Islamic banking

Three years ago, I delivered a lecture at the Institute of Objective Studies in Calcutta, titled ‘Islamic Banking: An Economist’s Perspective’.

Very few people know what Islamic banking is or what interest-free economy means. Only some devout Muslims who try to adhere strictly to the Islamic stricture against interest follow Islamic economics. We do not find mainstream academic institutions working on this subject. However, this is something that touches everyone’s life, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Hence there is a pressing need for wider awareness among people about what Islamic economics means.

There are three aspects of the subject that merit attention. First, a moral, ethical one, which sees interest as fundamentally unjust because the borrower bears greater risk or loss, or has less security of making a profit than the lender. The lender of money is passive, while the borrowing entrepreneur is active; yet the lender commands a return even before the enterprise yields anything.

Second is the politico-economic or social revolutionary aspect. Interest is the means to protect and perpetuate the socio-economic power of those who represent the past (owners of capital) as opposed to those who seek to become something in future. Credit is the only means through which new, creative economic activity can take place. But the emergence of new enterprises, the creation of new wealth and income, empowerment of the poor and the low income group and the realisation of social justice – are all hostage to the urge of capital-owners to secure maximal returns while bearing minimal risk. Interest breeds speculation, which is the bane of productive economic activities.

The third aspect is the faith-based one, of following scriptural prescriptions.

The vision of interest-free economy has the potential of bringing together under a common movement people of Islamic faith, people of conscience, radicals and social revolutionaries.

One could cite anti-usury thinking in the pre-Christian and early Christian era (Aristotle, Plato etc). One could also highlight the underlying conflict in the American economy and society, between the interests of those with old wealth and those with nothing but their dreams, their zeal for advancement, and their labour. The ‘populist’ movement in the USA, led by Andrew Jackson (President, 1829-37), brought this tension to the fore. The conservative policies of the 1920s and the 1980s Reagan era, with their severely negative social distribution consequences may also be seen in this light.

Islamic banking or interest-free economics means that lenders become risk-sharing business partners. Social ethics, community participation and public accountability are inherent in this vision. A brave new world is waiting to be built, but this cannot happen in isolation, undertaken by one community, in a few countries. It must be a global movement of humanity, seeking to build a just world.

The Economist had recently carried an article on Islamic finance. After summarising some of the technical difficulties involved in "mainstreaming" Islamic banking, the article concluded: "None of these challenges is insurmountable. This is an era of financial innovation where investors delight in exploring new areas of risk. Cultural barriers are there to be crossed. "

Reading this, it struck me that Islamic economics is a conception whose time has now come.

Abbé Pierre

Henry Grouès (“Abbé Pierre”), champion of the homeless, died on January 22nd, aged 94. I reproduce below an obituary that appeared in the 3 February 2007 issue of The Economist.

Traditionally most saints are gentle creatures. Those enshrined in French homes, or on prayer-cards stuffed into the missals of elderly churchgoers, are usually St Anthony carrying the child Jesus, or smiling St Thérèse of Lisieux with a bouquet of flesh-tinted roses. Odd, then, that the nearest modern France has come to a saint was a man fuelled and driven by unceasing anger: anger that the poor should suffer and that the rich did not care.

For any man in authority, clerical or lay, a visit from Abbé Pierre was an unsettling experience. First there was the look of him: the coupe zéro haircut under a black beret, the straggling beard, the black cape thrown dramatically across the shoulders, the belted soutane and muddy boots from tramping through slums. Then came the disquieting blue stare, and the surprisingly loud, ringing voice. He was not a large man or a strong one: lung trouble had disrupted his studies as a boy, and he had been advised at 26 to give up the monastic life for his health's sake. His anger surprised even himself; it did not seem in character. But it made him a giant.

Charles de Gaulle summoned him in 1945, after giving him the Croix de Guerre for a brave, clandestine war, to have an appreciative word; Abbé Pierre lectured him on the lack of milk for babies. Almost 50 years later, the elderly priest refused to wear his Légion d'honneur until a crowd of 300 poor African families, sleeping rough on the esplanade de Vincennes in Paris, was given lodging. When Jacques Chirac, hoping to score electoral points, offered to open up empty buildings for the homeless, Abbé Pierre berated him for hypocrisy. With “measured insolence”, he scolded John Paul II for not allowing married priests and for refusing to retire. He would bite people's ears like a flea, he said, and yell, “Wake up!”

France first heard that voice at lunchtime on February 1st 1954. The napkins were tucked in, the spoons poised over the soup, when Abbé Pierre, having seized the microphone at Radio Luxembourg, told his listeners that a woman had frozen to death that night on the boulevard Sebastopol. She had been clutching an eviction notice, served to her the day before. The weather was grim; all over France, thousands more were dying. Abbé Pierre appealed for blankets, food, stoves and money to be brought to his temporary headquarters at the Hotel Rochester. The response was so enormous that not only the hotel lobby, but the disused Gare d'Orsay nearby, were filled to the roof with donations. Army lorries helped distribute them, and the National Assembly voted 10 billion francs for housing for the poor.

The organisation to which the rich brought their jewellery, and ordinary people packets of rice and jars of jam, was still a strangely fluid affair. It was run from a large ramshackle house in Neuilly-Plaisance, a Paris suburb, where Abbé Pierre in 1949 had started taking in the homeless, first in rooms and then, as numbers grew, in shacks in the garden. He had no idea what this project would become. Perhaps it would be no more than a kindly bourgeois gesture, the sort his own wealthy father had made when he went, each Sunday, to wash and shave the poor in the shelters of Lyon.

His colleagues were a strange, quarrelsome band, ex-cons and ex-legionnaires, some of whom had been homeless themselves. To raise funds they picked rags and salvaged furniture, or begged with laundry baskets in the Paris streets. Abbé Pierre called his project “Emmaus”, after the place where two disciples had given shelter to the risen but unrecognised Christ.

Love human, love divine

Emmaus communities caught on and thrived; by 2006 there were 350 of them in nearly 40 countries, 110 in France itself. Abbé Pierre became a thorn in the side of successive French governments, and a year before he died was still lobbying for a law establishing the right to lodging. Yet he did not relish publicity on his own account. After regularly topping the annual poll of best-loved figures in France, in 2004 he asked to be removed from it. Celebrity helped the cause, but it appalled him.

He had little enough to hide: a clutch of Utopian left-wing views, and one dismaying brush with Holocaust denial which seemed the mere misjudgment of old age. In 2005 he also admitted, in a memoir, that chastity was too hard for him. He had decided to become a monk at 15, and had joined the Capuchins at 19; from then on, the pain of living without sexual love was constant. Indeed, he did not always live without it. He occasionally slept with women and would sometimes, wistfully and innocently, fall into discussions of sex with women who scarcely knew him.

Yet those who imagined him deprived of love were wrong. Abbé Pierre was possessed by it. Priest though he was, he rarely preached or mentioned God by name, a fact that only added to his popularity in proudly secular France. The force he invoked was different. “Despite all the evil that men and women suffer”, he said once, “I believe that the Eternal is Love all the same, and we are loved all the same, and we are free all the same.” Love would absorb him in the end, when his “Sister Death” came, as tenderly as any woman, to embrace him. And it was Love, he said, that made him so angry.

Photo: AFP

Business as philanthropy

The CPI(M) should be credited with a revolutionary achievement. It has been successful in transforming business into philanthropy, and businessmen into philanthropists.

The earliest instance of this revolutionary transformation that I can personally recall is the acquisition by the state govt, in the early 1990s, of a large plot of land on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass in Calcutta, for handover to a private business group to build a “5-star” hospital. Obviously, this wonderful act of benevolence by the business group merits land acquisition and handover, its in the public interest. And in such good work, what does it matter that the business group eventually sold the hospital to its overseas collaborator and made a neat profit (for its efficient mediation using its access to people who matter)?

Some years later, we witnessed another remarkable revolutionary transformation, with a real estate development company undertaking a “social” mission, by way of constructing some apartments for the low-income population (in a segregated, and already squalid section) as part of a large project for which, once again, public land was made available to the developer. For this great act of benevolence, the developer went on to receive a national award. He also went on to receive further, and continuing, awards of public land for his private projects.

Having established his philanthropic credentials, the same developer also blessed the city with its first “heritage mall”, for which valuable public land was given by the state govt (no matter that the city is starved of open and recreational spaces). Here one must buy a ticket to enter, and patronise costumed “ethnic” vendors, selling “street foods”. The poets, painters and intelligentsia of the city are often to be found inaugurating and gracing splendid functions in this mall, unfettered by any notions of public space in the face of private joys.

In the last few years, a whole new philanthropic real estate sector has emerged, all of whom have merited gifts of land.

Perhaps the sector where the revolutionary transformation is best manifest is in public transport. Private bus owners are doing a great favour to the masses by ferrying them across the city. Hence this necessitates organising the city's public transport system around meeting the needs of bus owners, rather than meeting the transportation needs of the people.

This should help us see the Singur issue in perspective. The Tatas are keen to engage in an act of great benevolence and philanthropy towards the people of West Bengal, by starting a car plant. (This imperative is so compelling that they are compelled to ignore what even The Economist says: “With India's transport arteries already so badly clogged, a boom in sales of low-cost cars could bring about a seizure.”)

For this benevolence, surely the state govt is justified in enabling that by giving them a huge tract of land? Not for this new breed of "social" businesses anything like the stupid market principles. They help people, so the state helps them.

Business itself has become philanthropy. And where earlier there would have been a little bit of "corporate social responsibility” by business houses, now the philanthropic houses do a little bit of business activity, making a little bit of incidental profit.

It is unfair and unjust that this revolutionary achievement of the CPI(M) has not been widely recognised or acknowledged.

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.

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

Salaam Pakistan!

The Economist had carried a "Survey of Pakistan" in its 8 July 2006 issue. When I read that, I realised that if I had been a thinking Pakistani citizen with a sense of self-dignity, I would have been angered and offended by much of what had been written. In short, the analysis is clichéd and superficial, and does not really present what the people of Pakistan are thinking or doing.

Thanks to the seeds of dissension and strife sown by the British in India – on a soil already fecund with the divisions of caste, class, power and ethnicity – the anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, popular, pluralist, secular, democratic and pro-poor struggle and legacy of the subcontinent was ruptured. Though people in today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) had actively fought for freedom from colonial rule, yet, because of the Hindu-Muslim conflict, power-politics, partition and the resulting riots - this legacy was overshadowed and forgotten.

This evening I was reading the 12 August 2006 issue of The Economist. Right at the beginning, in the "Letters" page, I saw six rejoinders to the Survey. Two were from Pakistan and four from Europe, presumably by persons of Pakistani origin. Reading these really warmed my heart. They have expressed the kinds of things I wanted to hear. They have stood up for, and done their people proud.

Today is Pakistan’s Independence Day. I really felt like shouting out: Salaam Pakistan! (I salute you, Pakistan!)

My heartiest greetings to my brothers and sisters in Pakistan.

Elephant empathy

A couple of days ago, I wrote about evolution of the human personality, study of animal behaviour and social life, and Lord Buddha's Jataka Tales. Here’s an arresting report from The Economist (July 27th 2006).

Elephants, proverbially, never forget. This photograph suggests that they may even remember their dead. It comes from a paper about to be published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science by Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a Kenyan zoologist, and his colleagues. The question of whether intelligent mammals such as elephants have similar emotional reactions to those of people is much debated in zoological circles. Mr Douglas-Hamilton's researchers were able to observe the reaction of other elephants to the death of Eleanor, the matriarch of a group called the First Ladies. The picture shows an elephant from a neighbouring group pulling at her body. On several occasions before she died, other elephants had tried to help her stand up. Such behaviour is in contrast to that shown by most animals to sick or dead individuals. They just ignore them.

Thinking about multitasking

A few days ago I wrote about JP Rangaswami, who works in the information sector. I asked him for his thoughts about Attention Deficit Trait (ADT) which my blog reported on. ADT is a condition afflicting office workers that's worrying medical researchers.

JP has discussed this in his blog. I reproduce his piece , and would only like to add: we must never stop learning, from everyone and everywhere. And this reflection of yours is also very thought-provoking and educative JP. Thanks!


In that serendipitous flow that blogs excel at, Chukti made contact with me after a quarter of a century. (Great connecting up, Chutki!) And as we conversed he brought up Attention Deficit Trait (as defined by Edward Hallowell) and wondered what I thought of it.

A few days later I found Tim Hindle's article in The Economist's Intelligent Life, Summer 2006 issue. I quote : "Mr Hallowell says that people who work in physical isolation are more likely to suffer from ADT than those who share a lively office".

When I see statements like that I start thinking about popes and catholicism and bears and woods and faeces.

But what do I know?

So I continue to do what I do, and learn from my wife and my children. It’s strange, my wife does not do e-mail. She wants to, and we keep putting off “the lesson”. It will happen. Soon.

But in the meantime. Watching her deal with her daily routine, and (when and where possible) participating in it, teaches me more about multitasking and dealing with distractions than I could learn in an “office” environment. Let me draw out some themes, briefly.

1. Some of her tasks are regular and inflexible in terms of time. School runs and mealtimes are classic examples.

2. Some are regular but more flexible in the context of precisely when she does them. Shopping and laundry and meal preparation are examples of these.

3. Some are regular and low-flexibility in terms of time, but she outsources them. Cleaning and ironing and dry-cleaning come to mind.

4. Most of this is done while I am at work and the children are at school, so she does them largely on her own. But she interacts a lot with people while she does them. And she has many interruptions, some welcome, some not. Phones and doorbells ringing. “Outsourced” task handlers needing answers to questions in order to continue. Things to follow up, things to organise.

5. And somewhere within all this, she finds time for herself, to rest, to relax, to read the Bible, to pray. And motivate and spur and cajole and support the rest of us. And stay contented and patient.

Yes, I can learn a lot about multitasking from her. And I try to. Especially since she has all this without e-mail and IM and RSS, and has learnt how to deal with it all.

This mix of must-do and may-do, of time-inflexible and time-flexible, interspersed with personal and household recharging, this mix tells me a lot about how 21st century management could be. Not assembly line but networked household. With adults and children and friends and service providers. I learn a lot about prioritisation and pragmatism from my wife.

Making India shine

The 3 June 2006 issue of The Economist carried a special report on Indian business, titled “Can India fly?”.

I wrote to Simon Long, the New Delhi correspondent of The Economist and the author of the report. (I met Simon at the international conference on “Does Culture Matter” organised by the Goethe Institut in 2004.)

Hullo Simon,

I'm writing to you a propos the India special report in The Economist.

That section concluded by saying:

"Business leaders know that including the excluded majority in the rise of modern India is essential for social harmony, and ultimately for the success of their firms. They also know that compared with improving their bottom lines, this really is the hard part."

I would like to suggest that a future special report takes up this question: social inclusion. If the 1991 issue of The Economist looked at India the caged economic tiger, and that is viewed as significant from today's context - I for one would like to see a different India 15 years from now, on this matter of social exclusion and inclusion.

I can visualise a scintillating, brilliant educative special report on various aspects of this concern, with articles, tables / graphics, interviews, opinion review (i.e. a report on the views of eminent Indian economists like Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, Meghnad Desai, Pranab Bardhan, Partha Dasgupta, Debraj Ray, C Prahlad, etc etc), review and analysis of indicators, academic work, as well as actual public policy and social development performance. Looking at the whole civil society domain, and throwing a challenge to this section. I believe The Economist can play an important strategic role, for India, through such a report.

I would be glad to assist in such a venture! Do consider this.

In today's 21st century context, The Economist's ideology should be for wealth creation for the well-being of the poor of the world, rather than for the likes of the scions of Enron etc! And hence poverty, and poverty reduction as the most important concern and end of economics. A shift of focus from "economics" to welfare economics.

I thought of the title: "Making India Shine" - with a picture of smiling, healthy, happy children (from a poor community) working together in school or something like that. Making India really shine, not the India that the world has now awakened to, but the other India that is really the non-convoy disappearing in the darkness - quoting Arundhati Roy in The Economist's earlier India special report.

When one sees, relates to and dwells in this other India, then one can't see the shining India at all. The great Urdu poet of the subcontinent, Faiz, in his poem "See the city from here", wrote about just this.

An Indian literature professor in the US wrote about giving a compilation of articles on agrarian violence in Andhra Pradesh written by Balagopal to a young professor, who later responded: "I am stunned. How can we theorize this ? How can we represent such corporal violence in words and images?"

Best wishes and regards

rama