Over the top

Image: www.thehindu.com

By Shazia Nigar

It was a day to remember. After all, American movies with images of black hats flying up in the air while smiling happy people hug each other have created quite an euphoria around what we call the convocation ceremony. However, around 15 students at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, did not partake in this merry making. The boycott resulted out of the decision of the administration to invite Mr Jairam Ramesh, Minister of Environment and Forest as Chief Guest at the convocation. Mr Ramesh, has in the recent past cleared controversial projects that raise grave concerns over human rights, environmental degradation and violation of constitutional laws.

As Mr.Ramesh stepped out of his polished posh car he was greeted with students in bright yellow t-shirts that carried anti-nuclear messages. Several others, as they received their certificate, handed out anti-nuclear badges in return. The students had a clear message to get across to our ‘Minister with a sympathetic ear’ (courtesy the Bt brinjal lok adalats): ‘NO JAITAPUR’ and ‘NO POSCO’.

Later, in an interactive session with the students Mr Ramesh stated ‘For the economic development of the country at a GDP of 8% to 9%, we need to rely on energy sources such as coal, gas, hydel and nuclear power. We, of course, need to invest in renewable energy sources but they will not be able to sustain our growth.’ Yes, we are a growing economy. There is a need for greater infrastructure. But is growth the only trajectory we should be aiming for. Isn’t equitable allocation of resources, not the only, but an essential part of the solution? Secondly, growth, but at what cost?

The Jaitapur nuclear power plant is set to displace 40,000 people, their economy and a thriving ecosystem. Further, the site is rated by scientists as Zone 3, which is prone to high seismic activity. Jaitapur witnessed an earthquake rated 6.3, which left 9000 dead, in 1993. The lessons we should learn from Japan’s recent nuclear debacle only warn us against the impending disaster. Further the power requirement for Ratnagiri and Sindhurgh, project affected sites, is a mere 180 MW above which 4663 MW is exported out of these areas. It is not clear as to what use the electricity generated will be used for. Most likely, it will be sold of to industrialists at subsidized rates.

Interestingly, the report brought out by TISS on Jaitapur was refuted by the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, on the basis that it consists of people’s opinion and is ‘not scientific’. This reflects a complete disregard for concerns of the very people at whose cost the project will come up.

Similarly, the POSCO steel plant in Orissa threatens the very identity of the project affected people adamant to stick to their ‘paan, dhan, meeno’ (beetle leaves, rice and fish) which sustain them. The project is set to affect 22,000 people in Dhinkia and several others in the adjoining Gram Sabhas of Nuagaon and Govindpur. This clearance violates the Forest Rights Acts which states that the consent of the affected Gram Sabhas is absolutely necessary for the establishment of any new project.

Both of these projects are not isolated developments. The advent of liberalization has led to the intensification of a development that functions on an economics that benefits a few while impinging on the rights of many. The call of the time is for structural changes. One that ensures benefits flow to all and which ensures that growth is not a term of exclusion. The protesting students of TISS are assurance of the fact that there is scope for these changes. It is the very students dubbed as the ‘Cola generation’ who are disturbed by what they see around them. And being disturbed by status quo is always the beginning of a new trajectory. The thoughts here are not new. But the spate of recent disturbing events compel me to repeat them again.

–Shazia Nigar is a student of  Media and Cultural Studies,TISS. She is presently interning with Himal Southasian.

By Maung Zarni

Oxbridge, Ivy League and Southasia.

ST Graphics

Well, if you specialize in the study of education (and educational institutions) from a sociological perspective, not just how one holds the chalk or manages a class, not that these things don’t deserve to be studied, meritocracy as we know is a complete farce if it is not accompanied by a serious analysis of race/ethnicity, class and sex.

It tickles me each time I hear some elitist and poshly-schooled friends brag about his or her own ‘world class’ education and implicit belief in his or her own ‘individual’ brilliance.

How many of us believe we are Marxes, Einsteins, Darwins, etc., (that is, geniuses) anyway? Darwin never had to work for money, ever in his life as he lived off his rich father. Even pro-proletariat Marx was largely supported by Engels whose wealthy German industrialist father owned cotton farms in Manchester and elsewhere: talk about class.

A lot of my Burmese compatriots often talk admiringly about world class education in the West. And the neighbourhood university, namely National University of Singapore, is one of the often-talked about places. All the rankings and ratings get their attention. The news of Yale-NUS building a new liberal arts college in the city-state which is envisaged as ‘the model’ for Asia is just the kind of excitement among the upwardly mobile whose quality of thought declines as they ascend the global ladder of power, wealth and privileges.

Sadly, beneath the surface of the institutional prestige and world class standing lies centuries of ugly histories, and no less ugly present.

If you are anti-imperialist, ‘Third Worldist’ type – like I unapologetically am, it may warm your heart to know that historically Oxford produced the highest number of folks who gave the rest of the world ‘the British Empire’, which among other things grew opium in India for export to China – as a brilliant economic policy to address the Raj’s trade deficit. (Cambridge was the runner up.)

Eighty-nine percent (that’s too close to 90%!) of Oxford student body is made up of upper and middle classes. Cambridge is behind only by 2% at 87%.  These places are first and foremost about social exclusion on the basis of class, sex and ethnicity/race. Let alone share their ‘playgrounds and boat-houses’ among general student populations, – not to mention the proverbial masses and town kids — these institutions set up hierarchies even within the universities, with each college literally enclosed, self-centred and generally inaccessible, staying true to their Medieval origins. They are in effect citadels of power, prestige, and privileges. They used to run the British Raj and they now run Britain.

Don’t tell me your class and your wealth and your skin don’t play a role in how you got into these power- and wealth-reproducing institutions.

These are not just institutions deeply rooted in the imperialism of the past, but neo-imperialisms of ‘development aid’, ‘liberal interventionism’, and arms trade.

Illustration: www.CartoonStock.com

Look across the Atlantic from here – you’ll find Harvard Law, the school built on the proceeds of a weekend slave auction by a wealthy American slave-owner. The most influential and strategically placed, it produces an overwhelming number of corporate lawyers who write laws for their corporate ‘citizens’. Only in such an unashamedly and pathologically Capitalist country as the United States such a legal concept and reality as ‘corporations as legal persons’ exist with all the rights and privileges reserved for humans.

The iconoclastic Gore Vidal once said on a BBC interview that first class corporate lawyers run ‘democracy in America’ while corporate ‘donors’ staff Congress with lesser ones.

Athenian democracy started out as a political process for property-and slave-owning white men. It maintained its honourable tradition in ‘America’ — Canada, Mexico, the whole of Latin America, and Central America could potentially sue the Americans for the monopoly over the continent-wide name — after 1776. In the second decade of the Gregorian 21st century, in its most advanced stage, the Athenian democracy appears to have ended up serving only the corporations.

History has ended here. One dollar, one vote — IMF-style.

Often our own Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is talked about as ‘Oxford-educated’ as if her Oxford education turned her into who she is and what she is made of. As a matter of fact, it was/is her (self-acknowledged) awareness of her parents’ exemplary lives as citizens that was/is her source of inspiration.

In our part of the world, we have no shortages of Oxbridge-types, and Ivy Leaguers. The late Indira Gandhi (Nehru’s daughter), the one who imposed draconian emergency rules, and the current PM Manmohan Singh, who heads one of the world’s most corrupt State, were Oxonian; Thailand (effectively a military-business-feudal complex) has many Oxbridge-products — the current Etonian PM is only the figurehead; and the ruling elite of Singapore with its high belief on social engineering (and eugenic) were trained in Oxbridge as well.

We are often exhorted to believe that ‘the great unwashed’ would be better off if they lived under these poshly-schooled leaders in the false hope that these men and women born with silver spoons in their mouth will discharge their ‘noble obligations.’

Don’t hold your breath.

Popular participation and public well-being are not part of their education, nor of their class consciousness, the rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.

In response to ‘A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education’s narrow band of values.’
– Michael Young, author of The Rise of Meritocracy (1958), at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

P.S. I wouldn’t be able to get on-line and type this diatribe if it weren’t for the fact that my parents came from a particular class/professional and educational background. One of my best friends in 5th grade in Mandalay who peer-taught me a few academic things had to drop out after 5th grade and go to work at his uncle’s shop because his parents could no longer afford to keep him in school. The thoughts of my 11 year old friend keep me humble and grounded each time my ego gets bloated.

Richard Boyle on travel, travellers, tourists, and everything in between.

One of my favourite travel writers, who happens to belong to the Indian diaspora, is Oxford-born Pico Iyer, the son of Brahmin Raghavan N Iyer, a philosopher and theosophist, and the religious scholar Nandini Nanak Meht. I have met Pico twice – in 2006, when he came to Sri Lanka to write a feature on the country’s political situation for Time magazine, and in 2008, when we both participated at the Galle Literary Festival.

Pico has written a number of travel books, many of them concerning Southasia, including The Lady and the Monk (1992), Falling Off the Map (1994), Cuba and the Night Quartet (1995), Tropical Classical (1998), Global Soul (2000) – ‘an astonishing and amusing view of the globalisation of East and West, as the author beholds how cultures fuse without completely losing their identities’ – Video Night in Kathmandu (2001) – ‘on the often bizarre effects of Western influences on the Far East’ – Sushi in Bombay, Jetlag in LA (2002), and The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008).

Of all his writings, what captured my attention most was a perceptive quotation from his Foreword to Wanderlust (2000), a collection of travel writings: ‘We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.’

Another quotation that caught my eye was a comment on the difference between tourist and traveller: ‘Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveller”, perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don’t. Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home”, while a traveller is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo” – or Cuzco or Kathmandu. It’s all very much the same.’

These quotations inspired me to search for other quotable views on travel down the centuries. For instance, an early commentator on the subject was philosopher Lao Tzu in the 6th century BC, whose ‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step’ has become a classic, and has even resulted in a modern rendering – ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance’ – by an unknown wit. Lao Tzu was also responsible for other pithy quotes such as ‘The further one goes the less one knows’ and ‘A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving’.

The Roman poet Horace, writing in the last century BC, had doubts about the value of tourism: ‘They change their clime, not their frame of mind, who rush across the sea.’ On the other hand, St Augustine of Hippo opined four centuries later: ‘The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.’

Moving forward to the 17th century, Francis Bacon in his Essays explains the difference between young and old travellers: ‘Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.’

The latter part of the 18th century was called the Age of Johnson, so it is not surprising that Samuel Johnson was responsible for several memorable travel quotes as reported by his biographer, James Boswell, in his Life of Johnson. One concerns the need for the traveller to be mentally well-prepared: ‘So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge’, and, ‘A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.’ However, my favourite Johnson quote – and the world’s it seems – is ‘Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see,’ which was written about the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

The 19th century was fertile. ‘It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar,’ declared Henry David Thoreau in 1854, not realising that 150 years later, that’s exactly what some people would find worthwhile. Francis Kilvert, Welsh vicar and diarist, derided his countrymen (and some countrywomen too I suppose) when he wrote in 1870: ‘Of all noxious animals, too, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists, the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.’

Robert Louis Stevenson confessed in Travels with a Donkey (1879): ‘For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.’ However, Stevenson’s best-known quote is ‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is labour’ from Virginibus Puerisque (1881).

The 20th century began to produce references with meaning for the contemporary traveller. For example, Noel Coward’s ‘But why, oh why, do the wrong people travel, when the right people stay at home?’ is a sentiment well understood today.

Since the 1960s, there has existed a belief that personal growth should ideally be gained in travel, but as George Moore comments in The Brook Kerith (1916), ‘A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it’.

‘Travel broadens the mind’ is a proverb dating from the early 20th century. GK Chesterton’s 1921 comment on it is a significant travel quote, too: ‘They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have the mind.’

Katherine Mansfield revealed her need for ultimate planning when she wrote in her diary in 1922: ‘Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.’

Antoine de St Exupery’s ‘He who would travel happily must travel light’ rubs shoulders well with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Let your memory be your travel bag’. Henry Miller’s ‘One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things’ harmonises with Marin Buber’s ‘All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware’.

My penultimate reference, by Nancy Mitford from The Pursuit of Love (1945), is prejudiced and chauvinistic, so it must stand on its own: ‘Abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.’

Which leaves me to reveal what I think is the most succinct travel reference of all time: ‘No matter where you go, there you are.’ Despite its currency, the origins of the phrase are uncertain. Possibly it was resurrected in modern times from Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ (c.1440): ‘So, the cross is always ready and waits for you everywhere. You cannot escape it no matter where you run, for wherever you go you are burdened with yourself. Wherever you go, there you are.’ Perhaps it was engendered by the spirit of the Sixties. Carl Franz’s People’s Guide to Mexico (1972) contains the phrase, for instance.

— Richard Boyle is a contributing editor for Himal Southasian.