Lands End

Quite often I along with my classmates used to track to this place during my school days in Nainital. The place was about six kilometers from my school. Tracking six kilometers on a hilly terrain was not that easy, but our then principal was a good sportsperson and in his leadership we used to track to this point called “Lands End”. I have heard that similar names are often given on other hill stations for the spots where you have a feel that there is a dead end to the road and what you can see further is just a railing, across which you can see a valley and other mountains around. During my childhood, I had a perception that ‘Lands End’ always means that it is end of the road. Today when I see the media reports in context of the land acquisition from farmers for development purposes, I do not why, but this word ‘Lands End’ is striking my mind creating a high entropy. 

Let me reduce my entropy by sharing some of my thoughts with my readers. With increasing urbanization and the evolving habit of convenience amongst a substantial section of society, Land is becoming a major cause of social conflicts. The capacity of Individuals to buy a physical piece of land by paying some ‘X’ amount made this natural resource, just like any other commodity. Quantification of rights on natural resources had given a lot of opportunity for economists to keep debating forever. In the name of development a person can be removed from a place where his generation lived since ages for a meager sum. He is also told that some unknown set of people will come, create palaces on his land and will give jobs to his children. He is further told, that look, the law has changed and since you voted us to create laws, you have no business to complain. The new law says that if anything is built on his land, even the consent will not be required. Dear Readers! Please do not think that I am losing any land, or being an activist following a particular thought stream. It is just that, as a writer, sometime I feel apt to share the thoughts crossing my mind with you. When I reach a ‘Lands End’ of thoughts, I try to get across the beautiful view of other mountains around. The moment you are reading this piece, I get connected to your thoughts also. Please give feedback on the Land acquisition issue in context of morality of the whole matter. 

Dr. Sunil Ji Garg 

Star Strikers

Munnar, in Idukki district of Kerala is a breathtakingly beautiful haven of peace and tranquility set at an altitude of approximately 6000 ft. It was the favored summer resort for the erstwhile British rulers in the colonial days. Unending expanse of tea plantations - pristine valleys and mountains- exotic species of flora and fauna in its wild sanctuaries and forests - aroma of spice scented cool air – all joined together makes Munnar an always inviting tourist destination. A friend of mine, a Company Secretary with MBA feathers on his cap, was sharing with us his experiences of a short visit there. We were over a cup of tea. Together with us was an industrialist, who generally was busy round the clock.  That Sunday evening seemed to me as if he is deliberately trying to relax. 

Any story on organic India is always a refreshing dose for me. Incidentally, the CS valla told us about a piece of bath soap which he bought from Munnar. He said that he was pulled in for a purchase mostly because of the box made of shredded bark of areca nut (supari) tree in which it was sealed. He told us that the aroma of that soap and the natural packing arrangement really attracted him and he suggested that if this is converted into a large scale business, it could fetch one a beautiful living. I understood that he was earnestly thinking of a planned production line and a wonderful market. Just then came into my mind the name of Sri Rohit Sharma, an Indian Youngster from Lucknow, who could build a million dollar business, ‘Simply Natural’, on supari leaves. I looked into the face of my industrialist friend, who I thought might help the CS man to invoke the risk passions in him. However, he looked at us with a helpless sharpness and told us that successful business is always exposure of hidden talents and continuation of long withheld aspirations within. He said that he doesn’t ever go after lucrative ideas unless it does fall within his interest/aptitude range.

All the day, I was on this Insight. I connected it with a recent article on Arvind Kejariwal the new AAP Chief Minister of Delhi. Kejariwal was not a professional politician. There were a lot of articles on him dissecting all possibilities which lead to his massive victory. One of the write ups said that there were and still there are identical people who also recite the same slogans every day. The article but continued saying that the factor which made Kejariwal different is that he did it a few more years longer. The writer, I remember, also said that it is how Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi became Gandhiji and Martin Luther King became King Martin Luther. 

India is full of vibrant entrepreneurs. A silent survey will show that the percentage of startups that fall shattered within two years is as big as 75%. The industrialist friend who sat with us was pointing to the big factor behind this. Look at the studies. An entrepreneur who identifies his interests and talents and hold on to that line with perfect consistency is the one destined to win. Most fortunate are the parents with children who have dared to choose a career for themselves. They have clearly spotted their interests and aptitudes and thus confirmed their position among the star strikers.

Joseph Mattappally

God As an Accountant

On August 15,1995, I was invited by Fort Williams’ Central School, Calcutta, as the Chief Guest. The invitation was extended by the Principal more as a personal equation than official. After the hoisting, I was asked to garland a picture of Sri Aurobindo. At that time I learnt that August 15th was his birthday. I did not know it earlier though I always had deep reverence for him. The Principal of the school was a devotee of Sri Aurobindo and, perhaps, that was the reason for such a ceremony.

Before this, I had tried to read one or two books of Sri Aurobindo but found them difficult to understand despite my interest in spiritual literature. This event, however, created in me a desire to know more about him. So soon after, I bought a biography of Sri Aurobindo and read it. Many aspects of his life influenced me deeply and I am going to share here one which affected me most. Sri Aurobindo was born on August 15,1872 at Calcutta. His father, Krishna Dhan Ghosh, was a completely anglicized person, as he had studied for an M.D. in England. He was posted as a civil surgeon with the British government. Sri Aurobindo grew up in an anglicised atmosphere at home. When he was five years old, he was sent, along with his two elder brothers, to the Loretto Convent School at Darjeeling, run by an Irish nun. There the three brothers had only European boys as friends and companions, for it was a school meant only for English children. 

Later, they were sent to England and thus Sri Aurobindo grew up in entire ignorance of India, her people, her religion and her culture. During the course of his stay in England, he mastered French and learnt enough of Italian and German. His father wanted him to join the ICS but destiny had something altogether different in store for him. In deference to his father’s wish, he passed the ICS examination with distinction but his heart was not in the service, which he had joined only to comply with his father’s wish. He neglected his lessons in riding and purposely failed so that he could escape from the bondage of the ICS. By this time he had started taking an interest in Indian politics and was looking for an opportunity to return to India. At this point of time he came in contact with the ruler of the state of Baroda, who appointed him in his service at a salary of Rs. 200 a month. He left England in January 1893 and joined the state service of Baroda. Sri Aurobindo was very simple in his mode of living. He did not care much for food or dress, because he never attached any importance to them. He never visited the market for his clothes. At home, he dressed in a plain white chaddar and dhoti, and outside invariably in white drill suits. He had no love of money. He used to get a Iumpsum of three month’s pay in a bag which he emptied in a tray lying on his table. He never bothered to keep money in a safe under lock and key. He did not keep an account of what he spent.

One day a close friend asked him why he was so careless about his money. He laughed and then replied, ‘Well, it is proof that we are living in the midst of honest and good people’. ‘But you never keep an account which may testify to the honesty of the people around you?’ the friend asked him. Then with a serene face Sri Aurobindo replied, ‘It is God who keeps account for me. He gives me as much as I want and keeps the rest to Himself. At any rate, He does not keep me in want, then why should I worry?’ This is what influenced me most. Most of us waste our life in keeping accounts. Sri Aurobindo had a great mission in life and, therefore, he considered this activity to be too trivial. He left it to God and was confident that He would keep the accounts in good shape and at the same time would not keep him in want. And it is true that money is never a problem for a truly selfless mission. For such a mission, money comes from unexpected sources. The same is true with a selfless life. God takes care of the needs of such a person and works as an accountant for him. The secret, however, is that He takes care of only the needs and not the greed.

Rakesh Mittal IAS

Humanization

There is a report today (February 19, 2015) of a judgment from the Supreme Court of India that acquitted a husband whose wife was driven to suicide after strained marital relationship on account of his ongoing illicit relationship with another woman. In effect the highest legal authority in the country seems to opine that the husband's behavior may be immoral and illegal, but it does not establish or tantamount to cruelty that should drive a wife to suicide. Living in a democracy, and as someone who practiced clinical psychology over thirty years, I respectfully disagree with the judgment as reported online in the Times of India. The judgment is reminiscent of the times when slavery was immoral but legal in the United States of America or caste discriminations were immoral but legal in India. It may be interesting to note that various forms of legal slavery were in India and in the USA in most of the 20th century in the guise of casteism and racism. Practical enslavement is widely prevalent under dictatorships, monarchies, theocracies, or autocracies in large areas of the world. I grant that it is difficult to establish the kind of cruelty that should lead one to suicide. In fact as a psychologist I may argue it is not cruelty but poor self-esteem that leads one to suicide. Certainly I do not want to get into deep waters. The simple reality is that the husband broke the marriage vows that he made to his wife. The woman may not have married him if he had the intention to have an illicit relationship with another woman. It is not uncommon for a married woman having an illicit relationship with another man to be murdered.

Moral, civil or criminal law comes in the context of human relations or transactions in established societies. The process of humanization in established societies fine tunes human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 as a global expression of human rights to which every human being in the world is entitled. In 1976 the Bill of International Human Rights was declared International Law whereby human beings all over the world can be indicted for their criminal activities against humanity. Human beings created in the image and likeness of God took so long to establish basic human rights that spell out ingredients necessary for humanization.

As a person who spent most of his life in institutionalized or non-institutionalized religious settings, I began to seriously wonder what established religions did to further human rights and humanization. Clinging on to authoritarian and autocratic power structures in the name of God, the representatives of these religions only slowed down or interfered with human rights.  They do not have the vision or the insight to see that grace is built on nature, and that the more human and humane one is the more divine one can be.  As more and more people are tuning off or turning away from established religions and their irrelevant and superstitious rituals and practices, I have been working on a viable spirituality beyond religions in the context of the unity of humanity. We are all God's children; we are all one in the Great One (God). We all have one God however we conceive and name that Power or Entity. Religions seriously need to take the task of humanization as true humanization in the context of one's faith is nothing else but divinization. Only humanization can prepare one for a true union with divinity for which all humanity relentlessly yearns.

Swami Snehananda Jyoti  

Landslide Victory

GZ 71 180215 Landslide Victory 

Recently we have seen an extra-ordinary mandate for a particular party in New Delhi assembly elections. This was immediately categorized as one of the historical landslide victories on the Wikipedia page with the name “Landslide Victory”. Not many are there. Why the mandate given by the real people always surprise the so called great psephologist has always been a mystery. Every process of elections has many lessons to learn, both for the political parties and for the people at large. This time when a seasoned administrator with a long experience was positioned against a labeled anarchist, most people thought that inclination of the masses will be shifted towards experience. For a moment I also thought so. Then comes a report that the same experienced administrator was asking party workers to go out of the room if they don’t listen, or don’t reach for campaign on exact time. I could immediately understand the negative under current. On the other hand there was some kind of under current in a positive direction in favour of the other contestant when I heard the views of the youth on various social forums. The message for all of us was loud and clear that the leaders need to be like their followers and not the ones of exceptional extra-ordinary qualities that the followers will never be able to assimilate in themselves. 

I checked back many books on the subject of leadership. Most will recommend a person to develop such kind of personality traits which are quite bookish in nature. A practical and real life leader can rarely match these books. I tried to match these qualities with undisputed historical leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. What I necessarily find was that even the key qualities like great communication skills and great decision skills were questioned by their contemporaries. Today also the challenge of leadership is the real people and real world. The only pattern that I could observe was that all leaders were little more persistent for the cause they picked up. This property is found even in the negative leaders like Osama and Baghdadi. Here I would like to the quote the great leader from the field of science, Albert Einstein expressing about himself as, “It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems a little longer”. 

Dr. Sunil Ji Garg 

Coming Soon, ‘The Cool Boys’

I always love the tribulations of my home village than the boons in any city in the world. But my personal experience is that it is not our surface plans but the sponsoring intentions within that always work. Now it seems that I’m destined to continue in the concrete forest of Ahmedabad. Each day, like anywhere else, sets with at least a couple experiences worth sharing. The apartment I live with my son and family belongs to a big complex with around 400 apartments in it. From morning to evening, children are seen playing in the garden, walkways and parking lots. The most common complaints on children that parents generally share are about their academic performances. Even though almost all parents throw many thousands on tuitions each month, they are not happy. They won’t be, until their children become best in their respective classes. They are worried; worried over the bad luck their successors are supposed to shoulder. 

A few weeks back I noticed my grandson, hardly ten, returning too late after his play time. When questioned, he said that they had ‘shooting’ that day. I gently explored into the details. He told me that they are shooting a film ‘The Cool Boys’ and they could complete only hardly five scenes that day. I understood that the gang had scripted a beautiful story, fixed the characters, agreed upon the dialogues and had even marked the shooting spots and arranged the costumes. All they had for shooting was an ipad. I could not believe that it is a group of children, all between seven and eleven, that is behind this much planned project. Still, it did not surprise me at all, because I always believes that each and every one born to this earth has enough talents and aptitudes hid in their individuality. Does our system of education bring them out and foster them accordingly? Never! We have a culture in which a child hurries to the public school at 3 and retires as a man or woman on a day in which all his/her experiences blossom fully. Why not we let children play at least until five? There are a few countries in the West which follows this precept. But countries like India still believe that learning at 3 is advancement. 

We have done many studies in this regard at various levels and have found that we have better smart entrepreneurs and bright intellectuals in India than in the West. How many of you have noticed that our early entrepreneurs retire early, fully oozed off all their energy? The damage done by a lost childhood spoils their future ‘hoods’. Grooming is an art; it is building an emotional connection with anybody to gain their trust for the purpose. Knowingly or unknowingly grooming is happening every moment, though people don't understand that they have been groomed. Who will tell our groomers that advancement is exposure of individual talents and not degrees in caskets? 

Joseph Mattappally

The Divine Court

There are three main pillars of democracy, namely, the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. As the press also plays an important role in democracy, it may be called the fourth pillar. If all the four pillars are strong and play their role properly, we can create an ideal society to live in. They also keep a check on each other, and this is a very important aspect of our Constitution which has, by and large, worked well.

This check and balance system is very obviously reflected in recent times when the courts have exercised their powers in the larger interest of the society. People in general have welcomed this development because they feel that the other three pillars of the democracy have not played their roles properly. From this point of view, the judiciary has done a great service to the system. However, the real solution lies in each organ playing its role properly and we hope that they will. In the judicial system, there is a hierarchy starting from the lowest court to the Supreme Court. Of course, the judicial process in general is so slow that justice is often delayed. In many cases it amounts to justice denied. Even if it is not denied, we cannot say for sure that justice is always done by the courts. After all, there is a process of law which is full of lacunas and chances of committing errors are quite high, despite all the good intentions and best efforts on the part of those who are involved in the dispensation of justice. Such errors may be committed at the level of the apex court also but there is no forum to approach thereafter, as far as the mundane world is concerned. 

Is this really so ? I had a chance to contemplate over this subject many years back when I was posted as a District Magistrate. One day, a smart young boy came to see me in my office. He was an officer of the Indian Forest Service and came to me in connection with the parole of his father who was in jail, undergoing a life sentence. I had rejected the case on the previous day only in a routine manner because it was not recommended by the relevant officers. The young boy told me that he was going to be married soon and the parole of his father was required for that purpose. He had brought an invitation card of the marriage for my perusal. He also told me that his father was a school teacher and had been implicated falsely in a murder case. They had fought the case up to the High Court but beyond that they could not afford more litigation. I felt sympathetic towards the boy on account of his manners and the purpose for which the parole was sought. Though the case had been rejected, I recalled the file and recorded the new facts brought to my notice. I made a recommendation for release, overruling my previous recommendation and eventually the parole was granted.

Perhaps, the boy and his father felt personally grateful to me. After the marriage was over and the time for going back to jail had come, both of them came to see me to express their gratitude. The father had also brought two books written by him. I do not remember their exact subject but they were a reflection of his inner growth. All this touched me greatly and I felt like hearing the story behind his conviction, which he narrated briefly. On hearing this story, my inner conscience felt that he was really innocent. So I asked him a very personal question, notwithstanding my official position. The question was how he felt about his conviction for life without being guilty, if he was innocent. He gave a very enriching reply which I am sharing here. He said that in the beginning, he had felt very anguished and had questioned the validity of not only the man-made laws but also the divine laws. However, by the grace of God, he soon became contemplative and started accepting reality. Gradually the acceptance turned into faith. He then felt that all events in life happen under cause and effect laws, which can be called divine laws, and man-made laws were just part of them. While there may be errors in the dispensation of justice through the manmade system, there is no chance of such an error in the dispensation of divine justice. In his case, perhaps, the same thing had happened and his conviction must have been the result of divine justice. Once viewed that way, he was trying to make the best use of the situation for his inner growth.

Very few of us can accept the harsh realities of life so gracefully. However, once the fundamentals of divine laws are understood, the acceptance becomes natural. Then one starts seeing the grace of God even in the seemingly bad events of life. Perhaps, the errors committed by mundane courts is one way of dispensing justice by the Divine court.

Rakesh Mittal IAS