Dec 13 2016 : The Economic Times (Delhi) Almost 40% Indians Don't Go on Vacation New Delhi: Our Bureau   Country ranks fifth among the most vacation-deprived countries About 40% Indians do not go on vacations due to their work schedule that either does not allow for vacations or there are not enough staff to look after their job in their absence, shows a survey.South Korea is the only country where work schedule prevents a higher percentage of people -43% -from going on vacations, according to the 2016 Vacation Deprivation Study by Expedia, an online travel company with presence in 33 countries. It ranks India fifth among the most vacation-deprived countries, behind Spain (68%), the UAE (68%), Malaysia (67%) and South Korea (64%). Indians on average received 21 annual vacation days in 2016 but could only take 15 days in the year, the survey shows. This is much less compared with countries such as Brazil, France, Spain, Finland and the UAE, where people took 30 vacation days. About 21% Indians do not go on vacation because they feel important work decisions will be made in their absence. Elsewhere, this is the reason for 18% of people from avoiding vacation in both Hong Kong and the UAE. Interestingly, about 21% Indians feel that their not going on leaves would be perceived positively by their boss. About 12% respondents in South Korea and 11% each in Brazil and Thailand have similar feelings. While work schedule is the main reason for not going on leave, 14% Indians also said they cannot afford to take holidays. In Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, 6% could not book holidays due to cash crunch. Unable to plan a holiday was another reason. About 27% said they found it difficult to coordinate time that works for them and their spouse, partner, family member or friend. The survey also shows that spouses are the favourite travel buddies for Indians: about 73% holiday with the spouse, followed by 59% with children, 53% with friends, 26% with colleagues and 9% with tour groups. The survey also shows that Indians are the second most in the world when it comes to exploring new destinations during holidays. While 78% Italians love to explore new destinations during vacations, 77% Indian respondents said they love to explore new places on vacations. Source: Economic Times, 13-12-2015

Love bigger cause of unhappiness than cash

Charlotte England

THE INDEPENDENT





LSE Study Finds Failed Relationships Have Greater Role In Unhappiness Than Monetary Issues

Economic factors are not the biggest cause of un happiness -failed relationships and mental illness play a far greater role, a major new study into the “origins of happiness“ has found.Eliminating depression and anxiety would reduce misery by 20%, whereas eliminating poverty would only cut it down by 5%, social scientists at the London School of Economics have said, after conducting extensive research into the most effective ways to promote wellbeing and reduce misery .
Treating mental illness would involve no net cost to the public purse, the team added, because the economic benefits would exceed the initial costs. The group, led by economist Richard Layard, said they want to “revolutionise how we think about human priorities“ and promote using the “burgeoning new science of `subjective wellbeing'“ as a measure of successful governance, instead of the economy.
“The evidence shows that the things that matter most for our happiness and for our misery are our social relationships and our mental and physical health,“ said Layard, “This demands a new role for the state -not `wealth creation' but `wellbeing creation'.“ He added: “In the past, the state has successively taken on poverty , un employment, education and physical health. But equally important now are domestic violence, alcoholism, de pression and anxiety conditions, alienated youth, exammania and much else. These should become centre stage.“
Although living stan dards have vastly improved in the last 40 years, levels of enjoyment from life have stayed static for people in Australia, Germany , the US, and the UK, the team said, as they prepared to present their findings for the first time at an OECD co-organised conference on wellbeing, which will be held at the LSE on Monday and Tuesday .
When people evaluate their income or education, they generally measure it against the prevailing local norm, the study found, as a result, overall increases in income or education have little effect on the overall happiness of the population.
In fact, income inequality explains only 1% of the variation in happiness in the community , while mental health differences explain over 4%.Other key findings included education only having a very small effect on life satisfaction, compared with, for example, having a partner. The strongest factor predicting a happy adult life is not children's qualifications but their emotional health, the researchers said, criticising “exam-mania“.

Source: Times of India, 13-12-2016

Practice Is So Important For Body And Mind

Girish Deshpande





The other day i read an interview of a successful Indian tennis player.Answering a question on why a training routine is so important ­ even practising during off-season by playing the same shots over and over again ­ he said it was to develop `muscle memory'.In the interview, he further revealed that memory of such kind acquired by the muscle or a set of muscles in playing a certain kind of shot comes in handy in cliff-hanger situations of a close game, when there is no time to think and respond, but simply react.
Muscle memory
Rather than the player's brain memory , he would rely on the built-in memory of the muscle that would subconsciously follow a particular swing with ease to play that shot. Such muscle memory is developed over the years by practising the same shot tens of thousands of times. No wonder it is said that `practice makes perfect!' This is about practice in the physical realm and in this case, it is to do with sports, a highly physical activity . This got me contemplating on what it would be like to develop the memory of our mind in the spiritual context. Isn't this what practitioners of all traditions do or are supposed to do in their meditation sessions? Indeed, yes.
In Buddhist practices, Three Wisdom Tools are handy to the seeker. They are: listening to the teachings (also reading the teachings), contemplating on them and finally meditating on them. While the first tool is self-explanatory , to contemplate is basically to debate the subject within ourselves using the intellect to derive conclusively and finally meditate on the outcome thus concluded in order to make it our mind stream. This sounds easy but practitioners spend a lifetime over it! And yet our mind is merely a feather in a storm, gullible to the omnipresence of powerful seductive phenomena around us, attracting and distracting us, all the time.
From skin to marrow
A proverb in Tibetan says: “It takes six times of thorough study and practice, for dharma to travel from skin to the bone marrow.“
Clearly the emphasis is on the dogged pursuit of our practice.It is the repetitiveness of such meditative sessions, over and over again, that builds our mind memory , that not only builds moment-to-moment awareness, making us mindful and thoughtful, but also reminds us to be aware of something or do something at a designated time in the future (Pali: sati, Sanskrit: smrti, Tib: trenpa).
With this, we can offer a response to a situation quite different from our habitual patterns and painful habits. On the subject of how and why we're able to control reactions and emotions during meditation, yet fail to do so in real life situations, Dzongzar Khyentse Rinpoche says, “In meditation we notice but don't do anything about them. In other situations we don't do anything about them because we simply don't notice.“
Building our mind's memory helps close the gap between `noticing' and `doing'. If meditative sessions can be compared to laboratory trials or practice sessions, live situations are field trials or real matches.
O seeker! Let there be no difference between the two! (The author is an ordained Ngakpa and follows the Palyul School of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism).

Just 3% forest area under community governance'

Jayashree Nandi

New Delhi:





Millions of forest dwellers in the country still do not have rights to conserve forests or access to forest resources. Ten years after the Forest Rights Act was passed by Parliament -a law that secures rights of forest dwellers and empowers them to protect forests -only about 3% of the potential forest area for community governance has been recognised, says a new study .The `Promise and Performance: Ten Years of the Forest Rights Act' to be released on Tuesday finds that the rights to manage, conserve and use forest resources by forest-dwelling tribes could have been recognised over an area of 34.6 million ha -an area larger than Madhya Pradesh -but has only been recognised in little over 1.1 million ha or only 3% of the potential.
The report by Community Forest Rights-Learning and Advocacy (CFR-LA) uses data from Census 2011 to assess total forest area inside and outside village boundaries (34.6 million ha) as the minimum potential area over which community forest resource rights could be recognised. This includes the minimum estimated forest area outside revenue village boundaries under custom ary use. The authors rely on data from the ministry of tribal affairs and state governments to compute the actual area over which rights have been recognised and it is estimated that the law can deliver community forest resource rights to about 200 million tribals and other forest dwellers living in 170,000 villages across the country.
The reason for such poor performance of the act, authors say is a “lack of political will“ and opposition by “forest bureaucracy“ or the ministry of environment and forests in handing over governance rights to the communities.
But why is this law important? Because it transfers decision making powers and forest conservation responsibilities to gram sabhas.The Niyamgiri case in Odisha has already established how gram sabhas can play a powerful role in protecting cultural and resource rights of indigenous communities after gram sabhas unanimously voted against bauxite mining in hills inhabited by the Dongria Kondhs.

Source: Times of India, 13-12-2016

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Historian and truth-teller

Jadunath Sarkar has not got his due as he was attacked by both Left and Right.

Sitting in Jadunath Sarkar’s home city of Kolkata as I write this piece, I recall when I browsed through his works in my father’s eclectic and vast personal library. Navigating modern, medieval and ancient (early Indian) history it was and is fascinating to see how regional and national histories have evolved, the former often received short shrift in our desire to evolve a uniform, conformist national narrative.

December 10 is Sarkar’s 176th birth anniversary. It is worth recalling through two historical figures — Shivaji and Aurangzeb — how Sarkar’s monumental work was, in a sense, sidelined or some would say even marginalised. What did Jadunath Sarkar say about Shivaji’s coronation and his diversity-driven governance? And how would Indian rulers of today react? Why is his monumental work on Aurangzeb dissatisfying to the Left, constructing as it does a comparative narrative between that ruler’s reign and the more inclusive Akbar’s?

In my research on his work, used extensively in schools and training workshops, I have asked two questions: Was Shivaji himself a victim of the evils of caste, and was he not in every sense an inclusive and plural ruler as some of the Mughals were too? Here are some of the answers from books by Jadunath Sarkar. One of the oldest authorities on the Marathas, with two meticulously researched books on Shivaji, the historian has dealt with the tricky issue of how caste affected Shivaji’s acceptance as a formal (anointed by Brahmins) ruler despite his successful military campaigns and massive popularity.

He writes: “A deep study of Maratha society, indeed of society throughout India, reveals some facts which it is considered patriotism to ignore. We realise that the greatest obstacles to Shivaji’s success were not Mughals or Adil Shahis, Siddis or Feringis, but his own countrymen… Shivaji was not contented with all his conquests of territory and vaults full of looted treasure, so long as he was not recognised as a Kshatriya entitled to wear the sacred thread and to have the Vedic hymns chanted at his domestic rites. The Brahmans alone could give him such a recognition, and though they swallowed the sacred thread they boggled at the Vedokta! The result was a rupture. Whichever side had the rights of the case, one thing is certain, namely, that this internally torn community had not the sine qua non of a nation.”

No wonder truth-telling is not a favourite activity of the extreme right. Those who march today under Shivaji’s name, brandishing the bright saffron flag of an illusive and exclusivist nationalist past, would like us to forget the practical pluralism that guided Shivaji’s governance. Here’s what Sarkar says of Shivaji’s religious toleration and equal treatment of all subjects in House of Shivaji: “The letter which he wrote to Aurangzeb, protesting against the imposition of the poll-tax on the Hindus, is a masterpiece of clear logic, calm persuasion, and political wisdom. Though he was himself a devout Hindu, he could recognise true sanctity in a Musalman, and therefore he endowed a Muhammadan holy man named Baba Yaqut with land and money and installed him at Keleshi. All creeds had equal opportunities in his service and he employed a Muslim secretary named Qazi Haidar, who, after Shivaji’s death, went over to Delhi and rose to be chief justice of the Mughal Empire.”

If Sarkar’s rendering of Shivaji pricks the Hindu right, his voluminous work on the Mughals and especially Aurangzeb, has made him the unfair target of some Left and “Marxist” historians.

Sarkar wrote at the end of his vast five-volume study of Aurangzeb: “Aurangzeb did not attempt such an ideal [of nation-making], even though his subjects formed a very composite population.and he had no European rivals hungrily watching to destroy his kingdom. On the contrary, he deliberately undid the beginnings of a national and rational policy which Akbar had set on foot.” Akbar had successfully converted “a military monarchy into a national state”. Aurangzeb failed precisely on this score. Whereas the “liberal Akbar, the self-indulgent Jahangir, and the cultured Shah Jahan had welcomed Shias in their camps and courts and given them the highest offices”, the “orthodox Aurangzeb.barely tolerated them as a necessary evil”. The latter’s conflict with the Rajputs and “the hated poll-tax (jaziya)” lent Shivaji the aura of a Hindu “national” leader in the eyes of his contemporaries.

Shivaji or Akbar, Aurangzeb or Babur, it is strange and telling how we pick, and exclude, those aspects from the figures of the past that do not suit our own perceived contemporary realities.

It is when we as a society and people, are able calmly and confidently to appreciate the works of scholars — whatever side of the ideological spectrum we may place them — on the objective merit of their work, that a truly modern consciousness could be born. Sarkar, once the vice chancellor of Calcutta University, historian of India from the 17th to the 18th century, a moving force behind the Indian Historical Records Commission, and the forerunner of the National Archives of India, is undoubtedly one such person.

The writer is a civil rights activist, educationist and journalist

Source: Indian Express, 10-12-2016

Beware the cultural revolution

Government directive to educational institutions to execute the digital financial literacy mission subverts the idea of the university.

Cultural revolution, feared by this writer and promised by a minister of the Modi government in these pages, has begun in India. As in the Cultural Revolution in China, universities, schools and educational institutions are being harnessed to unleash it on the country.

In an unprecedented and outrageous move, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has asked institutions of higher education to deploy their students, faculty and other resources to implement this government’s scheme of turning India into a cashless society. A high-sounding name has been found for this drive: The Digital Financial Literacy Mission. All central universities, IITs, AISERs and other institutions have been asked to rope in students and train them to be digital finance educators. They will fan out in the bazaars, like Sadar Bazar and Azadpur Sabzi Mandi in Delhi, to teach street vendors and shopkeepers the technicalities of cashless transactions.
They are expected to train traders in using the machines and apprise them of the benefits of moving towards a cashless society.

The MHRD has issued a four-page circular, where it calls the scheme a transformational mission. The ministry has asked the directors/heads of institutions to ensure that the mission is undertaken earnestly. Not only are organisations like the NCC and the NSS to be used, but to ensure the participation of students, the ministry has asked the institutions to make it an academic programme and award credits. The language of the circular is one of command, not of suggestion.

The merit of the government’s intention to make India a fully digitised or cashless economy apart, we need to ask how the drive against black money morphed into a mission to make a cashless society. That will happen once we regain our senses and have the right information. But we know that not all economists and financial experts are in agreement with the government’s claims. Sociologists and psychologists are supposed to study the impact of the shift on societal behaviour and tell the society about its long-term implication.

In short, students would expect their teachers to lead them to a process of analysing and criticising the government’s move. What is the other way of creating knowledge about this situation and creating an ethos where informed discussion becomes possible, instead of being forced to choose between the competing claims?

If the Centre is right in using the universities to change the financial habits of the people, why should the government of Bihar not ask students and teachers in that state to work as prohibition volunteers? After all both governments seek legitimacy in the language of morality.

Universities are neither cheerleaders nor footsoldiers of the government of the day. Universities are also not the implementation agency of governments. Forget the government, which in a democracy is supposed to be temporary, even the state and society do not bind the universities to them in a utilitarian relationship. Universities, though created and supported by the state and society, are meant to maintain a respectable distance from the two institutions. There are different theories of knowledge creation, but we can be sure about one thing. If the university merges its interests and being with the centre of power, it loses the ability to talk about it in a language of knowledge. The university is not a spokesperson of the government.

We also know that, from time to time, governments feel tempted to make use of the youth in the campuses to implement their policies. The cover of national interest is used for the purpose. Fight against terrorism is a national mission in many countries. But when the UK government sought to turn the faculty and students into informers and informants, it faced strong opposition. The government was forced to retreat.

What is noble and urgent and universal in the eyes of the government need to be questioned if we are to be true inheritors of the shastras, Plato, Socrates, Gandhi and Foucault. The claims of the government need to put to the severest test. Who will do it if not universities, for they alone have the necessary tools.

The government’s order does two things: It discourages, rather disallows, the faculty and student, to study and examine the state’s move, and uses an unpaid youth population to force people to accept its plan. Involvement of the universities will give the scheme a veneer of respectability.

This was coming. In the last two-and-half years, universities have been receiving circulars directly from the Centre. The UGC has been reduced to a post office that routes government orders. Universities have been ordered to observe days like Swachhata Divas, Ekta Divas, Samvidhan Divas, etc. They are asked to submit proof of implementation of the government order. These orders infantilise and trivialise the nature of the university. But unfortunately, heads of our institutions lack the courage to stand up to the government and say the faculty decides the agenda for the campus.

An innocuous sounding word like divyang coined by the prime minister has entered the administrative vocabulary of academic institutions without any debate. When power becomes the source of wisdom, and when knowledge seekers and creaters reduce themselves to the state of followers, we need to worry.

The writer teaches at Delhi University

Source: Indian Express, 10-12-2016