A Fulfilled Life ?

Reading about Mark and Cathy Delaney made me think about Swades playing in reverse. In the movie, Shahrukh Khan, a rich Indian working for NASA returns to India, initially on a holiday but then stays on to pay what he considers his social debts. Mark and Cathy are a real life middle class couple hailing from Australia who live in a Delhi slum in a bid to understand the problems the urban poor face by actually enduring such problems physically. They then try to see how the problems- be they inclusion of names in the electoral rolls or non availability of rations in the public distribution system. The couple have two children who seem to have taken to this well too.

While a lot of NGOs work among the urban poor and do so by adopting a “9 to 5” system, coming to office in the morning, going and spending time in a slum and then returning back to the comfort zones of their homes before dark, this family has chosen to actually live in shanties where typically middle class families would avoid staying even out of compulsion. It is truly an interesting scenario because although this is exactly the kind of identification with the people that voluntary agencies were known for but have given up.

Of course while lauding the life style the family has adopted, a couple of things do need to be pointed out. Firstly, any time things get really difficult, the family has the option to opt out of the slum and move back to their home land, an option that their Indian slum dwellers do not have. Secondly, the article mentions that their expenses are underwritten by friends and supporters back in Australia and that means that although living expenses in a slum will not be high, they do have an assured source of income that allows them to live there and play Guru, a privilege that most others living there do not have.

As someone who has worked practically all his life in the development sector with the hope that my small efforts will make a small difference in the human development indices of India, I am often confused when I read stories like this as to which way is best. Mark Delaney’s route is quasi-Gandhian in its essence - I was just reading about the Harijan Basti close to Delhi’s Mandir Marg where Gandhiji lived close to a year hoping by his example to identify himself in some way with the plight of that class of people.

But was Gandhiji successful? The beloved Harijans of Gandhiji prefer to call themselves Dalits and are closer to Dr.Ambedkar than Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhiji is no doubt considered an iconic figure by most but most of his methods are considered quaint and dated except by the most die hard of his followers.

Meanwhile, the voluntary sector has mostly gone professional. Yes, the jhola chaaps still exist but that exists in most cases more as a statement of attire than a vocation that it once was. Mostly the voluntary sector has turned professional and is more tuned to 509 deliverables, results and evidence. Methodology doesn’t count for much but results do. And so NGO workers like me function in day to day life not with Khadi spinning charkhas but with e mail weaving lap tops.

I like to think that my methodology of doing things that scientifically work and are proven to make a difference is the way to go, never mind if I live in a middle class housing colony or a shanty with a tin roof. So who is on the right path? I guess, it is time or is it the folks living in the slum colonies keeping the Delaneys company who will pronounce the final verdict!

Betrayed by a Name

I have met Annie Zaidi only once for a couple of hours at a read meet organized by the literary group Cafetari. On that occasion, I remember wondering as to what part of her name meant what. If I didn’t ask, it was partly at the end of the day it didn’t really matter and of course it might have looked pretty crass asking that sort of a question. But now I am hoping that I will meet her more often. For Annie’s essay on growing up with a Muslim name in India which I read a couple of days ago left me aching. Maybe it is because I myself am a Christian and a minority though my name doesn’t indicate so, I am one nevertheless, and I too in this forum and else where never try to hide it. And even my simple essays which address issues of broad social are viewed by some as attempts at prosleytisation by proxy. And going by what she goes on to say in her essay, my question about her identity might not have been so boorish after all.

I finished reading Annie’s write up only to switch on the television and found Times Now running footage on Ranjan Singh Negi, the man who conceded 7 goals to Pakistan in an Asian Games match 16 years ago and lived since then with the unproven stigma of having accepted a bribe to betray his country. His story was of course the one on which Chak De India was based and it would seem that his rehabilitation is complete with him being appointed as the goalkeeping coach for the latest version of the Asian Games coming later this month. At the end of the show, I could not help sit back and wonder that if it took so little for a man from the majority community to be so labeled and so long for his rehabilitation, how easy must it be to label some one who because of his or her name, the most visible of all markers along with dress, are seemingly almost asking for it.

I guess it hurts more when you are profiled for what you are not just because a few people fit the description and all you are, have done and plan to do are just swiped away with the ease with which one might swat a housefly. That is how easy it is to dismiss a race, a religion, a skin color – a couple of words are all it takes to label and it stays with you, going where ever you do, much like chewing gum on the seat of your pants, an irritant and a stain that never quite goes away.

Annie mentions somewhere in her essay that she never mentions her religion and once when practically accosted to reveal who she was on a railway platform, she hedged and dodged, because it was difficult to lie and also difficult to tell the truth. Eventually she lied. It proved easier. But doesn’t a bit of ourselves die a little every time we lie and wear a mask like a coat of amour? More so when you really know that you have done nothing to deserve going through life wearing a mask defending yourself against a shadowy identify that has never been you?

In sum total, I read narratives like this and am confused. As some one like Taslima Nasreen would affirm, it is still far better to be a minority in India then practically any where in the neighborhood and yet still because as a secular democracy, the standards that were set in the early days of our independence are so high, that even the smallest deviance seems a big leap backward. After reading Annie’s piece, I looked through the Citizens for Peace site for comments and found that I wasn’t the only one touched by her moving prose. But then Annie is a journalist after all and can craft her words well and perhaps in the process expunge some of her pain. I wonder about the many other minorities who don’t have that privilege and opportunity and wonder what burdens and crosses they carry buried in their heart

Large Weddings, Short Marriages

Recently I was reading about the wedding of the daughter of Vandana Luthra, the founder of the VLCC fitness centers. In fact I saw a picture of the qawwali singers brought in to entertain the wedding guests. Apparently, there was a pretty glamorous pre-wedding bash too as part of the package. But I don’t need to know about celebrity weddings to know that India’s middle class is increasingly having lavish weddings.

I don’t live in a celebrity-studded area in any sense of the term, but even in my extremely middle class locality I know. The decibel level of the sounds and the fire crackers is increasingly as is the garishness of the decorations and the impunity with which people encroach on public land for private celebrations. It seems from the scale of the celebrations that apart from ostentatious display of noveau rich wealth, they seemingly are trying to purchase their children’s’ happiness with new found wealth. But it doesn’t seem to be working.

Here are some of the issues that are creeping up the underbelly of the grand wedding ceremonies:

1) Dowry: The evergreen and custom-sanctified practice has been banned many times over but things aren’t getting any better, never mind the rising levels of education. In fact, the Law Commission has recommended the imposition of capital punishment in dowry cases according to a statement filed by the Law Minister in Parliament. That is the latest in a series of steps increasingly getting harsher but with no visible impact.

2) NRI Brides who often are married off in haste by their parents so that they can repent at leisure after being dumped by their NRI husbands. The number of such women who are being physically and financially exploited. NRI grooms and Indian brides have become an organized business, run much like a mafia.

3) Domestic Violence: A recent Indian Express report indicates that close to two thirds of married women in India are victims of domestic violence and that close to 70 percent of the women between 15 and 49 are victims of rape, beatings or coerced sex.

4) Then there is the case of the parents who fund these lavish weddings. Here is their plight: “Pan-India surveys reveal that almost 30% of India’s elderly are subject to some form of abuse or neglect by their families. Ironically, in spite of this, only one in six of the abused elderly reports the injustice. Shockingly, 47.3% of abuse against elders is committed by adult caregivers, partners or family members”.

What it really means is that the same parents who organize these weddings with such pomp and show haven’t probably made enough provision for their own needs and perhaps their own children and their spouses have inherited the same propensity for more and even more wealth which they can flash. The recent passing by parliament of a Bill making it obligatory for children to provide for their elderly parents is an indication of the fact that the land of Shravan’s filial piety is changing its contours very rapidly.

Finally what about the marriages themselves? Well according to TIME, though the official divorce statistics are still very low, divorce rates among middle class families are also climbing. It seems that this being the age of instant gratification, people seem to marry in haste and walk out of it in post haste as well. With social stigma still surrounding divorce, the numbers of cases reaching the courts still do not reflect the real picture, In urban India it has doubled over the past five years, despite the fact that failed marriages remain a cause for shame in much of the country and that divorced people, especially women, continue to face fierce social stigmatization and often find it hard to remarry.

The TIME article goes on to say that the market for divorced people is now large enough for it to warrant a separate matrimonial website- www.secondshaadi.com. While the magazine does its own analysis of divorce, what I find intriguing in the meanwhile is the contrast between larger weddings and shorter marriages. May be a fit topic for some one’s Ph.D.

Technology and Child Labour

Bibek Debroy, the economist, has made an interesting point in the Indian Express about child labor that should make NGOs, child labor activists and even the government take note. He states that in a societal problem like child labor, passing legislation is not going to solve the problem. Rather he argues that the induction of technology that makes child labor uneconomical will work better and argues that changes in society have rarely occurred because of legislation and activism though they may provide the ballast from which other more relevant techniques are launched. Introduce technology that makes using child labor an uneconomical proposition and over time it will wither away.

Debroy brings out other interesting facts. One that the United States, the supposed custodian of all that is moral in today’s world hasn’t ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the seminal document on child rights. Also that when legislation was passed in the US Congress to ban child labor, it was struck down by the US Supreme Court on the grounds that the statute violated a child’s fundamental right to work. What eliminated child labor eventually in the United States was the Great Depression when so many industries shut down that plenty of adults became available for employment at discount prices driving children away from the market for good.

I find Debroy’s thoughts and his historical illustrations going all the way back to the Industrial Revolution revealing because they are quite out of the ordinary from a typical NGO perspective. Also, it possibly addresses the question that nobody has been quite able to answer – it is fine to ban child labor and insist on children going to schools, but in the typical poor family, the incentive to go to school isn’t there; what is there is the motivation to go to the market place and earn a living. But what if an environment were to be created where technological upgrades made it impossible for a child to be employable unless he first went to school and got some basic education? Would it work?

A Brazilian friend of mine shares his experience. Brazil is a country known for the sheer numbers of street children in its cities. It used to be that kids would drift into big cities like Sao Paolo, merge with street gangs, and do odd jobs along the way, typically as motor mechanics. That was then. But then as cars began to be more advanced in their technology and parts began to get computerized, car repairs required less and less crawling under the belly of a car and poking with a screw driver, and more and more knowledge of how to interpret and fix diagrams on a computer screen.

Eventually it came to the point that it was no longer possible to repair cars without basic school education and some understanding of computers. Kids began to drift into school and began getting educated not because they liked it or school had suddenly become exciting but because to remain employable they needed skills that could only come with education. The goal of education for every child became attainable not because of stringent legislation or strident NGO activism, but because going to school and getting an education became a necessity for sheer survival.

Over time as the profile of the child on the street changed to those of an educated lot, rehabilitation became easier as children taken off the streets had more options and choices than their predecessors and had lesser motivation to return back to the streets once they were resettled. Did economics dissolve the street kid and child labor phenomena in Brazil? Of course not. Did it make the job manageable and the problem containable? Certainly, yes. Will it work in India? Bibek Debroy says so and it is certainly worth a try.

Technology and Child Labour

Bibek Debroy, the economist, has made an interesting point in the Indian Express about child labor that should make NGOs, child labor activists and even the government take note. He states that in a societal problem like child labor, passing legislation is not going to solve the problem. Rather he argues that the induction of technology that makes child labor uneconomical will work better and argues that changes in society have rarely occurred because of legislation and activism though they may provide the ballast from which other more relevant techniques are launched. Introduce technology that makes using child labor an uneconomical proposition and over time it will wither away.

Debroy brings out other interesting facts. One that the United States, the supposed custodian of all that is moral in today’s world hasn’t ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the seminal document on child rights. Also that when legislation was passed in the US Congress to ban child labor, it was struck down by the US Supreme Court on the grounds that the statute violated a child’s fundamental right to work. What eliminated child labor eventually in the United States was the Great Depression when so many industries shut down that plenty of adults became available for employment at discount prices driving children away from the market for good.

I find Debroy’s thoughts and his historical illustrations going all the way back to the Industrial Revolution revealing because they are quite out of the ordinary from a typical NGO perspective. Also, it possibly addresses the question that nobody has been quite able to answer – it is fine to ban child labor and insist on children going to schools, but in the typical poor family, the incentive to go to school isn’t there; what is there is the motivation to go to the market place and earn a living. But what if an environment were to be created where technological upgrades made it impossible for a child to be employable unless he first went to school and got some basic education? Would it work?

A Brazilian friend of mine shares his experience. Brazil is a country known for the sheer numbers of street children in its cities. It used to be that kids would drift into big cities like Sao Paolo, merge with street gangs, and do odd jobs along the way, typically as motor mechanics. That was then. But then as cars began to be more advanced in their technology and parts began to get computerized, car repairs required less and less crawling under the belly of a car and poking with a screw driver, and more and more knowledge of how to interpret and fix diagrams on a computer screen.

Eventually it came to the point that it was no longer possible to repair cars without basic school education and some understanding of computers. Kids began to drift into school and began getting educated not because they liked it or school had suddenly become exciting but because to remain employable they needed skills that could only come with education. The goal of education for every child became attainable not because of stringent legislation or strident NGO activism, but because going to school and getting an education became a necessity for sheer survival.

Over time as the profile of the child on the street changed to those of an educated lot, rehabilitation became easier as children taken off the streets had more options and choices than their predecessors and had lesser motivation to return back to the streets once they were resettled. Did economics dissolve the street kid and child labor phenomena in Brazil? Of course not. Did it make the job manageable and the problem containable? Certainly, yes. Will it work in India? Bibek Debroy says so and it is certainly worth a try.

The Generation X Lady Doctor

Female medical students are putting up a unique case to oppose the scheme that all medical students before being awarded their degrees must serve a year in the states where they are studying, possibly in the rural hinterland. They are saying that because of this requirement, their marriages are going to get stalled that therefore the health minister should go around hunting for life partners for these damsels. Listening to this story, one does not know if one
should laugh or cry. These students are studying in government institutions – Nalanda Medical College is the institution mentioned and the ruckus is because the new requirement would increase the duration of the course to six and a half years from the five and a
half years (including internship) as is the arrangement now.

Now consider this. The students are going to government medical colleges which means that their education is to a very significant extent subsidized by the tax payer. These are not students of snazzy self financing institutions - and even if they were, the agitation
would still be questionable. Secondly, these students are students in one of India's poorest states and if any state in India needs doctors in their rural hinterland to serve, it is probably Bihar and its neighbors. Thirdly, by extending the duration of the course to six and
a half years, the ministry is not stepping beyond any kind of line. The norm in fact for medical colleges in most countries is to have courses of exactly this duration and actually much more before one can actually get down to practicing medicine.

It is a symptom of the consumerist culture these days that has so seeped into our marrow today that the state requiring its citizens to perform a civic duty in lieu of subsidized education is met with opposition using the most ridiculous of reasons. When I read these
sort of articles and the grossly selfish mind set that is perpetuated by these sort of demands, I wonder if for certain kinds of professions at least, meritocracy and the entrance examination driven system that decides who enters the portals of our medical colleges and other such
institutions is a flawed methodology.

Professions like medicine require and demand a certain kind of moral fiber, character and aptitude that determines whether one has the basic service mentality to enter into this kind of a profession. But these things are never assessed in our exam driven system except in a
handful of institutions like the Gandhian college at Wardha and the Christian Medical College, Vellore and the one who gets the nod to get admissions in the government colleges are the ones who head the merit list and in the private colleges, the ones who have some money and
some merit.

In a profession like medicine which is part science and part art, is the merit list the best indicator of who is going to be the best kind of doctor - the most humane, the most caring and the most ethical? hat kind of medical ethics might I expect from some one who even as a
student is so self centered as to only worry about when they can get arried and settle down even before they have done a day's work? If they are on emergency duty in the casualty ward, would these doctors of tomorrow be tracking the well being of their patients or tracking
their watches so that they can go back and attend to their families?

There is nothing wrong with wanting to get married and having a family but these things need to have a perspective. Imagine a soldier in the midst of a conflict wanting to go home to his wife and kids. That they don't is largely why the armed forces survive as an institution and
the country is safe in their hands. A doctor's situation is some what similar. If I were in need of acute and a pretty intense level of medical care I would worry if I knew that the treating physician was some one trained in Nalanda Medical College with one eye on my pulse
and another on the clock because she wanted to fix dinner for her husband. But till we change our methodology of evaluating candidates and look at other intangible factors other than the academic score card, I guess I will have to just keep worrying.

Are We Slow and Unresponsive ?

The Indian Express in its op-ed column of Dec 01 informs that the Prime Minister in a recent speech delivered on November 29^th has lamented that our system doesn’t value time and that it is one weakness that worries him a great deal. The Prime Minister isn’t completely correct. Witness the manner and speed in which the law was passed to fix the age at which the Director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences retires at 65. Parliament typically doesn’t have time to transact much business and even the current session has already been adjourned several times over Nandigram and other matters. But this particular bill was cleared by the Lok Sabha on November 23^rd, by the Rajya Sabha on November 29^th, received in the President’s Office on the following day and signed with in hours in to law. By sun down Dr. Venugopal the doughty fighter had lost his job and there was a replacement in place. Clearly when it comes to vendetta the system responds lightening fast and the Prime Minister couldn’t be more wrong.

In the old days, if you annoyed the monarch, you had your head lopped off. This happened the world over but at a point of history, when at least in England , some folks thought that even the sovereign had crossed a line, the elite got together to draft the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 to force the king to guarantee certain institutions of State, basic functional freedoms. The Magna Carta is today accepted as the essential building block of democracy around the world with adaptation and modifications as needed.

But as the Ramadoss episode demonstrates we may have the veneer of democracy but the vestiges of feudalism and crude demonstration of power die slow. In the olden days, the King’s frown was enough to bring down the sunset on an unlucky victim, today the King needs to do some paper work and win over a bunch of pliable people. And the job is done. Clearly, the spirit of democracy has not sufficiently seeped in to our marrow. For instance, The Lok Sabha instead of engaging in any debate over the treatment to Malkaysians of Indian origin and coming out with a reasoned diplomatic response, chose to do what it is best at – get adjourned after a group of Tamil MPs created a ruckus. Presumably the members did not have the energy to debate and discuss a tricky issue event though a Malaysian minister had issued a stinging rebuke to Karunanidhi walking a diplomatic tight rope.

So is the Prime Minister right, and are we slow and more so slow because we are a democracy and supposedly we have mechanism that tries to ensure that laws made in the country best reflect all shades of public opinion and that consensus building exercise takes time? Wish that were the case. In his speech, the Prime Minister cites the instance of South Korea in the old days when it was a totalitarian regime and the Finance Minister of the day had to make a decision on devaluation of the currency. He needed to make a short phone call to his president to ascertain his views and that would take about half an hour and that he felt was a bit too long a time. Man Mohan Singh goes on to say that decisions in democracies do take a little longer than thirty minutes but laments that in India the pendulum has swung to the other extreme and decision making takes forever.

Perhaps our good Prime Minister should be more specific and also lament our priorities. The trial in the Mumbai bomb blasts took 13 years and more, with mercy petitions on behalf of those sentenced to death pending since 1992, the women’s’ reservation of seats bill in parliament eluding a consensus since it was first introduced in 1996, there is a lot for our law makers to mull over certainly. But whereas these things can wait, what seemingly can’t wait is the passing of a law whose sole purpose is to ensure that a person and that too a person of eminence whatever his frailties is sacked and sacked fast and quick, so that his minister boss can strut. India is 57 year old democracy alright on paper, but in real life, the shadow of the jahanpanah’s wrath still looms long on the lok shahi that we think we have.