Regular Practice Is The Way Forward

Satsang: Swami Sukhabodhananda





What kind of healthy attitudes should we develop towards people, things and events in our life to be happy and peaceful?In Sanskrit there are two related words, mitraha and maitreyi. Mitraha means friendship, maitreyi is friendliness. In the Bhagwad Gita, Krishna says, “Adweshta sarva bhutaanaam maitra karuna evacha ­ Don't have dwesha (animosity) towards anything or anybody , but have maitreyi (friendliness and karuna) towards all beings.“ He does not use the word mitraha which means friendship ... that is relationship which is defined and confined while maitreyi refers to quality in a relationship.Friendliness is not limited to relationship.It is the same quality that makes a flower give its fragrance to all without regard to their social, economic or intellectual status; regardless of whether they appreciate the fragrance or not. It imparts its fragrance to a stone lying nearby or a buffalo that brushes against it as it grazes the grass around the bush.
A human being with evolved sensibilities and an enlightened mind should be like a flower; willing to make friends with, willing to share knowledge and possessions with anything or anybody in life. Friendliness is a quality of unconditional caring, loving and forgiving. Mitraha is friendship that has been nurtured and developed, while maitreyi stands for friendliness that evolves into forgiveness when needed. Is this concept relevant to us in dealing with our sense of guilt?
Yes, because it is important for us to forgive ourselves so that we do not nurse guilt. We can overcome our past failures, mistakes, or wrongdoings and get on with life. When one is wise, one can let go of one's guilt, hurt, frustrations. Whipping, hitting, or criticising a guilty person is not going to reform him. Similarly , pitying yourself over an ill-advised act is not going to help you grow out of it. Forgiveness of both self and others proceeds from the quality of maitreyi.
Roots of crime go deeper than the physical body and the organs involved in the commission of a particu lar crime. It is here that maitreyi, friendliness, should really come into play . Friendliness encompasses much more than friendship or love. It is inclusive of mercy , care and compassion. It arises in and applies to the heart, not the body. It is truly twice-blessed.
I understand and agree with you about facing problems. But what you say remains in my mind only for a very short time. Then it vanishes and i am clueless about how to handle problems. How can you help me?
How many of you are doctors and how many of you are engineers? As a doctor, you have to keep in constant touch with developments in the field to be a reliable practitioner of medicine. If you rest content with what you learnt as a graduate, you will soon find yourself outdated. Professional and technical fields of knowledge like IT, engineering, and medicine are undergoing such rapid changes, that if you do not keep pace, you will be left behind. It is the same with what you learn from what i say . Think of the knowledge you gain as a form of energy . When you are connected to its source, you feel energised. When you lose this contact, you feel weak. What is the solution?
You have to recharge by getting reconnected. You must practise what you learn. Then a stage will come when you will be strong enough to charge others. There is no shortcut to practice.Practice alone is the way forward.

Helping Dalits start business would be more effective than any affirmative action to achieve equality: RBI Governor

RBI governor Raghuram Rajan has come up with his master plan to bridge the caste gap in the country by stating that enabling Dalits to start businesses will be a more effective step in bringing about social equality than any other affirmative action.

This opinion of Rajan is backed by the logic that money empowers than many other forms of affirmative action.

Rajan further added that rather than prohibiting the use of money and wealth, let us think about increasing society’s tolerance for its use, he said, addressing the convocation ceremony of Shiv Nadar University in Greater Noida.

Rajan also cautioned against the growing inequalities in the country. He emphasised on the role of education and health care to restore faith in markets in these circumstances.

Taking a difference stance on tolerance in the society the RBI Governor said that money is a great equaliser and took took on the criticism of money by US political scientist Michael Sandel in his book What Money Can’t Buy: the Moral Limits of the Market.

Rajan pointed out that the income inequality is on the rise, with some having colossal incomes and others worrying about the next meal.

In his address, “Money and Education”, the RBI governor attributed the growing inequalities partly to skills and capabilities that have become much more important in well-paid jobs. As such those born in good circumstances have a much better chance at acquiring these.

As a solution, he said, we have to work to provide effective access to schooling and health care for all, a non-discriminating job market with many jobs, equal opportunities for further advancement regardless of gender, race or background. All this will increase the perceived legitimacy of wealth and society’s willingness to broaden the areas where it is spent.

Thoughtful philanthropy can further help enhance society’s acceptance of great wealth, he said.

These observations of the RBI governor are noteworthy because it comes admist the International Monetary Fund’s warning to India and China, the two fastest growing large economies, about rising inequalities.

He also said India needs to have a more “contingent student loan system” which needs to differentiate between those who can repay their loans and those who cannot. Such a system would prevent an US-like education loan crisis in India, he added.

Rajan also pointed that unscrupulous schools do not prey on uninformed students, leaving them with high debt and useless degrees.

As on January 2016, the unpaid student debt could be as high as $1.2 according to reports.

Source: Digital Learning, 11-05-2016

Addressing the causes of inequality

Equality,”

wrote Balzac, “may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into a fact.”

Just ask any schoolchild who has watched some classmates breeze four grades ahead in the math curriculum as others struggle to complete their daily assignments. Life is rife with inequality: some people are good looking and others plain, some clever and others slow, some soar to popularity while others long to be noticed.

No wonder we are so preoccupied with inequality, and no wonder our conversations about policy solutions leave off many of the inequalities that most worry us. The world is full of problems, but public policy recognizes only those for which there’s a reasonable chance the government might attempt a solution. Any other “problem” is simply a sad fact, and will remain so.

If we want to have a public discussion about inequality, the first thing we have to do is define which sorts of inequality meet the definition of a “problem”. We then need to decide which of these problems should be solved. Not every problem qualifies.

We will begin by excluding the “sad facts”: the large swathes of inequality that the government probably won’t attempt to solve, because the possible solutions would be politically impossible or morally abhorrent. The government isn’t going to find you friends, nor can it get you a loving spouse or a better singing voice. On the other hand, the government is pretty good at moving money around, so we tend to spend a lot of time talking about income inequality.

Yet, even income inequality turns out to be surprisingly ill-defined. It is a melting pot into which we throw wealth inequality, wage inequality, inequality of opportunity, inequality of political power and often rigidity of socioeconomic class. Frequently, we also toss in the absolute, rather than relative, difficulties of a life in poverty. Yet, no matter how hard we stir, these things cannot all be made into a single issue called “inequality”.

So, which ones should we try to fix, and how?

I would cross income inequality itself off the list of priorities. Far greater concerns include: absolute suffering among those with low incomes; a socioeconomic structure that seems to be ossifying into a hierarchy of professional classes; and a decline in income mobility, which is to say, in equality of opportunity. It doesn’t really matter whether Bill Gates has some incomprehensible sum of money at his disposal. It does matter a great deal whether there are Americans in desperate want. And of course, it matters whether anyone with the aptitude and motivation can become the next Bill Gates, or only a handful of privileged people who are already well off.

I also submit that the importance of the issue is inversely proportionate to the ease of solution. The government is very good at taxing income of some Americans and writing cheques to others. (Whether you think it should do this is, of course, a different question.) It is very bad at preparing someone to live a solid and fulfilling life of work and community, which is one reason we mostly leave that job to parents.

The government is also not well suited to creating a lot of satisfying and remunerative jobs. It can contribute to productivity and help companies to flourish, for example, through basic research and by maintaining a competent legal and regulatory system. And it can directly create a few jobs providing government services; these have been, for many communities at many times, a stepping stone to the middle class.

But there are limits to how many jobs the government can create without choking off the productive economy that funds the government (not least, the current financial limits imposed by state budgets already deeply overstrained by financial promises made to previous generations of workers). For the most part, the best the government can do is to avoid stepping on the creation of satisfying and remunerative jobs; no nation on earth seems to have figured out how to generate “good jobs” for everyone.

All this means is that there is no silver bullet for the government to guarantee full employment and solve structural inequality. The government can do something—but it remains to be seen exactly what, and how much.

Source: Mintepaper, 11-05-2016

Why India loves to vote

The explanation for increasing turnouts in elections is simple: for the vast majority, being able to cast a vote freely is an affirmation of their status as equal citizens of the country

Indians clearly like to vote. Evidence from the ongoing Assembly elections shows that turnouts are above 80 per cent and are likely to be similar when two more States and a Union Territory hold elections next week. Indians seem also keener to vote than ever before. Statistics show a steady rise in the turnout figures over the last three decades in several parts of India. The gap between women and men voters has also steadily reduced and in some States female voters outnumbered males.

But what does this enthusiasm for voting actually signify? One popular theory proposes that poor people vote because they are intimidated into doing so. Intimidation occurs for sure, but why then do voters in places where there is no intimidation do so? Another theory is that people vote in return for inducements. But recent research across India has shown that those who spend the most do not always win elections and voters do not feel any obligation to vote for those handing out freebies. In fact, they often accept the goodies from all parties but vote for only one.

Development, a vote-winner

So do people really vote because they are keen to express their support for a particular candidate or party? This is certainly true; using your vote to express your choice — as captured in the Hindi word for vote, matdan — indicates. Several factors determine voter choice and as a current three-year study by an Indo-European network of scholars from the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, London School of Economics, King’s College London and CERI-Sciences Po shows, more and more people vote for development interests rather than merely to support the party that projects their ethnic or caste identity.

Political parties, on their part, tend to get very excited when turnouts are high and hope that a surge in voter numbers will add to their tally. Again, research has shown that historically high percentages in voting do not provide any indication of results and dramatic upsets have been caused both by low turnouts and high ones.

Some institutional factors have, however, contributed to the rise in voter turnouts that we are seeing currently, namely the cleaning up of electoral rolls and the voter enrolment and awareness drives undertaken by the Election Commission. First-time voters are particularly targeted and deceased voters are being removed from lists. But what about the rest of the electorate? How do we explain the significant number of votes that are registered on the NOTA (None of the Above) button introduced only recently? In some seats, the votes for NOTA have been larger than the winning margin, thereby determining the result. Do people take the trouble to go and vote only to register their rejection of every candidate? What are they voting for? Why are people in tears when they are unable to vote? How do we explain a middle-aged pot-bellied policeman in Kolkata expressing blissful satisfaction at being able to vote and approvingly pointing out that he was asked for his Elector’s Photo Identity Card despite his uniform? Why did he think this was a good thing? Even more astonishingly, he went on to describe the vote he cast as “beautiful”.

The use of the word “beautiful” to describe a vote should give us pause for thought. Elections globally can be dry affairs dominated by numbers, percentages and tallies. In India, election campaigns are rambunctious events, full of sound and fury, as the world is turned upside down, candidates trade insults, untold sums of unaccounted money change hands, electoral brokers use every trick in the book to deliver the votes they have promised to the party that pays them. Yet despite this mad carnival that could cause cynicism and apathy and turn people off politics altogether, when polling day arrives millions dutifully show up with their identity cards and cast their vote, and some even describe it as a “beautiful”experience. How do we explain this?

In my book Why India Votes? I presented some explanations. Based on research conducted by a team of researchers across India, we show that to understand the significance of elections and high voter turnout rates, we need to pay attention not just to politicians but also to the voters themselves. Research revealed that the act of voting itself holds enormous significance for people because on election days the most important actors are not the politicians but the voters. While politicians seemingly dominate campaigns, people point out the irony of even the most arrogant heads being bowed to beg for votes and the most corrupt of them being unable to buy a victory — thereby conceding that it is ordinary people who hold power at least during elections. Many noted that it is also the only time they see the administration doing their work free from political interference, thanks to the Model Code of Conduct imposed on the political establishment. It is the world they crave for.

People are of course clear-eyed that politicians are crooked and corrupt and try to buy their votes but they point out that as long as they have the secret ballot they can ultimately vote for whom they like. “The vote is our weapon,” as many put it. In response to sceptical looks from the researchers, they offer examples from the past in which those who spent the most were not victors and the many surprise upsets. So do they simply vote in the vain hope that things will get better? Hope is oxygen, they reply, for to not hope is a luxury few in India can afford. In a philosophical vein, we were reminded of the meaning of the word dan in matdan: to give without expectation is the real virtue, and so it is with the vote. So what kind of virtue is this that is not quantifiable and cannot be depicted on graphs and tables? The simple answer is that being able to vote gives people self-respect and dignity. For the vast majority of the impoverished and ostracised population of India, being able to cast a vote freely is an affirmation of their status as human above all and as equal citizens of India.

Where all are equal

A polling station in India is the only public space of its kind where there is genuine social diversity, where women are unafraid, where VIPs cannot be ushered to the front of the queue and where people are forced to stand shoulder-to-shoulder regardless of caste, class, skin colour or the richness of their attire — and women have to queue behind their domestic servants and men wearing gold watches stand behind one without shoes on his feet. No sense of entitlement or privilege works. Given India’s pernicious and vicious inequality, this is a radical arena. The procedure inside the polling booth reinforces the dignity of the voter further where she is treated politely and efficiently by officials, has her name called out without mention of her father or husband, sees her name on an official record, proving she is an individual in her own right.

Each of these actions reaffirms the identity of ordinary people as equal citizens of India, each of whom counts and is worthy of respect — and this alone for many was a good reason to vote. In fulfilling their duty to vote, people noted they had claimed their most fundamental right as citizens. It should not surprise us therefore that people proudly display their inked fingers after voting, for it is a material manifestation of a bundle of emotions that entering the polling booth brings with it. As one Dalit man put it, “After voting I walked tall, as I felt I too had some value in society.”

So in India, elections are the most important constitutionally radical moment in public life. By exercising their franchise, voters are able to reacquaint themselves with the values that democracy promises — equality, dignity and civility — values that sadly only manifest themselves on election days. We need to preserve their integrity at all cost.

Mukulika Banerjee teaches social anthropology at the London School of Economics and is Director of the South Asia Centre.

Keywords: voting, election, Indian citizens

Source: The Hindu, 11-05-2016

A Finale and a New Life

ARUNA JETHWANI





Believe it or not, Jamnagar's cremation ground is a popular picnic spot. Its entrance gate is colourful, its passages decorated with frescoes and relief paintings. The sprawling woods around have some amazing dioramas, depicting incidents from mythology . All this is set amidst fountains, moats and lotus ponds. There are thoughtfully placed benches and wood stumps for you to sit and take in the aesthetically pleasing ambience. The oath to the cremation enclosure is flanked by statues of renowned saints, including that of martyr Sindhi Saint Kanwar Bhagat Ram.On several visits to Jamnagar, I avoided visiting this place.How can the sorrow of a departed soul be mingled with fun and frolic? Then, realising that death was an exit and an entry , I ventured to that holy spot. A body was being consigned to flames as children played around, and visitors read the writings on the diorama or on the walls, and children discussed the mythological characters depicted there.
The entire ambience conveyed one message: death is a natural part of life. If all life is a celebration, then death, too, is a celebration. Death is freedom from the gross physical. Says Sadhu Vaswani, “When you die, you drink the waters of the river of silence. Coming to the other side, you glimpse the light and your soul bursts into a song of joy!“ Who among us doesn't want to go home? All of us have to take the journey forward. As a doctor said, a rose is fragrant and smells sweet, because it is going to fade.

DIGITAL DIVIDE - Nearly 1bn Indians can't access net: World Bank

Despite rapid spread of digital technologies in India, nearly a billion people still need to connect to the internet for pushing growth, creating jobs and accessing public services, says a World Bank report. The Bank also pointed out that India has most restrictive market regulation in retail finance and banking.

“At least 8 in 10 individuals in India own a mobile phone and digital technologies are spreading rapidly . With nearly a billion people still not connected to the internet, the opportunities for increasing access to digital technology for creating higher growth, more jobs, and better public services are significant for India,“ said the World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends, by co-directors, Deepak Mishra and Uwe Deichmann.

Releasing the report in India on Tuesday , Mishra said that dig ital development strategies in India need to be broader than Information and Communication Technology (ICT) strategies.

“There is little doubt about the transformative potential of digital technologies. However, they are not a shortcut to development, though they can be an accelerator when used in the right way ,“ he said.

India is the largest exporter of ICT services and skilled manpower in the developing world.The BPO industry currently employs over 3.1 million workers, 30% of them are women. World Bank country director in India Onno Ruhl said digital revolution is transforming the world, aiding information flow and creating huge opportunities for growth and poverty reduction.

“India's Aadhaar programme is today a model for many countries and recent initiatives like Digital India have the potential to generate greater digital dividends among all sections of its society ,“ Ruhl said.

Source: Times of India, 11-05-2016

What Is Negative Could Be Positive

Arup Mitra





We dislike outcomes which go against our expectations. Any incident that causes material loss becomes a source of frustration. We tend to ignore the quote that `failures are the pillars of success'. And this happens because we are not able to read the message that we are supposed to receive from what we term as negative incidents in life.Tagore in Gitanjali says, “I had let my mind remain engrossed in worldly affairs; in the name of pleasure what I sought was only sorrow; but what you offered in the name of sorrow was actually joy .“
Life is a journey from what is mundane to what lies at the core. Both body and mind are to be used in pursuing that journey . And that journey can never progress unless there are obstacles. It is the tendency of the mind not to think deeply and act accordingly until certain incidents force us to do so. In the sakta tradition the 10 great kinds of knowledge called Das Mahavidya represent 10 different routes to liberation of the Self, particularly which one can enjoy when one is alive, that is, jivanmukti. The goddess Dhumabati represents death, agony and all kinds of misery that one can think of. But then this is also an important way of making us realise the transitory aspect of what we want to cling to. Once that realisation comes in us and does not get swept away by a sense of attachment, permanent knowledge beomes accessible. The real challenge is to retain this knowledge persistently. Once we know what we achieve or what we consider as a positive outcome is only tempo rary in nature, the happiness associated with achievement does not weaken our mental balance or lead us to pride, which can be crushed in no time. Ramakrishna clarifies that being a true devotee does not rule out the possibility of encountering agony and misery in life. As diverse incidents are inevitable in life, sorrow and joy too keep happening.But a true devotee keeps his objective distinct from these incidents. His efforts do not get influenced by the day-to-day happenings or what is known as the way of life. To highlight the absence of correlation between the path of devotion and the absence of misery , Ramakrishna cited the example of the pandavas from the Mahabharata. They were so devoted to Krishna, the living god, yet their misery knew no bounds. After burning in the fire of misery what remains is pure love. How to initiate this habit of reading negative outcomes as positive ones? The best way is to reflect on what we call a negative outcome. As we coolly keep watching the outcome with our inner eye, the feelings of fear, shame and frustration disappear and new energies flow in. This practice then slowly becomes a habit. The negative feelings associated with an outcome then cannot reside in the mind for long. Like waterdrops on the lotus leaf they do not stay fixed or get deep-rooted.
Next, what efforts can be pursued to gain positive outcomes from the one that has a negative epithet? As we pose this question a degree of maturity shoots up. New inspirations flow in and new pursuits are found with a feeling of detachment. Detachment is often mistaken for laziness or inaction. But full effort without any attachment is the context in which the term is used. Once the internal system in us develops this practice of looking at negativity from a positive point of view, one develops a sense of freedom from everything. Isn't freedom what we want, really?