On the abbreviation "DAD" (dollar-a-day)

When I was growing up, a phrase I often heard - mostly from the mouths of working people - would translate thus: "What is money? After all, its dirt off your hands." Then, there is this memory of my grandfather; as soon as he sat up after a night's sleep - it was usually in the open, under the stars - no mosquitos then as now - he would bring his hands up palm towards him and mutter something in Sanskrit. Later, I learnt that this was a fairly wide practice.

One day, years later, I figured out what that short Sanskrit was about. In translation, it will go "On the front of the hand is Lakshmi, Mother of prosperity, In the root of hand is Saraswati, Mother of learning. In the middle is Govinda, (Krishna).Thus we respectfully see our hands in the Morning"... The Sanskrit word for hand is 'Kara' (from this you get Kartaa - kartaar - Creator) which is also the root word for Karma.... That prayer is now contracted into temple ritual and in some homes as routine. Not much feeling or undertanding go in it.

I have always maintained that the two hands and the head form the Triangle of Cognition.

All of the above bubbled up when I received a banner from a friend that I ended up using for this blog. As I did this I wondered how many would understand that I am using D. A. D. as a figure of speech. I do not 'make' a dollar a day. In fact, any money I 'make' is little and far in between. Its a situation that can be best summed up as "Total Employment at Zero income"

So, How do I make ends meet? how do I get 'food' on the table?

My answer: I am supported by the awesome philanthropy of people who do make about a dollar a day. They work with their hands. They are not greedily attached to money. Although they are not heard saying those old things I mentioned in the beginning, their actions indicate that they know their validity in their bones. In comparison the class of people above them is shameful in its stingy, calculating, hoarding attitude.

I find the philanthropy of dollar-a-day people just awesome. It is possible that the human race has a giving instinct, some kind of a gene. When people have nothing to give, they give themselves, and that is what is enoblingly awesome. They have little material wealth. Hardly any education. They are too busy to read newspapers or watch TV. And yet, in their working and in their amazing capacity to give themselves they sustain more than the people meeting at any G-8 conference.

- Vyom Akhil, an email dated 06/02/2007 9:06 PM

RA-CAN Proposed: the Rotary Alumni Cyber Ambassadors' Network

Staring at the corpus of knowledge & Wealth we now have, is our collective inability to reach this know-Wealth to all. Internationally bureaucratized and economically multinationalized systems are stymied by a macabre synergy of problems which has made Earth more anti-biotic, human-life upon it more robotic, marginalizing food, health and education away from 3/4ths of our kind.

The Brookings Institute says that the Global Disparity Ratio for 1998 is at an unsustainable 135:1. One way to rev-up our skills and capabilities is to rehearse them against a larger snarl of problems first; to simply change achieved goals into milestones on a longer journey. In the Rotary Club, humanity breathes in hope and breathes out purpose. When so many of us are getting sicker, poorer , mis-educated, we look to Rotarians to raise the voice which will be heard and heeded world wide. Shake out of your Complacent Fatiguapathitis, please!.

A commodified education which unrealistically fires up individual ambition, a learning which nurtures the homocentric hedonist, an attitude which looks out only for options, opportunities, entitlements, rights and freedoms, but disregards responsibility, relevance, service, duty and sacrifice cannot be supported. Rotarians are right to tourniquet such resource-exporting eduCommiments. In hyped up acadeMedia, postures masquerade as concepts, but ideas still upset ideologies. Confounding experience, the Reality of a thorn takes out the hurting one; and by sticking to the tree, the bitter fruit escapes into sweetness. For less than a world-around airline ticket, without leaving home & hearth or Mom's cooking for a single day, a deserving past/potential Rotary alumnus can today transform into Rotary's Conflict-Resolution-Supporting lifetime cyber-ambassador. My 1996-97 Walter Mitty had mused thus: "If I were re-doing my scholarship today, instead of my ticket to L.A., I'd ask Rotary to enable me with a multi-media, multi-lingual computer-station with all the Internet bells and whistles so that, if need be, I could drive the Mars Rover from Dehripaali, Sambalpur." RA-CAN, the Rotary Alumni Cyber Ambassadors' Network I've envisioned here, can become the synergizing link between the clubs, the Foundation, and the anywhere-on-Earth Community Programs of Health, Education, Hygiene, Nutrition, Sanitation, Conservation, Employment and Farming. For instance, by accessing and disseminating the knoWealth of specific processing, storage and marketing, RA-CAN, in India, alone, can help prevent the annual USD 7 billion "already-grown" food-loss.

It has taken Jeremy Rifkin to point out that markets, governments businesses--in flux & dissaray today--are creatures, not creators, of communities; that revitalizing them is what globalization if really about, something Rotary pioneered long before it became buzzword. Rotarians know we do not create order, but Order, divine and benign, created us.

HERO/MARTYR OPPORTUNISTS SEEK/CREATE CRISES.

Zillions of upstart NGOs are doing tons of humanitarian work in Dubiousdom, displaying their vested interest in keeping us dehumanized on their doles, subsidies, handouts, soupkitchens--and their good intentions which, one may've heard, pave the road to Hell. RA-CAN can become Rotary's Instrument of Relevence in the millenium now almost upon us."

- From Vyom's 1998 speech to Rotarians

The Future Sits in India's Lap

He whose lap seats the child global,
Eyeballs the singularity beyond the zenith.

My colleague of Kozhikode, Kerala, India, and I were attending an international seminar hosted by the Architectural Department, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal. As a send off, the gracious people at the IIT organized a luncheon-inclusive half-day session at a picturesque archeological site some 30 kilometers out of Kharagpur. A few of the faculty joined us with their families. The child sitting on my lap eating an apple is a Professor's son.

My colleague saw us sitting, sensed a photo and soon after sent a copy to me (January 2001). The serendipitous theme, which makes the subjects in the photo coincidental, occurred to me almost immediately, as did the idea of sharing it. I add these words:

Bhavishya Bhaarat Ki Gode Mein.

Thuumak baithaa ho jiski gode mein, svayam vishwa bhavishya
Vyom paar uuse terey vah, jo huumak banaa Param Eesh

Feel free to share this photo with anyone you wish, just include the photo-credit ("Photo by Bipin M. C."). Acknowledging feedback would be most welcome. Thank you.

- Vyom Akhil and boy, November 5, 2000, at the IIT Kharagpur Internation Seminar, hosted by the Architectural Department, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal.

- Photo by Bipin M.C.

On International Understanding

Speech delivered by Vyôm Akhil, Guest Speaker, Rotary Club Sambalpur (Main), February 28, 2003

Thank you for having me as your chief guest today. I am to talk to you on International Understanding.

Friends, International Understandings are badly needed today. I wish you would not construe this cliché as a set-piece sentence. We have a major crisis staring at us. Its specifics have inter-related components. India’s Finance Minister who is busy presenting his budget right now, says, we have a sluggish GDP growth rate. Oil prices, if they should rise, will upset the apple cart further. And that depends on THE DESIRE OF THE UNITED STATES TO LAUNCH A WAR AGAINST IRAQ.

This morning I heard three news items:
(1) Saddam Hussein has agreed to dismantle the long-range missiles per the suggestions of the U.N. Chief Inspector Hans Blix.
(2) U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfledt says Saddam should not be believed.
(3) Hans Blix is under further pressure to present a report that will facilitate a war.

Since it would be counterproductive to line up the good guys on the one side and the baddies on the other, what are the key elements of understanding from these items? Furthermore, must one not have an alternate format from what the media usually dish out?

Asking and answering a set of questions can aid this: For instance,

• For how long have Saddam and George Walker Bush been presidents of their respective countries?
• Who was elected and how? For how long will they be in office?
• How much propaganda from either side should be given credibility and how much of it discounted?
• What are the real, personal, domestic compulsions driving their behavior?

I am sure all of you remember that the evidence for going to war - touted to have been gathered by spy satellites, presented with fanfare in the British Parliament, and later used by Secretary Colin Powell in the United Nations Security Council - was quickly found to have been plagiarized from an old research paper submitted at the Oxford University and, actually published in Jane’s Defense Weekly. Not even a comma or a full stop was altered.

If you remember, the last time a U.S. president attacked a country in Asia without any immediate provocation, he had a domestic scandal on his hands. I allude to President Clinton’s decision to rocket positions in Afghanistan. And it is possible 9/11 was Al Quaida-Taliban’s angry retaliation.

But that is just one reason why the U.S. naval taskforce gets ordered into international waters. The so-called ‘gunboat diplomacy’ is an old one and is named after a so-called doctrine is named after U.S. President James Monroe. In fact, it would be plainer if we called the doctrine or policy by its ancient name: “Have muscle. Shall bully.” A couple of years ago, BBC’s Christopher Gunness interviewed the U.S. intellectual, Gore Vidal, a cousin to the then U.S. vice president Al Gore. At one point during the interview, Mr. Vidal quoted former U.S. president Richard Nixon, who, having had the insider’s experience after having been vice-president for eight years, had this amazing thing to say, and I paraphrase: The United States does not really need a president because it runs by itself. Mr. Vidal, then explained, that the U.S. president has chiefly a foreign policy role, where he has to safeguard U.S. national interest.

One can ask, which part of the U.S. economy has a major interest abroad? So that U.S. multinationals can operate in foreign countries, U.S. Government’s foreign policy must have pliant governments in those lands. This is usually achieved by diplomacy, and aid and advice of dubious value because it is based on the most superficial and cursory understanding of those lands, its people and their problems. But the aid money is “easy money” and it attracts and seduces the dominant elite in those countries to be amenable and agreeable and compliant.

When diplomacy and aid fail, then comes war. And months before it is actually executed, details are prepared as to who will benefit from them and how. For instance, after being World War II’s hero and serving the United States for eight years as president, Dwight Eisenhower, warned the people of his country against the threat to them from “The Military Industrial Complex” of their own country.

As someone who has first hand experience of all this, thanks to my decade-long stay in Los Angeles, after having completed and returned back to India my Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship for International Goodwill, I can vouch for this. The day the Soviet Union broke up, people working for defense contractors – they, not Hollywood, are the major employer in the State of California - were thrown out their jobs. But soon, there was Desert Storm and the rehiring began.

And about Desert Storm – George Bush senior, had advisors who helped him circumvent Congressional approval. I remember that period very well. At 9:30 that morning, on D-Day, he had gone on record saying there would be no attack on Iraq. But at approximately 6 pm, after a 4:30 meeting with Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of U.K., he had changed his mind and launched a 32-day long carpet-bombing campaign against Iraq.

The next day I called into a talk show and brought this up but was politely hushed up. From then on, whenever, my North American wife, who used to teach at the UCLA, and I had an argument that entailed calling each other names, we would say, “You are George Bush, You are George Bush.”

Part II

Friends, as my topic is International Understanding, I have to cut short my thoughts on the current crisis and share with you what I think the nature of Understanding is.

This part of my speech will force me to become somewhat theoretical and speculative and I hope you will bear with me. I beg for your sustained attention because I believe my comments and thoughts could be of assistance to you both in your fields of classification as well as your duties and functions as Rotarians of this premier Club in this region.

Given that over a millennia-spanning period, our species has consistently demonstrated that it will unerringly choose to be silly, stupid, selfish, dangerous, vindictive, arrogant, jealous - the list is as long as you wish to stretch it - one may ask why do we need to understand anything at all? The insects and animals - not to mention all that is inanimate - do very well in the surviving-&-thriving game without, apparently, understanding a thing. In fact a saint had gone so far as to say ‘happy and content are those who are not bothered by the conditions and problems of the world’.

During a previous visit to your Club, I had spoken of the stage-related origins of the word "understanding". Someone had to stand under the stage and hand up the props, such as a bouquet, to a Romeo who would use it then as a love-vehicle and give it to the actress playing Juliet.

The word originally meant, "to be supportive". That is not the same as “being wise and full of insights."

Understanding is a first but not the final step towards an accommodative, mutually beneficial sustainable co-existence. Without this goal at the end, an ocean full of understanding cannot, with any reliable degree of certainty, prevent aggression and attack, cruelty, violence, destruction and tragedy.

Resolving existing conflicts is laudable and that is what negotiators skilled in the use of facts and their effective communication try to do. But this heroic act is akin to performing a life-saving surgery on an old and malignant tumor that has brought the body to the verge of death. To this extent conflict-resolution is the next thankless step in the vocabulary of crisis management. Frequently, the high-pressured process of resolving conflicts, reasonable dialogue has to be set aside because there are deadlines to meet and innocent lives might be lost. Often negotiators have to go into what I call the deal-making mode.

Friends, it is obvious that understanding is multidimensional. From an individual wrestling with the essential nature of Being and Becoming, to a group that may be as small as a nuclear, or, even a single-parent family of two, or a tribe, a community, a village, a region, a nation, all the way up to the global level of international understanding, there are events and on-going processes that first need an understanding and then a comfortable accommodation. Beyond the international, we need understandings and accommodation with nature and our physical space - with those creatures, whether plant, insect or animal. And this needs to occur both at the local as well as global level. But as we explore outwards from this planet, there are understandings that challenge our notions of time and space, of the meaning of life and intelligence. Called by the National Geographic Society in 1976 to look at the future, the late R. Buckminster Fuller observed that after having traveled 39 times around the world and actually feeling it to be a tiny planet of a tiny star, he was convinced no one out there in the Universe was dying to know who would be the next president of the United States. We can also appreciate the fact that partial understandings in one domain affect the processes in the other. That, at every level, there has to be a good fit to build upon. In some respects the nature of understanding is like those in fractals. For instance, there is the oft-quoted Sanskrit aphorism, “Yathä-piñdé tathä-brahmäñdé”. One can looslely translate this to say, ‘as the point, so the Universe.’ Today, understanding is when you say, "I see!" or "I got it!" or even more colloquially "Bingo!" or, Jackpot!"

Clearly, this is more than being supportive. It means to be able to figure out something, to know its nuts and bolts, its P's and Q's. And It's time, therefore, we revert to the intent of the original Sanskrit word, "Antarsthäna". For what is really occurring when you understand something today is a mental process.

But how does the human - perhaps all mammalian - mind process information, most of which comes to it through the sense of sound?

Even the horizon, be it noted, is limited to line of sight vision. It is for this reason that our sound-sensory apparatus switches on during gestation, long before we are born to this earth.

One can say that our ears have a head start.

What exactly happens when we receive sounds from the outside? Brain scans now confirm that our visual cortex is stimulated and our minds use the sound to create an internal image of the event.

It is this image that predominates the one we receive from our eyes. We even say of a prejudiced person as one, whose vision is colored, thereby implying that the internal image he has, overpowers the evidence of his own physical eyes.

At this point, to limit my exposition, I shall revert to Sanskrit words, "Chitta" or the active part of the mind, "Chétanä" or the state of consciousness, and "Chitra" or an image, usually internally formed in the active part of our mind; for the one visible on the retina Sanskrit has the "Drishya".

I have a confirmation of sorts. Don't people who understand something say, "I see" without really meaning that they are sighted and not blind?

I am, therefore, suggesting to you something that may not have been submitted to anyone anywhere:

Understanding means creating accommodative images.

I use the word "accommodative" with reason. Quarrels occur when our images are not in agreement. We have the famous and well-known story of the six blind men who were using their sense of touch to figure out what an elephant was. And each had an image that did not agree with those of the others. Friends, I now have to use two phrases to explain my next point. We have this 'Image-based understanding" and we, the educated and the influenced, find we also try, unsuccessfully, to often substitute it with what I would call 'A word-based understanding'.

Here, when I say 'word-based', I mean those words that, for one reason or another - like the abuse, or overuse of available of visual technologies - do not create a "Chitra", or, a sharp internal image/vision.

Most words - especially long speeches are so boring, listeners fall asleep. Even India's Vice President recently found his foot had gone to sleep as he was reading out the Hindi text of the President's address to the Parliament! I hope Rotarians - and those who come to speak to them - are free from this affliction.

Opposed to a word-based understanding, I bring to you an example of an image-based understanding in the shape of a small visual - a chart - that I like to call "Humankind's Price of Fear" and what can be done if we reduced it just by 25%...." Each square on the chart represents one billion U.S. dollars. There are one thousand squares. That equals one trillion U.S. dollars that was the approximate sum total of the annual military budgets of all the countries on this world in 1993.

Super-imposed on these one thousand squares is a small area – approx 25% in size. This area is made up of thirteen approximate rectangles of varying sizes, each representing the amount of money and time to solve a problem that humankind faces. Once you see problems in this perspective you immediately understand that the money that the few billions of dollars that are being asked for are negligible in comparison to what we spend for our collective fear, which, paradoxically increases the more we spend in search of a security we have you to clearly define and understand. The text that came with this chart, not included in this presentation says, “If asked by a child, how would you explain our failure to act on this information?” Friends. I have to save the rest of theoretical part with this example and save it for another opportunity, another day.

Rotarians, when I was here more recently your able and dedicated President informed you about the Foundation’s new program of Scholarship for Conflict Resolution.

A couple or so years ago at the First Alumni Multi District Conference in India held in Goa, I was lucky to be selected as a panelist and I must gratefully add that your Club had contributed to defraying part of the expenses of that trip. At the Goa Conference I had suggested that Rotary set up RA-CAN, the Rotary Alumni Cyber-Ambassadors’ Network,” because, “For less than the price of a world-around airline ticket…a deserving past/potential alumnus can today transform into a Conflicts-Resolution-Supporting, life-time cyber-Ambassador. (Such) a Network can become the synergistic link between the Clubs and the anywhere-on-earth Community Programs of Health, Education, Hygiene, Nutrition, Sanitation, Conservation, Employment and Farming…”

I conclude by quoting to you lines from the excellent editorial in the February 20, Times of India, entitled “People Superpower”, which, in turns, quotes Patrick E. Tyler writing in the New York Times. Mr. Tyler has described the current Iraqi situation as a standoff between two Super Powers: the United States and world public opinion. The paper suggests Mr. Bush take a lesson from Mrs. Indirä Gändhi who imposed an Emergency on India in the name of National Interest. And the people here overwhelming voted her out at the first chance.

I am hopeful, International Understanding will somehow prevail. We, in India won’t have to face a price rise and a sluggish economy because of Oil prices and the misadventure in the Middle East will be prevented in the nick of the time.

Thank you.

Speech delivered by Vyôm Akhil, Guest Speaker, Rotary Club Sambalpur (Main), February 28, 2003

A Geodesic Mosque for the 20th Century

from inside outside magazing, oct/nov 1984, pp20--22, a description of a Mosque I built in the 1970's. - Vyom

When the 5,000 Muslims of Jittursuguds, a small town (pop. 50,000) on the Bombay-Calcutta mainline in Orissa's Sambalpur district, empowered their community's president for 1975-77 Sadr-e-Birideri Mohammed Zatur Haji Saheb Samad, to organise the rebuilding of their old mosque, no one had an inkling that Allah had settled for the latest in 20th century architecture. At the end of his term, as the Haji Saheti ceremoniously handed them the key to their new mosque, the Brethren found glass substituting for plaster, aluminum instead of brick and mortar and 'see-through' structural elements of steel frames in the place of rock and boulder, a feature which made them aptly rename the edifice as Masjid-e-Hadeed.

And to their unexpected delight, the Faithful also discovered that the mosque no longer 'belonged' only to those who came in to pray five times a day! Proud Jharsuguidians, most of them Hindus, never fail to show off Masjid-e-Hadeed to their out of town guests with proprietary elan. And the mosque marvelers return impressed.

Exulted Dilip Panda, Orissa PWD's new, silver haired, Canada trained, Chief Engineer, when he first saw it, 'I didn't realise you could do such things here. It's a show piece all right!" And, when she chanced upon it during a private visit to India in 1981, Ms. G. Kunze, a Vienna trained UN official, wowed, "First Konarsk! And now this--a mosque with a geodesic dome in the land of the Hindu Lord Kagarinam!) Buckminster Fuller's ideas do get around for sure."

Said Dr. V V Jayaraman, sober professor who has the civil engineering department of the University College of Engineering at Burla, "The mosque is on the annual alumni itinerary of study tours. We were most happy to have provided encouragement to the architect."

Thread-like struts and octet truss

To the uninitiated visitor, though, Masjid-e-Hadeed, with its 'woven' rather than 'hewn' look, is straight out of Ripley's Believe it Or Not. Three of its walls are transparent! The massive roof, with its aluminum dome, appears as if floating unsupported. From the outside, the slender struts of the octet truss--no thicker than a child's little finger--with which the entire rectilinear portion is made, bemuse the eye and one has to peer through the intricacies to peep inside. On the inside, with the thread-like struts in silhouette, the truss acquires the texture of gossamer and muslin to subdue the harsh daylight coming in through the transparent glazing in which the walls are encased. The honeycombed mirror ceiling and the dome's aluminum diffuse and distribute this subdued light to create a cool, clean, quiet, crepuscular suffusion within the praying sanctum. Stained glass, used on the seven sliding doors and on the northern and southern friezes, lends a pleasing, bewitching hue to the hush, its luminescent, multicoloured glow casting a miasmatic spell.

The octet truss of the west wall, on the outside, is covered with only 35 mm of cement mortar; and, on the inside, it is clad in beige "Cali-Clad' to lend the marble and gold Imam's mihrab a solemn sobriety. A decorative chandelier is suspended within the concavity of the dome and its inner rim has panels on which words from the Koran are inscribed. The flooring is of light green mosaic ties with traditional motifs.

Masjid-e-Hadeed's unusual azangah is atop a giant icosahedron with easy approach steps welded to its steel edges. A small geodesic canopy, filled with loudspeakers, shelters the muezzin whose call to prayer reaches the farthest corners of the town. The huge dome, surrounded by an angle iron service frame, is made from one-hundred, self-locking ridged aluminum diamond shapes. The dome is topped off by a dodecahedron which conceals a vent through which hot air can escape. The mosque has a single minar after the fashion of the holy mosque in Mecca. It rises up majestically in a crescent shape from the corbets of the octet parapet. One only wishes there was more space around the mosque so that the proportional harmony of all its parts could also be perceived by the visitor, as well as the devotee.

Even though Masjid-e-Hadeed was built very recently, it has already found a place in local legend and lore. Vyom Akhil, its architect, believes that the concepts and techniques used for its construction can have much wider applications in the design and building of the enclosures need in our country.

Architect's comments

Initially, a brick and lime mortar, flat roofed, 4x7 metre mosque of uncertain age was to be strengthened for a dome. When it was impossible to do so without access to the old foundations, the problem became less simple. The expertise--equal to building anew--and the inconvenience would have yielded no extra space for the growing population.

The restated problem required the maximising the praying space by building around the old mosque. But then, trench digging would have endangered the old mosque as well as the neighbouring houses. There was no adequate bedrock under the ground and the soil was known to have a tendency to swell up during the monsoon and contract in the summer.

The Sadr-e-Biradari showed exemplary boldness (and faith in the will of Allah) in accepting the octet truss as the structural solution to the problem. The strength, economy, speed and precision of the concept as it became evident during its execution further encouraged the community to accept an unconventional, yet highly functional decor. Even the dome, initially desired in reinforced concrete, could eventually be executed with a lighter material. Lastly, the satisfying success of the project helped forge durable human bonds amongst all concerned.

Client

The Muslim community of the township of Jharsuguda, District Sambalpur, Orissa. Sadr-e-Bradan, Haji Mohammed Zahar Samad.

Jagannath Odissi's land of dancing prayers

I drafted this as part of my feedback to the one-laptop-per-child OLPC team. I include it here, as first drafted, with pictures.

During a drought in Bihar state, a religious relief organization thought it'd go in and dig wells. It wanted the locals to discard their doles-dependency habit. It asked they do some token manual work at the well-sites. The locals said, "You've come to do good. Then do good. Don't tell us what we have to do."

There are many more examples but I shall pass them to tell you how I encountered and - countered - this mindset in a village. The villagers said, "Look the government has done nothing here in all these years." I said, "You're stupid if you're waiting for the government. You should consider yourselves lucky that you've been left alone, untouched by this corrupt and corrupting machenry that you call the government.

They - "How can we do anything. We don't know anything. We are ignorant. We have no learning."

I - "F**k the learning" (That's the translation of what went across not the exact words) "Let me look at your heads and behinds. I want to see your horns and tails."

They - "But we don't have horns and tails. We are not hoofed animals. We're human beings."

I - "That's it! Didn't you know that our religion says you belong to the one and only known "Doing Category"? All the other forms of life are in the "suffering catogries" (Karma Yoni - Bhog Yoni). So now, you start the doing and the learning will happen. I am simply here to jump-start you guys. I am not going to do any other thing here except drink lots of tea, talk and play with your children. Settled?"

They said, "If you say so.!"...

By the end of it all several months later, during which I visited them infrequently, what followed was nothing sort of a 'world-first' kind of miracle of precasting and assembly....

The villagers even borrowed a camera from the neighboring village to take pictures of what they were doing because I told them I wasn't there to take pictures. If they wanted to keep a record of what they were doing for posterity that was their funeral not mine ...

On assembly day, they wanted me to be there for them; said my presence would be a great help. I agreed with feigned reluctance and on the condition that I'll sit there with my back to their site, playing with their kids and drink. No one was to approach me to ask a question or seek help....

They asked me to 'break the cocount' (meaning I should propitiate the gods and things will go auspiciously). I said, if you guys want to listen to me, nix on my breaking the coconut. Let the guy who worked the hardest do it...

After it was all over, this is how they complimented me: "You're smart. You made us do everything. You know, had you been supervising, we'd've been tense and would've made a few more mistakes than we did. I said: No, no, I didn't make you do anything. You all did it on your own. Get this into your heads. All I did was drink tea and play with your kids.."

India rising against the prevailing dispensation

Masses, unite! To buy? To fight?

The Capitalist Myopia does not allow the 'westoxicateds' to see this huge mass of people - the Indian (and the Chinese) establishment and middle class - as anything more than a market - consumers for Obnoxica Inc. stretched up to and beyond the horizon.

Few remember that Napoleon as well as Gäñdhi transformed them into successful "fighting machines."

Greek Pres. Greets Indian Pres. in Sanskrit

April 27, 2007 10:23 IST: It was a pleasant surprise for President A P J Abdul Kalam when his Greek counterpart Karolos Papoulias greeted him in Sanskrit at the banquet ceremony hosted in honour of the visiting dignitary. Read more...
I think it's a Big Day for the world moving in the direction of what NASA found years and years ago, viz., that Sanskrit is the most appropriate language for global as well as cyber discourse.

Perhpas a Mark Shuttleworth or a Nicholas Negroponte will smell a purpose in this direction, or maybe, a Steve Jobs or even a Bill Gates will smell money in this.

Bringing Sanskrit to the children of the world as their main language after their native one is, in my opinion, the single notable service our generation can do for the future - aside, of course, putting the Humpty "climate" Dumpty on the wall. Maybe, there's link between the two that only I am accursed to see.

IMC - The Indian Middle Class

The European genesis and evolution of "Middle Class" is generally well understood. But the transfer, acceptance and currency of this nomenclature to the intellectual discourse in cultures peripherally affected by Europe’s industrial hysteria have created cognitive confusion. In China, an exception-instance, the phrase is discouraged. There, they speak of the "Middle Stratum". But like the water hyacinth, this semiotic import is ‘core-valued’ as a ‘given’ in most Indian societal analyses [ii].

As one, by comparison, fortuitously born and school-educated in an economically-advantaged environment, I have, to get my bearings here in India, had to do a fair bit of thinking on the IMC-phrase. Most of my real thinking has found expression in Hindi. It is not the size of a learned tome but a monograph. What follows is a best-effort English rendering of my thoughts.

I find that when applied to a group of people here in India, the IMC-phrase appears little more than a convenient, but inappropriate, cosmetic that attempts to make a very old exploitative situation appear politically correct and palatably contemporary.

Since it’s often used in India as a synonym for westernization/industrialization/modernization, an intellectually brilliant clarification that uses a more accurate phrase, 'the westoxicated', instead of ‘the IMC’, is noteworthy [iii]. Sadly, no remedies are therein speculated upon, or offered.

I see the IMC as both the problem and - under possible appropriate reorientation - an exemplary means to the solution. It is a problem because most of its social participation is phony and its 'productivity', not only a fake, but shamefully exploitative and immensely resource-draining.

A highlighting-digression on post-1947 Indian governance that enables IMC-members unprecedented security, near-absolute unaccountability and blatant dominance, regardless of the superficial democratic processes, will aid understand the two examples [iv] cited herewith. The present Indian constitution, for instance, can be characterized as entirely by, of, and for the IMC Bäbûcracy.

Before 1947 – when, on the sub-continent, there were 500+ kingdoms that had been brought under the British heel - the survive-&-thrive strategy of most IMC-networks was comparable to that of the outlaw power-structure that operated globally under different names [v]: (a) Disguise under convenient labels; and (b) Subvert the local power systems by all possible means. This ‘voluntary vassalage’ and compliant complicity in exploitation, enabled them to retain their hierarchical positions that had first been created by distorting and corrupting the caste-system [vi].

This remarkably-consistent-over-eons, chameleon-like felicity of the IMC to get in phase with the dominant elements in the social matrix has no parallel. Day before yesterday, IMC spoke Sanskrit; yesterday, to please its Mogul masters, it learnt Persian and Arabic. Until WW-II, it was the Queen’s English’s ‘received pronunciation’. Today, IMC call-center-jobbers train for the California accent.

A unique feature of this is that while, in comparison, the attempt to interpret Christianity to validate racism, slavery etc. finally lost much of its steam, in India Hinduism was most successfully and thoroughly corrupted to get religious sanction for behavior that is different only in name.

For example, socio-religious divisions based on work and position in life - and not birth - were made to take a U turn to make the reverse sanctified and acceptable.

Hindu thought anthropomorphizes everything into an organic whole system, be it the Universe, the solar system, the earth and its species of life, including human groups. The "head", "arms" “torso" and "feet" are called 'varña' - a Sanskrit word with nine other meanings and fifty-eight derivatives [vii]. Varñäshrama Dharma is a dynamically holistic Hindû way of social organization.

Few today know that the 'caste-system', or Jäti-prathä, originates in skills-grouping. Without contradiction, I have speculated that the birth-related 'Jä’ in 'Jäti' is a misheard-corruption of a similar sounding knowledge-related syllable, spelt variously as ‘jnä/gnä/gya/’ in the Roman script. In Gûjerät, for instance, people still ask for your ‘Gnäti’ [a collective noun for ‘Gnäta(s)’, meaning ‘(which) skills-community (do you belong to)?’ The answer can be ‘cobbler/goldsmith/carpenter etc).

While many, including Mahätmä Gändhi, tried to exorcise the aberrant, by-birth-determined caste-system from the collective Hindû mind, enduring, broad-based success still eludes. This pernicious anachronism is now rolling back under increased global connectivity. Perhaps, what is still missing is the theoretical knockout that I have alluded to in the previous paragraph. I am reconciled that the transformation is Kabuki and not cataclysmic.

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[ii] This is because Indian intellectuals, while they superficially but perpetually maintain a mutually-bickering mode, are more pliant, less discriminating, ingratiating even, to the external influence of received wisdom. In a perverted way, they are proud of being aliens to their own land and culture.

[iii] Extract from a January 2000 Times of India Edit Page Dipänkar Gûpta essay titled < 'Westoxication' Syndrome> in which he credits Iranian intellectual Jaläl-älé-Ahmed for coining and bringing this word into popular intellectual use. Mr. Gûpta says, and I Quote:
["Unlike westernization which implies the establishment of universalistic norms and the privileging of achievement over birth, westoxication is the superficial consumerist display of commodities and fads produced in the West.....Westoxicated people are not westernized in the true sense of the word at all. They use their privileges of birth, their superior access to wealth and power to flaunt their social distance from the rest. The places the Westoxicated inhabit and the lifestyles they exhibit are alien from what the majority are familiar with.....When people complain against westernization what they often fail to realize is that they are actually railing against westoxication….As the distinction between westoxication and westernization are not kept alive, the hearts of the liberals go out to the westoxicated whenever they are under attack. This only legitimizes on a larger scale the ideological pronouncements of fundamentalists and communalists. As a result the optical illusion that merges westoxication with westernization gets disseminated on an even wider-scale. This allows the westoxicated, too, to take refuge under the skein of secularism and modernization which only does true westernization more harm than good. Secularism appears as a shibboleth and a cover for the westoxicated. There is always the possibility that those against the westoxicated, need not always be communal or fundamentalist in their orientation. Yet the way….liberals line up behind the westoxicated tempts others to forsake the high ideological achievements of true modernization and westernization….India has been lucky because democracy has taken the edge off the mass anger that the westoxicaed usually succeed in generating (elsewhere).]

[iv] Per the Sept 24/04 Times of India item on p. 04 the Orissa government's PR department disburses Rs. 90,000,000/= as staff-salaries out of its total annual budgetary allocation of Rs. 110,000,000/=. Per an item in the Sept 29/04 The Hindu on p. 10, fourteen departments and 260 signatures are involved before flowers can be exported out of India.

[v] as ‘the East India Company’, the ‘British Empire’, ‘the United States of America’ and recently, under the leadership of George W, Bush, as ‘the Coalition of the Willing’.

[vi] This had become endemic at least 2000 + years ago. The most notable effort to remove these interpretative distortions was made by Krishna, who, today is deified more as an avatär than as an always-relevant preceptor. The followers of the Bûddha, who held sway over the subcontinent by their alliance with power - a condition similar to the alliance of the Church and the fiefdoms in Europe - threw the baby with the bathwater and, under the guise of nihilism, became so hedonistic and corrupt that it took an uprising to extirpate Buddhism out of India; but only after the best of its precepts were planted outside in Asia. This was quickly followed by the Moguls and British periods.
[vii] Thus in a human society, knowledge-workers(Brähmins), are identified as the 'head', security-personnel* (Kshatriya) are the 'arms', entrepreneurs(Vaishya) are the 'torso' while the utility-providers(Shûdra) are the 'feet'. Similarly, the various social positions in life were called 'äshrama'. Children and youth, busy with various explorations, are said to be in Brahmachayäshrama. The family-householders are in the Grihasthäshrama. When their children have grown and married to enter this äshrama in the joint family, their middle-aged parents are freed from their house-keeping responsibilities, to enter the Vanaprasthäshrama, where the activities’-focus of these 'elders' is the community and its relationships to other communities. Finally, those that can amongst the old (above 75), enter the Sanyäsäshrama, while the infirm and the sick are looked after within the joint family with ample help from the community. This self-disciplining, dynamic combination 'Varñäshrama' way of social life is one of the bedrocks of Hindû Dharma, which also has another name that would roughly translate as “The Eternal Code of Conduct”. It hardly needed any external 'governance' because it created self-regulating, lateral-vertical omni-syntegral connections in the social community whereby each person knew what his/her social role and obligations were.

A hybrid, community-inclusive, self-organizing format

Western India betters China. Under mäyee-bäp (patronizing, initiative-extinguishing, “we-know-better” attitude) visham-vikäs (developmental disparities), eastern India is sub-Sahäran.

My 3G (grassroots, global, godly) remedy: with non-interfering IDM-support, my NGO friends and I will, to a three-fifths-villages-fractal, aim to offer:

1. A hybrid, community-inclusive, self-organizing format I call the Sväsynt ⁵. Through it they can:

(a) Uproot the hopeless dependency infected into them, and

(b) Self-organize as initiative-taking, decision-skilled, and development-determining units that can order, receive and pay for improved infrastructure-needs/information-

services they may need from elsewhere.

2. With chosen vendors, Sväsynt rural communities will use the self-managed access of the vision-specified, BhaYûSh IT-System to offer markets for improved info-services relevant to their eco-agricultural, educo-health, produce-outlet and transportation needs that they will then self-fulfill.

We will demonstrate that ‘Digital Divide is a dumb phrase’, and that ‘Small is profitable’.

-- Submitted to the WB-IDM Innovation-Competition 2004 Improve Rural Services - Access and Quality. See also my Nişthä Vision Statement