Archive for category January 2015

Kollengode S Venkataraman  October 1999

As teenagers decades ago, we grandchildren sat around our family. A matriarch snacking on jackfruit and banana chips during a warm, sultry summer full moon night in a Kerala village. She was telling us how the Mahabharata war ended:

As the war progressed in Kurukshetra, Arjuna killed Karna, his own brother. Abhimanyu, Arjuna’s son, is killed. Acharya Bhisma, pierced by his favorite student Arjuna’s arrow, dies on a bed of arrows. Dusshasana and Jarasandha are slain by Bhima. And Duryodhana lies mortally wounded. Aswattama burns several of the Pandava princes by stealth in the dark.

After winning the brutal war, the victorious Pandava Fivesome go and meet King Dhrtarashtra and Queen Gandhari, the parents of the vanquished Kauravas, Grief-stricken with mixed emotions, they half-heartedly try to reconcile.

Then, I distinctly remember, my grandma telling us this:

You know what the Pandavas did afterwards? After destroying the Kauravas in the battle, the Pandavas go to the Ganga, and cremate the dead. And they perform the last rites for the dead warriors, including the Kaurava princes they killed. The Pandavas pour sesame (til) seeds and water during the libation (tarpanam) while invoking the names of their dead cousins as is the custom among us even today.

As a youth, I wondered, “If the Pandavas hated their cousins Kauravas so much to kill them in war, why were they grief-stricken?

And why did they perform the cremation ceremonies and offer til seeds and water after killing them? Patti (nani) was pulling a fast one on us grandkids.”

Later, in my 40s, I got my grandmother’s story confirmed in Rajagopalachari’s and William Buck’s renditions of the Mahabharata. The Pandavas doing the last rites for their sworn enemies after killing them was too much. Mahabharata’s author Vyasa, for dramatizing the scene, went too far in taking literary license, I thought.

Nearly 2500 years later, at the end of the 2-month war between India and Pakistan during May and July in Kargil, the above scene was re-enacted in the changed demography of the area. There was this news, not only in Hindustan Times, Times of India and The Hindu, but also in the venerable New York Times (July 17, Saturday) under the caption “India Buries Soldiers That Pakistan Won’t Claim.” During the Kargil war with India, Pakistan was in the worst possible spot whichever way you consider the misadventure. But in dealing with its war dead, the Pakistani military set the worst possible example.

Pakistan has been saying, not only for domestic consumption, but also for Indian and international consumption, that Pakistan gave only political, economic, and diplomatic support for the Kashmiri Mujahideens.

Militarily, they said, the Mujahideens were on their own.

Further, Pakistan insisted that its military regulars were never part of the Mujahideens. Nobody believed this inside or outside Pakistan. But Pakistani establishment had to live up to its oft-repeated fiction even when the Pakistani army regulars died in the battle.

According to the New York Times story, when Indian military personnel tried to hand over the bodies of Pakistani soldiers killed in action, Pakistan did not accept because doing so would imply that their soldiers were among the Mujahideens. This is the worst that a nation could do to those who have given the most precious of their possessions, their very lives.

Therefore, in the bone-chilling weather on the barren mountains at 15,000-feet altitude, Indian jawans on the Indian side of the Line of Control buried the Pakistani regulars killed in action at the very spots where they found the bodies.

How did they bury them? According to the New York Times story,

“the Indian soldiers covered the dead bodies of Pakistani soldiers in Pakistani flags. A Muslim cleric from the Indian army presided over a respectful, if abbreviated, minute-long funeral service. When he chanted Allahu Akbar (God is Great), six Hindu soldiers around him dutifully answered, Allahu Akbar.”

The Mahabharata is full of stories that not only exemplify honor, valor, generosity, compassion, loyalty, and love, but also portray the dilemmas, ironies, twists and turns, predicaments, treachery, and intrigues of life. Therefore, pouranikas (traditional storytellers) say whatever is not found in the Mahabharata, can never be.

After reading the story in the New York Times, Vyasa’s depiction of the Mahabharata war’s end, I recognized, was a lot closer to the 20th century reality of Kargil. END

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Kollengode S. Venkataraman Written in 1998

Last year end, December 8 to be exact, I was stuck for several hours in one of the cavernous concourses of Atlanta airport after missing my flight. You can kill only so much time reading papers. So, I watched the CNN Airport News’ disjointed bits of information telecast with slick graphics and voice-overs. The news piece was on sports, on golf in particular. The reporter, with a balmy Southern California golf course as his backdrop, discussed a recent trend among golf courses in the US banning shoes with metal spikes.

Not being familiar with golf—other than deriving a vicarious pleasure when I see on TV a star golfer missing an easy putt, or drives into deep rough, a sand trap, or into water—I didn’t know that golfers wear shoes with metal spikes. Only sprinters, I thought, need spiked shoes. Golfers don’t even jog on golf courses. In fact, they barely walk. Many move around in golf carts a la Presidents Bush and Clinton.

Then why do they need shoes with metal spikes? Golfers, the reporter explained, use spiked shoes for getting better traction so that they cannot blame the ground below when they miss an easy putt.

The reporter continued. On his calculation, each green gets millions of spike marks annually. His creative camera crew showed the consequences of these spike marks on golfing: Veteran golfers missing easy putts in spite of taking into consideration the wind speed and the terrain of the green (assessed by sitting on their toes while leaning on their putter for balance, and pensively looking at the terrain between the ball and the hole. The balls roll over the dimples of the spike marks, get deflected erratically, and miss the hole. Ohhhhhhh!

The reporter then went on to estimate the dollar value for repairing the greens, and for the damage the spike marks do to the flooring inside the building, not to speak of the wooden foot bridges along the walkways. Therefore, an ever-increasing number of golf courses across the USA are banning spiked golf shoes on their golf courses.

Stupefied by boredom, I yawned. I agreed. Very good, indeed.

I had two more hours to kill. I picked up a news magazine lying around. The lead article discussed the Ottawa treaty banning land mines signed by over 120 nations, and why the US refused to sign the treaty.

The contrast between the two news items was cynically stark.

Of course, land mines are primarily a Third World or Fourth World problem exacerbated by the First and the Second Worlds. They are planted along highly populated fertile river deltas as in Vietnam and Kampuchea, and not along the path where their leisurely classes go for their evening stroll. And along mountainous trails in Afghanistan and Africa where poor, uneducated men, women, and children walk barefoot carrying their merchandise on their heads or on their backs to eke out their meager living. And along the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, where millions of land mines are planted by South Korea with US help giving a protective shield from invasion from the North.

In places like Vietnam, years after the treaty was signed over a champagne toast and the aggressors retreated, poor farmers go back to their land to eke out a living. When they plow, the land mines explode killing them or even worse, maiming them for the rest of their lives. In the mountains, there are no roads because of the rough terrain. Only trails. Since the trails are mined, whole communities either have to live immobilized or take a chance to get killed/maimed.

On explosion, these land mines leave not tiny spike marks, but craters large enough to resemble unmanicured sand pits in expensive golf courses. The damage land mines inflict in terms of misery and pain during hospitalization, and in incapacitating men, women, and children from useful life is incalculable. Since the damage is not amenable to computations, they’re not worth worrying about. Further, even if you can compute them, because of the poor living standards in the Third World and low value of their currencies, in terms of dollars, it is not worth much, anyway.

That is why it is easy for the US golf courses to ban spiked shoes in their manicured golf courses, and convenient for the US for refusing to sign the treaty banning land mines from the face of earth even as it is working hard for selectively containing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and ban weapons of mass destruction in the Third World. END

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By Kollengode S Venkataraman, written in 1997

Comparing the education levels of entrepreneurs and the population in the US is quite revealing. See the table below. Among entrepreneurs, only 3% have not completed high school, while 20% of the general population has not completed high school. Without even a high school diploma it is tough to survive in business. Phenomenal success stories like Wendy’s Dave Thomas are aberrations.

                              US Entrepreneurs                        US population

Postgraduate                     12%                                                7%

4-year college                   38%                                               21%

Some college                     23%                        

High school                        24%

Some High school                3%

In the US, 12% of entrepreneurs have postgraduate degrees, while only 7% of the population has higher degrees. While 50% of entrepreneurs have bachelor’s degrees or better, only 28% of the population has bachelor’s and higher degrees. Fifty-two percent of the US population has high school diplomas, but without college degrees. Among entrepreneurs, this category is 47%. It is worth noting that while 50% of the entrepreneurs have college degrees, the remaining 50% have no college degrees.

A disproportionate fraction of Indian immigrants have higher education, mostly in engineering, medicine, management, and the sciences. If we exclude physicians, lawyers, and CPAs, who find it both lucrative and safe to go on their own, one can unscientifically guess that more than 70% of primary income earners among our families

businesses, even when both husband and wife are professionals.

Indian immigrants from social backgrounds traditionally associated with trade and enterprise have preserved their native enterprising instincts. In this culture that has made free enterprise a mantra, these immigrants have further nurtured their enterprising instincts with their commitment, family participation, and long hours of hard work. With some good luck, many own successful businesses, mostly in the service sector, not only catering to other immigrants, but also the American mainstream. We bid them Godspeed!

Other Indian immigrants are from families having no business background. For many of these professionals, working for large and medium-size corporations gives social identity and instant access to the American middle-class lifestyle, economically, in any case.

This is understandable in our culture where our ZIP codes define us socially and economically. Marketing gurus would make you believe that if you are under 36.6 years of age and own a home (in a desirable ZIP code address) having more than 4.3 BR, 2.2 GRG, 2400 sq. ft living area (bsmt exclded), 4.7 TV sets, 7.7 phone jacks, 3.7 phone lines, 2.6 cars, and a 166 MHz computer or better with Internet access, and have fewer than 2.13 kids, you’ve made it buddy! Wow, your lifestyle is in the top 5th percentile of the US population!

These professionals, partly because of their higher education, often are risk-averse. Further, higher education gives increased mobil-ity, a plus-point in an economic/corporate down turn, at least till one hits middle age. After middle age, it is another story: One has higher odds of getting ” surplussed,” “out-sourced” “downsized,” “readjus-ted,” “rightsized,” “fenced-out,» “reengineered” or simply laid off or fired. Then, one is as disoriented as a domesticated animal that has lost all its innate survival instincts suddenly thrown back into the wild.

Most of our children take for granted many of the creature comforts that we consider trophies. These children, naturally, will aim for things very different – sometimes even nebulous and abstract – in their adult life. They may, one hopes, feel confident to take calculated risks and venture along unchartered waters. END

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Kollengode S Venkataraman, Written in 1996

Things we do not allow a seven-year-old to do on legal, moral, or ethical grounds, or out of simple old-fashioned common sense: Driving cars or motorcycles, drinking alcoholic beverages, handling power tools, smoking cigarettes, staying home by themselves, taking free-fall rides in amusement parks, handling open flames or corrosive chemicals, and using handguns.

And yet, adults-including the parents, teachers, friends, and those in the media—not only encouraged, but also egged on the seven-year-old Jessica Dubroff to fly to her death last April in a plane crash on her maiden cross-continental flight in a Cessna. One can understand, even if one does not agree with, the motives behind the enterprise that led to this entirely avoidable accident. The allure of publicity in prime-time TV, opportunity for commercial endorsements and the accompanying megabucks, are irresistible in a society in which fortune and fame are the only measures for success. We wrap our vanity & greed in lofty expressions such as freedom, courage, choices, and options to make them more palatable.

As recent immigrants to this nation, we seem to have acquired a mutated strain of this attitude, which in some ways is even worse. For example, it is not enough if our children get the best education in the natural course of their maturing into adults. We want them to get their degrees at ever-decreasing younger ages. We want them to become MDs and PhDs in their late teens. Early teens is even better.

If this happens naturally, as it does sometimes, or even with some coaxing, let all of us rejoice in it. However, to accomplish this, parents increasingly seem to drive their children hard, drive them nuts, and rob them of their childhood. The subliminal message to our children in this pursuit is: You may be far above average in your class, but you are still substandard because you are, after all, inside the bell curve.

But no matter how smart we are, other personality traits having nothing to do with our Is are necessary for becoming successful and productive citizens in our vocation, whatever it be.

I have heard (“overheard” is more appropriate) people saying,

“We had her arangetram when she was barely ten. She excellently brought out the shrngara rasam (erotic passion) in rendering Jayadeva’s Ashtapadi.” Isn’t there something intrinsically distasteful in ten-year-old pre-puberty girls bringing out the passions of adults in their abhinayam?

One of the descriptive names for son in Sanskrit is Atmaja, which literally means “born out of oneself.” Parents, probably seeing themselves in their children, stoke their own adult vanity in imagining that they have begotten child prodigies.

Does one have to show in one’s childhood potentials of greater accomplishments to come later in life? And do such early promises guarantee greater accomplishments later in life? The answer to both questions is, “Probably no.” For, history is full of personalities who bloomed naturally at the appropriate age, sometimes, even very late.

Also, countless people who showed great promise early lost their luster later, only to join the rest of us in their adult life. This is simply because several factors outside our genetic makeup mold our personality. And don’t forget a) the social, technological, and political environment determine what opportunities we get, and  b) the events in our personal life that influence how we unfold as adults.  Recognizing this might be helpful to get a sense of proportion and balance in life.

Another sore point: Some of our very middle-aged women -— and down-sized men too —because of unfortunate circumstances, are left in the lurch in awkward stages in their lives. Against tremendous odds, some of these courageous men and women go back to school and acquire marketable skills. They start afresh, becoming productive, tax-paying members of society, full of confidence and verve. These people’s tales of human endeavor are as worthy of our recognition as the brilliance of our kids who are born naturally smart.

Forget about inviting these middle-aged men and women as keynote speakers to address our graduating high-school students in recognition of their overcoming great odds in life. We should be happy if their profiles in courage get mentioned to our children during dinner-time conversation. By the way, in these days of workaholic lifestyle, long commute, and TV addiction, how many of us eat at least one meal a day with our spouse, children, and parents to have dinner conversations in the first place?

Siddhirbhavati karmaja (Fruition is born out of work) may be excellent for a lofty, pithy motto on the insignias of institutions. Such profound expressions, unfortunately, do not satisfy our vanity and conceit. Our behavior appears closer to Siddhirbhavati (mama) garbhaja! (Fruition is born out of [my/ womb). END

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By Kollengode S Venkataraman, Written in 2001

Note: In Indian philosophy, literature, and science, the contribution of Jaina thinkers is quite significant. Apart from their works in Sanskrit, Jain monks have also authored (dated between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD) some of the well-known Tamil literary works and on Tamil grammar. Jainism, with its heavy emphasis on an individual’s personal efforts for liberation, does not care for Divine Intervention. The following is an adaptation from an article by Amrit Gangar in Times of India, December 4, 2000.

Philosophical speculation is based on reasoning and experience using which we try to answer the “whys” of life. In science, a hypothesis becomes a theory only when backed by evidence. In philosophical speculation, an idea supported by experience gains acceptance.

But here is the problem: Even among people understanding/seeing the same phenomenon, an understanding of the phenomenon often varies from person to person. The famous story of a group of blind men describing an elephant after “experiencing” it by feel and touch is a classic example. Here, we see the folly of mistaking a partially genuine experience for the final whole. In real life too, we often do not recognize that our understanding of a topic, though genuine, can be correct only partially. This often leads to conflicts and grief.

Jainism (founded by the prince Vardhamana Mahavira over 600 years before Christ) avoids this pitfall with its idea of multiple entities of partial truths. The attempt at comprehending anything from any one standpoint is known as Naya and the system of describing reality from different points of view is termed as Naya-vaada or the doctrine of Nayas.

Naya-vaada enables one to analyze the various points of view and appraise their relative validity. It is a remarkable method for understanding a complex question.

Naya-vaada, while revealing several partial or particular views of the totality, clearly recognizes that such partial truths standing by themselves should not be mistaken for the whole.

In other words, Jainism treats reality as a complex phenomenon that is not only multifold (aneka), but it is also anekanta — it has more than one viewpoint. That is why Jainism believes that reality should be comprehended from as many angles as possible.

Affirming the non-absolutists’ point of view, the doctrine of Naya-vaada provides the framework for what can be called “Maybe” theory.

Jaina logicians call it Syat or Anekanta-vaada.

A Naya is a particular opinion framed with one point of view that does not rule out other viewpoints. It is an expression of a partial truth about an object as understood by the knower. Jaina logicians also recognize that the totality of knowledge is massive and complex. It is constituted of substance and qualities that change all the time, while its space is infinite.

Implicit in this approach is the element of tolerance that is central to Jaina thinking. The spirit of non-absolutism in beliefs naturally leads to respect for others’ views. Naya-vaada shows the way to reconcile conflicting viewpoints by appreciating the relativity of the various aspects of reality.

Naya-vaada subtly warns those who steadfastly assert that their way alone is the right way, and that their understanding is absolute and comprehensive.

IF the aim of any inquiry is to understand reality, the Jaina philosophers point out, it cannot be achieved by merely formulating certain simple, categorical propositions. Reality being complex, any one simple proposition, all by itself, may not express the nature of reality fully.

Jainism’s Naya-vaada, developed more than two thousand years ago, resembles what we today call “scientific temperament.” Scientific temperament eschews categorical assertions, demands that the scientist be tentative in his/her findings, and attempts at reconciling different viewpoints. Modern science, like Jaina thinking, gives us the freedom for continuous revisions/improvements in our understanding of nature on the basis of newer insights.

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By Kollengode S Venkataraman, Written July 2009

With the center of gravity of the global economy shifting towards Asia, Asian populations in the US have come under the media glare. How these relatively new immigrants have succeeded in the US despite their dis-anctly non-Caucasian looks, languages, foods, faiths, and ethos has been the topic in stories in Business Week, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Look at these 2008 numbers from US Census Bureau on the the median annual household incomes:

Asian: $66,000; Non-Hispanic Whites: $56,000; Blacks and Hispanics have median incomes around $35,000; Entire US: $50,000

Asians’ — including Indians’ — high incomes and net worth, the desirable ZIP codes of their homes, and their Spelling Bee performances are commented upon endlessly in the mainstream media. One common theme in these stories is Asians strong family identity and honor, respect for elders, thrift, and stress on education, all contributing to their material success.

Understandably, Indians, feel pretty glib about this favorable media glare, even though they subliminally know, but would want to attribute their success to their supposedly better genes and DNAs. So, among Indians, the working axiom is: If you are a desi, you ought to be well educated with a sigh-paying job; you ought to live in a desirable ZIP code. If you don’t, then something is wrong with you.

But the material success of Indians in the US is also due to their skewed demography. An overwhelming majority of Indians — the first immigrants in all their families — are cherry-picked by US for immigration for their education and skills that are in shortage here. These immigrants acquired these skills through their access to resources (wealth, connection, influence, their mostly middle-class background or better) and the highly subsidized education in India in the 1940s through the 1990s. What they acquired through these combination of favorable factors, they would like to attribute to their DNAs and brains.

The same US Census Bureau’s study also shows a disturbing feature of poverty among Asians that does not typically draw our attention.

The Bureau defines $22,000 annual household income as the threshold for poverty. On this basis, despite their high median family incomes, Asians also have relatively high percentage of their population living below the poverty threshold. Here are the poverty statistics:

Asians: 11.8%; Whites: 8.6%; Blacks and Hispanics each around 23%.

A disturbing trend is that the percentage of people in poverty in all demographic groups has increased between 2002 and 2008, the increase being sharpest among Asians. One main reason for the increase in poverty among Asians could be because of the professional immigrants sponsoring their less educated siblings. This is true in the case of Indians to a great extent.

Therefore, just because we don’t see our poor cousins in social desi gatherings, let us not assume that we don’t have too many poor among us. The less resourceful among Indians may not be interested in showing their faces in a gathering full of people who they perceive as successful

One in nine or ten among Asians — Indian-Americans are a big chunk of this group — lives in poverty in the US.

One needs to analyze this census data and understand the whys. END

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By Kollengode S Venkataraman, Written October 2008

Many challenges are ahead of us in the US — an aging population with longer life span and insufficient resources to take care of itself in old age; economic problems triggered by recklessness at many levels; lack of discipline in personal spending; the rise in the cost of energy, healthcare, child-care, and education; piling budget and trade deficits; the high cost of ongoing Iraq war and maintaining our global military installations……

So, we expected candor from politicians this election year on their approaches to the challenges affecting all of us — How much it would cost us in terms of money and reduced services, and who is going to pay.

But what we heard from Senators Barack Obama and John McCain in their summer interactions with an evangelical minister in the Saddleback Church in California was not reassuring. One of the questions asked by the minister was the definition of middle class. Barack Obama’s definition: Around $250,000 annual household income. I was amused by Obama, answer. But Obama recognized that “someone has to pay” for all the collective commissions, omissions, and sins in managing the economy.

I was amused because I  recalled reading that the median household income in the US was around $45,000/year. Median is the midpoint in any distribution. When we say the median age is 45 years, it means 50% of the population is under 45 years, and 50% is over 45 years of age.

But John McCain’s answer “Oh, maybe $5 million annual income?” was not only facetious, but also disingenuous and callous. Give him some slack though. He doesn’t even know how many homes he owns. Let us see some real numbers here:

• In the US Census Bureau’s income statistics for 2007 (see plots), only 4% of the US households are above Obama’s “Middle Class” making over $250,000 a year.
  Both Obama and McCain were pandering to voters-McCain much more so than Obama. They don’t want their opponents to vilify them as the one starting the much-maligned Class War in the election year. But elections are about publicly discussing social and economic inequities.
  
• The median household income in the US is $50,000/year.  If $250,000 annual household income is “Middle Class” (Obama’s definition), families living on $80,000/year are Working Poor, and those under 150,000 would come under Lower Middle Class!

By McCain’s callous definition (income — not assets — of $5 million/ year), the entire US population excepting the ultrarich is way below McCain’s Middle Class. Families making $250,000/year can call themselves poor!

Granted, the higher-income families’ “middle class” comfort depends on their well-paying jobs. When they lose jobs in an economic downturn, corporate restructuring, or serious sickness, they are in free fall from Middle Class to the indigent! Even as the “middle class” is enjoying all creature comforts, it also lives in a perpetually nagging anxiety of losing them. Have you considered how low-income families manage?

How are we, as a nation, going to wriggle out of the challenges ahead if the better-educated have such a skewed view of themselves in their access to resources and wealth? Who are they kidding when presidential candidates portray the affluent as “Middle Class”?

Inequality is, of course, the law of nature. However, as the great ethical teachers of the world through the ages stressed, those endowed with better talent and intelligence, or who have acquired more power and wealth, have an obligation towards others who don’t. And precisely because of the inequities, proportionally more is expected of the affluent in sharing the burden of maintaining societal decency.

We are unlikely to wriggle out of these multifaceted financial burdens, some of them entirely man-made, simply by economic growth or innovative technologies alone. We need to redefine the role of government (the supposedly “fiscally conservative” George W. Bush already showed the way by bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with $200 billion tax money, the biggest ever bailout) and the value of personal prosperity in the midst of increasing inequities bordering on poverty all around us.

Obviously, more will be expected from those who have much more to spare, including from the loosely defined “Middle Class.” END.

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By Kollengode S. Venkataraman Written in 2007

Geographically, India forced out the British and the Europeans starting on August 14, 1947. But the Indian polyglot media, with its elite angrezi media in the lead, continues to give great importance to the West’s recognition of India this and India that. And even after sixty long years, the Indian elite still craves recognition from its erstwhile colonial masters, who were actually its occupiers. It never occurs to India’s “elite” why it took so long for the West to recognize India’s inherent strengths. That is another story. Now is the time to emphasize the positive.

For forty years after independence, India suffered through the Nehruvian controlled economy, which in the mid-1980s took India to the brink of bankruptcy. With no other choice, the Congress Party was forced to loosen its stranglehold on the economy. Since then, India’s foreign exchange reserves have been steadily growing. Now it is in excess of $200 billion; China’s is 1200 billion. Without embarrassment, the Congress Party shamelessly takes credit for this liberalization.

Without the need for any statistics, even cursory visitors to India these days see the strengths not only of India’s macroeconomy, but also feel and experience the vibrancy of ordinary “unpadh” (illiterate) Indians.

The Wall Street Journal and others routinely feature articles on the strengths of India’s English-speaking manpower that is “cheap” by the standards of the industrialized West. India’s huge population now is an opportunity, not a problem. My, my, how perceptions change!

Now, multinationals, big and small, driven primarily by the cost advantage, invest heavily in India in manufacturing and in R&D in pharmaceuticals, transportation, and biotechnology. With the cost of healthcare rapidly escalating in the West, many in the West are looking at the option of going to Asia (India, Thailand, and others) for elective surgeries. It costs a lot less in India, including travel, hospital fees, and sightseeing.

That all these changes came in India just in the last 20 years is quite impressive in itself. What is more impressive is that these changes are mostly the result of the instinctive enterprise of native Indians. All that the government did was loosen its stranglehold (derisively called the Permit-Licence-Quota Raj of the Congress Party on the economy, which enormously benefited only India’s established businesses, bureaucracy, and politicians, at the cost of everybody else.

Overseas visitors to India-mostly tourists and businesspeople complain about the terrible state of the physical infrastructure like roads. rails, electric power, communications, and mass transit. If you talk to Indian sociologists, social workers and activists, or read newspapers such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Spiegel, and others, you see a different India with a widening chasm between the educated Indians who gained by globalization and the others left behind.

You can see this for yourself in India. See the quality of primary education your nephews/nieces or your siblings’ grandchildren get. And then go to a primary school in a nearby rural area, and see the difference between the two schools. See if the poorer kids even have footwear; see if they sit on benches in classrooms or squat on dirt floors in the open; or talk to people in Ekal Vidyalaya (www.ekalvidyalaya.org) or others who run schools in rural India for the poor.

Then go to any hospital where middle class Indians go for treatment

— I am not talking about the top-of-the-line Apollo/ Escort hospitals where India’s rich and other patients from outside India go for treatment. And then go to a nearby public hospital where the poor go. See the difference.

This is not peculiar to India. The much-touted trickle-down theory of the Reagan era did not work. The US is now more socioeconomically polarized than it was 30 years ago. But the starkness in the differences you see in India is quite unsettling. This has led to deep fissures among India’s social segments because the beneficiaries of globalization are the 300 million-strong educated class that is anglicized to varying degrees. Larg numbers (over 400 million by one count) are left behind.

The following scenes encapsulate India’s irony, paradox, dilemma:

The Father of India, Mohandas Gandhi, the London-educated barrister, on his return from South Africa in the 1930s gave up his 3-piece suit and arrived in Bombay in the traditional Gujarati dhoti and turban. A large number of Indians, including London-educated barristers in their flannel jackets and ties in the warm, humid Bombay, were there at the seaport to enthusiastically receive Gandhi.

And a few years after Independence, in 1953, the very first Filmfare awards ceremony was held at Metro Cinema Bombay, and the post-awards dinner was at the Willingdon Club run by India’s brown sahebs. Bimal Roy, who had won two awards for Do Bigha Zamin was denied entry into the club because Roy was in his white Bengali dhoti.

Now come to May, 2007, sixty years after India’s independence. (Source for this story is in Kumudam, the most popular Tamil weekly).

Place: the so-called “Traditional” Chennai. Venue: The Madras Cricket Club. A group of Rotary Clubs was holding a seminar on how to make the benefits of the IT boom in India reach rural India in the club auditorium.

A US-returned Chennai native, Mr. A. Narayanan, a senior honorary official in India’s federal ministry of Panchayat Raj (or ministry for Grassroots Democracy, was an invited speaker because of his expertise in the field. He had returned to India after living in the US for several years. Since he was going to speak on improving rural India’s development, Narayanan went to the Madras Cricket Club in a dhoti, worn in the traditional Madras-style.

As it happened to Bimal Roy in Bombay, Narayanan too was denied admission to the club in the “tradition-bound” Chennai. Mind you, the club was only the venue, and not the organizer of the event.

And this happened 60 years after India’s Independence! And there was not even a whimper in Chennai’s English media for Narayanan being denied entry into the Madras Cricket Club because of his dhoti.

Looking at the irony, one can say that during its colonial days, India’s leaders might have been politically slaves, but were free in Spirit. And with spiritual strength, they drove the European colonial occupiers out with very little bloodshed. The Partition was a bloody scar, though.

But today, India’s ruling and social elite is spiritually a slave of the West, while remaining nominally free politically and economically.

Where India will be in the next twenty years depends very much on how well India reconciles its accelerated growth in the aggregate with the imperatives for more equitable opportunity for all to benefit.  The inequities are no longer exclusively along caste lines. In the years ahead, the voices of India’s conscience keepers will only become louder. The challenge for India is for it to regain its spiritual freedom, using the word “spiritual” in its transcendental sense. END

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By Kollengode S Venkataraman (Written in 2007)

We are in the early stages of the next presidential election season.

With the field wide open for both parties, we have nearly two dozen declared and undeclared candidates, evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. It is refreshing to see Republican candidates violating their 11th Commandment, “Thou shalt not criticize another Republican in public” — even daring to make tangential remarks about other Republican candidates’ less-than-perfect family life.

Obviously, the Iraq mess created by Bush-43 is the focus of the ’08 elections, with over 3400 US soldiers killed and nearly eight times that many seriously wounded so far. The psychiatric issues of the tens of thousands of soldiers who are not wounded are another story. The financial and social implications of this reckless war will be felt for the next several decades.

In campaigns, what politicians do not talk about often means a lot more than what they do talk about. So far, we have not heard any candidate painting a rosy picture of the future, a la Reagan. Is it possible that the candidates, for once, realize that the situation is quite serious? It seems so. Just consider these:

• In the wake of this war, US credibility and influence globally on matters of politics and economics have never been this low since WW-II.
• US trade deficits and federal budget deficits keep on piling.
• US citizens’ lack of discipline in personal savings is scandalous.
• Social security and Medicare are in jeopardy.
• Even blue-chip companies stopped offering pensions to new employees.
• The cost of college education ($20,000 in public universities and $45,000 in private universities) has driven a wedge not only between the rich and the poor, but also between middle class and the affluent.
• Over 45 miilion people ( over 15% of the population) are living without health insurance
• the net worth of the top 2% has increased significantly, while those at the bottom 25% are struggling, and the middle class is being squeezed out.

And while the US military is at war, the rest of the population makes no personal sacrifice for the war, not even financial (as a War Tax).

Anyone, two, even three of the above are manageable, if we are strong on other measures. But when all these indicators are bad, they tell us that difficult times are ahead. Is that why the presidential candidates are less than sanguine in their rhetoric? END

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By Kollengode S Venkataraman   Written in 2006

In October of 2006, under TIE-Pittsburgh’s banner, Vijay Manya, the flamboyant tycoon of the alcoholic beverage industry in India, addressed a gathering of desi entrepreneurs and mainstream VCs at the Rivers Club downtown. In addition to his entrepreneurial skills, he is into racecars, horse breeding, and is a member of India’s Parliament. The TIE brochure, keeping in tune with the upwardly mobile Indians’ assessment of themselves, described him as the king of Good Times—he is the chairman of $2.5 billion conglomerate United Breweries Group, maker of Kingfisher beer and McDowell rums. Mallya is also into petrochemicals and fertilizers, and recently into the airline industry.

He has made his Indian shareholders happy, but his ventures in the US have only brought grief to investors, reported Len Boselovic in the Post-Gazette (Sunday, October 9, 06).

In his hour-long address to his adoring audience, his two points drew my attention.

• Mallya said the role of government is to provide infrastructure – transportation, communication, water, and electricity, demanded by foreign investors and the Indian middle class. We would argue that it should also include quality primary and secondary education and basic health care for ALL citizens. Then the private investors can use the infrastructure to provide goods and services in open competition. However, the Indian government, after 58 years of independence and squandering billions of taxpayer money, is now asking foreign investors to invest in India’s infrastructure development. This, he said, is a misplaced policy. There is merit to this argument.

• The other point Mallya made, when seen from the opposite end, highlighted the crux of India’s dilemma. While the GDP grew at 8% per year for the whole of India, Mallya told his audience, in Metro India the growth rate was around 12-14% annually, with software growing at 30%.

What is “dragging India down,” as Mallya described it, is the low under-three% growth rate in rural and small-town India dominated by traditional farming and technology-lean manufacturing.

This huge gap in the growth rates between Metro and Rural India is obvious to visitors spending time in both Indias. Even within Metro India, the English-educated and the regional language-educated live in two vastly different worlds. Making matters worse, Metro India, with all its sophistication, has become incapable of understanding Rural India.

Metro India’s educated class has the attitude of European colonial rulers — patronizing and condescending — towards people educated in regional languages, calling them “vernacular” languages using the same derisive term of their European masters.

Vernacular, according to Webster, means a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language, and “relating to a nonstandard or substandard language or dialect of a place, region, or country.”

Take Tamil. Tamil has 2000-year-old history we see in its oldest literary work, with a large compendium of literature on ethics, economics, governance, romantic love, valor, and devotion. Besides, its performing/ visual arts in music, dance, iconography, and temple architecture are world famous. Yet, for the European colonialists, and now the anglicized desis, Tamil and all other Indian languages, are “vernaculars”!!!

In the wake of globalization, the educated class in every country is seamlessly integrated with the educated class in every other country while it is increasingly disengaged from its own hinterlands.

But what makes it worse in India is that the anglicized India is also disengaged from India’s history, languages, and its literary and philosophical ethos. Remember, India has given birth to four major religions-Hinduisms, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism; has over fifteen languages with rich collections of refined, even radical and iconoclastic thoughts in their literature, and has vibrant performing arts and traditional architecture having older than 4000 years of history.

This Metro-Rural divide has social and political consequences. Already, if you’re educated in regional languages, your lot is pitiful:

• You do not know the language of the legal and healthcare systems. No prescription/dosage instructions are given in the regional languages.
  
• When you buy a camera, cell phone, or a DVD player in India, you get the receipt, warranty card, and the instruction manual only in English that you can’t read.

• You go to the temple/mosque. You don’t understand Sanskrit (or Arabic for Muslims) the language in which the priest conducts the service. Often, the pandits and the maulvis themselves do not know either the literal meaning or the import of what they recite.

With nearly 2/3 of people living in smaller cities and villages, the divide between those with resources and those without is becoming wider and deeper by the day. In cities, most modern medical treatments are available, but are not affordable to low-income families. If you’re poor, you’re out of luck.

This widening gulf is a cause of great concern in public forums in India. Where India will be as a society in the next fifty years depends on whether India’s ruling elite and its ambitious middle class listen to India’s conscience keepers and bridge — at least narrow — this widening gulf. It is unrealistic, even cruel, to expect the non-anglicized India to catch up. A bicycle can never catch up with a motorbike.

After nearly twenty-five years of runaway growth, Chinese leaders have recognized that wide disparities between its affluent and its rural poor threaten its social stability, and may thwart its goal as a superpower.

The Metro India today, oozing with confidence, believes that it is the smartest in the world. So, can we hope Indians will learn from China? Don’t bet on it. END.

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By Kollengode S. Venkataraman  Written in July 2005

In mid-May, I read a frivolous, derisively funny, and outrageous novel, Bergdorf Blondes, by Plum Skyes describing the life of young high-flying men and women hopping between Europe, NY, and LA, living a life of excess even as they endure marital infidelities, pettiness, jealousy, and backstabbing behind their shroud of wealth. (Review in the next issue.) Soon after enjoying reading Bergdorf Blondes for its hilarity, in the week of May 22 and later, I read in The New York Times the riveting multipart series published under the general title “Class Matters.” This serious series, which the Times reporters worked on for over a year, discusses, among other things:

1) How the American sociocultural landscape is transformed in the last 25 years by the ever-widening disparities in wages, incomes, and access to resources between the top 2% of the population with wealth and the bottom 30% of the population struggling to make ends meet,

2) How the falling purchasing power of the dollar and stagnant income levels of the working class have seriously affected typical families (couple + 2 kids) living below the median income ($42,000 per year) but above the Poverty Line ($15,000 per year), and

3) How it is becoming impossible for new immigrants taking up the lowest paying jobs to climb out of poverty.

The contrast between the two stood in stark relief.

The series discusses the accelerating costs of healthcare, college education, and housing, leading to more and more people getting marginalized. Forty-five million Americans out of a 300 million population live without health insurance. State universities cost nearly $20,000 per year and private universities $45,000 a year for tuition and boarding. The dropout rate of average university students from low-income families is on the rise because of the high cost of education.

The American middle-class lifestyle precariously hangs on the thread of people having jobs, which are at best nebulous, given periodic convulsions in Corporate America. The salaried “haves” feel insecure even as they keep a gloss of good life, and the have-nots feel trapped and see no way out of their misery. If this is not enough, consider these:

* The Medicare program (which seniors depend on in their old age) is in deep trouble right now.

* Social Security will be in trouble in the next 30 to 40 years. If Wall Street gets into this (as President Bush wants it), this safety net may end sooner, or end in a bigger disaster for the poorer, less educated individuals unfamiliar with speculative investments, particularly those who get into the market late in a rising market. Since it is their “personal” accounts with full decision-making control, losers cannot blame the government or Wall Street. We have been here before.

* Large corporations, left, right and center, are filing for bankruptcy and walking away from their pension and healthcare obligations to retirees. Smaller companies are sure to take their cues from their Big Bros.

* As it is, many national retail chains don’t offer healthcare and pension benefits to their new employees. Wal-Mart (with employees nationwide over one million) pays its employees $19,000/year on average, forcing them to seek support from food stamps and government subsidized medical care. Since these are taxpayer-funded, even those who don’t buy at Wal-Mart, are indirectly subsidizing Wal-Mart!

The AFL-CIO reports* that “Fewer than half of Wal-Mart workers are insured under the company plan — just 46%, while 66% of workers at large private firms are insured under their companies’ plans. Wal-Mart’s workers also pay an exceptionally large proportion (42%) of what it costs the company to buy the insurance. The typical employee in large companies pays 16% to 25% of total health plan premiums.

So, in the next twenty to forty years, more and more low-income seniors in their last few years will be depending on their children not only for emotional support, but also economic support, like in India or China. This will further cut into the disposable resources of young parents in the American middle- and lower-middle-class families.

We are already becoming an economically polarized society, much like feudal societies of Europe and Asia, with ever-decreasing opportunities for upward mobility for those born into economic and social disadvantages, whether white, black, brown, or yellow.

Given this reality, eternal optimists want us to believe that economic Darwinism is still the solution, and the forces of Free Market will eventually take over and level the field.

This optimism is unrealistic. At some point, the federal government, even when Republican ideologues occupy the White House and control the Congress and the federal judiciary, will be forced to provide for increased socioeconomic mobility for the socioeconomically disadvantaged through subsidized education, healthcare, and opportunities for youngsters to acquire marketable skills.

Politicians will do it not because it is the conscionable and right thing to do. As Gov. Ed Rendell said recently in a lecture at Pitt, governments [and other man-made establishments including religious institutions] rarely respond to moral imperatives. They will respond only because gross inequities are the breeding ground for much larger problems such as social upheavals.

inequities are the breeding ground for much bigger problems such as social upheavals.

**(http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/prsptm/pr10212003.cfm)

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Retold by Kollengode S Venkataraman Written in 1995

[Panchatantra stories are forerunners for today’s cartoons. The Panchatantra was not written as children’s literature. It was intended to teach a future ruler the practical wisdom of statecraft through stories.  These stories, at once funny and profound, give human characters to animals, address life’s dilemmas, and stress that brute force does not necessarily lead to survival. With an agile mind & quick wit, one can even transmute one’s helpless situations to one’s advantage, and render the strength of one’s adversaries irrelevant. You can call this a primer in realpolitik through a children’s story and can be interpreted at many levels. Vishnusharman, who lived around 2nd century AD in today’s Kashmir, wrote these stories in Sanskrit verses]

In a jungle, Wildcat and Mouse lived in a tree, Mouse in a burrow near the root, and Wildcat in the branches above. Mouse, realizing that Wildcat would be delighted to feast on him, stayed away from him.

One evening a trapper, looking for his catch, placed a net underneath the tree. Wildcat, not seeing the trap, jumped into it for the bait, and was snared. Mouse was vicariously pleased to see the plight of Wildcat entangled in the net. He gleefully ran around the net. Suddenly, Mouse noticed two predators, Owl on the tree and Mongoose on the ground, both ready to pounce on him. Mouse saw the situation threatening his very survival. Very quickly he decided on a plan.

He told Wildcat, “Friend, I will tear open the net with my sharp teeth and set you free if you shelter me inside the net.” Wildcat, desperate to get out of the net, agreed, seeing the deal as the only way to his freedom.

Inside the net was the strange sight of Wildcat, Mouse’s enemy under normal conditions, protecting him from Mongoose and Owl. Under Wildcat’s very protection, Mouse ran around inside the net, nibbling at the bait.

Mouse thought, “If I set Wildcat free right away, he being my natural enemy, may feast on me. Further, I will have to deal with three enemies, Wildcat, Owl, and Mongoose. Therefore, let me not be in any hurry to free Wildcat!”

Wildcat protested to Mouse the delay in releasing him. Mouse thought: “By daybreak, Owl and Mongoose would be gone & the trapper would be coming for his catch. If I free Wildcat then, he can’t even think of me because he has to save himself from the trapper.” Further, Mouse knew that his arch enemy, and now his savior, Wildcat, had no other choice but to wait. So, he told Wildcat, “My dear friend, wait till daybreak, and I will set you free.” Wildcat waited, not having an alternative.

Mongoose and Owl were gone by daybreak. Mouse, seeing the approaching trapper, chewed the net away and released Wildcat. Both ran for their safety, Wildcat to the branches above, beyond the reaches of the trapper, and Mouse, to his rat hole beyond the reach of Wildcat.

Endnote: In politics, there are no permanent friends and permanent enemies. We have only permanent interests. Attributed to Winston Churchill (1940s)

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By Kollengode S Venkataraman  Written in October 2006

Indians often learn about their own history through the writings of Europeans during their colonial rule over India between the 18th and 20th centuries. Consequently, Indians themselves look at India through European lenses. Even to buttress arguments on history and culture, Indians need to quote the works of European writers, many of whom had their own missionary biases and colonial axes to grind.

Nowhere has this damaged more than in matters of faith and spirituality. This has resulted in a common “understanding” that Hindus are polytheists, image worshippers (polite expressions), idolators (derisive term), or even worse, pagans and heathens, whose “souls” need to be “saved” through conversion by persuasion, incentives, or, if necessary, by force.

This is because, with rare exceptions, even college-educated Indians are not known to critically examine writers coming from different cultural and religious backgrounds, whose goals were economic exploitation, political domination, and religious conversion.

While the world knows about the Bhagavad Gita as a work that conveys the essence of Hindu thought, there are other less-known shorter Gitas no less sublime than the famous Gita. I had not heard of these till I read Mananam, published by the Chinmaya Mission West.

Among these shorter works on transcendental and intuitive spirituality is the Avadhoota Gita. Avadhootas are mendicants living beyond the concepts of merits and sins. Like the Sufis in Islam who came centuries later, a true avadhoota doesn’t proclaim himself to be an avadhoota. Jyotirmanayananda in Mananam writes on the Avadhootas:

“Avadhoota Dattatreya’s uncompromising, nonindividualistic view of the Absolute is most beautifully expressed in the following verse:”

त्वद्यात्रया व्यापकता हता ते|  ध्यानेन चेतःपरता हता ते ।|
स्तुत्या मया वाक्परता हता ते|  क्षमस्व नित्यं त्रिविधापराधान् ||

tvad yaatrayaa vyaapakataa hataa te| dhyaanena chetah parataa hataa te ||
stutyaa mayaa vaakya parataa hataa te | kshamasva mama trividaa aparaadhaan ||

Translation:

By going on pilgrimages, I killed Your omnipresence.
By meditating on Your form, I killed Your transcendental nature.
And by singing hymns, I killed Your nature of being beyond words.
Forgive me for these three transgressions.

So long as people have religious beliefs, there will be objects of veneration, be they the books themselves (the Torah, Bible, or Koran) and other relics or symbols. So, how can one say that veneration of one kind is OK, but not the other? Besides, all true religions remind us that these objects of veneration are only ladders for believers to look beyond.

Yoga Vashistham is another work that would shatter ideas that many of us have about fate. Here is a sample: “In this world, whatever is gained is gained by self-effort… … What is called fate is fictitious……There is no power greater than the right action at the present moment… One who says, ‘Fate is directing me to do this’ is dumb and the goddess of fortune would abandon him.” END

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Kollengode S Venkataraman  (written in January 2005)

Democrats and their sympathizers can parse the November election results any which way they want, but the simple truth is undeniable:

The president was reelected to office with a plurality of votes, something that had not happened in the last several elections. The Republican majority in the US Senate has jumped up from a thin 51-48 majority to a comfortable 55-44 majority, with one independent. In the US House, the Republicans have picked up three more seats to 231 from 228 in a House of total 433 members. In the House, where members have the best job security one can imagine, a 3-member gain for Republicans when they are already in a comfortable majority is definitely noteworthy. If this is not a mandate in the political sense, then what is?

To quote the Tamil poet Kannadasan, “Nobody asks a victor whether he followed the right path towards his victory.” Naturally, in elections, and in business, and even in our personal lives, the bottom line is the only thing that counts, unless there is a big scandal behind the successes.

Republicans feel that they followed not only a right path towards their victory, but also righteous path, given their President George Bush’s proclivity to wear his faith on his sleeves and the millions of Christian Fundamentalists who delivered votes in battleground states.

Senator Kerry, for his part, gave a gallant fight, given the difficult set of circumstances he was in. That he was not helped by his running mate, the Southern Senator John Edwards, wouldn’t have surprised him, given the pre-election calculus of his own party.

Generally, US presidents have difficulty in their second term because of their lame duck status. What may make it more difficult for President Bush is that Vice President Dick Cheney is unlikely to seek the Republican nomination in 2008, given his age, health history, and more to the point, his political baggage. So, with no “natural” heir of a vice president seeking nomination in the 2008 election, the field for the Republican nominees will be wide open.

And this has the potential to complicate President Bush’s second term particularly in the second half, when he cannot avoid the lame duck status. This is because a large number of ambitious Republican candidates would be jockeying themselves, first for nomination, and then for victory against Democrats. If things do not go well for Bush between now and 2008 (Iraq, Iran, the economy, trade, and budget deficits), these unencumbered Republican presidential aspirants would not hesitate to distance themselves from his policies.

So, for President Bush, between now and the midterm election in 2006 is the most crucial time to push through as much of his political agenda as he possibly can. His list is very long indeed: On the domestic front, a) making permanent the tax breaks he has given to the people in the top 1% of the income level and shifting the tax burden on the middle class, b) privatizing social security, c) packing the federal court system with religious and social conservatives of his liking, d) the changing health care delivery system and higher education necessitated by their costs escalating at 300% to 400% the rate of inflation.

On the international front: a) fighting terrorism outside the country “so that they do not attack us inside,” b) nuclear proliferation, c) taking care of the remaining components of what he termed as “Axis of Evil” given his religious fundamentalist background, d) salvaging whatever is left of the US-Europe alliance badly weakened by Bush’s go-it-alone Cowboy attitude, e) his holy-grail of democracy in middle east, f) breaking the Gordian knot of the festering Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The list is indeed very long.

Usually, US presidents in their second and final term become obsessed with the legacy they leave behind. This gives them a rare opportunity to become expansive mentally, intellectually, even spiritually, provided they are reflective.

But this president is not known to be reflective. He even brags about this as his strengths. He likes to understand the outside world in simple black-and-white terms – remember his statement, “If you are not with us, you’re against us!”- in terms of his Fundamentalist Christian theological beliefs.

He may be transformed by his desire to leave an inclusive legacy.

But he will meet opposition from within. The social and religious conservatives, not to speak of the powerful corporate donors, on whose back Bush rode to victory, would sure ask for their pound of flesh in terms of what he can, and can NOT do on domestic and foreign affairs.

And he may find himself a prisoner in the cage of his own making.

For Democrats, there may be a ray of hope, even though they are completely out of power in the Federal government. he executive and legislative branches of the Federal government are firmly in Republican control. And the federal courts, with more and more Bush appointees, will be more right-leaning. Therefore, it is understandable if Bush and his Republican Neo-Con ideologues in their second term play hardball in dealing with Democrats and become even more right-wing.

And the Republican’s hubris might lead to their nemesis in the form of the inevitable fissures within the Republican party between its moderates and the right-wingers, with moderate Republicans getting support from the Democrats, at least in the Senate.

The Republicans may even self-destruct themselves with power, as it has happened time and time again in history, and also in epics… … as it happened to the Yadhavas in the Mahabharata towards its end. END

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Kollengode S Venkataraman (written in 2004)

The life span of Indians has impressively increased from 49 years in 1970 to 65 years in 1998. And the infant mortality rates have dropped from 146 per 1000 live births in the 1950s to 70 per 1000 live births in 1999, still relatively very high.

But these observations belie the harsh reality of India’s reckless, exploitative, greedy, and irresponsible healthcare industry that holds in its vice-like grip a large number of people (over 70% of the population, or 700 million) who have very little disposable resources. Of these, many (rural and urban poor) have no disposable resources at all.

While the healthcare industry shortchanges India’s citizens in all possible ways as you will see in this article, it

provides quality healthcare including organ transplants and open-heart surgery to people from the Middle East, Central Asia, and other South Asian countries. This is the medical equivalent of “outsourcing” in the IT industry. Going to Europe or North America for medical treatment will cost these people several times more than it does in India. Now Europeans too go to India for medical treatment.

This gives good publicity in the global marketplace apart from earning foreign exchange. So, India’s elected officials and its babudom close their eyes to what this is doing to further balkanize India.

In this background, on Sunday, November 2, AID (Association of India’s Development), an organization mostly of graduate students from India, held a lecture at CMU by Dr. Abhay Shukla on the deplorable condition of the Indian healthcare industry. Shukla is an alumnus of All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, a physician-activist working in rural Maharashtra, a recipient of the prestigious Ashoka Award, and a founder of Jan Arogya Abhiyan. AID supports Shukla’s work in India. There were 15 people in the audience, mostly students. Shukla put the Indian healthcare industry in context:

* In any society, public health is the government’s responsibility, whose major thrust is increasing health awareness among people, prevention of diseases, immunization, pre- and neo-natal care, etc. In India, governments are spending less and less proportion of their GDP on public health. The health of people (mostly poor) has suffered, and society as a whole pays the price.

* Most of the taxpayer money spent on public health goes to paying salaries of healthcare workers, with very little spent on infrastructure, equipment, or modern diagnostic tools. Government hospitals lag behind even more in an industry where new developments are sweeping across the landscape at breathtaking speeds.

* Health insurance covers only 7% of Indians, mostly urban and affluent. A vast number of people don’t even know what health insurance is.

* India spends 6% of its GDP on healthcare, with only 1% coming from governments. The remaining 5% is what people spend mostly out-of-pocket for private hospitals and private doctors.

* Healthcare provided by private doctors and hospitals now accounts for over 80% of India’s healthcare industry, which is mostly urban, unregulated, with no mechanisms to check its practices.

* The Indian Medical Association, the professional body of physicians and surgeons, is incapable of regulating itself (much like it is in the US).

* Naturally, healthcare costs are the single most common cause for people’s indebtedness. People either sell their properties or take loans way beyond their capacity to repay.

* People from established sections (politicians, bureaucrats, and the organized sector have first dip into the public healthcare system in government-run teaching hospitals. Only the leftovers go to the poor.

* There is rampant abuse of modern medicine by many of India’s doctors, particularly in treating poor and illiterate patients. Use of entirely avoidable injections and saline infusions is most common among doctors since they charge more for these services than for tablets and drinking fluids. The abuse of antibiotics and corticosteroids is also widespread, giving rise to resistance to antibiotics in patients, which also has an epidemiological consequence.

In addition to what Dr. Shukla presented in his address to the AID group, also consider these:

* The gender ratio among under 5-year-old children in India is scandalous. Even among the educated and upwardly mobile people in Gujarat, Punjab, Haryana, and other places, we have only around 800 girls for every 1000 boys. Education has not helped in counteracting deeply held cultural biases against daughters. The Indian middle class has no guilt in using modern technology (amniocentesis, ultrasounds, etc.), and India’s radiologists and OB-GYN doctors have no scruples or conscience in making India’s pregnant women abort female fetuses.

The social consequences of this are not hard to fathom.

* The Indian private healthcare industry is heavily biased towards curing diseases rather than preventing diseases because curing is where all the money is. There is little incentive for private doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to stress preventive care.

* India has the highest number of people with HIV, a staggering number of over 4 million people. HIV is no longer confined to drug users and sex workers (prostitutes). HIV is now very much a mainstream problem in some states.

* The incidence of leprosy and TB diseases is the highest in India.

* Taking legal recourse to medical negligence by doctors and hospitals is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire because the Indian criminal justice system is even more corrupt. In their infinite wisdom, Indians pray that they complete their journey on this earth without ever having to visit a lawyer. But this may be changing as described by Aditi Iyer further down.

* The most diabolical aspect of the Indian healthcare industry is the kickbacks physicians receive from diagnostic labs. Physicians prescribing lab work (blood and urine analysis), X-rays, CAT scans, ultrasounds, echocardiograms, EKG, etc. get as commissions nearly 30% of what the labs charge the patients. This is in addition to what these physicians charge patients directly for their services. So, there is great financial incentive for physicians to order questionable, expensive tests more often than necessary, further exacerbating patients’ financial burden. Remember, most of the expenses are out-of-pocket for the patients.

So, it should surprise no one that a recent World Bank study reported “[The  Indian] public remains badly informed about much of the health system. It knows very little about whether the health services [they receive] are appropriate, who is benefiting from them, whether the quality is sufficient, or whether people are getting good value from public and private spending on health…… There are major problems with equity, vulnerability, financial catastrophe, quality and accountability in both public and private health sectors.

The problem is receiving social scientists’ attention. Aditi Iyer (Health for the Millions, Vol. 22, No. 4, July-August, 1996) writes that the Godlike image of doctors in India is finally changing:

… An overwhelming majority of doctors are employed in an individual capacity in the profit-oriented private sector, in which the sick does not receive medical care without making on-the-spot payment. So central are monetary transactions to the healing, and so repeated is the experience of it, that in the public eye, doctors have begun to resemble traders……

“Accompanying this altered image are reports of medical negligence, malpractice and unethical practices that have increasingly made their way into the mainstream media. With aggrieved patients and/or their crusading relatives taking doctors through the orchestrations of civil and criminal lawsuits, the unquestioned trust that once underpinned the doctor-patient relationship has all but disappeared.”

is no wonder counter-movements are coming up all over India, led by social activists who are often physicians themselves, such as Dr.

Abhay Shukla. They work to educate rural people on the basic health care issues, on preventive care, social hygiene, and how to care for minor ailments themselves, and when and how to seek medical help so that the healthcare system exploits them less. They also try to make the Indian physicians in rural areas accountable to their patients.

Dr. Abhay Shukla works in rural Maharashtra in Kolahpur District. The most impressive part of Dr. Shukla’s work is developing pictorial educational material with minimum verbiage on healthcare issues that are very effective in teaching rural people, given the high levels of illiteracy. These materials can be easily used all over India.

Another feature of Shukla’s work is making patients shame exploitative doctors. People have taken silent and peaceful protest processions in rural towns to bring their grievances against doctors to public notice, and put the doctors on notice to change their professional behavior. This has increased the overall awareness of the underlying issues.

Obviously, India needs more Abhay Shuklas in its healthcare system. You can contact Dr. Shukla at: abhayseema@vsnl.com

The website of the organization is: www.cehat.org

Editor’s end note: The challenges and significance of Dr. Shukla’s work are enormous since people like him are trying to change the basic premises of India’s healthcare system. And in the Pittsburgh metro area live a fairly large number of accomplished healthcare professionals of Indian origin, and we also have other resourceful Indian organizations. So, AID should have tried to get a wider audience for Shukla’s talk. People like Shukla need all kinds of resources in addition to money. A wider exposure for his yeomen work would have increased the odds for Shukla to have access to these other resources as well.

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By Kollengode S. Venkataraman (written in 2005)

Recently, during my emergency business trip to China in February, I had to transit through Beijing on my way to Qingdao (1-h flight from Beijing), situated along the shores of Yellow Sea facing Korea. I was forced to spend a night at the Holiday Inn at Lido, Beijing. This was the time of the Chinese New Year weekend, when the world sees the largest peacetime movement of people, with over 140 million Chinese of all backgrounds going to their hometowns to visit their extended families.

Thoroughly jet-lagged and weary after 19 hours in airplanes and an 11-hour time difference, I tried to revive myself with a shower. And then went to have dinner in the restaurant in the hotel lobby.

One more visible sign of China’s booming economy is a proliferation of American-style big-spread buffets in hotels catering to the diverse tastes of international business travelers. I went around the buffet table and condescendingly chuckled at the items “Cole Slow”, “Chocolate Mouse,” “Brownites.”, and “Gonjee.”

Also in the complex was an Indian restaurant appropriately called “The Taj.” I went over the obviously overpriced items in the menu card. One item that caught my attention on the Indian menu card on display was “Milaughutawney.”

The name traces its origin to the early British colonial days (18th century) in Southern India, in the Tamil Country. The name is the Englishmen corrupting the simple, colloquial Tamil word, Milagu-tanni, that they heard from the unpadh local foot-soldiers for the East India Company. With Milagu meaning black pepper and tanni meaning water, Milagu-tanni refers to a very light, spicy soup, containing tamarind, dal, cumin, crushed pepper, turmeric powder, mustard seeds…… The Tamil upper crust would call it milagu-rasam. It should have worked wonders for clearing up the sinuses the goras.

In typical Desi ishtyle, over the years, Indians have come to use not the original Indian names for many things that are authentically Indian, but the corrupted versions of the names given by the angrezi, thanks to our subservience to the colonial rulers.

Milaughutawney we see in Indian restaurant menu cards is one example. Another is coir. Coir is the English term for the rope made of coconut fibers taken from the coconut husk. The original name is kayiru in Tamil, or kayaru in Malayalam. Yet another is “gonjee” for gruel with broken rice kernels, for which the original term is the Tamil “kanji.” Catamaran is likewise a corruption of Tamil “kattu-maram” (literally “logs tied together” in Tamil, a device in which several 20′ to 30′ long logs of wood are tied together with kayiru. Kattumarams can still be spotted along the Tamil Nadu coastline used by local fishermen.

Sometimes, we have even taken the altogether Europeanized names for things very Indian. Tamarind is the English name for imli as it is called in most North Indian Languages, or puli in Tamil and Malayalam, and huli in Kannada. This is a quite common cooking item in India household.

Tamarind is again the Englishman’s corruption of the Arabic/Persian Tamar-i-Hind, which literally means, “dates of India.” For Arabs/Persians, the desi imli came close to the dates they were familiar with in color (dark brown pulp) with a hard seed inside. The taste was not sweet, but sweet-sour. In typical Desi ishtyle, anglicized desis use Tamarind, the Goras’ corrupted word for imli, which the Goras borrowed from Arabs/Persians.

Another word is the Persian/Urdu sharbat, pronounced shur-buth in the Indian subcontinent, a cold drink made with crushed ice and sweet syrup of different flavors. Europeans took the word from the French, who first took it from the Persians/Indians. The French made the word sound, well, very French.

The French swallow the “t” at the end of many words. Monet, the name of the famous French painter, is pronounced Monay. Filet, a boneless piece of meat, is likewise filay. Merlot, the type of wine is Merlow, and cabaret, buffet, and gourmet are cabaray, buffay, and gormay. So, the French, as they swallowed their serbet, also swallowed the “t” pronouncing it sorbay.

The English, and then the Yankee, to display their eclectic French gourmet tastes, would order for sorbay at the end of the dinner.

To complete the circle, we see native Desis, showing their anglicized, and now Americanized, sophistication, ordering their sorbay at the end of a 10-course dinner in upscale restaurants in India.

The grand prize for many educated “modern” Indians’ ignorance is they calling the decimal system of numbers “Arabic numerals.” Europeans called it Arabic numerals because they learned it from the Arabs. Arabs did not create the decimal system. Arabs learned it from Hindus. The Arabic name for the number system is “hinsa,” meaning, “of the Hindus.” The term “decimal” is as close as it can get to the Sanskrit “dashama-, with dasham meaning ten, as in Vijaya-dashami.

As this etymological exercise went through my mind, I wondered: If caucasians can corrupt the simple Kayaru to Coir, Sher bath to Sorbay, Milagu-tanni to Milaghutawny, and if desis can embrace the corrupted terminology and pronunciation as a sign of their sophistication, what is wrong with the Chinese corrupting coleslaw to Cole Slow, Chocolate Mousse to Chocolate Mouse, and the Brownies to Brownites!

As I was thinking along this line, I was embarrassed that I instantaneously and condescendingly chuckled on first seeing Chocolate Mouse and Cole Slow and Brownites on the buffet table in Beijing.

Mulling over this etymological exercise through my jet-lagged stupor, helped myself to the very Chinese Chocolate Mouse and Cole Slow, and Brownites at the buffet. •

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By Kollengode S Venkataraman, Written in April 2006

Indo-US relations have cozied up for the long haul irrespective of who governs in the US or in India. For the first time, two successive US presidents, one Democrat (Clinton) and the other Republican (Bush), visited India. In his address to Asia Society in Washington, DC in late February before his South Asia trip, and later in addressing a pre-screened audience from Purana Qila (Old Fort) in New Delhi in March, President Bush was waxing about India — about its diversity, a Sikh prime minister and a Muslim president, multiethnic and multireligious social fabric; India’s burgeoning middle class (300 million and counting); India’s democratic ethos (even with all its cronyism from top to bottom; rich history, arts;

India’s independent accomplishments in the medicine, agriculture, technology, not to speak of the contribution of the 2-million-strong people Indian descent in the US in healthcare, science c technology, research, teaching, and entrepreneurship.

The condescension of the orthodox and conservative US political establishment typified by the Kissinger-Nixon interactions towards India is a faded memory now.

The conservative political establishment in the US knows that the Sole-Super-Power status of the US is not only unstable, but also untenable. In Greek and Indian mythologies, we read about powerful overweening kings becoming overconfident – remember “The sun never sets in the British empire”? – only to be destroyed by their own hubris. So, the unbridled Superpower status of the US will be short-lived.

EU and Japan have aging populations, and are only too aware of the consequence of their colonizing past before WW II.

The other power center emerging is the totalitarian China. China, with its 1.2 billion people population has already become a political, economic and cultural fulcrum in Asia Pacific and Southeast Asia. China also has to avenge the humiliation it suffered in the 19th and 20th centuries at the hands of Japanese and European colonizers.

It is this context that is forcing US traditional conservatives to forge closer relationship with the democratic India with the hope to checkmate China, which pits one Asian country against another.

Already, China’s inroads into the US are formidable, going beyond Wal-Mart and consumer electronics. It is sustaining (partially, in any case the low interest rates and the real estate boom here by pumping billions of dollars into US treasuries. So, as China seeks world domination, US tries to rope in India within its sphere of influence to check

With its 8% annual growth for years into the future, the equally populous India is the natural choice for the US to counterweigh China, even though India lags behind China on many measures. But this alliance has its own risks for US and India. The new alliance is bound to make Pakistan, which sees India as its archrival and enemy, very uncomfortable. This is because US has been Pakistan’s ally through several dictatorships. The estranged Pakistan is bound get closer to China, Pakistan’s all-weather friend. This has the potential to disturb regional stability.

However, the beneficiaries of India’s economic boom are by and large India’s middle class. The shining part of India (~30% of the population, or 300 million) shines so brightly that it blinds the other part of India that is left behind (around 750 million), which has no chance of catching up with the shining India. The situation is analogous in China.

In the new paradigm of the globalized economy, the threat to global peace and stability may not be aggression from neighbors and enemies from far off lands, but from inside, triggered by the huge inequities in access to resources towards quality education, health care, communication and transportation between the affluent and those left behind. In India and China, the appalling disparity in every quantifiable measure between the affluent and the poor hits every first-time visitor.

The disparity in the quality of primary and secondary schooling in India between the rich and the poor is scandalous. The Indian middle class buys relatively inexpensive high-quality primary and secondary education from private schools for their children, giving its kids enormous advantage when they compete for admission into highly subsidized university education. The kids from these two social classes in India grow up in two entirely different Indias, with the two Indias not having much in common socially, economically, culturally, even emotionally.

Another is in healthcare. (See Sherry Narang’s article elsewhere). While most of the modern medical care is available in urban India, they are way beyond the reach of low-income Indians.

Even in the US nearly 15% of the population — or 45 million people – mostly young and poor, don’t have health insurance. The personal savings of citizens in the US are among the lowest in the world. The cost of college education is way beyond the paying capacities of average students from Low-income families. One by one, large American corporations are withdrawing their pension plans for new employees. So, if the trend continues, in 30 years, Social Security checks would be the main source of income for many future retirees in their autumn years. To this, if you also add the macro consequences of the US trade and budget deficits piling year after year, even without a degree in economics, one can see the general direction we are heading.

The educated Indian Middle class cannot even relate to the low- income people in their midst. So, in the one-man-one-vote Indian democracy, grass-root political leadership comes not from the educated middle class, but from the disenfranchised classes. This dichotomy has serious consequences for India’s social stability.

So, ultimately India’s strength will be decided not by how well its anglicized sector services the needs of the industrialized West, and not by the purchasing power of its affluent middle class. It will be determined by how it reconciles the ethically indefensible huge inequities among its citizens. The Indian middle class in its pursuit for personal success does not seem to recognize these issues.

And MNCs (multinational corporations), in their desire to expand their markets, only look at the 300-million Indian middle class, “larger than the entire population of the U.S”

As President Bush put it in his Asia Society address. The yearnings of the 700+ million disenfranchised Indians are not their concern. This trend is repeated globally with varying degrees.

While nations form alliances for countering real and perceived external threats in traditional ways, their real threats would be internal strife caused by the widening inequity between the well-connected and the disenfranchised. All the global alliances and the most sophisticated weapon systems would be of no use against this threat. END

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By Kollengode S Venkataraman Written in Jan 2005

The Indian intelligentsia wants to believe that India is on a roll, with its IT Pros solving problems for the industrialised societies; its three hundred million affluent jet-set middle class having large purchasing power, with USA-style malls sprouting all over the country……

But behind the facade of all development stories, India is still a feudal country not capable of managing its affairs intelligently. Consider the latest infighting in the Reliance Group of companies built by Dhirubhai Ambani, who passed away 2 years ago. Reliance is not a small company. According to the Reliance website, the group has a dominant presence in India. The Reliance Group:

• Is India’s largest highly diversified business house with revenues over 100,000 crore rupees (22 billion dollar); net profit of 6,000 crores rupees (1.4 billion dollars) and export of 15,000 crores rupees (3.5 billion dollars).
• Has over 80,000 people work at the Reliance Group of companies.
• Exports its products to more than 100 companies.
• Has its revenue equivalent to 3.5 % of India’s GDP and contributes to 10% of the country’s indirect tax revenues.
• Over 3.1 million people — it is India’s largest for any single company — are Reliance shareholders.
• Is the only Indian company in the list of global companies that create more value for their shareholders.
• Accounts for 7% of profits of the entire Indian corporate sector.

After the death of Mr Dhirubhai, the company is run by his two sons, Mukesh, Chairman and Managing Director, and Anil, the Vice Chairman and managing Director of the corporate giant. The brothers are MBAs from Stanford and Harvard. With all the case studies the Ambani brothers did in their MBA assignments, if you expect modern management principles in Reliance Group, perish the thought.

Recently the two brothers are at each other’s throats, bar-room style for controlling the empire, with Mukesh issuing statement to his employees, “There is no ambiguity in Dhirubhai Ambani ‘s legacy that the Chairman and Managing Director is the final authority on all matters concerning Reliance.”

Who do you think is sorting out their ego clash? Not the board of directors, not the 1.3 million shareholders, not the institutional investors, not the mavens of Dalal Street, not even the Indian courts. The dispute is treated as a family feud mediated by the brothers’ widowed mother Kokila Bank, and their two sisters Deepti Salgaonkar and Nina Kothari. Which begs these questions: what is the role of the board of directors other than being potted plants decorating the boardroom table? Where are the 3.1 million shareholders, the nominal owners of the company?

The dispute over the leadership of the 23-billion-dollar joint stock company is treated as a quarrel between two brothers fighting over their favorite Christmas toys. How much more pathetic can India Inc be?

The dispute only tells us how feudal India is even in the day and age. In India, leadership transitions are hereditary. Motilal Nehru to Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi’s Italian widow Sonia, who is grooming her son and daughter to be the inheritors of the party’s (and by implication, the nation’s) helm. The story is the same in Tamil Nadu, the Land of the Rationalists, where Karunanidhi’s extended family treats the whole state as a fiefdom. Bollywood is no different, and so are the performing arts.

Maybe Ambani brothers should read the rise and fall of their fellow Sindhi enterprise Kamanis, which brings to mind the Urdu saying: haveli ka Umar sath saal. The lifespan of a hereditary enterprise is 60 years.

India is a regional superpower? Yeah, keep dreaming.

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By Kollengode S Venkataraman   Written in July 2003

I am a practicing agnostic Hindu. But I believe that faith, either in an external Being or in one’s own Self or self, has the potential to help individuals to make some sense of the roller coaster ride of life and manage life’s aggravations. But faiths, when organised into religions, often lose their spiritual underpinnings and become empty shells of rituals and trite catechisms seemingly based on high-sounding theology. Don’t get me wrong. Rituals and catechisms are often necessary in the early stages of one’s spiritual development, like temporary scaffolding necessary for building permanent structures. However, in organized religions, they often become ends in themselves, or worse still, means towards a more sinister end. When religions get organised into mass movements, their virulence often becomes deadly in dealing with nonconformists within the faith, and dealing with people of other faiths. Histories of all religions bear testimony to this.

Now to the rise of Hindu assertiveness in India that goes by several pejorative terms in the Indian English media — Saffron brigade, Sangh Parivar, Moditva, and Hindutva being the most common ones.

Let us for now ignore the critics of Hindu assertiveness among those with strong Christian and Muslim theological grooming. Let’s also ignore that these critics have no problem in being assertive in their faiths.

The other critics of Hindu assertiveness in India are mostly in the Indian English media. Many of them converts to Marxism and the Western media, having been educated and trained to see Indian through the Western lenses. They intentionally and disingenuously look at Hindu activism in isolation, as if it is something new originating from India. The rise of strong religious fundamentalism started decades earlier outside India. India is only responding and reacting to this as it was affecting India also.

Rise of religious fundamentalism in the US

All societies, Western democracies included, always had, and always will have, fringes of religious extremists. India is no exception.

In the 1970s, to combat communism, the US never hesitated to use the Christian faith — Catholic, traditional Protestant and more aggressive Southern Baptist, evangelicals, Pentecostals, and others — to solidify its masses against communism.

In the US, Ronald Reagan rode to power on the horse of Christian fundamentalists. Remember Jerry Falwell and company’s crusades in the 1970s in the name of Traditional Family Values? These were coded words for the fundamentalists’ Judeo-Christian view, not only of what the U.S. to be, but also how the world at large should look like.

During the Cold War, the US never hesitated to use the Vatican, a hierarchical, rigid, and intolerant religious organization, in its war against the equally intolerant communist evil Empire. Remember Lech Wałęsa of Poland’s Solidarity being used by the U.S. through Pope John Paul to fight the Soviet evil empire?

Even in his war against terrorism, George W Bush goes out of his way to appeal to Christian conservatives and invokes Evil, which has theological undertones in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Axis Of evil Includes Iran and Iraq (Muslim), North Korea (Communist). Bush’s political operatives know well that the idea of an enemy full of Evil resonates well with Judeo-Christian conservatives. The US electronic media and most of the US print media, not to speak of Indian English media, never made an issue of it. If Vajpayee calls for Dharma Yudh against terrorism, God forbid against Pakistan, imagine how the Western media and the Indian English media would characterise it. US presidents routinely invoke expressions from the Bible in their addresses to nations more to appease their religious conservatives than to inspire citizens.

Islamic fundamentalism in Asia

In the 1970s, Ayatollah Rohullah Khomeini rode the Shiite fundamentalist wave and overthrew the Shah of Iran, then a stable ally of the US against communism. Iranians thought of the Shah differently. They thought the Shah was trying to modernize — read, westernize — Iran too much, too fast without actually democratising it. Iranians saw the Shah as hedonistic. He was also despotic and let loose his US-trained secret police, Savak, on his citizens. The mullahs only exploited Iranians’ seething anger.

At the same time, in neighboring Pakistan, General Zia ul Haq appeased the Pakistani mullahs by making Pakistan an Islamic Republic with Sharia, the medieval Islamic laws, becoming the law of the land. Zia’s Pakistan was contrary to what the founder of Pakistan, Qaid Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had in mind. In Jinnah’s vision, Pakistan would be a liberal, secular democracy rooted in the enlightened Islamic idea of ijtihad, a country in which “Muslims can go to their mosques, Hindu to their temples, Christian to their churches,” as Jinnah said on August 11, 1947, just days before Partition.

With the Arabian Peninsula overflowing in petrodollars in the 1970’s and the 80s, countries such as Saudi Arabia were in no mood to liberalise their society. After all, Saudi Arabia literally means Arabia of the Souds, with the House of Souds having over 1000 Princes.

Saudi Arabia brought peace with the orthodox Wahhabi Sunni clerics by funding thousands of madrasas in poorer countries in Africa and South Asia. In India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, these madrasas recruited youngsters from poorer rural families to an education program with heavy emphasis on learning Quran by rote and indoctrination against not only infidels like Jews, Christians, Hindus and Buddhist, Jains and Sikhs, but also against other Muslims like Shias, Sufis, Ahmadiyas, who do not conform to the Wahabi view of Islam.

One must acknowledge that in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the mushrooming of madrasas was possible only because governments there abdicated their responsibility towards quality primary and secondary education for all children, particularly in the countryside. The madrasas have only filled the void.

In the last quarter of a century, the US from Pakistani soil staged its war against the Soviet-supported Afghanistan. In this war, the US recklessly used the Islamic card to recruit mercenaries from the Arab world. Completing the mission of crushing the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the US simply walked away, leaving the area to become infested with narco traffic and a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.

After the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in 1980s, Pakistan used these terrorists to infiltrate into India’s Kashmir in pursuit of its very cost-effective policy of slowly “bleeding India to death.” Islamic terrorists, trained in Pakistan with U.S. taxpayer money, from Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other nations infiltrated into Jammu and Kashmir and murdered thousands of civilians, including older people, women and children, mostly Hindu and Sikh. These Pakistan-supported infiltrators also terrorised the Kashmiri Pandits and drove them out of Kashmir, making them refugees in their own country. This was one of the early instances of ethnic cleansing, before the phrase even became common.

Till September 11, even though the US establishment knew about Islamic militants breeding in Pakistan, it ignored it. The very same Islamic terrorists brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001, plunging the US into anger, anxiety, and fear towards the Islamic terrorists. Then everything changed.

Christian fundamentalism in India

1500 years before European missionaries set for set their foot in India in the 16th century, India already had a Christian population in pockets. These later European missionaries, in their Eurocentric view of the world, believed that they were the first ones to bring Christ to India’s idol-worshipping pagans and heathens. When the European missionary saw the brown-skinned natives practicing their own version of Christianity, which was by now fully assimilated into the Indian ethos, the European missionary considered the native Christians heretics.

But in the last one hundred years, Pentecostals, Charismatics, Southern Baptist Fundamentalists, and Jehovah’s Witness from the US are active in India seeking to “save souls.” These are the fire-and-brimstone preachers we see in rural America in revival tents in summer, guaranteeing you heaven if you heed their particular version of Christianity, and condemning you to eternal hell if you don’t. They are an embarrassment to many traditional mainstream Christians in India.

In India they shout in street corners and close to Hindu temples — and they avoid mosques — using aggressive tactics, often using virulent and vitriolic language in describing local religious traditions. How do I know? As a teenager I have seen them, listened to them, and even occasionally picked up rhetorical discussions with them, when walking along poorer neighborhoods in Chennai where I gree up.

I wonder how people here in the US would react if, say Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist preachers, scream in front of their churches, peddling their faith and putting down the highly evolved Christian traditions using languages like the virulent and Christian missionaries in India. Looking back after living in the US for over two decades, I’m glad that as a teenager I confronted then missionaries in India.

All beliefs being trans-rational, if not irrational, how can anyone’s system of belief claim exclusive rights to Truth and for man’s salvation in the life after his death, when most of man’s struggles are here and now. Arrogance in matters of spiritual matters is the biggest impediment in man’s spiritual growth. This applies to Hindus as well.

Could it be possible that the Hindu assertiveness in India did not spring forth in isolation from nowhere, but came as a reaction to the Islamist terrorism and the virulent evangelism of many of the latter-day Christian missionaries in India?  Simply blaming Hindu fundamentalists or calling them names is unlikely to tame the phenomenon.

During the 45-year Congress party rule, secular historians, many of them Marxists, held patronage jobs in government departments and universities. These Marxist historians, while presenting the history of the entry of Islam in India, only highlighted the good things that Islam brought to India. They glossed over the brutality of Islam in India, the details of which are well documented not by Hindu writers of that era, but by Islamic historians of the era themselves.

Indian secular historians similarly gloss over historical facts on the unholy alliance among the European missionaries, European scholars, and British administrators in India to consolidate the imperial power over India. See the references at the end.

But when cultures and faiths meet, they influence each other in ways both good and bad. Simply emphasizing the good and glossing over the bad is intellectually dishonest. Indian Marxist historians have no embarrassment for blatantly distorting Indian history just to make it fit into their Marxist view of the world.

But despite Indian secular Marxist historians sugar-coating historical events, they live in India in people’s consciousness. (Guru Gobind Singh, Shivaji and Aurangzeb), in Indian folklores, (Jhansi Ki Rani, Mohammad Ghazni and Somnath, Malik Kafurr, Raj Deo Singh), and in the ruins of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain temples across the Indian subcontinent, as in the 15th century Hampi ruins in Karnataka. After all, Islamic Fundamentalists destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in the 21st century in the full glare of international audiovisual media.

As a society we can grow not by glossing over history, but only by coming to terms with both good and the bad in history. The US came to terms with itself in its bad race relations with Blacks by acknowledging them, and the country has become that much stronger. The race relations in the US is still a Work in Progress. India is coming to terms with these injustices of caste system and to that extent, it is becoming stronger.

But in India, the Muslim and Christian fundamentalists have not come to terms with India’s spiritual, cultural, literary, intellectual, and artistic ethos, and the vicious circumstances of their interactions with the local traditions. If you listen to the versions of Indian history as told by the Hindu, Muslim, Christian orthodoxies, you wonder if they are even telling the history of the same land mass.

In this context, Indian secular Marxist historians are not helping either. Having distorted history, their credibility is questioned now. They use shrill rhetoric to put all the blame on the Hindu fundamentalists, themselves becoming in the process, “secular” fundamentalists. There is a lesson for all of us here. If we hate our enemy intensely and irrationally, we run the risk of unconsciously internalizing some of the very traits for which we hate them. Unless we come to terms with history, how can you move on?

References.

1. Eminent Historians, Their Technology, Their Line and Their Fraud by Arun Shourie, Harper Collins Publishers in India. ISBN number 81722335581919. 98 to 270 pages.

Missionaries in India continually. Continuities, Changes and Dilemmas, by Arun Shourie. Harper Collins Publishers in India. ISBN 8172232751994. 293 pages.

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By Kollengode S Venkataraman March 2003.

Psychologists say reality shows are popular because people derive pleasure seeing others lose and be humiliated. The better these characters are in youth, beauty, handsomeness, wealth, power, or class, the more vicarious is our pleasure seeing them squirm. That is why people watch Joe, the handsome fake millionaire, picking one chick from among twenty others over several weeks to perky Bachelorette trying to do the same to men.

But even as the new genre of reality shows were being fed to us by networks, the real and scary reality show has been playing out for months with Washington DC as a prime locale, with the locales shifting to UN headquarters in New York, and parliaments the world over with leaders grandstanding in political oratory.

US TV reporters in North Korea, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan in the wee hours of their local times appeared live during our dinner time to give updates.

They showed the European Main Streets with millions protecting George Bush ‘s martial unilateralism against Saddam Hussein. They showed Arab leaders in their native dresses talking in diplomatic double and triple speak about their stand on non stand on the impending US invasion, trying to secure diplomatic escape routes to save their faces, whichever way the crisis ends.

The shifting sands of the Iraqi deserts are a fit metaphor for the US policy. It was first removing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, then regime change in Iraq, then ushering democracy in Iraq, then democracy in the entire region run by ruthless despots, then settling the Israeli-Palestine conflicts, then to break the yet unproven Iraq-Al Qaeda-9/11 link, and finally protecting citizens here in the US.

It is eerie to see the Sole Superpower throwing goodies at and twisting the arms of the non-permanent, nondescript members Cameroon, Guinea, and Angola in the UN Security Council to garner their votes through checkmate French, Russian, Chinese vetoes on the next UN resolution for war, whose outcome in terms of death, devastations, durations, political instability, and cost, nobody in the government acknowledged publicly, even though they have estimates.

Look at the irony in Turkey, the only Muslim democratic nation in the in that part of the world. When some members of NATO dithered about military support to Turkey in a hypothetical Iraqi invasion, US extracted a NATO resolution protecting Turkey. Turkey bargained hard with the US and obtained over thirty billion dollars in grants and soft loans for letting U.S. open a northern theater subject to its parliament’s approval to attack Iraq from Turkey. Turkey, instead of voting on the issue right away in its parliament, dragged its feet because 90% of its people opposed the US invasion of Iraq. And when the Arab League, a nebulous association of despots, opposed regime change in Iraq, the Turkish parliament denied the US the desirable Northern Front.

When the US wants to inject democracy into the region, it cannot openly criticise Turkey for its democratic vote. But a yes-vote from Turkey would have partially legitimized the US invasion of Iraq in the Islamic world. Talk about twists, turns, suspense, paradoxes, and ironies. The sequence of events is so bizarre it is hard to believe it is real.

Winning the war against Iraq, with or without the UN support is easy, given the overwhelming asymmetry between the all-powerful US and emaciated Iraq. But the price for winning will be undermined. Will be an undermined UN, a weakened NATO, and a fractured alliance between Europe ‘s strong powers and the US. Besides, even though the US bashes the UN regularly, it never hesitates to use UN when it suits. So, does emasculating the UN serve US interest?

War and no war against Iraq, with or without UN support, damage is already done to the foreign policy interests of the US. A new alliance is certain to emerge to respond to the sole superpower displaying its raw power in Asia, Africa, and Middle East. The memories of European imperialism of the last century have not faded.

Watching the retired generals on network TV payrolls glibly discussing the different scenarios: three thousand cruise missiles dropped in 48 hours over Iraq. Battle fatigue has already set in without even a shot being fired. If this is not enough, the US economy shows no signs of recovery. Crude oil cost over $40 a barrel, gas prices near $2 a gallon, even while white-collar jobs are being outsourced; and with military expedition to cost in billions, Bush is preparing tax breaks for the rich.

In make-believe made-for-TV reality shows, the producer knows how the show would end. But in the REAL reality show on Iraq, nobody knows how the show would end or when. While there are excellent actors, grand sets, and well-chiselled dialogues, the show has no producer or director. That is scary.

In mythologies, we read stories of one craftily drawing one’s opponents into a battlefield formation from which it is impossible for the opponent to get out. This is called Vyuham in the Mahabharata. Politically, we are getting ourselves into such a formation with our eyes wide open if we haven’t already done so. END
 

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