ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY: TABLE OF CONTENTS
Monday, February 05, 2018
Death Is A Button For Continuity Of Life
Kamal Jain
Despite our fear of death, we have to confront it one day. Like change, death is inevitable. Life can’t move on without death. In fact death is the ‘off ’ button of life and life is the ‘on’ button of death. German philosopher Martin Heidegger said, “Man is being towards death.” It means that we start dying with our birth itself.
Animals and trees die, but they don’t know that they die. Since as human beings we are aware of death, we can outgrow fear of death. We have the potential to face death and overcome our fear of it. It is death which has inspired human beings to contemplate on life and this has given birth to metaphysics. After birth, death is the only guaranteed happening in the world, albeit with the uncertainty of when, where and how.
The body plays the important role of being the instrument of soul or consciousness in carrying life. Body tends to decay and perish over a period of time as per laws of nature. Once the body is unable to sustain itself beyond a point, the soul departs and starts afresh with a new body. This departure is termed as death and the starting of new life is birth.
The Gita terms it as change of cloth. Change of body is a necessity; that’s what makes death imminent. Though we can’t outgrow death at the physical level, change of body might facilitate continuity of the journey of the life of the same soul with the legacy of past impressions and conditionings. We may find some element of immortality in the natural process of reproduction by which we continue to live by passing on our biological traits to our offspring.
Death plays a positive role in the universe. On the one hand, life seems transient like a dewdrop; and on the other hand, it is permanent with the potential for eternal continuity. At the level of body, life is temporary and at that of soul, life is a continuum and permanent. Life in itself is immortal since it keeps assuming new shapes and forms even in the midst of destruction.
Growth, progress and evolution of the universe necessitate change which happens with death – destruction of old and creation of new to replace the former.
It is our desires which propel and bind us with the cycle of creationprotection-destruction. Our desires necessitate birth and we later meet death, all part of the circle of birth and death. As long as desires are there, we all are constrained to keep settling the account of karmas.
Since we can’t remain in body forever, why not seek immortality through our thoughts and actions? Mind is the faculty of soul, able to interact with the external universe through the body’s sense organs. Whatever we gather as knowledge, experiences and wisdom during our whole life must be shared and passed on as a legacy to the new generation for continuity of our ideology to further the progress and development of humanity and its prosperity.
This is the eternal aspect of life which outgrows individual death. This can be a way also to contribute a bit of ours in return for whatever we get abundantly from Mother Nature and society.
Monday, January 29, 2018
ECONOMIC & POLITICAL WEEKLY: TABLE OF CONTENTS
Vol. 53, Issue No. 4, 27 Jan, 2018
Be ready to accept change’
Ad guru Prahlad Kakar shares how college helped him prepare for a war zone of a different kind
Ad guru, restaurateur, entrepreneur, scuba diver, environmentalist... Prahlad Kakar dons several hats. But the first one he donned is that of an ad filmmaker. He has worked with brands such as Pepsi, Kit Kat, Nestle, and Whirlpool, through his ad film agency, Genesis. If you still hum jingles like “Yehi Hai Right Choice Baby! Aha!” (Pepsi), “Ting Ting Ti Ting” (Britannia), and quote tag lines like “It’s different” (Maggi Sauce), then Kakar is the one who should get the credit.
The latest hat he has come to wear is that of an educationist with the launch of The Prahlad Kakar School of Branding and Entrepreneurship (PKSBE), along with co-founder Pratish Nair. It is a one-of-a-kind business school where aspiring entrepreneurs and advertising filmmaking professionals are honed on their risk intelligence, decision-making, crisis management, and crisis prevention skills.
For Kakar, this decades-long journey from filmmaker to entrepreneur took shape in college, where he learnt life-lessons that he values even today. Here he shares more about his years in college...
Yesteryears
“I attended Fergusson College, Pune. Though I graduated in Economics honours, the subject I really liked was military strategy. Economics sounded far more respectable in terms of getting a job. But my true passion was military strategy, which is basically the history, strategy, and tactics of all major wars,” he explains. It taught him why the victors were victorious, sometimes from sheer luck and accidents, and sometimes from sheer brilliance of strategy and tactics.
Later in life, when he opted for a career in advertising and marketing, he realised how military strategy helped him nail it! “Economics, as we studied, has no practical translation. The market place is a war zone and my understanding of strategy and tactics has given me a far better insight, and therefore, the edge in the business of brand building in a hugely competitive field. My understanding of the art of war has helped me much more than anything else in the battle of brands,” he adds.
College taught me...
Other than the conventional curriculum and focus on real-life lessons that one learns from teachers, batchmates and friends, Kakar says college helped him with skills to face the future and be a winner. “My college taught me that most people are hypocrites; they all have double standards, and are taught to accept being second best because being best is far too exposed to risk, criticism, and failure. On the funnier side, it also taught me that pataoing girls is a big deal! I had to use all my wits, charms, intelligence, and acting abilities to impress them, and I did very well. This was the most difficult exam of all, and to be honest, it made me think out-of-the-box, which has helped me a lot throughout life,” he says.
Memorable moment
Kakar was quite popular in college. Once, when he came back from the holidays, he found that some miscreants had painted the back wall of the ladies hostel in big letters: “Lock up your daughters. Robin is back in town.” Kakar was known as ‘Robin’ in college!
Favourite mentor
“Shyam Benegal will always be my most favourite mentor. I started assisting him in 1972 and he taught me how illiterate I was! I felt utterly humiliated when he asked me about movies because I knew nothing and was completely clueless! What he really did for me was by criticising me at that early age, he forced me to become film-literate. And also literature-literate! Shyam Benegal is largely responsible for my voracious appetite for reading,” he states.
Message
“My advice to the youth of today is that there is only one constant in your life and that is change,” says Kakar. “As students, if you are not trained and ready to accept change on an everyday basis, you will struggle, and possibly not survive.” Change, he says, comes in most unexpected places, and as students, one needs to be flexible, adaptable, and not have a huge ego which can ultimately destroy you. “Success stories today are written by those who have learnt to take the risk. The ones — those who are incapable of taking risk because they are afraid — usually end up taking a job or working for somebody else,” he adds.
The market place is a war zone and my understanding of strategy and tactics has given me a far better insight, and therefore, the edge in the business of brand building.
Source: The Hindu, 29-01-2018
Red alert on the green index
India’s poor ranking in the Environmental Performance Index should force a policy appraisal
Reports, late last year, on India’s improved ranking in the World Bank’s ‘Ease of Doing Business’ Index (from 130 to 100) have been cause for much celebration. As a follow-up to this, the government announced additional reform measures to further improve the ranking.
Low green score
However, coinciding with this is the news that out of the 180 countries assessed, India ranks low in the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) 2018, slipping from rank 141 in 2016, to 177 in 2018. The EPI is produced jointly by Yale University and Columbia University in collaboration with the World Economic Forum. In comparison, emerging peer economies, Brazil and China, rank 69 and 120, respectively. The EPI ranks countries on 24 performance indicators across 10 issue categories. No index is perfect. But if an improvement in an index for ease of doing business is cause for celebration, then, equally, a drop in an index ranking environmental performance should be cause for concern and used as a context to examine our policy measures.
A look at recent initiatives shows that the government has set ambitious targets for environmental protection. In December 2015, it notified new, strict environmental standards for coal-fired power plants, to be effective from January 2018. An aggressive target was set to implement Bharat Stage VI emission norms from April 1, 2020, skipping Stage V norms. In 2017, the Minister of State for Power and Renewable Energy said that a road map was being prepared so that only electric vehicles would be produced and sold in the country by 2030. In order to accelerate the transition to renewable sources of power, the government, under the National Solar Mission, revised the target for setting up solar capacity from 20 GW to 100 GW by 2021-22. The Centre has also assured the Supreme Court of India that the highly polluted Ganga will be cleaned up by 2018.
A gap
What are we missing then? Unfortunately, there appears to be a big gap between policy goals and action. While we seem to be moving in the right direction on solar targets, we are seriously lagging behind in a number of other goals. For example, the government has gone back on its promise of implementing strict power plant emission norms by December 2017, and may even dilute the norms. The automobile industry has categorically stated that based on current estimates, full conversion to electric vehicles is realistically possible only by 2047. After setting electronics manufacturers a reasonable annual electronic waste collection target of 30% of the products sold in the market, the figure has now been relaxed to 10%. And late last year, the Comptroller and Auditor General, in a report, pulled up the government for not developing an action plan and for its poor utilisation of allocated funds in the clean-up of the Ganga. The list can go on.
Should we ignore environmental degradation as being just a cost of development? It turns out that the costs are pretty high. A recent study by the World Bank and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, Seattle, U.S., showed air pollution to be the cause of an estimated 1.4 million premature deaths in India, which translated into a welfare loss equivalent around 8% of India’s GDP in 2013. In addition, the cost of lost labour productivity was 0.84% of its GDP. These estimates do not account for many other forms of environmental degradation and are quite conservative also because of our lack of scientific understanding of several other key ecological impacts. A significant concern is also the fact that the poor are affected disproportionately because of environmental degradation.
The right price
Thus viewing environmental problems even from a purely market logic suggests that the solutions lie in recognising the environmental costs of development and “getting the prices right”. Rapid transition to solar energy can be accomplished not only by enabling subsidies but also by pricing the more polluting fuels correctly. The strict environmental standards for coal plants are expected to do precisely that — the price we pay for coal-based electricity reflect, at least partially, the true costs of producing such electricity. The failure to implement these standards would be a step backwards. Similarly, the transition to electric vehicle use would be aided by pricing petrol and diesel, and perhaps the vehicles that use these fuels, to reflect their external costs to society.
It is of course not the case that the current environmental mess we are in is entirely because of our recent environmental policy failures. It is linked also to the lack of political will to implement even existing environmental laws and regulations. It is not possible to restore environmental quality overnight. However, we must ensure that we are moving forwards, not backwards, in meeting our environmental targets. Being among the four worst countries in the world in terms of environmental performance should hopefully serve as a wake-up call.
Rama Mohana R. Turaga, a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, teaches environmental sustainability and public policy. The views expressed are personal
Source: The Hindu, 29-01-2018
How Does One Achieve The Impossible?
Arvind Sharma
Let’s begin by examining the concept of the impossible before trying to answer such a tantalising question. Some things are clearly impossible in a physical sense. A nonagenarian who hopes to qualify for the Olympics for high jump is clearly hoping for the impossible unless of course one has a seniors’ Olympic event in mind.
But when Napoleon said that the word ‘impossible’ is found in the dictionary of fools, then clearly, he did not have such impossibilities in mind. What he perhaps had in mind was that certain goals or accomplishments, which we normally consider out of reach, may be capable of being achieved if only one was daring enough to entertain them and determined enough to go after them. One might have considered it impossible of France to achieve the kind of military victories that Napoleon achieved for his country.
This idea of the impossible becomes even more relevant when we come to the individual, who might consider certain accomplishments impossible without realising that with persistent effort and determination they could be achieved. Perhaps, in such a context, the word ‘impossible’ is best understood as really denoting the improbable, which our imagination considers impossible. With these introductory remarks let us now consider what some sages have to say about achieving the impossible.
Swami Vivekananda met Sage Pavahari Baba of Ghazipur in the course of his wanderings across India. Vivekananda was so impressed by the Baba that he wanted to be initiated by him but whenever he resolved to do so, he was dissuaded by the appearance of an apparition of Sri Ramakrishna. Pavahari Baba later immolated himself upon being unable to bear the sufferings of his country in Kali Yuga.
Vivekananda, perhaps overwhelmed by the enormity of India’s problems asked Pavahari, “How does one achieve the impossible”?
Pavahari Baba replied: “By treating the means as the end and the end as the means.” One hesitates to offer an interpretation of such an oracular pronouncementand the reader may have his own understanding of it. But what was perhaps meant was that when we think of achieving something, we tend to focus on the end product more, rather than how that end product might be actually achieved in terms of the concrete steps required, to accomplish it.
So what the sage was perhaps suggesting was that we should focus our attention entirely on the means with the same passion with which we covet the goal itself. That would be one way of treating the means as the end. And then once such a concrete step is realised, similarly, the success we have achieved should be considered only a step in relation to what remains to be achieved to accomplish the goal. This would be one way of treating the end as the means.
St Francis of Assisi’s remarks do seem to shed light on the exciting question under discussion. He says that one should begin by doing the necessary; then one should do the possible, and then he adds that if one does so one would find oneself accomplishing the impossible. His remarks clearly bear a family resemblance to what was uttered by Pavahari Baba in response to the question put to him by Swami Vivekananda. (The writer is Birks Professor of Comparative Religion, McGill University.
India in top 3 where trust in govt remains high...
Media Highly Trusted, Says Global Survey
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
New Delhi: India continues to be among the top three nations where trust in government remains high despite a small slip since last year, according to the Global Trust Index released annually in Davos. The ranking will reassure the Modi government in the wake of tough reforms like demonetisation and goods and services tax.
India is also in the trust zone as far as how the public sees business, media and NGOs. Though its position slipped to number three this year from first last year, its rating remains at ‘trust level’ with Indonesia and China ahead of it.
The annual Global Trust Index, released by communications marketing firm Edelman in Davos last week, showed that China gained strongly and jumped to the top position whereas the US reported the steepest decline in public trust in its institutions. China's climb could be linked to the view in the country that it has gained at the expense of a US “withdrawal” from the Asia-Pacific in trade and security.
In aggregate, India's trust rating across government, media, NGOs and business fell 13 percentage points, statistically marking one of the sharpest decreases. But in each category it remained in the 60-100 band marking popular ‘trust’ in institutions. Media was the lowest at 61, dropping five points since 2017.
The index showed that globally, trust in government, media and NGOs was low as 20 out of 28 countries surveyed online during October-November last year came in the categories where general population distrusted those institutions. India, as last year, continued to buck this trend.
The overall high trust rating will come as welcome news to the Modi government, particularly in the wake of his visit to Davos where he gave a major speech pointing to the benefits of tough and painful reforms like demonetisation and implementation of GST. A worry for India was the perception — outside the country — that its businesses could not be fully trusted. It scored low on this parameter, pointing to the need to make contracts and arbitration more reliable. The report showed that companies headquartered in Canada, Switzerland, Sweden and Australia were most trusted. The least trusted country brands were headquartered in Mexico, India, Brazil and China.
The index report — 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer — revealed that trust in the US had suffered the largest-ever-recorded drop in the survey’s history among the general population. Trust among the general population fell nine points to 43, placing it in the lower quarter of the 28-country trust index. The collapse of trust in the US was driven by a staggering lack of faith in government, said an Edelman statement.
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