Anatomy and chemistry

Connect the Right Dots! Don’t make unfounded or automatic assumptions. Become more data-driven in your decisions Mohit Malik Businessworldindia.com

Recently, I came across an intriguing study where researchers found that men give a higher rating to sexual traits (like flirtatiousness) than women in terms of perception about themselves and the member of the opposite sex they just interacted with. The authors of the study found that after a five-minute conversation with a stranger of the opposite sex, men were more likely to interpret ambiguous or friendly behaviour as indicating sexual interest. For the study, people of opposite sexes were paired together. Within their brief conversation, partners introduced themselves and talked about college experiences. After the allotted five minutes, each man and woman walked to a separate room to answer questions about their perceptions of their study partner, themselves and the conversation.

The men and the women rated themselves and their partners on personality traits such as extroversion, agreeableness, physical attractiveness, sexual traits and interaction behaviours. They were also asked if they thought the person they'd just talked to was sexy, flirtatious, seductive or promiscuous. As it turned out, men rated their women partners higher in sexuality than the women rated the men. Researchers found that “men generally think in more sexual terms than women.” My colleagues had many interesting observations on these findings (regretfully, none suitable for publication in this site). So what's new, you already knew that?...

All the dots are often not visible, and these are usually the important ones. Researchers also mentioned that “men's ratings of women were also associated with physical attractiveness but unrelated to whether he saw her as agreeable or felt the conversation was enjoyable.” In plain words, if attracted to a woman, men automatically assumed, ‘she is interested in me'. The quality of conversation was irrelevant. Effect begetting the cause? Similarly, we often carry around other such premise of cause and effect, which, sadly, are untrue.

[For more on identifying and using such ‘theories' effectively, read Using Theory to Gain the Edge ] Mohit Malik heads the leadership and strategy practice at Anoova Consulting . The views expressed in this column are his own. If you have ideas or suggestions for future columns or comments on this one, please contact me directly at mohit.malik@AnoovaConsulting.Biz

Evolution of solution

The caste system is an anachronism that needs to be removed from Indian society. This can only be done if the terms in which people identify themselves and one another are changed. Therefore, to begin with, all surnames that indicate a person’s caste should be dropped. CPI (Muddled) Samrat HindustanTimes.com June 22, 2006

I am no friend of the communists, but the way some green-horns understand our society and get to publish their hare-brained views, is really surprising. Social infirmities can't be wished away and the political parties are busy interrogating them in multi-layered encounters with the people. It's puerile to pooh-pooh all that from the comfort of one's key-board and cabin. Tusar N. Mohapatra

Male Matters

Harsh Kabra The Times of India Wednesday, June 21, 2006

With his recent book titled Manliness, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield may well have rekindled the debate on the role and attributes of masculinity in contemporary societies. But the gender-neutral context he sets his contention in does not entirely hold good for India. For one, gender is extremely crucial, even exaggeratedly defining, here. The ensuing prejudices render weak the groundwork necessary to build a fair perception of masculinity.

For young boys, growing up isn't so much about masculinity as it is about being men. Then there's the deficit of fathering, an apparent legacy of the industrial revolution that divided fathers and boys between factories and schools. Surrounded by women at both the home and the school, boys are left wanting for models of masculinity. Where then do they pick their masculinity from? Media is one learning ground, but it teems with images of men whose identity stems from belligerence, violence, unforgiving competitiveness, adventurism or occasional pride in bending the rules. Another learning ground is the peer group, itself shy of adult support and therefore a questionable agency to be setting the standards of masculinity. In both instances, the more aggressive, anti-system guys are construed as more masculine.

However, in emulating such stereotypes, being male inadvertently becomes being not-female or even anti-female, where emotion or consideration is to be zealously shunned. According to Nancy Chodrow's work on gender identity acquisition, women usually care for both young boys and girls. But while girls learn to be female by identifying with and remaining close to a caretaker of the same gender, boys learn masculinity through a process of individuation and separation from the mother. And these early experiences, she noted, create an objectifying sense of self in men.

Even as the boy is forever told to be different from the mother he first starts relating to, there simply aren't enough, ordinary men around to qualify this difference with wider emotional behaviour, otherwise relegated to silver screen histrionics. Boys therefore learn masculinity, not by imitation and identification, but by separation and censure. It's time then that primary schools involved more men in the teaching process. And it's time fathers became regulars at crafts projects and parent-teacher meetings. There sure is a crisis of masculinity, but the solution lies closer home.

The Third Sex

Amrita Nandy-Joshi The Times of India Saturday, June 17, 2006

I was chatting with a young district collector, picking his brains about reasons behind choosing the services. The conversation veered around and finally the collector's thoughts settled upon his college life. His eyes seemed to move to a distant past. The nostalgia and memories were writ large on his face. He spoke of friendships and ragging, the lectures and the food in the mess. A product of one of the premier engineering colleges in the country, he reminisced on the excitement of being surrounded by bright people. Talking of his classmates, he said,"My class had all male students except three non-males". Not very surprised by the skewed sex ratio of a civil engineering class, I was stunned by his choice of words. "Non-males? Why do you say that?", I asked in quick succession."

Arrey yaar, they wore those thick glasses and salwar-suits, oiled their hair. Ugly girls and with no personality. Not worth being called women". The collector had just thrown his female classmates outside society's accepted binaries of male and female. Women he described as ugly and with no personalities (a misnomer for sexuality) were part of the same bright group of people he remembered. It was interesting to note that he could differentiate between female and women but equally shocking to find that the meanings behind his words were still stuck in their traditional phallocentric spaces. Those bright females were not women because, to him, they lacked physical appeal. And they certainly did not have what it takes to be a man. Non-males was the only other category that they could be sidelined to.

Seeing my horrified expression, he soon realised his slip and aggressively tried to cover up with what can best be called political correctness. This high-lighted yet another sad truism for me, that political correctness is largely being used to camouflage certain thoughts with a polite, velvet veneer to cover crude, socio-cultural biases and beliefs. It has become a new tool of hypocrisy in the hands of those who live in a milieu where political correctness is de rigueur. Beauvoir's words make for a perfect quote here: "We are told not that femininity is a false entity, but that women concerned are not feminine". The contrary facts of experience are impotent against the myth.

Egalitarian redistributionist policies

Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour by Helmut Schoeck

A fascinating study of human behavior and motivation, August 9, 2004 Reviewer: Patrick Henry "clasicalliberal" - See all my reviews Amazon.com

I loved this book, a true tour-de-force. Although I am a fairly fast reader, it took me a while to get through this, because after reading 10-15 pages, I would have to stop and assimilate the information Schoeck was presenting. Absolutely fascinating.

Schoeck has assembled a vast array of information on the manifestations of envy in societies spanning the globe and across time. He has ferreted out information from the sociological and anthropological literature, fiction literature, cultural fables, crime data, political debates, among other sources. He uses example after real world example to show how ubiquitous envy is as a state of mind, and how various cultures deal more or less successfully with it. Societies that are successful in dealing with envy are essentially those that largely suppress its active, overt expression.

Numerous cases from the sociological and anthropological literature indicate how primitive societies, where objective differences between society members are much smaller than in more developed cultures, actually have more severe problems with the expression of envy than do cultures where such differences are larger. He shows how world-wide in primitive cultures, the 'evil eye' is universally regarded as the sorcerous expression of envious malice, and further shows the lengths to which primitive peoples will go to avoid or deflect the evil eye.

Schoeck reveals from objective sources that such envy appeasement is not limited to primitive societies, but that egalitarian redistributionist policies are merely the manifestation of envy avoidance and/or appeasement in industrialized nations. Schoeck spends extensive energies analyzing the egalitarian-utopian impulse and its various practical experiments. Those of a socialist/egalitarian bent [generally known as 'liberals' in the US, and contemporary as opposed to the classical type] will not like this book, because Schoeck makes an iron-clad case that their reasons for promoting such an unattainable society are either 1) envious malice seeking to deprive others of envied assets or 2) the appeasement of envy in others.

Schoeck shows, from the writings of people who have promoted utopian social models, that the motive for doing so is to create an envy-free society. He marshals an impressive body of documentation showing that policies such as progressive taxation are essentially institutionalized envy.

The so-what of all this is where Schoeck shows that uncontrolled envy inhibits all innovation and technical progress, and the destruction of achievements made in a society. He cites evidence showing further, how the legitimization of envy, and its subsequent appeasement, results in a vicious cycle in which the crocodile must be continually fed, as each social difference successively assumes the position of the BIGGEST difference, and becomes the new target for elimination by those who are envious of differences.

White Guilt and black anger

I’m reading Shelby Steele’s new book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era... Remember, Steele is writing about a time when America actually was still a racist country 50 years ago. And yet, black leaders were not as angry then as today's liberal white-appointed "leaders... Steele’s book is in part the story of how, in a span of just 40 years, America could go from being a place where the murderers of Emmett Till could go free because they were white, to a place where O.J. Simpson could go free because he’s black. And it all revolves around how the civil rights movement, at the very moment it succeeded in achieving its goals, cynically betrayed its own ideals and became just another industry, an industry revolving around the exploitation of white guilt.

White guilt is the key, because in Steele’s formulation dysfunctional “black anger” varies directly with the guilt-ridden white liberal establishment that indulges it. In a truly oppressed people, this kind of anger would be unthinkable. There were no displays of “Russian anger” in the USSR, nor is there “Muslim anger” directed at the totalitarian states that oppress them. Just like black anger, Muslim anger is directed at a target that will indulge it: America or Israel. If Palestinians were truly an oppressed people we wouldn’t even know about it, because Israel would have driven them out and eliminated them long ago. The Palestinians' angry and dysfunctional existence revolves around the world’s indulgence of it.

Steele notes that the exploitation of white guilt leads to a perversion of character, wherein the victim can elevate himself above the guilty oppressor, thus creating “an empowering feeling of license.” He writes from the personal experience of having been a militant radical in the 1960’s, “the feeling that being black released me from the usual obligation to common decency and decorum.... I was licensed to live in a spirit of disregard toward my own country.”

Suddenly, with the perception of white guilt, Steele realized “I could use America’s fully acknowledged history of racism just as whites had always used their race--as a racial authority and privilege that excused me from certain responsibilities, moral constraints, and even the law.” It was “an abusive power very similar to the abusive power that had been wielded against me--a power of privilege deriving solely from the color of my skin,” capable of muscling “concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization...” Every black problem could be magically explained away “because it was an injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems.” posted by Gagdad Bob at 7:22 AM 7 comments

Make money, make funny, make honey

Feminine Mythtique Ambika Shukla timesofindia.com Saturday, June 3, 2006

Ho hum, here’s the umpteenth attempt by the umpteenth woman to explain what women really want, as if we were some kind of mutant species that had to have our strange noises and signals decoded. We’re actually not fooled. The longer men pretend they don’t understand, the longer they have an excuse to skip doing any of the things we want them to. Ignorance is bliss, right? I mean, did you know that when we ask you to put the toothpaste cap back on, it might actually mean what we mean, and not some Martian code for “make love to me quick”.

It’s not that men don’t know, it’s just that they don’t want to know, or that they don’t want to admit to knowing. Women are less self-delusional. We know what men want. That’s why the makeup, the perfume, the lingerie, the gym, we’re not knocking ourselves out for nothing. We’re not fooling ourselves that it’s our charm or intelligence or baking skills that men want, we know pure and simple, it’s our bods. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could be all fat and floppy, walking around wideeyed wondering what it was that men really wanted?

Men on the other hand don’t do anything to brush up on fidelity or consideration, romance, humour, foreplay or any of the things we’ve been bleating on about for years. Of course, they know what we want; it’s just that the selfish sods don’t want to do anything about it. So they do the next best thing, they pretend to be all confused by the strangeness of the female and how hard it is to decipher what she wants. How can a guy be blamed when he doesn’t even know what makes her happy?

It takes a nuclear scientist, naturally, to figure out that she might just appreciate a little time and interest, and a genius to understand that maybe, she might not be thrilled by her partner sleeping with her best friend. But the poor chap couldn’t have fathomed that, could he? Party’s over, guys. Your cover’s blown. We know you know. So here for the last time is the list: Provide for us, amuse us and love us to bits. Simple. Make money, make funny, make honey. Your time starts now.

Mother-father-infant triad

One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read is The Human Animal, by Weston LaBarre. LaBarre was both an anthropologist and a psychoanalyst, and this book deals with exactly what I attempted to outline in Chapter Three of my book, that is, how primates and proto-humans eventually evolved into proper (some of us, anyway) human beings. Being that it was published in 1954, many of the details in his book have undoubtedly been superseded by more recent research. And yet, he captured the big picture in a way that few people even attempt to do these days.

I don’t know of anyone else who cites LaBarre as an influence, but if nothing else, he’s a very entertaining writer, full of pithy and astringent comments, asides, and insults. Interestingly, he was a militant atheist, but that doesn’t bother me. So long as someone has a piece of the truth, their overarching philosophy is of no consequence to me. I feel the same way about Schuon, who is LaBarre’s polar opposite. I could never go as far as he does in his condemnation of modernity, but his spiritual genius is so luminous that I just have to overlook that part.

Chapter 6 of The Human Animal deals with sexual differences and the evolutionary circumstances that allowed humanness to emerge. LaBarre makes the provocative statement that “human society is biologically based upon the human body, and most especially upon the human breast and human sexuality.” In an evolutionary tradeoff, human brains grew so rapidly that women had to give birth earlier and earlier, to the point that the brain's incomplete neurology could only be wired together in the extra-uterine environment. The resulting infantile helplessness meant that the evolutionary unit switched from the mother-infant diad to the mother-father-infant triad. This symbiotic relationship further modified all of its members, as they adapted to each other. For example, “the whole emotional pattern of greater closeness in the mother-child bond has ultimate effects upon the more intense inter-individual bond between the sexes.”

Furthermore, this is why “a society’s attitudes toward women and toward maternity will deeply influence its psychological health and all other institutional attitudes.” LaBarre could write in 1954--well before the degradations to womanhood brought about by the feminist movement--that “It is a tragedy of our male-centered culture that women do not fully enough know how important they are as women.” Sadly, today so many women only know how important they are as men. This is a tragedy of monumental proportions, in part because it also results in men not understanding their own role in terms of being men.

One of the keys to understanding male-female differences lies in examining the different ways in which we are permitted to love. As a child we must love in one way, but in order to become an adult we must love in others. Naturally the process is infinitely more complicated for males. This is because our first love object is the mother with whom we are merged. Male identity must me wrested and won from this primordial matrix, otherwise there will be no manhood, only maleness. On the other hand, female identity is absolutely coterminous with their primordial union with the Great Mother, both literally and archetypally. All primitive men know that women can magically make children with their bodies. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons that women are generally more “grounded” and secure in their identity than men are. It would also explain the essential restlessness (and sometimes rootlessness) of men, along with the psychological adaptiveness of male homophobia.

Femaleness as a category is secure: its undeniable signs are menstruation and maternity. But manhood--as opposed to mere biological maleness--has no such obvious visible markers. Rather, it is something that must be constructed and achieved. The adaptive mechanism that allows males to become men is culture. What connects mother to infant is very concrete: the breast and all it symbolizes and implies. Likewise, what connected male to female was the evolutionary change that made females sexually available year-round. But what connects man to man?

“What connects father and son, male and male, is the mystery of logos and logos alone...” It is through this shared pattern that “father can identify with son and permit his infancy, within which son can identify with father and become a man, and within which a male can perceive and forgive the equal manhood of his fellow man.” At the foundation of the State “is our struggle to find both paternal power and brotherly justice in the governing of men.” This is why something very psychologically noxious happens when government becomes mother.

A similar thing happens when God becomes mother or mother becomes God. It interferes with the primordial basis of culture qua culture, which is to convert boys to men. This would explain the universal practice of various male initiation rituals, in which boys are sometimes brutally wrenched away from their mothers in order to facilitate male “rebirth” and full membership in the society of men. Again, femaleness is given by biology, but maleness must be proven, not just to oneself, but to the group. If appropriate models are not given for this drive, we will simply have pathological versions of it, such as the urban youth gang, which is all about proving one’s manhood. In fact, this is why so much contemporary rap and hip hop is so perversely male.

In a matriarchal culture so lacking in male role models, these boys are constantly trying to prove that they are what they imagine a man to be. This is why they are such pathetic, brooding, aggressive, and hyper-sexualized caricatures of manhood. (And ultimately this results from female sexuality reverting back to the mother-infant diad, with no role for men.) Other males--we call them liberals--often take women as their role models, with predictable results. They regard auto-castration as the quintessence of civilization.

Again, male sexual development is inherently more complex and hazardous, for men must first love and identify with the female, only to make a clean break of it and then return to the same object as an adult. Many things can go wrong with this process at each step along the way, as the road is filled with conflict and ambivalence. It explains why men often have the harder time growing up. But women have their problems as well. Some can never graduate from their default setting of loving the infant or mother to loving a man. posted by Gagdad Bob at 7:48 AM 3 comments

We actually share the same identity

But reading Spinoza today, it seems very religious, there's a lot of talk about God.

But it's not in any way a personal God. Spinoza's God is logic, basically. It's the sum of all the reasons for everything. But it's not a God whom one can pray to, and certainly not a God who would enter into a special relationship with a people.

And Spinoza was intent on disproving any sense of a special relationship or chosen people. Why?

For Spinoza, being a Jew is a problem to be solved. The continued identification of this people and their stubborn insistence on their difference has only brought woe on them, and the best way to solve this unbearable suffering that the Jews have been subjected to is to cure them of their beliefs in a difference. When he was a boy, there were stories of people who had gone back to Portugal and who were burned in the auto-da-fé—an ongoing calamity, the worst calamity of the Jewish people until the Holocaust. These stories clearly made an impression.

Spinoza's rationalism is a kind of answer to this tragedy, to the tragedy of all racist hatred—and the Inquisition wasn't just religious hatred but racial. It's saying that, to the extent that we're rational, none of the differences between us matter. To the extent that we're rational we actually share the same identity. Part of our salvation—our secular salvation, as he sees it—is to deconstruct one's own identity. I believe that somehow he had indicated this even at an early stage of his philosophy, that being Jewish is not the essence of one's identity for those who are Jews; it's not ethically essential. That's a viewpoint I don't think that Judaism could tolerate—not in his time, not in ours. Rebecca Goldstein AUDIO Rebecca Goldstein talks with Sara Ivry about philosophy and betrayal Listen >> These are mp3 files. What's a podcast? >> Betraying Spinoza

There are still a lot of unresolved issues from the civil rights era

Mr. Laster is dapper and cosmopolitan, a part-time professor and Democratic activist who drinks and dines with a wide circle of black, white and Hispanic friends. He said he marveled at first as the images of cheering, flag-waving immigrants flickered across his television screen. But as some demonstrators proclaimed a new civil rights movement, he grew uncomfortable. He says that immigrant protesters who claim the legacy of Dr. King and Rosa Parks are going too far. And he has begun to worry about the impact that the emerging immigrant activism will have on black Americans, many of whom still face poverty, high rates of unemployment and discrimination in the workplace.

"I think what they were able to do, the level of organization they were able to pull off, that was phenomenal," said Mr. Laster, who is also a part-time sociology professor at a community college in Baltimore. "But I do think their struggle is, in fundamental ways, very different from ours. We didn't chose to come here; we came here as slaves. And we were denied, even though we were legal citizens, our basic rights."

"There are still a lot of unresolved issues from the civil rights era," he said. "Perhaps we're going to be pushed to the back burner." This painful debate is bubbling up in church halls and classrooms, on call-in radio programs and across dining room tables. Some blacks prefer to discuss the issue privately for fear of alienating their Hispanic allies. But others are publicly airing their misgivings, saying they are too worried to stay silent. nytimes.com/2006/05/04

Caste myopia

Occupational immobility and founding principles Gautam Chikermane

Indian Express: Monday, May 08, 2006

To ascribe a precise state of consciousness to a particular community, race or religion and fix it into rigid clusters of misery is a needlessly short-sighted look at a vision profound. And India has been suffering from this myopia for centuries. It is today a part of a constitutional mechanism that seeks to “uplift” the socially downtrodden through a series of measures, including reservations, so that India moves towards being an egalitarian state, a nation where equal opportunities are not a theoretical construct but a practical reality.

But the caste system, whose poetical and refined form is beautifully encapsulated in four shlokas of the Bhagwad Gita (chapter 18, verses 41 through 44), has nothing to do with matter at all; it has everything to do with the Spirit. When Krishna explains to Arjuna the duties of the four castes, he is not talking about any colour or texture of skin but with their states of consciousness. Follow the argument long enough and we meet swabhava (loosely, one’s inherent nature) — brahmin, kshatriya, vaishya, shudra. And based on that swabhava, the organisation of society by caste was fluid and free.

Moreover, even as we attempt a discussion standing on a brittle intellectual crust, it would be wise to time-travel a few millennia that have passed since the conception of the caste and the writing of this column. During this time, along with social evolution has come the birth of a far more layered, multi-faceted man. There is, today, a Ravana-like, 10-headedness, multi-beingness that surrounds all of us. Who can say that the brahmin doesn’t serve and the shudra doesn’t rule, or the vaishya doesn’t teach and the kshatriya doesn’t trade? At any point we, knowledge workers, are part-brahmins (we think), part-shudra (we serve) and part everything in between (we organise, we conquer).

Knowledge is equally our tool to negotiate the world with and a sword to fight in the arena of marketshare. We trade the capital between our ears and finally serve one another. To say that as a brahmin our business is only mind or sense control and forgiveness, purity, integrity, mediation our tools, or as a shudra our job is merely to serve the higher castes, is living in an unevolved past. Besides, the caste system, as we know it socially, is a perversion. When formulated, there was free mobility. Can we, for instance, forget that it was not a brahmin whose words of wisdom are encapsulated in the Gita, but a kshatriya’s? gautam.c@expressindia.com

Whom Dalits don’t touch

There is a hierarchy within untouchables.The top sub-castes do not dine with, marry or even touch the lowest layers By Manu Joseph TNN epaper.timesofindia.com

In any given situation in this country, there is a Brahmin and there is a Shudra. Even within an impoverished group that is emotionally called Dalits or the untouchables, someone is higher and someone is lower. There are about a thousand recognised sub-castes within the 160-million dalits, and almost all of them come under the scheduled caste. The top echelons of the community, like the Vankars and Mahars who were traditionally weavers or farmers, do not mingle with the lowest sub-castes, and in villages today, they do not even touch the Valmikis who have traditionally been sanitation workers. So the leaders of Dalit liberation wear two faces and neither is a mask. Sometimes they froth at the cruelties committed against them and their forefathers by the upper castes. Sometimes they turn sheepish under the burden of a quiet acceptance that Dalits themselves perpetrate the same crimes on the lowest of the low. This food chain is inspiring the untouchables among the untouchables, to ask for reservations within the scheduled caste quota. The battle lines are clear in some states and just forming in others. Dalit leaders fear a looming civil war.

When Martin Macwan, a social activist, ate in the household of a sweeper in one Gujarat village, he was denied entry into a Vankar village for that reason. “There are Dalit activists who do not drink water in a Valmiki village,” he says. Many at the bottom of the Dalit underground run away to towns to seek anonymity and escape discrimination by other Dalits. In the cities, they settle for professions that are baser than what some animals have to endure. They are hired by morgues, especially in Ahmedabad, to squat on corpses during autopsy, take out body parts and show them to the doctor who may not want to touch the cadaver. They clean human excreta with their hands, like in Jain monasteries where meditating inmates refuse to install flushes in the fear that flushing will kill germs, a micro murder that is unacceptable to their faith. Valmikis also get into manholes where they die sometimes after inhaling poisonous gases.

These cursed sub-castes that go by different names in different states are beginning to complain that it is only a handful of somewhat liberated comities of Dalits who enjoy quotas the most. Communities like Chamars in Maharashtra and Malas in Andhra Pradesh have over the years prospered due to persistence with schooling and by that virtue being in a position to take advantage of reservation. While communities like Moshahars still catch rats and eat them because they have no other means of surviving. The growing financial and even social inequality between various Dalit sub-castes is at the heart of the lowest groups demanding further fragment the scheduled caste reservation. These demands are growing stronger, muffled only by the fact that influential Dalit leaders are against such a liquidity. “Splitting the country into anymore caste categories can disintegrate the nation,” says Dalit leader Udit Raj who believes that there is a serious distinction between bifurcating and splintering.

In Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and to some extent Karnataka, the movement to further split the scheduled caste quota is formidable. In other states, the murmurs are waiting for the arrival of an opportunistic politician. In AP, Naxalites of PWG are inciting a lowly subcaste called Madigas to carve out a separate quota. “They are claiming that educated sections like Malas are taking away all the benefits,” says G Shankar, secretary general of AP Scheduled Caste Welfare Association. “Such splintering is very complicated, because a sub-caste which is not doing well in one state may be doing well in another.” The issue smoulders down many grey rustic lanes of the country far away from the mainstream. It is dividing the Dalits and disturbing the battle plans of liberated Dalits who can see clearly how official fragmentation of untouchables will dilute their struggle for welfare. So, though one may find it hard to believe, there are times when educated Dalits think reservation is bad.

Quick justice only for raped foreigners?

Indian victims are ignored by the very system that dispenses 22-day convictions, says 26-yr-old German student who was raped in Alwar J S epaper.timesofindia.com Sunday, 07 May, 2006

A rape conviction in 22 days is not the norm in India but a rare exception. Until now, this exception has only been made in Rajasthan for foreigners who come from countries that are important for the Indian tourism sector. These convictions show the potential capacity of the police and judiciary for dispensation of quick justice but they also point to the fact that many Indian rape victims are discriminated against and ignored by the same system. A victim has only a small chance of getting (quick) justice if there are no financial interests at stake, if she is not in an influential position and if there is not much media attention. The fact that in many cases victims have to wait for a trial for several years and that the majority of rape accused are acquitted demonstrates that state governments and judiciaries fail to handle cases of violence against women with due diligence.

Amnesty International has elaborated in several reports that governments, under these conditions, are responsible for human rights violations against women even if the acts are committed by private individuals. If a state fails to ensure law enforcement, if the behaviour of police and judiciary officials leads to a widespread impunity in cases of sexual violence, this has to be judged as the tolerance and acceptance of violence against women by the state. This state failure is not only a human rights violation against women who already have become victims of sexual violence, it concerns all women in India. The prevalent impunity in rape cases creates an atmosphere within society which encourages men to use violence against women.

The danger comes not only and not mainly from perpetrators who are unknown to the victims but often from colleagues, friends, husbands and other relatives. It makes things even worse that crimes committed by persons who are well-known to the victim are mostly not taken seriously. A widespread prejudice about socalled date rapes is that it was a consensual act. But can anyone really imagine that a woman would choose to go through many humiliating judicial procedures, especially in a society where rape victims are strongly stigmatised and where it is highly probable that the offender will be acquitted, if her claims were not true? In fact, most women who experience sexual violence don’t report it because they are afraid of the police, afraid of the stigma and afraid of the offender and his family.

It is a shame if people allege in so-called date rape cases that the victim agreed or that she is somehow responsible or guilty for what has happened. Is a victim guilty only for trusting a friend or colleague and being friendly to him or, in other words, for having a drink and dinner with him? Is it asking too much if a woman expects respectful behaviour from a friend? Fair, fast rape trial a must It seems to be a widespread misconception among men that they can do anything with a woman if she is friendly and shows a bit of trust. If a woman says no they don’t care, maybe some don’t realise that a ‘no’ expressed by a woman really means NO, regardless of the relationship or situation. This mindset of men who rape their friends, colleagues, neighbours or relatives is not an individual problem, it is a reflection of a society in which women are still discriminated against and disrespected.

The state has responsibilities to prevent violence against women. It has to make more effort to build a society in which women get equal rights and where they can live a more independent life. Most important, it has to ensure that every rape victim gets a fair and quick trial, regardless of her nationality or position in society and regardless of the circumstances of the offence—be it a date rape, marital rape or rape by an unknown offender. Convictions should become the norm. (The writer’s initials appear with her consent.)

Contra-Contraception

By RUSSELL SHORTO NYTimes.com Homepage Published: May 7, 2006

The English writer Daniel Defoe is best remembered today for creating the ultimate escapist fantasy, "Robinson Crusoe," but in 1727 he sent the British public into a scandalous fit with the publication of a nonfiction work called "Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom." After apparently being asked to tone down the title for a subsequent edition, Defoe came up with a new one — "A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed" — that only put a finer point on things. The book wasn't a tease, however. It was a moralizing lecture. After the wanton years that followed the restoration of the monarchy, a time when both theaters and brothels multiplied, social conservatism rooted itself in the English bosom. Self-appointed Christian morality police roamed the land, bent on restricting not only homosexuality and prostitution but also what went on between husbands and wives.
It was this latter subject that Defoe chose to address. The sex act and sexual desire should not be separated from reproduction, he and others warned, else "a man may, in effect, make a whore of his own wife." To highlight one type of then-current wickedness, Defoe gives a scene in which a young woman who is about to marry asks a friend for some "recipes." "Why, you little Devil, you would not take Physick to kill the child?" the friend asks as she catches her drift. "No," the young woman answers, "but there may be Things to prevent Conception; an't there?" The friend is scandalized and argues that the two amount to the same thing, but the bride to be dismisses her: "I cannot understand your Niceties; I would not be with Child, that's all; there's no harm in that, I hope." One prime objective of England's Christian warriors in the 1720's was to stamp out what Defoe called "the diabolical practice of attempting to prevent childbearing by physical preparations."
The wheels of history have a tendency to roll back over the same ground. For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960's culminated in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."
The American Life League is a lay Catholic organization, and for years — especially since Pope Paul VI's "Humanae Vitae" encyclical of 1968 forbade "any action which either before, at the moment of or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation" — being anti-contraception was largely a Catholic thing. Protestants and other non-Catholics tended to look on curiously as they took part in the general societywide acceptance of various forms of birth control. But no longer. Organizations like the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, which inject a mixture of religion and medicine into the social sphere, operate from a broadly Christian perspective that includes opposition to some forms of birth control. Edward R. Martin Jr., a lawyer for the public-interest law firm Americans United for Life, whose work includes seeking to restrict abortion at the state level and representing pharmacists who have refused to prescribe emergency contraception, told me: "We see contraception and abortion as part of a mind-set that's worrisome in terms of respecting life. If you're trying to build a culture of life, then you have to start from the very beginning of life, from conception, and you have to include how we think and act with regard to sexuality and contraception." Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, who was appointed by President Bush in 2002 to the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee despite (or perhaps because of) his opposition to contraception, sounded not a little like Daniel Defoe in a 1999 essay he wrote: "Sexual union in marriage ought to be a complete giving of each spouse to the other, and when fertility (or potential fertility) is deliberately excluded from that giving I am convinced that something valuable is lost. A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification."
As with other efforts — against gay marriage, stem cell research, cloning, assisted suicide — the anti-birth-control campaign isn't centralized; it seems rather to be part of the evolution of the conservative movement. The subject is talked about in evangelical churches and is on the agenda at the major Bible-based conservative organizations like Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. It also has its point people in Congress — including Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, Representative Joe Pitts and Representative Melissa Hart of Pennsylvania and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma — all Republicans who have led opposition to various forms of contraception.
R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is considered one of the leading intellectual figures of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. In a December 2005 column in The Christian Post titled "Can Christians Use Birth Control?" he wrote: "The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm.. . .A growing number of evangelicals are rethinking the issue of birth control — and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies." 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9Next Page » Russell Shorto, a contributing writer, has written for the magazine about the anti-gay-marriage movement and religion in the workplace.

In South India, more the merrier

TIMES NEWS NETWORK epaper.timesofindia.com Wednesday, May 3, 2006

Hyderabad/Chennai/Bangalore: That engineer K Suryanarayana had two wives became public only after his murder in Afghanistan, but the revelation isn’t surprising in Andhra Pradesh, indeed in most of south India. In Tamil Nadu, bigamy is pretty much institutionalised and even has a name — Chinna veedu, which translates as ‘small house’ or second home. It is an age-old tradition surviving to this day despite its illegality. When DMK was in power in the state, security agencies had a tough time providing security to two houses for many ministers, as each of them had two wives.

Whether it was the late M G Ramachandran, or M Karunanidhi, they have all had it, and flaunted it. Karunanidhi has married at least three women, the first of whom is dead. The DMK chief now divides his time in the houses of both wives — spending mornings at the Gopalapuram residence with Dayaluammal while moving to the house of his other wife, Rajathiammal, at CIT Nagar in Chennai in the afternoons. Another towering Tamil actor, Gemini Ganesan, married five times while his first wife was alive. The Chinna veedu concept is fairly common in Krishnagiri and Salem districts of TN, where males believe in more the merrier.

Actor-director K Bhagyaraj even made a Tamil movie called Chinna Veedu. At least one top Union minister from Tamil Nadu is known to have two wives and so does a senior DMK official, who married his daughter’s classmate. An academic said, ‘‘The social sanction for two wives can be traced to religion and mythology. Lord Muruga, for instance, had two wives.’’ In Andhra, bigamy doesn’t have the traditional sanction it enjoys in TN, but the practice is fairly widespread among the powerful and even a status symbol.

Museum on caste

By RAMA LAKSHMI The Times of India 17 Apr 2006

After 16 years of debate and delay in the US Congress and Senate, the Smithsonian Institution finally announced this January the plan to open a National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum will be one of the largest in the US dedicated to explore the tortured history of African Americans, their struggles against slavery, racism and injustice, and also to celebrate their triumphs. The museum, estimated to open in 2016, will tell the story of the African American experience through photographs, video films, oral histories, archival documents, letters, diaries, posters, music, art and literature. The legacy of racism in the US is not very different from our own shackles of the caste system.

The caste system is arguably even more degrading and pernicious than racism in the US. Many believe that the biggest social cleavage in India is not religion or gender, but it is caste. Despite progressive constitutional guarantees and abolition of untouchability, discrimination continues. Can we envisage a museum on the caste system in India? To do that, we may have to think beyond the notion of museums that present our history as a series of archaeological artefacts and royal treasures. A museum need not just be about archaeological artefacts, it is also a repository of collective memory. There is a profusion of story-telling museums around the world today that are built around people’s histories.

A caste museum is one way of confronting the existence of a parallel narrative (of Dalits) that has remained invisible from mainstream historiography. The experience of caste in India is an integral part of our history and permeates every aspect of our collective experience — history, identity, religion, economy, rituals, justice, and nation-building.

There are a lot of Indians who would dismiss caste as a thing of the past. They claim to live in a caste-neutral 21st century. If indeed, it is something we have overcome, then the story truly belongs in a history museum — of how a crippling social system was defeated by us. The nation and future generations will benefit from an acknowledgement of this past. But is it really over? Problems as old and deeply embedded like this do not disappear by a set of laws enacted for over 50 years, but they have to be debated and confronted at shared platforms.

Museums are sites of dialogue about traumatic episodes of history and also of community pride — the black history museums in the US, post-apartheid museums in South Africa, the Holocaust museums, the aboriginal museums in Australia, post-Soviet museums in the Baltics and the recent on-line Chinese Cultural Revolution Museum. There are those who would say that this may only deepen our social divisions. But such a museum need not be a confrontational site. It could also be a site to celebrate the prideful moments in Dalit history, literature and art.

For example, how many school-going children read about Dalit figures like Jhalkari Bai and Udha Devi, who courageously fought the British army? What would be more fitting than a tribute to these a gallery attached to the figures in National Gandhi Museum at Rajghat? Our history tends to be formal, inflexible and academic — a grand national narrative that subsumes the various strands of social and public histories. It is time we present different and differing approaches to our culture and identity. We need to go beyond fixed narratives because history has to be constructed continually and make room for other instruments of social memory — whether it is the history of our caste system, independence movement, partition history, Emergency, or even the Aryan migration theory.

Whose stories belong in the museum? Surely, not just those of the privileged. I don’t suggest replacing one version with another, but creating spaces in a museum where both stories can live together and engage with each other’s truths. A museum’s story need not be static and can be continually and collectively built. The museum of the caste system can be a dynamic locus of reflection and reconciliation. The writer, a journalist for The Washington Post, is on leave studying museology

The Friedan Mystique

Dan Seligman Commentary Magazine April 2006

Of course, even if The Feminine Mystique is rated a dreadful book, there remains the possibility that its author did a great deal for American women. This view will seem intuitively plausible to anybody who believes that feminism itself did a great deal for them. There is certainly no doubt that Betty Friedan was one of, arguably the most important of, the movement’s “founding mothers” (to quote again from the many obituaries). Possessed of boundless energy, an instinct for leadership, and self-confidence verging on arrogance, if not megalomania—even the most fawning obituaries felt obliged to mention her dictatorial impulses—she seemed always to be out front during the formative years.

In 1966 she was the main founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and in the 1970’s played significant roles in creating the National Women’s Political Caucus (slogan: Make Policy, Not Coffee) and the National Abortion Rights Action League. And the evidence suggests that, despite its flaws, The Feminine Mystique did succeed in articulating the grievances of a certain class of American women while simultaneously packaging an ideology for the nascent movement.

Well, what did feminism do for American women? Many people would argue that it had at least one important and incontestable achievement: the opening-up of broad new career opportunities for women, and especially for those with a claim to intelligence and education, like many of the suburban homemakers described in The Feminine Mystique. But this argument needs to be seriously qualified.

During the years in which the movement was taking shape, something else was happening: an explosion in the number of educated women: the number of female college graduates in America more than tripled (to around 5 million) from 1940 to 1970. It is inconceivable that this swelling supply could have long existed without creating its own demand in the labor markets. With or without a feminist movement, educated women would have seen opportunities opening up. Indeed, it is fascinating to speculate on a counterfactual scenario wherein they would have received their opportunities without the unpleasant side-effects of movement feminism: without sexual warfare, affirmative action, boundless litigation, and maybe even without the raging political correctness that would make it increasingly troublesome, even for a president of Harvard, to mention the possibility of innate differences between men and women.

A difficulty for anyone who wants to believe in Betty Friedan and also in the feminist movement is that she herself became a critic of it. During the 1970’s, she was increasingly unhappy with its emphasis on lesbian concerns and obsessive anti-male rhetoric. In 1981, she produced The Second Stage, a book intended to bring feminism back to its senses—to reestablish its relevance for heterosexual women who expected to marry and have children. Referring to women’s “femininity,” she complained in the opening chapter: “We blush even to use that word now.” Her new position brought on breaks with other feminist icons, including Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem.

But The Second Stage did not have the resonance of The Feminine Mystique, and utterly failed in its effort to force the movement back on track. Part of the problem here was that even while disagreeing with the movement’s radicals, she shared many of their basic assumptions. Like them, Friedan assumed that the women’s movement must always be on the Left. Like them, she took it as axiomatic that, aside from certain reproductive differences, men and women were indistinguishable. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter began talking about a military draft and indicated that such a draft would include women; quite a few women proved unthrilled by the prospect, and The Second Stage, which appears to have been written at about this time, registers concern about such women. They are said to be demanding equal rights while failing to accept equal responsibility.

Finally, we learn from The Feminine Mystique that her own marriage was a shambles. This brings us to an inescapable question: whether the unhappiness Friedan purported to find among affluent suburban women was somehow reflecting her own wretched situation. In principle, of course, a book’s findings should be judged on the evidence put forward by its author and not by details of the author’s life. In principle, the problem that has no name could have been discovered by a suburban housewife who thought her own life was marvelous. But when an author is passionately committed to sensational new ideas for which the evidence is shaky, it is impossible to avoid suspicions about her own problems and predispositions.

Fusion and synthesis

We often hear the cliché that truth emerges through the clash of opinions in the "marketplace of ideas." This is the ideal of democracy, of unregulated free speech, of political factions, and to a certain limited extent, it is obviously true. We wouldn't want to live in a place where someone's version of truth was handed down from on high, and we were not free to discover it.

But there is lower truth and higher Truth, discovered truth and revealed Truth, inductive truth and antecedent Truth. In each case, the former is the type of truth that may be fought out and determined in the marketplace of ideas, while the latter is only apprehended in another way. In that case, fighting it out the way you would a spending bill, a scientific debate, or a legal case would only muddy the water and debase and distance ourselves from the Truth we are seeking.

The sort of Truth discussed on this blog does not emerge through contra-versy, that is, "flowing against." Rather, it is only achieved through con-versing, or "flowing together." All of my work is the end product of years of "conversing" that you cannot know about. Nor can you know about my subservience to, and reverence for, those who surpass my understanding.

That is, it is a work of fusion and synthesis that could only be achieved by dwelling in a multitude of disparate and outwardly contradictory particulars and allowing their higher truth to emerge at their own rhythm and pace. This truth cannot be imposed from on high. Nevertheless, once it is revealed, it reveals itself to be from "on high." It is a higher truth that flows from a "center," not on the same plane as the lower truths it synthesizes.

When I talk about this truth, there is a knee-jerk instinct in some to treat it as any other truth available on a lower plane. This reflects the independent American spirit of "everyone's entitled to their own opinion." Yes, that's true, as far as it goes. posted by Gagdad Bob Sunday, April 02, 2006 at 6:29 AM 3 comments

Consensus, synchronicity, and solidarity

Tusar N Mohapatra said... Construed almost synonymous with democracy, the idea of plurality and choice is also lapped up by the market economy. The more the merrier, is the new refrain. But what about consensus, synchronicity and solidarity? Are they not equally significant?

This war between the modern and the post-modern has forced upon us lopsided priorities and warped perspectives. The fact that the divergent concepts must be applied in their respective locus is easily forgotten, and the contra attempted to corner browny points.

Then what about creating such a consensus on a particular knowledge system or a philosophy? Can’t it be attempted in an informed environment by employing dispassionate discourse? Or, at least, is it not worth striving for?

Sri Aurobindo holds a unique position among the modern day thinkers of the world. He has lived through the tradition of the east as well as the west for quite a long time and has not only delved deep into the soul of both the cultures, but also written about them extensively in English with a universal sweep.

Where shall I go!

Bishnupada Sethi

bishnupada.sethi@undp.org

Leaving this land,
For which I am only a trustee
As a tribal, I am duty bound
To pass it on to the generation next!

Who would shift the banyan tree!
And the village spirits lying underneath.
What would happen to the streams?
Singing praises in the names of God,
And the rocks lying there,
Our monuments for ages.

I will set my ancestors free,
Whose spirits I had installed in the home;
I am not sure,If they won't be angry,
As I failed to preserve things, given to me.
They were lucky,They knew no state,
No king ever ruled them before.

After I leave the land,
They would build the modern temple
For making gold out of earth.
A new era would dawn
With promises of more happiness;
And I know not for sureIf it means anything
To me or people like me.

Lush diversity and freedom

Border War By GEORGE BALL NYTimes.com: March 19, 2006 Warminster, Pa

THE horticultural world is having its own debate over immigration, with some environmentalists warning about the dangers of so-called exotic plants from other countries and continents "invading" American gardens. These botanical xenophobes say that a pristine natural state exists in our yards and that to disturb it is both sinful and calamitous. In their view, exotic plants will swallow your garden, your neighbors' gardens and your neighbors' neighbors' gardens until the ecosystem collapses under their rampant suffocating growth. If anything suffocates us, though, it will be the environmentalists' narrowmindedness. Like all utopian visions, their dream beckons us into a perfect and rational natural world where nothing ever changes — a world that never existed and never will.

Native plants are the survivalists of the botanical world, and in the appropriate settings — wilderness areas, home and botanical gardens, public parks and sidewalks — they bless us with their beauty and awe us with their tenacity. Our lives would be poor and grim without the strawberry, cranberry, columbine and trillium. They've always been here, in the same way that Native Americans have been; only their arrival and settlement are more ancient.

Their presence illustrates a geologic time, about 8,000 years ago, when the glaciers receded and unimaginably vast deluges swallowed the surface of the future United States — an airplane ride over the Midwest reveals enormous lakes formed by even larger melted ice masses. As the landscape changed, the botanical world sorted itself out, leaving us with the hardy "natives." (It should be noted, though, that many plants now considered natives — like sycamores, magnolias and cinnamon — arrived from other continents, just as we did. They are products of adaptation.)

Like human survivalists, natives are also subject to exploitation by the horticultural equivalent of radical fundamentalists. The anti-exotics argue that gardens should be populated exclusively by native plants, as if the exotics were trying to enter the flower bed illegally. The consequences of such a stand could be dire. Should we eat no onions or garlic, apples or lemons; feast our eyes on no magnificent tulips or roses — all exotics of Eurasian origin? Should Asians not enjoy their distinctive peppers, tomatoes, beans, squash, sunflowers and corn — all from the Americas?

Indeed, the world's most popular root crop, potatoes, started life as a staple of the Andean people and achieved its first international fame as a slave food. By the time it reached France, the "earth apple" was a delicacy likened to truffles; their flowers were featured in tiaras of court ladies. Exotic indeed.

Should we deprive ourselves of petunias, begonias, impatiens and hollyhocks — not a one of them "native"? Must we, on pain of being cast out of the garden as horticultural pariahs, deny the elephant his peanuts? This wouldn't be merely ridiculous. It would compare with the denial of human immigration on grounds that certain ethnic groups breed in numbers "too prolific" for the existing elite to tolerate. Imagine, then, a horticultural ruling class. No "invasives" need apply: let the lily find another valley. Such prohibitions of exotic plant species demonstrate only an elitist snobbery that is as dangerous to a free society as it is to a free botany.

No one, and certainly no gardener, grows truly destructive invasive plants in his garden. The devastating kudzu in the South, star thistle in the West and purple loosestrife in the East were accidental introductions from Asia, most often mixed with the feed and bedding of livestock. Yet the pro-native, anti-exotic partisans also wish us to stop enjoying the charms of harmless and beautiful plants like Queen Anne's lace, yarrow and chicory. Aside from requiring a bit of weeding, exotics are safe as milk, unless one considers gardening a chore rather than a passionate hobby. If so, forget the forget-me-nots.

Let's welcome, as spring arrives tomorrow, as many huddled masses of flowers, herbs and vegetables as can fit in our unique melting pot of a nation, unrivaled in its tradition of lush diversity and freedom to grow rampantly. George Ball, a former president of the American Horticultural Society, is the president of the seed and plant company W. Atlee Burpee & Company.

The great Indian train journey

After decades of socialist rhetoric, our nation’s grey (and greying?) cells are now getting stimulated with tons of free-market mumbo-jumbo. Ideas after ideas confuse and confound us. The worst of these “idea marauders” is “Competition.”It is said that Darwin’s Theory of evolution is a difficult idea to grasp. Not so among our compatriots. Suddenly it seems such an obvious theory and we love the Briton for it. To all of us in the subcontinent who are happy to be fed and clothed, Darwin’s thesis rhymes simplistically, monotonously and sweetly in our ears, all suitably adapted to the local milieu.

The fittest shall survive

None but the fittest shall survive

The strong shall inherit

None but the strongest shall inherit

This blessed earth

And all the material (and non-material) wealth

The pious amongst us knoweth.

The point is we do not understand what Competition really means. For most Competition is still the zero-sum games that we all play under inadequate supply conditions, like those we experience with the great Indian train journey. The scramble for body space, leg space and luggage space all define competition for us. It is such rawest forms of human exchange that condition our idea of Competition. And we seem to have difficulty in coming out of this mindset.

The train journey manoeuvres cannot be dismissed as instinctual, unpremeditated animal action. It appears that everyone thinks he or she is being “strategic” -- making complicated calculations to appropriate maximum space, beating the slant of the sun, or making clever manoeuvres to detrain most efficiently. Behind these competitive dynamics with the “other” individual(s), lurks an investment of human intelligence no animal can match. In a supply-choked society, tactical thinking passes for strategic thinking. Business Today, August 15, 2004 posted by Sankaran at Sunday, February 26, 2006 TAPMI, Manipal, Karnataka, India

The problems of home life

The Parent Trap By JUDITH WARNER The New York Times: February 8, 2006

Although it often seems anecdotally to be true that domestic tasks and power are pretty evenly divided in families where both parents are working full time, the statistics argue quite differently. The fact is, no matter how time- or sleep-deprived they are, working women today do upwards of 70 percent of household chores for their families. The gender caste system is still alive and well in most of our households.

After all, no one really wants to do the scrubbing and folding and chauffeuring and mopping and shopping and dry-cleaner runs. (I'm leaving child-minding out of this; in a happily balanced life, it doesn't feel like a chore.) Once the money for outsourcing runs dry, it's the lower-status member of the household who does these things. It is the lower-status member of the household who is called a "nag" when she repeatedly tries to get other members of the household to share in doing them.

This is just one indication that the feminist "revolution" that was supposed to profoundly reshape women's lives remains incomplete. Another is the fact that there are no meaningful national policies to make satisfying work and satisfying family life anything but mutually exclusive for most men and women.

Ms. Friedan herself anticipated this issue, in the final pages of "The Feminine Mystique," when she called for changing "the rules of the game" of society at large. In 1970, she came back to this thought, arguing that if we did "not only end explicit discrimination but build new institutions," then the women's movement would prove to be "all talk." Thirty-six years later, with women having flooded the professions and explicit gender discrimination outlawed, the institutions of our society simply have not changed to embrace and accommodate the new realities of women's lives.

The problems of home life seem to me now to be an all but hopeless conundrum. Yet the enduring failure of our social institutions to realize the larger promises of the women's movement is something we can address, straightforwardly and comparatively easily. We owe to Betty Friedan, to our daughters and to ourselves.

Ms. Friedan said last year, "We are a backward nation when it comes to things like childcare and parental leave." That's just the beginning. We need universal preschool, more and better afterschool programs, and policies to promote part-time work options that don't force parents to forgo benefits, fair pay and career prospects. We desperately need leadership on these issues. Without it, our national commitment to family values is truly "all talk."Judith Warner, who has been writing the "Domestic Disturbances" blog for the last month on TimesSelect, is the author of "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety."

The torch just passes on to you and me

Books change lives. Remember that Ayn Rand-quoting misanthrope you used to know in school? Or that Sartre-reading existentialist who kept raving about how meaningless life was? But how many books can you think of that changed not just a few lives but the whole world? Books that questioned an entire generation’s attitude to life and their place in society, books that transformed the world as we knew it to be.

Rousseau’s The Social Contract heavily influenced the protagonists of the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, two events which changed the course of history. Marx’s Das Kapital reverberates in various parts of the world even today. Einstein’s essays on Relativity changed the way we looked at the physical universe. And more recently, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (along with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex) changed the fabric of Western society and inspired women’s movements on the other side of the globe. I read The Feminine Mystique when I was 19 and I was completely captivated by what she called “the problem with no name”. She wrote:

"The problem that has no name — which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities — is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease."

Her emphasis might have been on middle-class, suburban American women but there was no doubt in my mind that it applied to women everywhere. I grew up in a place where gender inequality is very much institutionalized and rarely questioned. In classrooms and playgrounds, when you are not “allowed” to do certain things or play certain games, when you need to be more “protected” from the world, when you are “pushed” towards certain professions, when you learn to carry safety pins and chilli powder in your purses, in movies where the women are a “commodity”, at work when you have to work twice as hard and still don’t make the cut, and most of all, at home where your worth is measured by your ability to cook and clean, to bear and bring up children. That I was brought up in a “liberated” household is hardly the point; the biases of the society always wield an unconscious influence in every home, admit it or not. And every single time that happened to me or to anyone I know, I would remember Friedan:

“Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights -- the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for.”

And today, as I read the news of Friedan’s death, its very humbling to remember that the many things that I take for granted here in the country that has been my home for the past five years – equal rights, equal pay, legal abortion, maternity leave to name a few – were the fruits of the feminist movement that this woman kick-started in the 1960s. To those who argue that Friedan’s feminism is not inclusive (as she does not seem to include the poor, the blacks or the lesbians), I would say that lets not take the woman or her ideas out of her time and place.

• So has the battle been won?
• At least in this part of the world?
• Can we all go back home victorious and wait for the food to appear on the table?
• Not so fast. Just switch on the television set, or read one of those “lifestyle” pieces (remember Maureen Dowd’s book?) that seem to appear with astonishing regularity in the NY Times? Or just look around you. How many of your co-workers slipped into suburban obscurity over the past few years?
• Can we really deny that in this country, we are still “taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents?”
• Can we really claim that we as a society don’t measure a woman’s worth by the man she ends up with?

And until a day arrives when we can make that claim, here or in any other part of the world, Betty Friedan’s work is not finished. The torch just passes on to you and me. Update: Do read R~’s tribute to Friedan at Locana. posted by Veena @ 3:59 PM 0 comments