C+ive: Vision Statement

Enabling communities through partnerships, leveraging resources, positively impacting life, realising holistic and sustainable development for the greater good of all.


Enabling. . .

It’s a word we have used often at C+ve. It was picked over ‘facilitate’. It reflects ‘facilitating’ rather than imposition of ideas, action plans. It implies supporting as much is needed, rather than pushing support down someone’s throat. Implies supporting to improve capabilities……… to sell/ market / utilise/ consume products/ existing technologies. That there is something humble about being an enabler and not an enforcer.

Communities. . .

Its not an individual, but groups of people; it could be rural, urban, students, poor, farmers, any group.

There was a debate about doing more for rural specifically, but that was vetoed on the basis of being restrictive and if in the future one wanted to engage with students or hawkers from the urban area, one would technically violate one’s own vision!

Partnerships . . .

Reflects complete two-way give and take in the relationship, where C+ve understands that it would not have an identity if communities weren’t open to receive C+ve ideas, initiatives. That C+ve exists and has an identity because there are takers for its ideas. That C+ve can learn continuously from communities to improve delivery models.

Leveraging. . .
Leveraging as in utilising specific uses to the advantage of all partners.

Resources. . .

Initially, the words written here were ‘technology’ and ‘knowledge base’ to include traditional knowledge systems/ knowhow. But, it was felt that resources reflected a larger category . . all resources ……… human, minerals, forests, etc including technology and traditional knowledge base.

Positively. . .

Was chosen over the word ‘favourably’.

Though favourably has a gentle and open tone to it compared to positively which has a more determinate ‘thumping the desk’ kind of tone, ‘positively’ was picked as it is consistent with the name.

Impacting. . .

Picked over ‘changing’, ‘influencing’. Impacting sounds more positive, with change having been overutilised.

Life. . .

The initial phrase used was impacting ‘lives’, improving ‘quality of life’. The word life was chosen as it would reflect lives of all – of rural and urban people, animals, trees, everything that lives in the ecosystem. And it sounds a.l.i.v.e.!!!

Realising . . .

This word was picked over ‘rediscovering’ which probably has an ethereal quality to it, hoping to restore the glory of the past when humans lived in harmony with nature. But, it didn’t seem to include the freshness of the new.

Sustainable Development. . .

Some felt that the term ‘sustainable development’ was clichéd from overusage in development literature. But, it was felt that there was no better substitute to communicate the same message of ensuring that all development was long-lasting and self-sustaining, requiring minimal prop-ups for survival. Therefore, whatever products C+ve promotes must not make communities dependent.

Holistic. . .

It was felt that sustainable development reflected balance between environment and economic development but did not acknowledge cultural richness, traditional and spiritual knowledge systems, of which India has a rich repository. So, to include all these, the word ‘holistic’ was brought in.

Holisitic and sustainable development hopefully take care of Mc Namara’s 4Es . . . Economic efficiency, ecological compatibility, equity, endogeneity.

For the greater good of all. . .

‘All’ picked in favour of word ‘Planet’. Cause the Planet was limiting . . . not including other planets!
All – less defined, more inclusive.
Also went with the old term of ‘greatest good of all’.

Greater good. . .

Greatest good of all….. overused term
………………………………has a superlative sense of having arrived at the highest point with no more to climb.

Whereas ‘greater’ gives a sense of humbly accepting that one is only improving and accepting that there is more scope for improvement.

Initially, it was felt that ‘equal access and equal opportunity’, ‘equity’ were important end –results and must be incorporated but they again are oft-used terms and seem to sound like some rhetoric that is now scoffed at and is accompanied with cynicism.

However equity being an important core value for most members, this was included.

Exhausting the Planet’s Capital

‘Saare jahan se acchha,’ gushed Sq Ldr Rakesh Sharma with enthusiasm when Mrs Gandhi, the Prime Minister at the time, asked him what his country looked like from that distance of outer space. What perhaps didn’t cross Rakesh’s mind was that the blue planet also looked extremely vulnerable. When the first set of pictures of the earth rolled out in the late 1960s, for the first time we looked with new eyes at the third big rock of the solar system, its place in the universe, and our place on earth as one of many million species and many billion beings.

The last fifty years has begun a rediscovery, of a global understanding that takes into account who we are and the state of our relationship to this planet, our only home. Even as we have relentlessly gone on to destroy those resources of Earth that have been created over many million years, there is also a slow dawning that Life on Earth is possible only because a number of parameters lie in certain very narrow ranges. Many of these are clearly environmental. Like the Earth has the right temperature and pressure to have lived with water.

Our ancients wrote and sang about the marvel of Creation in the universe. They paid their deep reverence to Creation as everything that we can see and a whole lot that we can't. Probably more that we can't see.

It’s amazing how our planet is just far enough from the sun, has just enough of that atmosphere of a certain composition that more heat stays here than radiates out to the vast cosmic space. Not too hot, not too cold, just right… and we just happen to be here. We forget that we are an incredibly young species on Earth. We are just over 100,000 years old, while the roach is 700,000 years, the rhino is nearly a 500,000 years old, many of our tree species are over 700,000 to a million years old.

Our instincts, like of all animals and plant species, have been conditioned by an essential character: opportunism. But what has made us different from the rest of the species is our greed. While other living species do what's necessary for them to do in order to survive, the human ability to think and strategize has thrown us out of balance with the rest of nature.

Until the last 200 years, for the vast majority of human history of over 100,000 years, humans lived on current sunlight. Sun fell on the fields, the fields grew plants. The plants made cellulose, plant matter. Animals ate the cellulose, we ate the plants. We ate the animals, we wore clothing made out of them. We were living off of current sunlight. It was our food supply, our clothing, we heated with wood it was our heat supply, our light supply. It was all current sunlight.

The sunlight that fell on Earth in a year was the maximum amount we could use. It was the maximum amount of energy that we could use. And from the earliest evidence of human civilization up until a few centuries ago, pretty much, that's how we lived. And our population never surpassed a billion people.

And then we began discovering that there were pockets of ancient sunlight. WE found coal, and then we mined oil. And over 300 years, a slow but insidious creep of consumption occurred, between such use of coal and oil, and the agricultural revolution. Our population rose, until we hit our first one billion people by the 1800s. It didn't take 100,000 years to go from one billion to two. Our second billion only took us 130 years. We hit two billion people in 1930. Our third billion took only 30 years, 1960.

It is startling to realize that about the time Nehru died, there were half as many people as today in the world. When Nehru went up the Red Fort’s ramparts in 1947, India was home to 280 million, under 25% of today’s population. The reason that we've been able to have this exponential growth of population is because we have managed to create food and clothing and transportation. We have been enamoured by our own genius at being able to gain mastery over the world’s resources, all the time forgetting that we're doing it all with this ancient sunlight that was stored in the Earth 300-400 million years ago. And if we had to go back to living off current sunlight, lacking technology the planet couldn't sustain more than a half a billion to a billion people. So we live in the most unusual period in the history of the planet in terms of a species getting access to energy-rich carbon.

What we have done is become good alchemists: the ability to take fossil carbon and turn it into human biomass. And we have used the supermarket the transportation system, to make that happen. So the cornerstones of this system that we have are all resting upon nonrenewable, energy-rich carbon we call fossil fuels.

The real problem is there are too many of us using too many resources too fast. Now, coal and oil has enabled us to do that. We use oil to increase the rate at which we extract all other resources—everything from topsoil to fresh water, from aluminium to zinc.

Chandrashekhar Hariharan

Save The Environment, or Yourselves?

We have another World Environment Day before us, and another ceremonial set of noises that we will make as a nation, and as citizens of the world.

When you look back even to times as late as the late 1980s, you realize how little we did or understood of how life on earth is basically a relationship between what someone called ‘the two most complicated systems on Earth’ : Nature in all its vastness and us as humans in our desire to tame that vast beast to meet our ends.

When we came as a species to Earth—a mere 150,000 years ago, we weren't very many or very big, we weren't gifted with special senses. We evolved to be a new species on a planet that has so far lost nearly all the millions of species that it gave birth to, as part of the continuing change and evolution over 4 billion years.

The one thing, the key to our survival and our taking over the planet was the human brain. But because the human mind ‘invented’ the concept of a future, we were the only animal on the planet that actually was able to recognize that we could affect the future by what we do today. As one earth researcher remarks, “We look ahead, recognize where the opportunities are where the dangers lay, and choose accordingly to survive. That was a great survival strategy of our species.”

When people struck a good balance with Nature, it worked, they lived well. When they didn't, the people were gone. Every civilization perished without a trace after long centuries--because they reached an acme of such abuse and arrogated to themselves the power to tame natural resources. The Indus Valley civilization lasted over 3,000 years, spread over two-thirds of what is today’s India, displayed the finest knowledge of urban planning, showed immense respect for their forests and rivers, … until the last 200 centuries when something went wrong. From the little we know of that civilization, it disappeared without a trace in less than a hundred years. The Mesopotamian civilization died for similar reasons—even if it had recognized the importance of the environment to a point where the Hammurabi Code sentenced anyone to death who was guilty of felling a tree.

Saving The Environment?

At the end of the day, when we all talk about ‘saving the environment’, in a way it's misstated because the environment will survive far beyond us. We're the ones who may not survive. Or we may survive in a world we don't particularly want to live in, if it is going to be as bad as some of the dire predictions of our scientists is to be believed.

It takes no more proving that our biosphere is sick. We have a planet that's behaving like an infected organism. We just have to look around in the environment in which you live, for you to agree.

We continue to go ahead with these massive plans for making new roads and flyovers and bridges for all those cars that we desire, we covet. We think wider and more roads will sove the challenge; that we can continue to buy more and bigger cars; that the government will offer us all those wonderful roads for us to gratify this desire for speed and comfort. San Francisco has its traffic crawling today at 12 km an hour, after 30 years and many millions of dollars on building bigger and better roads.

The rivers, the forests, the lakes. Our continued profligate ways that is causing devastation that has already threatened the very foundation of the life system that has given us birth. “We are ultimately committing mass suicide as a civilization,” says one researcher. So as we destroy nature, we will be destroyed in the process.

Is There Any Escaping That Conclusion?

As the celebrated actor, Anthony Hopkins says in a recent movie where he plays an anthropologist who has spent time with a clan of gorillas who accepted him, ‘We humans are just takers.” We’ve never known how to give. If the human mind made that difference to this species among the many million others that Earth has spawned over a billion years, and if the human’s instinct for survival threw us out of balance thousands of years ago, what changed in recent history?

Disconnect With Nature

In the last century, we've dramatically increased our impact on planet Earth. One element has emerged that has made us even more destructive, accelerating our disconnection and causing extensive damage to our climate and all other natural systems. We’ve assiduously built an illusion in the world that as humans we are separate from nature. When it takes so little to see we are part of nature. We are indeed nature. This fundamental misunderstanding has helped us cause havoc on a scale that it looks like we have no way to return, to redeem ourselves and our place on Earth.

This our present ‘Christian civilization’, if you may want to call it, which started around the time of Christ, assumed these forms about 1500 AD when industrial society, the way we know it, was born. It is built on the assumption that we are the superior life form on Earth, that we are separate from all other life forms. It began conspicuously from the maritime invasions of 1400 AD of European sailors who believed that humans were given dominion over all other life forms. Then began this tide of rot that we have done little to stem.

We have learnt to create our homes, our offices, our hotels and hospitals, our cars and buses… all these ‘boxes’ that protect us from the very elements of nature that we cannot do without. We live today totally in disharmony with the planet. When was the last time you spent a couple of hours under the sun soaking in its rays, while you worked, naturally, with earth, her plants?

When you spend day after day in the centrally air-conditioned environs of your office, your home or your car, it is easy to think you're different from other creatures. And to delude yourself into believing that as a race we're smart, that we know how to create our own habitat, and, worse, that we don't need nature. The next time you walk around the aisles of a shopping mall, it’d be useful to remember that every single thing that you buy is out of Earth, and worked by humans who spend hours under the sun, relating to nature, and paying their obeisance to the produce that the sun, the winds, the waters and air offer these growers.

In the frenzy of our cities, the economy has become the only important thing. And in focusing on the money and trade, we've forgotten some ancient and humbling truths. Our traditional wisdom, are the essence of the learning of those past civilizations who had themselves died because of their lack of reverence to nature.

That's the lesson that we've forgotten and that we're paying a price for today.

Chandrashekar Hariharan

The writer is head of the Bangalore-based green solutions company, Biodiversity Conservation India.

C+ive presents PROSEED_ A Lantern Service To Light Up India

The PROSEED Lantern Service was introduced in SE Asia by Dr. Brahmanand Mohanty to reduce the usage of Kerosene and bring light to the rural areas of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos.

This Lantern Service is most suitable for rural India and for the small entrepreneurs 'on the move' in urban India.

To understand the PROSEED lantern service business model please visit the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=069ZutR2gkg&feature=channel

Your investment of Rs. 800/- to purchase a lantern could light up many lives in rural India.

For further inquiries, please contact citizen.positive@gmail.com

Learning to Live with Bloggers by Salil Tripathi

http://www.feer.com/politics/2009/april55/Learning-to-Live-with-Bloggers

Indian bloggers and other online commentators are challenging the status quo in business and politics like never before. And they are redefining attitudes toward the media in a country whose celebrated protection of free speech has often been undermined by the libel laws of its common law legal system.

Most Indian businesses are growing accustomed to criticism from bloggers. Yet there are still some that, instead of mounting a PR offensive, send in their lawyers and try to stifle speech on the Internet. What they’re finding is that this approach is counterproductive—they may succeed in silencing an individual blogger, but a hundred more then take up the cause. Like Western companies before them, Indian companies must learn that trying to stifle speech instead of winning debates is a losing strategy.

In one recent case, NDTV, the Indian news broadcaster, threatened to sue Cheytanya Kunte, an Indian professional based in the Netherlands, after he criticized the way Indian networks covered the terror attacks in Mumbai last November. Mr. Kunte was harsh in criticizing the network’s anchor and managing editor, Barkha Dutt, calling her conduct unethical, and suggesting that her actions may have jeopardized some hostages’ lives.

Mr. Kunte was not alone in criticizing the broadcast media: There has been much soul-searching within the Indian media over whether they conducted themselves well in covering the crisis. NDTV threatened to sue Mr. Kunte, and obtained an unqualified apology from him, now displayed prominently on his blog.

But the strategy clearly backfired: Other bloggers began to reiterate Mr. Kunte’s original criticism, and resurrected the original post that upset NDTV. With multiple bloggers linking to each others’ posts, the story got a far wider play than it would have if NDTV had simply ignored the criticism.

Some of the new criticism was sarcastic and vehement, with bloggers pointing out the irony of a media network stifling freedom of expression. Intrepid bloggers unearthed a wire agency story, published by NDTV on its own Web site, that cited Mr. Kunte’s post and other media criticism of Indian broadcasters, including NDTV. (The network immediately took down that story). Gulliver declared victory, but the Lilliputians were laughing.

Then, in late January, India’s Tata Group sent a notice to Ranjan Kamath, a Bangalore-based writer and filmmaker, after he sought signatures for an online petition calling upon Indian cell-phone users to maintain a day of silence on the death anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi, India’s founding father. This was a protest against three companies—Tata, Reliance, and Bharati—because there senior executives had publicly praised Narendra Modi, the controversial chief minister of Gujarat, at an investment forum earlier in January. The CEOs of Reliance and Bharati—Anil Ambani and Sunil Mittal—had endorsed Mr. Modi to be India’s next prime minister. Ratan Tata had said investors who don’t invest in Gujarat state were being “stupid.”

Mr. Tata had reason to thank Mr. Modi—after protests in West Bengal shut his project to build the world’s cheapest car, Nano, Gujarat offered land and facilities, allowing Tata Motors to hit the ground running in Mr. Modi’s state. Mr. Modi is known for cutting through the red tape, but he is also known for being implicated in failing to prevent one of the worst Hindu-Muslim riots in post-independence India. Nearly 1,000 people died in 2002 under his watch. In 2005, the U.S. State Department denied him a visa to enter the country under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which prohibits foreign officials who are “responsible for or [have] directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom” from obtaining U.S. visas.

While threatening to sue unless certain changes were made in the petition, Tata Group lawyers acknowledged Mr. Kamath’s right to free expression. They sought changes in the petition, so that it would not imply that Mr. Tata was endorsing Mr. Modi. Mr. Kamath amended the petition.

In 2003, an Indian journalist, Pradyuman Maheshwari, launched a blog called Mediaah!, a treasure-trove of gossip about the Indian media. It carried juicy stories about editors, how journalists operated, who got promoted or lost their job, and why certain stories appeared when others did not. The Times of India is India’s largest daily, and it markets itself aggressively, making the Times as much a consumer product as a newspaper. Some of its practices are controversial, such as selling space to advertisers, and running those stories on editorial pages, with only an arcane indicator to tell the reader if the story is a genuine news story or an advertisement. Many purists are upset about such tactics, and Mr. Maheshwari gave voice to such criticism. The Times group threatened a lawsuit unless Mr. Maheshwari removed 19 offending posts. He chose to suspend his blog.

Then in 2005, a youth magazine challenged claims made by the Indian Institute of Planning and Management, a business school, about its placement record, the caliber of its faculty, and the facilities it offered its students. An IBM marketing executive, Gaurav Sabnis, linked that article to his blog, in which he called the school “a fraud.” The IIPM sent him a legal notice, saying it was going to launch criminal proceedings against him. Mr. Sabnis told his readers about the threat. The IIPM then approached Mr. Sabnis’s bosses at IBM, saying it would cancel its orders and that its students would burn IBM laptops in protest.

IBM did not cave in: Mr. Sabnis had broken no law, and he had not violated IBM’s own code of conduct. But to prevent embarrassment to his employer, Mr. Sabnis left the company. He later went to the U.S. for a doctoral program, and has since said the IIPM decided not to pursue the matter further.

A recent judgment by the Indian Supreme Court may encourage the heavy-handed tactics of those who want to silence bloggers. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court refused to dismiss a case brought by a political party, the Shiv Sena, against Ajith D., a 19-year-old computer science student. The Shiv Sena is a Hindu nationalist and Marathi chauvinist party, and Mr. Ajith started an Orkut community that was critical of the party. In that community, an anonymous commentator posted a death threat against the party’s leader, Bal Thackeray. Because he was merely hosting the Orkut community and wasn’t the one who threatened Mr. Thackeray, Mr. Ajith asked that the case be thrown out. The Supreme Court denied that request but has yet to rule on the merits of the case. Still, by allowing the Shiv Sena suit to go forward the Supreme Court has emboldened those who would silence criticism on the Internet.

Indian companies and political parties should adopt an enlightened approach, and instead of going after entire Internet communities or individual bloggers (except, of course, in cases where there is clearly just cause, such as a death threat), address the concerns raised in those complaints. Blogs and social-networking are redefining the way we think of the media, and what the limits of free speech may be. But trying to silence bloggers is a losing strategy in the long run.

Salil Tripathi, a former Singapore-based regional economics correspondent of the REVIEW, is a writer based in London.

C+ive"s Neighbourhood Shuttle Service For India

C+ive & Reva Electric Car Co. have initiated discussions with the Govt. of Karnataka and transport agencies like BMTC etc. to shortly introduce the following services in the city of Bangalore.

The same services will be initiated in other metros of the country if the state governments and their transport agencies are amenable to the concept.

The objective of this joint initiative is to REDUCE: :

• Traffic congestion on city roads by providing citizens easy and rapid access to public transport
• National fuel consumption
• Atmospheric pollution and significantly improve urban air quality in metros
• Carbon Footprint
• Two-stroke auto rickshaws -Auto rickshaw drivers will transferred to shuttle services; vehicles will be reduced and re-cycled)
  

NEIGHBOURHOOD ELECTRIC SHUTTLE SERVICE

Golf Cart type buggies (solar/ electric charging hybrids) of capacity 4-12 seats will run in each municipal ward as:

• Feeder Service to BMTC bus stops
• School and Office drops and pick-up service within a ward
• Senior citizens/ housewives service during off-peak hours
  

RENT-A-REVA SERVICE @ APARTMENT COMPLEXES

C+ive will arrange for REVA cars to be stationed 24x7 within apartment complexes. Commencing with Bangalore, this service will be made available to all apartment complexes, gated communities and housing societies in the major cities of India.

The Revas' will be available for individual use on a per hour/per km basis for members of housing societies that register for this service.

If your housing society might be interested in inquiring about/registering for this service, please contact C+ive at citizen.positive@gmail.com

Together we can transform the micro-climate of our cities!

N.B. If there are suggestions, opinions, criticism etc., of the above proposals then please contact the undersigned.

C+ive looks forward to citizen support in spreading the word if you consider this a worthwhile initiative that deserves to be replicated across the country.

sincerely

Ranjan Kamath

CONSUVISM_ Consumer Satyagraha With A Difference

We want change. Most Indians are concerned about social issues and want to help make the world a better place but with the daily challenges of eking a livelihood, making time for social activism is difficult, almost impossible.

Traditional methods of activism like the boycott are uninspiring, stale and ineffective at solving today’s problems - it is passé activism of the 20th century.

In the 21st century, CONSUVISM is a method of activism that:

* Leverages consumer power to effect ‘win-win’ change through ‘conscientious consumerism’
* Makes the most socially-responsible business practices the most profitable choices
* Rewards businesses committed to improving the world we live in; bringing the greatest good to the greatest number through eco-friendliness of product and/or business practice.
* Fosters competition between businesses to expedite change for the better in the world we live in. The friendliest product, the friendliest store is rewarded with the largest number of consumers.

CONSUVISM is a strategy patented by C+ive, responding to fellow Indians frustrated by the disruption to livelihood of traditional methods of activism like hartals, bandhs chakka jams and petitions to MP’s, letters to editors, and silly slogans falling on deaf ears.

In the first micro initiative, C+ive is facilitating the distribution of food preserves, pickles and chutneys produced by Women's India Trust, based in Mumbai.

Women’s India Trust since 1968 has endeavoured to provide training and employment opportunities to unskilled and underprivileged women, drawing them into mainstream economic activity. Most importantly, empowering them with knowledge, power, self-reliance and prosperity.

C+ive is pleased to announce a 'beta testing' of the CONSUVISM strategy at the micro-level, before it is scaled up to more ambitious levels of consumer activism in due course, with growing mass support.

Instead of distribution of WIT products through large established retail chains, C+ive is facilitating the creation of a network of senior citizens, widows and the underprivileged, to distribute WIT products in their neighbourhoods, communities etc. Through such sales, participants earn up to 15% of the M.R.P. on the sale of each food product.

As a further value addition, this network would also accept orders of gift hampers of WIT products for all occasions, providing them with an additional opportunity to earn through commission.

With many people from all walks of life being adversely affected by the recession which has depleted their life savings by up to to 75% of its value, it is expected that selling WIT products through such a grass root network would help the many in a small way. Moreover, the proceeds of such sale helps WIT in its endeavours of making women and children self-reliant.

C+ive seeks your support in creating such a proactive consumer network in Bangalore and making it mutually beneficial for all involved.

Thereafter, C+ive will facilitate the creation of similar networks in other states with the support of C+ive membership.

If C+ive receives citizen support for this first exercise in Consuvism, we shall thereafter 'scale up' our attentions to the marketing and distribution of organic food, eco-friendly and renewable energy products and services to the benefit of the urban consumer in terms or affordable prices and quality and ofcourse change to our urban enviroment!

C+ive wishes to create a confidence of volume in:

* the farmer to invest more agricultural land in organic farming over time to meet such demand.
* the manufacturers of renewable energy products
* entrepreneurs who wish to invest their talents and business expertise in eco-friendly services and products

For further inquiries about the C+ive_ Consuvism initiative please email: citizen.positive@gmail.com

Mahatma Gandhi Has Left The Country

Unknown to many in the land of Mahatma Gandhi, on March, 4th and 5th 2009, at the Antiquorum Gallery in New York, some of India’s most iconic heritage will go under the auctioneer’s hammer.

A Zenith pocket watch, spectacles, slippers, plate and bowl of Mahatma Gandhi – father of the Indian nation – are all up for auction. This heritage has till now, been locked away in the custody of unspecified individuals who had received them as gifts.

Decades before she became India’s Prime Minister, Indira Nehru presented the Zenith pocket watch to Mahatma Gandhi – a possession he cherished dearly. When it was stolen from him at Lucknow station during a train journey, he was so distraught by its loss that he published an appeal in the HARIJAN newspaper. Moved by his appeal, the thief eventually returned the watch to the Mahatma who characteristically forgave the man for reuniting him with his beloved possession.

Mahatma Gandhi enjoyed his last meal before he fell to assassin’s bullets on 30th January 1948, from the very plate and bowl to be auctioned off in New York City. The slippers, being parcelled off with equal equanimity at the same event, were the Mahatma’s token of appreciation to a British officer who had taken photographs during a transit stop in Aden, en route to the Round Table Conference in London.

The spectacles being sold off with élan, were in fact, presented by Mahatma Gandhi to the then Nawab of Junagadh with the memorable words that framed a vision of optimism for India’s future: “I have seen the dream of a free India where all will be equal with these glasses. I gift you my eyes, they may help you to see the India of my dreams.”

The spirit of Mahatma Gandhi would insist that same money be used to educate the deprived and under-privileged. If he did wear those spectacles again he would be disillusioned to see the equal India he dreamt off still a distant dream.

Ironically, given his anathema for materialism, Mahatma Gandhi would certainly have rebuked his great-grandson Tushar Gandhi for attempting to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-possess his personal belongings.

While it is certain that the Mahatma would have disapproved of such a purchase, it is unfortunate that the government of India has taken no initiative whatsoever, to purchase such priceless memorabilia at whatever cost, before it is subjected to the humiliation of the auctioneer’s hammer.

Each pound of the auction block - parcelling India’s history - hammers out the reality of our misplaced priorities. It is all the more shocking to consider the fact that more public money is probably wasted in a single day on a Parliament that shirks conducting business or, on the Z-security of peoples’ representatives being protected from the people.

It is even more demoralizing to discover banter amongst Indian and American buddies on Facebook about “bidding for the Mahatma’s loin cloth, or purchasing his pince nez glasses”, grinding the Dandian salt of his erstwhile status in the dust of ridicule from his own countrymen.

Irrespective of who eventually owns the Mahatma’s belongings or, in which distant corner of the world they enjoy safe custody, the iconic memorabilia and the memories attached to each artefact shall remain priceless.

Now more than ever India needs to walk in the Mahatma’s footsteps) see India the way he did, sup from his plate of spiritual plenty setting aside differences of caste, creed and community.

Return of such memorabilia to the mother land just might inspire and educate our youth to envisage the India of Mahatma’s dreams; at a particularly fraught time in our history when non-violence and frugality are embarrassing, even obsolete words.

If Tushar Gandhi’s efforts come to naught then it can only be said that the Mahatma will remain a genie trapped in a bank locker till a time when India views a future for itself through his spectacles.

There Is More To Recession Than Meets The Eye _ Chandrashekhar Hariharan

It is only recently that this column featured a set of reflections on how Thoreau is not perhaps relevant to this day and age with the dramatic change in our perception of needs and the big realization of what it means to the world in terms of the loss of ecology and threat to the planet.

A recent edition of a newspaper had the historian scholar Ramachandra Guha quoting Gandhiji, writing as far back as in 1928: “God forbid that India should take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny kingdom [Great Britain] is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million Indians took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts”. Guha has written for many years now of the anguish of consumerism and of the need for moving away to lifestyles that would leave a softer footprint on the planet.

The traditional values and emotional anchors that our houses provided or the city landscape offered is now quickly a thing of the past.

Globalization of some kind or the other is being experienced by each of us in our own little ways. It sometimes means you’re given the pink slip, the American euphemism for being unceremoniously dumped out of your job with no notice. It sometimes means you get very rich. Sometimes it means both. More often it means that you’ve got a job but you’re very, very poor. All this stems from a certain kind of globalization that has fed oru greed with complete disregard of social obligations or of environmental realities. There is only one narrow pursuit of the single bottom line for a human being or for an organization. [This writer heard recently of the sad plight of many pedigree dogs that have been packed off to CUPA by the rich young types from the IT industry who have been hit by the recession. Those poor dogs…]

These are very powerful forces that can’t but have the Armageddon of growth hurtling on with little that you can do but being a helpless bystander.

The sort of growth that we had in the last ten years was based on the promise of limitless economic growth. A feature carried in these same columns by this writer a few weeks ago reminded us, of how way back in the 1960s we carried the sanguine notion that the planet can continue to offer all that we need if only we know and are convinced of the ingenuity of man. To fulfill the promise of US lifestyles for all would need may be two planets’ worth of natural resources—some thing we can never have. We have already exceeded many limits. We have become too big for our ecological boots, is the start fact, and continue not to recognize it.

Of Carbon Debts

To support the profligate lifestyles enjoyed by the rich, the Earth’s biosphere needs at least one year and three months to simply regenerate the amount lost to human consumption in a year. So what can be the result but environmental decline of a kind that the planet has never seen before? Disproportionate use by the rich of the atmosphere’s limited ability to absorb pollution also means that countries and individuals are running up massive carbon debts. Unlike any debt that a country or an individual has to service, there is no mechanism to call in the ecological debts that the rich create. The other worrisome dimension is that with the sharp urbanizing that we have seen in the last 20 years, culture has suffered as diversity has been lost. Cultural diversity is important for personal identity and well-being; it also matters because local cultural production is an important part of any economy.

The trouble with big brands and the corporate biggies is that they suck out wealth from local economies, and repatriate their profits to shareholders across the world in most cases these days—take the example of any IT major today who has global shares participation and you know the story. Local producers usually encourage the creation of wealth where it matters, in the community. For example, a rupee spent in a supermarket on globally branded goods is worth only about half the same spent in a local shop selling local produce. But the catch is that packaging and branding usually claims the customer’s attention and desire. Look at what is happening to you and me, when it comes to buying: we prefer the food mall to the friendly kirana store!


More to the Recession

What we are seeing today as a recession is far beyond its current dimensions. The slew of horrendous news we are receiving on the business and economic fronts from nearly every country in a business world that is coming crashing down on all of us, is that this is not merely an economic downturn but will signify a complete redefinition of the future of consumption itself in the world—no more the insensitive adoption of pedigree dogs or building of megapools and houses that bespeak of obscene avarice.

A whole new sobered generation of youngsters will now want to see how they recalibrate their economic and career ambitions to get to the good old fashioned way of working hard to earn the day’s wage. What this recession is showing is that there will be a dramatic across-the-board drop in consumption over the next ten years. What this new sober economy of the future is saying is this: dependence on external markets beyond our own country, or our district, or our community, will reduce to the levels that prevailed in the middle of the last century. India still qualifies as the fastest growing economy in the world at over 7 per cent GDP growth. We only have Nehru and the legacy of self-sufficiency his 17-year regime created, and the hard-working, enterprising commonplace Indian of today for this growth and the assurance it offers in this world of turmoil. You only have to walk on busy street and watch Life as it passes you by, and you know that here is a country of people who have the ambition to succeed, the hunger to achieve, and the pride in succeeding.

The Kirana shop is dying

Globalization has devastated cultures and environments over the last 20 years. Capital has never shown as much or more appetite than it has done in the last few years. But it does not have enough stomach to digest all the people it pretends to control. While putting people on corporate payrolls, it closes the doors of the globalized market to millions of small producers and enterprises. All you have to do is to step out some morning and chat up the pushcart vendor who sells vegetables every day on your street to know how he is now reduced to making visits only twice a week, because no one buys.

The kirana shop, or the friendly neighborhood provision store that has been part of India’s invisible infrastructure for a 100 years, is slowly crumbling with the advent of the retail market. People simply don’t have the time to pause by, have a chat with the shop owner and give him the list of things that you will need for the month. We find it easier to walk the aisle of an anonymous shopping mall and pick up what we need without loss of time.

What this kind of globalization has meant is fundamentally that human beings are disposable. We have become prisoners of addiction or prisoners of envy that is stoked by the onslaught of advertising on television or the newspaper.

Inherent in all this is a tyranny of subdued violence that has inevitably led to what we are seeing around us today. The recession, and what will come as its aftermath, is going to rejuvenate the world even if it’s going to leave us a little staggered and chastened on our urban lifestyles. The nicer fallout of the recession over the next decade, with hope, would be that life will move at a gentler pace and people will enjoy a degree of leisure unknown to many of the younger generation in the urban India.

Chandrashekar Hariharan

The writer is from Biodiversity Conservation [India] Limited, a pioneering green homes organization based in Bangalore.

Go Ahead Daddy...Make My Democracy! or. Criminalisation Of Politics Explained

Democracy means many things to many people and has assumed manifold incarnations in the various countries that have advocated this system of government. However, by virtue of being an occidental creation, the western embodiment of Democracy is assumed to be the ‘correct’ form, the benchmark for newly formed countries and newly liberated nations around the world to aspire and follow.

Democracy is not a system of governance in itself but a systematised process that eventually perpetuates the prevalent system of governance, evolved over centuries by a people, their culture, religion, geography and resources.

For example, China, Singapore and Malaysia have highly regimented systems that seem undemocratic to the west but quite acceptable to their own people; Afghanistan and Iraq have systems determined by tribe and community, once again appearing undemocratic by western definition.

In the nation state of India, risen from the cradle of an ancient culture and civilization, the preferred system of governance has not intrinsically changed since time immemorial but India has absorbed the democratic process and the procedural trappings that go along with it.

What is most fascinating to observe is how Democracy has assumed a multiplicity of incarnations – almost like sub-species - determined by class, caste, community, feudalism etc., but all functioning symbiotically within the same nation state.

While the great Indian urban middle class – a creation of western education - seeks its democratic inspiration and direction from the western world, the rest of the country has looked within and always displayed a disposition towards kingship. Throughout history it has preferred the benevolent dictator with charismatic authority and citizens are prepared to negotiate their rights and freedom to obtain such charismatic leadership.

Even after independence, the Indian citizen has had implicit faith in royal lineages representing him in Parliament. When he has not had access to royal lineages, he has chosen to repose his faith and vote for the progeny of charismatic political leadership. This is how the system worked while India was a socialist democracy.

When the Indian economy was liberalised and its markets opened, endemic corruption made the price of democracy unaffordable, thus depriving access to the poor and the marginalised. The prosperous classes found it easier to grease the cogs of the democratic machinery with their purchasing power.

So, the democratic process itself churned up another option for the poor and marginalised –an alternate facet of kingship - competing with established royal lineages and political dynasties: the slum lord, the gang lord the mafia don. He is all three branches of government rolled into one, ensuring immediate delivery of social welfare, employment, justice and protection for the price of abiding loyalty… not a high price to pay in times of a precarious existence within a liberalized economy.

The poor man who hitherto could not access the democratic machinery system, without an ‘old school tie’, caste or, community connections, money etc., is now able to use his vote as currency to ‘purchase’ his fundamental rights by accessing power, through the criminal. He now has a better chance of a acquiring a water connection, electricity, employment and education for his offspring.

By including the criminals, defined above, as candidates during elections, political parties know that they have immediate access to vast vote banks, fashioned by loyalty, money and muscle power, which would ensure election victories and return to power.

We have created a system of alibis in which authority is de-linked from accountability, and stake-holding is divorced from power-wielding. In such a situation, honest legislators have very little capacity to influence events for public good. But a mafia don enforces iron discipline, and makes the bureaucracy comply. The very criminal reviled by the media and middle classes is perceived as a saviour by the common man! And once a gangster makes money, he spends lavishly for 'good causes', styles himself as the leader of his caste or religious group, and can muster the muscle power required to navigate through the political and bureaucratic minefield.

Ironically, while the middle classes publicly protest the criminalisation of politics, economic greed has driven them towards the mafia don too, for protection of business interests and immediate ‘justice’ in the settlement of disputes. He is prepared to vote for the ‘don’ like Arun 'Daddy' Gawli who is a “man of action” capable of using means fair or, foul to deliver on his promises.

With mafia Don’s like Arun ‘Daddy Gawli, as their representative the poor and marginalised know that for the price of a vote they can sup at the same table, with the more prosperous classes and perhaps fulfil their aspirations … that is the fascinating story of how democracy works in India.