The Bhagwad Gita As A Scientific Handbook

Jaya Row





The Bhagwad Gita is a scientific handbook that takes you from spiritual infancy to heights of perfection. It resonates with everyone, because of its mind-stretching quality . If you think that to be assertive is the way to go, the Gita speaks of softness. If non-action seems to be the option, the Gita prescribes action. If grasping will help you acquire more of the world, it counsels you to let go ­ lose it, to gain it.The Gita's first lesson is on impor tance of the intellect. You have two gifts ­ choice of action and intellect. Choice is a given. Intellect has to be developed.Nobody understands the importance of the intellect and the need to strengthen it. Hence people are making choices with a weak intellect. The mind is the seat of emotion, impulse, like and dislike. Intellect discriminates, judges, discerns, weighs the pros and cons and arrives at a decision. Mind is irrational, intellect is rational. The purpose of life is to make the mind work for you and no against you. A mind not governed by the intellect is dangerous. It distracts, tricks and misleads you. The Gita helps you use your existing intellect and gives knowledge to fortify it.
The Gita bestows serenity, tranquillity and contentment. When the mind is calm, the intellect is sharp and you achieve success effortlessly . Across the world people are in varying degrees of agitation. The cause is unbridled desire. Ride on desire and you will be agitated.Rise above desire and you will be content. Shift from the attitude of grabbing to that of giving, sharing and contributing; from profiteering to offering. And you will be showered with prosperity. Grab and you lose; give and you gain. Think of yourself only and you will be discontent. Focus on others, you will be happy.
The Gita speaks of excellence ­ in the world and beyond. It inspires you with a higher ideal. Move from mere physical delights to emotional motivation, intellectual stimulation and the highest ­ the lure of the Infinite.With a higher ideal you tap into your potential, become creative and energetic, and transform from an ordinary mortal to an extraordinary immortal. The world does not need more brilliant or talented people. It needs ordinary people with extraordinary motivation. Chapter 3 of the Gita gives the ingredients of perfect action that help you gain the world and take you to the Transcendental.
The Gita extols the virtue of oneness ­ vasudhaiva kutumbakam, the entire universe is one. Just as the one ray of white light refracts into seven distinct and different colours when passed through a prism, the one Brahmn is seen as the pluralistic, diverse world when seen through the prism of the body, mind and intellect. You are strongly entrenched in feelings of otherness. You imagine adversaries where there are benefactors. You see opponents, not partners.You create a hell for yourself. When you see yourself in others, you revel in their victory. Then you never encounter failure. Drudgery becomes revelry and you gain power. The sixth chapter of the Gita gives oneness as the test of spiritual development. Spiritual growth is not measured by the number of scriptures mastered or pilgrimages undertaken. It is measured by the extent of oneness you experience and live.
The Gita offers many more valuable principles of life that you can use to achieve success and happiness in the world. And it takes you to enlightenment.

Los Angeles International Business and Social Science Research Conference (LAIBSRC) 2016.

Los Angeles International Business and Social Science Research Conference (LAIBSRC) 2016.

LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH CONFERENCE (LAIBSRC) 2016

Dates: 5-7 March 2016

Venue: The Garland Hotel, 4222 Vineland Avenue, North Hollywood, California.

Broad Conference Theme: Capacity Building in Research
Conference Web: http://aabl.com.au/la-conference/

Organizer: Australian Academy of Business Leadership (AABL)

OOPs! Cashless scheme makes patients pay

Ankita Bhatkhande TWEETS @ankitab_MIRROR





TISS study finds that 63% of beneficiaries of central health scheme had to pay out of their pocket for some expenses

A cashless scheme meant to take care of medical needs of the poor seems to be failing in its endeavour due to poor awareness among patients and sloppiness of some hospitals. A study conducted by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) has found that over 63 per cent of patients treated under the Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayi Aarogya Yojana in Mumbai have paid out of pocket (OOP) expenses.This defeats the very purpose of the scheme, which was launched in 2012 in the state, as its primary endeavour is to provide cashless treatment.
A total of 1,489 cases from the city between 2012 and 2014 were surveyed for the study. Sixty-one per cent of the beneficiaries accessed the scheme through private hospitals and 39 per cent from public hospitals.The study was conducted by Priyanta Rent and Soumitra Ghosh under TISS. As many as 971 surgeries and procedures are covered under the scheme. Most beneficiaries of the scheme -32,566 -were from Mum bai and Mumbai suburban districts in 2012-13. Despite being formally enrolled in the RGJAY, over 63 per cent of the beneficiaries still incurred OOP payments for services when admitted to the hospital. More worryingly, it was found that 88 per cent of families living below poverty line paid for diagnostics, medications or consumables. “Our study points to major concerns with regard to the effectiveness of RGJAY in Maharashtra and Mumbai in particular. We found that the households continue to incur OOP payments even while availing services under RGJAY and the OOP spending was more than double in private hospitals than in public hospitals.This clearly suggests the need for empanelling more public hospitals and RGJAY should come up with a mechanism to check the moral hazard behaviour on the part of the private pro viders,“ said Priyanka Rent.
After being asked about the reasons for paying out of their own pockets, a large number of beneficiaries (33 per cent) said that they paid from their own pockets as they were not aware about the expenses covered in the scheme. Other patients said their expenses were not reimbursed by the hospital.
Piyush Singh, CEO of the RGJAY, said: “I have not seen the report yet but we do get many complaints from patients. A large number of cases come from private hospitals as they delay sending all the documents of the patients in time. We take necessary action against such erring hospitals and, if necessary, de-panel them.As far as the awareness is concerned, our staff (Aarogya Mitra) is there in each hospital that is on the panel to assist patients in the process and register their grievances.“

Source: Mumbai Mirror, 19-112015

Tribal Art of Living

UMA RAM





The tribals' disinterest in theological discussion may be frustrating to an academic, but it is typical of the Bastar world view: be! Just be in the wonderful brotherhood you have been placed in. This brotherhood extends beyond the home, clan, tribe...to include the forests, beasts, birds, rocks, hills, stream and rivers. It is a large undivided family mothered by the Earth. As Grigson puts it, for the Maria tribes in Bastar, children are also one of the crops of the Earth.If the great approach to life is to be, then life becomes an endless festival. Living becomes a celebration of being. Song and dance spring forth naturally with such a world view.
Kinship in Bastar extends to the inanimate world. Every stone pulsates with life. Humans, birds or beasts turning to stone is common in Bastar legends and poems. Although the poems abound in references to somebody cutting somebody `into seven pieces', and the pieces becoming `stones', the word `killing' is generally not used as it connotes the end of life. Here, there is no end, only transformation. The stone is as `alive' as a person. Interestingly , the transformation is reversible. In one poem, a legendary hero gets bored in the grave and returns to society! There is not a single traditional song in Bastar that has the complaining strain, whether it is addressed to a lover or God.There is no supplication to change the present condition of existence. For Bastar tribes, creation is perfect; the art of living is to gratefully celebrate life with song and dance.

The Wisdom Of The Greater Fool

Jug Suraiya





Who is the Greater Fool? The term was originally coined in stock market analysis and had a derogatory connotation. Investors will buy stocks of dubious value in the hope that there will be a Greater Fool on whom they can offload their investment at an even higher price. Eventually , a succession of Greater Fools will drive prices so unviably high as to create a bubble which bursts and leads to economic meltdown.However, a character in the television series, The Newsroom, has given a new twist to the term. According to her, by putting a greater value on something which the world of common sense regards as being of little or no consequence, the Greater Fool enriches all our lives by lifting us above the matter of fact and the mundane and giving us a glimpse of what lies beyond the horizon of everyday consciousness.
Poets and artists are Greater Fools, as are spiritual masters, scientists and philanthropists. In Darwinian terms, the Greater Fool would be the mutant which, by being out of genetic step with others of its species, could prove to be an evolutionary breakthrough.
A real life example of the Greater Fool was Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, who refused to patent it ­ thereby losing untold millions by way of royalties which would have accrued to him ­ because he wanted the whole world to benefit from his invention.
In fiction, the most celebrated Greater Fool is Cervantes's great mock hero Don Quixote, the delusional knight-errant who tilted against windmills which in his crazed imagination were evil giants which it was his duty to slay.
Clad in his rusty and tarnished armour, riding his scrawny mare, Rosinante, followed by his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, astride a donkey , and serenading the bedraggled whore whom he calls Dulcinea, Don Quixote is a figure of ridicule, a comical caricature.
But in his futile foolishness he assumes heroic stature, for he persists, against all reason, to see the world not as it is but as it ought to be. He refuses to accept what is real because he yearns for that which lies above and beyond the consensual conspiracy that society calls reality , and condemns as madness any challenge to its predominance.
In that he dares to dream the impossible dream, to reach the unreachable star, Don Quixote is indeed mad. It is a madness he shares with the Sufi mystic who, intoxicated with the wine of divine love, sings of the rapturous union which transcends all barriers and divisions of the mind so that Creator and created become one. In marketing terms, the Greater Fool is the ultimate disruptive innovator, the greatest risk taking venture capitalist who dares to bet against overwhelming odds and in doing so extends the boundaries of what convention has established as the realm of the possible.
In this sense, the very failure of the Greater Fool is a victory . In his vain glorious attempts to assume the role of an epic hero, Don Quixote is a laughable failure. But like the shield in which he sees a reflection of himself, his failure reflects a triumph of the ideal of chivalrous heroism, impossible though its actual attainment might remain. The protagonist of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea epitomises the spirit of heroism fated to be doomed: It can, and will, be defeated, but it cannot be destroyed.
It is the quest for a Holy Grail that matters, more than the unrealisable object of that quest. In his ceaseless search for knowledge, Socrates said that he was the most knowledgeable of men because he alone realised that he knew nothing. That is the vision, and wisdom, given to us by the Greater Fool.

Women mantris help reduce gender gap

TIMES NEWS NETWORK





India Moves Up From 114 To 108 Rank

India has improved its ranking in the World Eco nomic Forum's Global Gender Gap report 2015 moving up from rank 114 in 2014 to 108 among 145 countries. The improvement has come mainly on the back of stronger representation of women in political leadership. However, in health survival India has regressed over the past decade and ranked third from bottom, 143 out of 145 countries.India's rise in the rankings was mostly thanks to a doubling of the number of women in ministerial positions, which pushed up the proportion of women in ministerial positions from 9% to 22%.
In economic participation, India slipped five places to 139 out of 145 this year, the lowest position it has occupied on this criteria since the measuring of gender gap began in 2006. On this count, it has declined not only relative to its international peers, but also in absolute terms, with a wider gap today than 10 years ago, stated the report.
India's ranking in health is pulled down by its ranking for one of the sub-indicators, sex ratio at birth, where it was ranked 143 ahead of only China and Armenia.
The annual report put together by the WEF since 2006, measures the gap between men and women in health, education, economic opportunity and political representation.The overall ranking of a country is on the basis of its performance in these four areas.The top five ranks are dominated by Nordic countries -Iceland, Norway , Finland and Sweden in that order -followed by Ireland at No. 5, having risen from rank 8, pushing out Denmark, which failed to get a place within the top 10.
Interestingly , Rwanda, which entered the index just last year, was ranked at No. 6 moving up by one place and Philippines ranked 7, the only non-OECD countries to figure in the top ten. Major economies in the top twenty included Germany (11), France (15) and the UK (18). The US was ranked 28.
Among the BRICS grouping, the highest-placed nation remained South Africa (17), supported by strong scores on political participation. Russia (75) was next, followed by Brazil (85), which lost 14 places this year due to growing wage gaps and a decline in the number of women in ministerial level positions. China (91) lost four places falling from its rank of 87 in 2014. Yemen remained at the bottom of the index as it has since 2006, despite significantly improving relative to its own past scores.
The report noted that despite an additional quarter of a billion women entering the global workforce since 2006, wage inequality persists, with women only now earning what men did a decade ago.

Source: Times of India, 19-11-2015

95% disabled, JNU scholar battles huge odds to get PhD

Manash Gohain

New Delhi:





At a special convocation held in the vice-chancellor's office recently , Jawaharlal Nehru University awarded a doctorate degree to Bunty Dada. The proud student struggled to grasp the degree being handed to him by VC S K Sopory , though his eyes shone and his hands moved towards the document that signified a tremendous victory of mind over matter.The name inscribed on the doctorate degree was “Akshsansh Gupta“. But he is Bunty Dada on the campus of India's top university .
Gupta's lower limbs are of no use, his slurred speech is difficult to decipher and his arms have the stiff, awkward flailing of someone not quite in control of his movements.In a system that insensitively rates disability in terms of percentages, the 32-year-old is deemed 95% disabled -he grew up with cerebral palsy . More equipped people would have quailed at the extraordinary hardships Bunty Dada faced in trying to get a “Dr“ as a prenomial, but he persevered and that is why the university honoured him with the special convocation, months in advance of the formal ceremony next year.
From his room in the Kaveri Hostel, Gupta braved the odds for five years to finish writing his thesis on “Brain Computer Interface“, in between travelling to Malaysia to present a paper on his chosen subject of computer science. “I opted for computer science as it is easier for me because of the nature of practicals and laboratory work it entails,“ says Gupta. Of course, when stated like that, it sounds like a fairly easy achievement. But the words do not reveal that even getting admission into a primary school in his hometown of Jaunpur in east Uttar Pradesh was a challenge. “When I saw my siblings go to school, I wanted to do likewise.But in my condition, which school would admit me?“ he says. Then, with admirable lack of rancour, he adds, “In general, in our country the attitude towards people with disabilities is quite negative. The first thing people ask is, `Kya karega padhke (What will you gain by studying)?'“ In his small hostel room, you see a wheelchair, radio set, laptop, piles of books on computers, and in a corner, a garlanded photograph of his mother among statues of Lakshmi, Saraswati and Ganesha. It is with justified regard that he places the picture of his mother, whom he lost in 2011, among the divine beings, for she was one of the two women who determined his destiny . She was the one in the family who insisted the tot who couldn't walk be given an education. The other was Meera Sahu, a teacher who finally got him admitted to school.
Gupta is also eternally grateful to Mahajan, the rickshaw puller who ferried him every day to Umanath Singh Institute of Engineering and Technology in Jaunpur, where he pursued a BTech degree in computer science. An illiterate rickshaw puller and a student with physical limitations dreamed an unimaginable future when they travelled the 15 km between home and college every day . “Mahajan and I talked about the world beyond Jaunpur and that is when I decided I want to step out. My family was reluctant, but they eventually agreed, and here I am in Delhi,“ he says.
Piyush Maurya, an MPhil student and his hostel mate at JNU, knows the sort of person Gupta is.“He has an extraordinary mind. He always wanted to prove that disability was a myth,“ he marvels.And while Maurya says that Gupta mostly refuses to take the help of others, the scholar did benefit from JNU's policy of having two helps in every hostel for those like Gupta who might need their assistance.
Gupta, a freshly minted doctor now, is hopeful of getting a job, preferably in the university itself. If JNU obliges, he will be overjoyed. “JNU's atmosphere is such that anyone would like to always live here,“ he says with a grin. He does grudge the government, though, for framing disability policies without consulting the affected people. “Because we are not vote banks,“ he explains.

Source: Times of India, 19-11-2015