Hillary

When this lady, Hillary speaks,you feel like listening.It is not like the rhetorical diatribe that Mrs.Gandhi comes out with everytime she makes a serious speech.Last week Mrs.Gandhi spoke about the office of profit debacle,her point was that many in the Ganges heartland doesnt like her and all that debate in both houses of parliament was because these MPs hate her.It seems these same MPs hated Indira and Rajiv as well,its all personal.She didnt make sense,she cant expect us to sob and cry and call her back everytime she plays this all sacrificing 'bahu' persona.Its true that we like her,but she shouldnt be exploiting our fondness for her every time elections happen in some state.

Hillary Clinton,she was giving this fourty minute long -at times rambling speech in Brown University,C-SPAN was airing it.You like her for the wide variety of things she speak about,at times she opens a whole new perspective on a topic.She's got clarity,strength and a sense of urgency.The political part of the speech was pure rhetoric and mostly around the blunders of the 'Mission Accomplished' administration.That part comes easy I suppose because everytime she said 'our President' the crowd laughed their hearts out for no understandable reason.The second part of the lecture was fresh, and nicely done too.She spoke about,

Office Decoration

When she started practicing law,there was this unique office decoration protocol.If you are a guy, you fill your office with family photos and kids stuff so that people think you are a devoted person with family values.You are from the fairer side,anything that reminds you of family is out of bounds in office,because that would be a sign of a distracted professional.Hillary according to her, camouflaged office space with family signatures.


Descriminations and prejudices of this kind are widespread even today in conservative streams like law as well as sunrise streams like information technology.I know of this Business capablity command center where women work on monitoring the health of systems but in the connected high visibility crisis management group its an unwritten rule that only men should be on the team.This often if not always has a debilitating impact on the women members of the team,they find that few floors are out of reach no matter how hard they climb.The reason cited for the above was women get married,relocate,brain drain,odd hours,pregnancy - except for the last rest is common for both sexes and as for the last I think organisations should be mature enough to understand that women get pregnant.Such an exclusion affects the team in such a way that these women employees stop competing, rather contributing,they dont give a darn if the system goes to hell 'cause they are not the system anymore.Rest is what we see around us.

Washing machine and Dryer

Hillary's mother didnt have a dryer thereby spending her entire afternoon doing the laundry.Nowadays new technology and small families create a lot of productive free time which was spend earlier on these mundane chores.Women should put it to better use,they should dare to compete.

I thought about India,we had excluded women from nation building for a very long strech of time,on top of it we excluded dalits from our thought process,we had divided the rest into four ambiguous groups and again restricted any free flow of ideas.What a waste of human capital and we continue to do that as much as we can.Now I have to contradict myself,women work from dawn to dusk and after that, in some two hundred million households in India,they raise the next generation,feed the future India with food,ideas and values - I think this could be nation building - though it never shows up on the national product,never gets recognized anywhere in developmental economics.

Many of these women are denied a say in household decision making as they dont have any measurable produce.It would be fun if they stop all their work for a week,just to measure the kind of impact it causes.

Almost half our women cant read or write,not that literacy is so important,but the world around us is changing,economics is changing,we cant be a peasant country anymore,hands to mouth existence of Indian villages will have to undergo radical changes,economic output per household will need to increase in the indian countryside as the market dynamics set in,indian villages will have to consume more if this nation needs to go any futher from here and for this incomes will need to increase and it cant be done without value adding extensively to our products.This where education becomes a basic need from now on for the Indian woman.

A clear shift from 'welfare' of women to 'well-being' of women and womens' 'agency' is needed in our policy orchestrations.Respect and regard for womens wellbeing,is enhanced a lot when she has a economic and social role outside the household.Empirical data says so,one respected feminist economist wrote.

How does one manage office and home ?

She said 'everyone of us is a pioneer' and went on to say some bad jokes.
That was one great answer.

The first genocide of 21st century

Is happening in Darfur,she said.Women and children are the worst hit.Killings,abductions,gang rapes and more evidently mutilation of body parts to leave a stigmata of a lifetime are occuring at mind numbing rates.The west needs to intervene.

The west had apologized for Rwanda,Sudan seems to be the mother of all Rwandas.I tend to believe that if Hillary was the Commander in chief of the world instead of Bush,she would have send her troops to Sudan instead of Iraq.War and abject poverty in the dark continent undermines all the glory human kind has acheived in this world.

Hotel Rwanda said 'nobody cares about afrikans,they are not human,they are not even niggers' - I agree,if one hundred thousand people get killed somewhere in godforsaken cantsaythename place in Africa,its just a number for us.If it happens in Europe,it will be World war IV.

Constant Gardener said women never went to war anywhere - we can think about this.

Hillary showed that she can make people think and still be a politician and I believe she should run for the President of the United States.Not that she should win,but that will be one hell of a campaign to watch.

Back home,dear Mrs Gandhi is fighting another election.Nobody asked her to resign,nobody asked her to contest again,we'll spend a lot of our money to bring her back into parliament where she will be doing absolutely nothing and we'll wait for her to cry and resign and leave and contest again when some Samajvadi party MP snorts.Not that we have an issue with that,the Gandhi family has sacrificed so much for us,we continue to love them and Mrs Gandhi is so adorable a person,but I really believe madam could put her time to some better use - like make some nice pizza or something like that.Maino,think about it.

Goodnight and Goodluck !

On May 11th in Kerala

Elias John (Aniyara,Surya Tv),May 2001 :

"Inspite of all the criticism this programme has aired against the Nayanar government,we feel sad today.Because Kerala is losing yet another left front government.Because our past experiences tells us not to expect anything in the next five years"

five years since,its seems malayalam telivision's Ed Murrow was in a prophetic mood that day.

A change is inevitable in gods own country.Because we've had enough of dysfunctional governance.Because we've had enough of aya ram gaya ram squabbles.Because we've had enough of ice cream parlour rapists.Because we've mortaged most of the state.Because all our exam papers leak.Because we dont need muslim league and its casanova kuttis.Because we've become a land of mafias.Because the father,son and the holy spirit suck.Because the chief executive is a convenor of corruption.Because Devils own land is a tagline in the making.
Not to forget we have one of the highest consumption of liquor,highest suicide rate and high unemployment as well.

In his book,Development as Freedom,Sen compares US,China and Kerala.I read again,its US,China and Kerala.It was a pleasant surprise.This was not the first time the Kerala model was being touted as a road map for all the developing world,time and again the green strip has been on the radar of global think tanks.

Kerala is a land where social development has gone hand in hand with economic and political development,rather it has overtook the two.Its Human development index compares with North America and Europe in many parameters.Areas like medical care,education,social harmony,rural infrastructure and political vigilance have reached a point where developmental economists sit up and take note.

Because Kerala has the least mortality of infants.Because kerala has the highest sex ratio - which means if you are a girl child,you dont get killed down here.Because kerala has one of the worlds highest life expectancies.Because kerala is one urban stretch of four hundred miles.Because ink pads dont sell in kerala - they use pens instead.Because kerala is one place where extinction of lion tailed monkey or the ghat deer can bring down cabinets.Because the ubiquitous tea shops discuss 'mandari' disease in coconuts and lula of brazil with the same concern.Because people on an average read three newspapers down here.

If one looks at Kerala's political history - the state is 50 years old,the left front has been in power for around fifteen years.(excluding the right wing left front party).The congress lead governments ruled the rest of the years.Now if you look at path breaking reforms that made all the above possible,it was more or less during those fifteen years.Be it the land reforms,educational reforms and wage reforms brought about in 1957 by the EMS government (the first democratically elected left front government in the world).The coalation politics dharma of the sixties - another first in India.The literacy campaign of the eighties - another first in India.The peoples plan of the nineties - ditto.

The last term of the left front saw the Peoples plan campaign,stretching four long years.The idea was to eliminate centralised power and centralised planning.How could a beurocrat or a minister sitting somewhere in a capital city know what is good for a far away village,whether they need a bridge or a school or an internet kiosk.All across the state people met in schools,everyweek and made their list of developmental demands,based on ground realities and burning needs of the time.Village roads and bridges were built in places not even on the surveyor of India maps.Power percolated to lowest levels of society.Development and its benefits were not anymore confined to the urban shopping centres,goverment offices and kitchen coteries of the men in power.Every village and every town in kerala felt energized,it was probably the greatest leap forward in the history of development in Kerala.

It surely increased the overall debt of the state manifold and drew a lot of crticism from world bank and the Asian bank.Today after five years when one looks back at the days of Peoples Plan (the brain child of late EMS Namboodiridpad)we realise the good it has done to the state,it was an astute marxist's understanding of kerala's developmental needs in a economy which was getting liberalised from all the sides,it was a theoritician's insightful comparison of Kerala's present state with meiji era Japan and pre-reform China.

The new left front government which I believe will take oath in May,will have to lead Kerala from a support led success story to a growth meditated success.As a close adulator of kerala model and its politics,I am excited at what will be in store for the state this time around.I am optimistic about change because these guys been there before,they've delivered before.On May 11 th Kerala will have its tyrst with destiny and 'hope' may be retuned to us after a long wait of five years.

Good Night and Good Luck !

Good Night and Good Luck !

Ed Murrow said,
"We must not confuse dissent from disloyalty.We will not walk in fear, one of another, we will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. If we dig deep into our history and our doctrine, we will remember we are not descendant from fearful men. Not from men who dared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular. We can deny our heritage and our history but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of the republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom where ever it still exists in the world. But we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.Cassus was right, the fault dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Good night, and Good luck."

News programmes,talk shows,radio addresses,telecasts of speeches and our late night conversations often end with a "Good night" and a hapless smile.The ideas,the rhetoric,the understanding goes to sleep with us and in the morning you are alone,the bird would have flown.As I watched the celluloid version of the Friendly and Murrow telecasts in CBS during the McArthy years,the way they ended the show stood out - "Good luck" is a freindly reminder to think and muse and be uncomfortable.

Good Night and Good Luck !