Don’t Equate Booty With Brilliance

Mahesh Bhatt

"Wealth is based on insights. A nation’s growth turns on one key factor, which is, its openness to new ideas and its ability to mobilise and harness the creative energies of its people. Regardless of industry or profession, our future value will come from our capacity to create, originate and innovate...’’ said a senior World Bank official to me recently.

Corporations have always regarded creativity as a major driving force in their success. However, most corporations tend to confuse creativity with productivity. It is time that they realise that great advances in the creative field have always come from ideas, and ideas do not fall from the sky or grow on the trees. They flower in the hearts of the people. It’s people who write great screenplays on which a multi-billion dollar film is based. It is people in whose hearts great musical scores are born, which, in turn, kick-starts the fortunes of a dying music industry.
It was not the state-of-the-art technology and acoustics which the industry paid fortunes for, but a Nadeem-Shravan in the nineties, and now Himmesh Reshammiya, who has become the life support system of the music industry. The history of Hollywood was rewritten by a group of young filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, who brought dazzling new concepts and ideas into the film domain. Hollywood icon Robert Redford says it all with these words: Do you think the world was created by an accountant? No! The universe was created by the combustion of a creative explosion. Fire and chaos started everything. Then order came on top of that.
Today, when I look around, I find that in this ‘Age of Ideas,’ the creative spirit has somehow gotten buried beneath the ferocity of artificial financial engineering. I find that in our frenzy to produce the illusion of growth, too many companies have started relying on acquisitions, aggressive accounting practi-ces, and financial revenue-boosting techniques, rather than innovation of genuinely new markets, products, and services. The other sad characteristic of these times is that in this so-called technological age, we have become a nation that is investing more in technology than in our people. When will begin to see that gadgets and structures are not enough for a firm’s success. It’s high time that managements began to focus on what their creative work force ‘think’ instead of what the management does.

The paradox of our times is that we are fast becoming a world, which is rich in technology but bereft of ideas. Today, we make celebrities of the rich and equate their booty with brilliance, when their success has more to do with cunning and pure marketing.
The real predicament facing the world and particularly the global entertainment industry is a threatening shortage of creative talent. Even the US, which has been the Goliath of the global economy, is struggling to maintain its global supremacy since terrorism made it shut its doors to the flow of creative talent, which for years, has contributed to make it a land of opportunity and innovation.
Do you know that in the United States, scientists, entertainers, architects, lawyers, financiers and others, who make their livelihood “creatively”, outnumber traditional blue-collar workers? Though this creative class makes up just 30% of the US workforce, it earns nearly half of the nation’s wages and gives America its creative clout.
We have a lesson to learn from the United States. It’s high time that our government and the private sector began investing generously in our creative people and developed an infrastructure to educate, inform and inspire them on an on going basis. I’m glad that in our world, film makers like Subhash Ghai and Anupam Kher have taken the lead to create film and acting schools. There are also welcome signs that the Film and Television Institute of India is making that brave attempt to play the role it was originally fashioned to play. Their effort to invest in screenwriters and give them centrestage deserves to be applauded. But these are isolated attempts that are too few for a nation of one billion people.
What leaders need to do is to create a great sense of urgency and inject that into their people and into their systems. But that will only happen if the leaders themselves begin to recognise that there is a gap between the ground reality and their claims and expectations. The problem is that most of us become the victims of our own hype, and mistake our aspirations to be our reality.
To take an example, the products that Bollywood manufactures are far below global standards. Every year, our stars and starlets go to the Cannes film festival to hob-nob with the mighty players from the rest of the world. But the truth is none of our movies even qualify for competition. Getting bigger does not mean getting better. Our creative wells are running dry. Cynics say that our innovators are dead. But I do believe that the creative spirit is still very much alive and kicking within us. It is the imperative and moral responsibility of our leaders to uncover, restore, and revitalise the nation’s imaginative resources and make it erupt.
Our businessmen need to realise that creativity is not a tangible asset like gold or silver, which can be hoarded or fought over, or even bought and sold. The creativity of the human race is like liberty, which can be used for the common good. It is the essential perfume of life that belongs to everyone. It just needs to be nourished, renewed and maintained, or else it will wither and die.

—The writer is a Mumbai-based film maker

Source: The Indian Express

WTF of the Week

“It was shocking as well as suspicious on the part of the government to send soldiers from the Battalion involved in the killing and disappearance of many civilians in the recent past,” Minister for Information and Communication Krishna Bahadur Mahara (CPN Maoist).

Why tell half the truth, Mr Mahara? And on what moral grounds?

In defense of dangerous ideas

In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them.

BY STEVEN PINKER

Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?

Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?

Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?

Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?

Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?

Do men have an innate tendency to rape?

Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?

Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?

Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?

Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?

Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?

Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?

Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?

Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?

Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?

Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?

Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?

Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?

Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?

Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?

Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?

Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?

Perhaps you can feel your blood pressure rise as you read these questions. Perhaps you are appalled that people can so much as think such things. Perhaps you think less of me for bringing them up. These are dangerous ideas -- ideas that are denounced not because they are self-evidently false, nor because they advocate harmful action, but because they are thought to corrode the prevailing moral order.

Think about it

By "dangerous ideas" I don't have in mind harmful technologies, like those behind weapons of mass destruction, or evil ideologies, like those of racist, fascist or other fanatical cults. I have in mind statements of fact or policy that are defended with evidence and argument by serious scientists and thinkers but which are felt to challenge the collective decency of an age. The ideas listed above, and the moral panic that each one of them has incited during the past quarter century, are examples. Writers who have raised ideas like these have been vilified, censored, fired, threatened and in some cases physically assaulted.

Every era has its dangerous ideas. For millennia, the monotheistic religions have persecuted countless heresies, together with nuisances from science such as geocentrism biblical archeology, and the theory of evolution. We can be thankful that the punishments have changed from torture and mutilation to the canceling of grants and the writing of vituperative reviews. But intellectual intimidation, whether by sword or by pen, inevitably shapes the ideas that are taken seriously in a given era, and the rear-view mirror of history presents us with a warning.

Time and again, people have invested factual claims with ethical implications that today look ludicrous. The fear that the structure of our solar system has grave moral consequences is a venerable example, and the foisting of "intelligent design" on biology students is a contemporary one. These travesties should lead us to ask whether the contemporary intellectual mainstream might be entertaining similar moral delusions. Are we enraged by our own infidels and heretics whom history may some day vindicate?

Unsettling possibilities

Dangerous ideas are likely to confront us at an increasing rate and we are ill equipped to deal with them. When done right, science (together with other truth-seeking institutions, such as history and journalism) characterizes the world as it is, without regard to whose feelings get hurt. Science in particular has always been a source of heresy, and today the galloping advances in touchy areas like genetics, evolution and the environment sciences are bound to throw unsettling possibilities at us. Moreover, the rise of globalization and the Internet are allowing heretics to find one another and work around the barriers of traditional media and academic journals. I also suspect that a change in generational sensibilities will hasten the process. The term "political correctness" captures the 1960s conception of moral rectitude that we baby boomers brought with us as we took over academia, journalism and government. In my experience, today's students -- black and white, male and female -- are bewildered by the idea, common among their parents, that certain scientific opinions are immoral or certain questions too hot to handle.

What makes an idea "dangerous"? One factor is an imaginable train of events in which acceptance of the idea could lead to an outcome recognized as harmful. In religious societies, the fear is that if people ever stopped believing in the literal truth of the Bible they would also stop believing in the authority of its moral commandments. That is, if today people dismiss the part about God creating the Earth in six days, tomorrow they'll dismiss the part about "Thou shalt not kill." In progressive circles, the fear is that if people ever were to acknowledge any differences between races, sexes or individuals, they would feel justified in discrimination or oppression. Other dangerous ideas set off fears that people will neglect or abuse their children, become indifferent to the environment, devalue human life, accept violence and prematurely resign themselves to social problems that could be solved with sufficient commitment and optimism.

All these outcomes, needless to say, would be deplorable. But none of them actually follows from the supposedly dangerous idea. Even if it turns out, for instance, that groups of people are different in their averages, the overlap is certainly so great that it would be irrational and unfair to discriminate against individuals on that basis. Likewise, even if it turns out that parents don't have the power to shape their children's personalities, it would be wrong on grounds of simple human decency to abuse or neglect one's children. And if currently popular ideas about how to improve the environment are shown to be ineffective, it only highlights the need to know what would be effective.

Another contributor to the perception of dangerousness is the intellectual blinkers that humans tend to don when they split into factions. People have a nasty habit of clustering in coalitions, professing certain beliefs as badges of their commitment to the coalition and treating rival coalitions as intellectually unfit and morally depraved. Debates between members of the coalitions can make things even worse, because when the other side fails to capitulate to one's devastating arguments, it only proves they are immune to reason. In this regard, it's disconcerting to see the two institutions that ought to have the greatest stake in ascertaining the truth -- academia and government -- often blinkered by morally tinged ideologies. One ideology is that humans are blank slates and that social problems can be handled only through government programs that especially redress the perfidy of European males. Its opposite number is that morality inheres in patriotism and Christian faith and that social problems may be handled only by government policies that punish the sins of individual evildoers. New ideas, nuanced ideas, hybrid ideas -- and sometimes dangerous ideas -- often have trouble getting a hearing against these group-bonding convictions.

The conviction that honest opinions can be dangerous may even arise from a feature of human nature. Philip Tetlock and Alan Fiske have argued that certain human relationships are constituted on a basis of unshakeable convictions. We love our children and parents, are faithful to our spouses, stand by our friends, contribute to our communities, and are loyal to our coalitions not because we continually question and evaluate the merits of these commitments but because we feel them in our bones. A person who spends too much time pondering whether logic and fact really justify a commitment to one of these relationships is seen as just not "getting it." Decent people don't carefully weigh the advantages and disadvantages of selling their children or selling out their friends or their spouses or their colleagues or their country. They reject these possibilities outright; they "don't go there." So the taboo on questioning sacred values make sense in the context of personal relationships. It makes far less sense in the context of discovering how the world works or running a country.

Explore all relevant ideas

Should we treat some ideas as dangerous? Let's exclude outright lies, deceptive propaganda, incendiary conspiracy theories from malevolent crackpots and technological recipes for wanton destruction. Consider only ideas about the truth of empirical claims or the effectiveness of policies that, if they turned out to be true, would require a significant rethinking of our moral sensibilities. And consider ideas that, if they turn out to be false, could lead to harm if people believed them to be true. In either case, we don't know whether they are true or false a priori, so only by examining and debating them can we find out. Finally, let's assume that we're not talking about burning people at the stake or cutting out their tongues but about discouraging their research and giving their ideas as little publicity as possible. There is a good case for exploring all ideas relevant to our current concerns, no matter where they lead. The idea that ideas should be discouraged a priori is inherently self-refuting. Indeed, it is the ultimate arrogance, as it assumes that one can be so certain about the goodness and truth of one's own ideas that one is entitled to discourage other people's opinions from even being examined.

Also, it's hard to imagine any aspect of public life where ignorance or delusion is better than an awareness of the truth, even an unpleasant one. Only children and madmen engage in "magical thinking," the fallacy that good things can come true by believing in them or bad things will disappear by ignoring them or wishing them away. Rational adults want to know the truth, because any action based on false premises will not have the effects they desire. Worse, logicians tell us that a system of ideas containing a contradiction can be used to deduce any statement whatsoever, no matter how absurd. Since ideas are connected to other ideas, sometimes in circuitous and unpredictable ways, choosing to believe something that may not be true, or even maintaining walls of ignorance around some topic, can corrupt all of intellectual life, proliferating error far and wide. In our everyday lives, would we want to be lied to, or kept in the dark by paternalistic "protectors," when it comes to our health or finances or even the weather? In public life, imagine someone saying that we should not do research into global warming or energy shortages because if it found that they were serious the consequences for the economy would be extremely unpleasant. Today's leaders who tacitly take this position are rightly condemned by intellectually responsible people. But why should other unpleasant ideas be treated differently?

There is another argument against treating ideas as dangerous. Many of our moral and political policies are designed to preempt what we know to be the worst features of human nature. The checks and balances in a democracy, for instance, were invented in explicit recognition of the fact that human leaders will always be tempted to arrogate power to themselves. Likewise, our sensitivity to racism comes from an awareness that groups of humans, left to their own devices, are apt to discriminate and oppress other groups, often in ugly ways. History also tells us that a desire to enforce dogma and suppress heretics is a recurring human weakness, one that has led to recurring waves of gruesome oppression and violence. A recognition that there is a bit of Torquemada in everyone should make us wary of any attempt to enforce a consensus or demonize those who challenge it.

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant," according to Justice Louis Brandeis' famous case for freedom of thought and expression. If an idea really is false, only by examining it openly can we determine that it is false. At that point we will be in a better position to convince others that it is false than if we had let it fester in private, since our very avoidance of the issue serves as a tacit acknowledgment that it may be true. And if an idea is true, we had better accommodate our moral sensibilities to it, since no good can come from sanctifying a delusion. This might even be easier than the ideaphobes fear. The moral order did not collapse when the Earth was shown not to be at the center of the solar system, and so it will survive other revisions of our understanding of how the world works.

Dangerous to air dangerous ideas?

In the best Talmudic tradition of arguing a position as forcefully as possible and then switching sides, let me now present the case for discouraging certain lines of intellectual inquiry. Two of the contributors to this volume (Gopnik and Hillis) offer as their "dangerous idea" the exact opposite of Gilbert's: They say that it's a dangerous idea for thinkers to air their dangerous ideas. How might such an argument play out?

First, one can remind people that we are all responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions, and that includes the consequences of our public statements. Freedom of inquiry may be an important value, according to this argument, but it is not an absolute value, one that overrides all others. We know that the world is full of malevolent and callous people who will use any pretext to justify their bigotry or destructiveness. We must expect that they will seize on the broaching of a topic that seems in sympathy with their beliefs as a vindication of their agenda.

Not only can the imprimatur of scientific debate add legitimacy to toxic ideas, but the mere act of making an idea common knowledge can change its effects. Individuals, for instance, may harbor a private opinion on differences between genders or among ethnic groups but keep it to themselves because of its opprobrium. But once the opinion is aired in public, they may be emboldened to act on their prejudice -- not just because it has been publicly ratified but because they must anticipate that everyone else will act on the information. Some people, for example, might discriminate against the members of an ethnic group despite having no pejorative opinion about them, in the expectation that their customers or colleagues will have such opinions and that defying them would be costly. And then there are the effects of these debates on the confidence of the members of the stigmatized groups themselves.

Of course, academics can warn against these abuses, but the qualifications and nitpicking they do for a living may not catch up with the simpler formulations that run on swifter legs. Even if they did, their qualifications might be lost on the masses. We shouldn't count on ordinary people to engage in the clear thinking -- some would say the hair-splitting -- that would be needed to accept a dangerous idea but not its terrible consequence. Our overriding precept, in intellectual life as in medicine, should be "First, do no harm."

We must be especially suspicious when the danger in a dangerous idea is to someone other than its advocate. Scientists, scholars and writers are members of a privileged elite. They may have an interest in promulgating ideas that justify their privileges, that blame or make light of society's victims, or that earn them attention for cleverness and iconoclasm. Even if one has little sympathy for the cynical Marxist argument that ideas are always advanced to serve the interest of the ruling class, the ordinary skepticism of a tough-minded intellectual should make one wary of "dangerous" hypotheses that are no skin off the nose of their hypothesizers.

(The mind-set that leads us to blind review, open debate and statements of possible conflicts of interest.)

But don't the demands of rationality always compel us to seek the complete truth? Not necessarily. Rational agents often choose to be ignorant. They may decide not to be in a position where they can receive a threat or be exposed to a sensitive secret. They may choose to avoid being asked an incriminating question, where one answer is damaging, another is dishonest and a failure to answer is grounds for the questioner to assume the worst (hence the Fifth Amendment protection against being forced to testify against oneself). Scientists test drugs in double-blind studies in which they keep themselves from knowing who got the drug and who got the placebo, and they referee manuscripts anonymously for the same reason. Many people rationally choose not to know the gender of their unborn child, or whether they carry a gene for Huntington's disease, or whether their nominal father is genetically related to them. Perhaps a similar logic would call for keeping socially harmful information out of the public sphere.

Intolerance of unpopular ideas

As for restrictions on inquiry, every scientist already lives with them. They accede, for example, to the decisions of committees for the protection of human subjects and to policies on the confidentiality of personal information. In 1975, biologists imposed a moratorium on research on recombinant DNA pending the development of safeguards against the release of dangerous microorganisms. The notion that intellectuals have carte blanche in conducting their inquiry is a myth.

Though I am more sympathetic to the argument that important ideas be aired than to the argument that they should sometimes be suppressed, I think it is a debate we need to have. Whether we like it or not, science has a habit of turning up discomfiting thoughts, and the Internet has a habit of blowing their cover.

Tragically, there are few signs that the debates will happen in the place where we might most expect it: academia. Though academics owe the extraordinary perquisite of tenure to the ideal of encouraging free inquiry and the evaluation of unpopular ideas, all too often academics are the first to try to quash them. The most famous recent example is the outburst of fury and disinformation that resulted when Harvard president Lawrence Summers gave a measured analysis of the multiple causes of women's underrepresentation in science and math departments in elite universities and tentatively broached the possibility that discrimination and hidden barriers were not the only cause.

But intolerance of unpopular ideas among academics is an old story. Books like Morton Hunt's The New Know-Nothings and Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate's The Shadow University have depressingly shown that universities cannot be counted on to defend the rights of their own heretics and that it's often the court system or the press that has to drag them into policies of tolerance. In government, the intolerance is even more frightening, because the ideas considered there are not just matters of intellectual sport but have immediate and sweeping consequences. Chris Mooney, in The Republican War on Science, joins Hunt in showing how corrupt and demagogic legislators are increasingly stifling research findings they find inconvenient to their interests.

Steven Pinker is professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His new book, The Stuff of Thought, will be out in September.

Source: SunTimes

Compassionate Capitalism

Book Case Madhuri Santanam Sondhi

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent remarks to the Confederation of Indian Industries on the unacceptable gulf which separates India’s affluent class from the poor and immiserated and his suggestions for tackling it produced much media outrage. Critics suggested that he was hamstrung by his earlier doctrinaire views on the command economy with its accompanying ethic of distributive justice. He was almost accused of sabotaging India’s economic growth.

For the record, China, the envy of Indian capitalists and socialists alike, also faces environmental crises and a growing income gap between rich and poor: 70,000 cases of civil unrest were recorded last year, attributed to tensions arising from inequality (The Economist, June 2007). The Chinese Prime Minister, in no mood for another Maoist revolution, criticised the privileged for flaunting their wealth and threatening China’s "harmonious society." And in Europe and the United States, hard centres of capitalism and globalisation, industry itself has conducted an internal debate over the scale of CEO paycheques and the need for balance.
It is worth recalling that one of the major planks of the national movement against foreign occupation arose out of the grinding misery of the Indian masses. For the privileged Gandhi advocated a socio-economic ethic of self-restraint, controlled consumerism and low-level production, to equilibrate a largely agricultural society without offensive income distances and to maintain the natural environment. He warned against the unsustainability of greed and profligacy. Nehru the modernist found Gandhi’s prescriptions archaic moralisms, attracted as he was by socialism which promised utopian gratification to all through state-controls, state-distribution and large-scale industrialisation. Added to democracy this promised social equality, basic human rights and freedoms. Still his government imposed certain sanctions against lavish displays of wealth, especially at public functions and weddings. His grandson Sanjay Gandhi, in contrast to other restrictions enforced during the Emergency, dispensed with these controls, and since then extravagant spending by the rich has kept pace with India’s economic development, especially after economic reforms. But it would be wrong to assume that economic growth depends on excessive spending by the rich.
Debates on conspicuous consumption have arisen at various periods in the history of capitalism, with a series of interlocutors: Marxists, Green crusaders or essentialists concerned with job satisfaction or "quality of life" (neither synonymous with sheer wealth). Both socialism and capitalism are indebted to the Enlightenment vision of egalitarianism, rooted in humanistic individualism. Their differences lie in their methodologies, state ownership and controls versus free markets, and both in their pristine forms failed to achieve full social equality. So the Prime Minister only sought to restore the rhetoric concerning the humanistic goals of modernity, which has faded in the glare of liberalism and globalisation.
Citigroup strategists Ajay Kapur and Niall Macleod used the term "plutonomy" for economies dominated by the spending power of elites, a relatively new phenomenon resulting from globalisation. They argue that twentieth century mass democracy was economically supported by the earnings of blue-collar workers, especially those massed in mining, manufacturing, and transport industries. With their decline and the rise of enterprises employing skilled white collar labour, the economic mass base of democracy weakened, opening the door to oligarchy if not political extremism. Such phenomena are disproportionately skewed in a multi-layered developing economy like India’s which ranges from pre-modern agriculture to internationally competitive IT.
The term "conspicuous consumption" was coined by late nineteenth century American sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, best remembered for his classic Theory of the Leisure Class. He criticised not capitalism as such but the capitalists of his time for seeking social importance through flamboyant displays of wealth. The term now has wider application, encompassing the nouveau riche with their ostentatious spending, ubiquitous in expanding economies such as those of Russia, India and China. There is no disagreement amongst right-thinking people that all have the right to a decent standard of living: it is the inverse relationship between those who have too much and those with next to nothing that is, when publicly flaunted, unacceptable and politically volatile.
As it happens, the Prime Minister’s commitment to economic growth was integral to his argument. "Unless workers feel they are cared for at work, we can never evolve a national consensus in favour of much needed more flexible laws aimed at ensuring that our firms remain globally competitive." In other words, primitive capitalist exploitation is bad business in a globalised world. Veblen himself attacked the leisure class for slowing the pace of economic development and immiserating the poor, and pointed to the invidious effects of conspicuous consumption in a democratic society. Although it is undoubtedly true that liberal reforms in India have helped pull a good number of the erstwhile poor into the middle class, the sheer numbers of their neighbours still outside the reach of the trickle are a tinder-box of anger and resentment.
Interestingly, the economist Prime Minister did not suggest a luxury tax, but appealed, Gandhian fashion, to his audience’s moral conscience. The outraged media response suggested that the riche old or new no longer wish to be burdened with a conscience, which in itself is a challenge to any democracy. But the corporate heads to whom these admonitions were addressed made no demur, and some, like CII president Sunil Bharati Mittal, even responded: "The Prime Minister’s … concern was in view of the wealth inequality in the country ... in-your face spending hurts people. He meant ostentatious display of wealth should be avoided." Incidentally, in this regard, the Prime Minister, unlike many politicians, is himself an honourable exception
Patwant Singh is heir to traditions both of Sikh community service and enlightened modernity. In his Second Partition Fault-Lines in India’s Democracy (Hay House India 2007) he provides a detailed statistical examination of the abyss that separates India’s globalised elites and the 300 million marginalised and impoverished "rest," covering ill-health, malnourishment, unemployment, homelessness, lack of educational opportunities, which aggravate vulnerability to communalism, corruption et al. Also, for good measure, he criticises the "frenzied militarisation of the state" based on the popular belief that there is a "peace dividend" to be automatically harvested from disarmament, though history has not proven this to be a simple equation.
Disillusioned with state welfare, Patwant Singh concludes with faith in the possibilities of civic action, for which he has set a personal example with the founding of the Kabliji Hospital in rural India. It is also possible to cultivate a more compassionate capitalism with excess profits directed towards welfare: foundations such as those of Tatas, Mahindras or Bill Gates are exemplary. Humanising capitalism could initiate a virtuous circle of acceptable wealth creation and employment. If as Eugen Loebl defined it, an economy is "a system of thinking human beings," then hopefully India, with the best of her received ethos and her renowned economists can further explore the possibilities of combining economic growth with social responsibility.

Madhuri Santanam Sondhi can be contacted at mssondhi@hotmail.com

Source: The Asian Age

Img src: flickr

Some Images of Bhutanese Refugees in Jhapa, Nepal

The Culprit : Bhutanese King

Tactics: Atrocities against Ethnic Nepalese in Bhutan

The Aftermath: Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal

Image source: Flickr
eKantipur

We are Here: Pale Blue Dot

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Bhutanese Refugees: The Right of Return, the Chance for Resettlement

Posted June 20, 2007

Bhutan may profit from evocative tourist images of an isolated cloud kingdom whose people live in serenity and colorful traditional dress, but for many Bhutanese it's far from idyllic. It's a place where citizens can't get a government job, buy or sell land, or open a business without a police-issued card attesting that the bearer is not "anti-national." But it's still home - or at least it should be - for the more than 100,000 Bhutanese citizens expelled in the early 1990s.

The Bhutanese refugees, ethnic Nepalis cleansed from the remote mountain kingdom in the early 1990s, have been warehoused ever since in overcrowded refugee camps in eastern Nepal with no progress toward a resolution of their plight. They have insisted on their right to return to Bhutan; the Bhutanese government has refused to allow them back. Fifteen rounds of bilateral talks between the governments of Nepal and Bhutan have led nowhere. The impasse has lasted more than 16 years.

But a new player has entered the scene: the United States has offered to resettle 60,000 or more of the Bhutanese refugees.

The U.S. wants to break the impasse of the bilateral talks, perhaps out of worry that years of pent-up anger and frustration could soon explode, or maybe just because it is tired of pouring humanitarian aid into the bottomless sinkhole of refugee camps.

Overwhelmingly, Bhutanese refugees say their first choice is to go back home, as is their right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as binding international treaties signed by Bhutan, enshrines the right of people to return to their country. During this long period of exile, however, Bhutan has not allowed a single refugee back.

Repatriation is generally regarded as the best option for refugees - but only when the conditions that caused them to flee have changed enough that they can return safely. The government's treatment of the ethnic Nepalis who still live in Bhutan, however, shows such conditions do not exist. They remain a marginalized group in constant fear that they too could be evicted.

"It is not possible to say that we want human rights for ethnic Nepalis. It is very dangerous to say these things," an ethnic Nepali living in Bhutan told Human Rights Watch. "They will definitely take away your No Objection Certificate [the police-issued permit]. They might even take away your citizenship card."

Despite their right of return, under present circumstances Bhutanese refugees in Nepal still can't go home. So, they continue their long wait. Without permission to work or farm, and dependent on international hand-outs for their survival, the refugees experience the range of social ills associated with protracted camp life, including depression, and domestic and sexual violence.

"After finishing their studies, young people don't get jobs. They have no work, they are idle," a refugee at the Beldangi II camp said. "They fall into bad company, and they drink a lot. They get violent."

The US resettlement offer has provided a ray of hope for some refugees. Parents can finally envision a brighter future for their children. But for others, the offer looks like a ruse to undercut the goal of return to Bhutan and to undermine the will to seek the fundamental political changes in Bhutan that would make return possible. These refugees cannot bear the idea that resettlement might relieve Bhutan of its moral and legal obligations, and that their own dreams of return to their homeland might be delayed that much longer.

Some have started to threaten and intimidate refugees who speak out in favor of resettlement; in late May, a mob attacked refugees who have supported resettlement, beating one of their leaders, burning their huts, and chasing some resettlement supporters out of the camps. In the ensuing violence, Nepali police forces shot and killed two of the rioters. The anger of the opponents of resettlement appears to be misplaced: resettlement does not extinguish the right of return. Those moving to the United States could still insist on their right to go back to Bhutan, and might even be better placed here to advocate for change in Bhutan.

At this critical moment, the United States and India, among other governments, need to pressure Bhutan to fulfill its obligations under international law and allow refugees to return in conditions of safety and dignity. But first, the government of Nepal must provide security in the camps to allow all refugees to make their own choices, free from threats and violence. The refugees who want to hold out for return deserve steadfast international support, but those who can wait no longer should be allowed to choose resettlement now.

Bill Frelick, Refugee Policy director at Human Rights Watch, researched and edited the report "Last Hope: The Need for Durable Solutions for Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal and India." He has worked in the refugee field for nearly 25 years. He previously was the director of Amnesty International USA's refugee program and before that directed the U.S. Committee for Refugees and edited The World Refugee Survey.

Source: The Huffington Post

Image: Tamal Roy, The Associated Press