E D I T O R I A L   P A G E

EDITORIALS

Signals from Majitha
THE byelection in the Majitha Assembly constituency in Punjab has virtually become a battle of prestige for both the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and the opposition Congress. The SAD leadership has made it a life and death issue. That is the reason why it is not leaving anything to chance.

Muddling through Maruti 
THE government wants to get out of Maruti Udyog Limited and, as is its wont, has opted for the most cumbersome and roundabout route. It will first prevail on the Japanese equal equity holder, Suzuki Motor Corporation (SMC), to agree to a rights issue ostensibly to bring in fresh capital for the company. The real intention is to pave the way for the eventual shedding of the government’s 50 per cent share capital in MUL.

Poaching in Corbett
THE report of large-scale poaching of elephants in the high-security Corbett National Park cannot but cause disquiet among the growing tribe of lovers of wildlife. The park officials have thus far failed to nab the team of poachers which is said to have killed at least five male tuskers for their ivory in the past one month. The figure of the number of elephants killed by the agents of the ivory merchants may be much higher and would be known only after the process of head count of the pachyderms is completed.

OPINION

SAARC: regional diplomacy
Need for new formulations
by G. Parthasarathy
When the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was set up in 1985 to promote the welfare of the peoples of South Asia, its leaders pledged to expand economic, scientific, social, cultural and technical cooperation. They also agreed to work together in international forums on issues of common interest.

MIDDLE

Food for thought
by Suchita Malik
MOTHERS face a peculiar problem! No, it is not the studies of their children or their unit tests or the generation gap this time. It is not even finding a suitable tutor or the right tuition group for their children. Nor it has anything to do with the children’s obsession with the cable TV, the computer or the idiot box.

TRENDS AND POINTERS

Fatter the better in Africa
In Niger, as in many other places in Africa, fat is the beauty ideal for women. At one festival, called Hangandi, women of the Djerma ethnic group compete to become the heaviest. They train for the beauty contest by gorging on food, especially millet, and drinking lots of water on the morning before the contest. The heaviest woman is declared the winner and given a prize — and more food.

OF LIFE SUBLIME

The Self and the other
by Jasbir Singh Ahluwalia
The Self in its generalised form means aggregation or configuration of soul, mind and body, with different thinkers singling out, or giving priority to, one or the other constituent of selfhood. Plato identified the Self with soul, while Descartes took it as the "thinking I". Some philosophers envision the Self, as a substratum, a container, of the physiological faculties and processes.

ANALYSIS

Tamil leaders turn to God
by Papri Sriraman
CHENNAI: With Assembly elections due in three months, the top rivals in Tamil politics, Chief Minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and former Chief Minister J. Jayalalitha of the All-India Anna DMK (AIADMK) are turning to the Gods.

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

Signals from Majitha

THE byelection in the Majitha Assembly constituency in Punjab has virtually become a battle of prestige for both the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and the opposition Congress. The SAD leadership has made it a life and death issue. That is the reason why it is not leaving anything to chance. What is, however, regrettable is that, in the process, it is giving the impression of overplaying with its administrative clout. The fact that the official machinery is reportedly being used for this purpose is a sad commentary on the ruling establishment's overanxiety to retain this seat by hook or by crook. Legitimate electioneering is very much part of a dynamic democratic polity like ours. But an overkill in this regard could be both risky and counter-productive. Akali leaders do not lack in maturity. They understand what is what. Still, amidst powerplay they often tend to overlook the ground rules which clearly spell out the do's and dont's. We have been carrying reports for the past several days of violation of the poll code in Majitha. Of course, the ruling party alone is not to blame. The Congress Party is equally at fault in taking liberties with a view to countering the Akali campaign. But what makes things disturbing is the range and dimension of the poll code violation. It is no secret that a mini secretariat is functioning at Majitha and most of the ministers are camping there to woo voters. Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, a skilful organiser, is working hard for the success of his party candidate. He knows it well that any setback in Majitha may send disquieting signals for his party. As it is, the Assembly elections in the state are scheduled to be held early next year. He, therefore, attaches much importance to the present contest. Mr Badal's anxiety is understandable. However, as a veteran politician, he must not forget that the battle of the ballot should not only be fair but also seen to be fair. It is the duty of the leaders of all political parties and groups to ensure fairplay. The games being played right now at Majitha do not make a detached observer feel reassured of fair practices during electioneering.

It is for the Chief Election Commissioner, Dr M.S. Gill, to see that everything is clean and above board in this golden jubilee year of the formation of the Election Commission of India. During its golden jubilee celebration last month in New Delhi, Dr Gill talked eloquently of the country's transparent election process. We all are proud of the performance of the commission all these years. We expect Dr Gill to live up to its reputation. All those who have a stake in a free and fair election need to remember that the voters must not be fed on misplaced promises in the Majitha bypoll. At stake is the honour and prestige of the people of Punjab as a whole.

Muddling through Maruti 

THE government wants to get out of Maruti Udyog Limited and, as is its wont, has opted for the most cumbersome and roundabout route. It will first prevail on the Japanese equal equity holder, Suzuki Motor Corporation (SMC), to agree to a rights issue ostensibly to bring in fresh capital for the company. The real intention is to pave the way for the eventual shedding of the government’s 50 per cent share capital in MUL. As the term “rights issue” states, only present shareholders are eligible to participate in it, and that means the central government. It will then give up its right in favour of government-controlled lending agencies like the IDBI, UTI and the LIC. This is a financially incestuous arrangement, but quite moral from this government’s point of view. Thus the real outcome will be an exit door for the government but also a backdoor entry to control it. Once this half-clever process is over, the government will start talking to the SMC on the next step. No date has been fixed for completing any stage, although Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha will like the whole thing to be over before he stands up on the last day of this month to present the budget. It is very curious since the government’s resolve to sell its share in the flourishing company has been an open secret for years now. Remember the famous but unoriginal words of junior Minister Arun Shourie that it is not the government’s business to be in car-making business? It is a different matter that Cabinet Minister for Heavy Industries Manohar Joshi, the lord of MUL, is hostile to the whole idea and wants to buy out the SMC’s share so that the jewel in the government’s crown is fully in its hands and not shared with a foreign company. He is opposed to the strategic sale of Maruti shares to General Motors, the US automobile giant which has shown interest in being an equal partner with Suzuki since it has invested in the parent Japanese company and is not a rival in the Indian market.

Not only the route of disinvestment but the timing is hopelessly wrong. Only last month MUL managed to end a three-month long labour dispute which hit its sale of eight major models with 35 versions. At one time it appeared that there was a distinct chance of its leadership position in the passenger car market being threatened, but sales in January have restored its top rank. It has introduced several new models like Zen, Wagon R, Alto and the luxury Baleno despite wrangles between the two partners and the labour unrest. The government has announced that the whole process of fixing a price of the equity will be transparent and three internationally known banks will be chosen to do the job. But that is only of secondary importance. What is urgent is the need to do what is officially described as backroom work or, in plain language, home work. It is apparent that this government is deficient in this vital department. Get the equation with Suzuki in order, decide on what Maruti is really worth and sell the shares to someone who will keep the company going and profits coming in. It is as simple as that. 

Poaching in Corbett

THE report of large-scale poaching of elephants in the high-security Corbett National Park cannot but cause disquiet among the growing tribe of lovers of wildlife. The park officials have thus far failed to nab the team of poachers which is said to have killed at least five male tuskers for their ivory in the past one month. The figure of the number of elephants killed by the agents of the ivory merchants may be much higher and would be known only after the process of head count of the pachyderms is completed. A desperate administration has now ordered the closer of the world famous park to tourists to help the combined team of forest guards and police in tracking down the killers. It has even announced a reward of Rs 1 lakh for information leading to their arrest. The killing of elephants has put a big question mark on the efficiency of the security network set up at huge expense for providing a safe haven to a large variety of wild animals. The possibility of the involvement of some corrupt foresters in the killing of elephants cannot be ruled out. The safety network the park authorities have created ensures that even the movement of virtually every tourist is monitored by trained guards. In spite of the global ban on the ivory trade, the demand for products made out of it is met by organised cartels through underworld channels. India continues to be a major source of supply of the illegal product.

It would be a mistake to link the killing of wild tuskers to the running battle between the forest officials and the local population over the periodic damage caused to the standing crops and farm animals by wild beasts. Last year a group of villagers had allegedly poisoned six tigers in the Corbett reserve after attacks on human settlements. They employ equally revolting methods for protecting their crop of maize and sugarcane. The fact that only male elephants were killed for their tusks made the forest officials start looking for a gang of well-armed and trained poachers. It is a pity that in spite of the global hype in favour of wildlife protection, no worthwhile effort has yet been made in the country to ensure that rare and even common species of animals are not killed for sport or profit. 

SAARC: regional diplomacy
Need for new formulations
by G. Parthasarathy

When the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was set up in 1985 to promote the welfare of the peoples of South Asia, its leaders pledged to expand economic, scientific, social, cultural and technical cooperation. They also agreed to work together in international forums on issues of common interest. Even though there have been 10 summits of SAARC leaders, precious little has been achieved either in promoting economic cooperation, or in jointly implementing agreements that have been reached on issues ranging from combating terrorism to expanding trade, investment and industrial ties.

The SAARC Convention on Terrorism is full of so many loopholes and inadequacies that securing the extradition of terrorists is virtually ruled out. Despite this convention, people like Dawood Ebrahim live in resplendent splendour in the elite localities of Karachi and Lahore. Further, there has been very little progress achieved in promoting meaningful economic cooperation, primarily because Pakistan is not prepared to develop economic ties with India. While self-styled SAARC enthusiasts in India tend to find fault with their own government for not being enthusiastic about another SAARC summit, they ignore the fact that it is Pakistan that has refused an early meeting of experts in Kathmandu, on further expanding the South Asian Preferential Trade Arrangement (SAPTA).

The reasons why SAARC has not been able to take off are obvious. SAARC is perhaps the only regional organisation in the world where only one member (India) shares common borders and has extensive interaction with others. There is precious little by way of economic or other cooperation between say Nepal and Maldives or between Bhutan and Pakistan. SAARC does, therefore, periodically tend to become a forum for “India bashing” by any member that has a real or imaginary grievance against New Delhi. This is particularly so of Pakistan, which tries to make every political level meeting an exercise in theatrics, rather than an opportunity to promote economic cooperation. There is nothing to suggest that Pakistan is going to change this approach. But India does now have an opportunity for setting an agenda for SAARC. It should, however, be made clear to other SAARC members if we are not going to achieve substantive progress on expanding economic cooperation within the SAARC framework, we will seek to achieve this both bilaterally and sub-regionally outside SAARC. In any case, it is now time for us to look beyond the narrow confines of the subcontinent, shed some of our earlier inhibitions on projects of sub-regional cooperation and develop new links and strands of cooperation bilaterally, sub-regionally and regionally across the entire Indian Ocean region.

Our “look east” policies have led to vastly expanding economic ties with members of ASEAN. Singapore is today one of the most important partners for economic cooperation and tourism with our southern states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. States on our eastern shores will find countries ranging from Myanmar to Malaysia as viable partners for meeting their energy needs. The BIMSTEC — bringing together the countries of the Bay of Bengal — Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Thailand — needs to be activated and specific projects in areas like fisheries, transport, communications and energy resources involving two or more member-countries identified expeditiously and implemented. The SAARC experience has shown that unless there are specific projects identified and implemented, all talk of regional or sub-regional cooperation is meaningless. But in moving ahead on this road we should be prepared to show understanding and generosity in concluding free trade and investment arrangements with countries like Bangladesh and Myanmar. We should avoid the sort of unseemly haggling that we indulged in while negotiating a free trade agreement with Sri Lanka..

Maldives seldom receives media attention in India. But there does appear to be considerable potential for developing a sub-regional grouping involving India, Sri Lanka and Maldives to promote cooperation in areas like trade, tourism and fisheries. There will be considerable interest in the private sector in states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu in such cooperation. Similarly, states on our west coast like Kerala, Maharashtra and Gujarat will benefit immensely if New Delhi expands cooperation in energy-related and other areas with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council and Iran. We have to recognise that in a liberalised economic environment, states in India will develop natural complementarities with countries in our neighbourhood. The identification of specific projects in the growth quadrangle involving Nepal, Bhutan, India and Bangladesh will be of particular interest to the people of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam. But here again New Delhi should shed its inhibitions in seeking cooperation from institutions like the ADB and the World Bank in studying the implications of and financing these projects. The insistence on bilateralism on such economic issues can be counterproductive if overdone. A similar approach needs to be adopted in developing economic and tourism ties among our North-Eastern states, including Assam, and countries in their immediate neighbourhood like Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand and even the Yunan province of China.

The adoption of measures to place an increasing emphasis on bilateral and sub-regional cooperation in our neighbourhood, does not necessarily imply that we have to give up efforts to promote regional cooperation within SAARC. The “SAARC Vision Beyond 2000” report provides an excellent framework for regional economic cooperation in the subcontinent (one wonders why we fight shy of calling it the “Indian subcontinent” instead of referring to it even domestically as “South Asia”!). The “SAARC Vision 2000” envisages the subcontinent becoming an economic union by 2020 in three stages. SAARC is to become a free trade area by 2008 with the free trade provisions coming into effect for its least developed members by 2010. A Regional Investment Agreement is to be concluded prior to this. This is to be followed by the establishment of a customs union in 2015, before an economic union is set up in 2020. In the meantime, the countries of the subcontinent will adopt a social charter incorporating social welfare targets in population stabilisation, universal primary education, empowerment of women and nutrition and protection of children. A former Foreign Secretary, Mr Muchkund Dubey played the key role in finalising this vision report.

New Delhi should even now indicate that it is prepared to commence discussions at the official level to implement the provisions of SAARC Vision 2000. In case Pakistan expresses reservations about moving in this direction as it has hitherto been doing on developing a SAARC Preferential Trade Agreement, we can conclude that it is really not serious about promoting regional economic cooperation. There is little point in holding annual regional summit meetings if all these efforts are meant to merely pave a road to nowhere. India and the other countries of the subcontinent like Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh are today showing signs of accelerating their economic growth and improving the human development indicators with rates of economic growth varying between 5% and 6.5% annually. Pakistan is, however, fast proceeding in the opposite direction. Pakistan is today the sick man of South Asia. This trend is going to continue, especially if our western neighbour continues to mismanage its financial priorities and remains rooted in its advocacy of “jehad”. While calls to “revive” SAARC are laudable, the hard reality remains that even as we attempt to do so, we must realistically promote alternative options also.

— The writer is India’s former High Commissioner to Pakistan.

Food for thought
by Suchita Malik

MOTHERS face a peculiar problem! No, it is not the studies of their children or their unit tests or the generation gap this time. It is not even finding a suitable tutor or the right tuition group for their children. Nor it has anything to do with the children’s obsession with the cable TV, the computer or the idiot box. What drives them to their wits’ end is —- what to provide the children in their tiffin boxes, which they find not only palatable but also takes care of their hunger pangs and yet provide them the required nutrition. It is certainly a tall order for the mothers!

Vipin, Vinita’s school-going tiny-tot, refuses to carry a “parantha” or a plain sandwich in his lunch-box. He doesn’t like it, it gets cold and his friends get far more trendy stuff in their lunch-boxes. He constantly pesters his mother to give him some money so that he could buy things of his own choice. “What kind of eatables you buy with the money,” his mother asked him one day. “Why, mama, we get lots of “Cheetos”, “fun-flips”, “Uncle Chips”, hot-dogs and even ice-cream from the vendors,” answered Vipin with an innocent grin on his face. “Oh God! now I know why you get your throat infections so frequently...” retorted his mom in despair.

With the fast-food trends having picked up at a rapid pace during the last decade, a tremendous change in the food habits of the school-going children has come to the fore. Gone are the “aloo-paranthas”, “puri-chhole”, “dal-vadas” or the all time favourite “kheer” or “halwa” and in come the two minute Maggie noodles or the all bland macaroni, chunks of pizzas or hamburgers or monster-munches and what not? The fast-food bug has caught up in a big way with the tinytots and the nutrition caution has been thrown to the winds. The glut of readymade food-items in the market, be it the “pure-magic” range of biscuits, buns, cakes, doughtnuts, umpteen kinds of crisps and chips, ready-to-eat pizzas or muffins add to the mother’s woes and have forced her to sit back and have a fresh look at the contents of their tiffin-boxes.

“The ‘aloo’ or ‘gobhi-prantha’ with ‘aam ka achaar’ is too oily and tastes ‘yuck’ when cold,” say the children disapprovingly. The veg etable sandwich is an all time favourite with chutney but it gets soggy after a while and can be boring when taken frequently. Also, you can’t be sure of the quality of bread since the shelf life is never indicated on its wrapper in the Indian market. “Dals” and curry-vegetables are always troublesome to carry since these can land you in quite a mess. Fruits and salads are an ideal bet but they are hardly filling for the fast growing children and are best taken in the form of accessories to something solid. Chocolates and sugary sweets actually melt during the summer season. The extremes of Indian weather make the work of a mother all the more difficult and challenging. Many times children just refuse to carry their lunch-boxes just for saving themselves the trouble of carrying it along.

Research has proved that a sumptuous breakfast goes a long way in keeping the mind alert and the body agile during the daytime and is, therefore, imperative for the young growing children. What happens in practice is quite the contrary. At best, they gulp down a glass of milk and there is no time for eating in the mornings. This further calls for a healthy tiffin-box.

Perhaps, the time is ripe for a commission or a committee to be set up so that it can sit together along with the dieticians and experts from the home-science colleges and come out with their recommendations regarding the tiffin-box contents for the school-going children as well as for the parents. In fact, the school authorities, in unison with the parents, should prepare a well-structured menu. A balanced approach and a well-researched effort, on their part, would indeed go a long way in keeping our “hopes of the nation” healthy, energetic and yet bubbling with energy. Dieticians, health freaks, here is some food for thought for you!

Fatter the better in Africa

In Niger, as in many other places in Africa, fat is the beauty ideal for women. At one festival, called Hangandi, women of the Djerma ethnic group compete to become the heaviest. They train for the beauty contest by gorging on food, especially millet, and drinking lots of water on the morning before the contest. The heaviest woman is declared the winner and given a prize — and more food.

Among the Calabari people in southeastern Nigeria, brides are sent to so-called fattening rooms or fattening farms before their weddings. They are not permitted to leave the farms for a few weeks, during which their caretakers prepare copious helpings of food and massage them into a rounder shape. At the end of their stay, before the wedding, the brides are paraded in the village square so everyone can admire their fullness. So popular is fat that here in Maradi, a sleepy town just north of the border with Nigeria, women take steroids to gain bulk, or pills to sharpen their appetites. To gain weight, some women even ingest feed or vitamins for animals - though few will admit it.

“Caution: for animal use only,” read the pamphlet for Savit, a well-known livestock feed sold here. Among its benefits: “fleshing in beef animals, body weight increase.”

Abdou Idi, a 24-year-old who sells Savit and other medication from his bicycle, said the fattening pills and animal feed are among his best-selling items. “It’s usually married women who buy these products,” Idi said. “If the women are too thin, they worry that their families and friends will think that their husbands are not taking care of them or that they have abandoned them. So they come and buy these products, especially before the major holidays.”

And so, if the beauty concept here is the reverse of the West’s, its motivations appear the same: seeking men’s approval. “If you are a man and your wife is not fleshy, people will say that you are not taking care of her,” said Ramatou Lea Roger, 31, a radio host here, who was sipping soft drinks with two of her friends at a bar in the late afternoon. “But if your wife is fleshy, people will say that you are a wealthy and responsible man who takes care of his family. And so there is a lot of pressure on women to become fat. If they don’t have the money to eat lots of rich food, women will take a shortcut and buy these chemical products.” Besides animal feed, the most popular product is dexamethasone, a kind of steroid easily bought without prescriptions on the streets, said Dr Ousmane Batouré, 37, who like many physicians in Niger studied medicine in China. Many women, he said, come to his general clinic desperately wanting to gain weight. “I tell them to take ordinary vitamins,” Dr Batouré said. He warns them away from the chemical products, especially the animal feed, which can cause lasting health problems. But he said he knew that many did not follow his advice — the same way women in the West might ignore medical advice not to overdiet.

“The world is a funny place,” the doctor said. “In America, you are rich, you have everything, and the women there want to become so thin as if they had nothing. Here in Africa, we have nothing, the women who buy these products have nothing, but they want to become fat as if they had everything.”

Indigenous male contraceptive

A first-of-its-kind male contraceptive developed indigenously by the Indian Institute of Technology and All India Institute of Medical Sciences is in its final stage of clinical trials.

“The Phase-III clinical trials of the injectable male contraceptive started in May 2000”, says S.K. Guha, biomedical engineer from IIT, Delhi.

The contraceptive — RISUG, an acronym for Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance — is the result of 25 years of research combining biomedicine and engineering, it offers several advantages over conventional vasectomy.

“Intellectual Property Rights are protected by process and product patents in India, Bangladesh, US and China. Some more patents are pending, including an international patent under PCT”, Guha told PTI.

The contraceptive has been successfully tried on 100 males till now and scientists plan to test it on more than 500 individuals in the third and final stage of experimentations before marketing it. 

— PTI

The Self and the other
by Jasbir Singh Ahluwalia

The Self in its generalised form means aggregation or configuration of soul, mind and body, with different thinkers singling out, or giving priority to, one or the other constituent of selfhood. Plato identified the Self with soul, while Descartes took it as the "thinking I". Some philosophers envision the Self, as a substratum, a container, of the physiological faculties and processes. There are some other theorists for whom the Self is stream-like consciousness with no underlying thread or principle of continuity. However, almost all of the philosophers, particularly since the 17th century in the west, differentiate the (determining) Self from the (determined) Other. They not only trace back the dilemma of the human condition, but also the origin of the social, economic, political and cultural problems of society to the chronic contradiction between the Self and the Other. Religion also has been grappling with this contradiction.

By definition, all that is not Self, non-Self, is deemed as the Other - the unknown, the unknowable. The fear of the unknown and the awe of the unknowable conditions the response of the Self towards the Other; the self when unable to fraternise, overcome, or sublimate the Other, tends to demonise it. On spiritual level, the Devil, the Satan, the Asur, is posited as the Other: the opposite of God. On sociological level this tendency takes many forms, depending upon the variables of time and space: The Philistines of the Old Testament narratives; the Jew in Nazi Germany; the bourgeois in communist utopia; the real or imagined enemy across the border; the Kafir in religio-political Islam; the malechha in Hindu caste system and the manmukh in Sikh ethics - these are some of the forms of the Other who are to be wiped out!

In this encounter between the Self and the Other, the paradox lies in the point that the Self for its self-determined identity requires the Other, for the very idea of identity means identity in relation to something other than itself. The paradox in life, in a sense, begins (as medical science tells us) when a three-month old infant for the first time starts recognising his mother and other immediate members of the family as distinct from other persons; implicit in this nebulous perception of distinctness is also the diffuse distinctiveness of his own being. From here originates the dialectical relationship between the Self and the Other that persists throughout one's life and spills over to societal levels. Once the infant nebulously perceives this two-layered distinctiveness, he also seeks a bond with his mother and other immediate members of the family, whom he starts recognising as his own different from the other. Conkceptualising this dialectical phenomenon, we can say that the self on he one hand posits its identity in differentiation from the Other, and on the other hand, seeks re-bonding with that from which it has separated itself off initially. The Self, as an object, sets itself apart from the Other so as to re-relate itself as subject with the latter. How the Self re-relates itself with the Other — in diverse, contradictory forms — has been the perennial problem of man and society, both on subjective and objective levels.

Overwhelmed by the merciless forces and elements of nature, man (the self) propitiates them (the Other) in different forms of nature worship; the next step in this direction is the deification of the elements of nature. The deified elements of nature-Indradevta, Varunadevta, etc. — are gradually subsumed under an absolute category: God as the supreme Deity, the Other of which, obstinately, re-appears, as mentioned above, qua the Devil, the Satan, the Asur. On actual, practical religious level, the community of the faith-followers draws a line between the insiders and the outsiders. The outsiders are then sought to be brought onto the Self-poclaimed righteous path to God through preaching, persuasion, inducement, allurement or coercion. The non-conformists — the Other — are, then, condemned to hell in the other world and to the ghetto in this world.

On psychological level, the Self (the Freudian ego) suppresses the norm-breaking libidinal impulses, as the Other, necessitating their suppression. The repressed Other subsisting in the subconscious and unconscious layers of mind gets either sublimated expression in creativity (sensuous Ajanta paintings; almost nude uakshis-females-figures-excavated at Sanghol near Chandigarh; sexual imagery of some bivalent stands of Bhakti poetry), or de-sublimated manifestation in pathological states of personality.

This tendency, on sociological level, takes the form of homogenisation of the Other — the minorities, ethnic communities, trebles, etc., — treated as being outside the majoritarian manistream to the extent to which such sub-totalities seek to preserve their identities, their differential lifestyles and values. This phenomenon is, in a sense, a case of the polarity of the Self and the Other inherent in the Kantian dualism of the transcendental ego and the things-in-themselves. The Kantian Self, in the sense of transcendental ego, super-imposes its inherent, innate structures on the things-in-themselves. This is how we get the structured, mediated, forms of experience of the world. In a goggles-like manner that colour what is viewed, the Self, in imposing itself structures on the reality-in-itself, determines the Other. The Kantian Self incarnates itself on political level in the form of modern nation-state which seeks to determine, to structure, to homogenise the Other — the sub-totalities.

In brief, what starts as an infant's perception of recognition gradually takes the form of a distinction between the Self and the Other, changing into differentiation which, when not accepted, invite intolerance and hostility; suppression and annihilation.

But a turning point seems to have arrived in postmodernist thought. It is being realised that when the Self can be constituted only under the condition of difference and differentiation, then, the Other is necessary for the very being of the former. The dialectical (contradictory) relationship gives way to reflexive (mutually conditioning) relationship. This new relationship accords respectability, legitimacy and autonomy to the hitherto considered Other — the minorities, ethnicities etc. Autonomy of particularity and heteronomy of societal totality seem to be emerging as the basis of the third millennium civilisation. But the homogenizing trends inherent in globalisation seem to be bringing in, form the backdoor, the old polarity of the determining Self (the consumers under the illusion of being the choosers, the King); the new polarity is more complex, more dangerous. So between the Self and the Other who would have the laugh?

Tamil leaders turn to God
by Papri Sriraman

CHENNAI: With Assembly elections due in three months, the top rivals in Tamil politics, Chief Minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and former Chief Minister J. Jayalalitha of the All-India Anna DMK (AIADMK) are turning to the Gods.

Jayalalitha last week took a list of her party’s candidates to the Kamakshi temple nearby to seek divine sanction. Karunanidhi, whose DMK’s guiding philosophy has always been rationalism, is highlighting how even the late C. Annadurai, the state’s first Chief Minister, accepted the existence of God.

Karunanidhi went so far as to “confess” at a wedding on Sunday that he could well have turned out a leftist if “leaders like Anna (Annadurai) were not born in Tamil Nadu.” He, however, hastily added he would have been a “practicing communist” like Karl Marx and Lenin and “not like today’s Communists.”

With religious affairs such as the Ayodhya dispute increasingly dominating national politics, the two rival politicians are making their “godly” moves with a view to ingratiating themselves with the various smaller parties that need to align with one of the two if they are to make an electoral impact this summer.

At the same time, Karunanidhi has taken to calling the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that rules the Centre and of which the DMK is a partner, as “Secular”, while he finds Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi to be communal because she took a dip at Allahabad during the Kumbh mela. By the same token, he holds Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to be “non-communal” as he did not travel to Allahabad for the holy dip.

Jayalalitha’s religious forays have seen her go, besides the Kamakshi temple, to Mysore where she offered prayers at the Chamundeswari temple. Her friend and party functionary N. Sasikala is believed to have conferred with Sankaracharya of Kancheepuram and sought his blessing for the AIADMK candidates.

— India Abroad News Service

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS 

Love grows not in the garden,

nor is it sold in the marketplace.

Whosoever likes to purchase,

be he a king or subject,

can offer his head and have it in return.

***

Everyone takes the Name of love

but none truly recognises its essence.

That which endures all the twenty-four hours

That is love.

***

If ye heard in exchange for the head

love being sold in the market,

Lose no time in negotiating the bargain:

Instantly sever thy head and go in for love.

***

Let thy love be the Chakor's love for the moon:

Even if the head severe from the body falls

to the ground,

Its gaze still fixed on the moon.

***

Great is the love of fish;

aught falls short of it.

As soon as it is separated from water,

she gives up her life.

***

When love struck its shafts

and went deep into my heart;

Every pore of the body cried out,

'Oh! my Dear Oh! my dear'.

It did not need lips to say that.

***

When there is love, there are no rules,

no reason and no formalities.

When the mind is in ecstacy of love,

who counts dates and days.

— From the couplets of
Sant Kabir

—The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 6:1-3.