International Day of Persons with Disabilities

A thin boy in a wheelchair

On International Day of Persons with Disabilities, the families of people with disabilities want one thing most: acceptance.

My brother was disabled. I talked about him to friends, maybe referred to him only in broad terms in work environments, and very rarely wrote about him. When I did write about him, I was asked — both by people who knew me at the intimate-at-a-remove level that social media has made common and by those who have my family and I knew for decades — why I had never done so before.

The reasons are not that easy to explain. But I’ll try.

(A caveat: I speak only of places we’ve lived in and visited: Vizag, Secunderabad, Madras, Bombay and New Bombay, Ooty. Other people’s mileage may differ.)

John’s disabilities were cerebral palsy, mental retardation (what is called a learning disability now, but those words still appeared on his medical files and were the ones used by our family doctor to refer to his handicap) and a heart disease.

Peter Griffin

The heart condition did not manifest visibly, but the palsy was, of course, clear to see. His legs were stick thin, bent a little. More so his right leg, which thanks to muscle atrophy and a hip joint that disintegrated, was bent a little more and could never straighten. Because he had the use only of one hand, he was unable to support his body evenly when sitting. So as he got older, his spine curved more to the right. His right hand was small; he had very limited control over it: just a little movement at shoulder level and the ability to twitch two fingers. It mostly would just be folded, palms and fingers hanging. When he was younger, before the curvature became pronounced, he could manipulate his own wheelchair by propelling the left wheel and then reaching over to propel the right wheel. Later, this became impossible, and he needed extra support on one side whenever sitting up. Another manifestation of his palsy was in slurred speech. He also had a pronounced gagging reflex, so we were never able to clean his teeth properly, and he couldn’t gargle, so he wound up losing all his teeth eventually. There was a slight squint in one eye. He couldn’t wink, though he did, in his words, ‘wink his eyebrows,’ basically a theatrical blink. One side of his face was more mobile than the other, so except with a wide grin (which resulted also in a ‘wink), his smiles were always lopsided. We tried to teach him to read and write, but he could not. He could count reliably up to three, sometimes five.

In brief, he was visibly disabled.

In close interaction — with our friends, our neighbours — he was often talked at or talked around or talked about rather than talked to. Sometimes this is awkwardness: people didn’t know if he understood and would ask us, his caregivers, about him. Mostly these questions were on the lines of ‘what is wrong with him?’ and ‘was he born like this?’ Our answers would then inevitably provoke pity. They would see the disability, recognise that it handicapped him, but they so very rarely look beyond the condition at the person.

The thing is, if you could get past the slurred speech, the retardation was not immediately evident in conversation. In the subjects he could talk about, he was always coherent, though sometimes approaching topics from very different perspectives which needed patience to figure out.

(All John’s favourite people always talked to him, never condescending, but adjusting the topics of their conversation to him, as some people have the gift of doing naturally with children. You know who I mean, that favourite aunt or uncle who you were hugely fond of as a child and who will always be special to you, the one who always talked to you straight, never made you feel like a child.)

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To the casual passer-by, he was just a thin boy in a wheelchair. (I use ‘boy’ advisedly; though he was older than me, he looked at most 20 right through his adult years.) But, in all the cities we lived in, John would attract curiosity in public spaces. At its best, it would be mild double-takes. Sometimes — often, yes, often — it would also be that gawker nudging a companion, inviting the companion to gawk as well. Sometimes it would be open pointing and loud remarks.

I’ve heard, often, in different places, the word in the local languages for ‘mad’. All this made me furious when we were children. It continued to cut deep even when I became an adult, even though I would tell myself that these behaviours were just a result of poor education about mental disability in this country, that one couldn’t blame individuals for cultural mores they’ve imbibed.

Even so, when in casual conversation, on social media, the anger still boils up in me when I hear the suffix ‘-tard’ as an insult, when I hear people laughing about spazzing out.

It enrages me that this world, this country, this city, does so little to make a more accessible, more caring planet for those whose bodies aren’t ‘normal’, whose minds will stay, always, childlike. And that needs more space than this page will allow. So let me not go there. Let me get back to the personal.

Over time, I reached a point where I don’t want to explain any more. I didn’t want to be angry. I definitely didn’t want concessions. That last is also partly why I haven’t spoken publicly about my brother; one didn’t want to be seen as seeking attention, or seeking pity, or largesse from the state or society.

All this I’ve heard this from friends who have family members with learning disabilities: all you want is acceptance, for your loved one, for your family. You want the world to just be okay with the fact that this is just another person's ‘normal,’ that it doesn’t need pity, or sorrow.

You don’t want the attention. You’re not brave, you’re not extraordinary. You’re not a saint, heaven knows. This is just your life. This is his life. This is our life. You would do the same, but these just don’t happen to be the circumstances of your life.

All we want, the families of and caregivers to people with disability — I deliberately do not try to speak for people with disability, because I do not know that world — is to not be ‘special’. To not be a symbol for courage. To not have our loved ones be the disability.

From where I sit, your fight against the financial circumstances you have risen above, or the loss of a parent early in life or of a child, or a bad marriage or broken heart or rebellious children, they are all strange to me, perhaps. Are you a hero? I don’t know; perhaps you are. But it could be just that you are playing with the cards you have been dealt.

There is no divine plan, I’m sure. This isn’t happening to you or me ‘for the best’.

It is what it is.

You live the life you find yourself in, the best way you know how.

peter.griffin@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: International Day of Persons with Disabilities, Cerebral palsy, learning disabilty

Source: The Hindu, 3-12-2015

IIM Udaipur to start FPM from 2016, students to get full fellowship

Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Udaipur has announced the launch of a fellow programme in management (FPM), which is also popularly known as the doctoral programme in the field of management, from 2016. While most of the IIMs have been offering doctoral programmes, Udaipur is one of the last institutes to launch it.

The institute, one of the newer IIMs , which started operating since 2009 along with five other IIMs, decided to launch FPM only after they recruited more than 25 full-time faculty members. The reason behind this move was to be able to provide a fair amount of support to the fellows. Talking on the institute’s aim to provide a quality FPM programme, Professor Janat Shah, director, IIM Udaipur says, “In our country, we have been able to do a reasonably good but not a great PhD programme in management. Our MBA programmes are reasonably good when compared with the top institutes of the world, but when it comes to doctoral programmes, we do a good job, but not a great job.”

The institute has decided to launch the programme with a small batch of only four students in two areas – marketing and operations management, in order to be able to give better attention to all the fellows. “We are starting with a small batch as we want to make sure, we do a great programme. We want to find out what we are doing right and where we are going wrong, and expand accordingly in the coming years,” says Shah, who was associated with IIM Bangalore as a faculty of production and operations management before joining IIM Udaipur as the director.

The candidates will be shortlisted on the basis of their applications and invited for an interview and a test at Udaipur. All successful candidates will do a rigorous course work for the first two years before they start working on a research topic under the guidance of a faculty member.

The students will be provided with a full fellowship which will cover the cost of tuition fee, accommodation, other programme expenses and a stipend will be given as living allowance. All students will be eligible for a stipend of Rs 30,000 per month in their first year. They will get a 10% annual increment up to a maximum of five years.

IIM Udaipur currently hosts 28 full-time faculty members and 265 students on campus. The institute is currently functioning from their temporary campus at Mohanial Sukhadia University. Shah informed that they hope to move into the permanent campus by June 2016.

Source: Hindustan Times, 3-12-2015

Ambedkar the equaliser

I owe my proficiency as a political journalist to one of my first editors who dismissed my journalism until then as ‘Sunday journalism’. If I wanted to be taken seriously I must choose either politics or business as my specialisation, he said.

Rather reluctantly, I trotted off to Nagpur, my home town, when he set me an assignment on the RSS and the Dalit movement — Nagpur is the confluence of both movements. I sought the help of my political science professor at Nagpur University — he was related to Balasaheb Deoras, the long reigning RSS sarsanghchalak at the time. When I asked him to brief me about the Dalit movement, he gave me the names and numbers of various leaders and experts in the field, “I do not think I am qualified to talk about the Dalit movement,” he said, even as I thought that was a strange confession for a professor of political science to make. Only years later did I realise he was only being circumspect, not wishing to invite allegations of influencing a young mind against Babasaheb Ambedkar who was really no favourite of the RSS at the time.

The word ‘Hindutva’ was yet to enter the Indian political lexicon but people in the RSS did not much care for the Dalit movement, not the least because Ambedkar succeeded in Nagpur as the RSS never had — he had converted lakhs of his followers to Buddhism there and that was reason enough. When I met some Dalit scholars, I realised why —Ambedkar had carefully chosen Buddhism instead of Islam or Christianity, which would have brought his followers more approbation but also a complete alienation from their roots. Choosing Buddhism was a masterstroke because it at once gave his followers room to observe Hindu rituals if they wished without having to submit to all its various restrictions. Ambedkar believed that Hinduism was not designed for liberty, equality and fraternity and that is why he stressed upon those ideals in the Preamble to our Constitution. One quote from Ambedkar that has since influenced my thinking is: “You cannot be liberal in politics and conservative in religion.”

It has shaped my own understanding of Indian politics.

That is why I find December 6 very poignant each year — it is the day the Babri masjid was demolished in Ayodhya but it is also Ambedkar’s punya tithi. He died a few weeks after converting his people to Buddhism in 1956. This year is the 125th anniversary of his birth but also the shashti poorti of his death. There is also a great irony in the fact that the BJP-led government at the Centre should commemorate him in Parliament by fishing out a new date as Constitution Day (to me November 26, though, will always be 26/11, the day of the worst attack by Pakistan on Bombay) but there is also a sort of poetic justice. In towns and villages across Maharashtra, upper caste Hindus hated Ambedkar because the conversion of his followers to Buddhism deprived them of scavengers and a major section of their ‘balutedars’ (village servants who rendered important community duties). Becoming Buddhist gave Dalits the right to refuse upper caste slavery and brought them a great sense of self-worth.

Dalit leaders since have betrayed many of his ideals but there is no one who did more to equalise Indian society than Ambedkar — and not just for his followers alone. The Constitution with all its guarantees is testimony enough. Even Narendra Modi today has described it as a “holy book”. What could be a greater tribute?

Source: Hindustan Times, 3-12-2015

ndifferent Universe?

DEEPAK CHOPRA





I was asked the following question: Energy emanating from a source of creation is my religion. I focus on beauty , dwell in possibility and believe our thoughts have tremendous power. This morning I awoke feeling insignificant. If humans represent a mere 14 seconds of time on the cosmic calendar, how unbelievably self-centred are we? Cosmologist Carl Sagan said, “The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.“ Which does not sit well with me, spiritually. I like the idea of emanating from an abundant source of creation much better than evolving from a chance rock collision. So, what's it all about?
My response started with the generally accepted view of the universe as being composed of atoms and defined by the laws of physics. This view does not account for our experience of creativity , love, free will, selfawareness, beauty or compassion. My view is that a universal field of consciousness underlies, creates and unites the objective physical world as well as the subjective world, and that the description of these dynamics is consistent with quantum field theory .This doesn't mean that the hydrogen and helium gas clouds of the universe care about us. It means that our core existence of consciousness shares an existence with everyone and everything else in the universe. When that knowledge becomes an experienced reality, then your awareness is the awareness of the universe.

16 Indian Institutes Among Top 200 Univs

SreeradhaD Basu

Mumbai:





IISc 16th in Times Higher Education BRICS and Emerging Economies rankings

Sixteen Indian places of learning are among the top 200 universities in The Times Higher Education BRICS and Emerging Economies rankings. The Indian Institute of Science broke into the top 20 for the first time and was listed at No. 16.Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, entered the top 30, with the premier engineering school ranked at 29. Last year, IISc and IITBombay were at 25 and 37, respectively. Other Indian institutes that have gained ground in the rankings include IIT-Madras (to 36 from 44), IITDelhi (to 37 from 56) and IIT-Guwaha ti (to 83 from 98).
Those that have declined include IIT-Kharagpur, IIT-Roorkee, IIT-Kanpur, Aligarh Muslim University and Panjab University. Jawaharlal Nehru University, which was at 71 last year, isn't in the list this year.
New entrants include Jadavpur University, Savitribhai Phule Pune University, University of Calcutta, University of Delhi, Amrita University and Andhra University.
China dominates the overall rankings, including first and second place besides half the top 10. In the top 200, China has 39 universities.
The top five are Peking University (China), Tsinghua University (China), Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia), University of Cape Town (South Africa) and National Taiwan University (Taiwan).
Taiwan comes in at second position in the overall rankings with 24 universities in the top 200. India is the third best represented country.
“India will have to work harder to compete with other developing na tions, such as Russia, which have a higher proportion of institutions in the upper echelons of the table. India is the only BRICS nation without a university in the top 10,“ said Phil Baty, editor, Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
India spends less than 0.88% of its GDP on science research, compared with 2.76% in the US and 4.04% in South Korea, Baty said.
“With the population of young people in the country continuing to expand, resulting in further pressure on resources, it is now more crucial than ever that India invests in research and strengthens its links with other nations,“ he said.
ET VIEW

Integrate Teaching & Research
These rankings offer hope for India which had earlier lagged behind even its peers in the emerging economies. For Indian universities to offer world-class edu cation and research-based knowledge creation, there has to be sustained policy reform in the education sector. The quality of education must be raised across the board. This calls for not only stepping up investment, but also raising the efficacy of public spending. State universities need more financial support. Industry must chip in by giving grants and funding research. Attractive salaries for teachers and rewards for research faculty will draw talent. Teaching and research should be integrated.





Source: Economic Times, 3-12-2015

World's richest 10% produce 50% of CO2: Report

London THE INDEPENDENT





The richest 10 % of people produce half of the Earth's carbon emissions, while the poorest half-most threatened by droughts and super stroms linked to climate change--contribute a mere 10%, British charity Oxfam said in a study released on Wednesday .The richest 10% have, on average, carbon footprints 11 times that of the poorest 3.5 billion people on the planet, the campaign group said in its report. One of the biggest obstacles facing negotiators from 195 countries, attending the Paris climate meet, is how to find the billions of dollars needed by developing nations to enable them to stop using fossil fuels and adapt to the weather shocks.
“Climate change and economic inequality are inextricably linked and pose one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century ,“ Tim Gore, Oxfam's head of food and climate policy , said.
Emissions are rising fastest in developing countries, Oxfam said. Yet emissions relating to goods and services consumed by the richest citizens in China, India, Brazil and South Africa are way behind those of their counterparts in the wealthiest countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, it said.
Oxfam found that India's richest 10% use on average just one quarter of the carbon used by the poorest half of the population of the US.It also said total emissions of China's poorest 600 million people are one third of the total emissions of US's richest 10%, some 30 million people. REUTERS
Tuvalu faces threat from rising sea
The PM of Tuvalu, the world's fourth smallest nation, has appealed for help from EU leaders to stop it disappearing from Earth. Enele Spoaga arrived in Brussels on Monday to call on EU leaders for support. The islands, home to just 10,000, is under threat from rising sea levels as it is just 4m above sea level. He called on Europe to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to keep warming down to 1.5°C. He said: “We need to save Tuvalu to save the world. “

Source: Times of India, 3-12-2015

View The World From A Vantage Point

Sant Rajinder Singh





Look down upon this physical world from a high vantage point. You would find the light of billions of souls shimmering throughout the world. Like a foaming sea, they move about from one life to another, from one form of living thing to another.All souls, when seen in their true perspective, are the same. They are all a part of God's consciousness; they are all light and they all have innate bliss.But if we look at the condition of our world, we are appalled and shocked by the suffering and pain each form of life is undergoing. We find strife and dissension throughout the world. Many nations are embroiled in internal conflicts. We see religious groups at odds with each other. Community strife is widespread. Even within families we find discord and disharmony . We find human beings killing each other and also harming other forms of life. We wonder how there can be so much pain and turmoil among people who have within them the same Divinity .
Just as a couple bear children to increase their mutual love and joy, so did God bring about the creation of so many souls, so many children.Yet the result is far from what was intended. We who are moving packets of bliss and all-consciousness are aware only of great pain and torment. If we could return to our true state of bliss, we would experience peace and ecstasy . If we could tap deeply within, navigating beyond physical body and mind, we would find a wellspring of eternal peace and happiness, the secret of unity underlying the uni secret of unity underlying the universe.
Saints from every religion teach the same truth. They help us find the common elements in each. They have love and respect for other great saints and the world's religions. They recognise that they are teaching the same Truth.Although outer languages, cultures, customs and the ways of dressing and greeting may differ, in essence all religions are the same: Love. The various religious and spiritual traditions have more commonalities than differen ces. The common core of each is the same. They believe that we have a spiritual core within us created by a higher power. They also speak of tapping into the spiritual dimension through prayer, meditation, or inversion to uncover our Source.
While language and customs differ, at the heart of it all are practices that connect our true essence, the soul, with the higher Power.
Saints, masters, spiritual teachers and enlightened beings, such as the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mahavira, Moses, Krishna, Rama, Guru Nanak, Kabir, Maulana Rumi, St Teresa of Ávila, Mira Bai, Hazur Baba and many others came to help connect the people of their times with the divine within.
We think we are body and mind. We do not realise that we are soul. We are true children of the Divine. The stillness experienced during meditation is the reflecting pool in which we can see who we really are. When our body and mind are still, we can see our own true Self as soul.
Meditation is a practical method with which we can discover our true Self as soul and achieve spiritual consciousness by reuniting our soul with the higher Power. It is a way to discover our true purpose in life and to reach the goal of enlightenment in this lifetime. In this way , we can uncover who we really are and can truly say that we know ourselves.