From Elsewhere
On this page we will archive material from elsewhere that would be of interest and use to students in South Asia.
1. Vietnam Whistle-Blower Suffers for War on Graft: There is rapid economic growth in Vietnam but also a lot of corruption. Economic growth is not dependent on eliminating corruption first. Here is another story about corruption in China.
2. Student ties trump Indo-Pak tension: The experience of two Indian students in Lahore when Mumbai was struck. This is where our hope lies and this is what we have to build on. For our proposal, read the post Terrorism -4: Reaching Out.
3. Slokas after a noon Namaz: Muslim students study Sanskrit and Hindu ones read Quran in these UP madrassas. Some things have become impossible for us to believe now. You will have to register (for free) but this article will really make you re-think a lot of things.
4. Oneness-Family School: I am placing here the curriculum of a school in the US that has the motto Peace Begins with the Children. It would be a useful source of ideas for educators and for parents interested in promoting tolerance and mutual respect in society.
5. The cost of fearing strangers: Who should we fear more – the guy in the backyard or the stranger from across the fence?
6. Al-Beruni’s India: What it takes to make a scholar.
7. Marco Polo’s India: Interesting views of a famous tourist.
8. Time Perspective: Are you past, present or future oriented and why it makes a difference? A new and interesting view of human behavior.
9. Neighbors: If South Asians could understand the message in this excellent film, the Kashmir dispute would soon vanish! (Link thanks to Isa Daudpota).
10. Toba Tek Singh: One of the great short stories of all times. You can put all the scholarly analyses of the Partition on one side and Toba Tek Singh by Manto on the other – you will learn more from Manto. In Urdu, English and Devanagari on Fran Pritchett’s gift to South Asia.
11. Born Believers: How the Brain Creates God: On the origins of religious belief and a discussion on whether it is hard-wired.
12. Bill Moyers interviews Karen Armstrong: Hear/Read the leading scholar of religion say that compassion is far more important than belief. That it is the essence of religion. Also hear her talk about Islam, Pakistan, fundamentalism, the literal interpretation of religious texts, and evolution. Here is a shorter text about the charter of compassion and the Socratic method.
13. From mammals to humans: Susan Savage-Rambaugh on TED. Rethink how much of what a species can do is determined by biology and how much by cultural exposure. A lesson in evolution.
14. Innovations in Education: Sugata Mitra on TED. How children can teach themselves and illiteracy is not a barrier to learning.
15. The Evolution of Religions: Professor Jared Diamond talks about the four major functions of religions and how they have changed over history.
16. God Talk and God Talk, Part 2: Professor Stanley Fish explains why thinking about religion requires a certain intellectual sophistication. The debate is muddied by simplistic comparisons of science and religion or reason and faith.
17. Einstein and Faith: What Einstein thought about religion and God and how he got to thinking that way.
18. Lincoln’s Black History: Lincoln fought to end slavery but what were his own views on race? An article that South Asians should read and reflect upon.
19. Pakistan – The State of the Union Report: Selig Harrison’s 12 recommendations to help Pakistan survive (April 2009).
20. How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think? Professor Lera Broditsky describes the results of a study designed to answer this question.
21. Public Opinion on Kashmir: A 2008 poll conducted by the University of Maryland. The polling was limited to urban areas in India and Pakistan.
22. The Evolution of God: A review of the book by Robert Wright on the Bill Moyers Journal – video and transcript.
23. The Great Himalayan Watershed: Agrarian Crisis, Mega-Dams, and the Environment. A useful survey by Kenneth Pomeranz showing how South and East Asia are linked, why Tibet is important, what might be the binding constraint in the future, and why lack of cooperation might spell disaster.
24. Capital Gains: An essay on Delhi by Rana Dasgupta in Granta Summer 2009. A piece we can build a discussion around.
25. What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy: Historian Tony Judt in a remarkable video that presents a framework in which we need to address the issues of our time. A powerful combination of human intellect and human spirit.
26. Pakistan Picaresque: An essay by Samia Altaf in the Wilson Quarterly. Lucymem meets the Director of Nursing and a chat over tea at a government office in Islamabad reveals why billions in aid have done so little for Pakistan’s poor.
27. Beyond Progressive Religion: Ivan Petrella argues why it is necessary to move from being progressive believers to being progressive about belief.
28. Dehumanized: Mark Slouka makes a compelling case for the humanities. You can also listen to a conversation with the author about the article.
29. Developmentally Disabled: Ken Silverstein shows how foreign aid to Afghanistan stays in America. Ditto for Pakistan.
30. Is India a Flailing State? Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization: Lant Pritchett (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) on what ails India and how it compares with China.
31. India and Her Traditions: Professor SN Balagangadhara explains why the lingam is not just a penis.
32. On Music and Passion: Benjamin Zander on what we need to be and how to measure success.
33. E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and American Cultural History: An essay by John Raeburn that enriches the reading of the novel and also suggests how culture feeds into literature. A good insight into an important period in American history.
34. Rediscovering Central Asia: This valuable historical account by S. Frederick Starr fills a huge gap in our knowledge and confirms our belief that we should think in terms of regions, not countries or religions.
35. Entangled Giant: Gary Wills highlights some very serious problems in American democracy.
36. The Invention of Pakistan: How the British Raj Sundered: Karl E. Meyer provides a good account of the forces involved in the partition of the Indian subcontinent with new evidence on some contested issues like the Radcliffe line.
37. Barack Obama and the Fight for Public Education: William Ayers pens a stirring, inspiring essay that makes one believe one can change the world, that the struggle must go on. [Access is presently restricted unless you have institutional log-in privilege to the Harvard Education Review.]
38. Justice: What is the Right Thing to Do? Great news. Michael Sandel’s course, the most popular at Harvard University, is the first course made available by the university online free of charge. This is how we need to teach in South Asia.
39. The Human Experience: Inside the Humanities at Stanford University. What are the humanities and why they matter. Plus a lot of very useful material and ideas.
40. Catching the Wind in Rural Malawi: A very instructive story. What I took away was the critical and transformative role of the library. Our vision should be an Internet equipped center in every village. Read #14 to connect the possibilities.
41. The Importance of Basic Education: An address by Amartya Sen that discusses the consequences of the education gap and also highlights the implications of the content of education.
42. Achievetrons: Lewis Lapham explains how the best and the brightest can lead us to disaster.
43. Basti: Intizar Hussain is the foremost novelist and short strory writer in Urdu. His novel has been translated into English by Frances Pritchett with an introduction by MU Memon that is invaluable for all who are interested in South Asian culture.
44. All (Muslim) Politics is Local: How Context Shapes Islam in Power. Professor Charles Tripp argues why it is important to grasp that politics takes precedence over ideologies.
45. Want a Stronger Democracy? Invest in Education: Edward Glaeser argues that the causality runs from education to democracy. Do you agree with him? Does the kind of education matter? How does one account for the politics that determines the nature of education? Link this hypothesis to those presented by Mark Slouka (#28 on this page) and Lewis Lapham (#42 on this page). For the issue in South Asia, see Why is Pakistan Half Illiterate? How does one explain the Indian exception?
46. Professor Video: Visual, audio, and interactive media are transforming the college classroom. An update from Harvard Magazine.
February 1, 2009 at 3:44 am |
One can definately see the parallels between the situation in South Asia and “Neighbors”. I especially like the drawing and redrawing of boundries to favor each side and the irony of the ending.
August 28, 2009 at 3:42 am |
What a brilliant list. Many thanks for the alert. I am loving all the entries here. The UP madrassa is unbelievable. Cheers. RR
August 30, 2009 at 9:52 pm |
The essay by Rana Dasgupta in Granta about Delhi is excellent, although his hanging of the millstone around liberalization does not give enough the picture.
Among all the cities of modern India, Delhi (and to an extent Chandigarh) stands apart, because it is not part of a larger (rural and ethnically homogenous) state. All the other major cities, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore etc. are ruled by state governments.
One can now reflect on how this affects the politics and administration of these cities as compared to Delhi. Administratively, cities like Mumbai and Kolkata are very unimpressive, with slums occupying the centres of these cities. Delhi is quite different, its infrastructure is much better and to an observer, apart from the traffic Delhi will seem to be an ‘alright’ city. The slums have been ‘relocated’ further and further away from the fringes of the city.
Attempted relocations in Mumbai have been fiercely resisted, by both slum-dwellers and civil society. More importantly, gross mistreatment of migrants (correspondingly slum-dwellers) especially those from within the state, usually result in a heavy political penalty. Although I cant recall any instances of such mistreatment in Mumbai, one can look to the recent events in Nandigram in West Bengal (following which Mamata Banerjee’s party’s votes increased by 65 %) and Rajasthan (defeat of Vasundhara Raje), to see what I mean.
Mumbai and Bangalore are cities of the rich and famous, ruled mostly by peasants (see story), Delhi is ruled by the middle class and the rich. So not punishing a Sanjeev Nanda for running over migrant workers does not lead to lost elections, while not punishing Shiney Ahuja for raping his Maharashtrian maid will most definitely will. And these incidents of the cruelty of the rich are nothing compared to the wholesale destruction of neighbourhoods and livelihoods in the name of modernization, backed almost completely by the cruel rich and the Dasgupta’s ‘anglicized’ middle class.
August 30, 2009 at 11:21 pm |
Vikram: Do you have any thoughts on the role of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai? The equivalent in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, would be the MQM. Both use intimidation to enforce their will. What lies behind this kind of phenomenon? How and why did these forces arise? What are they trying to achieve? Why are they being allowed to flourish?
August 31, 2009 at 12:20 am |
There are many facets to the Shiv Sena’s rise. The key historical events would be the ones leading upto the States Reorganization Act, which are described in Guha’s book ‘India After Gandhi’. The reluctance of the Congress government in Delhi to give the go-ahead for Maharashtra and keep Mumbai part of the state, alienated much of the Marathi working class in the cities. The Shiv Sena under Bal Thackeray consolidated this alienation into a latent resentment of migrants from other parts of the country, along with the already existing resentment of the existing Gujarati and Parsi business elites in Mumbai.
Overtime an equally important (if not more) source of support became the rising number of rural migrants from Maharashtra who found themselves living in ‘illegal’ slums. The Shiv Sena played a key role in legalizing the slums and giving the dwellers control of the land, one of the main reasons why slums can be razed in Delhi but not in Mumbai. Many of the slum dwellers became corporators in the city government of Mumbai on Shiv Sena tickets.
So the Shiv Sena combined right wing Marathi and Hindu chauvinism with leftist slum politics.
I dont know what the Sena’s future is now. My guess is that after Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena will dissipate with a lot of its rural supporters moving to Raj Thackeray’s MNS. It is already losing ground in urban Maharashtra. So basically, we are back to square one.
September 8, 2009 at 1:07 am |
Vikram: This is an issue of great importance. When the second tier of government (State in India) is the most important, it has very negative implications for cities (even large ones) in those states because the rural vote dominates the urban vote and rural priorities are quite different from urban ones. I think this has been very intelligently handled in Vietnam where as soon as a city crosses a population threshold (used to be half a million) it is designated as a separate state. The remnant old state gets a new provincial capital. At present four cities have the status of states.
China also faced the problem of cities being stifled by provinces. This became acute after the country decided to make cities the engines of their new growth model. In China the problem was solved differently – the status of cities was raised above that of provinces and their administrative areas greatly expanded. For example, you can now enter a city jurisdiction and its downtown can be more than 100 kilometers away. Also, it is mayors of the major cities and not the governors of provinces who rise to top leadership positions.
So yes, the problem is a serious one but there are ways of resolving them.
September 1, 2009 at 7:49 am |
[...] the need to show the benighted heathens the true light. This is when the lingam became the penis as described by Professor [...]
Post reproduced without attribution – not a good practice.
October 6, 2009 at 8:14 am |
congratulations
October 26, 2009 at 1:08 am |
I skimmed the essay by Slouka and was disappointed: the author seems to have confused one distinction with another. The first distinction is between a math/science education and a humanities/arts education. The second distinction is between a more theoretically oriented education stressing foundations and principles and a more practically oriented education stressing applications and practice. Vocational education is an extreme form of the latter. It should be obvious that a balanced education should straddle all four parts of the cross-cutting distinctions: math/science and humanities/arts and theoretical and practical.
Slouka rants against math and science but is really against a more practically oriented education. Math and science if taught properly can be as character-forming as the arts and humanities and can teach one as much about life and the world as the latter. In my view, a deep gap even in the best liberal arts education offered today is precisely its lack of emphasis on math and science, which is precisely why the humanities today are in the mess they are in. Public intellectual life in the US could be much better than it is given its resources and I view this as resulting from the lack of clarity and reasoning skills that math and science teach – apart from their content.
Slouka complains about the lack of attention given to the arts and humanities by society. Yet, a cursory glance at the media reveals that it is writers, artists, and especially people in film and fashion who are glamorized so that young people find such pursuits sexy whereas most young people find math and science unattractive because they are more difficult and harder to understand. In India, people are crazy about Bollywood – actors are treated like gods. How many people know the winners of the Nobel prizes and how many people know the names of actors?
The problem of the right education is much more complex than Slouka has indicated or is even aware of because his frame of reference is the simplistic humanities vs. science distinction. I personally tend to view the world’s mathematicians and scientists as our greatest heroes as they are the ones generally doing the deepest work, they toil in relative obscurity, they earn relatively little, and are generally accorded little respect in society. Yet modern society and modern life would be impossible without their contributions, both theoretical and practical. Indeed, their influence on the arts and humanities has been enormous. I mention math and science in this light only to counter Slouka’s criticism.
I repeat that a balanced education is one which is well-rounded and one that allows human beings to develop their full potential.
October 26, 2009 at 3:33 pm |
Here is another philosopher’s take on the relationship between science and arts:
And science and art are not quite as far removed as the so-called “two cultures” often presume. We’re not plunging our fists straight into reality in pursuing the sciences, but rather modeling reality. This modeling is an imaginative work. I’ve always taken pleasure in Einstein’s remark that if he were exceptional in anything it was as a fabulist. As fabulists, both artists and scientists not only call on their imaginations but also rely on aesthetic criteria of beauty and elegance to guide them in their work.
Thanks to Isa Daudpota for the link.
October 30, 2009 at 1:16 am |
Bala: Your general point is well taken but I am puzzled about your example of people in film and fashion and their glamorization by others. Entertainment and sports have a huge following in almost every society but neither the celebrities not their admirers need have anything to do with the humanities. More often than not they are poorly educated, relatively speaking. Slouka’s point was that neglecting the teaching of the humanities or of treating the humanities as an addendum to business has negative consequences for society. I think that is a fair point. His attributing the cause to math and science was problematic as you have pointed out.
October 30, 2009 at 2:29 am |
I only skimmed Slouka without reading him carefully but I think his point was to contrast not just the humanities but also the *arts* (with math and science as seen through his eyes).
My reference to film and fashion was meant to include both high and low film (e.g. Ray as well as Bollywood or Bergman as well as Hollywood) and high and low fashion (Yves Saint Laurent as well as Hugo Boss).
At the high end of these practices, they are both treated as high art and, in that respect, as intellectual endeavors. These days, even the low end of these practices is treated with great intellectual respect – witness the number of courses in American universities offering “intellectual” readings of Bollywood cinema. The younger Bollywood insiders are much slicker and better educated even though they churn out vacuous cinema while at the same time appearing on panel discussions of their films. Or think of the fame of someone like Mira Nair (whom I consider a mediocre filmmaker – she charges $30K for a talk!) compared to the recent Nobel in chemistry: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan – who knew of him before his prize? It is not just poorly educated persons who indulge in the arts and “entertainment.”
Basically, there is hardly any media coverage of the sciences as compared with the arts. In my view, this is because the arts deal with the emotions more directly and are generally easier to understand. If society’s values were different, there would be a greater effort to make science more accessible. To be fair to science writers, there has been something of a revolution in popular science writing in the last three decades compared to what was available before that. But it still has a long way to go. I recently attended a lecture by Richard Dawkins and it was very gratifying to hear the audience cheer and whistle and treat him like a rock star. But it was a very select audience. This kind of thing never happens in the wider world.