Happy Days

June 7, 2009, 10:35 pm
The Joy of Less
By Pico Iyer
“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park

In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).

When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who

Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.
have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

Pico Iyer at his best in the NYT.

Habib Tanvir

Habib Tanvir theatre person, poet and activist has passed, here is an obit from DNA India and after that is an article from Samar Magazine about Habib Tanvir

Bhopal: Eminent playwright Habib Tanvir, one of the greatest stalwarts of Indian stage, was known for blending theatre, folk and poetry in his works, leaving an indelible mark on the minds of the audience.

A multi-faceted personality, Habib Ahmed Khan adopted the pen-name 'Tanvir' when he began writing poetry at an early age.

Born on September one, 1923 at Raipur, Tanvir passed his matriculation from Laurie Municipal High School, Raipur and completed his BA from Morris College Nagpur in 1944.

After pursuing his Masters degree for a year at Aligarh Mulsim University, Tanvir moved to Bombay and joined All India Radio (AIR) Bombay as a producer in 1945.

While in Bombay, he wrote songs for Hindi films and even acted in a few.

He also joined the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA) and became an integral part of Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) as an actor.

Later, when most prominent IPTA members were imprisoned for opposing the British rule, he was asked to take over the organisation.

The playwright is a recipient of Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1969, Padma Shri in 1983, Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship in 1996 and the Padma Bhushan in 2002.

Tanvir was also a member of the Rajya Sabha from 1972-1978.

His play Charandas Chor that was first produced in 1975 got him the Fringe Firsts Award at Edinburgh International Drama Festival in 1982.

In 1959, he founded the Naya Theatre in Bhopal and it is set to complete 50 years this year.

In 1954, he moved to New Delhi and worked with Qudsia Zaidi's Hindustani Theatre and also worked with Children's theatre and authored numerous plays. It was during this period he met actor-director, Moneeka Mishra, whom he later married.

Later in the same year, Tanvir produced his first significant play Agra Bazar, based on the work and time of the plebeian 18th century urdu poet, Nazir Akbarabadi, of Mirza Ghalib's generation.

In this play he used local residents and folk artists from Okhla village in Delhi with students of Jamia Millia Islamia creating a palette never seen before in Indian theatre, a play not staged in a confined space, rather a bazaar, a market place.

This experience with non-trained actors and folk artists later blossomed with his work with folk artists of Chhattisgarh.

In 1955, Habib moved to England where he trained in Acting at Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) and in Direction at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (1956).

For the next two years, he travelled through Europe, watching various theatre activities.

One of the highlights of this period, was his eight-month stay in Berlin in 1956, during which he got to see several plays of Bertolt Brecht, produced by Berliner Ensemble, just a few months after Brech's death.

This proved to a lasting influence on him, as in the coming years, he also used local idioms in his plays, to express trans-cultural tales and ideologies.

This gave rise to a "theatre of roots", which was marked by an utter simplicity in style, presentation and technique, yet remaining eloquent and powerfully experiential.

A deeply inspired Habib returned to India in 1958 and took directing full-time.

He produced Mitti Ki Gaadi, based on Shudraka's Sanskrit work, Mrichakatika and it became his first important production in 'Chhattisgarhi'.

There was no, turning back from there. It led to the foundation of 'Naya Theatre' in Bhopal, along with his wife, Moneeka Mishra.

In his exploratory phase, 1970-73, Tanvir broke free from one more theatre restriction, he no longer made the folk artists with whom he had been performing all his plays speak Hindi, and instead switched to 'Chhattisgarhi', a dialect, they were more accustomed to.

Later, he even started experimenting with "Pandavani", a folk singing style from the region and temple rituals, making his plays stand out amidst the backdrop of plays which were still using traditional theatre techniques like blocking movements or fixing lights on paper.

Soon spontaneity and improvisation became the hallmark of the new style, where folk artists were allowed greater freedom of expression.

A further evolution was seen in 1972 with his next venture with Chhattisgarhi Nach style, a play titled Gaon Ka Naam Sasural, Mor Naam Damaad, based on a comic folk tale, where an old man falls in love with a young woman, who eventually elopes with a man of her age group.

The technique has finally evolved to an accomplished form, by the time he produced his seminal play, Charandas Chor in 1975, which immediately created a whole new idiom in modern Indian theatre, whose highlight was 'Nach' - a chorus that provided commentary through song.

During his career, Habib acted in over nine feature films, including Richard Attenborough's Gandhi(1982).

His burial is slated for tomorrow.


Here is an analysis of his career from Samar Magazine.

In any culture and in any age, it is rare for a person to become a legend in his or her own lifetime. Yet, judging by the immense enthusiasm and interest with which his productions are received by large audiences in different parts of the country, the 76-year old stalwart of contemporary Indian stage, Habib Tanvir, seems to have already attained this distinction. However, since legends are not born but made, it is instructive to remember that Tanvir's great success and popularity was not given to him on a platter but was earned through a lifetime of serious and sustained effort and struggle.

In popular mind, the name of Habib Tanvir is closely linked to the idea of the folk theatre. However, when he began his career, "folk" had not yet become a major preoccupation in contemporary theatre practice. In fact, he can be regarded as one of the pioneers of the interest in folk forms and traditions of performance. Nonetheless, his approach to folk culture distinguishes itself sharply from that of many others in contemporary theatre. His approach to the folk in particular and his cultural consciousness in general were shaped in the crucible of the left-wing cultural movement -- particularly Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) and Progressive Writers' Association (PWA) -- in which Tanvir actively participated during his early, post-university years.

Tanvir traces the genesis of his interest in the folk to his childhood. He was born and brought up in Raipur, which was at that time a small town surrounded by villages on all sides. There was daily and constant interaction between the residents of the town and the village folk. Although his immediate family was town-based, some of his uncles were landowners and visited the countryside often. As a child, he too had several opportunities to visit villages where he listened to the music and songs of the local people. He was so fascinated by these melodies that he even memorised some of them. After finishing school, he was sent to Aligarh Muslim University for his Bachelor's degree. Having completed his studies there, he moved to Bombay in 1945 and immediately joined IPTA and PWA there.

Tanvir's twin interest in poetry and music found its first major expression on stage with Agra Bazar, which he wrote and produced soon after moving to Delhi in 1954. When he arrived in Delhi, and began his career in the theatre, the Capital's stage scene was dominated by amateur and collegiate drama groups which offered English plays in English, or in vernacular translation, to a socially restricted section of the city's anglophone elite. These groups, as also the NSD a decade later, derived their concept of theatre, their standards of acting, staging, and direction, from the European models of the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There was little effort to link theatre work to the indigenous traditions of performance, or even to say anything of immediate value and interest to an Indian audience. In complete contrast to this, Agra Bazar offered an experience radically different, both in form and content, from anything that the city had ever seen.

The play, as we know, is based on the works and times of a very unusual 18th-century Urdu poet, Nazir Akbarabadi, who not only wrote about ordinary people and their everyday concerns but wrote in a style and idiom which disregarded the orthodox, elitist norms of decorum in poetic idiom and subject matter. Using a mix of educated, middle-class urban actions and more or less illiterate folk and street artists from the village of Okhla, what Tanvir, in a highly interesting (and, for its time, revolutionary) artistic strategy, put on the stage was not the socially and architecturally walled-in space of a private dwelling, but a bazaar -- a marketplace with all its noise and bustle, its instances of solidarity and antagonism, and above all, with all its sharp social, economic and cultural polarities. The play also foregrounds a poetry that takes the ordinary people (their lives, and their everyday struggles) as both its inspiration and its addressee. It uses the example of Nazir's poetry and his plebeian appeal to challenge orthodox, elitist literary canons. What the play thus offers is a joyful celebration of what Mikhail Bakhtin called 'the culture of the marketplace.'

In Agra Bazar, two major emphases that characterise Tanvir's work in the theatre -- one, an artistic and ideological predilection for the plebeian, popular culture; and, two, a penchant for employing music and poetry in plays not as superfluous embellishment but, much like Brecht, as an integral part of the action -- had their first and one of the finest expressions.

Soon after this production, Tanvir went to England where he spent over three years studying theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He also traveled extensively through Europe, watching theatre. He spent about eight months in Berlin in 1956 and saw several recent productions by Bertolt Brecht (who had died that year). This was Tanvir's first encounter with the German playwright-director's work and he was more profoundly influenced by it than by anything that RADA could teach him. In fact, on returning to India, he quickly began to unlearn much of what he was taught in England -- and thus followed a trajectory of development diametrically opposite to that followed by other British-trained Indian directors. Tanvir was now doubly convinced that no truly worthwhile theatre -- that is, no socially meaningful and artistically interesting theatre -- was possible unless one worked within one's own cultural traditions and context.

The result of this enhanced awareness was, that disregarding the colonial mind-set that dominated the theatre scene at the time, Tanvir began his long quest for an indigenous performance idiom. This quest went through at least two distinct stages before the director arrived at the form and style which is now the hallmark of his work in theatre. His first move was to work with some folk artists of Chhattisgarh and their traditional forms and techniques. His first production, mounted soon after returning from Europe, Mitti ki Gadi (a translation of Shudraka's Mrichchakatikam), included six folk actors from Chhattisgarh in the cast. Besides, he used the conventions and techniques of the folk stage, thus giving the production a distinctly Indian form and style. The play, which is still revived from time to time (although it is now performed entirely by village actors), is considered by many as one of the best modern renderings of the ancient classic.

Mitti ki Gadi convinced Tanvir that the style and techniques of the folk theatre are akin to the ones implied in the dramaturgy of the Sanskrit playwrights. He believes that the theatrical style of the latter can be accessed through folk traditions. The imaginative flexibility and simplicity with which the classical playwrights establish and shift the time and place of action in a play, Tanvir argues, is found in abundance in our folk performances. Mitti ki Gadi, as well as his recent production of Visakhadatta's Mudrarakshasa, are practical demonstrations of this fact. For example, changes in time and locale in both productions are suggested through dialogues and movements without formally interrupting the performance. To quote just one instance from Mitti ki Gadi, when a character orders his subordinate to go to the garden and see if there is the body of a woman there, the subordinate simply runs around the stage once and returns with the answer, 'I went to the garden and found that there is a woman's body there.'

Tanvir and his wife Moneeka Misra (herself a theatre person) founded a company of their own in 1959 and called it Naya Theatre. The group produced a number of plays including modern and ancient classics of India and Europe. Although most of these plays were produced with urban actors, Tanvir's interest in the folk traditions and performers had come to stay and continued to grow. However, it was not until the early 1970s that this involvement reached a new and more sustained phase.

At that stage of his career, Tanvir was not entirely satisfied with his work with folk actors. He recognized two 'faults' (as he calls them) in his approach to them. One, he realised that it was not correct to fix the performance rather rigidly in advance by blocking movements and arranging lighting on paper. This, he felt, did not work with the rural artists who could not read or write and could not even remember which way and on what line they should move. The second difficulty was that, by doing plays in Hindi or Hindustani, he was making these actors speak standard Hindi, a language they were not accustomed to. This had the effect of making them act with a severe handicap and thus of inhibiting the full and free expression of their creativity in performance.

Conscious of these faults, Tanvir began to rid his style of work of them. He started using the method of improvisations. He also allowed the folk actors to speak in their native Chhattisgarhi dialect. The years 1970-73 were an exploratory phase for him. During this period, he worked intensively with rural performers in their native language and style of performance. He allowed them to do their own traditional pieces mostly in their own way, merely editing and touching them up here and there to make them more stageworthy. During this period he tried many things, from temple rituals to stock skits and pandavani.

The second significant breakthrough came during a nacha workshop that Tanvir conducted in Raipur in 1972. In addition to several observers from the urban centres of Raipur, Delhi and Calcutta, more than a hundred folk artists of the region participated in the month-long exercise. During the workshop, three different traditional comedies from the stock nacha repertoire were selected and more or less dovetailed into one another to make one compact, full length play. A few short scenes were improvised and inserted to link them up into one story. A number of songs, which had never before been brought on the stage were also included after appropriate editing. The production which was thus created was called Gaon ka Naam Sasural, Mor Naam Damaad, an almost wholly improvised and delightful stage play.

The play was a significant turning point in Tanvir's development. With this production, which was a great success not only in Chhattisgarh but also in Delhi, he had broken new ground. He felt that he had found the form and style that he had been searching for ever since his arrival on the theatre scene as a director in the 1950's. After the 1973 workshop, it became easier for him to go on with the construction and casting of a play through improvisations -- a method that he continues to use to this day. By the time he produced his masterpiece, Charandas Chor (1975), that evergreen darling of theatregoers throughout the country, the form and style of his theatre had reached its perfection.

Tanvir's Naya Theatre works almost exclusively with folk actors. However, even his occasional productions with urban actors and for groups other than Naya Theatre -- such as, Dushman (Gorky's Enemies) for the NSD Repertory or Jisne Lahore Nai Dekhya Wo Jamyai Nai (Asghar Wajahat) for the Sri Ram Centre Repertory -- are marked by the style that he has developed through his work with the folk artists. Nonetheless, the theatre that Tanvir had developed was not a "folk theatre" in the strictest sense of the term. He is a conscious and highly sophisticated urban artist with a modern outlook, sensibility and a strong sense of history and politics. His interest in folk culture and his decision to work with and in terms of traditional styles of performance was itself an ideological choice as much as an aesthetic one, whether Tanvir himself was fully conscious of it as such or not. There is a close connection between his predilection for popular traditions and his left-wing disposition. His involvement with the left-wing cultural movement, an association which he maintains (no matter how loosely) to this day, already meant a commitment to the common people and their causes. His work in the theatre, in style as well as in content, reflects this commitment and can be seen as part of a larger (socialist) project of empowerment of the people.

Tanvir's fascination with the "folk" is not motivated by a revivalist or an antiquarian impulse. It is based, instead, on an awareness of the tremendous creative possibilities and artistic energies inherent in these traditions. He does not hesitate to borrow themes, techniques, and music from them, but he also desists from the impossible task of trying to resurrect old traditions in their original form and also from presenting them as stuffed museum pieces. Notwithstanding a popular misconception, his theatre does not belong within any one form or tradition in its entirety or purity. In fact, as he is quick to point out, he has not been "running after" folk forms as such at all but only after folk performers who brought their own forms and styles with them. The performance style of his actors is, no doubt, rooted in their traditional nacha background, but his plays are not authentic nacha productions. For one thing, while the number of actual actors in a nacha play is usually restricted to two or three, the rest being stop-gap singers and dancers, Tanvir's production involve a full cast of actors, some of whom also sing and dance. More significantly, his plays have a structural coherence and complexity which one does not usually associate with the "simple" form of the nacha. Another important difference is that while in the nacha songs and dances are used largely as autonomous musical interludes, in Tanvir's plays they are neither purely ornamental in function nor are they formally autonomous units inserted into a loose collection of separate skits. On the contrary, they are closely woven into the fabric of the action and function as an important part of the total thematic and artistic structure of the play.

In other words, Tanvir does not romanticise the 'folk' uncritically and ahistorically. He is aware of their historical and cognitive limitations and does not hesitate to intervene in them and allow his own modern consciousness and political understanding to interact with the traditional energies and skills of his performers. His project, from the beginning of his career, has been to harness elements of folk traditions as a vehicle and make them yield new, contemporary meanings, and to produce a theatre which has a touch of the soil about it.

This rich interaction between Tanvir's urban, modern consciousness and the folk styles and forms is perhaps best exemplified by the songs in his plays. Tanvir's excellent adaptations of A Midsummer's Night Dream (Kamdeo Ka Apna, Basant Ritu Ka Sapna) and The Good Woman of Szechwan (Shaajapur ki Shantibai) could not be possible without this interaction. In these plays, he has worked close to the original text and written songs which reproduce the rich imagery and humour of Shakespeare's poetry and the complex ideas of Brecht. Despite this fidelity to the original texts, not only has Tanvir given his poetic compositions the authenticity and freshness of the original but has also fitted his words to native folk tunes with remarkable ease and skill.

One of the most outstanding examples of this kind of interaction is Tanvir's Dekh Rahe Hain Nain, based on a story by Stephen Zweig, in which he has successfully represented a complex theme without compromising the vitality and creativity of his folk actors. It was the moral dilemma embodied in the protagonist, a courageous warrior, who is tormented by the guilt of having to kill his own brother, which had attracted Tanvir to Zweig's story. However, in writing the play, he went beyond the story and invented new events, situations, characters and added dimensions and nuances which significantly enriched the story and made it more poignantly relevant for us today. The result is a play that traverses a complex gamut of motifs from the abstract, almost metaphysical, quest for inner peace to the concrete, material problems of the ordinary people in wake of a war, economic inflation and political corruption; from an idealist impulse towards renunciation of political power and towards an absolute solitude to an urgent sense of the necessity to get involved with others for a shared endeavour to change the world.

Tanvir is quite careful not to create a hierarchy by privileging, in any absolute and extrinsic way, his own educated consciousness as poet-cum-playwright-cum-director over the unschooled creativity of his actors. In his work, the two usually meet and interpenetrate, as it were, as equal partners in a collective, collaborative endeavour in which each gives and takes from, and thus enriches, the other. An excellent example of this non-exploitative approach is the way Tanvir fits and blends his poetry with the traditional folk and tribal music, allowing the former to retain its own imaginative and rhetorical power and socio-political import, but without in any way devaluing or destroying the latter. Yet another example can be seen in the way he allows his actors and their skills to be foregrounded by eschewing all temptations to use elaborate stage design and complicated lighting.

Thus in contrast to the fashionable, folksy kind of drama on the one hand and the revivalist and archaic kind of 'traditional' theatre on the other, Tanvir's theatre offers an incisive blend of tradition and modernity, folk creativity and skills on the one hand and modern critical consciousness on the other. It is this rich as well as enriching blend which makes his work so unique and memorable.

Javed Malick teaches English at Delhi University, and is a theater critic.

Perseverence and Drive

Nicholas Kristoff says that Jews, Asian Americans and West Indian Blacks have been unusually successfull in America, and he credits that to their high academic achievements.

In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us.

As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.

West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher.

These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. In the debate over nature and nurture, they suggest the importance of improved nurture — which, from a public policy perspective, means a focus on education. Their success may also offer some lessons for you, me, our children — and for the broader effort to chip away at poverty in this country.

Richard Nisbett cites each of these groups in his superb recent book, “Intelligence and How to Get It.” Dr. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, argues that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics.

“I think the evidence is very good that there is no genetic contribution to the black-white difference on I.Q.,” he said, adding that there also seems to be no genetic difference in intelligence between whites and Asians. As for Jews, some not-very-rigorous studies have found modestly above-average I.Q. for Ashkenazi Jews, though not for Sephardic Jews. Dr. Nisbett is somewhat skeptical, noting that these results emerge from samples that may not be representative.

In any case, he says, the evidence is overwhelming that what is distinctive about these three groups is not innate advantage but rather a tendency to get the most out of the firepower they have.

One large study followed a group of Chinese-Americans who initially did slightly worse on the verbal portion of I.Q. tests than other Americans and the same on math portions. But beginning in grade school, the Chinese outperformed their peers, apparently because they worked harder.

The Chinese-Americans were only half as likely as other children to repeat a grade in school, and by high school they were doing much better than European-Americans with the same I.Q.

As adults, 55 percent of the Chinese-American sample entered high-status occupations, compared with one-third of whites. To succeed in a profession or as managers, whites needed an average I.Q. of about 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of just 93. In short, Chinese-Americans managed to achieve more than whites who on paper had the same intellect.

A common thread among these three groups may be an emphasis on diligence or education, perhaps linked in part to an immigrant drive. Jews and Chinese have a particularly strong tradition of respect for scholarship, with Jews said to have achieved complete adult male literacy — the better to read the Talmud — some 1,700 years before any other group.

The parallel force in China was Confucianism and its reverence for education. You can still sometimes see in rural China the remains of a monument to a villager who triumphed in the imperial exams. In contrast, if an American town has someone who earns a Ph.D., the impulse is not to build a monument but to pass a hat.

Among West Indians, the crucial factors for success seem twofold: the classic diligence and hard work associated with immigrants, and intact families. The upshot is higher family incomes and fathers more involved in child-rearing.

What’s the policy lesson from these three success stories?

It’s that the most decisive weapons in the war on poverty aren’t transfer payments but education, education, education. For at-risk households, that starts with social workers making visits to encourage such basic practices as talking to children. One study found that a child of professionals (disproportionately white) has heard about 30 million words spoken by age 3; a black child raised on welfare has heard only 10 million words, leaving that child at a disadvantage in school.

The next step is intensive early childhood programs, followed by improved elementary and high schools, and programs to defray college costs.

Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, “Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.”

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Indian Students attacked in Australia

Time Magazine is reporting the racist attacks on Indian students in Australia. The law enforcement does not seem to be doing a good enough job to stop this from happening. I am glad Amitabh Bachaan refused the degree from an Australian University to protest these happenings. It is ironic that some Indians that live in Australia are justifying these attacks and blaming the Indians for being attacked!

On paper, Australia looks like an ideal choice for young Indians seeking to further their education. The nation's vibrant democracy, high educational standards, and a perceived low crime rate have made it something of a mecca for students from the sub-continent — with some 93,000 attending courses in everything from hospitality to engineering.


But over the last few weeks, a disturbing side to Indian student life down-under has come to light, sparking allegations of widespread racism in Australian society, and a failure by law enforcement authorities to act. The first incident occurred in the early hours of May 24 at a suburban party in Melbourne, Australia's second largest city in the country's south. Indian student Sravan Kumar Theerthala, a guest at the birthday party, was confronted by party-crashers, one of whom stabbed him in the head with a screw driver allegedly without provocation. (See pictures of Australia's apology for its past aboriginal policies.)

The attack left the 25-year-old student battling for life in hospital and three other party goers who rushed to assist him also injured by the interlopers. On the same weekend about 700km to the north-east in Sydney, Australia's largest city, Indian hospitality graduate Rajesh Kumar was at his home reading a book when he was hit by a petrol bomb. The bomb caused burns to 30% of his body and left him in hospital in a critical condition.


The extraordinarily brutal incidents coming so close together have jolted Indian students to action and shocked government authorities. Seizing the window of publicity that had been generated, students came forward to allege the attacks were hardly isolated incidents, but a regular feature of student life. Student leaders said this kind of violence racially motivated and had not been properly addressed by government authorities such as police and politicians. "There's a name for them: 'curry bashing' ... 'Let's go curry bashing'," Yadu Singh, a Sydney-based Indian-born cardiologist told the Sydney Morning Herald. "They are not random at all, the people are targeting them. They know these students are easy targets."


Leaders in Australia's Indian community say the attacks have been occurring at up to two or three a week since 2004, but are mostly going unreported. "There is no improvement because this has been happening all the time," says Sreenadh Brahmapuram, committee officer of the Australia-based United Indian Associations. He believes many students who come to Australia are concerned that reporting the attacks may jeopardize any chance they may have of gaining a more permanent residency status in the country. He suspects many Indians were targeted because they were seen as easy targets. "They are just bashings that are happening in every day life. It is happening in the Indian community because they are seen as a soft target by anti-social elements." Simon Overland of the Victoria Police Commission released figures showing 1,083 cases of robbery and assault were reported against Indians in 2007-08, and that the attacks increased to 1,447 over the same period last year, with many of the attacks directed against students.


But the more prevalent police response, the students say, should have been to treat the attacks more seriously. On May 31, students decided to try and jolt authorities to take action. Federation of Indian Students Association (FISA) organized a protest in the Melbourne central business district in which hundres of protestors blocked one of Melbourne's busiest intersections. The protest was later broken up by police and 18 people were arrested. "The students are frustrated... Whenever they go to the authorities, they believe they are not taken seriously," says FISA president Amit Menghani. On Monday June 1, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told Federal Parliament that he had spoken with the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and assured him that Indian students — whose tuition is healthy source of income for Australian universities — are welcome. In a press release, he said a taskforce had been set up which would include senior officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Education and Workplace Relations, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and the Attorney-Generals' Department to deal with the problem. (Read a short bio of Kevin Rudd.)

Rudd has stopped short, however, of criticizing law enforcement authorities. "Any decent human being just responds with horror at the sorts of attack which have occurred recently. But the key thing is to make sure our law enforcement authorities are doing the best they can. I am confident they are," he told Melbourne's 3AW radio. FISA's Menghani warned if authorities failed to deal with the issue, it would be the Australian economy that would suffer. "Each student is worth about $30,000. And there will be students who will not be coming to Australia because of this," he says. "Each attack discourages five students from coming here. And it adds up."

Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan, the charismatic Muslim leader writes this on his website in response to Obama's speech at Cairo University.

President Barack Obama to the Muslims. Just a speech ?



Friday 5 June 2009, by Tariq Ramadan

We are used to nice words and many, in the Muslim majority countries as well as Western Muslims, have ended up not trusting the United States when it comes to political discourse. They want actions and they are right. This is indeed what our world needs. Yet, President Obama, who is very eloquent and good at using symbols, has provided us with his speech in Cairo with something that is more than simple words. It is altogether an attitude, a mindset, a vision.


In order to avoid shaping a binary vision of the world, Barack Obama referred to “America”, “Islam”, “the Muslims” and “the Muslim majority countries”: he never fell into the trap of speaking about “us” as different or opposed to “them” and he was quick to refer Islam as being an American reality, and to the American Muslims as being an asset to his own society. Talking about his own life, he went from personal to universal stating that he knows by experience that Islam is a religion whose message is about openness and tolerance. Both the wording and the substance of his speech were important and new: he managed to be humble, self-critical, open and demanding at the same time in a message targeting all of “us”, understood as “partners”.



The seven areas he highlighted are critical. One might disagree with President Obama’s reading and interpretation of what is happening in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Palestine (and the US role in these conflicts), but he has clearly avoided shying away from addressing these issues and has called all the parties to take their share of responsibility by putting an end to violence and promoting respect and justice. He clearly acknowledged the suffering of the Palestinians and their rights to get a viable and independent State. It is a first necessary step: the future will tell us if the new President has the means to be strong and consistent when dealing with the Israeli government. He left opened some channels as to the dialogue with both the Palestinian authority (calling for unity without sidelining Hamas) and Iran. These were and remain critical issues and there will be no future without addressing them with consistency and courage. Expectations are immense and the Barack Obama has still to show his true practical commitment to justice and peace.



President Obama made an important distinction between the democratic principles and the political models. Rule of law, free choice of the people, duty of transparency are universal principals while the political models are depending on historical and cultural factors to be taken into account. We hope the Obama administration would put this vision into practice by both promoting democratisation everywhere and scrupulously respecting the choice of the people: it would be good to start with Iraq and Afghanistan. As to the undisputable principals of democracy, this is a good reminder to be uttered... in Egypt, to the Egyptian Government, where the President was delivering his speech.



Barack Obama mentioned seven issues to be addressed. He started by the more political issues and quite intelligently ended with the critical areas of “women” and “education”. This is where, he recalled, we all have to do much better. In these two areas he came with practical solutions and presented future interesting projects. Facing economic crisis, doubts, fears, and global threats, the world needs the women to be more involved and education to be promoted everywhere. These commons challenges helped the President, once again, to talk about an inclusive us, a “new we” so to say, where we are partners sharing the same concerns, facing up to te similar challenges, exposed to common enemies.



This speech is not only directed to the Muslims around the world. The West and the non Muslims should listen. Barack Obama spoke about acknowledging the historical Islamic contribution to sciences, development and thought. He wants his fellow American citizens to learn more about Islam, to be more humble and he expects from all the “liberals” not to impose their views on the practising Muslims, men and women. No one can impose a way of dressing or a way of thinking and we should learn from one another: the implicit reference to the French controversy around the headscarf was indeed quite explicit. He quoted religious texts that were coming from the three monotheistic faiths, everyone of them delivering a universal message. As if true universalism is about educating one’s self, listening to and respecting the other. Two days before his speech in Cairo, Obama surprisingly stated that America was a great “Islamic country”: it was a way for him to remind the Americans, as well as all the Westerners, that the Muslims are their fellow citizens and Islam is a religion which is part of their common national narrative.



A powerful speech which was not only " a speech": it embodies a vision both positive and demanding. Something has surely changed. As Barack went from personal to universal principles, we are waiting for him to go from ideal to practical. He is young, he is new, he is intelligent and smart: has he the means of being courageous? For it is all about presidential courage as one wonders if it is possible for the United States to be simply consistent with its own values. Could one man tackles and reforms this extraordinary tension that inhabits the contemporary American mindset : on the one hand, promoting universal values and diversity while on the other nurturing a spirit that still has some features of imperial attitude (intellectually, politically and economically). He will not be able to achieve it alone and maybe his greatest challengers so far are more Indian and Chinese than the Muslims. Yet, it remains critical to acknowledge the positive sides of a speech announcing "a new beginning": it is imperative for the Muslims to take Obama at his word and, instead of adopting either a passive attitude or a victim mentality to contribute to a better world by being self–critical and critical, humble and ambitious, consistent and open. The best way to push Barack Obama to face up to his responsibility in America, in the Middle East or elsewhere is for the Muslims to start by facing up to their own without blindly demonising America or the West or naively idealising a charismatic African-American US President.


P.S.: A personal note : President Barack Obama wanted us “to speak the truth”. It happens that once I spoke the truth as regard to the illegal American invasion of Iraq and the blind unilateral support of America towards Israel. I have been banned from the States and still remain. It may be one of these inconsistencies that make some of us still doubt the very meaning of political words. Once again a question of consistency.

from 3qd

Ragging and Rape

NDTV we the people has a great show on Ragging and how it becames sextualized and violent.

Obama in Egypt

Interesting article in 3QD about the two different messages Obama has to relate in Egypt.

The anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding."

So declared President Barack Obama during his celebrated speech on race in March 2008. He was speaking, of course, about America's history of slavery and segregation. But he might as well have been speaking about the anger felt by millions of Arabs and Muslims - and the tragic legacy of American involvement in the Middle East.
President Barack Obama will give his highly anticipated address to the Muslim world on June 4th. His choice of Egypt as the venue presents risks but also offers the opportunity for a potentially groundbreaking address - one that attempts not only to explain American policy but to re-orient it. This is what Obama was able to do in two of his most impressive speeches, the March 2008 address on race and the June 2006 address on religion in America. In contrast to most political speeches, Obama managed to challenge different audiences - black and white, religious and secular - to face difficult, complex realities, paving the way forward for a reconciliation of seemingly contradictory impulses in American life.

Such skills and rhetorical ability will be sorely needed in Egypt. Already, the selection of Egypt, rather than, say, Indonesia, Morocco, or Turkey, has been interpreted by members of the embattled Egyptian opposition as a tacit endorsement of President Hosni Mubarak's increasingly repressive regime. Mixed in with such concern is a kind of repressed nostalgia for the days of late 2004 and 2005 - the now blurry "Arab spring" - when the Bush administration seemed, for a moment at least, serious about putting pressure on Arab autocrats to open up.
Arab reformers are worried that Obama, in prioritizing the Arab-Israeli conflict and other American strategic interests, will de-prioritize human rights and democracy. They may have reason to be concerned. Obama's decision to come to Cairo (or perhaps Alexandria) was lauded by Egypt's pro-government press, which seemed to interpret the choice as a vote of confidence in the present Egyptian leadership.

The speculation, however, may be premature. What Obama chooses to say - and how he says it - will be much more important than the matter of one location over another. After giving a major interview to al-Arabiya and a major address in Turkey, Obama will be expected to break new ground, going well beyond a message of mutual respect and tolerance. Mutual understanding and dialogue, after all, will not be enough to recast our damaged relationship with the Muslim world.

President Obama has correctly put his finger on torture abuses, the Iraq war, Guantanamo Bay, and the festering Arab-Israeli conflict as sources of anti-Americanism. But before Iraq and Guantanamo, and at the peak of Oslo peace process, the U.S. was still viewed by many in the region with weariness, if not, at times, outright suspicion and hatred.

The sources of grievance are deeper and more pronounced than we like to think. America has been seen as a destructive force and an obstacle to Arab progress, in large part due to our remarkably consistent support of repressive Arab autocrats, over not years but decades. It has been an unfortunate, costly bargain - regimes support our strategic interests in the region. In return, we turn a blind eye to the crushing of domestic opposition. This wager was justified by policymakers as a necessary evil during the Cold War. However, it did not end then, and our economic and military support for some of the region's most egregious actors continues.

What do you think?
Join the discussion on Obama's speech in Cairo.

In short, President Obama, on June 4th, will have two primary audiences, but, then again, America has always had two audiences in the Arab and Muslim world. For too long, we prioritized one over the other, favoring regimes at the expense of publics. Next week, Obama will have the opportunity to shift the balance. To do so, he will need to frankly acknowledge the mistakes of the past, and the role we have played in looking away, when reformers were hoping that we would at least look.

But how does the President speak to two audiences at once? There will be an unavoidable tension. He will obviously need to be respectful of his Egyptian hosts. At the same time, he will need to show the Arab people that American ideals will not be sacrificed at the altar of short-term strategic interests. Just as in Latin America and Eastern Europe, authoritarianism in the Middle East cannot last forever. With this address, President Obama can demonstrate that, even if democracy may not be the only or overarching concern, that it is something that America will not forget or ignore as it attempts to improve its troubled relationship with a troubled region.

Shadi Hamid is Director of Research for the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) and a Hewlett Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University.