Fine Tune Heart And Head With Commitment

Discourse: Swami Sukhabodhananda





In Indian culture, there is a maxim called `andha panku nyaaya'. The narration goes further ­ a blind man and a lame person are trapped in a forest fire. One cannot see but he can walk, while the other cannot walk but he can see. They both help each other... lame person guiding and the blind person carrying the lame person and thus they both escape the forest fire.We are caught in the forest fire of samsara, living a life of deficiency . Our head and heart each has one type of strength and also one type of weakness.Strengthening the strengths and weakening the weaknesses makes a person integrated. Krishna refers to such an integrated person as yuktaha.In such an integrated space one can come out of the forest fire of samsara, conflict and the ups and downs in life.
We need to amalgamate both head oriented knowledge and heart oriented devotion. In the words of Adi Shankaracharya, both head and heart should blend in the right proportion. Fine tune both your head and heart right now, in all walks of your life. Dealing with your patner, sometimes only the head may not work, sometimes only the heart may not work.At times, you have to be flexible with both dimensions of your heart and head.
The complete works of Adi Shankaracharya addresses both these methods: balancing your head and your heart. What is very important is your commitment towards growth and enlightenment ­ moksha, towards liberation, niravana, call it by any name it does not matter. It is such a commitment which brings about a certain synergy , brings about certain homeostasis in your whole being.
Without commitment all knowledge one acquires will only decorate one's ego. Without commitment towards enlightenment all the feelings in one's heart are directed towards decorating a feeling that one is a very heart oriented person. Have you seen a lot of `feeling oriented arrogance' as some people express? More often they shun knowledge and take shelter by declaring that they are just feeling oriented.
Therefore, the bottom line is ­ it is neither the head oriented knowledge nor heart oriented feelings but it is the commitment towards liberation ­ nirvana ­ which is most important.
Just for a moment let us scan back to the lives of great masters. We realise that there existed thirst for achieving enlightenment irrespective of the situations or difficulties that they encountered in their lives.
By studying the lives of enlightened masters one gets in touch with the recipe for engaging in an adventure ­ a true adventure of life. In fact, this adventure is the very purpose of their whole lifetime. It is said, `What is the quality of an enlightened person (`Siddhashya lakshanaani yani') should become the effort for the seeker ­ saadhakasya saadhanani prayatnena sampaadyani iti shravanaat.
For example, if someone's cooking ability is something to be emulated, the recipe of that good cooking should be taken and adopted in one's life.
Pause for a moment; let us examine clearly our commitment and fine tune our understanding so as to get clarity and polish our understanding. All great masters had commitment towards enlightenment, and it is that commitment with which one's knowledge will sharpen the focus. One's heart, one's elevated feeling is going to smoothen one's way into understanding. Without a deep rooted commitment nothing substantial would happen.

Stranger in the classroom

I am beginning to understand what cultural exchange means, and I am relishing these moments here because very soon I will miss, ‘Onkita’ and they won’t be around to sing their song ‘Tchikita’ to me.

It feels wonderful when you enter the school premises and the students come running to greet you. Some ask if I will stay with them the entire year and some even correct my French pronunciations. “Bonjour Onkita,” they all chanted on my first day in class. I knew the French were at loggerheads with the phonetics of the Indian languages, but now I witnessed it, as they could not pronounce a simple ‘Ankita.’ And here is where my journey began…

I was teaching English and French in India, but the notion of learning in a new education system came in the form of The Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF). The idea was not to merely help French teenagers speak better English, as their language assistant, but to take my culture to theirs, mix both in a crucible and produce some interaction in English. Now that was a challenge! My first month in Paris went by smoothly. After the initial week of introduction, I encouraged them to ask me questions. I made a presentation about my country (India), my city — basically the life I left in India to pursue this opportunity. The curious minds spoke and I was instantly put at ease. They had all sorts of questions: “How many languages do you speak in India?” “Do you see elephants on roads?” “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Do you have any pets?” I happily answered all of them.

As months passed, exercises became different and more interactive. The challenge for me was that I had to teach different age groups. It was and still is irksome to decide activities based on these age groups. Learning a language in French classrooms is pretty different from India. In India we focus more on completing a syllabus and appearing for a ‘final exam’ as our target, but here in France, students have to take the language exam only at the end of Class XII.

As an assistant teacher, it is a bit relaxed, as I need to work in accordance with the main teacher, and with the class in half and half groups. Sometimes, the students remind me of the time when I was learning French. So once I decided to do a role-play activity, just like I had during my French language learning days. It turned out to be the most fun activity that day; not more fun than a Trump and Hillary telephone conversation. On November 14, I spoke to them about Children’s Day celebrations in India. The students asked me a lot of questions, and many also debated having a similar day in France. This was followed by a video of the song ‘Bum Bum Bole.’ I was floored by their reaction.

I have just three months left with these students here, and I have got attached to them and their stories. It’s wonderful how these few months have been preparing me to go back to India with all that I have learned from my students. I share a beautiful rapport with my colleagues here. They are not just people I work with, they are people who encourage me with their teaching ideas; after work, they take me out dancing or playing badminton or invite me over for dinner.

I am beginning to understand what cultural exchange means, and I am relishing these moments here because very soon I will miss, ‘Onkita’ and they won’t be around to sing their song ‘Tchikita’ to me.

(The writer is a language lover who left journalism to pursue her passion for teaching)

Source: DNA, 8-02-2017

Pride as well as prejudice

The tribal bodies’ protest against reservation for women in local municipalities in Nagaland must not be allowed to settle the argument

All-male tribal bodies have been against the 33% reservation for women in urban local bodies (ULBs) in Nagaland right from the time the Nagaland government enacted the Nagaland Municipal (First Amendment) Act in 2006, on the grounds that reservation for women in ULBs would violate Article 371(A) of the Constitution and infringe on Naga culture, traditions and customary laws. Faced with vehement opposition, the Nagaland government did not conduct elections to civic bodies for over 10 years.

Spearheaded by the Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA), Naga women filed a writ petition challenging the State government’s refusal to hold municipal elections before the Kohima Bench of the Gauhati High Court on June 26, 2011. In October 2011, a single-judge bench of the court upheld the Naga women’s petition and directed the government to hold elections to municipal councils and town councils on or before January 20, 2012. But before the deadline, the Nagaland government filed an appeal before a Division Bench of the Gauhati High Court, which stayed the previous ruling. One of the arguments put forward by the Nagaland government was the claim that implementing such a law would ‘upset the peace’ in Nagaland. On September 22, 2012, the Nagaland State Assembly adopted a resolution rejecting women’s reservation in ULBs on the ground that it infringes on the social and customary practices of the Nagas, which Article 371(A) safeguards.

The Joint Action Committee on Women Reservation (JACWR) then moved a Special Leave Petition in the Supreme Court in September 2012. On April 20, 2016, the Supreme Court upheld the single-judge ruling of the Gauhati High Court of October 2011. So, the Nagaland government enacted the Nagaland Municipal (Third Amendment) Bill 2016, which revoked the September 2012 resolution, paving the way for women’s reservation in ULBs. Early in January, the State government announced that elections to the ULBs would be held on February 1.

Tribal threats

The tribal bodies protested loudly as soon as the elections were announced and threatened candidates who intended to file nominations that they would be ex-communicated from their respective tribes. Coming under pressure, some candidates didn’t file nominations and some others withdrew their papers. Those who refused to withdraw from the fray were ex-communicated, ranging from 10 to 30 years.

Through all this, the State government remained a silent spectator and failed to assert the rule of law, especially because these tribal bodies are not traditional institutions recognised by Article 371(A). The ULBs too are not traditional Naga institutions but constitutional bodies under Part IX of the Constitution over which Naga traditional bodies have no mandate.

When the State government refused to call off the elections, the tribal bodies announced a bandh from January 28 to February 1. They enforced the bandh across Nagaland although elections took place in several places on February 1. Clearly, some towns did not agree with these tribal bodies.

Meanwhile, on January 31, two persons were killed in Dimapur, the commercial capital of the State. Things soon took an ugly turn, and the Nagaland government declared the elections ‘null and void’. Since then, tribal bodies have begun clamouring for more, seeking the resignation of the Chief Minister, no less. Though life is limping back to normal, there is still a bandh on government offices and a restriction on movement of government vehicles.

But it must be said that even before the bandh call, the focus had started shifting from women’s reservation to issues of taxes and land ownership contained in the Nagaland Municipal (Third Amendment) Bill 2016.

Unconstitutional demand

What is even more alarming, and preposterous, is that the Nagaland government has decided to write to the Centre demanding that Nagaland be exempted from Part IX A of the Constitution. “If the State Government and all the stakeholders cannot arrive at an amicable resolution of this issue at the earliest, the best option appears to be to seek exemption of Nagaland from Part IX A of the Constitution, which contains a mandatory provision under Article 243T for 33% women reservation in ULBs, which will put to rest the issue and avoid further misunderstanding among the people,” the Chief Minister’s office explained in a release.

Clearly, to rescue itself, the Nagaland government is doing a Pontius Pilate by washing its hands of the reservation issue and sacrificing the rights of Naga women at the altar of Naga males’ primeval tribal ego. If Nagaland is exempted from the purview of Part IX of the Constitution, Naga women will have absolutely no hope of entering into and participating in decision-making bodies.

Reservation for women is necessary in patriarchal societies like Naga society, for instance, where there is a historical culture of inequalities even though Nagas don’t practise sati, female foeticide and infanticide, and do not believe in dowry or the caste system. But Naga customs, culture and traditions preclude women from inheriting land and participating in the decision-making process, which is exactly what Article 371(A) protects.

The other deeply worrying issue is that because the government at the Centre appears to be misinformed about ground realities in Nagaland, it is possible that the State government’s claim that the reservation issue may ‘upset the peace’ in the state could cloud its judgment.

Undeniably, the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Naga women now depend on the Centre, as much as on the gender sensitised public of India.

Monalisa Changkija is a journalist, poet and editor of Nagaland Page.

Source: The Hindu, 8-02-2017

SBI PO 2017: Recruitment notification for 2,313 vacancies issued, check it here

The State Bank Of India (SBI) on Monday issued a notification (CRPD/PO/2016-17/19) for the recruitment of 2,313 Probationary Officers (PO) in the state-run bank.

The notification can be viewed in the careers section of SBI’s official website.

Interested candidates would need to go through a selection process which includes a preliminary and main examination followed by group exercises and interview.

The online registration process began on February 7 and will continue until March 6, 2017. A candidate should be a graduate in any discipline from a university recognised by the Government of India or have any equivalent qualification recognised as such by the central government. Those who are in the final year/semester of their graduation may also apply provisionally subject to the condition that, if called for interview, they will have to produce proof of having passed the graduation examination on or before July 1, 2017. Chartered Accountants can also apply.

Source: Hindustan Times, 7-02-2017

TSPSC gurukul teachers recruitment notification 2017 out, apply for 7,306 posts from Feb 10

Telangana State Public Service Commission has issued notification to fill 7,306 vacancies under Residential Educational Institutions Societies (REIS) on its official website.

The online application process for the exam starts on February 10 and will end on March 4, 2017.

The examination is being conducted to select 4,362 Trained Graduate Teachers (TGT), 921 Post Graduate (PG) Teachers (PGTs), 6 Physical Director (School), 616 Physical Education Teachers (PETs), 372 Art Teachers, 43 Craft Teachers, 197 Music Teachers, 533 Staff Nurses and 256 Librarian (schools).

The online examination (objective type) for art teacher, craft teacher, music teacher, staff nurse is likely to be held on April 2, 2017.

Source: Hindustan Times, 7-02-2017

By banning NGOs from foreign funds, the govt is crippling its own services, laws

It was at an airy, well-equipped hospital of 100 beds on a sylvan hilltop in tribal Tamil Nadu that N Devadasan realised how, even when it appears prepared, India’s public health system is not. Catering to about 17,000 tribals at the tri-junction of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, the government hospital could not stop the deaths of many pregnant women. There was no follow-up care after admission, and there were only two doctors, usually loath to physically examine their tribal patients. “There was a local saying,” said Devadasan. “‘You come in on your own, and you are carried out by four people’.”

A soft-spoken, earnest doctor determined to work “in a place of need”, Devadasan spent a decade with his wife in the late 1980s and ’90s catering to the primary healthcare needs of tribals whose children died from reasons difficult to comprehend in prosperous, emerging India, including diarrhoea, measles, respiratory infections and malnutrition. These illnesses continue to kill Indian children by the thousands. Although India has steadily improved its infant-mortality rate (a 53% drop over a quarter century), a million babies die every year at a rate higher than the average of 154 low- and middle-income countries.

Living on the forest edge in the town of Gudalur, initially in a leaky house with no TV, fridge or running water, except in the toilet, the Devadasans represented many idealistic folk who try to fill the country’s biggest governance gap: The last-mile delivery of services, particularly to disadvantaged communities. The Devadasans set up a system of immunising children, monitoring growth and delivering babies, but they could not handle complicated deliveries or treat disease, such as pneumonia. Financed by British and Dutch donors, the NGO they worked for asked the government: Could they volunteer at the hilltop hospital? No. Could they get vaccines to deliver to remote tribal villages? No.

This perverseness is an Indian quality. It also explains why many NGOs that work on governance failures report that Indian donors want to see buildings or tangible things — they are reluctant to donate money for research or training, and, largely, flee from anything that spells “r-i-g-h-t-s”. After a decade with the tribals of Gudalur, the Devadasans left to see if they could address the knowledge gap at the district and state level in the government health system by working with public health services. If they could be strengthened, the poorest would benefit.

Today, Devadasan’s decade-old NGO, the Institute of Public Health (IPH) — run from a modest house in a Bangalore suburb — generates data from within district hospitals to help evidence-based decision making. It shares the data to influence policy — in other words, advocacy (which, Devadasan admitted, is now a “bad word”), and provides on-the-job training and professional education for government health officers.

Some IPH recommendations have become part of India’s public-healthcare improvements. Devadasan was part of the Karnataka government’s task-force on reorganising primary healthcare and the national health assurance mission; a colleague was part of India’s official delegation to the UN in October on anti-tobacco laws; and IPH training programmes — for the police, education, urban development, information, infotech/biotech and other departments — have led to Karnataka, which has tasked the NGO with being the implementing agency, being furthest along in giving life to the country’s anti-tobacco law, more than eight years after it came into force, 13 years after it was passed.

Helping the government implement its own laws in a country full of high-quality legislation but poor execution is an important role that NGOs like the IPH fulfil. That argument did not stop Narendra Modi’s government from banning, “in the public interest” or for “anti-national activities — to use the vague, official reasons — foreign donations to IPH and 24 other NGOs in November. The real reasons, of course, are clearer. 

Some of the NGOs forbidden from foreign donations have helped implement laws in a manner inconvenient to Modi in the past, such as the Sabrang Trust of Teesta Setalvad, which fought cases on behalf of Muslim victims of the 2002 Gujarat riots, and the Lawyers Collective, run by former Indian additional solicitor general Indira Jaising, who defended Sabrang. Another banned NGO includes Gujarat’s 27-year-old Navsarjan Trust, which has built facilities for disenfranchised Dalits and fought legal cases, most notably on behalf of four Dalit tanners flogged by Right-wing Hindu vigilantes for skinning cows.

The IPH had rocked no boat associated with the BJP (although, its anti-tobacco work, I heard, could have riled the tobacco industry). Its foreign-donations ban further illustrates the inherently arbitrary and opaque nature of the government’s actions. Devadasan first got to know of the cancellation of the IPH’s foreign-contribution licence from the newspapers. An appeal to ministry of home affairs, got this reply on December 26: “It is (sic) to inform that the application for renewal is refused in the public interest.”

With four donors (Belgian, German, the United States, and the Red Cross) cashiered, so to say, the IPH’s Rs 2.5-crore annual budget is in disarray, and 30 of IPH’s 40 public health professionals and other staff will leave by the end of this month. Only one donor remains: The World Health Organization, which does not require government clearance.

To use the public-interest justification against respected organisations that work in the public interest, delivering the government’s own laws and services, is an act of irony (consider, the IPH works with the health ministry and faces action from the home ministry). To provide no clear justification is not only perverse but sets yardsticks others can similarly misuse — the precedent for the hounding of NGOs was established by the previous Congress government. And to argue that these NGOs can do without foreign donations — which political parties are free to receive — hides the uncomfortable fact that Indian donors aren’t exactly lining up.

One prospective Indian donor told Devadasan the most it would do was sponsor a bag of medicines — provided IPH carried their logo and name.

Samar Halarnkar is editor, Indiaspend.org, a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit

Source: Hindustan Times, 8-02-2017

A combination of aspiration and desperation is fuelling migration in India

The latest Economic Survey (ES) points to a dramatic spike in internal migration with Delhi and the NCR being the top destinations.

Between 2011 and 2016, close to nine million migrated between states annually, up from about 3.3 million suggested by successive censuses, says the survey.

Among the states that send the highest number of migrants to these places, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar top the list. They are followed by Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal.

In an interview to HT, Indrajit Roy, Principal Investigator of University of Oxford’s study Lives on the Move, talks about what triggers such high migration and why it is now absolutely critical to make social and political rights of citizens portable.

KD: India is on the move. Is it a good or bad thing?

IR: Well, the short answer is that ‘it depends’. What does it depend on? The circumstances and the nature of migration. Migration in general is to be welcomed and there are indications that migration in India helps people to exit from hierarchical social relationships. However, much of the migration in India, especially related to work and employment, is circular — which means people don’t find enough social and economic opportunities outside of their home localities and must fall back on these for sustenance. You have in India a perverse sort of mobility, an ‘immobile mobility’: Individuals are mobile but their households remain immobile.

Migration is good because it might improve people’s economic condition. More importantly, migration and mobility enables people to escape local oppression and lead dignified lives, further their social networks, learn new skills and disseminate social and political ideas. This is the reason that statesmen such as BR Ambedkar argued that Indians should be more mobile than he found them to be. Mobility, if motivated by a desire to exit caste hierarchies and to aspire to better lives, can be emancipatory.

It is often said that migration will disrupt the village way of life, thus destroying a civilisation. These fears are ahistorical. India’s so-called ‘village way of life’ was a product of colonial rule that encouraged the country’s ‘peasantisation’. Disrupting this ‘way of life’ only disrupts a colonial creation, not Indian civilisation.

Concerns about mobility are also motivated by a desire to keep ‘people in their place’. Look at the way migrant workers are treated in Delhi and Mumbai: They are almost considered to be ‘not human’. Bal Thackeray once said one Bihari brought with him a 100 headaches. I believe caste hierarchies inform elite suspicion of mobility and migration, especially by Dalitbahujans, in a major way. Anti-caste struggles over the last two centuries have weakened the caste hierarchy considerably. Migration is one of the ways of diminishing the hold of caste on people’s lives further.

However, if mobility is forced due to economic distress, civil unrest and political persecution, it signals a problem. One is not here talking only of physical coercion, but also extreme conditions of destitution and exclusion. In such circumstances, mobility is far from the panacea and might even exacerbate existing social and economic hierarchies.

In India, fragmented landholdings in the countryside make it imperative for people to combine agricultural work with work outside of that sector, the 2011 census reported an absolute decline in the number of cultivators across India. This might have been good news, except that the number of agricultural labourers increased during precisely this period .

Informal employment remains in the region of a whopping 92% .

To make matters worse, inequality is at an all-time high and we have a long way to go before the per capita incomes of the States even begin to converge, as the Economic Survey itself notes in the report (Chapter 10).

This combination of aspiration and desperation results in internal migration in India, at least for employment at the poorer end of the spectrum, being ‘circular’: one estimated - reported in the Economic Survey (page 267) suggests there are 100 million circular labour migrants in India.

This means 100 million people traverse the length and breadth of India, seeking dignified lives and livelihoods, working for a few months at different locations throughout the year, and then returning because of limited opportunities.

Throughout this time, their families remain home - circular labour migration is a mostly male thing. Although economic remittances do contribute to migrant households being less dependent on local elites, the fact remains that at the end of the day, migrant workers and their families remain rooted to their villages.

During their iterations, migrant workers have no access to their social entitlements or their political rights.

Thus, India today is witness to both impulses. On the one hand, people seek to exit oppressive social hierarchies and lead dignified lives as equals. On the other hand, poverty and inequality continue to blight the lives of an overwhelming majority. People trying their best to lead dignified lives and exit social hierarchies. But there are simply not enough opportunities for them - either in their ‘source locations’ or their ‘destinations’.

KD: Your ongoing research in migration is based in Bihar. What’s triggering migration from that state?

IR: Our research shows that the quest for dignified livelihoods is an important motivating factor for people leaving Bihar. I want to insist on ‘dignified livelihoods’: there is employment available locally, but many labourers, the majority of whom are Dalitbahujans, will refuse to work for farmers or landlords who practice caste discrimination.

Our research assistants tell us of labourers who, during the 1970s and 1980s, fought with local employers because they were not being paid on time or because they faced caste discrimination. Refusing to tolerate continued oppression, they left for dignified work as far as Punjab when agricultural opportunities were available. But more than incomes, people justified their going to Punjab on the grounds that they were treated with respect and dignity there: “Sardarji sits on the same cot as us” or “We are offered food in the same utensils that everyone else eats in”.

Remember this was the time the Bihar socialists had been really campaigning along themes of izzat and samman. Under Lalu Yadav’s regime, migrant workers felt confident that local landlords (the dabang people) would not harm their families.

Over the last few years, Punjab’s popularity has declined and people look to Delhi and the southern States for work. A recent survey we did in 10 districts of Bihar reveals that while 40% of all migrant workers flock to Delhi for work, as many as 22% seek work in the southern States. Clearly, economic opportunity is important - but not the only thing they are looking for- for example, there was not a great deal of enthusiasm regarding Gujarat and Mumbai, the hubs of economic growth although - yes - Delhi is deemed as welcoming.

KD: What kinds of policies are required to ensure a better life for migrants?

IR: Social and political rights in India are based on the assumption that people are sedentary. Under the public distribution system (PDS), people’s ration cards are invalid in their destinations of work. These migrants depend either on their employer or labour contractor for food provisions or purchase food in the open market.

This significantly increases their cost of living and reduces the additional earnings they might hope to remit to their families. The only social support their families possess is the compensation offered by the state in case of death at work. Because migrant workers are mostly in informal employment and dotted across several sectors and industries, they have little organised space to voice their grievances or articulate complaints.

Migrants’ voting rights are also restricted to their villages – what the census calls their ‘usual place of residence’ (UPR) – despite the fact that they give the best part of their working lives to the city. On the one hand, this reduces their ‘value’ to the destination locality’s politicians, who do not need their votes to win elections.

And on the other, it sees them excluded from the electoral process when they are unable to go back to their homes during election time to cast their votes. A study conducted by the NGO Ajivika and their partners revealed that over 60% of itinerant migrants were unable to cast their votes in at least one election for the simple reason that they were away from home.

Taking cognisance of this mobility, the state should consider making social and political rights portable. People should be allowed to access their social entitlements - the PDS grain, etc - from anywhere in the country. This government loves digital technologies and should use such technologies to serve the circular labour migrants who build India.

Moreover, NRIs are being the given the right to vote, irrespective of where they live. Surely, the Indians who labour to construct, manufacture and service India deserve that right no matter where they live.

Source: Hindustan Times, 7-02-2017