Thursday, May 18, 2017

Dealing with depression

How to help young people cope with the blues

The morning of April 23 began with a front-page news report stating that another IITian had committed suicide on the campus. His friends claimed that he had been depressed for a few months. The report showed a timeline chronicling suicides on Indian Institute of Technology campuses over the past year. This young man should have had a promising future, yet what had his life amounted to? Surely, it was worth more than serving as a mere statistic for the next timeline.

It is a tremendous leap of faith for a depressed person to talk about his or her suffering. They fear being judged or just dismissed. Most often, all they hear from a parent or friend is, “It's going to be alright.” This approach would be ‘alright’ if it is followed up by exploring a route map to restoring normalcy. The word ‘alright’, however, is just used to package the whole event and brush it under the carpet. As a society we are equally to blame for depression leading to suicide. We will forget this death till a new suicide comes along, reported alongside a longer timeline enlisting dates and college affiliation.

The popular misconception is that depression is a lifestyle disease and the luxury of an indulgent few. Nothing could be further from the truth; students, professionals and housewives are likely to experience depression at some point in their lives. We are always taught to gloss over any unpleasant episode. It could be a bad examination grade or a friendship turning sour. The repeated advice is to ‘move on’ without processing or acknowledging how we feel. These repressed feelings accumulate over time, and when we are least expecting it, debilitate us.

The most unsettling fact about depression is that you cannot rationalise why you are feeling a certain way. To compound the problem, it is often not a permanent phenomenon, paying random visits for months or even years. You could have woken up feeling okay, yet, a few hours later, you just want to be alone or cry in the confines of your apartment. You are in an environment where everyone is working towards their goals, yet you are in a state of suspension after being pulled out unceremoniously from your previous trajectory. As the days progress, a feeling of worthlessness encapsulates you; you question your purpose and the need to live. And standing at the precipice, you decide that death might be the preferable option.

Sometimes well-meaning friends will say, “You can indulge in retail therapy, that’s always helpful,” “Wear bright lipstick,” “Listen to peppy music,” or “Come have dinner with us.” It would be a lot easier if any of these suggestions helped a depressed person. They achieve the opposite: the tips heighten the surreal contrast in his or her life.

The primary cause for student depression is stress. We celebrate academic success, the perfect score and GPA, the high rank in an entrance exam, and the award-winning project. Every failure is also scoffed at to the extent that even a small deviation from what is considered successful is accompanied by a feeling of shame and disappointment. Take the case of students who have topped every school exam, won medals and aced the entrance test. Placing them in an environment where they might not be the best anymore or where they could get an average grade, leads to their being insecure, questioning their abilities, and feeling inferior to their peers. Add to this the filial pressure to appear always perfect: land the best job or get the prestigious scholarship from a top-ranked university, and you have the formula for stress-induced depression.

My friend, a psychology major and student counselor, prescribes as part of a weekly exercise, a daily log listing out every emotion of a patient along with any explanation for why he or she might feel that way. During follow-up meetings, she would focus on instances when a sinking or helpless feeling could not be attributed to a causative event. She found that tackling those episodes helped her patients the most.

Depression can be cured by going to a counselor or taking prescribed anti-depressants, or a combination of the both. It is imperative that every college campus have a psychological services centre staffed by counselors specialising in fields such as relationship issues, academic stress and grief management. It is still anathema for Indian families to accept counseling as part of a treatment plan to fight depression. The frequently heard refrain is, “What will other people think?” The truth is that depression is an illness, and just like parents would take a child to an orthopedic physician to treat a sprained ankle, they should be able to encourage a child to see a certified therapist when he or she is suffering from mental illness.

The time has come for us to be more attentive to the way our friends or peers feel; one non-judgmental conversation could be the starting point for someone in distress to regain lost equilibrium and consult a psychologist, and could eventually save a life. — Krithika Chandrasekar

Source: The Hindu, 18-05-2017

The long journey of a forgotten people

ime Minister Narendra Modi’s public rally on May 12 with Sri Lanka’s hill-country Tamils, on the second day of his two-day visit to the country, was a success, if you went by conventional markers such as the crowd he drew or the cheers that arose from it. But its real outcome is rather limited compared to the wide-ranging needs of the historically neglected community.

That an estimated 35,000 people from in and around the central highlands converged on the small town of Norwood – many walking over 5 km since buses clogged the narrow roads — partly reflects the affinity the Tamils feel for India, from where their ancestors moved to Sri Lanka about 200 years ago. Moreover, hill-country politicians put in their might to mobilise workers, campaigning widely across the tea estates that employ a fourth of the over one million-strong community.

Mr. Modi’s visit to the region, the first by an Indian Prime Minister, was a strong affirmation of the community’s economic and political significance. In Sri Lanka’s key 2015 presidential elections, hill-country or Malayaha Tamils decisively voted for the President Maithripala Sirisena-Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe opposition combine that ousted the authoritarian Mahinda Rajapaksa regime.

A story of neglect

Hill-country leaders who met Mr. Modi sought greater assistance in education, which remains a crucial need. Most estate schools lack teachers for mathematics and science, limiting higher education and employment choices for students. While Sri Lanka takes pride in its public health delivery and indicators, services in plantation areas are woefully inadequate. The India-funded hospital he inaugurated is no exception. Short-staffed and overburdened, it is struggling to serve the local community.

Indian assistance to a deprived region is certainly welcome but, at best, can only supplement what Sri Lanka ought to deliver to a forgotten people.

Several decades of neglect by the plantation companies and the state, that earned huge profits and export revenue from the estate workers’ cheap labour, have pushed hill-country Tamils to the margins of society. Northern Tamils underplay their sacrifices in the armed struggle, forgetting that many of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam cadre who died in the final offensive in May 2009 were those who migrated from the hill country. Often quick to empathise with the northern Tamils, Tamil Nadu politicians are never heard speaking for Malayaha Tamils, who came from the State to work in British-owned plantations. Even New Delhi’s attention to these Sri Lankans — of most recent Indian origin — seems an afterthought, and coincides with their growing political clout.

After decades of struggle over citizenship and the largely patronage-style politics of the Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC) that traditionally represented them, the community has hardly escaped its exclusion. The highly politicised trade unions have weakened as the estate labour force has shrunk. A widespread wage struggle last year was defused by companies that ultimately had their way. Even as a professional and business class emerges from the community, many women plantation workers are migrating to West Asia to work as domestic help, for meagre wages in highly exploitative conditions. Some return home only in coffins.

Slow political steps

In their 2015 vote, hill-country Tamils made an important political shift, breaking away from the CWC that supported Mr. Rajapaksa, and backing younger leaders from new parties who formed the Tamil Progressive Alliance (TPA). Now Ministers in the government, they have been vocal in their disappointment over slow progress on many fronts, including post-war reconciliation with minorities and a political solution to Tamil grievances. Notably, they are eager to position Malayaha Tamils as national player, like the majority Sinhalese, minority Tamils of the north and east, and Muslims.

It will take substantial political commitment from the government to deliver what is due to this community and bridge the gap between the hill country and the rest of the island. Last December, the cabinet decided to provide seven perches of land to estate residents — a belated but important step to address their landlessness. India too has offered to build 14,000 houses, a drop in the ocean of the nearly 1,60,000 homes the community needs. Acknowledging the estate sector as “most deprived”, the national unity government unveiled an ambitious National Plan of Action for the Social Development of the Plantation Community (2016-2020), but what it will do with it remains to be seen.

Given the task ahead and the limits to what an external actor can do, the euphoria around Mr. Modi’s visit not only appears misplaced but also has the danger of reinforcing hill-country Tamils as passive beneficiaries rather than rightful citizens.

When he addressed Malayaha Tamils at the Norwood grounds, he hailed them as the “indispensable backbone of Sri Lanka”. Quoting a couplet from the Thirukkural, he assured them: “Wealth will find its own way to the man of unfailing energy and efforts”. Clearly, he missed the irony of saying this to a community whose toil and tears have been unrewarded for two centuries.

meera.srinivasan@thehindu.co.in

Source: The Hindu, 18-05-2017

Our Inner Stillness

RAJINDER SINGH JI MAHARAJ

A soul infuses `life' in the human body for a certain period of time. When the soul inhabits the body , it is still one with God.The soul, however, is overpowered by powerful forces, such as the mind, the body and the outer world, which cause it, over time, to forget itself. The soul slowly begins to identify itself with the body , mind and world outside. It is attuned to only one channel: the channel of the world.This physical planet is not a separate offshoot from all of creation and God. Most religions believe there are higher regions of existence to which the soul goes after it dies. Scientists and doctors have tried to verify this by documenting accounts of people who were declared clinically dead but had near-death experiences and described something in the nature of after-life.
The question is, where are these realms? They are not zones in outer space delineated by borders. These realms exist concurrently with the material or temporal realm. The reason we are not aware of them is because they operate on a different frequency or vibration.
The saints and mystics tell us that we have the choice to either stay tuned to this physical world or to tune in to the channels of God. For this, we must stop identifying with the body , mind and temporal world, and identify with the soul instead.Once we identify with the soul, we will pick up the frequencies the soul is capable of receiving.God has not made it hard for us to become aware of our true Home. It is we who have made it complicated.

The Fundamental Principle Of All Existence

Kishor Kulkarni

Everything is simply a manifestation of the singular Brahmn, the funda mental principle that underlies all physical creation. There is nothing other than Brahmn. Brahmn splits into basically two objects the perceiver and the perceived. It indicates the fundamental oneness of all objects, their perceived separateness and distinctions notwithstanding. Brahmn is the sum total of everything. It exists before creation and it will exist after creation is destroyed.What is eternal and what is transitory? The body and perceptible objects in this physical world are transitory an illusion like a dream. So they will appear and disappear like waves on the ocean. But there is something else that is truly eternal though not directly perceptible to our senses the soul.
Energy and matter at a fundamental level are indestructible they only change their form. Likewise, the fundamental concept of soul that underlies physical bodies is indestructible. This soul manifests as different bodies and keeps changing the visible form. But fundamentally , it remains unchanging.
For example, we experience many dreams one after another in one night, and night after night. But our waking-state existence remains unchanged and we don't think much about dreams when we wake up. Likewise, we should not vest any emotional attachment in the superficial form that is impermanent.Whatever happens to visible forms is immaterial because it is unreal. That is why Krishna tells Arjuna to go ahead and proceed with the war because it is only an unreal and transitory manifestation of the eternal and hence not worth worrying about. Creation is a transitory illusion.Brahmn, the underlying fundamental phenomenon that manifests as different objects in the physical world, has a perpetual existence. The perceived physical world with all the fascinating variety in it, including our body, is in fact not separate or different from the Creator (Brahmn). It is like seeing waves and surf on the ocean surface. The waves are merely a manifestation of water only and nothing else.
Likewise, even though in dividual objectspersons in physical creation seem to be born, live for some time and then disappear, it is merely like a kaleidoscope pattern chang ing when we rotate the tube.e discard duality as unreal, then If we discard duality as unreal, then we can say anything about beings like they are in the Divine, but the Divine is not in them, or that the Divine pervades them and yet it is not in them! All these are equally valid or invalid! In other words, the Divine and His creation cannot be regarded as separate and simultaneously existing.
At one place, the Bhagwad Gita says that creation has neither beginning nor end, but there is just this temporary illusion in between as if it exists. What it means is that creation itself does not exist. So something that does not exist cannot have any beginning or end! A similar situation is described in the scriptures by way of a story that starts as follows: A woman who was not biologically able to conceive, gave birth to two children! The story is based on something that is unreal, impossible in reality because a woman who cannot conceive cannot give birth to children! But then, a story can be built on something that can have anything in it because the whole thing is to be taken with a bucket full of salt!

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 52, Issue No. 19, 13 May, 2017

Editorials

Crime and Punishment

At the Public Expense

Can They Come Together?

From 50 Years Ago

From 50 Years Ago: Demonetisation and ‘Black’ Money

H T Parekh Finance Column

Public Bank Privatisationin a Post-truth World

C P Chandrasekhar

Of Power and Politics

What Makes BJP Really Different

Suhas Palshikar

Commentary

The Curious Case of Justice Karnan

Smita Chakraburtty

University Grants Commission and Jawaharlal Nehru University - A Tale of Exception Told in Two Acts

Ayesha Kidwai

Applying for Furlough in Maharashtra

Arushi Garg

Happy Days Are ‘Not’ Here!

Anant Kumar, Kesavan Rajasekharan Nayar, Muhammed Shaffi, Chitra Grace, Lekha D Bhat

Review Article

Emotion and Rasa in Premodern and Classical India

Kedar A Kulkarni

Perspectives

Sixty Years of European Integration

Kanad Bagchi

Tagore's Social Praxis

Current Statistics

Letters

Why Is Kashmir Burning?

Arup Kumar Sen

Death Is No Deterrent

Anushka Singh, Cijo Joy

Coercion by MHA

Jashodhara Dasgupta, Sandhya Y K

Web Exclusives

How France Chose Macron: A Vote against the Extreme Right

Vaiju Naravane

Appointments/Programmes/Announcements

Special Articles

Setting Environmental Standards - Comparing Processes in Thermal Power Plants in India, US, and EU

Shripad Dharmadhikary

Dominant or Backward? - Political Economy of Demand for Quotas by Jats, Patels, and Marathas

Ashwini Deshpande, Rajesh Ramachandran

Evolution of Electricity Tariff in India, 1975–2010

Muralee Krishnan C, Santanu Gupta

- See more at: http://www.epw.in/journal/2017/19#sthash.l35yD3hE.dpuf

Theirview Gender discrimination defines India’s economy

Improving the gender balance in labour force participation, entrepreneurship and growth is an important first step for India’s development

Ais a World Bank economist. central driver of economic growth is the increased role of women. This growth comes in many forms: better education and health that increase female labour force participation, reduced discrimination and wage differentials that encourage greater effort, and improved advancement practices that promote talented women into leadership and managerial roles.

Despite its recent economic advances, India’s gender balance in labour force participation, entrepreneurship, and growth remains among the lowest in the world. Improving this balance is an important first step for India’s development and its achievement of greater economic growth and gender equality.

In a recent work with Arti Grover, Sari Kerr and William Kerr, we examine how female participation in economic activity has evolved in India (Will market competition trump gender discrimination in India? Policy Research Working Paper Series 7814). Women entrepreneurs in India are mostly concentrated in low-paying industries. This gender concentration in low-wage industries has increased over time. In the manufacturing sector, tobacco products, apparel and textiles attract the largest count and share of women entrepreneurs, perhaps because these industries are known to have lower physical labour requirements. Among services, it is the education, sewage, refuse disposal, sanitation and financial intermediation services that attract the largest share of female proprietors. There is a strong negative relationship between average industry wages and the share of female-led plants in the manufacturing sector. The association between the share of female-owned plants and average industry wages in the services sector is also negative, but not as strongly so.

Industries that show higher rates of female entrepreneurship and employment are also, broadly, the industries that show the highest segmentation in terms of female employees being matched to female owners. If people prefer to work with their own “types”, then in the case of India, gender of the owner overwhelmingly predicts the gender of the employees.

This is also true for male-led plants, where, for instance, radio, television, and communication equipment, other transport equipment and fabricated metal products are among the most gender segmented in informal manufacturing. In the case of services, male-led plants in water transport, land transport and research and development tend to employ the largest share of male workers. Although segmentation by gender is increasing in most industries, it is remarkably heightened in female-led plants in the basic metals and motor vehicles, trailers and semi-trailers segments of informal manufacturing, while within services, it has increased the most in postal and telecommunications and real estate services.

Despite many competitive reforms that India has undertaken, gender-based segmentation has increased over the years. For instance, the share of female employees in female-led informal manufacturing plants increased from 88% in 2001 to 93% in 2010. In the case of services, the share of female employees in women-led establishments increased from 75% to 87% during the same period. Likewise, the share of male employees in male-owned businesses has increased from 80% to 86% in unorganized manufacturing.

Gender segmentation is larger for small plants. Segmentation is larger for an average male employee vis-à-vis an average female employee across all size bands. Said differently, on average, a male employee is more likely to be working with a male co-worker than a female employee is to be working with a female co-worker. This measure of segmentation is also at its peak in smaller plants; however, for female employees it declines with increase in plant size up to mid-sized plants. Segmentation among male employees in manufacturing does not change much across the various size bands. In services, we observe a marginal but smooth decline across size bands in the services sector.

Which states in India have attracted more female entrepreneurs? Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are amongst the states that have experienced the highest number and shares of female-owned plants in both manufacturing and services. The states with the lowest shares of female-owned plants are Bihar and Assam. Delhi, the nation’s capital, surprisingly has the lowest share of female-owned establishments in manufacturing. Its position in the services sector is only slightly above the national average.

The states that have the highest count and shares of female entrepreneurs are also the states with the highest count of females in the workforce, be it in manufacturing or services. For example, two out of the top four states with the highest count of women employed in manufacturing are Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. In the case of services, it is again the states from south India that account for large employment count in female participation in economic activity.

Has gender gap converged across different states in India? No. The states with higher income have displayed higher growth in shares of female-led plants. The gap in female-led plants has widened between the leading and lagging states in India.

Has urbanization reduced gender segmentation? It has helped, but the share of female-owned businesses declines with the increase in distance from the Big 7 cities in India. In terms of female employment share, it has declined with distance from the Big 7 cities in the services sector, while we do not observe any definitive spatial location pattern in the case of manufacturing industry.

What can policymakers do? Physical and human infrastructure play a key role in tapping into gender as a new growth driver. Inadequate infrastructure affects women entrepreneurs more than men, because women often bear a larger share of the time and responsibility for household activities. Travel in India can be limited and unpredictable, and women face greater constraints in geographic mobility imposed by safety concerns and social norms. Better transport infrastructure should alleviate a major constraint for female entrepreneurs in accessing markets. India’s future growth escalators are in creating a robust platform for growth, and successfully utilizing its workforce, both male and female. Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com

Source: Mintepaper, 17-05-2017

Deprivation Points Must Stay

The system is commended at the highest policy level, but is under threat in JNU

The business of deprivation points started from JNU, entered the policy systems of the NDA at the highest level of policy advice. But the powers that be, while eulogising this at meta policy levels, went on to question them at JNU. When policy debates become highly politicised in the wrong sense of the term, intellectual consistency and time-honoured criteria of judging good policies, like the relationship between objectives and instruments, go for a sixer.

In JNU, in the beginning, the preference to children from backward regions and poor families was absolute. A new elite was being created, without any discrimination, as it were. You can make out a JNU-trained SP, collector or joint secretary a mile off. It is ironic, but perfectly understandable, that senior intelligence officers monitoring the present JNU story were JNU-trained. When I was a minister going to a meeting, the ranking civilian there would whisper in my ears: “Sir, I am JNU, 1982 batch. Wink wink, nudge nudge.” We won’t say it, but we know what we want, what we are doing, what to say and how to get it done. All clubs are like that and this was then and, I suspect now, not any different.

JNU’s admission policies are reviewed every five years. When I was their vice-chancellor (VC), I gave the students union some money to organise debates on this. The business of deprivation points came up. The radicals wanted many deprivation points around the merit criteria to give weightage to backwardness. At least 50 points out of 1,000. The opposite was also argued. The alums who came in were persons like Prakash Karat, Sitaram Yechury and Anand Sharma, all former JNU-ites. Also, outside experts like the historian Barun De and others, joined. Finally, we agreed on 10 deprivation points out of a total score of 1,000.

Around the admission range there is a struggle. At each point there are scores of kids. The VC’s job between June-end and August 15 when it all closes, is just to protect the unique, totally foolproof and non-tamperable admission system from the pressures of the highest in the land. A few deprivation points will matter.

In the final admission system, it was decided, after a lot of bloodletting, that if you were a girl, poor and did your qualifying degree from the poorest quartile of districts, you got 10 points. At the other end, if a boy and poor, you got three. Eight kids made it on account of deprivation thus defined. The radicals went for me hammer and tongs. Only eight! I told them that eight is a lot and my job was to run the best university in the country. I will work for the revolution after I leave JNU.

N.C. Saxena picked it up when he was planning secretary. He did what I wanted, although haltingly. He introduced deprivation points in the national poverty debate. To my regret, he did not change the Alagh Poverty Line but within it, introduced deprivation points to enable entitlements to plan benefits. Arvind Panagariya inherits that and his vision for the next three years is out. Not the chhota press version for those who can’t read and must see PPTs, but a regular plan document. There is something about this planning business. You can say, abolish it, wipe it out, Mahalanobis stuff, and then, you come out with the same; of course, taking into account the changes taking place and of course, the natural fact that you will do better. The ghosts of Yojana Bhavan haunt you; the urge to do better is natural.

So, the document has all the planning and policy chapters and we will, of course, discuss them again. There are targets, financial resources, regional development and sectoral strategies, the works. It starts: “the signs of change began to emerge during the second half of the 1980s, with 1991 proving a turning point. The reforms that followed first under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and then under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, placed India first on a six per cent growth trajectory and then, beginning in 2003-04, on an eight per cent plus trajectory (emphasis added).’’ Discussing MGNREGA, it says: “Therefore there is a need for developing inclusion, exclusion and deprivation criteria (emphasis added)”. Panagariya’s preliminary thoughts on poverty in a separate note say the same. It’s business as usual; only the Niti Aayog doesn’t disburse. Deprivation points are safe at the meta level, but not in JNU.

The writer, an economist, is a former Union minister

Source: The Hindu, 17-05-2017

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