liberation in a space of webs and cages

you realise how busy and stressed your life has become when you have to revisit your blog to see if you have missed the once in a week deadline that you set for yourself or not. in the first place the mind is occupied elsewhere and has forgotten when was the last blog or when is the next due. also the mind is so much feeling about being stifled as it wants to blog but can move towards it only in the free time which is a rare resource. as such the mind is trapped and caught in a web of too many activities and things. so the agenda today is freeing the mind. but freedom from what - the cage and the web. the mind needs avenues to roam free and fly.. spending time with children or relaxing with some sport usually top the list or doing a favourite activity. they refresh the mind and give it new energy to move on in a enthusiastic manner. so breaking the cage seems simple in pursuing a hobby or a pleasure giving activity. many youngsters today move to the pub in order to break away from their routine but most of them are confused the pub and disco routine every week does not help us break from our cage - we just transgress from one cage to another. there are very few of us who can let the mind free to roam everywhere in a dance and pub routine and that's why so many parties give us joy then and five minutes later on we are back to square one. the larger problem is to break the web. the pub routine like any activity at best is helpful in breaking the web cause it absorbs us into something which takes us away from the web. however many times such things might be less in u number but they have a web of their own and the end result might be no benefit at all. any activity like cooking which gets us totally involved into something breaks our mind away from the many trifles it is concerned about and frees us and is liberating from the web but not from the cage. liberation from the web is about being free from the many things that bind us and being liberated from the cage is about being free and moving in many different directions and getting the liveliness and loveliness of diversity in our life . so it needs a diverse set of activities and group to make us do wonderful things. famous profs are known to have quirks of sports / movies / travel / some other idiosyncrasy which makes them wander in a domain they have not been before and that is breaking the cage in a true sense. so how do i do it. the blog is what breaks the web and absorbs me in itself. and spending time with children or enjoying the beauty of everyday life in pictures . movies, plays , art , or beautiful places to travel that make us seek different skills of trekking , swimming, languages, culture or food habits and this is liberating truly. at the end it reminds me of the motto of IRMA the institute of rural management anand what liberates is knowledge and my researcher at pun mind asks me what about the researcher for whom new knowledge is mundane .. do we really have answers? if you think NO read this bit again .

The system of consumerism and poverty traps

Everyday there is so much waiting to be written and so much wanting to be written and at times documented but rarely is there time enough in modern life to write a good blog or to keep your thought trained on one thing to do justice to it.

Today morning over a cup of tea i got discussing about the culutre of doing sewing , embroidery , stitching at home. It is a dying culture or has already died in most parts of India. my counterpart was trying to tell me "why do you worry if we can help generate employment by getting someone to do it what's so bad in it?" ...it made me think why was it that i was disliking this change in culture.. i'd like all of us to think through this with our understanding of life, money, jobs, economics, or whatever.

To me the answer was not strange or unknown.. The answer to my predicament not that i have the best understanding on the same. I had to patiently tell my friend that everytime we outsource, we bring in an element of consumerism into services. While to our eye this consumerism has only one effect - generate employment for someone who provides services to us, to a seasoned rural manager and IRMA passout it is not too difficult to realise that consumerism has dual effects on the poor populace. The first is the effect of rising consumerism which raises the prices for services that were otherwise delivered within the household free of financial cost. They never the less had an economic cost. In being provided in-house they avoided the unnecesarry economic costs of packaging ( a shop or an office to provide services etc. ) and develoment (skill training etc.) . The second effect is that the poor generally survive on open access and community or common resources and as such increasing consumerism draws on their meagre financial resources and increasingly renders their community and common resources non-tradable and as such they do not get monetary benefits of the same or the monetary benefit gets significantly reduced.

In summary by killing such cultures we are pushing the poor away from a sustained common resource livelihood to an unsustainable private rights resource livelihoods that simply do not give enough returns.

Now the question is why do they not give enough returns. Well to answer this question we have to look back at our own behaviour - how many times have you paid the rightful price of hand-work embroidery and how often have you bargained that on"xyz" footpath the same embroidery is available for 1/10 the price. How often do we realise that we are not just killing a culture but by pegging a persons labour equal to an exploitative regime we are also killing the chance of survival for these folks by making life more unsustainable.. As a parting shot i'll ask you to work out the relations of a community of people that lives an unsustainable life with illegal activities. and you will know where we are headed in the "growth only" regime.


Hail Growth - Whither Growth

Blogging ain't easy

Blogging ain't easy at all , especially if you get to it after a long hiatus. I wonder if the hiatus can be long or not lols. well ill try to be back to blogging about once a week amidst the chaos and chorus of my life and retain a habit that has given me some very wonderful friends for life. As my life changes slowly and the year of the "realisation" impacts things around me and my life it is only apt that i should preserve a good habit and i shoudl preserve my good freinds and the platform which brought me to them.

However everytime we come back to something we have not touched for sometime.. my pserspective changes and so i guess has my perspective about my own blog and it is only with time that we will see what perspective this takes but trust me its going to be fun as my thesis work and my personal life catches up with me and i try to catch up with all of you on my blog:)

So its back to happy blog days again and long live the blog.. but man seriously bloging ain't easy at all!!!