Fertility, Faith, & the Future of the West - Books & Culture
the Future of the WestA conversation with Phillip Longman.Interview by W. Bradford Wilcox
Phillip Longman is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, where he studies health care policy and demography. A former editor at U. S. News & World Report, Longman is the winner of UCLA's Gerald Loeb Award, the top prize for investigative journalism from Investigative Reporters and Editors. His 2004 book The Empty Cradle (Basic Books) explores the impact of declining fertility rates on the social, economic, and political health of societies across the globe.
Since the 1960s, many in the West have been deeply concerned about the social and environmental consequences of population growth—witness, for instance, the popularity of Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. In the United States, our population recently passed the 300-million mark. Should we in the West still be concerned about population growth at home and abroad?
World population is still increasing by some 77 million annually. That's equivalent to adding a whole new country the size of Egypt every year. Yet here is a curious fact few people know: the number of children under 5 in the world is actually smaller than in 1990.
How can this be? Mostly it is because of the massive global decline in birthrates. Now, in literally every region outside of sub-Saharan Africa, the average woman no longer bears enough children to replace the population. For now, world population continues to grow, though at a slower and slower rate, primarily because of the enormous increase in the numbers of elderly people. But many countries, such as Russia and Japan, are already shrinking in absolute size, and on current trends, global depopulation will occur within the lifetime of today's young adults.
Why should we be worried about falling birthrates in Europe and the United States? What are the social, economic, and political implications of this demographic phenomenon for the West?
For nations, as for people, there are many benefits to not having children, at least until you grow old. Many economists believe, for example, that falling birth rates helped make possible the economic boom that occurred first in Japan and then in many other Asian nations, beginning in the 1960s. As the relative number of children declined, so did the burden of their dependency, leaving more resources available for adults to invest and enjoy.
But over time, a falling birthrate means not just fewer children but also fewer workers, even as the population of dependent elders increases. That's the bind that grips more and more of the world today. There are fewer and fewer working-aged people to support each elder. This is true within the formal systems we use to provide support in old age, such as Social Security, Medicare, and private pension plans. And it is also true within the family. When you grow up with few or no siblings, as is now becoming the norm throughout much of the world, there is often no one else available to share in the burden of looking after one's ailing parents.
Ultimately, low fertility means population aging and population decline. This is not all bad. A population dominated by middle-aged and elderly people, for example, is probably less inclined to send its few children off to war. But our economy, particularly large sectors like housing and transportation, has always depended on population growth to sustain economic growth. Similarly, the government programs we use to create security in old age, like Social Security as currently structured, depend on an ever increasing supply of youth.
At best, all the major institutions of our society will have to be fundamentally reformed to deal with a world in which each new generation is smaller than the last. Refusing to face up to this means rising poverty, increased taxes, depleted savings, lower investment, and a very real risk that excessive government borrowing and pension debt will tank the world economy. All this could happen much sooner than most people realize. Today, for example, the United States has a fairly healthy birthrate compared to the rest of the industrialized world, but it has grown dependent on massive borrowing from rapidly aging nations. Germany, Japan, and China are growing so old that they will soon be drawing down their savings and repatriating their investments in U.S. debt. This implies a complete restructuring of the world economy—one that could well entail a prolonged global recession or depression.
You are a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a progressive think tank. Why should progressives be concerned about fertility declines in the West? How do fertility declines specifically threaten progressive values and public policies?
It's fair to say that most self-described "progressives" don't agree with me that low fertility is a problem. Many environmentalists, for example, believe that fewer people means a cleaner environment. Other progressives suppose that a decline in population would increase the amount of food and other resources available to the poor. Many feminists, gays, and "childless by choice" people in general feel threatened by suggestions that society needs more children. And when it's pointed out that the lowest birthrates are generally found among the most "progressive" people, then the conversation gets really heated.
On all these counts, I believe progressives are in denial. Today in the United States, for example, we have far cleaner air and water than we did in the 1940s, when the population was just half its current size. That's no paradox. Population growth is a spur to more efficient and cleaner use of resources, so our cities are no longer choked with smoke from steam engines and our cars get far better mileage and are far less polluting. Similarly, population growth is what drove us as a society to find far more productive ways to grow food. Thanks to increased crop yields, per capita food production is higher than ever, even as world population surpasses 6 billion. At the same time, there is more forested land in the United States than in the 19th century because so much less acreage is needed for farmland.
Progressives also tend to forget that many of their positions on human reproduction, such as a "woman's right to choose," only won widespread support when fears of overpopulation began to pervade the culture in the 1960s and '70s. Until then, bans on abortion, birth control, and homosexuality, for example, were justified in many people's minds by fears of underpopulation, which left questions of human reproduction too important to be settled by individual "choice." They also forget that if progressives themselves "forget to have children" then the future belongs to people who have opposing values. Finally, progressives forget that without a growing population, such "crown jewels" of the welfare state as Social Security lose their financial sustainability.
How might dramatic population declines in Europe, and the severe economic and political challenges they pose to countries like Germany, which may soon see its pension system collapse under the weight of its own demographic decline, affect élite thinking about the family? Many scholars, public policy analysts, and journalists I'm familiar with tend to assume that the family is simply destined to grow ever weaker. Might dramatic demographic developments change élite thinking about the family? Might such developments also change the kinds of family-related public policies Western élites support?
During the 19th and especially the 20th century, the state gradually took over many of the functions once performed by the family—notably education and support in old age. Élites have generally cheered this process on. But more and more in the future, individuals will find that they cannot rely on the élites who govern them. They will see health and pension benefits cut, even as taxes rise. They will see funding for education squeezed by the ever growing burden of providing even minimal benefits to the dependent elderly. This implies that more and more people will be forced to rely again on the traditional, extended family. People will need to have children and raise them well if they hope to find security in old age. For the same reason, they will also have to sacrifice on behalf of their aging parents so that their own children grow up to see this as a moral duty.
Today, élites who are uncomfortable with this future are calling for the state to take over still more responsibilities from the family—for example, by offering subsidies for child care, greater family allowances, or even bonuses to parents, all of which are being tried in Europe and much of Asia. I'm not opposed to such measures on ideological grounds, but I'm doubtful about their potential to boost the birthrate for more than a short time unless very serious amounts of money are involved, and that creates huge political problems.
If you are going to pay people to have children, you're going to spend a lot on people who would have had them anyway. And meanwhile, people who currently see no reason to become parents are not going to be persuaded by the offer of even tens of thousands of dollars in benefits. In the United States, the direct cost of raising a middle-class child born this year through age 18, according to government estimates, exceeds $200,000—not including college. Meanwhile, in an age in which most women have the opportunity to join the paid workforce, the cost of motherhood—in lost wages and compromised careers—is often measured in the millions.
The huge bundle of benefits World War II veterans received under the G.I. Bill does seem to have contributed to that era's baby boom. But in those days, we didn't have to pay for Medicare, and Social Security was only a tiny percentage of federal spending. The median age of voters was also much lower then than now, and the feminist and environmental movements were still in the future. For all these reasons, I think élites are going to have a hard time selling pronatalism on a scale that's sufficient to the problem. In the end, I see élites simply losing their legitimacy because they cannot maintain, much less expand the welfare state in an aging society.
If the demographic predictions you make in The Empty Cradle come to pass, how might they affect the relative position of orthodox religions in the West? In other words, what role might Islam, evangelical Protestantism, or traditional Catholicism play in Western countries that have experienced subreplacement fertility for 40 to 50 years? How might their distinctive approaches to family life look to ordinary people? To élites?
On current trends, Europe's population just withers away. But I don't expect current trends to continue indefinitely in Europe or the West in general, for a special reason.
In Asian countries such as Japan, nearly everyone eventually marries and eventually has, almost without exception, one child. In Europe, and the West in general, by contrast, there is far more diversity in reproductive behavior. Among American baby boomers, for example, nearly a fifth of us never had children, and another 17 percent had only one.
The high incidence of childless and single-child families in the West has one big implication many overlook. It means a very large proportion of the children that are being born are being produced by a small subset of the current population. And who are the people who are still having large families today?
The stereotypical answer is poor people, or dumb people, or members of minority groups. But birth rates among American racial and ethnic minority groups are plummeting. The more accurate answer is deeply religious people.
To be sure, religious fundamentalists of all varieties are themselves having fewer children than in the past. But whether they be Mormons, Orthodox Jews, or Islamic or Christian fundamentalists, devout member of these Abrahamic religions have on average far larger families than do the secular elements within their society.
In Europe, for example, the fertility differential between believers and nonbelievers has recently been estimated at 15-20 percent. Though children born into religious families often do not become religious themselves, many do, especially if they themselves go on to have children. Meanwhile, of course, the childless stand no chance of passing along their values to their progeny.
The faithful thus begin to inherit society by default. The West's total population may fall or stagnate, perhaps for quite awhile; but those who remain will be disproportionately committed to God and family, whether they be Christians, Muslims, Jews, or members of new pro-natal faiths. Let us just hope that this new age of faith will also be an age of peace.
W. Bradford Wilcox, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, is the author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Univ. of Chicago Press).
Friday, May 25, 2007
Dera chaos lets radicals raise head
Dera chaos lets radicals raise head
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Dera chaos lets radicals raise head
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By IBNlive.com
Friday May 25, 09:56 AM Chandigarh: The Dera controversy has given Punjab's hardliners and dormant organisations an opportunity to move out from the shadows to occupy center stage. It has also turned into an opportunity for the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee – SGPC to reassert itself.It's a passionate religious debate that the Dera Sacha Sauda has stoked in Punjab frighteningly familiar for those who battled years of militancy, but also highly enticing for others, who love fishing in troubled waters. “We want the Deras closed,” said Bhai Mohkam Singh, a hardliner.Hardliners like Mohkam Singh had been lying low since the end of militancy in the state. But with the Deras emerging as a powerful religious counterweight, radical Sikhs are making it clear they're out for a long battle. Here's the head of the organisation once headed by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. “First it was the Nirnakaris, then the Dera Sacha Sauda and we also know who are the others who are not preaching the Guru's teachings in the right way – such as Ashutosh Maharaj and Baba Bhaniarawala,” said Head of Damdami Taksal Sant Harnam Singh Bhindranwale.Harnam Singh now heads the organisation (Damdami Taksal) once headed by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the radical supporter of Khalistan.Experts are warning against the growing influence of radicals on the SGPC and the Akal Takht “If it is a principled move on the part of the radicals and the Akal Takht to get Deras closed which is totally undemocratic,” said Pramod Kumar of Institute for Development Communications.“SGPC and Akal Takht…the need is they should send these radicals back to the barracks as early as possible,” Kumar added.The Government, however, says it is aware of the problem. “We are keeping a close watch on the situation,” said Punjab government Spokesperson H S Bains.The reason that the Dera-Sikh standoff turned into such a complex problem is also because hardliners have not let the opportunity to take center stage go by. The question is how long will this Dera controversy boost keep them going and will they continue to stoke the fires in Punjab?
TOP STORIES
Dera chaos lets radicals raise head
Enlarge Photo
By IBNlive.com
Friday May 25, 09:56 AM Chandigarh: The Dera controversy has given Punjab's hardliners and dormant organisations an opportunity to move out from the shadows to occupy center stage. It has also turned into an opportunity for the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee – SGPC to reassert itself.It's a passionate religious debate that the Dera Sacha Sauda has stoked in Punjab frighteningly familiar for those who battled years of militancy, but also highly enticing for others, who love fishing in troubled waters. “We want the Deras closed,” said Bhai Mohkam Singh, a hardliner.Hardliners like Mohkam Singh had been lying low since the end of militancy in the state. But with the Deras emerging as a powerful religious counterweight, radical Sikhs are making it clear they're out for a long battle. Here's the head of the organisation once headed by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. “First it was the Nirnakaris, then the Dera Sacha Sauda and we also know who are the others who are not preaching the Guru's teachings in the right way – such as Ashutosh Maharaj and Baba Bhaniarawala,” said Head of Damdami Taksal Sant Harnam Singh Bhindranwale.Harnam Singh now heads the organisation (Damdami Taksal) once headed by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the radical supporter of Khalistan.Experts are warning against the growing influence of radicals on the SGPC and the Akal Takht “If it is a principled move on the part of the radicals and the Akal Takht to get Deras closed which is totally undemocratic,” said Pramod Kumar of Institute for Development Communications.“SGPC and Akal Takht…the need is they should send these radicals back to the barracks as early as possible,” Kumar added.The Government, however, says it is aware of the problem. “We are keeping a close watch on the situation,” said Punjab government Spokesperson H S Bains.The reason that the Dera-Sikh standoff turned into such a complex problem is also because hardliners have not let the opportunity to take center stage go by. The question is how long will this Dera controversy boost keep them going and will they continue to stoke the fires in Punjab?
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Activists propose, apparatchiks oppose Somnath's president bid
Activists prTOP STORIES
Activists propose, apparatchiks oppose Somnath's president bid
By IANS
Friday May 25, 11:06 AM
New Delhi, May 25 (IANS) His supporters in the party want to see him in Rashtrapati Bhavan, although the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leadership is bitterly opposed to Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee pitching for the country's top post.
According to CPI-M sources, the party does not favour any of its leaders taking up crucial constitutional posts because it would have serious repercussions for the party that believes in ideological purity in this era of coalition politics.
The party says that if Chatterjee were to become the president now and if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were to take power in 2009, the CPI-M leader would end speaking for the government before parliament's budget sessions and when he travels abroad.
'It will be extremely embarrassing for a person like Chatterjee to represent a rightwing government,' a CPI-M MP from West Bengal told IANS.
Party sources added that the CPI-M also did not want one of its men to become the president because it would entail taking support from the Congress, which is a frequent target of Marxist criticism.
'If a CPI-M man becomes the president as a UPA (United Progressive Alliance) candidate, people will laugh at us for attacking the government while taking their help to get into Rashtrapati Bhavan,' the MP argued.
However, those who want Chatterjee as the country's head of state say these arguments are not tenable.
'If the communists do not want to take up a constitutional post, why did they field Lakshmi Saigal against A.P.J. Abdul Kalam in 2002?' asked a leader of the party from southern India who did not want to be named.
To such criticism, politburo member Sitaram Yechury says that Saigal's candidacy was an act of protest against BJP's unwillingness to give former president K.R. Narayanan a second chance as president.
Chatterjee supporters also point out that the Left parties had campaigned for Narayanan, who was a Congress candidate in Marxist mould and that he had been in the post when the BJP ruled India.
In the process, the Left favourite did end up speaking for a BJP government. CPI-M sources say just as Narayanan stood up to BJP over the Gujarat violence of 2002, nothing prevents a Marxist president from opposing government actions.
'Why have you made Chatterjee the speaker of the Lok Sabha?' asked a party leader, reacting to the leadership arguments that it would like to shun constitutional posts.
A Lok Sabha speaker, this leader said, also has to work closely with the government, even if he is not in agreement with the government or its policies.
Determined to have their way, those backing Chatterjee have given their points of view in writing to the CPI-M politburo, which meets Friday and Saturday here to discuss several issues including upcoming presidential elections. opose, apparatchiks oppose Somnath's president bid
Activists propose, apparatchiks oppose Somnath's president bid
By IANS
Friday May 25, 11:06 AM
New Delhi, May 25 (IANS) His supporters in the party want to see him in Rashtrapati Bhavan, although the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leadership is bitterly opposed to Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee pitching for the country's top post.
According to CPI-M sources, the party does not favour any of its leaders taking up crucial constitutional posts because it would have serious repercussions for the party that believes in ideological purity in this era of coalition politics.
The party says that if Chatterjee were to become the president now and if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were to take power in 2009, the CPI-M leader would end speaking for the government before parliament's budget sessions and when he travels abroad.
'It will be extremely embarrassing for a person like Chatterjee to represent a rightwing government,' a CPI-M MP from West Bengal told IANS.
Party sources added that the CPI-M also did not want one of its men to become the president because it would entail taking support from the Congress, which is a frequent target of Marxist criticism.
'If a CPI-M man becomes the president as a UPA (United Progressive Alliance) candidate, people will laugh at us for attacking the government while taking their help to get into Rashtrapati Bhavan,' the MP argued.
However, those who want Chatterjee as the country's head of state say these arguments are not tenable.
'If the communists do not want to take up a constitutional post, why did they field Lakshmi Saigal against A.P.J. Abdul Kalam in 2002?' asked a leader of the party from southern India who did not want to be named.
To such criticism, politburo member Sitaram Yechury says that Saigal's candidacy was an act of protest against BJP's unwillingness to give former president K.R. Narayanan a second chance as president.
Chatterjee supporters also point out that the Left parties had campaigned for Narayanan, who was a Congress candidate in Marxist mould and that he had been in the post when the BJP ruled India.
In the process, the Left favourite did end up speaking for a BJP government. CPI-M sources say just as Narayanan stood up to BJP over the Gujarat violence of 2002, nothing prevents a Marxist president from opposing government actions.
'Why have you made Chatterjee the speaker of the Lok Sabha?' asked a party leader, reacting to the leadership arguments that it would like to shun constitutional posts.
A Lok Sabha speaker, this leader said, also has to work closely with the government, even if he is not in agreement with the government or its policies.
Determined to have their way, those backing Chatterjee have given their points of view in writing to the CPI-M politburo, which meets Friday and Saturday here to discuss several issues including upcoming presidential elections. opose, apparatchiks oppose Somnath's president bid
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Yahoo! Mail - jacobthanni@yahoo.co.in
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THE VISION OF THE WORLD IN GODBy Jurgen Moltmann
trans. Marc Batko & printed here with permission[These excerpts from Jurgen Moltmann's writings are translated fromthe German on the World Wide Web. Jurgen Moltmann, emeritus professorsystematic theology at the University of Tubingen, is the author of"Theology of Hope," "The Crucified God," "The Church in the Power ofthe Spirit" and "God in Creation."]Mysticism has been reproached again and again for contempt of theworld and hostility to the body. Ideas of neo-Platonic idealism andGnostic dualism can be easily found in the writings of mysticaltheologians. Surprisingly a pantheistic vision of the world in Godand God in the world is emphasized in many of these theologians. "Allis one and one is all," says the "Theologia Deutsch." For thepoet-monk Ernesto Cardenal, all nature is nothing but "God's tangiblematerialized love," a "reflection of God's beauty" that is full of"love letters to us."Mystical theologians certainly acknowledge the Old Testament doctrine of creation as in Barth's "Church Dogmatics." But they prefer the terms "pouring" and "flowing", "fountain" and "well," "sun" and "shining" for their vision of the world from God. For their vision of the world in God, they use the terms "homecoming, " "meditation, " "immersion," and "dissolution. "In the history of thought, this is the neo-Platonic language of the emanation of all things from the all-one and their re-emanation in the all-one. Understood theologically, this is the language ofpneumatology. Unlike creation and God's historical works," the HolySpirit is "poured out" on all flesh (Joel 2,28ff; Acts 2,16ff) and inour hearts (Rom 5,5). One is "born" again from the spirit (Joh 3,3).The gifts of the spirit are not created ex nihilo but originate fromthe Holy Spirit. They are divine powers. The spirit making alive"fills" creation with eternal life in that the spirit "comes" to allthings and "indwells" all things. In the history of the Holy Spirit,another presence of God is revealed than in the creation at thebeginning. People in their corporeality (1 Cor 6,13-20) and then thenew heaven and the new earth (Rev 21) become the "temple" indwelt byGod. That is the eternal Sabbath, the rest of God and the rest inGod. Therefore the history of the spirit aims at that perfectiondescribed by Paul with the pantheistic- sounding formula "God will beall in all" (1 Cor 15,28). With their neo-Platonic sounding doctrineof creation and redemption, the mystical theologians emphasized thishistory of the spirit poured out on all flesh and this new worldglorified in God.A new specifically Christian vision of reality is hidden in mystical theology that is marked by the believed incarnation of the Son and the experienced indwelling of God's spirit. The ecclesiastical repetition of the Yahwist and priestly doctrine of creation can not be seen as a creative achievement of Christian theology. This doctrine of creation can be Christian and non-Christian. In it, a distance of the Creator and the creature occurs that does not reflect the Christian experience of God. If the Israelite doctrine of creation is a reflection of Israel's exodus experience, the Christian doctrine of creation must be a reflection of Christendom' s experience of Christ and the spirit. Seen theologically, mystical "pantheism" is an unsuccessful step inthis direction. Gregor Palamas' doctrine of the energy of the HolySpirit leads here: "The world overflows with divine power, working andshining init."We come back to the substantiation of this pantheistic vision of the world in God.In the death on the cross, God takes evil, sin and rejection onhimself and transforms them to good, grace and election in thesacrifice of his infinite love. All evil, sin, suffering anddamnation are "in God." These dislocations are endured by him,annulled in him and transformed by him "to our benefit." Hissuffering is "the miracle of miracles of divine love" (Paul of theCross). Nothing can be excluded from that divine love. Thereforeeverything lives from the omnipotence of his suffering andinexhaustible love. There is no nothingness threatening creation anymore. The nothingness destroyed in God; intransitory life appears.On account of the divine cross, the creation lives from God and istransformed in God.Paul first sees this dissolved contradiction in the abolition of the opposition of life and death in Christ's rule: "If we live, we live to the Lord and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Rom 14,7ff). According to 1 Cor 15,28, the future of Christ's presence – embracing the living and the dead is the presence of God himself filling all things.Without Christ's cross, this vision of God in the world would be pure illusion. The suffering of a single child would prove it an illusion. Without the knowledge of the suffering of God's inexhaustible love, no "pantheism" in this world of death could be endured. Pantheism would immediately become pan-nihilism.The knowledge of the crucified God gives foundation and duration to this vision of the world in God. In the rule of the crucified, theliving and dead come to eternal community. The sins and suffering ofthe whole world sink in the cross of the Resurrected. Therefore thevision of God in all things and all things in God arises under thecross. Whoever believes God in the God-abandonment of the crucifiedsees him everywhere and in all things as life is experienced moreintensively after an experience of death.This vision of God's world is alive in the experiences of thepersecuted and martyrs who feel God's presence in prison. This visionis alive with the mystics who find God's presence in the dark night ofthe soul. It shines in the piety of simple existence. God is presentin the darkness of the lived moment. "In him we live, move and haveour being" (Acts 17,28) because "from him, through him and to him areall things" (Rom 11,36). from: Jurgen Moltmann, Gotteserfahrungen: Hoffnung, Angst, Mystik, 1979GOD IS THE CRITIQUE OF THE PERSONThis thesis stands in opposition to the foundation of the modernanthropocentric view of the world where the person is God's criterion.The age of anthropology, the anthropocentric age, began with theRenaissance and the Enlightenment. Anthropology in the modernempathic sense presupposes theology at the mercy of anthropology asits heir. One of the central myths of the modern age is the myth:"God is dead! We have killed him!" (Nietzsche). The mystery oftheology was revealed as anthropology. The person is not God'slikeness. Persons are not God's creatures. The gods are thecreatures of human fear and longing. Ludwig Feuerbach underscoredthis suspicion of the modern person in his religion criticism.Feuerbach reversed subject and predicate and reduced all thepredicates of God to the human subject. Consciousness of the infiniteis nothing but the infinity of consciousness. The consciousness ofGod is nothing but the self-assurance of the person. God is a wishprojection of the person who breaks down with himself. God is thebetter self of the person, so to speak, who then worships himself.How can the person come to himself? Only in this way can heunderstand his religious ideals as his own projections, appropriatethem and withdraw in himself. Then he is no longer the divided personwho transports his better self into heaven. He is a person unitedwith himself who realizes his better self on earth. In his negation,Feuerbach criticized the religious pictures of human fear of oneself.In his criticism, he followed the Old Testament prohibition of images."You shall not make yourself a graven image or any likeness… youshall not bow down to them or serve them" (Ex 20,4). He took up theold tradition of negative theology: "We do not know what God is"(Thomas Aquinas). But in his perspective, he was religious again."With inclusion of nature, the new philosophy makes the person… thesole universal and highest theme of philosophy. Anthropology becomesthe universal science. "Person with person, the unity of I and you,is God." Thus Feuerbach believed in all God's predicates and onlytransferred them to the person. According to Feuerbach, the mysteryof theology is anthropology. The mystery of his anthropology isanthropo-theism (deification of the person). Therefore he concluded:"politics must become our religion. However that is only possiblewhen we have a Most High in our contemplation. " But what is themeaning of religion criticism when politics is made religion? If thede-divinization of the heaven of religion leads to the deification ofthe person on earth, what does anthropology mean?If God's dethronement makes the person into the god of himself, there is no sense speaking of anthropology. God is dead and should beburied. But if the heir takes God's place, the heir is god and not aperson any more, "a god in becoming" (R. Garaudy). The misery ofmodern anthropology on the ground of an inherited theology lies in itstheological and religious inheritance. The person must do what hecannot do as a total person, an ideal person, a possibility person ordecision-making person. Deification of the person makes the personmore inhuman, not more human. An anthropology inherited in the modernpost-Christian sense of theology loses sight of the real person andthe real God. Since this anthropology equates God and the person, itcannot speak clearly any more.The modern age makes the person into the iconoclastic word against God. An iconoclastic movement against religious pictures of God starts from human self-knowledge. However this is only sensible when the real God becomes the iconoclastic word against the person. An iconoclastic movement against images of man starts from the knowledge of God, in which the person looks at himself in a mirror, justifies, idolizes and worships himself. Knowledge of God and self-knowledge are connected. No knowledge of God is possible without self-knowledge (and without religion criticism) and no self-knowledge is possible without knowledge of God (and without self-criticism) . Anunderstanding of transcendence that humanizes without estranging oridolizing and an understanding of immanence making possible finitefreedom without resigning or tyrannizing only arise in the mutualiconoclasm of criticism.Anthropology in the empathic sense of the murder of God is no longer possible today. Anthropology must abandon its claimed anthropo-theism to speak more humanly about the person and not strainthe person with absolute demands that he can only disappoint.Auschwitz and Hiroshima must be forgotten to hold the person as adivine being. The person becomes more human when transposed in thesituation of leaving his self-deification, idolatry, profits andachievements. But what really transposes him into this situation?The critical task of theology is to withdraw the absolutetotalitarianism and legalism of salvation from anthropology. Theologyfirst comes to itself when it takes pleasure in anthropologicalreligion criticism and takes seriously the image prohibition.Conversely, anthropology first comes to the ground of reality when ittakes pleasure in critical theology and respects the wholly other inwhom all human self-knowledge becomes a finite fragment. Without thiswholly other, moral happiness and imperfect justice are unacceptable.Without the longing for the wholly other, the person loses thedignity of his dubiousness. Without trust in God, the protest againstinjustice and the struggle for justice grow weary.From: Jurgen Moltmann, Mensch: Christliche Anthropologie in denKonflikten der Gegenwert, 1979FAITH PRESSES TO POLITICAL ACTIONThis question has at least two traps. Firstly, one would like toknow more exactly what faith is really proclaimed. As everybodyknows, there are many forms of religious faith. There are ways offaith with strong inspirations and motives for political action whileother ways of faith dismiss political action because they are notinterested in the world of politics. Both ways of faith occur inChristianity.WHAT FAITH REQUIRES POLITICAL ACTION?Secondly, some would like to know in advance what political action is crucial. Welcoming a faith when it confirms our political views is all too human. But when a faith decries our political ideas and desires, we prefer faith not to meddle in political affairs. To what politics does faith press?We begin with essential doubt in a politics from faith as among many Christians and non-Christians. "What does this mean for theologians? " Axel Springer recently asked nervously. Springer is editor-in-chief of the Hamburg Abendblattes that published a series on "Rebels in Christ's Name." People turn away from God and churches bear responsibility, Axel Springer summarized. In the last decades, the state reduced its responsibility for alleviating poverty and distress. The churches and especially theologians have been on the lookout for other worldly tasks instead of worrying more intensively about pastoral care or spiritual welfare. The result was a loss in moral authority. The religious was repressive. The churches abandoned moral authority in part because they were too concerned about politics. Thus we help the modern person so he becomes capable again of learning to see transcendence and goodness in the world, AxelSpringer says. Let us help the churches in this time of apostasy fromGod so they become connecting links between people and the Most High.If the churches do not rightly fulfill this religious function ofspiritual welfare to the people, Springer's newspaper house willassume this pastoral commission out of responsibility in the Christianspirit as it has always exercised it in a relaxing and depoliticizingway in Germany since the war.Does faith press to political action? Certainly not, according to this interpretation, at least not directly. Here faith is something emotional, religious and very personal. Faith is sense fortranscendence and therefore should be far elevated above politicalquestions. If it affects politics, it is only in the sense ofmoderation toward political and religious radicalism.For this faith, good and evil are mixed in the world. The divine and the satanic wrestle with each other. The person is just and sinful at once. Faith stands in this ambiguous world and yet at the same time is above it. In the positive and negative, this may be the current picture of faith and of the role of churches in politics. Let us first find out what is positive and what is negative about this.Faith here is faith in God, in a higher being, in a governingProvidence. Faith is religious faith and not political faith in anidea, leader or party. For this faith, salvation does not come frompolitics. Therefore politics cannot bring disaster in an ultimatesense. This faith doubts the absolute and total meaning of politicalaction. For this faith, the political is something earthly,transitory and human, in any case something non-divine. Whoeverbelieves in God does not believe in Caesar any more.The positive of this faith lies in the disillusioning of politics. We cannot be forced to political action as though everything depended on it. It liberates to sober action for what is politically necessary. On the other side, the political meaning of such faith is doubted. Whoever calms himself that God will accomplish whatever happens politically is apolitical. He can come to terms with every injustice befalling him or others. Because he believes in a God and a kindly Providence, he does not need to be very worried about political fate. He has his eternal comfort in his God and therefore can feel relieved from world responsibility. This faith enervates political action, its critics say, and leads back to a childish responsibility. That is the negative.Faith can be hope in a heaven in the world to come of this worldhistory. The political becomes the penultimate for whoever sets hishope on the world to come. Paradise cannot be realized on earth. Onearth, everything is and remains ambiguous. Suffering and trouble arepart of this earth. The positive in this view is that it relativizesevery political standpoint and opposes all totalitarian claims ofpolitical parties. The negative is that this hope in a world to comeseduces to resignation in this life. A secret disinterest in allpolitical systems and campaigns is always the result.Whether monarchy, democracy, capitalism or socialism, all earthlyforms of society are equally near and far from God and the world tocome. One can console oneself about good and bad conditions. Theyoung Karl Marx found religion was the sigh of the oppressed creation,the heart of a heartless world and the spirit of spiritlessconditions, i.e. opium of the people. If this religious faith isannulled, the person is literally "forced" to political action. Thecriticism of religion disappoints the person so he thinks and actslike a person who comes to his senses.This faith is a heart faith. Whoever believes relies on himselfalone despite dependence on tradition and the community of the church.Faith leads into isolation. The positive is seen in the infiniteworth of the individual person before God. Whoever believes this wayis no longer determined in his innermost being by political interestsor class- and ethnic affiliations. He is free and critical towardsociety. While many praise this Christian subjectivism, the negativeconsequences must also be recognized. They lie in the politicalindifference of the heart. If one is unassailable in his innermostsoul through faith, all outward things become unimportant. Faithpreserves his purity of heart. Therefore he finds that politics isalways a "dirty business." As history shows, these believers leavepolitics to others, to those who promise the most peace and securityto them.Does "Christian" faith press to a certain political action? We have discussed two forms of faith that are called religious. They have nothing especially Christian in themselves apart from the fact that they are practiced by Christians. General faith in God, hope in a world to come and pious introspection do not need to be Christian.Christian faith in God is faith in the crucified Christ or as Luthersaid more sharply faith in the "crucified God."Does this faith press to political action? I think the answer isunequivocally yes. The cross is not a religious symbol but aninstrument of political execution. The cross was a politicalpunishment. If it is true that Jesus was condemned according toIsrael's law as a blasphemer, he did not endure the punishment forblasphemy at that time, namely stoning, that the Jews executed onStephen. Crucifixion was a Roman way of execution reserved to theRoman occupying power. According to Roman law, it was the punishmentfor political rebels and agitators against the Roman Empire. Jesuswas certainly not a Jewish freedom-fighter like the two zealotscrucified with him.Jesus was not an apolitical itinerant preacher, a "charmingcarpenter" who drew through the cheerful Galilean populace fromvillage to village on a gentle mule, as middle class romanticism (E.Renan) described him. He was also not a forerunner of Che Guevara asthe anti-bourgeois revolution stylized him. Nevertheless he waspolitically executed because he threatened the religious foundationsof the Roman Empire. Christians who believe God in the crucifiedshould be well aware of this since the starting point and standard fortheir political action lie in the political event of his crucifixion.We can only briefly describe the consequences. If the one desecrated by the state power with the cross is God's Christ, the lowest political idea is inverted to the highest. What the state defined as the basest degradation, the cross, has the highest dignity. God's glory rests on the suffering and dying of the humiliated, not on the crown of the powerful any more. If this crucified is the supreme authority for Christians, then all religious justification "from above" is denied political powers and principalities. Belief in political-religious authority ends for one who believes in the crucified. What results for political action? The resolute struggle against political idolatry, political cult of persons and their consequences in political tutelage, estrangement and apathy arises. No area of life is as filled with idols feared and loved above all things, alienation and underdevelopment as politics and the political religion of a people. Through Christ's cross, all justification "from above" is taken from political authorities for Christians. Political rule can only be justified "from below."A political iconoclastic movement starts from faith in the crucified. Submission under a visible image always exists in representative institutions. This is idolatry. The Puritans in England and America knew this. "Democracy has no monuments or medallions and imprints no head of a man on its coins. Iconoclasm is its true nature," declared John Quincy Adams, the fourth president of the US. However if the true nature of democracy is political iconoclasm and permanent revisionism of fortified institutions and customs, then democratic action fulfills the claim of the crucified on Christians. Liberation from the idolatry and passivity experienced by Christians in faith in the crucified God then changes into liberation from political religions and the political estrangements produced by those religions.The first effect of Christian faith on politics is exorcism,iconoclasm and the demythologization of the state. The second effectis democratization of public life. The crown rests on theconstitution of free citizens and no longer on the head of asovereign, the Puritans said. Free citizens have abolished the ruleof political castes- and classes and replaced that rule with theinternational treaty of free citizens. In their states, free citizenshave created many authorities for exercising political rule sopolitical rule is controlled by the public and set for a limited time.Democracy here does not mean a specific form of state raised to anideal. Democracy means a way and a political process of the commonwill in which as many groups and individuals as possible activelyparticipate in a society. Democracy is a society of open processesthat aims at a future of freedom and humanity involving allparticipants in its creation.God is politically present in the crucified below, according to the Christian faith, not above and a long way off. Liberation of politics from its idols and demons is a negative consequence. The democratic construction of a society from below is a positive consequence. If this freedom was won for Christians in the public event of Christ's crucifixion, this freedom must be publically responsible. This does not mean faith must accept Caesar's definition of politics that salvation comes from politics. Faith cooperates in the healing of politics, its liberation from superstition and gullibility and its activation by citizen participation in decision-making processes. Iconoclasm and democratization from below are the two most important tendencies to which faith presses in political action if it is Christian faith (p.140f).
THE VISION OF THE WORLD IN GODBy Jurgen Moltmann
trans. Marc Batko & printed here with permission[These excerpts from Jurgen Moltmann's writings are translated fromthe German on the World Wide Web. Jurgen Moltmann, emeritus professorsystematic theology at the University of Tubingen, is the author of"Theology of Hope," "The Crucified God," "The Church in the Power ofthe Spirit" and "God in Creation."]Mysticism has been reproached again and again for contempt of theworld and hostility to the body. Ideas of neo-Platonic idealism andGnostic dualism can be easily found in the writings of mysticaltheologians. Surprisingly a pantheistic vision of the world in Godand God in the world is emphasized in many of these theologians. "Allis one and one is all," says the "Theologia Deutsch." For thepoet-monk Ernesto Cardenal, all nature is nothing but "God's tangiblematerialized love," a "reflection of God's beauty" that is full of"love letters to us."Mystical theologians certainly acknowledge the Old Testament doctrine of creation as in Barth's "Church Dogmatics." But they prefer the terms "pouring" and "flowing", "fountain" and "well," "sun" and "shining" for their vision of the world from God. For their vision of the world in God, they use the terms "homecoming, " "meditation, " "immersion," and "dissolution. "In the history of thought, this is the neo-Platonic language of the emanation of all things from the all-one and their re-emanation in the all-one. Understood theologically, this is the language ofpneumatology. Unlike creation and God's historical works," the HolySpirit is "poured out" on all flesh (Joel 2,28ff; Acts 2,16ff) and inour hearts (Rom 5,5). One is "born" again from the spirit (Joh 3,3).The gifts of the spirit are not created ex nihilo but originate fromthe Holy Spirit. They are divine powers. The spirit making alive"fills" creation with eternal life in that the spirit "comes" to allthings and "indwells" all things. In the history of the Holy Spirit,another presence of God is revealed than in the creation at thebeginning. People in their corporeality (1 Cor 6,13-20) and then thenew heaven and the new earth (Rev 21) become the "temple" indwelt byGod. That is the eternal Sabbath, the rest of God and the rest inGod. Therefore the history of the spirit aims at that perfectiondescribed by Paul with the pantheistic- sounding formula "God will beall in all" (1 Cor 15,28). With their neo-Platonic sounding doctrineof creation and redemption, the mystical theologians emphasized thishistory of the spirit poured out on all flesh and this new worldglorified in God.A new specifically Christian vision of reality is hidden in mystical theology that is marked by the believed incarnation of the Son and the experienced indwelling of God's spirit. The ecclesiastical repetition of the Yahwist and priestly doctrine of creation can not be seen as a creative achievement of Christian theology. This doctrine of creation can be Christian and non-Christian. In it, a distance of the Creator and the creature occurs that does not reflect the Christian experience of God. If the Israelite doctrine of creation is a reflection of Israel's exodus experience, the Christian doctrine of creation must be a reflection of Christendom' s experience of Christ and the spirit. Seen theologically, mystical "pantheism" is an unsuccessful step inthis direction. Gregor Palamas' doctrine of the energy of the HolySpirit leads here: "The world overflows with divine power, working andshining init."We come back to the substantiation of this pantheistic vision of the world in God.In the death on the cross, God takes evil, sin and rejection onhimself and transforms them to good, grace and election in thesacrifice of his infinite love. All evil, sin, suffering anddamnation are "in God." These dislocations are endured by him,annulled in him and transformed by him "to our benefit." Hissuffering is "the miracle of miracles of divine love" (Paul of theCross). Nothing can be excluded from that divine love. Thereforeeverything lives from the omnipotence of his suffering andinexhaustible love. There is no nothingness threatening creation anymore. The nothingness destroyed in God; intransitory life appears.On account of the divine cross, the creation lives from God and istransformed in God.Paul first sees this dissolved contradiction in the abolition of the opposition of life and death in Christ's rule: "If we live, we live to the Lord and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Rom 14,7ff). According to 1 Cor 15,28, the future of Christ's presence – embracing the living and the dead is the presence of God himself filling all things.Without Christ's cross, this vision of God in the world would be pure illusion. The suffering of a single child would prove it an illusion. Without the knowledge of the suffering of God's inexhaustible love, no "pantheism" in this world of death could be endured. Pantheism would immediately become pan-nihilism.The knowledge of the crucified God gives foundation and duration to this vision of the world in God. In the rule of the crucified, theliving and dead come to eternal community. The sins and suffering ofthe whole world sink in the cross of the Resurrected. Therefore thevision of God in all things and all things in God arises under thecross. Whoever believes God in the God-abandonment of the crucifiedsees him everywhere and in all things as life is experienced moreintensively after an experience of death.This vision of God's world is alive in the experiences of thepersecuted and martyrs who feel God's presence in prison. This visionis alive with the mystics who find God's presence in the dark night ofthe soul. It shines in the piety of simple existence. God is presentin the darkness of the lived moment. "In him we live, move and haveour being" (Acts 17,28) because "from him, through him and to him areall things" (Rom 11,36). from: Jurgen Moltmann, Gotteserfahrungen: Hoffnung, Angst, Mystik, 1979GOD IS THE CRITIQUE OF THE PERSONThis thesis stands in opposition to the foundation of the modernanthropocentric view of the world where the person is God's criterion.The age of anthropology, the anthropocentric age, began with theRenaissance and the Enlightenment. Anthropology in the modernempathic sense presupposes theology at the mercy of anthropology asits heir. One of the central myths of the modern age is the myth:"God is dead! We have killed him!" (Nietzsche). The mystery oftheology was revealed as anthropology. The person is not God'slikeness. Persons are not God's creatures. The gods are thecreatures of human fear and longing. Ludwig Feuerbach underscoredthis suspicion of the modern person in his religion criticism.Feuerbach reversed subject and predicate and reduced all thepredicates of God to the human subject. Consciousness of the infiniteis nothing but the infinity of consciousness. The consciousness ofGod is nothing but the self-assurance of the person. God is a wishprojection of the person who breaks down with himself. God is thebetter self of the person, so to speak, who then worships himself.How can the person come to himself? Only in this way can heunderstand his religious ideals as his own projections, appropriatethem and withdraw in himself. Then he is no longer the divided personwho transports his better self into heaven. He is a person unitedwith himself who realizes his better self on earth. In his negation,Feuerbach criticized the religious pictures of human fear of oneself.In his criticism, he followed the Old Testament prohibition of images."You shall not make yourself a graven image or any likeness… youshall not bow down to them or serve them" (Ex 20,4). He took up theold tradition of negative theology: "We do not know what God is"(Thomas Aquinas). But in his perspective, he was religious again."With inclusion of nature, the new philosophy makes the person… thesole universal and highest theme of philosophy. Anthropology becomesthe universal science. "Person with person, the unity of I and you,is God." Thus Feuerbach believed in all God's predicates and onlytransferred them to the person. According to Feuerbach, the mysteryof theology is anthropology. The mystery of his anthropology isanthropo-theism (deification of the person). Therefore he concluded:"politics must become our religion. However that is only possiblewhen we have a Most High in our contemplation. " But what is themeaning of religion criticism when politics is made religion? If thede-divinization of the heaven of religion leads to the deification ofthe person on earth, what does anthropology mean?If God's dethronement makes the person into the god of himself, there is no sense speaking of anthropology. God is dead and should beburied. But if the heir takes God's place, the heir is god and not aperson any more, "a god in becoming" (R. Garaudy). The misery ofmodern anthropology on the ground of an inherited theology lies in itstheological and religious inheritance. The person must do what hecannot do as a total person, an ideal person, a possibility person ordecision-making person. Deification of the person makes the personmore inhuman, not more human. An anthropology inherited in the modernpost-Christian sense of theology loses sight of the real person andthe real God. Since this anthropology equates God and the person, itcannot speak clearly any more.The modern age makes the person into the iconoclastic word against God. An iconoclastic movement against religious pictures of God starts from human self-knowledge. However this is only sensible when the real God becomes the iconoclastic word against the person. An iconoclastic movement against images of man starts from the knowledge of God, in which the person looks at himself in a mirror, justifies, idolizes and worships himself. Knowledge of God and self-knowledge are connected. No knowledge of God is possible without self-knowledge (and without religion criticism) and no self-knowledge is possible without knowledge of God (and without self-criticism) . Anunderstanding of transcendence that humanizes without estranging oridolizing and an understanding of immanence making possible finitefreedom without resigning or tyrannizing only arise in the mutualiconoclasm of criticism.Anthropology in the empathic sense of the murder of God is no longer possible today. Anthropology must abandon its claimed anthropo-theism to speak more humanly about the person and not strainthe person with absolute demands that he can only disappoint.Auschwitz and Hiroshima must be forgotten to hold the person as adivine being. The person becomes more human when transposed in thesituation of leaving his self-deification, idolatry, profits andachievements. But what really transposes him into this situation?The critical task of theology is to withdraw the absolutetotalitarianism and legalism of salvation from anthropology. Theologyfirst comes to itself when it takes pleasure in anthropologicalreligion criticism and takes seriously the image prohibition.Conversely, anthropology first comes to the ground of reality when ittakes pleasure in critical theology and respects the wholly other inwhom all human self-knowledge becomes a finite fragment. Without thiswholly other, moral happiness and imperfect justice are unacceptable.Without the longing for the wholly other, the person loses thedignity of his dubiousness. Without trust in God, the protest againstinjustice and the struggle for justice grow weary.From: Jurgen Moltmann, Mensch: Christliche Anthropologie in denKonflikten der Gegenwert, 1979FAITH PRESSES TO POLITICAL ACTIONThis question has at least two traps. Firstly, one would like toknow more exactly what faith is really proclaimed. As everybodyknows, there are many forms of religious faith. There are ways offaith with strong inspirations and motives for political action whileother ways of faith dismiss political action because they are notinterested in the world of politics. Both ways of faith occur inChristianity.WHAT FAITH REQUIRES POLITICAL ACTION?Secondly, some would like to know in advance what political action is crucial. Welcoming a faith when it confirms our political views is all too human. But when a faith decries our political ideas and desires, we prefer faith not to meddle in political affairs. To what politics does faith press?We begin with essential doubt in a politics from faith as among many Christians and non-Christians. "What does this mean for theologians? " Axel Springer recently asked nervously. Springer is editor-in-chief of the Hamburg Abendblattes that published a series on "Rebels in Christ's Name." People turn away from God and churches bear responsibility, Axel Springer summarized. In the last decades, the state reduced its responsibility for alleviating poverty and distress. The churches and especially theologians have been on the lookout for other worldly tasks instead of worrying more intensively about pastoral care or spiritual welfare. The result was a loss in moral authority. The religious was repressive. The churches abandoned moral authority in part because they were too concerned about politics. Thus we help the modern person so he becomes capable again of learning to see transcendence and goodness in the world, AxelSpringer says. Let us help the churches in this time of apostasy fromGod so they become connecting links between people and the Most High.If the churches do not rightly fulfill this religious function ofspiritual welfare to the people, Springer's newspaper house willassume this pastoral commission out of responsibility in the Christianspirit as it has always exercised it in a relaxing and depoliticizingway in Germany since the war.Does faith press to political action? Certainly not, according to this interpretation, at least not directly. Here faith is something emotional, religious and very personal. Faith is sense fortranscendence and therefore should be far elevated above politicalquestions. If it affects politics, it is only in the sense ofmoderation toward political and religious radicalism.For this faith, good and evil are mixed in the world. The divine and the satanic wrestle with each other. The person is just and sinful at once. Faith stands in this ambiguous world and yet at the same time is above it. In the positive and negative, this may be the current picture of faith and of the role of churches in politics. Let us first find out what is positive and what is negative about this.Faith here is faith in God, in a higher being, in a governingProvidence. Faith is religious faith and not political faith in anidea, leader or party. For this faith, salvation does not come frompolitics. Therefore politics cannot bring disaster in an ultimatesense. This faith doubts the absolute and total meaning of politicalaction. For this faith, the political is something earthly,transitory and human, in any case something non-divine. Whoeverbelieves in God does not believe in Caesar any more.The positive of this faith lies in the disillusioning of politics. We cannot be forced to political action as though everything depended on it. It liberates to sober action for what is politically necessary. On the other side, the political meaning of such faith is doubted. Whoever calms himself that God will accomplish whatever happens politically is apolitical. He can come to terms with every injustice befalling him or others. Because he believes in a God and a kindly Providence, he does not need to be very worried about political fate. He has his eternal comfort in his God and therefore can feel relieved from world responsibility. This faith enervates political action, its critics say, and leads back to a childish responsibility. That is the negative.Faith can be hope in a heaven in the world to come of this worldhistory. The political becomes the penultimate for whoever sets hishope on the world to come. Paradise cannot be realized on earth. Onearth, everything is and remains ambiguous. Suffering and trouble arepart of this earth. The positive in this view is that it relativizesevery political standpoint and opposes all totalitarian claims ofpolitical parties. The negative is that this hope in a world to comeseduces to resignation in this life. A secret disinterest in allpolitical systems and campaigns is always the result.Whether monarchy, democracy, capitalism or socialism, all earthlyforms of society are equally near and far from God and the world tocome. One can console oneself about good and bad conditions. Theyoung Karl Marx found religion was the sigh of the oppressed creation,the heart of a heartless world and the spirit of spiritlessconditions, i.e. opium of the people. If this religious faith isannulled, the person is literally "forced" to political action. Thecriticism of religion disappoints the person so he thinks and actslike a person who comes to his senses.This faith is a heart faith. Whoever believes relies on himselfalone despite dependence on tradition and the community of the church.Faith leads into isolation. The positive is seen in the infiniteworth of the individual person before God. Whoever believes this wayis no longer determined in his innermost being by political interestsor class- and ethnic affiliations. He is free and critical towardsociety. While many praise this Christian subjectivism, the negativeconsequences must also be recognized. They lie in the politicalindifference of the heart. If one is unassailable in his innermostsoul through faith, all outward things become unimportant. Faithpreserves his purity of heart. Therefore he finds that politics isalways a "dirty business." As history shows, these believers leavepolitics to others, to those who promise the most peace and securityto them.Does "Christian" faith press to a certain political action? We have discussed two forms of faith that are called religious. They have nothing especially Christian in themselves apart from the fact that they are practiced by Christians. General faith in God, hope in a world to come and pious introspection do not need to be Christian.Christian faith in God is faith in the crucified Christ or as Luthersaid more sharply faith in the "crucified God."Does this faith press to political action? I think the answer isunequivocally yes. The cross is not a religious symbol but aninstrument of political execution. The cross was a politicalpunishment. If it is true that Jesus was condemned according toIsrael's law as a blasphemer, he did not endure the punishment forblasphemy at that time, namely stoning, that the Jews executed onStephen. Crucifixion was a Roman way of execution reserved to theRoman occupying power. According to Roman law, it was the punishmentfor political rebels and agitators against the Roman Empire. Jesuswas certainly not a Jewish freedom-fighter like the two zealotscrucified with him.Jesus was not an apolitical itinerant preacher, a "charmingcarpenter" who drew through the cheerful Galilean populace fromvillage to village on a gentle mule, as middle class romanticism (E.Renan) described him. He was also not a forerunner of Che Guevara asthe anti-bourgeois revolution stylized him. Nevertheless he waspolitically executed because he threatened the religious foundationsof the Roman Empire. Christians who believe God in the crucifiedshould be well aware of this since the starting point and standard fortheir political action lie in the political event of his crucifixion.We can only briefly describe the consequences. If the one desecrated by the state power with the cross is God's Christ, the lowest political idea is inverted to the highest. What the state defined as the basest degradation, the cross, has the highest dignity. God's glory rests on the suffering and dying of the humiliated, not on the crown of the powerful any more. If this crucified is the supreme authority for Christians, then all religious justification "from above" is denied political powers and principalities. Belief in political-religious authority ends for one who believes in the crucified. What results for political action? The resolute struggle against political idolatry, political cult of persons and their consequences in political tutelage, estrangement and apathy arises. No area of life is as filled with idols feared and loved above all things, alienation and underdevelopment as politics and the political religion of a people. Through Christ's cross, all justification "from above" is taken from political authorities for Christians. Political rule can only be justified "from below."A political iconoclastic movement starts from faith in the crucified. Submission under a visible image always exists in representative institutions. This is idolatry. The Puritans in England and America knew this. "Democracy has no monuments or medallions and imprints no head of a man on its coins. Iconoclasm is its true nature," declared John Quincy Adams, the fourth president of the US. However if the true nature of democracy is political iconoclasm and permanent revisionism of fortified institutions and customs, then democratic action fulfills the claim of the crucified on Christians. Liberation from the idolatry and passivity experienced by Christians in faith in the crucified God then changes into liberation from political religions and the political estrangements produced by those religions.The first effect of Christian faith on politics is exorcism,iconoclasm and the demythologization of the state. The second effectis democratization of public life. The crown rests on theconstitution of free citizens and no longer on the head of asovereign, the Puritans said. Free citizens have abolished the ruleof political castes- and classes and replaced that rule with theinternational treaty of free citizens. In their states, free citizenshave created many authorities for exercising political rule sopolitical rule is controlled by the public and set for a limited time.Democracy here does not mean a specific form of state raised to anideal. Democracy means a way and a political process of the commonwill in which as many groups and individuals as possible activelyparticipate in a society. Democracy is a society of open processesthat aims at a future of freedom and humanity involving allparticipants in its creation.God is politically present in the crucified below, according to the Christian faith, not above and a long way off. Liberation of politics from its idols and demons is a negative consequence. The democratic construction of a society from below is a positive consequence. If this freedom was won for Christians in the public event of Christ's crucifixion, this freedom must be publically responsible. This does not mean faith must accept Caesar's definition of politics that salvation comes from politics. Faith cooperates in the healing of politics, its liberation from superstition and gullibility and its activation by citizen participation in decision-making processes. Iconoclasm and democratization from below are the two most important tendencies to which faith presses in political action if it is Christian faith (p.140f).
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | The intellectual ties that bind
BBC NEWS UK Magazine The intellectual ties that bind
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The intellectual ties that bind
A POINT OF VIEWBy Lisa Jardine
Torn between two continents, Einstein championed co-operationWhatever the state of relations between London and Washington, Europe and the US should remember their long history of shared intellectual activity, championed chiefly by Albert Einstein, writes Lisa Jardine.
The campus of the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, in Pasadena, where I spent this week, looks more like a Latin-American hacienda than a top-flight university dedicated to teaching and research in fundamental science.
Practically all the giants of modern science have been associated with Caltech during the hundred years since its foundation. The best known of these by far is Albert Einstein, perhaps science's only folk hero - Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, forever associated with the evocative formula E = mc2 .
Caltech is where Linus Pauling pursued his research on the formation of chemical bonds between atoms in molecules and crystals, paving the way for Crick and Watson's discovery of the structure of DNA. This is also where Edwin Hubble's discoveries with the Mount Wilson telescope challenged Einstein's cosmological picture of the universe, and brought him here himself to discuss the implications of his general theory of Relativity with Caltech physicists and astronomers.
He loved Hollywood, and Hollywood loved him
...on Albert Einstein
Hear Radio 4's A Point of View The institute sits at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, in a lush landscape. Graceful jacaranda trees smothered in a purple haze of blossom, and soaring emerald-leaved palms, shade beds of bird-of-paradise flowers and headily-scented star jasmine. A long avenue of mature olive trees runs through the sunlit campus, to a pool on whose edge dozens of ebony-coloured turtles sun themselves among the reeds. Arched colonnades covered in bougainvillea border and connect the cool stuccoed buildings.
Walk up close, though, and these buildings have unexpectedly futuristic names: the Keith Spalding Building, home of the Space Infrared Telescope Facility; the Lauritsen Laboratory for high energy physics; and, a few short miles away, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and its current project LISA - the laser interferometer space antenna.
In this highly-charged intellectual environment, 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and 300 faculty work at the cutting edge of modern science.
Einstein visited Caltech for the first time in December 1930, returning in 1931-2 and 1932-3. It was while he was on his third research visit that the Nazis came to power in Germany. Einstein never returned to Europe, although he would spend the last 20 years of his life at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton rather than Caltech.
The other half of the Russell-Einstein manifestoAnd it is here at Caltech that the formidable project of transcribing and publishing the entire Einstein archive is currently being carried out. Tucked into a corner of the Caltech campus is a modest building which contains the Einstein Papers Project. Housed deep in its basement, in a row of locked black filing cabinets running the full length of one wall, are copies of more than 70,000 items - half a million pages of documentation - relating to Einstein's life and career (most originals are kept at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to which Einstein bequeathed them at his death in 1955).
Einstein's devoted assistant Helen Dukas began collecting and ordering Einstein's papers in Berlin, even before he left for America. The collection includes Einstein's letters, scientific manuscripts (published and unpublished), as well as lectures, speeches and articles on a wide range of topics from philosophy of science to education, Zionism, pacifism, and civil liberties. At Caltech a small team of dedicated researchers are editing the entire contents of the archive, transcribing them, annotating them, and publishing them volume by volume. On Monday I was given a guided tour, and shown some of the fascinating items the collection contains.
Among the papers are personal travel diaries Einstein kept whenever he was abroad. The diaries for the Caltech years give a wonderfully vivid picture of the elan with which he embraced his new California lifestyle. By the 30s Einstein was an international celebrity - the Los Angeles Times and the Pasadena Star newspapers produced over 1200 articles about him, which are also carefully filed in the Einstein archive. From the day he arrived he was feted and honoured.
Einstein dined with Charlie Chaplin and Randolph HearstHe loved Hollywood, and Hollywood loved him. On his first trip a motion picture tycoon made arrangements for Einstein and his wife Elsa to see his new film at the Universal studios. In his diary Einstein wrote: "We drove to Hollywood to visit the film giant Laemmle. They showed us All Quiet on the Western Front, a nice piece, which the Nazis have banned successfully in Germany".
That ban, he also noted, was "a diplomatic defeat for [the German] government". Hearing that Einstein admired the films of Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin himself invited the couple to dinner, together with the newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks entertained the Einsteins at their mansion, "Pickfair", in Beverley Hills. It was, Einstein tells us, like a three-ringed circus, but he loved it nonetheless.
Of course, the Einstein papers for the Caltech years are full of important science too. But the very human Einstein who emerges from the pages of the California travel diaries is for me a kind of symbol for the way in which the United States took up the torch of fundamental scientific research and kept its flame alight, giving great original thinkers like Einstein a home and public recognition, when National Socialism in Germany was turning its back on the future.
Beneath the surface differences in attitudes and beliefs, there runs a historically strong set of values connecting us
...on Europe-US relationsIt is also, for me, a reminder that the ties that bind European intellectuals to our fellow human beings in the United States are far stronger than the agendas of particular political administrations on either side of the Atlantic. If we take the long view - back to the founding years of Caltech, and forward, beyond the disaster of the Iraq war, and what some like myself regard as the damagingly anti-science ethos of the Bush administration - the common intellectual understanding between our two countries has to continue to be nurtured and cherished.
Because beneath the surface differences in attitudes and beliefs, there runs a historically strong set of values connecting us. It was out of the debris of World War II, and the team-work and collaboration between leading scientists in America and Europe that one of the lastingly important statements about war and weapons of mass destruction was issued by a group of distinguished scientists which included a number of Caltech illuminati -the "Russell-Einstein manifesto".
Together, Einstein in America and Bertrand Russell in England produced what still stands as one of the most important statements of the need for cooperation between nations. It was the last letter Einstein signed, shortly before he died on 18 April 1955, having drafted and redrafted the text with Russell in the weeks before his death.
The Russell-Einstein manifesto was addressed to the leaders of the western world. It urged them to recognise that weapons of war (specifically the atomic bomb) were now too deadly for war between opposed factions any longer to be an option:
"In the tragic situation which confronts humanity [they wrote], we feel that scientists should assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction.
"We have to learn to think in a new way [they went on]. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?"
The current clamour of anti-American sentiment in Europe runs entirely counter to Einstein and Russell's fervent hopes for the future. Just as they feared, it drives the world towards shrill factionalism and petty nationalistic posturing. But our response cannot be to deny the bonds of history and common aspiration which underpin decades of shared intellectual activities in Europe and America. We should not treat the Anglo-American accord as a doctrine to be imposed elsewhere in the world by military might, but rather redouble our efforts to build on our remarkable shared history of scientific advance.
As I wandered the campus at Caltech, and as I talked to faculty and students, the culture of serious reflection on the big issues in science and in human values filled me with a sense that together they and we could achieve a great deal for the future of the human race. As my plane touched down back at Heathrow on Wednesday, it struck me forcibly that we must hold on to that strong sense I had at Caltech of future purpose and possibility. We must not squander science's dream of an increasingly open world of discovery and opportunity.
Below is a selection of your comments.
As a scientist working in the field of chemistry and physics, I applaud your review of the community of which I am a part of. Everyday I work with a united nations of extremely talented people from all over the world; every peopled continent is represented. I say united nations because if one were to observe the interactions between the scientists I work with day to day you would find that they herald from Ghana, England, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Germany, America, Canada, China, Taiwan, India, indeed too many to mention. One would find that we are all united in the pursuit of knowledge, scientific understanding and reason. Perhaps it is due to the universal permeation of science that we can all come to the table with no arguments other than the theory or method under investigation, and the rules of engagement are facts and figures, not emotions, politics and presumptions. Every morning I read about anti-American sentiment, however it rings hollow for me. I go to work with my friends and colleagues from across the globe; we laugh over jokes and discuss implications of experiments and share ideas. I wish that everyone could see the world in this way, a collection of humans to laugh and learn with. A Talley, Cincinnati Ohio USA
The writer mentions a German scientist and an English one, but no American. She makes it sound as if Caltech is simply an incubator of European thought without contributing anything of its own accord.Will, USA
Your endearment for strong US-Europe ties is nothing but an excessive expression of sentimentality and are thus seriously faulted. To extract from Russell-Einstein manifesto, they stated "humanity" and "scientists" - I presume they had included all of humanities and leading scientists of on our planet, not just US and Europe's. As an Asian reading your article, I try my best to accomodate your overt pan US-Europe sentiments. But I must admit I fail miserably and feel immensely irritated. Although I agree that a large proportion of the best scientists still comes from US and Europe; and Asia or Africa has much less to contribute and has rooms for improvements in many respects; we are, nonetheless, all moving towards a global community of all humanities and hence we should based our motivation on more universal values, certainly not on misguided sentimental bondages of US and Europe's. Tommy Tan, Singapore
I think that had it not been for Hitler, the US would not be the superpower it is today. It was not just Einstein, but almost ever scientist and mathematician of significance in Continental Europe that fled to the US during the Nazi era.D Sakarya, Dover NJ USA
What a delightful point of view and how constructive it would be to focus on and build upon long-standing scientific collaboration which does indeed unite Europe and North America. This is of course also true of art and music.Ted Swart, Kelowna, BC, Canada
One word in your final sentence delineates the problem we face. The word is science. Educated, thinking people, those with a sense of history would agree with just about everything you say. But those sorts of people are by far not in the majority. World leaders and governments are elected (usuallly and ideally) by the majority. Most voters, in my view, are so intent on their own immediate self interest they will not or cannot focus on global issues. The few who do think about these things - you, me, scientists and the literati, look on in dismay at the mess in which we find ourselves. So what can we, the 5% to 10% to 20% do in practical terms to change the attitude of both the governing classes and the chattering classes. I don't think anyone can answer that question. But if someone does know how to save us from ourselves, then please tell the world before it is too late.David William ffynch, Victoria, BC CANADA
Interesting article. I had no idea that Albert Einstein had any contacts out of the field of science. Both in High School and University, we would study Albert Einstein's Scientific Contributions to our World. Other contacts such as Eistein's social relationships in Hollywood and such were not known. Alexander Mitchell, San Francisco, California -USA
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Printable version
The intellectual ties that bind
A POINT OF VIEWBy Lisa Jardine
Torn between two continents, Einstein championed co-operationWhatever the state of relations between London and Washington, Europe and the US should remember their long history of shared intellectual activity, championed chiefly by Albert Einstein, writes Lisa Jardine.
The campus of the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, in Pasadena, where I spent this week, looks more like a Latin-American hacienda than a top-flight university dedicated to teaching and research in fundamental science.
Practically all the giants of modern science have been associated with Caltech during the hundred years since its foundation. The best known of these by far is Albert Einstein, perhaps science's only folk hero - Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, forever associated with the evocative formula E = mc2 .
Caltech is where Linus Pauling pursued his research on the formation of chemical bonds between atoms in molecules and crystals, paving the way for Crick and Watson's discovery of the structure of DNA. This is also where Edwin Hubble's discoveries with the Mount Wilson telescope challenged Einstein's cosmological picture of the universe, and brought him here himself to discuss the implications of his general theory of Relativity with Caltech physicists and astronomers.
He loved Hollywood, and Hollywood loved him
...on Albert Einstein
Hear Radio 4's A Point of View The institute sits at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, in a lush landscape. Graceful jacaranda trees smothered in a purple haze of blossom, and soaring emerald-leaved palms, shade beds of bird-of-paradise flowers and headily-scented star jasmine. A long avenue of mature olive trees runs through the sunlit campus, to a pool on whose edge dozens of ebony-coloured turtles sun themselves among the reeds. Arched colonnades covered in bougainvillea border and connect the cool stuccoed buildings.
Walk up close, though, and these buildings have unexpectedly futuristic names: the Keith Spalding Building, home of the Space Infrared Telescope Facility; the Lauritsen Laboratory for high energy physics; and, a few short miles away, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and its current project LISA - the laser interferometer space antenna.
In this highly-charged intellectual environment, 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and 300 faculty work at the cutting edge of modern science.
Einstein visited Caltech for the first time in December 1930, returning in 1931-2 and 1932-3. It was while he was on his third research visit that the Nazis came to power in Germany. Einstein never returned to Europe, although he would spend the last 20 years of his life at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton rather than Caltech.
The other half of the Russell-Einstein manifestoAnd it is here at Caltech that the formidable project of transcribing and publishing the entire Einstein archive is currently being carried out. Tucked into a corner of the Caltech campus is a modest building which contains the Einstein Papers Project. Housed deep in its basement, in a row of locked black filing cabinets running the full length of one wall, are copies of more than 70,000 items - half a million pages of documentation - relating to Einstein's life and career (most originals are kept at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to which Einstein bequeathed them at his death in 1955).
Einstein's devoted assistant Helen Dukas began collecting and ordering Einstein's papers in Berlin, even before he left for America. The collection includes Einstein's letters, scientific manuscripts (published and unpublished), as well as lectures, speeches and articles on a wide range of topics from philosophy of science to education, Zionism, pacifism, and civil liberties. At Caltech a small team of dedicated researchers are editing the entire contents of the archive, transcribing them, annotating them, and publishing them volume by volume. On Monday I was given a guided tour, and shown some of the fascinating items the collection contains.
Among the papers are personal travel diaries Einstein kept whenever he was abroad. The diaries for the Caltech years give a wonderfully vivid picture of the elan with which he embraced his new California lifestyle. By the 30s Einstein was an international celebrity - the Los Angeles Times and the Pasadena Star newspapers produced over 1200 articles about him, which are also carefully filed in the Einstein archive. From the day he arrived he was feted and honoured.
Einstein dined with Charlie Chaplin and Randolph HearstHe loved Hollywood, and Hollywood loved him. On his first trip a motion picture tycoon made arrangements for Einstein and his wife Elsa to see his new film at the Universal studios. In his diary Einstein wrote: "We drove to Hollywood to visit the film giant Laemmle. They showed us All Quiet on the Western Front, a nice piece, which the Nazis have banned successfully in Germany".
That ban, he also noted, was "a diplomatic defeat for [the German] government". Hearing that Einstein admired the films of Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin himself invited the couple to dinner, together with the newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks entertained the Einsteins at their mansion, "Pickfair", in Beverley Hills. It was, Einstein tells us, like a three-ringed circus, but he loved it nonetheless.
Of course, the Einstein papers for the Caltech years are full of important science too. But the very human Einstein who emerges from the pages of the California travel diaries is for me a kind of symbol for the way in which the United States took up the torch of fundamental scientific research and kept its flame alight, giving great original thinkers like Einstein a home and public recognition, when National Socialism in Germany was turning its back on the future.
Beneath the surface differences in attitudes and beliefs, there runs a historically strong set of values connecting us
...on Europe-US relationsIt is also, for me, a reminder that the ties that bind European intellectuals to our fellow human beings in the United States are far stronger than the agendas of particular political administrations on either side of the Atlantic. If we take the long view - back to the founding years of Caltech, and forward, beyond the disaster of the Iraq war, and what some like myself regard as the damagingly anti-science ethos of the Bush administration - the common intellectual understanding between our two countries has to continue to be nurtured and cherished.
Because beneath the surface differences in attitudes and beliefs, there runs a historically strong set of values connecting us. It was out of the debris of World War II, and the team-work and collaboration between leading scientists in America and Europe that one of the lastingly important statements about war and weapons of mass destruction was issued by a group of distinguished scientists which included a number of Caltech illuminati -the "Russell-Einstein manifesto".
Together, Einstein in America and Bertrand Russell in England produced what still stands as one of the most important statements of the need for cooperation between nations. It was the last letter Einstein signed, shortly before he died on 18 April 1955, having drafted and redrafted the text with Russell in the weeks before his death.
The Russell-Einstein manifesto was addressed to the leaders of the western world. It urged them to recognise that weapons of war (specifically the atomic bomb) were now too deadly for war between opposed factions any longer to be an option:
"In the tragic situation which confronts humanity [they wrote], we feel that scientists should assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction.
"We have to learn to think in a new way [they went on]. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?"
The current clamour of anti-American sentiment in Europe runs entirely counter to Einstein and Russell's fervent hopes for the future. Just as they feared, it drives the world towards shrill factionalism and petty nationalistic posturing. But our response cannot be to deny the bonds of history and common aspiration which underpin decades of shared intellectual activities in Europe and America. We should not treat the Anglo-American accord as a doctrine to be imposed elsewhere in the world by military might, but rather redouble our efforts to build on our remarkable shared history of scientific advance.
As I wandered the campus at Caltech, and as I talked to faculty and students, the culture of serious reflection on the big issues in science and in human values filled me with a sense that together they and we could achieve a great deal for the future of the human race. As my plane touched down back at Heathrow on Wednesday, it struck me forcibly that we must hold on to that strong sense I had at Caltech of future purpose and possibility. We must not squander science's dream of an increasingly open world of discovery and opportunity.
Below is a selection of your comments.
As a scientist working in the field of chemistry and physics, I applaud your review of the community of which I am a part of. Everyday I work with a united nations of extremely talented people from all over the world; every peopled continent is represented. I say united nations because if one were to observe the interactions between the scientists I work with day to day you would find that they herald from Ghana, England, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Germany, America, Canada, China, Taiwan, India, indeed too many to mention. One would find that we are all united in the pursuit of knowledge, scientific understanding and reason. Perhaps it is due to the universal permeation of science that we can all come to the table with no arguments other than the theory or method under investigation, and the rules of engagement are facts and figures, not emotions, politics and presumptions. Every morning I read about anti-American sentiment, however it rings hollow for me. I go to work with my friends and colleagues from across the globe; we laugh over jokes and discuss implications of experiments and share ideas. I wish that everyone could see the world in this way, a collection of humans to laugh and learn with. A Talley, Cincinnati Ohio USA
The writer mentions a German scientist and an English one, but no American. She makes it sound as if Caltech is simply an incubator of European thought without contributing anything of its own accord.Will, USA
Your endearment for strong US-Europe ties is nothing but an excessive expression of sentimentality and are thus seriously faulted. To extract from Russell-Einstein manifesto, they stated "humanity" and "scientists" - I presume they had included all of humanities and leading scientists of on our planet, not just US and Europe's. As an Asian reading your article, I try my best to accomodate your overt pan US-Europe sentiments. But I must admit I fail miserably and feel immensely irritated. Although I agree that a large proportion of the best scientists still comes from US and Europe; and Asia or Africa has much less to contribute and has rooms for improvements in many respects; we are, nonetheless, all moving towards a global community of all humanities and hence we should based our motivation on more universal values, certainly not on misguided sentimental bondages of US and Europe's. Tommy Tan, Singapore
I think that had it not been for Hitler, the US would not be the superpower it is today. It was not just Einstein, but almost ever scientist and mathematician of significance in Continental Europe that fled to the US during the Nazi era.D Sakarya, Dover NJ USA
What a delightful point of view and how constructive it would be to focus on and build upon long-standing scientific collaboration which does indeed unite Europe and North America. This is of course also true of art and music.Ted Swart, Kelowna, BC, Canada
One word in your final sentence delineates the problem we face. The word is science. Educated, thinking people, those with a sense of history would agree with just about everything you say. But those sorts of people are by far not in the majority. World leaders and governments are elected (usuallly and ideally) by the majority. Most voters, in my view, are so intent on their own immediate self interest they will not or cannot focus on global issues. The few who do think about these things - you, me, scientists and the literati, look on in dismay at the mess in which we find ourselves. So what can we, the 5% to 10% to 20% do in practical terms to change the attitude of both the governing classes and the chattering classes. I don't think anyone can answer that question. But if someone does know how to save us from ourselves, then please tell the world before it is too late.David William ffynch, Victoria, BC CANADA
Interesting article. I had no idea that Albert Einstein had any contacts out of the field of science. Both in High School and University, we would study Albert Einstein's Scientific Contributions to our World. Other contacts such as Eistein's social relationships in Hollywood and such were not known. Alexander Mitchell, San Francisco, California -USA
BBC NEWS | Business | Winners and losers as India booms
BBC NEWS Business Winners and losers as India booms
Winners and losers as India booms
By Karishma Vaswani Business correspondent, BBC News, Mumbai On a dry, arid patch of land in Western India, a group of farmers make a political and economic statement - we are selling our farms, they say.
Many farmers have been hit hard by globalisationUnder the searing heat of the Indian sun, the head of the village, Dharampul Jarundhe, whose family has farmed for generations, wipes the drops of sweat from his brow.
"No more agriculture for us", he says. "It doesn't feed us, it doesn't feed our children. We will move to the cities and work as tea bearers, and live in Mumbai's slums if we have to - it is better than starving."
Seventy per cent of India's people make their living on the land. Millions of farmers, spread out across rural India, have had to watch the value of their products depreciate on the international markets.
There is a segment that is growing up in India right now that is ready to reap the benefits of what globalisation truly is
Pavithra Suryanarayan, independent economist. A lack of subsidies mean they are at the mercy of the whims and fancies of economic terms like the demand and supply curve, subjects they never studied in school, phrases they don't understand.
All they know is that they are caught in the cycle of debt and drought, and year after year life gets worse.
Higher expectations
Like many of India's farmers, Dharampal has heard the legendary tales of Mumbai. In the village next to his, there is cable television, brought thanks to the growing incomes of some of the villager's young who have gone to India's financial capital to make a living.
The gap between rural and urban India is enormousOn the TV sets, images of a rich, urban, glittering India are beamed into the tiny mud-patched homes of the Indian countryside, fuelling resentment, giving rise to an unimaginable fury that has manifested itself in demonstrations and protests scattered across the nation.
Critics of globalisation say the forces of free market style economics are to blame for the rising income inequality between the India of the haves, and the India of the have-nots.
"Is this what you call progress?" asks Jaideep Hardlikar, a farmer activist and a journalist. "I think it's loot by a few of the majority.
"No doubt software professionals are earning money their fathers and forefathers had never ever imagined in their life., but the kind of deprivation you see in parts of India that were once prosperous is shocking and unfathomable."
I am making more money than my parents could have ever dreamed of, and as an Indian woman that is so totally liberating
Devika, call centre worker, Mumbai
But economists say that globalisation is a useful bogeyman and should not be blamed for India's ills.
"This is not the fault of globalisation," scoffs Pavithra Suryanarayan, an independent economist.
Shopping malls have proliferated in India's cities
"Arguably, even if India had never liberalised, you would have seen the same results.
It is the fault of a lack of reforms in the agricultural sector. You cannot blame the faults of the government on globalisation. It is a convenient phrase that is bandied about and blamed for everything."
Big benefits
During loud protests on the streets of Delhi outside parliament house, globalisation gets blamed a lot.
It is the reason that many say India's social and cultural values are being eroded. It is what small shopkeepers say is bringing in American supermarket chains like Wal-Mart to India, threatening their livelihoods. And it is what is being blamed for rising pollution levels in the country, as a result of rapid industrialisation.
India's outsourcing industry has produced wealth for someBut ask 25-year-old Devika, who works at a call centre in Mumbai, whether her life has been changed for the better because of the free market and she will give you a resounding yes.
"It's a cliché now, isn't it, but it's still true. I am making more money than my parents could have ever dreamed of, and as an Indian woman that is so totally liberating.
"I don't need to depend on my parents for money, I don't need to depend on a husband for money. I can choose to get married later if I want to. I may not even need to get married. The opportunities that have opened up for me are mind-boggling."
Pavithra Suryanarayan agrees.
"There is a segment that is growing up in India right now that is ready to reap the benefits of what globalisation truly is, and what it can do," he says.
"They can tap into global markets, they are being given opportunities now to be part of a really global world. It is this generation in India that will see the benefits of a globalised economy."
Balancing the opportunities of the haves with the misfortunes of the have-nots, though, will be a priority for India as its economy develops.
Winners and losers as India booms
By Karishma Vaswani Business correspondent, BBC News, Mumbai On a dry, arid patch of land in Western India, a group of farmers make a political and economic statement - we are selling our farms, they say.
Many farmers have been hit hard by globalisationUnder the searing heat of the Indian sun, the head of the village, Dharampul Jarundhe, whose family has farmed for generations, wipes the drops of sweat from his brow.
"No more agriculture for us", he says. "It doesn't feed us, it doesn't feed our children. We will move to the cities and work as tea bearers, and live in Mumbai's slums if we have to - it is better than starving."
Seventy per cent of India's people make their living on the land. Millions of farmers, spread out across rural India, have had to watch the value of their products depreciate on the international markets.
There is a segment that is growing up in India right now that is ready to reap the benefits of what globalisation truly is
Pavithra Suryanarayan, independent economist. A lack of subsidies mean they are at the mercy of the whims and fancies of economic terms like the demand and supply curve, subjects they never studied in school, phrases they don't understand.
All they know is that they are caught in the cycle of debt and drought, and year after year life gets worse.
Higher expectations
Like many of India's farmers, Dharampal has heard the legendary tales of Mumbai. In the village next to his, there is cable television, brought thanks to the growing incomes of some of the villager's young who have gone to India's financial capital to make a living.
The gap between rural and urban India is enormousOn the TV sets, images of a rich, urban, glittering India are beamed into the tiny mud-patched homes of the Indian countryside, fuelling resentment, giving rise to an unimaginable fury that has manifested itself in demonstrations and protests scattered across the nation.
Critics of globalisation say the forces of free market style economics are to blame for the rising income inequality between the India of the haves, and the India of the have-nots.
"Is this what you call progress?" asks Jaideep Hardlikar, a farmer activist and a journalist. "I think it's loot by a few of the majority.
"No doubt software professionals are earning money their fathers and forefathers had never ever imagined in their life., but the kind of deprivation you see in parts of India that were once prosperous is shocking and unfathomable."
I am making more money than my parents could have ever dreamed of, and as an Indian woman that is so totally liberating
Devika, call centre worker, Mumbai
But economists say that globalisation is a useful bogeyman and should not be blamed for India's ills.
"This is not the fault of globalisation," scoffs Pavithra Suryanarayan, an independent economist.
Shopping malls have proliferated in India's cities
"Arguably, even if India had never liberalised, you would have seen the same results.
It is the fault of a lack of reforms in the agricultural sector. You cannot blame the faults of the government on globalisation. It is a convenient phrase that is bandied about and blamed for everything."
Big benefits
During loud protests on the streets of Delhi outside parliament house, globalisation gets blamed a lot.
It is the reason that many say India's social and cultural values are being eroded. It is what small shopkeepers say is bringing in American supermarket chains like Wal-Mart to India, threatening their livelihoods. And it is what is being blamed for rising pollution levels in the country, as a result of rapid industrialisation.
India's outsourcing industry has produced wealth for someBut ask 25-year-old Devika, who works at a call centre in Mumbai, whether her life has been changed for the better because of the free market and she will give you a resounding yes.
"It's a cliché now, isn't it, but it's still true. I am making more money than my parents could have ever dreamed of, and as an Indian woman that is so totally liberating.
"I don't need to depend on my parents for money, I don't need to depend on a husband for money. I can choose to get married later if I want to. I may not even need to get married. The opportunities that have opened up for me are mind-boggling."
Pavithra Suryanarayan agrees.
"There is a segment that is growing up in India right now that is ready to reap the benefits of what globalisation truly is, and what it can do," he says.
"They can tap into global markets, they are being given opportunities now to be part of a really global world. It is this generation in India that will see the benefits of a globalised economy."
Balancing the opportunities of the haves with the misfortunes of the have-nots, though, will be a priority for India as its economy develops.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
The Hindu News Update Service
The Hindu News Update Service
Ramchandra Guha
India defies all Western predictions: says Guha's new book
Mumbai, May. 21 (PTI): Terming India as an "unnatural nation born in infertile times", author Ramachandra Guha attributes the country's cohesiveness and progress to "the strength of the constitution and ability to defy western predictions".
"This world's largest democracy took birth amidst a myriad issues -- partition, language, ethnic diversities... but it has survived belying all predictions", he said releasing here his gargantuan compilation "India after Gandhi" to mark the country's 60th anniversary.
British historian, John Strachey had said "there was no Indian nation or country in the past: nor would there be one in the future" and Guha says - "his remarks were intended as historical judgment".
Winston Churchill had decried India's ability for self-governance and Robert Dahl among the doomsayers had said "that India can sustain democratic institutions seems on the face of it highly improbable".
"Like their foreign counterparts, some Indian observers too had come to believe that this place (India) was far too diverse to persist as a nation, and much too poor to endure democracy".
"And Yet", says Guha, "60 years on and we are here in a 'phifty-phifty' democracy, competing on a global platform with the developed nations".
"Moral vision, political skill, and legal acumen: these were brought together in the framing of the constitution" he says, adding "this is finally what has kept the nation together... secularity and equality seem to have worked".
Writing in the 1970's, journalist and old-India hand James Cameron had claimed "prominent women in Indian public life all came from the upper class, English-speaking backgrounds... there was not and never will be a working-class woman with a function in Indian politics".
Says Guha "Within decades there is an answer, or perhaps one should say a refutation... a lady born in a Dalit home has become Chief Minister..." referring to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati.
"India after Gandhi" penned almost on lines of historian Neelankanthan may be somewhat alien to today's 'chip-q1/q4' generation dealing as it does with leadership and mergers and acquisitions of the political arena.
But the underlying philosophies of what shaped the nation's economy are well-delineated and could serve as a new text-book for "the essentially under-40's generation".
"The economic integration of India is a consequence of its political integration. They act in a mutually reinforcing loop. The greater the movement of goods and capital and people across India, the greater the sense that this is after all, one country", the book says.
"In the first decades of independence, it was the public sector that did most to further this sense of unity... more recently it has been the private sector which has, if with less intent, furthered the process of national integration".
Explaining "why India survives" pedantically, Guha says "apart from elements of politics and economics, cultural factors have also contributed to national unity... pre-eminent here is the Hindi film".
Quoting lyricist Javed Akhtar, Guha says "there is one more state in this country. and that is Hindi cinema...as a separate state of India, Hindi cinema acts as a receptacle for all that is most creative in other states".
Ramchandra Guha
India defies all Western predictions: says Guha's new book
Mumbai, May. 21 (PTI): Terming India as an "unnatural nation born in infertile times", author Ramachandra Guha attributes the country's cohesiveness and progress to "the strength of the constitution and ability to defy western predictions".
"This world's largest democracy took birth amidst a myriad issues -- partition, language, ethnic diversities... but it has survived belying all predictions", he said releasing here his gargantuan compilation "India after Gandhi" to mark the country's 60th anniversary.
British historian, John Strachey had said "there was no Indian nation or country in the past: nor would there be one in the future" and Guha says - "his remarks were intended as historical judgment".
Winston Churchill had decried India's ability for self-governance and Robert Dahl among the doomsayers had said "that India can sustain democratic institutions seems on the face of it highly improbable".
"Like their foreign counterparts, some Indian observers too had come to believe that this place (India) was far too diverse to persist as a nation, and much too poor to endure democracy".
"And Yet", says Guha, "60 years on and we are here in a 'phifty-phifty' democracy, competing on a global platform with the developed nations".
"Moral vision, political skill, and legal acumen: these were brought together in the framing of the constitution" he says, adding "this is finally what has kept the nation together... secularity and equality seem to have worked".
Writing in the 1970's, journalist and old-India hand James Cameron had claimed "prominent women in Indian public life all came from the upper class, English-speaking backgrounds... there was not and never will be a working-class woman with a function in Indian politics".
Says Guha "Within decades there is an answer, or perhaps one should say a refutation... a lady born in a Dalit home has become Chief Minister..." referring to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati.
"India after Gandhi" penned almost on lines of historian Neelankanthan may be somewhat alien to today's 'chip-q1/q4' generation dealing as it does with leadership and mergers and acquisitions of the political arena.
But the underlying philosophies of what shaped the nation's economy are well-delineated and could serve as a new text-book for "the essentially under-40's generation".
"The economic integration of India is a consequence of its political integration. They act in a mutually reinforcing loop. The greater the movement of goods and capital and people across India, the greater the sense that this is after all, one country", the book says.
"In the first decades of independence, it was the public sector that did most to further this sense of unity... more recently it has been the private sector which has, if with less intent, furthered the process of national integration".
Explaining "why India survives" pedantically, Guha says "apart from elements of politics and economics, cultural factors have also contributed to national unity... pre-eminent here is the Hindi film".
Quoting lyricist Javed Akhtar, Guha says "there is one more state in this country. and that is Hindi cinema...as a separate state of India, Hindi cinema acts as a receptacle for all that is most creative in other states".
Saturday, May 19, 2007
NDTV.com: Students expelled for gay film
NDTV.com: Students expelled for gay film
Nandagopal
Saturday, May 19, 2007 (Chenganassery)
Five students of St Joseph's College of Communication at Chenganassery in Kerala were expelled last month for making a film on homosexuality.Secret Minds is a five minute film that explores the hypocrisy surrounding homosexuality in our society.Jeo Baby, the director of the film, does not regret making it, but what he regrets is that along with him four of his fellow students were expelled for acting in the film.The authorities at the institute felt that their film would corrupt young minds.''I made a film about homosexuality. In our society, lot of homosexual people live with us. How many of them admit to being homosexuals? They are secret minds, that is our mentality, we live in a secret society,'' said Jeo Baby, Expelled film student.Jeo's earlier films Ponnu - a film on teen pregnancy and God's Own Country - a film on begging - have won awards at student film festivals but this one seems to have touched a raw nerve.The expelled students have now appealed to the vice-chancellor of MG University in Kottayam.One of them has even filed a writ petition in the high court.Dijo Augustine, a close friend of Jeo and co-producer of the film, says that making the film hadn't been easy. They had to do with the Rs 2000 that they had collected from friends.Now they are very demoralized.''Secret Minds is an experimental film. We believed that the authorities will encourage our creativity. But the response was quite disappointing for all of us,'' said Dijo Augustine, Co-producer, Secret Minds.When NDTV contacted the college principal, he refused to comment, saying the matter was now sub-judice.Intolerance to alternative viewpoints at educational institutions - if this is the message that is being sent out to students, then there is little hope for any real change in our society.
Nandagopal
Saturday, May 19, 2007 (Chenganassery)
Five students of St Joseph's College of Communication at Chenganassery in Kerala were expelled last month for making a film on homosexuality.Secret Minds is a five minute film that explores the hypocrisy surrounding homosexuality in our society.Jeo Baby, the director of the film, does not regret making it, but what he regrets is that along with him four of his fellow students were expelled for acting in the film.The authorities at the institute felt that their film would corrupt young minds.''I made a film about homosexuality. In our society, lot of homosexual people live with us. How many of them admit to being homosexuals? They are secret minds, that is our mentality, we live in a secret society,'' said Jeo Baby, Expelled film student.Jeo's earlier films Ponnu - a film on teen pregnancy and God's Own Country - a film on begging - have won awards at student film festivals but this one seems to have touched a raw nerve.The expelled students have now appealed to the vice-chancellor of MG University in Kottayam.One of them has even filed a writ petition in the high court.Dijo Augustine, a close friend of Jeo and co-producer of the film, says that making the film hadn't been easy. They had to do with the Rs 2000 that they had collected from friends.Now they are very demoralized.''Secret Minds is an experimental film. We believed that the authorities will encourage our creativity. But the response was quite disappointing for all of us,'' said Dijo Augustine, Co-producer, Secret Minds.When NDTV contacted the college principal, he refused to comment, saying the matter was now sub-judice.Intolerance to alternative viewpoints at educational institutions - if this is the message that is being sent out to students, then there is little hope for any real change in our society.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Happiness wins science book prize
BBC NEWS Science/Nature Happiness wins science book prize
Happiness wins science book prize
Daniel Gilbert beat five other shortlisted titlesA scientific exploration of the various ways people attempt to make themselves happy has won the annual Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness had been tipped as the favourite to win the prestigious £10,000 award.
It beat five other titles including Henry Nicholl's Lonesome George, an account of the last known individual of a subspecies of Galapagos tortoise.
Each runner up received £1,000 at a ceremony at the Society's headquarters.
Professor Colin Pillinger, from the Open University in Milton Keynes, chaired the judging panel. He said that all of the books had been "excellent" and deciding on first prize had been "extremely difficult".
Read the full shortlist for the 2007 general prize
Discussing the winner he said: "Daniel Gilbert's voice provides a witty companion throughout this exploration of the science behind the pursuit of happiness.
"He uses cognitive science and psychology to provide intriguing insights into human nature, helping us to understand why we make the decisions we do."
Perhaps all children need is the confidence to approach a subject with enthusiasm and an open mind
Richard Hammond, junior prize winnerGilbert himself was thrilled to take the book prize. "I'm absolutely delighted to receive this tremendous honour from the world's oldest learned society," said the Harvard University psychology professor.
"There are very few countries (including my own - the US) where a somewhat cheeky book about happiness could win a science prize - but the British invented intellectual humour and have always understood that enlightenment and entertainment are natural friends. So God bless the empire!"
Tour de force
Now in its 19th year, the award was known as the Rhone-Poulenc Prize from 1990 to 1999. Until this year, it went by the name of the Aventis Prize but now bears the name of the Royal Society.
The author introduces readers to the world of physicsThere are two categories: the junior prize, which is given to the best book written for under-14s, and the general prize, for the best book written for a more general readership.
This year's junior prize was won by BBC Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond for his book Can You Feel the Force? published by Dorling Kindersley (DK). It explores the world of physics.
Read the full shortlist for the 2007 junior prize
Eleanor Updale, children's writer and chair of the junior judging panel, said it was an "instantly appealing book".
"With clear illustrations, practical experiments, and well-paced text, it makes an interest in science look like fun," she said.
Reacting to his win, Richard Hammond, who also presents the science series Brainiac on UK TV, said: "I was immediately captivated when the team at Dorling Kindersley approached me about making a book to try to bring physics to life.
"Perhaps all children need is the confidence to approach a subject with enthusiasm and an open mind. The DK team gave them just that and winning this award is recognition for a group of very talented people."
The general prize is often referred to as the "Booker prize for science writing", although the science prize winner often outsells its better-known counterpart.
Past winners have included Bill Bryson, Stephen Hawking and Chris McManus.
The judges were Colin Pillinger; Trevor Baylis, inventor of the wind-up radio; Louisa Bolch, commissioning editor for science on Channel 4; Emily Holmes, Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the University of Oxford; and Christine McGourty, science correspondent for BBC News.
The full shortlist for the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books:
Homo Britannicus, by Chris Stringer (Penguin Allen Lane) The book tells the epic story of the human colonisation of Britain, from our very first footsteps to the present day. Drawing on all the latest evidence and techniques of investigation, Chris Stringer describes times when Britain was so tropical that humans lived alongside hippos and sabre tooth tigers; and times so cold they shared the land with reindeer and mammoth; and times colder still when humans were forced to flee altogether.
In Search of Memory, by Eric R Kandel (WW Norton & Co) Nobel laureate Eric R Kandel charts the intellectual history of the emerging biology of the mind, and sheds light on how behavioural psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience and molecular biology have converged into a powerful new science. These efforts, he says, provide insights into normal mental functioning and disease, and simultaneously open pathways to more effective treatments.
Lonesome George, by Henry Nicholls (Macmillan) Lonesome George is a 1.5m-long, 90kg tortoise aged between 60 and 200, and it is thought he is the sole survivor of his sub-species. Scientific ingenuity may conjure up a way of reproducing him, and resurrecting his species. Henry Nicholls details the efforts of conservationists to preserve the Galapagos' unique biodiversity and illustrates how their experiences and discoveries are echoed worldwide. He explores the controversies raging over which mates are most appropriate for George and the risks of releasing crossbreed offspring into the wild.
One in Three, by Adam Wishart (Profile Books) When his father was diagnosed with cancer, Adam Wishart couldn't find any book that answered his questions: what was the disease, how did it take hold and what did it mean? What is it about cancer's biology that means it has not been eradicated? How close are we, really, to a cure? There was no such book. So he wrote it. One in Three interweaves two powerful stories: that of Adam and his father; and of the 200-year search for a cure.
The Rough Guide to Climate Change, by Robert Henson (Rough Guides) Robert Henson has written this guide to a pressing issue facing the world. The guide looks at visible symptoms of change on a warming planet, how climate change works, the evolution of our atmosphere over the last 4.5 billion years and what computer simulations of climate reveal about our past, present, and future. It looks at the sceptics' grounds for disagreement, global warming in the media and what governments and scientists are doing to try to solve the problem.
Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert (Harper Press) Psychologist Daniel Gilbert reveals how and why the majority of us have no idea how to make ourselves happy. The drive for happiness is one of the most instinctive and fundamental human impulses. In this revealing and witty investigation, psychologist Daniel Gilbert uses scientific research, philosophy and real-life case studies to illustrate how our basic drive to satisfy our desires can not only be misguided, but also intrinsically linked to some long-standing and contentious questions about human nature.
click here to return
The full shortlist for the 2007 Royal Society Junior Prize for Science Books:
Can You Feel the Force?, by Richard Hammond (Dorling Kindersley)The BBC Top Gear presenter takes the reader on an introductory tour of the physical forces in the universe. The book uses quizzes, brainteasers and home experiments to cover all areas of physics, answering questions such as why a cold ball bounces higher than a warm one and why a person's stomach goes up when a roller coast plummets straight down.
How Nearly Everything Was Invented by the Brainwaves, by Ralph Lazar, Jilly MacLeod, Lisa Swerling (Dorling Kindersley)The book is introduced by a group of pint-sized pals known as the Brainwaves who set out on a journey to discover the story behind 300 key inventions such as the light bulb, train and wheel. The friends uncover the who, what, when, where and why of each invention and how they have transformed the way we live today.
It's True! Space Turns You into Spaghetti, by Heather Catchpole, Vanessa Woods (Allen & Unwin)The sixteenth book in this non-fiction series is packed with quirky facts about life in space, including anecdotes from previous space missions as well as further information about the solar system and beyond.
KFK Natural Disasters, by Andrew Langley (Kingfisher)Part of the Kingfisher Knowledge series, the book details some of the most catastrophic events that have shook and shocked the world. It examines why disasters like tsunamis and wild fires occur and looks at new technologies which are trying to predict and prevent similar disasters occurring.
My Body Book, by Brita Granstrom, Mick Manning (Franklin Watts)A colourful book aimed at younger children, it uses multi-coloured illustrations and half-page flaps to reveal the inner workings of the human body.
Science Investigations: Electricity by John Farndon (Wayland)A practical book that answers common questions about electricity such as what it is, how it is measured and why it can make some objects glow. The book also provides questions for readers to investigate further on their own and links to useful websites as well as glossary, index and a list of further reading.
Click here to return
Happiness wins science book prize
Daniel Gilbert beat five other shortlisted titlesA scientific exploration of the various ways people attempt to make themselves happy has won the annual Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness had been tipped as the favourite to win the prestigious £10,000 award.
It beat five other titles including Henry Nicholl's Lonesome George, an account of the last known individual of a subspecies of Galapagos tortoise.
Each runner up received £1,000 at a ceremony at the Society's headquarters.
Professor Colin Pillinger, from the Open University in Milton Keynes, chaired the judging panel. He said that all of the books had been "excellent" and deciding on first prize had been "extremely difficult".
Read the full shortlist for the 2007 general prize
Discussing the winner he said: "Daniel Gilbert's voice provides a witty companion throughout this exploration of the science behind the pursuit of happiness.
"He uses cognitive science and psychology to provide intriguing insights into human nature, helping us to understand why we make the decisions we do."
Perhaps all children need is the confidence to approach a subject with enthusiasm and an open mind
Richard Hammond, junior prize winnerGilbert himself was thrilled to take the book prize. "I'm absolutely delighted to receive this tremendous honour from the world's oldest learned society," said the Harvard University psychology professor.
"There are very few countries (including my own - the US) where a somewhat cheeky book about happiness could win a science prize - but the British invented intellectual humour and have always understood that enlightenment and entertainment are natural friends. So God bless the empire!"
Tour de force
Now in its 19th year, the award was known as the Rhone-Poulenc Prize from 1990 to 1999. Until this year, it went by the name of the Aventis Prize but now bears the name of the Royal Society.
The author introduces readers to the world of physicsThere are two categories: the junior prize, which is given to the best book written for under-14s, and the general prize, for the best book written for a more general readership.
This year's junior prize was won by BBC Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond for his book Can You Feel the Force? published by Dorling Kindersley (DK). It explores the world of physics.
Read the full shortlist for the 2007 junior prize
Eleanor Updale, children's writer and chair of the junior judging panel, said it was an "instantly appealing book".
"With clear illustrations, practical experiments, and well-paced text, it makes an interest in science look like fun," she said.
Reacting to his win, Richard Hammond, who also presents the science series Brainiac on UK TV, said: "I was immediately captivated when the team at Dorling Kindersley approached me about making a book to try to bring physics to life.
"Perhaps all children need is the confidence to approach a subject with enthusiasm and an open mind. The DK team gave them just that and winning this award is recognition for a group of very talented people."
The general prize is often referred to as the "Booker prize for science writing", although the science prize winner often outsells its better-known counterpart.
Past winners have included Bill Bryson, Stephen Hawking and Chris McManus.
The judges were Colin Pillinger; Trevor Baylis, inventor of the wind-up radio; Louisa Bolch, commissioning editor for science on Channel 4; Emily Holmes, Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the University of Oxford; and Christine McGourty, science correspondent for BBC News.
The full shortlist for the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books:
Homo Britannicus, by Chris Stringer (Penguin Allen Lane) The book tells the epic story of the human colonisation of Britain, from our very first footsteps to the present day. Drawing on all the latest evidence and techniques of investigation, Chris Stringer describes times when Britain was so tropical that humans lived alongside hippos and sabre tooth tigers; and times so cold they shared the land with reindeer and mammoth; and times colder still when humans were forced to flee altogether.
In Search of Memory, by Eric R Kandel (WW Norton & Co) Nobel laureate Eric R Kandel charts the intellectual history of the emerging biology of the mind, and sheds light on how behavioural psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience and molecular biology have converged into a powerful new science. These efforts, he says, provide insights into normal mental functioning and disease, and simultaneously open pathways to more effective treatments.
Lonesome George, by Henry Nicholls (Macmillan) Lonesome George is a 1.5m-long, 90kg tortoise aged between 60 and 200, and it is thought he is the sole survivor of his sub-species. Scientific ingenuity may conjure up a way of reproducing him, and resurrecting his species. Henry Nicholls details the efforts of conservationists to preserve the Galapagos' unique biodiversity and illustrates how their experiences and discoveries are echoed worldwide. He explores the controversies raging over which mates are most appropriate for George and the risks of releasing crossbreed offspring into the wild.
One in Three, by Adam Wishart (Profile Books) When his father was diagnosed with cancer, Adam Wishart couldn't find any book that answered his questions: what was the disease, how did it take hold and what did it mean? What is it about cancer's biology that means it has not been eradicated? How close are we, really, to a cure? There was no such book. So he wrote it. One in Three interweaves two powerful stories: that of Adam and his father; and of the 200-year search for a cure.
The Rough Guide to Climate Change, by Robert Henson (Rough Guides) Robert Henson has written this guide to a pressing issue facing the world. The guide looks at visible symptoms of change on a warming planet, how climate change works, the evolution of our atmosphere over the last 4.5 billion years and what computer simulations of climate reveal about our past, present, and future. It looks at the sceptics' grounds for disagreement, global warming in the media and what governments and scientists are doing to try to solve the problem.
Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert (Harper Press) Psychologist Daniel Gilbert reveals how and why the majority of us have no idea how to make ourselves happy. The drive for happiness is one of the most instinctive and fundamental human impulses. In this revealing and witty investigation, psychologist Daniel Gilbert uses scientific research, philosophy and real-life case studies to illustrate how our basic drive to satisfy our desires can not only be misguided, but also intrinsically linked to some long-standing and contentious questions about human nature.
click here to return
The full shortlist for the 2007 Royal Society Junior Prize for Science Books:
Can You Feel the Force?, by Richard Hammond (Dorling Kindersley)The BBC Top Gear presenter takes the reader on an introductory tour of the physical forces in the universe. The book uses quizzes, brainteasers and home experiments to cover all areas of physics, answering questions such as why a cold ball bounces higher than a warm one and why a person's stomach goes up when a roller coast plummets straight down.
How Nearly Everything Was Invented by the Brainwaves, by Ralph Lazar, Jilly MacLeod, Lisa Swerling (Dorling Kindersley)The book is introduced by a group of pint-sized pals known as the Brainwaves who set out on a journey to discover the story behind 300 key inventions such as the light bulb, train and wheel. The friends uncover the who, what, when, where and why of each invention and how they have transformed the way we live today.
It's True! Space Turns You into Spaghetti, by Heather Catchpole, Vanessa Woods (Allen & Unwin)The sixteenth book in this non-fiction series is packed with quirky facts about life in space, including anecdotes from previous space missions as well as further information about the solar system and beyond.
KFK Natural Disasters, by Andrew Langley (Kingfisher)Part of the Kingfisher Knowledge series, the book details some of the most catastrophic events that have shook and shocked the world. It examines why disasters like tsunamis and wild fires occur and looks at new technologies which are trying to predict and prevent similar disasters occurring.
My Body Book, by Brita Granstrom, Mick Manning (Franklin Watts)A colourful book aimed at younger children, it uses multi-coloured illustrations and half-page flaps to reveal the inner workings of the human body.
Science Investigations: Electricity by John Farndon (Wayland)A practical book that answers common questions about electricity such as what it is, how it is measured and why it can make some objects glow. The book also provides questions for readers to investigate further on their own and links to useful websites as well as glossary, index and a list of further reading.
Click here to return
BBC NEWS | Americas | US evangelist Jerry Falwell dies
BBC NEWS Americas US evangelist Jerry Falwell dies
US evangelist Jerry Falwell dies
Life in pictures The Reverend Jerry Falwell, a leading US conservative evangelist, has died in hospital in Virginia after being found unconscious in his office.
Doctors gave Mr Falwell emergency treatment at Lynchburg General Hospital but could not revive him.
US President George W Bush paid tribute to Mr Falwell, 73, who he said lived a life of "faith, family, and freedom".
Mr Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority movement in the 1970s, had a history of heart problems.
He rose to prominence after founding Liberty University, a conservative educational establishment in his home town of Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1971.
Mr Falwell was regarded as the father of the political evangelical movement.
Dr Falwell is a huge, huge leader here in this area and in the nation at large
Ron GodwinLiberty University vice-president
Obituary: Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell in quotes As one of the first television preachers, he reached millions on his programme The Old Time Gospel Hour.
President Bush said both he and his wife, Laura, were "deeply saddened" by Mr Falwell's death.
"He taught young people to remain true to their convictions and rely upon God's word throughout each stage of their lives," Mr Bush said.
Controversial
Ron Godwin, executive vice-president for Liberty University, said Mr Falwell was found unresponsive in his office at about 1045 local time (1535 GMT) after missing an appointment.
Mr Godwin said: "Dr Falwell is a huge, huge leader here in this area and in the nation at large."
The Reverend Al Sharpton said he was saddened and was praying for the Falwell family. He said although he often disagreed with the reverend, they had a cordial relationship.
The BBC's Vanessa Heaney in Washington says Mr Falwell was a controversial figure who offended many.
But his alliance with Republicans in the 1980s was a key help in the elections of Ronald Reagan as president and many political leaders have since continued to seek his support.
Among them is Senator John McCain - a Republican contender for US president - who described him as "a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country".
Mr Falwell was a strong opponent of abortion, homosexuality and many other issues that conflicted with his fundamentalist Christian beliefs.
His statements on feminism and race issues often outraged liberals.
In 2002, he sparked anger across the Muslim world by calling the Prophet Muhammad a "terrorist". He later apologised.
Shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks, he said that gays, atheists, civil-rights activists and legal abortions in the US had angered God and "helped this happen".
In 1999, he denounced the BBC TV children's show The Teletubbies, because he believed one character, Tinky Winky, was homosexual.
US evangelist Jerry Falwell dies
Life in pictures The Reverend Jerry Falwell, a leading US conservative evangelist, has died in hospital in Virginia after being found unconscious in his office.
Doctors gave Mr Falwell emergency treatment at Lynchburg General Hospital but could not revive him.
US President George W Bush paid tribute to Mr Falwell, 73, who he said lived a life of "faith, family, and freedom".
Mr Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority movement in the 1970s, had a history of heart problems.
He rose to prominence after founding Liberty University, a conservative educational establishment in his home town of Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1971.
Mr Falwell was regarded as the father of the political evangelical movement.
Dr Falwell is a huge, huge leader here in this area and in the nation at large
Ron GodwinLiberty University vice-president
Obituary: Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell in quotes As one of the first television preachers, he reached millions on his programme The Old Time Gospel Hour.
President Bush said both he and his wife, Laura, were "deeply saddened" by Mr Falwell's death.
"He taught young people to remain true to their convictions and rely upon God's word throughout each stage of their lives," Mr Bush said.
Controversial
Ron Godwin, executive vice-president for Liberty University, said Mr Falwell was found unresponsive in his office at about 1045 local time (1535 GMT) after missing an appointment.
Mr Godwin said: "Dr Falwell is a huge, huge leader here in this area and in the nation at large."
The Reverend Al Sharpton said he was saddened and was praying for the Falwell family. He said although he often disagreed with the reverend, they had a cordial relationship.
The BBC's Vanessa Heaney in Washington says Mr Falwell was a controversial figure who offended many.
But his alliance with Republicans in the 1980s was a key help in the elections of Ronald Reagan as president and many political leaders have since continued to seek his support.
Among them is Senator John McCain - a Republican contender for US president - who described him as "a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country".
Mr Falwell was a strong opponent of abortion, homosexuality and many other issues that conflicted with his fundamentalist Christian beliefs.
His statements on feminism and race issues often outraged liberals.
In 2002, he sparked anger across the Muslim world by calling the Prophet Muhammad a "terrorist". He later apologised.
Shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks, he said that gays, atheists, civil-rights activists and legal abortions in the US had angered God and "helped this happen".
In 1999, he denounced the BBC TV children's show The Teletubbies, because he believed one character, Tinky Winky, was homosexual.
DNA - India - Pappu celebrates Madhuri's birthday - Daily News & Analysis
DNA - India - Pappu celebrates Madhuri's birthday - Daily News & Analysis
Pappu celebrates Madhuri's birthday
UNI Tuesday, May 15, 2007 18:01 IST
For the latest India News on mobile sms NAT to 4567
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JAMSHEDPUR: A die-hard fan of Bollywood 'Dhak Dhak Girl' Madhuri Dixit on Tuesday celebrated the cinestar's birthday with much fanfare and a bit of philanthropic work.
Pappu Singh, popularly known as Pappu Sardar, the owner of a small eatery at Sakchi market, drew media attention with his obsession with the Bollywood heroine.
Pappu has been celebrating Madhuri's birthday since mid-90s and shot into the limelight for his ''attraction'' towards Madhuri.
He, in fact, offers ''puja'' for the actress in his shop at the midnight with flowers, fruits and lighting of incense sticks before Madhuri's life-size photograph and celebrates her birthday but cutting a cake every year.
This year, Pappu invited a group of eunuchs to celebrate the day.
Dhalbhum Sub-divisional Officer(SDO) RK Sharma inaugurated the day's celebration at Pappu's shop last night, while Deputy Superintendent of Police(Traffic) F K N Kujur was also present at the celebration at Chesire Home for orphans and mentally challenged children in the outskirts of the city.
Like every year, Pappu spent the day among the inmates of the Chesire Home and Old Age Home, who were special invitees on this occasion. He distributed fruits and gifts to the inmates.
A special foodstall with various Inidan and Chinese delicacies was the main attraction for this year's celebrations.
Pappu also arranged LIC policies for the inmates of the Chesire Home from this year onwards.
In the evening, Pappu cut a specially designed 50-pound-cake in his shop. He also doled out free 'chats' and ice-creams to the citizens of the steel city, who had gathered at his shop.
Pappu celebrates Madhuri's birthday
UNI Tuesday, May 15, 2007 18:01 IST
For the latest India News on mobile sms NAT to 4567
Email Article
Print Article
Most Emailed Articles
Most Viewed Articles
Share this article
RSS Feed
Digg it
Add to del.icio.us
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To reprint this article, contact 3DSyndication
JAMSHEDPUR: A die-hard fan of Bollywood 'Dhak Dhak Girl' Madhuri Dixit on Tuesday celebrated the cinestar's birthday with much fanfare and a bit of philanthropic work.
Pappu Singh, popularly known as Pappu Sardar, the owner of a small eatery at Sakchi market, drew media attention with his obsession with the Bollywood heroine.
Pappu has been celebrating Madhuri's birthday since mid-90s and shot into the limelight for his ''attraction'' towards Madhuri.
He, in fact, offers ''puja'' for the actress in his shop at the midnight with flowers, fruits and lighting of incense sticks before Madhuri's life-size photograph and celebrates her birthday but cutting a cake every year.
This year, Pappu invited a group of eunuchs to celebrate the day.
Dhalbhum Sub-divisional Officer(SDO) RK Sharma inaugurated the day's celebration at Pappu's shop last night, while Deputy Superintendent of Police(Traffic) F K N Kujur was also present at the celebration at Chesire Home for orphans and mentally challenged children in the outskirts of the city.
Like every year, Pappu spent the day among the inmates of the Chesire Home and Old Age Home, who were special invitees on this occasion. He distributed fruits and gifts to the inmates.
A special foodstall with various Inidan and Chinese delicacies was the main attraction for this year's celebrations.
Pappu also arranged LIC policies for the inmates of the Chesire Home from this year onwards.
In the evening, Pappu cut a specially designed 50-pound-cake in his shop. He also doled out free 'chats' and ice-creams to the citizens of the steel city, who had gathered at his shop.
DNA - World - Indian writer on UK short story award list - Daily News & Analysis
DNA - World - Indian writer on UK short story award list - Daily News & Analysis
Indian writer on UK short story award list
PTI Tuesday, May 15, 2007 19:56 IST
For the latest World News on mobile sms WOR to 4567
To reprint this article, contact 3DSyndication
LONDON: Rana Dasgupta, an Indian writer, has been short-listed for Britain's National Short Story Prize, considered as the world's biggest award for a single short story.
Dasgupta's first novel, Tokyo Cancelled, was published in 2005.
The prize, worth 15,000 pounds, was launched at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2005 and aims to do for the short story what the Booker does for the novel.
Unlike the Scotsman and Orange Short Story Award, it is open only to previously published writers.
Others in the short list are Michel Faber for his story The Safehouse, William Trevor, the Irish elder statesman who was knighted for services to literature in 2002, James Lasdun and Rose Tremain.
Indian writer on UK short story award list
PTI Tuesday, May 15, 2007 19:56 IST
For the latest World News on mobile sms WOR to 4567
To reprint this article, contact 3DSyndication
LONDON: Rana Dasgupta, an Indian writer, has been short-listed for Britain's National Short Story Prize, considered as the world's biggest award for a single short story.
Dasgupta's first novel, Tokyo Cancelled, was published in 2005.
The prize, worth 15,000 pounds, was launched at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2005 and aims to do for the short story what the Booker does for the novel.
Unlike the Scotsman and Orange Short Story Award, it is open only to previously published writers.
Others in the short list are Michel Faber for his story The Safehouse, William Trevor, the Irish elder statesman who was knighted for services to literature in 2002, James Lasdun and Rose Tremain.
DNA - World - Indian firms under H1-B abuse glare - Daily News & Analysis
DNA - World - Indian firms under H1-B abuse glare - Daily News & Analysis
Indian firms under H1-B abuse glare
Uttara Choudhury Tuesday, May 15, 2007 23:47 IST
Add to Reddit
To reprint this article, contact 3DSyndication
NEW YORK: Five India-based firms which are heavy users of the H1-B visa, have been sent strongly worded letters by two US senators scrutinising potential misuse of the programme.
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin, a Democrat, who are on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, border security and refugees, are questioning nine companies, of which five are headquartered in India.
Infosys, Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, Patni Computer Systems, I-Flex Solutions, Satyam Computer Services, Larsen & Toubro Infotech Ltd, Tech Mahindra Americas Inc, and Mphasis Corp, who together used up to 20,000 of the 75,000 H1-B visas issued in 2006, have been issued the letters.
“We have been concerned about reported fraud and abuse of the H1-B and L visa programmes, and their impact on American workers,” said a letter to Nandan Nilekani of Infosys. Similar letters were sent to the eight other firms, asking questions about their visa use, wages, and layoffs.
The senators stressed that “too many H1-B visas are being used to facilitate the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries”. The inquiry comes on the back of a heated congressional debate aimed at crafting a comprehensive immigration
Durbin said: "We have to look at the system that generates these visas and the way they are used. This legislation will help protect American workers first by stopping H1-Bs from being exploited and used as outsourcing visas."
The letter to Infosys said: "A number of consulting firms reportedly recruit foreign workers and then outsource the individuals to other job sites or companies. Many of the top 20 companies that used H1-B visas in 2006 are firms, such as yours, that specialise in offshore outsourcing."
The senators also raised concerns about US workers getting retrenched by firms that exploit loopholes. "A number of firms have allegedly laid off American workers while continuing to employ H1-B visa holders," the letter said. "The American people are concerned about such layoffs at a time when the demand for visa issuances and the recruitment of foreign workers appear to be increasing."
Under federal law, 65,000 H1-B visas are issued each year for hi-tech workers. Another 20,000 are given to foreigners with degrees from US colleges.
Indian firms under H1-B abuse glare
Uttara Choudhury Tuesday, May 15, 2007 23:47 IST
Add to Reddit
To reprint this article, contact 3DSyndication
NEW YORK: Five India-based firms which are heavy users of the H1-B visa, have been sent strongly worded letters by two US senators scrutinising potential misuse of the programme.
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin, a Democrat, who are on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, border security and refugees, are questioning nine companies, of which five are headquartered in India.
Infosys, Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, Patni Computer Systems, I-Flex Solutions, Satyam Computer Services, Larsen & Toubro Infotech Ltd, Tech Mahindra Americas Inc, and Mphasis Corp, who together used up to 20,000 of the 75,000 H1-B visas issued in 2006, have been issued the letters.
“We have been concerned about reported fraud and abuse of the H1-B and L visa programmes, and their impact on American workers,” said a letter to Nandan Nilekani of Infosys. Similar letters were sent to the eight other firms, asking questions about their visa use, wages, and layoffs.
The senators stressed that “too many H1-B visas are being used to facilitate the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries”. The inquiry comes on the back of a heated congressional debate aimed at crafting a comprehensive immigration
Durbin said: "We have to look at the system that generates these visas and the way they are used. This legislation will help protect American workers first by stopping H1-Bs from being exploited and used as outsourcing visas."
The letter to Infosys said: "A number of consulting firms reportedly recruit foreign workers and then outsource the individuals to other job sites or companies. Many of the top 20 companies that used H1-B visas in 2006 are firms, such as yours, that specialise in offshore outsourcing."
The senators also raised concerns about US workers getting retrenched by firms that exploit loopholes. "A number of firms have allegedly laid off American workers while continuing to employ H1-B visa holders," the letter said. "The American people are concerned about such layoffs at a time when the demand for visa issuances and the recruitment of foreign workers appear to be increasing."
Under federal law, 65,000 H1-B visas are issued each year for hi-tech workers. Another 20,000 are given to foreigners with degrees from US colleges.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Brazil's Indians offended by Pope comments - Yahoo! News
Brazil's Indians offended by Pope comments - Yahoo! News
Pope's Bad comments
By Raymond Colitt Mon May 14, 3:15 PM ET
BRASILIA (Reuters) - Outraged Indian leaders in Brazil said on Monday they were offended by
Pope Benedict'
In a speech to Latin American and Caribbean bishops at the end of a visit to Brazil, the Pope said the Church had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
They had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest as they were "silently longing" for Christianity, he said.
Millions of tribal Indians are believed to have died as a result of European colonization backed by the Church since Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, through slaughter, disease or enslavement.
Many Indians today struggle for survival, stripped of their traditional ways of life and excluded from society.
"It's arrogant and disrespectful to consider our cultural heritage secondary to theirs," said Jecinaldo Satere Mawe, chief coordinator of the Amazon Indian group Coiab.
Several Indian groups sent a letter to the Pope last week asking for his support in defending their ancestral lands and culture. They said the Indians had suffered a "process of genocide" since the first European colonizers had arrived.
Priests blessed conquistadors as they waged war on the indigenous peoples, although some later defended them and many today are the most vociferous allies of Indians.
"The state used the Church to do the dirty work in colonizing the Indians but they already asked forgiveness for that ... so is the Pope taking back the Church's word?" said Dionito Jose de Souza a leader of the Makuxi tribe in northern Roraima state.
Pope John Paul' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> Pope John Paul spoke in 1992 of mistakes in the evangelization of native peoples of the Americas.
Pope Benedict not only upset many Indians but also Catholic priests who have joined their struggle, said Sandro Tuxa, who heads the movement of northeastern tribes.
"We repudiate the Pope's comments," Tuxa said. "To say the cultural decimation of our people represents a purification is offensive, and frankly, frightening.
"I think (the Pope) has been poorly advised."
Even the Catholic Church's own Indian advocacy group in Brazil, known as Cimi, distanced itself from the Pope.
"The Pope doesn't understand the reality of the Indians here, his statement was wrong and indefensible," Cimi advisor Father Paulo Suess told Reuters. "I too was upset."
Pope's Bad comments
By Raymond Colitt Mon May 14, 3:15 PM ET
BRASILIA (Reuters) - Outraged Indian leaders in Brazil said on Monday they were offended by
Pope Benedict'
In a speech to Latin American and Caribbean bishops at the end of a visit to Brazil, the Pope said the Church had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
They had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest as they were "silently longing" for Christianity, he said.
Millions of tribal Indians are believed to have died as a result of European colonization backed by the Church since Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, through slaughter, disease or enslavement.
Many Indians today struggle for survival, stripped of their traditional ways of life and excluded from society.
"It's arrogant and disrespectful to consider our cultural heritage secondary to theirs," said Jecinaldo Satere Mawe, chief coordinator of the Amazon Indian group Coiab.
Several Indian groups sent a letter to the Pope last week asking for his support in defending their ancestral lands and culture. They said the Indians had suffered a "process of genocide" since the first European colonizers had arrived.
Priests blessed conquistadors as they waged war on the indigenous peoples, although some later defended them and many today are the most vociferous allies of Indians.
"The state used the Church to do the dirty work in colonizing the Indians but they already asked forgiveness for that ... so is the Pope taking back the Church's word?" said Dionito Jose de Souza a leader of the Makuxi tribe in northern Roraima state.
Pope John Paul' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> Pope John Paul spoke in 1992 of mistakes in the evangelization of native peoples of the Americas.
Pope Benedict not only upset many Indians but also Catholic priests who have joined their struggle, said Sandro Tuxa, who heads the movement of northeastern tribes.
"We repudiate the Pope's comments," Tuxa said. "To say the cultural decimation of our people represents a purification is offensive, and frankly, frightening.
"I think (the Pope) has been poorly advised."
Even the Catholic Church's own Indian advocacy group in Brazil, known as Cimi, distanced itself from the Pope.
"The Pope doesn't understand the reality of the Indians here, his statement was wrong and indefensible," Cimi advisor Father Paulo Suess told Reuters. "I too was upset."
MSN INDIA - What made Maran quit?
MSN INDIA - What made Maran quit?
What made Maran quit?
Monday, May 14, 200711:58 IST
Blog this story
Chennai: Communications and IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran had to resign from the union cabinet as he is said to be up against the women of DMK patriarch and Tamil Nadu's Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi's family.
The women here would be Dayalu Ammal, mother of M.K. Azhagiri and M.K. Stalin - Karunanidhi's sons, his ambitious daughter M.K. Kanimozhi and her mother Rajathi Ammal.
In fact, his resignation letter states he was prepared to accept the party decision "if it gave any joy to Mr Karunanidhi and family".
It was probably one of the most pragmatic of political decisions in recent times after his DMK party served him a notice for "actions detrimental to the party".
In the last three years, Maran had emerged as an effective pointsman for the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), one of India's oldest parties and also part of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) ruling in New Delhi.
Shipping and Surface Transport Minister T.R. Baalu was the DMK pointsman before young Maran emerged on the scene. Maran's rapport with Congress president Sonia Gandhi was as much a matter of envy as was his closeness to the industry.
The suave and cosmopolitan Maran managed to draw investment worth Rs.30 billion into Tamil Nadu alone in just six-eight months. He has proved his capability as a minister and most parties would be proud to have him as a member. So why did Maran have to go?
Kanimozhi's mother Rajathi Ammal has emerged as a powerbroker ever since the DMK came to power in the state on May 13, 2006 and her CIT Road house is where many important decisions are taken. The English-speaking and smart Kanimozhi is a glib communicator and is in the long run expected to emerge as the next pointsman for the DMK in New Delhi - if not as good as Maran, certainly better than all the others.
Maran's exit is being seen here as an opportunity for Kanimozhi.
Then there is Dayalu Ammal, mother of M.K. Azhagiri and M.K. Stalin - Karunanidhi's sons. Azhagiri had for many years been alienated from the family. He was sent away from Chennai, as he was seen as a threat to Stalin, just as Murasoli Maran was sent to New Delhi by the DMK to again safeguard Stalin for chief-ministership.
What made Maran quit?
Monday, May 14, 200711:58 IST
Blog this story
Chennai: Communications and IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran had to resign from the union cabinet as he is said to be up against the women of DMK patriarch and Tamil Nadu's Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi's family.
The women here would be Dayalu Ammal, mother of M.K. Azhagiri and M.K. Stalin - Karunanidhi's sons, his ambitious daughter M.K. Kanimozhi and her mother Rajathi Ammal.
In fact, his resignation letter states he was prepared to accept the party decision "if it gave any joy to Mr Karunanidhi and family".
It was probably one of the most pragmatic of political decisions in recent times after his DMK party served him a notice for "actions detrimental to the party".
In the last three years, Maran had emerged as an effective pointsman for the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), one of India's oldest parties and also part of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) ruling in New Delhi.
Shipping and Surface Transport Minister T.R. Baalu was the DMK pointsman before young Maran emerged on the scene. Maran's rapport with Congress president Sonia Gandhi was as much a matter of envy as was his closeness to the industry.
The suave and cosmopolitan Maran managed to draw investment worth Rs.30 billion into Tamil Nadu alone in just six-eight months. He has proved his capability as a minister and most parties would be proud to have him as a member. So why did Maran have to go?
Kanimozhi's mother Rajathi Ammal has emerged as a powerbroker ever since the DMK came to power in the state on May 13, 2006 and her CIT Road house is where many important decisions are taken. The English-speaking and smart Kanimozhi is a glib communicator and is in the long run expected to emerge as the next pointsman for the DMK in New Delhi - if not as good as Maran, certainly better than all the others.
Maran's exit is being seen here as an opportunity for Kanimozhi.
Then there is Dayalu Ammal, mother of M.K. Azhagiri and M.K. Stalin - Karunanidhi's sons. Azhagiri had for many years been alienated from the family. He was sent away from Chennai, as he was seen as a threat to Stalin, just as Murasoli Maran was sent to New Delhi by the DMK to again safeguard Stalin for chief-ministership.
MSN INDIA - Seven Brahmins, six Thakurs in Mayawati's ministry
MSN INDIA - Seven Brahmins, six Thakurs in Mayawati's ministry
Seven Brahmins, six Thakurs in Mayawati's ministry
Sunday, May 13, 200718:12 IST
Blog this story
Lucknow: In keeping with her new social engineering, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati on Sunday inducted seven Brahmins, six Thakurs and five Muslims in her 50-member jumbo ministry.
Among the Brahmins, Ramveer Upadhyay, Rakesh Dhar Tripathi and Nakul Dubey were sworn in as Cabinet ministers while Rangnath Mishra and Anand Kumar Mishra were made Ministers of State (independent charge) and Rajesh Tiwari and Daddan Mishra as state ministers.
While Ramveer Upadhyay is said to be a close confidant of Mayawati, Nakul Dubey, a newcomer in politics is a lawyer by profession and said to be close to BSP leader S C Mishra.
Among six Thakurs, Thakur Jaiveer Singh and Narain Singh are Cabinet ministers, Badshah Singh is Minister of State (independent charge) and Sangram Singh, Yograj Singh and Yashpal Singh are Ministers of State.
Nasimuddin Siddiqui is the only Muslim leader who was sworn in as a Cabinet minister. Anis Ahmad Khan and Abdul Hussein were made MoS (independent charge). Abdul Mannan and Shahjil Islam are state ministers. Nasimuddin Siddiqui had been a minister in earlier regimes of Mayawati.
Two Yadavs - Awadh Pal Singh Yadav and Anand Singh Yadav - also got place in Mayawati's ministry as Minister of State (independent charge).
Among the ministers, Rakesh Dhar Tripathi and Phagu Chauhan were in BJP and had joined BSP before elections.
Seven Brahmins, six Thakurs in Mayawati's ministry
Sunday, May 13, 200718:12 IST
Blog this story
Lucknow: In keeping with her new social engineering, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati on Sunday inducted seven Brahmins, six Thakurs and five Muslims in her 50-member jumbo ministry.
Among the Brahmins, Ramveer Upadhyay, Rakesh Dhar Tripathi and Nakul Dubey were sworn in as Cabinet ministers while Rangnath Mishra and Anand Kumar Mishra were made Ministers of State (independent charge) and Rajesh Tiwari and Daddan Mishra as state ministers.
While Ramveer Upadhyay is said to be a close confidant of Mayawati, Nakul Dubey, a newcomer in politics is a lawyer by profession and said to be close to BSP leader S C Mishra.
Among six Thakurs, Thakur Jaiveer Singh and Narain Singh are Cabinet ministers, Badshah Singh is Minister of State (independent charge) and Sangram Singh, Yograj Singh and Yashpal Singh are Ministers of State.
Nasimuddin Siddiqui is the only Muslim leader who was sworn in as a Cabinet minister. Anis Ahmad Khan and Abdul Hussein were made MoS (independent charge). Abdul Mannan and Shahjil Islam are state ministers. Nasimuddin Siddiqui had been a minister in earlier regimes of Mayawati.
Two Yadavs - Awadh Pal Singh Yadav and Anand Singh Yadav - also got place in Mayawati's ministry as Minister of State (independent charge).
Among the ministers, Rakesh Dhar Tripathi and Phagu Chauhan were in BJP and had joined BSP before elections.
MSN INDIA - Intricate arithmetic behind choosing President
MSN INDIA - Intricate arithmetic behind choosing President
Intricate arithmetic behind choosing President
Sunday, May 13, 200712:26 IST
Blog this story
New Delhi: The election of India's 12th President due in July has generated lively debates in the country. But there are not many who know the hugely complex procedure it involves.
The Indian President is elected by the members of an electoral college consisting of the elected members of both the houses of parliament and of the legislative assemblies of the states and the union territories of Delhi and Puducherry.
The importance of each state in the electoral college depends on the number of votes it carries. Uttar Pradesh's 403 members of the assembly and 80 MPs therefore make it crucial for the presidential elections.
With the emergence of the Bahujan Samaj Party as the single largest party in that state ensuring the formation of a government, the picture for the election of the president has been made clearer.
A hung assembly or president's rule in the state, as predicted by pollsters and political analysts, would have made the situation different as there is legal ambiguity on whether members of an assembly that is in suspended animation could participate in the voting.
According to Article 55 of the Constitution, the number of votes each state is entitled to cast is determined as:
(a) Every elected member of the legislative assembly of a state shall have as many votes as there are multiples of one thousand in the quotient obtained by dividing the population of the state by the total number of elected members of the assembly;
(b) If after taking the said multiples of one thousand, the remainder is not less than five hundred, then the vote of each member shall be further increased by one;
(c) Each elected member of either house of parliament has as many votes as is calculated by dividing the total number of votes assigned to the members of the state legislative assemblies by the total number of elected members of both the house of parliament from the state. Fractions exceeding one-half are counted as one and other fractions will be disregarded;
The voting is by secret ballot. Among the 28 states, Uttar Pradesh has the largest number of votes and Sikkim the smallest. The value of votes in each state and union territory is as given below in the order.
State - number of legislators (x) value of each vote - total value
Andhra Pradesh - 294 x 148 = 4,351
Arunachal Pradesh - 60 x 8 = 480
Assam - 126 x 116 = 14,616
Bihar - 243 x 173 = 42,039
Chhattisgarh - 90 x 129 = 11,610
Goa - 40 x 20 = 800
Gujarat - 182 x 147 = 26,754
Haryana - 90 x 112 = 10,080
Himachal Pradesh - 68 x 51 = 3,468
Jammu and Kashmir - 87 x 72 = 6,264
Jharkhand - 81 x 176 = 14,256
Karnataka - 224 x 131 = 29,344
Kerala - 140 x 152 = 21,280
Madhya Pradesh - 230 x 131 = 30,130
Maharashtra - 288 x 175 = 50,400
Manipur - 60 x 18 = 1,080
Meghalaya - 60 x 17 = 1,020
Mizoram - 40 x 8 = 320
Nagaland - 60 x 9 = 540
Orissa - 147 x 149 = 21,903
Punjab - 117 x 116 = 13,572
Rajasthan - 200 x 129 = 25,800
Sikkim - 32 x 7 = 224
Tamil Nadu - 234 x 176 = 41,184
Tripura - 60 x 26 = 1,560
Uttar Pradesh - 403 x 208 = 83,824
Uttarakhand - 64 x 70 = 4,480
West Bengal - 294 x 151 = 44,394
Delhi - 70 x 58 = 4,060
Puducherry - 30 x 16 = 480
Number of legislators in the country - 4,120
Value of legislators' votes - 5,49,474
The number of MPs - 776 (543 in the Lok Sabha + 233 in the Rajya Sabha - Nominated members do not
have voting rights). The value of an MP's vote was fixed at 708. An MP's vote is calculated by
dividing the total value of all legislators' votes by the number of MPs.
The values of MPs' votes - 776 x 708 = 549,408
Total votes in the electoral college - 5,49,474 + 5,49,408 = 1.098 million.
(Source - Lok Sabha Secretariat)
Intricate arithmetic behind choosing President
Sunday, May 13, 200712:26 IST
Blog this story
New Delhi: The election of India's 12th President due in July has generated lively debates in the country. But there are not many who know the hugely complex procedure it involves.
The Indian President is elected by the members of an electoral college consisting of the elected members of both the houses of parliament and of the legislative assemblies of the states and the union territories of Delhi and Puducherry.
The importance of each state in the electoral college depends on the number of votes it carries. Uttar Pradesh's 403 members of the assembly and 80 MPs therefore make it crucial for the presidential elections.
With the emergence of the Bahujan Samaj Party as the single largest party in that state ensuring the formation of a government, the picture for the election of the president has been made clearer.
A hung assembly or president's rule in the state, as predicted by pollsters and political analysts, would have made the situation different as there is legal ambiguity on whether members of an assembly that is in suspended animation could participate in the voting.
According to Article 55 of the Constitution, the number of votes each state is entitled to cast is determined as:
(a) Every elected member of the legislative assembly of a state shall have as many votes as there are multiples of one thousand in the quotient obtained by dividing the population of the state by the total number of elected members of the assembly;
(b) If after taking the said multiples of one thousand, the remainder is not less than five hundred, then the vote of each member shall be further increased by one;
(c) Each elected member of either house of parliament has as many votes as is calculated by dividing the total number of votes assigned to the members of the state legislative assemblies by the total number of elected members of both the house of parliament from the state. Fractions exceeding one-half are counted as one and other fractions will be disregarded;
The voting is by secret ballot. Among the 28 states, Uttar Pradesh has the largest number of votes and Sikkim the smallest. The value of votes in each state and union territory is as given below in the order.
State - number of legislators (x) value of each vote - total value
Andhra Pradesh - 294 x 148 = 4,351
Arunachal Pradesh - 60 x 8 = 480
Assam - 126 x 116 = 14,616
Bihar - 243 x 173 = 42,039
Chhattisgarh - 90 x 129 = 11,610
Goa - 40 x 20 = 800
Gujarat - 182 x 147 = 26,754
Haryana - 90 x 112 = 10,080
Himachal Pradesh - 68 x 51 = 3,468
Jammu and Kashmir - 87 x 72 = 6,264
Jharkhand - 81 x 176 = 14,256
Karnataka - 224 x 131 = 29,344
Kerala - 140 x 152 = 21,280
Madhya Pradesh - 230 x 131 = 30,130
Maharashtra - 288 x 175 = 50,400
Manipur - 60 x 18 = 1,080
Meghalaya - 60 x 17 = 1,020
Mizoram - 40 x 8 = 320
Nagaland - 60 x 9 = 540
Orissa - 147 x 149 = 21,903
Punjab - 117 x 116 = 13,572
Rajasthan - 200 x 129 = 25,800
Sikkim - 32 x 7 = 224
Tamil Nadu - 234 x 176 = 41,184
Tripura - 60 x 26 = 1,560
Uttar Pradesh - 403 x 208 = 83,824
Uttarakhand - 64 x 70 = 4,480
West Bengal - 294 x 151 = 44,394
Delhi - 70 x 58 = 4,060
Puducherry - 30 x 16 = 480
Number of legislators in the country - 4,120
Value of legislators' votes - 5,49,474
The number of MPs - 776 (543 in the Lok Sabha + 233 in the Rajya Sabha - Nominated members do not
have voting rights). The value of an MP's vote was fixed at 708. An MP's vote is calculated by
dividing the total value of all legislators' votes by the number of MPs.
The values of MPs' votes - 776 x 708 = 549,408
Total votes in the electoral college - 5,49,474 + 5,49,408 = 1.098 million.
(Source - Lok Sabha Secretariat)
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Now a vaccine to control blood pressure - Sify.com
Now a vaccine to control blood pressure - Sify.com
Now a vaccine to control blood pressure
Saturday, 12 May , 2007, 22:36
London: British scientists have develop a vaccine which they claim will help people suffering from hypertension to control their blood pressure.
The vaccine developed by Cheshire-based drug firm Protherics has been successfully tested and is expected in the markets within five years.
The vaccine uses a protein found in limpets, a sea creature, to attack a hormone called angiotensin produced by the liver. Angiotensin raises blood pressure by narrowing arteries. The vaccine, however, turns the body's immune system against the hormone.
It would need a course of just three jabs, with a booster every six months.
A booster shot every six months, or even once a year, would keep blood pressure low, the researchers said.
People who have tried it have suffered a few side effects, although one in ten did complain of a brief flu-like illness.
Protherics is planning trials of an improved version of the vaccine, which is ten times more effective at stimulating the immune system than its original formula, the Daily Mail reported.
"Improving compliance in this way could save thousands from life-threatening complications such as heart attack or stroke," said Andrew Heath, an official of Protherics.
High blood pressure which affects a third of all adults doubles the risk of dying from heart disease or stroke and is blamed for 60,000 deaths a year in Britain. It is currently treated with pills with side effects and some patients simply stop taking them.
The Swiss firm Cytos Biotechnology is also developing a similar vaccine that uses an empty virus shell to spur the immune system into action.
Now a vaccine to control blood pressure
Saturday, 12 May , 2007, 22:36
London: British scientists have develop a vaccine which they claim will help people suffering from hypertension to control their blood pressure.
The vaccine developed by Cheshire-based drug firm Protherics has been successfully tested and is expected in the markets within five years.
The vaccine uses a protein found in limpets, a sea creature, to attack a hormone called angiotensin produced by the liver. Angiotensin raises blood pressure by narrowing arteries. The vaccine, however, turns the body's immune system against the hormone.
It would need a course of just three jabs, with a booster every six months.
A booster shot every six months, or even once a year, would keep blood pressure low, the researchers said.
People who have tried it have suffered a few side effects, although one in ten did complain of a brief flu-like illness.
Protherics is planning trials of an improved version of the vaccine, which is ten times more effective at stimulating the immune system than its original formula, the Daily Mail reported.
"Improving compliance in this way could save thousands from life-threatening complications such as heart attack or stroke," said Andrew Heath, an official of Protherics.
High blood pressure which affects a third of all adults doubles the risk of dying from heart disease or stroke and is blamed for 60,000 deaths a year in Britain. It is currently treated with pills with side effects and some patients simply stop taking them.
The Swiss firm Cytos Biotechnology is also developing a similar vaccine that uses an empty virus shell to spur the immune system into action.
NDTV.com
NDTV.com
Nandigram still hot
Press Trust of India
Saturday, May 12, 2007 (Midnapore)
The differences between CPI-M and allies of the Left Front over whether an all-party state-level meeting or a district-level one should be held to restore peace at Nandigram continued on Saturday, with the former opposing the demand by Forward Bloc, RSP and CPI.CPI-M state secretary and Left Front chairman Biman Bose said it was decided at a meeting of the front on May 7 that a district-level meeting would be held first to restore normalcy at Nandigram.Stating that unanimous resolutions at Left Front meetings could not be flouted, he said without naming the leaders of partners: ''Who are these leaders who are taking these initiatives? The CPI-M will not have any role in such meetings being proposed.''The decision of the LF allies, Forward Bloc, RSP and CPI that an all-party state-level meeting should first be held, was shot down by Bose on Friday, but the three parties have stuck to their stand.Senior CPI leader and Water Resources Development Minister Nanda Gopal Bhattacharjee met Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to convey the decision of the allies.
Nandigram still hot
Press Trust of India
Saturday, May 12, 2007 (Midnapore)
The differences between CPI-M and allies of the Left Front over whether an all-party state-level meeting or a district-level one should be held to restore peace at Nandigram continued on Saturday, with the former opposing the demand by Forward Bloc, RSP and CPI.CPI-M state secretary and Left Front chairman Biman Bose said it was decided at a meeting of the front on May 7 that a district-level meeting would be held first to restore normalcy at Nandigram.Stating that unanimous resolutions at Left Front meetings could not be flouted, he said without naming the leaders of partners: ''Who are these leaders who are taking these initiatives? The CPI-M will not have any role in such meetings being proposed.''The decision of the LF allies, Forward Bloc, RSP and CPI that an all-party state-level meeting should first be held, was shot down by Bose on Friday, but the three parties have stuck to their stand.Senior CPI leader and Water Resources Development Minister Nanda Gopal Bhattacharjee met Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to convey the decision of the allies.
NDTV.com
NDTV.com
Artists unite against moral police
Quote
“ We have suffered enough. Cant allow this bullying to happen ”
- Shivaji Panikkar
Supriya Sharma
Saturday, May 12, 2007 (Vadodara)
The face-off between artists and the saffron brigade in Vadodara's M S University continues.Members of the Fine Arts Faculty have gone on a mass casual leave in support of the suspended Dean, Shivaji Panikkar.A local court meanwhile has extended the police custody of art student Chandra Mohan till Monday. Chandra Mohan was attacked by VHP activists and jailed for so-called 'obscene art' but VHP activists are not satisfied. They now want Panikkar who defended Chandra Mohan's work to be arrested. Autonomy at stakeProf Panikkar, the dean in charge, was suspended on Friday night and has now gone into hiding, hounded by the moral police. Panikkar met NDTV and broke down as he said this is a battle that now needs reinforcements. ''We have suffered enough. Cant allow this bullying to happen.''There is enough support for Professor Panikkar, not just from artists but also from the university's teachers association.Even a senate member argued that what is at stake is not just the freedom of an artist but the autonomy of an academic institution.''Are we to allow people to walk into campus and tell us what we should be doing and what not. If this is allowed to happen then there's no end to it,'' said Prof Indraparamit Roy, faculty member.''In the last few years, university has been taken over by the RSS. What you see today is ultimate saffronisation. Either you agree with us or else we bash you up. It is happening in appointments, promotions. The disgusting thing is the role of the Vice Chancellor who is meant to be a symbol of intellectual freedom,'' Prof Bandukwala, former faculty member.Legal fightOn the face of it, this looks like solid support for the premier faculty of fine arts in what is one of the worst moments in its more than 50 years of history. But the odds against it are high.BJP leaders argue that local leader Niraj Jain, who led the attack which ended in the student's arrest, did not violate the law. ''It is clear that the professors are misleading the students. No one has the right to hurt Hindu sentiment just because we are tolerant,'' said N V Patel, Head of Baroda BJP.The student arrested is still behind bars, the dean stands suspended and the legal fight will have to be fought not just against VHP activist but against the university and as some would argue the law itself.
Artists unite against moral police
Quote
“ We have suffered enough. Cant allow this bullying to happen ”
- Shivaji Panikkar
Supriya Sharma
Saturday, May 12, 2007 (Vadodara)
The face-off between artists and the saffron brigade in Vadodara's M S University continues.Members of the Fine Arts Faculty have gone on a mass casual leave in support of the suspended Dean, Shivaji Panikkar.A local court meanwhile has extended the police custody of art student Chandra Mohan till Monday. Chandra Mohan was attacked by VHP activists and jailed for so-called 'obscene art' but VHP activists are not satisfied. They now want Panikkar who defended Chandra Mohan's work to be arrested. Autonomy at stakeProf Panikkar, the dean in charge, was suspended on Friday night and has now gone into hiding, hounded by the moral police. Panikkar met NDTV and broke down as he said this is a battle that now needs reinforcements. ''We have suffered enough. Cant allow this bullying to happen.''There is enough support for Professor Panikkar, not just from artists but also from the university's teachers association.Even a senate member argued that what is at stake is not just the freedom of an artist but the autonomy of an academic institution.''Are we to allow people to walk into campus and tell us what we should be doing and what not. If this is allowed to happen then there's no end to it,'' said Prof Indraparamit Roy, faculty member.''In the last few years, university has been taken over by the RSS. What you see today is ultimate saffronisation. Either you agree with us or else we bash you up. It is happening in appointments, promotions. The disgusting thing is the role of the Vice Chancellor who is meant to be a symbol of intellectual freedom,'' Prof Bandukwala, former faculty member.Legal fightOn the face of it, this looks like solid support for the premier faculty of fine arts in what is one of the worst moments in its more than 50 years of history. But the odds against it are high.BJP leaders argue that local leader Niraj Jain, who led the attack which ended in the student's arrest, did not violate the law. ''It is clear that the professors are misleading the students. No one has the right to hurt Hindu sentiment just because we are tolerant,'' said N V Patel, Head of Baroda BJP.The student arrested is still behind bars, the dean stands suspended and the legal fight will have to be fought not just against VHP activist but against the university and as some would argue the law itself.
Vadodara art controversy intensifies
Vadodara art controversy intensifies
Vadodara art controversy intensifies
VHP Against Artists
By IBNlive.com
Sunday May 13, 01:19 AM Vadodara: With the suspension of the Dean of the Maharaja Sayajirao University's Fine Arts Faculty, the art controversy has taken a new twist.But the students have now decided to protest against fellow student Chandra Mohan's arrest and the Dean's suspension. Fear has gripped the Fine Arts students at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara."Yes, there is a little bit of fear…quite a lot, in fact. Because we don't know, which way the things are going," said a student.One of their batchmates is in jail, their dean has been suspended and the University authorities are not standing by them in their hour of crisis. But the suspended Dean of Fine Arts Faculty Shivaji Panikkar refuses to give in to the moral policing."It is their misunderstanding – I mean, I have my knowledge in art, they don't have. And it is only experts, who know about arts, should be taking decisions about art," said dean Panikkar.The students too have decided not to give up without a fight. And they are using the weapon they know best – art. "We are putting up posters to protest the incident," said a student."What wrong has he done? The paintings were for evaluation...and it's a part of Indian Art," said another student.NGOs, former students and the artists' fraternity have also joined the protest. "The Vice Chancellor and Pro Vice Chancellor are joining what I call a bunch of goons and destroying the image of this university," said Artistic Director and former student Arun Agnihotri.Assisted by NGOs, students are planning to intensify their agitation. But this episode has also highlighted the growing instances of the communalisation of the educational systems.
Vadodara art controversy intensifies
VHP Against Artists
By IBNlive.com
Sunday May 13, 01:19 AM Vadodara: With the suspension of the Dean of the Maharaja Sayajirao University's Fine Arts Faculty, the art controversy has taken a new twist.But the students have now decided to protest against fellow student Chandra Mohan's arrest and the Dean's suspension. Fear has gripped the Fine Arts students at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara."Yes, there is a little bit of fear…quite a lot, in fact. Because we don't know, which way the things are going," said a student.One of their batchmates is in jail, their dean has been suspended and the University authorities are not standing by them in their hour of crisis. But the suspended Dean of Fine Arts Faculty Shivaji Panikkar refuses to give in to the moral policing."It is their misunderstanding – I mean, I have my knowledge in art, they don't have. And it is only experts, who know about arts, should be taking decisions about art," said dean Panikkar.The students too have decided not to give up without a fight. And they are using the weapon they know best – art. "We are putting up posters to protest the incident," said a student."What wrong has he done? The paintings were for evaluation...and it's a part of Indian Art," said another student.NGOs, former students and the artists' fraternity have also joined the protest. "The Vice Chancellor and Pro Vice Chancellor are joining what I call a bunch of goons and destroying the image of this university," said Artistic Director and former student Arun Agnihotri.Assisted by NGOs, students are planning to intensify their agitation. But this episode has also highlighted the growing instances of the communalisation of the educational systems.
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