Ramana's Musings

My friend K came today on his monthly visit. The topic of discussion today was on parenting.

K’s last born, now eighteen lives with him. K as my readers may recollect is a divorced single parent. K’s two elder children are daughters and now married and settled down to domestic and career bliss in India and the USA. K did not need to consult me on parenting for them, but now finds it necessary at least to discuss the matter to see if he is doing the right things with a growing young man who lives at home.

I started off by telling K that I know of no father who has been totally successful in providing the right kind of parenting and that it has been my observation that almost all, bungle their way around this and eventually come out smelling like roses. I also suggested that things will be alright and there is no need to worry unduly about this matter.

Interestingly, the topic then changed to some other matters that have been worrying K and on top of the agenda was the problem of an alcoholic in the family. That discussion took off in a direction that neither of us had anticipated. I had just been south to tackle the same problem for another friend’s family and I shared my experience of that visit and the course of action that we followed there. K is likely to get another meeting organised for me with the people concerned in his family soon and perhaps something will come out of it.

That discussion took us into another matter. K wanted to know why I don’t drink or eat non vegetarian food any more and whether I will start to do both ever again . This has been a topic that I have not discussed with many people, and certainly not with K. K knew that I was quite a bon vivant some years ago and wished to understand what brought about the change and whether the path that I chose is something that I enjoy being on or whether it is a distasteful experience that I am undergoing with some other self imposed compulsions.

That broke some dam inside me. I simply cannot figure out why it happened, but all the whymeitis that has been kept bottled up inside me for years, came out in a torrent, much to the surprise and eventual delight of K. At the end of it all he said, and I quote him verbatim, ” you are now ready for Sanyas.” Some friend!

I now have an idea for a post on whether I am ready for sanyas or not. In the meanwhile, some of my readers who have been following my rants here may have their opinions on the matter. I would be interested in reading their comments.

Tags: Alcoholism, Bon vivant, Parenting, Sanyas

I draw the attention of my readers to my earlier post on Lies and from there to the two links given to Nick’s blog on the same subject.

Now, I draw the attention of my readers to this article in the New York Times – “Lying children will grow up to be successful citizens.”

I am glad that I do not have grand children. How about the others with children and grand children? Does this make sense?

Tags: Children, Lies

“Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.” -Oscar Wilde

I am a secular Indian. I pay my taxes without complaint. I am a law abiding citizen and am considered to be a pillar of the local community.

Some of the following passages are from Wikipedia which I have accessed to convey the contents of this post in an unbiased manner.

The Preamble to the Constitution of India declares that India is a secular state.[1] The term secularism in politics refers to the governmental practice of indifference towards religion. Though such bifurcation is not totally possible, still, secular politics attempt to prevent religious philosophies or bodies from influencing governmental policies. The philosophy that the Indian constitution upholds is a kind of secular humanism made relevant through a historical development of the ideology within the context of religious pluralism in India.

The Hindi word that is commonly used for “secularism” in India is dharmanirapekshata (धर्मनिरपेक्षता) and which means “indifference towards religion” The usage itself denotes the understanding of secularism as more a policy of political practice than a philosophy in itself.

Here is a story about a modern Indian woman teacher from a modern Indian family and background who is facing secularism at its best, as practiced in India.

As I write this, no protests by any secular Indian has been raised and the University officials have not taken on the students’ union, because it is all about vote bank politics. Now, vote bank politics must not be a familiar term, to some of my readers as, it is perhaps not used to describe a phenomenon that is seen, but not described as such, in the countries from which my non Indian readers come. So, here is some more information about it from the Wikipedia.

I love India.

Tags: Burqa, Constitution of India, India, Secularism, Vote Bank Poliics

This article in the Guardian, is a balanced as well as nuanced one, and for me the key paragraphs in it are these two, almost at the bottom.

“However, beyond the Bangalore IT hubs, the manicured lawns of the ministerial bungalows in South Delhi and the Mumbai stock exchange is another India, featuring neither in the ministers’ breathless itinerary nor in their equally breathless praise for India’s accomplishments. A new UN poverty index shows there are more poor people in eight states of India than in the 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Child mortality rates remain among the highest in the world and two-thirds of the country do not have access to a toilet. In many places, there is simply no rule of law.

“There is a lot to counter the gung-ho optimism,” said Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, senior deputy editor of the Hindu newspaper. “The institutions of the state increasingly serve the very powerful and wealthy. In many states it is getting worse and that is frightening.”

Strangely enough, last week, I have been having an email debate on what needs to be done, arising out of a book that I had just finished reading, a review of which can be had here.

The key paragraph in that review which is the core around which our debate was built is this one:

“Easterly, therefore, argues that good institutions are the basis for economic growth by creating the right market-based and market-guided incentives. And these institutions are: rule of law, competitive markets, low taxation, noninflationary monetary policies, and free trade. These institutions then foster other cultural patterns of conduct, hard work, savings and industriousness, honesty and trustworthiness, creativity, and self-responsibility. These are the bases of the wealth of nations.”

My friend (MF) asked this pertinent question – “Could you clarify what’s referred to by the term ‘wealth’ used below? If it means material affluence, then I have considerable reservations. I’ll need time to articulate these.”

My response was – “I would include ‘human’ to ‘material’ in the term wealth.”

MF responded with – ” Human material wealth meaning HR resources for corporate consumption? Or character, wit, and stuff like that which thrives best outside organisations?”

My reply which will continue to generate more thoughts is as follows:

“Expand the horizon. Go macro and with Indian Human Resources treated as such, rather than as liabilities, healthy and wealthy, can take on the world Karl. To do that, we need to enable them. The brief paragraph gives a route map to achieve that.

Just use your imagination. Supposing all Indian farmers, irrespective of how big their land owning is, are allowed proper records of their titles, are free to use that assets as they see fit, including easy access to mortgage for working capital, or to expand, within an environment that offers them legal protection, the might of the law, with easy access to markets to source their inputs and to market their output, with labour available in plenty to hire and fire, what Indian agriculture/rural sector can achieve.

Similarly, the millions of Indian small businessmen, the road side vendors, the small tea shops, bicycle/motorcycle/other automobile repair shops, the retailers, the push cart vendors and so on, can achieve if they are provided with the same.

I can go on and on.

Indian entrepreneurship is what has been keeping us afloat. Not some great governmental interventions. The last has happened only in the last twenty years, prior to that the ordinary Indian is the guy kept us from becoming another Mayanmar. If that Indian can be given the benefit of all that the paragraph suggests, we can be world beaters. We have done that despite the claustrophobic atmosphere of the politico/bureaucratic set up.

All that is lacking is political will, added to the apathy of the Indian middle class which is busy feathering its own nest. If this class decides en bloc to bring about change in the body politic and the bureaucratic environment, it can. I wonder if it will.

There has been much coverage in the local and British newspapers about students being punished in schools and being harmed or being driven to suicide. This article in the Telegraph will give you an idea of the situation.

Just the other day, I read another news item about our Central Minister waxing eloquent on Indian education. What he said is unimportant, but the occasion drew my attention. It was a Kuruvilla Jacob Memorial Lecture. My antenna went up as Mr. Kuruvilla Jacob was the Prinicipal of a school where I studied for four years before getting my School Leaving Certificate. The Madras Christian College School. The link gives you a broad idea about the man and the esteem he is held in by his students.

Mr. Jacob will be remembered by thousands of students from the three schools where he left his imprint. I have nothing but great respect for him and the way he punished some of us, including me. I had met him on a number of occasions after leaving school at Chennai, Hyederabad and Bombay and he always remembered me straight off and would graciously congratulate me on my, then small, achievements.

The other teachers in the school did punish their students, usually by asking them to stand up on the bench for the duration of the class or by sending them out of the class. Both punishments invited trouble depending on whether Mr Jacob took his rounds during the time that the punishment took place. If it did, the student was called to his room where a cane was kept and depending on the seriousness of the occasion, the number of canings was decided by him. One stretched out one’s non writing palm and the cane swished down leaving a welt.

For many of us, getting caned by Mr. Jacob was equivalent to getting a badge of honour. I got many I can assure you. I doubt that any old student of Mr. Jacob can be found who will say that he was unjustly punished or was driven to suicidal tendencies by the punishment meted out by the teachers and/or the Principal of their highly regarded school. I doubt also that you will find any person of my generation or perhaps even a couple of younger generations complaining about the punishments that they received in their school.

I personally believe that excess parenting and molly coddling of children are making them into what Bikehikebabe so effectively calls namby pambies. Are we producing wimps? Or have we already produced wimps who in turn are producing wimps?

Tags: Caning, Madras Chrisitian College School, Principal

This is an article in The Independent, under “Green Living”, that needs to be read by all my regular readers. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I did.

Curry and spices are eaten by the entire South Asian sub continent. That is nearly a billion and a half people! I think that these scientists must come and satisfy themselves that these people do not leave any flatulent impact in the atmosphere before they proceed any further with their studies. I guarantee that if they do, they will change their views.

In fact, they may not need to. I am told that curry and spices have been hijacked by the British as their own national food. They even have a National curry week! The regular British curry consumers need to be studied. Don’t they need to be “burped”? That is all.

A few years ago, all of us came to know of the “Mad Cow Disease.” How do cattle develop BSE, which is the element in cattle meat, that caused the disease? Feed is the major route for transmission among cattle, according to veterinary medicine experts at Iowa State University. When ranchers and farmers feed cattle with products made from other cattle or sheep, such as ruminant feed, they are recycling diseased animal protein in feed containing meat and bone meal, thus causing the disease in cattle. Please see here.

When you feed cattle and sheep what nature did not intend them to eat, so that you can develop better meat for sale, you will have unintended consequences. I am sure that if you feed cattle curry and spice, we will have further unintended consequences. Don’t these scientists read books like ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ and ‘In Defense Of Food’ by Michael Pollan?

God help the cattle and sheep.

Tags: Cattle and sheep, Curry and Spices, Flatulence, Polluting the air, South Asia

I prefer not to write on Friday mornings as I have to post the LBC post in the evening anyway. Today is however an exception, as the topic that I want to write about just demands to be let out of my system.

I met a neighbour and friend yesterday after a long time. He has been busy the last couple of years helping his wife battle cancer, and though we have been seeing each other and would wave to each other, we had not found the time to have a quiet chat till yesterday, when both of us met while walking.

He is a completely transformed person. The confident, joyful and joking person has morphed into a morbid, shaky and unsure person. The doctors have given up hope and have stopped all treatment for his wife. It took them two years of all kinds of test, treatments, re-tests, hospitalization, relapses, treatments again and so on and so forth. He is so confused about the present, leave alone the future, that I had no words to comfort him. When I asked him how best I can be of help in his present condition, he simply said, pray for his wife and him.

On my return home, quite shaken by that meeting, I received a phone call from another friend to inform me that his wife passed away the day before. She too died of cancer, but did not suffer for as long or in the way my neighbour’s wife has suffered.

The difference between the two cases, is that in the latter, the doctors told both of them clearly in the beginning that the case was hopeless and at best another few months of living could be assured, but in great discomfort for the patient and the family. The wife, the brave lady and her husband, much against the wishes of other so called well wishers, decided to go the route of controlling the pain with drugs and face the end together. From the time of the first diagnosis and the passing away, it took just over six months. During that period, she was pain free but totally bedridden and my friend patiently looked after her like he would a baby.

Yesterday in the evening, I was talking about these two cases with another friend who sent me a link to an article in the New York Times, which I seem to have missed reading. It makes for poignant reading and I wish to share that story with my readers. Unusually, I had a restless night thinking about how medicine seems to be doing many wrong things and playing havoc with patients and their care givers.

I am still in a disturbed frame of mind, as sooner or later, I may well have to face similar situations either as a patient or a care giver, and despite telling myself that I should take things as they come, one day at a time and all the other formulae, morbid thoughts have been haunting me, and I hope to use this writing exercise to provide me with some catharsis.

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• Marriage, Divorce And Just Being Single.
• Flipkart And My Adventure With Them.
• Retirement – Fantasy And Reality II.

Tags: Cancer, Caregiving, Medicine, Pacemakers

“”It is not that the honest pursuit of one’s selfish interests cannot be a social good. It is that if one is selfish, why would one be honest?” – Robert Brault.

When I read this story in the New York Times regarding Shoplifters, I could not believe my eyes.

I am fully on the side of the shop owners, who need to do whatever needs to be done to protect themselves. If the solution is to hand over these shoplifters to the police every time one is caught, the shop keeper will simply be spending avoidable time and expense attending court cases.

I believe that this is sensationalism by the press. The next thing we will have is ambulance chaser type of lawyers filing class action suits and civil rights do gooders raising a lot of noise too. The starting point of shoplifters stealing will get buried deep down.

Rights? What rights? To steal? I think that it is ridiculous to talk about rights of the shoplifters in this situation. What do you think?

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• Kick The Bums Out.
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Tags: Rights and duties, Shoplifting

As my readers know, I am totally against any kind of talks with the Pakistani establishment. That it speaks with a forked tongue is known to just about every Indian, bar a minuscule minority who wish to establish direct contacts with it to try and bring about peace in the subcontinent.

I do not understand how the West can commit such a Himalayan blunder by arming Pakistan which supplies the same arms to the forces that are fighting the US, British and Nato forces in Afghanistan.

Don’t read me. Read independent news from tsources. Take the one from the BBC on Pakistan’s double dealing and the one from the Guardian on an interview with an insurgent commander from Afghanistan.

Throughout its existence, Pakistan has been doing this. Quite when the West will realize that they are backing the wrong horse, is the mystery that no Indian is able to solve.

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• The Lost Mobile Phone.
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Tags: Forked Tongue, London School of Economics, Pakistan, Taliban

That friends, is the current story of my life. This post has been in the making for quite some time and when this cartoon appeared the bulb went on about the timing.

Bar a few times, I have lived away from my father for more than half a century. What I knew of him from before that, and what I have seen of him on and off since then, did not prepare me for the situation that I am now in.

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.”
- John Bright

That about sums up my father’s personality. In retrospect, I should have anticipated his behaviour pattern, with all the theoretical knowledge that I have picked up in my career as a Manager. I still do not know what prompted me to invite him to come and stay with us, though to a large extent it was Urmeela’s idea that we do. I have been used to being appreciated for whatever I did for her throughout our married life and Ranjan does the same for whatever I do for him.

In my father’s case, it is just out of the question. It is his right to get service from me. He is just not conditioned to appreciate or thank his children or his late spouses for anything done for him. The blue blooded old fashioned patriarch. But let some thing that does not please him happen, then it is his right to criticize and sulk.

It is something that I can handle by and large and I am quite unaffected by his behaviour, but there is an added problem. He is hard of hearing and will not wear his hearing aid. I have to shout to get him to understand what I say. I suppose that this distorts my body language or whatever, and he goes off into orbit when that happens. Now, this is something that I am unable to handle. I have simply stopped communicating with him unless he wishes to talk about something and I refuse to shout and he is forced to lip read or wear his hearing aid.

I suspect that Salam is clairvoyant. He has given me another cartoon to suggest a possible frame of mind for my father.

I am sure that this post must ring a lot of bells with readers with similar people in their lives. It would be interesting to share some thoughts on how they handle the situation. I welcome comments and advise.

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• Revival Of The Whine Bar?
• The Lost Mobile Phone.
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Tags: Care-giving, Difficult elders, expectations, Rights and duties, Service