And I’m back with a renewed mission. I’m living in exciting times. We have team Anna – sometimes right, sometimes not-so-right, but according to me – a well timed Kick-in-the-right-place. That Anna Hazare plays on a Gandhian hangover is debatable, but unarguably one sees the outcomes of the careful orchestration of the team behind him (See here). Unintended, intended, good, bad. Then we have the Aruna Roys and the Nikhil Deys, tinkering away behind the scenes at the cogs and wheels of our constitutional system, surfacing oh-so-delightfully-more-frequently these days to fix a lacuna and toil away again. We have the niche Samskrita Bharati Movement working at a revival of Sanskrit in India, quietly, sure-footedly (bad adverb! please excuse the midnight rant). We are living through a natural social experiment that is Aadhar. Will it succeed or will it fail? More importantly, in it’s failure, will there be a larger civil society victory and vice-versa?

“Yes, yes”, you may say. “What, then is your point?”.

Simply that, well it is so hard to keep track of all the wonderful thing that change makers in India are working towards. And while there are some wonderful websites like The Better India that are already doing such a wonderful job, I am going to do my little bit too. After all, we are a country of billion. And we’re an enterprising lot.

Special thanks to Mani, who provided food for thought and a gentle nudge to get blogging again.

Reminds me of the Ralegan Siddhi story where community action under Anna Hazare‘s guidance began with a watershed development programs, but cascaded into multiple economic activities that alleviated the village’s poverty.

Such controversial and adversarial comments are not the first of its kind. There’s been some vitriol raised against the Bhargava and Balakrishna reports, the implications of which affect the autonomy awarded to IIM faculty as well as the larger governance of these institutions.  I have not seen the reports, but here are a few links to critiques of them.  No clarity on why these committees were constituted and what triggered their constitution.

• Prof. Ganesh Prabhu and Prof. Amit Gupta’s take on the reports , published in the Economic and Political Weekly. Click here for the full report.
• N.V. Krishna and Vinod Vyasulu: First published at Nvk’s blog and later published in EPW. Click here

I’m curious as to why this is not getting sufficient coverage in the Newspapers. And back to Jairam Ramesh’s article. Partnering with Reliance Industries for an educational institution. Really?  That’s your solution to the country’s higher education challenges?

In addition to parallels between the Yoga Vasistha and Inception, the author goes on to compare key themes in the movie  with Salvador Dali and Escher’s philosophies. Particularly enjoyed the ease with which the author’s writing despite the technicality of the content – clearly illustrates comfort and familiarity with the subject.

I’m thrilled at having discovered an fabulous site to pore over for a while.

Keep reading! Have fun! Stay tuned!

Having said that, you can’t be certain you’ve recruited a weird person through an interview either. Freakonomics has a bleg out asking for views on how you would weed out the weirdos through an interview process. By weird, they mean: antisocial, incompetent, lazy, disinterested, dishonest, unprofessional, combative and disruptive. Click here to read the full post.
Some of the comments are interesting. One of them links up to Eric Schmidt’s explanation of how Google hires. Read on.

My interest in this: how do we stem cases of perverts on campus, sexual harassment at the work place?

Meanwhile, here’s some Scott Adams for you.

My current research site is community organizations in Kerala and one frame that resonates with the masses is the Human Rights frame (a frame is simply put the cognitive models with which you view the events around you and take action. Like a picture frame). My social movement heroes in Kerala have been working tirelessly for the Palliativ ecare to be recognized as a right – a right to live and die with dignity. Good news is the Kerala state government now recognizes this as a human right!

The context of Kerala presents a very interesting paradox for the study of rights. One hand,we have a very vibrant civil society – in a state of almost constant mobilization. One the other hand, it is also infamous for its hartals and strikes. Work hardly ever progresses there; it is difficult to find labor. No doubt, the high levels of literacy are one explanation. But I’ve come across numerous situations where labor exists, but is obnoxiously demanding. For instance, I’ve experienced first-hand as well as heard stories of the notorious headload workers unions, who neither work nor let others work in their territories and are quite a menace to the rest of the world. A case of rights without responsibilities?

Update: In case you’re wondering what rights you have? This site should give you an exhaustive list of Human Rights respected (or supposed to be respected) by member countries.

“I want to discuss here the crisis of global capitalism and the notion of distinct political responses to the crisis, with a focus on the far-right response and the danger of what I refer to as 21st century fascism, particularly in the United States.

Facing the crisis calls for an analysis of the capitalist system, which has undergone restructuring and transformation in recent decades. The current moment involves a qualitatively new transnational or global phase of world capitalism that can be traced back to the 1970s, and is characterised by the rise of truly transnational capital and a transnational capitalist class, or TCC. Transnational capital has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to accumulation beyond the previous epoch, and with it, to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour – and to undercut the strength of popular and working class movements around the world, in the wake of the global rebellions of the 1960s and the 1970s.

Emergent transnational capital underwent a major expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, involving hyper-accumulation through new technologies such as computers and informatics, through neo-liberal policies, and through new modalities of mobilising and exploiting the global labour force – including a massive new round of primitive accumulation, uprooting, and displacing hundreds of millions of people – especially in the third world countryside, who have become internal and transnational migrants.

We face a system that is now much more integrated, and dominant groups that have accumulated an extraordinary amount of transnational power and control over global resources and institutions.”

The above excerpt captures a lot of what has been happening in India over the last few decades. During the course of my field work in Kerala where I studied community-based efforts to provide palliative care to chronically ill people, I was acutely aware that the care problem was indeed accentuated by demographic changes such as migration of youth, fragmented families and a breakdown of the social fabric even in the rural areas. Kerala has seen mass migration to the Middle East during the 1970s and 1980′s post discovery of oil in the region. I saw the collective action of the people of Kerala as an effort to rebuild communities.

I particularly enjoyed the critical approach adopted by Professor Robinson in pointing out the hegemony by social groups as well as the notion of “passive revolution” where the oppressed are co-opted. While there is so much applause over the revolutions in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, it might be worthwhile to step back and think who wins the real victory. What about the Nandigram and Singur controversies? While power shifts from one dominated group to another, the destitution of the oppressed intensifies.

Although the critical perspective is well taken, I see human history as a perpetual struggle between the dominating and the oppressed (be it classes, castes, fascist groups). Therefore, I do not see the current structural changes as a “crisis of humanity”. Through my perhaps rose-tinted lenses, as long as there is free speech and enough Robinsons in the world, there will be dialogue that preempts situations where “our survival is at risk”.