the speaking tree - We Are In The `Space Between Stories'

Marguerite Theophil





Every individual and every culture has a story that we hold on to in order to make sense of our world.But things are definitely changing. All over, young and not-so-young people no longer believe so resolutely in old paradigms.Our givers or maintainers of the story used to be religious heads, elders, and often, our politicians. But now most people no longer believe them; often with reason. Most of them imply that they know, they have the right answers, that everything is under control; we know that it is not so. We are, as things indicate, in that `space between stories'.
But what is this space between stories? Broadly speaking, it is the time when our familiar ways of understanding and behaving are no longer applicable. The old story of who i amwe are, what is real, what is true, whom to believe and how to navigate life, is breaking down. What had seemed so un derstandable, permanent and reliable is revealed now as being just an illusion.
Very simply put, it is a state of `I don't know'. Our world is entering it, and so are many of us as individuals, and we don't do `I don't know ...' well at all! Sometimes the new story ­ and its related new ways of thinking, being, and doing ­ emerges gradually; short cycles of change, with success and elation interspersed with disappointments and setbacks.At other times, it plunges us into a different world so swiftly that it is a while before we even know it has happened.
At a time of any longstanding, familiar story nearing its end, it goes through death throes. We know that normal isn't coming back again, and as a consequence, we experience a desperate clinging on to life no matter what. In this scenario, there comes fierce opposition, domination, conquest, violence, blame and separation taken to absurd extremes. But this need not be so.
The breakdown of the old story is actually a kind of a healing process; yet one that is very hard for us to fathom. In its worst moments, it uncovers old, unhealed wounds and false assumptions that had been hidden just under the surface of a `business as usual' or `all is well, really' attitude. When we comprehend that the old story does not suffice ­ but that the new one isn't quite here, many people, especially those in authority , rush to make sense with their own limited version of Truth. We go on pretending that everything is still normal, or rush into heightened expectations of change, impatient for results we crave. So the question becomes: How can we prepare for this? Actually, we cannot fully prepare. But we are being prepared ­ by the space between the stories. Here, we will be challenged to hold on to our positive and healthy values, else succumb to the negative exhortations of others and give them up. We will be pushed to condemn, suspect, hate and punish rather than to listen and understand the root cause of the frustration and pain of `the other', whoever that might be.
It is in such moments of paradox, tension and yes, creative energy that we can discover our humanity or our lack of it. We don't simply speak of compassion, justice or peace ­ we strive and struggle to manifest them, moment by moment. We face each other, help each other, and take care of one other, human to human. This we commit to do at both the individual and collective levels. The new story will never be easy, but it can be good. It is up to us.

 The River of Life

J KRISHNAMURTI





There is a long, narrow pool close to a river. The river is flowing steadily , deep and wide, but the pool is heavy with scum because it is not connected with the life of the river, and there are no fish in it. It is a stagnant pool, and the deep river, full of life and vitality , flows swiftly along.Human beings are like that.They dig a little pool for themselves away from the swift current of life, and in that little pool, they stagnate, die. This stagnation, this decay , we call existence. That is, we all want a state of permanency; we want pleasures to have no end.
We dig a little hole and barricade ourselves in it with our families, with our ambitions, our cultures, our fears, our gods, our various forms of worship, and there we die, letting life go by -that life which is impermanent, constantly changing, which is so swift, which has such enormous depths, such extraordinary vitality and beauty .
Have you not noticed that if you sit quietly on the bank of a river, you hear its song -the lapping of the water, the sound of the current going by?
There is always a sense of movement, an extraordinary movement towards the wider and the deeper. In the little pool, there is no movement at all; its water is stagnant.... This is what most of us want: little stagnant pools of existence away from life. We don't want to be disturbed because what we are after is a sense of permanency .

ET ANALYSIS - Should India be Compared with Indonesia Rather than China?

Kiran Kabtta Somvanshi ET Intelligence Group





India is found to be scoring lower than Indonesia on five of the seven counts mentioned in the report

India is a lot closer to its South East Asian neighbour Indonesia when it comes to inclusive growth and development, while population seems to be the only similarity that India shares with China, shows the inaugural `Inclusive Growth and Development Report' released by the World Economic Forum on Monday, which covers 112 economies.Dubbed as a lower middle income country, India is found to be scoring lower than Indonesia on five of the seven counts mentioned in the report.China, on the other hand, is classified as an upper middle income nation and has better rates than India on all the seven criteria. The seven criteria are education and skill development, employment and labour compensation, asset building and entrepreneurship, financial intermediation of real economy investment, corruption and rents, basic services and infrastructure and fiscal transfers. Except for financial intermediation and corruption, where both countries have similar scores, India logs a lower score than Indonesia -the fourth most populous country -on all the other parameters.
India ranks at the bottom 20% among its peer group of lower middle income nations on employment and fiscal transfers, while it figures among the top 20% on corruption. China, meanwhile, figures on the top 20% in the high middle income group of countries on employment, financial intermediation and corruption issues. Indonesia ranks in the top 60-80% in education, asset building, financial intermediation and corruption. While India fares better than Indonesia on growth rates of per capita GDP and labour productivity , its poverty and public debt to GDP rates are far higher than those of Indonesia.
The South East Asian nation also fares better on income equality and global competitiveness.
The report suggests that India must take further action to ensure that the growth process is broad-based in order to expand a small middle class and reduce the share of the population living on less than $2 a day (many of them in poverty despite being employed).
Educational enrolment rates are relatively low across all levels, and quality varies greatly, leading to notable differences in educational performance cial mobility. India under exploits the use of fiscal transfers. Its income tax is regressive and social spending remains low, which limits accessibility of healthcare and other basic services.Sanitation continues to be a problem across the board.
India scores well in terms of access to finance for business development and real economy investment, yet new business creation continues to be held back by the large administrative burden of starting and running companies, corruption, and underdeveloped infrastructure, the report concludes.
Kiran.Somvanshi@timesgroup.com

A better design for social justice

We are back to debating reservations. The argument in favour of affirmative action — for groups that suffer substantial, pervasive and abiding forms of disadvantage — is compelling. Such disadvantage is self-perpetuating. Given the mechanics of social power and its translatability into political, cultural and economic power, external intervention is essential to break the vicious cycle. Whether we should have affirmative action is an easy enough question to answer in our social context. It is the “how” that deserves more attention. Our chosen means — group-membership-based reservations — is one of the crudest, least imaginative and costliest (for the beneficiary group) forms of affirmative action. It is crude in two different respects: One, the criteria for allocation of benefits; and two, the nature of the allocated benefits. Greater sophistication on both counts is long overdue, although this column will address the criteria question alone. 

If we want to end the disadvantage faced by certain caste groups, it may seem obvious to distribute benefits directly along caste lines. However, doing so imposes significant costs on the intended beneficiaries themselves. Put simply, the argument is that caste-based affirmative action prevents us from transcending caste, its supposed objective. By increasing the social salience of group membership, it causes expressive harms to its ostensible beneficiaries. Resentment against the beneficiary group increases, and existing prejudices and stereotypes against the group are reinforced. These costs are, no doubt, entirely undeserved, but that unfortunately does not allow us to pretend they do not exist. It is a no-brainer that we should try to reduce the expressive costs of affirmative action to the disadvantaged groups while ensuring that they continue to derive meaningful benefits from it. This could be done by moving away from a group-membership-only criterion of allocation to a group-membership-plus or an indirect allocation method. The creamy layer’s exclusion from Other Backward Class (OBC) reservations, mandated by the Supreme Court, is a weak form of group-membership-plus allocation. Although caste remains the chief criterion for the distribution of benefits, certain other, mainly economic, factors are used to exclude certain categories of beneficiaries. In a significant article published in the Economic and Political Weekly in June 2006, Yogendra Yadav and Satish Deshpande had argued for a move to a stronger form of group-membership-plus model. Based on serious sociological evidence, they argued that group membership (caste, community, sex) should become but one factor in assessing a person’s eligibility for affirmative action, along with family background (managerial, professional, clerical, non-income-tax-paying) and the type of school a person went to (government or private, English or vernacular medium, residential, etc). Group-membership-plus models are attractive because they are likely to impose lower expressive costs on the beneficiaries. As a related bonus, they might also help target the benefits better by prioritising the weakest members of a weak group. Another allocation criterion, with arguably even lower expressive costs but more difficult to design, could be described as indirect affirmative action. The idea is simple — instead of allocating benefits directly on the basis of group membership, we should allocate these benefits based on neutral criteria that have a strong correlation with the membership of a disadvantaged group. For example, when race-based admissions at the University of Texas were introduced, it simply guaranteed admissions to the top 10 per cent of the graduating class of every Texan high school. Given the background of racially segregated schooling in Texas, the university’s intake of black students shot up dramatically. Sociological research could no doubt reveal similar correlations between group membership and (relatively) neutral criteria, such as the type of school attended, parents’ occupation and education, family size, sibling education, place of residence, use of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, and so on. This isn’t a simplistic income-based affirmative action proposal. Income-based proposals deny the fact that disadvantage is not simply material, but also social, cultural and political. By individualising disadvantage, they refuse to appreciate the weight of history that bears down on disadvantaged groups such as Dalits, Adivasis, women, the disabled and hijras. Indirect affirmative action measures, on the other hand, take history seriously and appreciate the multifaceted nature of disadvantage. But they also take the expressive costs of affirmative action seriously. The underlying empirical assumption is that measures that make direct classification based on, say, caste incur a higher expressive cost than a measure that makes classification based on an independently justifiable but less divisive criterion, albeit correlated with caste. We would do well to adopt evidence-based group-membership-plus and indirect affirmative action measures. Unlike the one-size-fits-all group-membership-only models, these alternatives will need to be designed flexibly from the bottom up, in the context of a particular institution and its location. If effectively monitored, that may be no bad thing. 
The writer, an associate professor in law at the University of Oxford and Hackney Fellow in law at Wadham College, is author of ‘A Theory of Discrimination Law’ -

Education Revolution





Government move to allow foreign universities a good idea, free Indian universities too

The Modi government's reported move to ask its thinktank, Niti Aayog, to prepare a framework for allowing foreign universities is a welcome idea whose time has come. Despite being among the world's youngest countries, India will not reap its demographic dividend if its higher education remains the mess it currently is. No Indian university is currently ranked among the world's top 200. India is the only Brics nation without representation in the top 100 global universities. So why not allow Ivy League schools like Yale and Harvard or universities like Oxford and Cambridge to set up campuses here?
This would be a breath of fresh air within India's stilted higher education system, giving more viable options to the two lakh or so Indian students who head overseas each year in search of quality education. Those Indians who can afford it are voting with their feet: the number of Indians going over seas to study grew by 256% between 2000 and 2009. UPA-I also tried to bring in a bill to allow foreign uni versities, following recommenda tions from the National Knowledge Commission, but that initiative failed because of opposition from the Left.The time has come for India to take the plunge. One solution is to set up the educational equivalent of free economic zones ­ where foreign and Indian universities provide cutting-edge education within set parameters and without the heavy limiting hand of the state. These special educational zones can be placed outside the ambit of UGC's stultifying bureaucratic empire.
The benefits of freedom and autonomy should not go exclusively to foreign universities; Indian universities too should be allowed to set up and compete under the same conditions. Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared at the Indian Science Congress earlier this year that his government will pay as much attention to ease of doing R&D in India as to ease of doing business. For that to happen, permitting foreign universities and reforming higher education to allow home-grown excellence to flower is essential. This would make India a premier Asian educational hub; `Educate in India' can then complement `Make in India'.

the speaking tree - The Eternal Poetry Of Consciousness

Deepak Hiranandani





Jug Suraiya, in `An Inclusive Reinterpretation of Reincarnation,' (Speaking Tree column, September 1, 2015) arrives at the well-articulated idea of an “eternal consciousness“. He asks how could there be new souls for a growing human population since souls are said to be eternal. Let me add that in many schools of thought and faiths, souls are thought to be not only human.The tiniest insect or single celled animal or jiva is thought to possess a soul, or jivatma. Traditionally accepted Hindu, Buddhist and Jain theories of karma clearly state this.Popularly , good conduct and actions (karmas) would lead to our soul being reborn in a human being. The souls of wise persons theoretically would escape the birth-death cycle by attaining moksha or nirvana, merging with the eternal universal soul or Paramatma.
Therefore not just humans, all living beings have souls. I had an interesting experience in this regard with a Tibetan Buddhist monk at Sera University near Kushalnagar in Kodagu, Karnataka, in 2002. It was sometime in the monsoon season, and the maroon robed monk d informed me that they were not supposed to walk or move much in the rainy season because many small insects could be trampled underfoot. Then why do you eat meat, i asked the monk. He re plied that it was worth thinking about. He also said that one large animal like a bull could feed 40 people whereas many small insects would have to be killed to feed one person. Clearly, to him, an animal soul was a soul, equally precious regardless of which body it was currently inhabiting.
If the souls of more and more creatures are being reborn as humans, and if humans are consid ered as a `higher' and `more evolved' type of creature, somehow one step closer to merging with the universal soul than are other animals, does it imply that we are in deed constantly evolving to a higher state?
Interestingly , in cultures across the globe plants have been revered, even worshipped; yet, classical theories of karma and of jivatma-paramatma do not seem to have been overtly applied to plants. A jiva is popularly conceived as a creature, or member of the animal kingdom, however tiny or immense a creature it may be. In a globalised world, inclusive and holistic ideas are gaining more acceptance among the people. As Suraiya concludes in his penultimate sentence, “There is only an eternal consciousness in which we participate and which participates in us.“
He concludes by saying, “The rest is just pretty poetry.“
This opens up new vistas of thought: poetry is a human creation, it is an art, one of the aims of which could be the search for beauty, that which is pretty.But `poetry' also brings us right back to the human being, the one who observes, conceives and creates beauty and who articulates ideas about the universe.
For Svetaketu, Albert Einstein, Fritjof Capra and for each of us who are reading this: the universe is, in some sense, meaningless without each of us. There is, or there must be, the world, but ultimately, when we speak of deep philosophical thoughts, they are just that: thoughts that question reality, cosmic consciousness, `apara aadi ananta Brahmn', the Universal Soul, Supreme Consciousness ... As always, our answers are tentative, alluding finally to a Supreme Power. But question we must, and always have. We dimly perceive that all the answers will never be found, yet we question on.And we continue to study , think, write articles and research papers, and pretty poetry . Is it not?

Refugee crisis is more about EU than migrants problem

The refugee crisis facing Europe is more about the European Union (EU) than the migrants problem. Migrants are a perpetual issue and hardly unique to the Mediterranean. What makes the day-to-day drama of thousands of Arab and African migrants breaking through one European boundary after another is that the EU had long claimed to be different.

The Schengen common immigration policy was cited as among the greatest European accomplishments. The EU also claimed that it would treat refugees in a more humane and institutionalised manner than other countries. All of this is now in a shambles. The Schengen agreement has fallen apart as individual European governments have violated many of its clauses.

Read | UN's ‘massive’ migrant plan: Asks EU to absorb 2 lakh refugees

Millions of illegal migrants, most of them inspired by economic motives but many by political chaos, move back and forth across the world. The UN put the number of global migrants at over 230 million in 2013. The number of Rohingyas fleeing persecution in Myanmar and dying in the high seas probably exceeds the roughly 3,000 a year who have been dying crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. But Southeast Asian governments are impervious to international media attention and know their own people are hostile to illegal migrants, so the Rohingyas have largely been left to their fate. Obviously, this is not the case with Europe. But Europe is also experiencing considerable economic problems and the rise of anti-immigrant parties in almost every EU nation has made governments skittish about refugees in any form or colour.

The EU could have avoided the media glare if they had united against an earlier Italian naval policy that had held back the refugee tide. Europe would have been even better off if it had sought to use diplomacy or military action to bring the Syrian civil war or Eritrea’s totalitarian dictatorship to an end. These two countries are the primary source of refugees. But the lack of a common foreign and security policy and the EU’s general loss of strategic sensibilities have made Europe, once the seat of great powers, a passive observer of global developments.

The refugee crisis, whose origins go back four or five years, has been notable for the absence of any long-term planning by the EU. This is still the need of the hour as the Mediterranean refugee problem is far from over.