Beyond The Shadows

Speaking Without Alibi

2012-01-13T09:07:00.000+09:00

We live in a world of alibis,
Of having been elsewhere,
Of retreating in the shadows,
Of dragging our feet.

But to speak out compellingly,
To produce some effect,
Is to provoke the other and
Confront ourselves without excuses.

by Mukesh Williams

550 Words Vocabulary

2011-12-06T22:19:00.000+09:00

Vocabulary
Management

1. built: of sound or sturdy construction
2. demonstrated: explain, describe, illustrate
3. developed: grow or expand
4. enhanced: intensify, magnify
5. facilitated: to assist the progress, make easy
6. generated: produce, bring into existence
7. impacted: forceful contact, influence, effect
8. implemented: put into effect
9. negotiated: bargain for contract, business deal
10. revitalized: renew

Sales & Marketing Words

11. closed: having a barrier or boundary, concluded
12. collaborated: cooperate
13. delivered: to carry and give
14. drove: move a group
15. established: found, build
16. generated: to bring into existence, produce
17. increased: to make greater in size, number or quality
18. presented: to bring, offer, give
19. prospected: outlook for future
20. retained: to keep in possession, to use

Technical Words

21. analysed: to examine critically
22. built: of sound or sturdy construction
23. consulted: to provide information or advice
24. created: to make, happen, exist
25. escalated: to become greater, more serious
26. formatted: general arrangement, plan, design
27. integrated: combining two or more things to make them work
28. maintained: to make something continue at the same level
29. programmed: giving a computer instructions to perform a task
30. supported: to help or encourage
31. trouble-shooter: a person helping to solve problems in a company

Academic Words

32. applied: used in a practical way not theoretical
33. authored: written
34. counselled: professional advice
35. developed: to become bigger, more advanced, stronger
36. educated: having been to a school, college or university, trained
37. evaluated: opinion of the amount, quality, or value of something
38. mentored: an experienced person’s help
39. nourished: provide with food to keep alive
40. researched: a careful study of a subject to discover new facts
41. taught: to give lessons to students to help them learn something
42. tutored: to be taught something

Healthcare Words

43. assigned: give work or responsibility to someone
44. assessed: judge about the nature or quality of something
45. assisted: to help
46. cared: providing what someone needs for health or protection
47. charged: amount of money for goods or services
48. provided: to give something to someone
49. monitored: to watch and check something over a period of time
50. nursed: to take care of injury or illness
51. secured: guarded and made stronger

Accounting Words

52. analysed: to examine the nature or structure of something
53. audited: official examination of business or financial records
54. justified: to show that something is right and reasonable
55. verified: checked as correct
56. prepared: to make something read to be used
57. processed: series of things done to achieve a particular result
58. reported: to give some information about something
59. researched: careful study of a subject
60. reviewed: a careful examination intending to change something

Complete List of Modern English Words
A

61. abated: calmed down
62. abbreviated: shortened
63. abolished: to officially end a law, system or an institution
64. abridged: to make a book short so as to leave out parts
65. absolved: statement that someone is not guilty of something
66. absorbed: to take something and learn and understand it
67. accelerated: to make something happen faster or earlier
68. acclimated: welcome, loud applause
69. accompanied: to travel or go somewhere with somebody
70. accomplished: very good at a particular thing
71. achieved: realized
72. acquired: procure, to get
73. acted: to do a particular thing
74. activated: to start something or a process
75. actuated: to make a machine or a device start to work
76. adapted: to change something to make it suitable for new use
77. added: to put together with something else
78. advance: to bring into consideration, notice
79. addressed: to think about a problem or a situation
80. adhered: to follow a rule, process or a principle
81. adjusted: to change something slightly to make it more suitable
82. administered: to give, manage or organize
83. admitted: allowed entry
84. adopted: to use a particular method or attitude
85. advanced: to employ recently developed ideas or methods
86. advertised: to tell the public about a product
87. advised: to tell someone what they should do
88. advocated: publicly recommended
89. affected: to produce a change
90. aided: to help
91. aired: advertised
92. allocated: to give money or space for a particular purpose
93. altered: to make changes to clothing, landscape et cetera
94. amended: to change law, document or statement
95. amplified: to increase something in strength especially sound
96. analysed: to examine the nature or structure of something
97. answered: something you say or write in response to a question
98. anticipated: to expect something and it happens
99. applied: to make something work in a particular way
100. appointed: to arrange or decide on a time to do something
101. appraised: to consider or examine something
102. approached: to come near to something
103. approved: something is good, acceptable or suitable
104. arbitrated: to officially settle an argument or dispute
105. arranged: to plan or organize something
106. articulated: to express or explain your thoughts
107. ascertained: to find out the correct or true information
108. asked: to request permission to do something
109. assembled: to come together as a group for a specific purpose
110. assessed: to judge the nature or quality of something, evaluated
111. assigned: to give something for use
112. assisted: to help
113. assumed: to accept something as true without proof
114. attained: to get something after a lot of effort
115. attracted: to pull, to be drawn towards something or someone
116. audited: to officially examine business or financial accounts
117. augmented: to increase the amount, value or size
118. authored: written by
119. authorized: to give official permission to somebody
120. automated: to use machines or computers
121. awarded: officially give something to someone

B
122. balanced: proper arrangement or adjustment, in proportion
123. bargained: advantageous purchase; transaction between parties
124. began: to commence, start or proceed
125. benchmarked: a standard of excellence to measure other things
126. benefited: something that is advantageous or good
127. bid: to set a price one would pay or charge
128. billed: a statement of money owed for goods/services supplied
129. blocked: to obstruct by placing obstacles
130. bolstered: to support or uphold something
131. boosted: to increase, raise, lift
132. borrowed: to take something with the promise to return
133. bought: to acquire or possess
134. branded: trademark of a manufacturer
135. breakthrough: advance, achievement
136. bridged: connect
137. broadened: extend, enlarge, expand
138. brought: to carry, convey, conduct
139. budgeted: an estimate of expected income and expense
140. built: to construct, assemble, join
141. buttress: support a structure, a prop

C
142. calculated: ascertained mathematically
143. canvassed: to solicit votes, opinions, subscriptions
144. captured: to take by force or stratagem
145. cast: to throw or conjecture
146. catalogued: to list or record items for sale or for a manual
147. categorized: to arrange in classes; classify
148. centralized: to bring under one control or authority
149. chaired: seat of office or authority
150. challenged: demand an explanation or justification
151. changed: to make different
152. channelled: to direct towards a particular course
153. charted: to outline showing special conditions
154. checked: to prove to be right, correct
155. circulated: to pass from place to place, person to person
156. clarified: to make an idea or statement clear or intelligible
157. classified: arrange or distribute into classed specimen
158. cleared: easily seen, sharply defined
159. coached: to be instructed or advised
160. co-authored: one of two or more joint authors
161. collaborated: to work with one another, cooperate
162. collected: brought or placed together
163. combined: joined or united
164. commissioned: an authoritative order, charge or direction
165. committed: to give in trust or charge, consign
166. communicated: to impart or transmit knowledge
167. compiled: to put together documents in one book
168. completed: finished, ended, concluded
169. complied: to put together documents or selections
170. composed: to form something by combining parts
171. computed: to determine something by calculation
172. conceived: to form a notion, opinion or purpose
173. conceptualized: to form a concept or think in concepts
174. condensed: to reduce in volume, area, length
175. conducted: way of acting , behaviour, deportment
176. conserved: to manage resources wisely
177. consolidated: brought together into a single whole
178. constructed: to make by putting parts together, frame or devise
179. consulted: to seek advice or information, get guidance
180. contributed: to give something for a common purpose
181. controlled: to exercise restraint or direction
182. converted: transmute, transform, change into something else
183. conveyed: to carry from one place to another, transport
184. convinced: to make someone agree by argument or evidence
185. coordinated: to act in a harmonious combination
186. corrected: united, joined or linked
187. counselled: advised or instructed
188. created: to cause something to come into being
189. critiqued: detailed evaluation, review
190. cultivated: to develop or improve by education or training
191. customized: to modify or build according to specifications
192. cut: to divide something

D
193. dealt: to take action with respect to a thing or person
194. debated: a discussion involving opposing views
195. debugged: to remove defects or errors
196. decentralized: to distribute administrative powers or functions
197. decreased: to diminish or lessen
198. deferred: postponed or delayed
199. defined: to state the meaning, identify
200. delivered: to give into another’s possession
201. demonstrated: to make evident or establish by argument
202. depreciated: devalue
203. described: to depict in written or spoken words
204. designated: indicate, show or specify
205. designed: prepare preliminary sketch or plan
206. detected: to discover the existence of
207. determined: decided, settled, resolved
208. developed: to grow, expand, elaborate
209. devised: to contrive, plan, elaborate
210. diagnosed: to determine the identity of , determine
211. directed: guided, regulated or managed
212. discovered: get knowledge of, learn or find
213. dispatched: to send, transact, dispose
214. dissembled: to mask, hide, camouflage
215. distinguished: noted, eminent
216. distributed: dispersed, divide, give
217. diversified: distributed amongst several types
218. divested: to deprive or rid
219. doubled: twofold or twice

E

220. educated: undergone education, cultured
221. eased: to lessen difficulty or effort
222. earned: to merit a compensation for service rendered
223. educated: undergone education, cultured
224. effected: something produced by agency or cause, result
225. elicited: to draw, bring forth
226. eliminated: to remove, get rid of
227. emphasized: to lay stress on
228. enabled: to make it possible, to give power
229. encouraged: to inspire or give confidence
230. endorsed: to improve, support or sustain
231. enforced: to put in force, compel
232. engaged: busy or involved
233. engineered: to manage something skilfully or artfully
234. enhanced: to raise the value or price of something
235. enlarged: to make large or big
236. enlisted: to enrol voluntarily in an organization
237. enriched: to add greater value or significance to
238. ensured: to secure or guarantee
239. established: to institute or build
240. examined: to observe or investigate carefully
241. exceeded: to go beyond quality or degree
242. exchanged: to give up something for something else
243. executed: to carry out or accomplish
244. exempted: to become free from obligation or liability
245. expanded: increased in area, bulk or volume
246. expedited: to hasten, speed up the progress of
247. explored: to traverse, scrutinize or look into closely
248. exposed: left without shelter or protection
249. extended: stretched or prolonged
250. extracted: to pull, draw out, deduce

F

251. fabricated: to construct by assembling parts or sections
252. facilitated: to make easier or less difficult
253. fashioned: prevailing custom or style
254. fielded: to answer or reply skilfully
255. financed: to provide revenue or resources
256. focused: a central point
257. forecasted: to predict or calculate in advance
258. formalized: authorize, accept
259. formed: shape, body, defined area
260. formulated: to develop or express in precise form
261. fortified: to protect or strengthen
262. founded: equipped, furnished
263. fulfilled: to carry out, realize, perform
264. furnished: to provide or supply
265. furthered: advance something
G

266. gained: to get or acquire
267. gathered: to bring together or assemble
268. gauged: to determine the exact dimension of something
269. generated: to bring into existence, to produce
270. governed: administered, overseen
271. graded: classified, sorted, categorized
272. granted: approved, allowed, decided
273. greeted: hailed or welcomed
274. grouped: gathered, assembled, congregated
275. guided: directed, showed
H
276. handled: held, moved, controlled
277. helped: aided, assisted, facilitated
278. hired: rented, appointed, employed
279. hosted: presented or accommodated
I

280. identified: to establish as being a particular person or thing
281. illuminated: to supply with light
282. illustrated: to show clearly, demonstrated
283. implemented: carry out, accomplish
284. improved: to enhance in value or quality
285. improvised: to make, invent or arrange offhand
286. inaugurated: to induct a person into an office
287. incorporated: united in one body
288. increased: make or become something greater
289. incurred: to become liable or subject to
290. individualized: particularize
291. indoctrinated: to instruct in fundamentals or sectarian opinion
292. induced: persuade or influence
293. influenced: to affect or alter by intangible means
294. initiated: to cause or facilitate the beginning of something
295. innovated: to effect change, to introduce as new
296. inquired: to search or investigate
297. inspected: to view closely, to examine officially
298. inspired: outstanding, brilliant
299. installed: to place in an office, induct
300. instigated: to goad or provoke
301. instilled: to impart gradually
302. instituted: to establish or organize
303. instructed: to give knowledge, teach or train
304. insured: compensation of life or property upon loss
305. integrated: unified control
306. interacted: to act upon one another
307. interpreted: to explain in understandable terms
308. intervened: to come in between, to hinder
309. interviewed: a formal consultation to evaluate performance
310. introduced: to bring something or someone for the first time
311. invented: find, discover, fabricate
312. inventoried: to catalogue
313. invested: to grant control or authority
314. investigated: to inquire, study, examine systematically
315. invited: to request the pleasure or participation of someone
316. involved: implicated, concerned in some affair
317. isolated: separated from others, alone, solitary
318. issued: putting forth, promulgating, distributing

J

319. joined: to bring into contact, connect
320. judged: to pass a critical judgement
321. justified: to show to be right
K

322. kept: simple past tense of keep
323. key: something affording means of access
L

324. launched: to send forth, start, initiate
325. lectured: a speech or reprimand
326. led: simple past tense of lead
327. lightened: to become lighter or illuminated
328. liquidated: to settle debts or get rid of someone by killing
329. litigated: subject of a lawsuit
330. lobbied: a group campaigning to influence members
331. localized: particular place or locality
332. located: establish a position or situation
333. logged: to enter a log, compile, amass
M
334. maintained: to preserve, retain
335. managed: to govern or control
336. mapped: represent, delineate
337. marketed: trade or traffic in a particular commodity
338. maximized: to increase to the greatest possible amount
339. measured: accurately regulated or proportioned
340. mediated: reconcile warring parties, settle disputes
341. merchandised: manufactured goods bought and sold
342. merged: coalesce, unite, blend
343. minimized: to reduce to the smallest portion
344. modelled: representation, imitation or comparison
345. moderated: kept within reasonable or proper limits
346. modernized: give a new modern character
347. modified: changed, alter partially
348. monitored: supervise, admonish
349. motivated: incite, impel
350. moved: advance, progress
351. multiplied: to increase manifold
N
352. named: appellation, designation, title
353. narrated: to give account of or to tell a story
354. navigated: to move through or over water
355. negotiated: to deal or bargain with the other
356. netted: net income or profit
357. noticed: information, warning, announcement
358. nurtured: to bring up, train, educate
O
359. observed: to perceive, watch, notice
360. obtained: to come into possession of, to acquire
361. offered: to present for acceptance or rejection
362. opened: relatively free for obstructions
363. operated: to work, perform, function
364. orchestrated: to arrange or manipulate
365. ordered: neatly arranged, well-organized
366. organized: having a formal structure
367. oriented: to adjust with relation to
368. originated: start, arise, begin
369. overhauled: to make necessary repairs
370. oversaw: to direct, supervise
P

371. participated: shared, took part in something
372. patterned: configuration, design
373. performed: to carry out, execute, to do
374. persuaded: to prevail upon, advise, to urge
375. phased: process of change or development
376. photographed: suitable for a picture in a specific way
377. pinpointed: to describe something exactly or precisely
378. pioneered: first to do something
379. placed: to be put in a particular spot or position
380. planned: scheme or method of doing something
381. polled: collecting opinion samples on a subject
382. prepared: properly organized or equipped
383. proffer: offer
384. propose: to suggest for consideration
385. presented: to introduce or submit something
386. preserved: to keep alive or in existence
387. presided: in position of authority, presided
388. prevented: to hinder or stop from doing something
389. processed: to move forward or continue and action
390. procured: to bring about, obtain
391. profiled: represent or outline a person or thing
392. programmed: a plan of action schedule, procedure
393. projected: something contemplated, devised or planned
394. promoted: advance in rank or dignity, to flourish
395. prompted: to assist a person to do something
396. proposed: to offer or suggest
397. proved: to establish the truth or genuineness of something
398. provided: to make available, furnish
399. publicized: to bring to notice, to advertise
400. published: to issue for sale or distribution
401. purchased: to acquire something by payment of money
402. pursued: to follow closely
Q

403. quantified: to determine the quantity of something
404. qualified: having the qualities or accomplishments
405. quoted: to repeat a passage from a book, an excerpt
R
406. raised: elevate; move to a higher position
407. ranked: social or official position; social class hierarchy
408. rated: price; degree of speed or progress
409. received: to take into one’s possession, something bestowed
410. recommended: to suggest, advice as an alternative
411. reconciled: become amicable; to settle a dispute
412. recorded: to set down in writing
413. recovered: to get back or regain something
414. recruited: newly enlisted or drafted member
415. rectified: to correct, set right
416. redesigned: to prepare pans or sketch once again
417. reduced: to bring down to a smaller level
418. refined: free from impurities
419. regained: to gain again; to recover
420. registered: recorded; enrolled
421. regulated: to control or direct by a rule
422. rehabilitated: to restore to good health; ability to work
423. reinforced: to strength with some support
424. reinstated: to establish again in a former position
425. rejected: to refuse to recognize or grant permission
426. remedied: something that cures or corrects
427. remodelled: to model again; to reconstruct
428. renegotiated: to re-examine and convince
429. reorganized: to organize again
430. repaired: to repair or renew
431. replaced: to provide substitute or equivalence
432. reported: a widely circulated statement
433. represented: to designate, denote
434. researched: a systematic inquiry
435. resolved: firm purpose or intent
436. responded: to answer, reply
437. restored: to bring back to the former condition
438. restructured: to change fundamentally, to restore
439. resulted: consequence of actions
440. retained: to keep possession of
441. retrieved: to recover or regain
442. revamped: to renovate, redo
443. revealed: to make known, disclose
444. reversed: opposite or contrary in position
445. reviewed: to go over a subject again
446. revised: to amend or alter an opinion
447. revitalized: to give new life to something
448. rewarded: something given or received as recompense

S

449. safeguarded: ensuring safety
450. salvaged: saving from danger
451. saved: to rescue; avoid spending
452. screened: to show a movie; selection
453. secured: protect from danger; to get hold of
454. segmented: something divided
455. selected: choice, preference
456. separated: to keep apart
457. served: to render assistance, to offer a meal
458. serviced: to help
459. settled: resolve or agree
460. shaped: designed
461. shortened: reduced
462. shrank: contract, draw back
463. signed: symbol, name token of indication
464. simplified: to make less complex
465. simulated: to create a likeness
466. sold: to transfer goods for money
467. solicited: to seek for something
468. solved: to find the answer or explanation
469. spearheaded: leading an attack
470. specialized: to pursue some special line of study
471. specified: to mention specifically, definitely
472. speculated: to engage in thought or reflection
473. spoke: to articulate
474. spread: to stretch or open
475. stabilized: to maintain level or quality
476. staffed: a group employed to do some work
477. staged: occurring as planned
478. standardized: to make an established standard
479. steered: to guide on a given course
480. stimulated: to rouse to action
481. strategized: to finalize a plan
482. streamlined: designed to give maximum efficiency; compact
483. strengthened: to make stronger
484. stressed: give importance or significance
485. structured: manifesting defined organization
486. studied: marked by conscious effort
487. submitted: to yield to power or authority; to hand in
488. substantiated: provide proof or competent evidence
489. substituted: acting or serving in place of another
490. suggested: to mention or introduce an idea or suggestion
491. superseded: to replace in power or authority
492. supervised: to oversee
493. supplied: to furnish or provide what is lacking
494. supported: to sustain or withstand
495. surpassed: go beyond
496. surveyed: to take a comprehensive view
497. synchronized: same rate and exactly together
498. systematized: to arrange according to a system
499. tabulated: calculated or determined by math calculation

T

500. tailored: made-to-order
501. targeted: goal to be reached
502. taught: to impart knowledge or skill
503. tightened: secure, fasten
504. took: acquire, procure
505. traced: sign, track, residue
506. traded: buying, selling, exchanging
507. trained: instruct
508. transacted: to conduct business
509. transferred: to remove from one place to another
510. transformed: to change, convert
511. translated: to change from one language into another
512. transmitted: to send or communicate information
513. transported: carried from one place to another; moved
514. treated: to behave in a specific manner; to negotiate
515. tripled: three times
516. troubleshot: to help overcome a problem
517. tutored: to instruct

U
518. uncovered: no protection or collateral
519. underlined: underscore, emphasize
520. underscored: draw a line beneath something, emphasize
521. undertook: to take upon oneself to do
522. underwrote: to show agreement or support
523. unearthed: to dig out, to find
524. unified: to make a single unit
525. united: harmony, single entity
526. updated: to bring up to date
527. upgraded: new version, improved model
528. urged: to push, impel, incite
529. used: worn out, utilized
530. utilized: to put to use, make profitable
V
531. validated: substantiate, confirm
532. valued: highly regarded, esteemed
533. verbalized: express in words
534. verified: confirm the accuracy through evidence
535. viewed: behold, inspect
536. visited: to go to and stay with a person
537. visualized: to recall or make a mental image or picture
538. voiced: expressed vocally
539. volunteered: offer service or undertaking

W
540. weathered: seasoned by exposure
541. wastage: loss by wear, decay
542. weighed: additional weight
543. welcomed: kindly greeting upon arrival
544. widened: broad or expanded
545. withstood: hold out against, resist
546. witnessed: to be present at an occurrence
547. won: to finish first
548. worked: effort directed to produce something
549. wrote: to trace letters or words
Y

550. yielded: to give forth or produce

Making a Classroom Presentation

2011-10-18T08:51:00.000+09:00

From time to time all of us are asked to make presentations about our research and what we know about our subject. This may look quite natural but it requires some skill. The best way perhaps to approach a presentation is to tell your audience clearly what you want to let them know. Then repeat it one more time in the end by way of summarizing it.

1. Clarity
It is always better to tell your audience clearly and in a systematic manner. The best way to do this is to give them a brief outline of the key points, then deal with each point in depth. As you come to the conclusion summarize your arguments in a few short sentences.

2. Say it Through Pictures
There is an old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. The visual effect is sometimes more powerful than mere words. So use photos, graphics and sketches.

3. Talk to the Audience
Never read the slides or your notes. Remember what you want to say and say it naturally. This would keep the interest of the audience alive.

4. Natural Pace of Presentation
Be easy and slow so the information sinks in, but not too slow lest the audience get bored. Finish you r presentation a few minutes before time so you allow the audience to ask you questions. Sometimes it is better to engage the audience by asking them to respond to your answers.

5. Slide Text
Do not use too much text in your slide. Remember the text accompanies your oral statements. Try using simple and short sentences. Do not use too many bullets; at most three or four in a given slide. If you are making a 10- minutes presentation you may use 7 or 8 slides maximum. Remember you can spend about a minute on one slide. Also use contrasting colors for text and background.

Some General Terms Used in Technical Research

2011-06-07T12:07:00.000+09:00

Technical Research

The term technical research usually refers to applied research in the engineering disciplines and attempts to develop tools and procedures to measure or test equipment. Technical research also provides solutions to technical problems.

Technical Report
A technical report is a document which objectively records the procedures adopted and results obtained after a scientific or technical investigation (experiment) has been completed.

Technical Proposal
A technical proposal states clearly the requirements of a project or a contract, the plan of its completion in stages, and the approach taken.

Technical Standard
There is a technical standard set for technical research which involves a formal and concise statement of specifications and scientific observation of results.

Technical Specifications
Technical specifications involve a precise statement of the needs to be addressed or essential requirements of an instrument (materials, methods and process used; service, system and work required). The specifications are usually written in a scientific and precise manner for all parties to understand and evaluate. Specifications are usually divided into two categories:
1) Performance specifications such as conformance to a specified range such as range of room temperature
2) Technical specifications which clarifies the level of performance of each unit. This is further subdivided into: a) unit boundaries, parameters and tolerance (level of departure from its nominal value); b) quality level of each unit; c) acceptable statistical distribution ( mean deviation and standard deviation).

Academic Writing: Writing with a Purpose

2011-05-04T13:36:00.001+09:00

Writing with a Purpose

1. A purpose invariably implies a goal or an end of an action deliberately undertaken. Human beings attempt to give meaning to their actions based on some ideal which we may be called purpose. It is built upon self-esteem and pursued with some degree of rationality. It may be stated as “will to meaning” (Viktor Frankl), “will to pleasure” (Freud) or “will to power” (Adler). A purpose signifies the self at the same time goes beyond it to give meaning to the world. Therefore purpose, self-esteem and reason are seen by some objectivist philosophers like Ayn Rand as the three dominant western values of life. The western discourse of academic writing is perhaps based on a worthy purpose, pursed rationally and based on self-esteem (my ideas are worth listening to). It is always good to ask: What is your purpose in writing this essay? Who is your audience? What are you expected to write about? Are you expected to summarize, be original or state your own views? Are you going to instruct, inform or document? Are you going to express a feeling, explore an idea, entertain the reader or mediate in an argument? It is possible to combine more than one purpose in an essay.

You may inform the reader of certain facts that you think are important and then persuade him to take a suggested course of action. But in doing so, you need a strategy to realize your purpose. Usually good writers employ various strategies to realize their goals. They define, classify, analyze, process analyze, cause/effect analyze, illustrate, compare and contrast, describe or narrate. A formal dictionary definition places the terminology you employ within an intellectual space that is easy for others to understand. When you define a term you give its meaning, place it in a genre and separate it from others. Classifying your subject into types will help you to sort out your material and argument. Deconstructing your subject by dividing it into parts will help you to both understand and explain better.

All readers have expectations and it is always better to understand the expectation of your readers before you write. Cause analysis might lead you from one cause to one effect or one cause to multiple effects. Illustrations would involve the evidence or primary sources that you collect. Compare and contrast method involves two sets of ideas, events or processes. You have an introduction, a thesis, then describe A and then B (show how A and B are similar or dissimilar?) and then draw your conclusions. Description may involve visual, auditory or tactile images to make you subject come alive. Narration helps to grip the attention of the reader and follows a logical sequence without digression. Observation is an essential component of good writing. It allows for original thinking, drawing of credible conclusions and analyzing a complex situation. Today you will look for specific, accurate and interesting information to construct short and readable pieces of academic writing.

What I Have Lived For
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, was a British mathematician, philosopher, and social reformer. In this passage from his autobiography (The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872-1914, George Allen & Unwin Limited), he summarizes his personal philosophy.

1. Three passions, simple but overwhelming strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

2. I have sought love first, because it brings ecstacy—ecstacy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

3. With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine… A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

4. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

5. This has been my life, I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

Notes
1. No word is out of place. No sentence is redundant. There is no repetition, no ambiguity. There are five clear paragraphs.
2. What I believe, what I stand for. What are my values?
3. Uses one metaphor carefully and does not mix it with others—example, winds
4. Idiomatic expressions make writing interesting
5. State your ideas clearly and present them point wise in that order as stated in the introductory paragraph. The first paragraph states all the points that Russell will later develop. The sub-theme of love develops three reasons about its significance—
a) it brings ecstasy,
b) it relieves loneliness and
c) it gives a vision of heaven.
6. In paragraph three he develops the idea of seeking knowledge:
a) to understand the hearts of men and
b_ to know why starts shine ) human passion and nature and its surrounding mysteries.
7. In paragraph 4: “Love and knowledge ….back to earth.” A connection between first and second point made here
8. In the last paragraph he expresses pity for mankind:
a) cries of pain
b) children in famine
c) victims tortured by oppressors
d) helpless old people
e) loneliness
f) poverty and
g) pain
9. The last sentence completes both the point he wishes to make and the emotional drama that he has created through the metaphor of the “great winds”—“I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot and I too suffer.”
10. The last paragraph though short shows his determination to carry on with no regrets. Since it is extracted from his autobiography the fifth paragraph has a meaning too, otherwise it would have been redundant.
11. One thing you realize after reading this essay is how short it is. “Brevity is the soul of wit” says Shakespeare in Hamlet. Try not to be a chatterbox like Polonius.

Questions
1. How does Russell achieve coherence in paragraph 1 and 2?
2. Considering the writer’s purpose in paragraph 2, explain whether the paragraph is complete.
3. Comment on the unity of the essay. Where, it at all, does the writer digress.
4. How are the central ideas of paragraph 2, 3, and 4 related to the main idea of the essay?
5. What are the topic sentences of paragraphs 3 and 4?
6. What passions have governed your life? Write about one of them in a single paragraph (120 words) that is unified, orderly, coherent, and complete.

Justice for All

2011-02-09T20:35:00.001+09:00

by Mukesh Williams

Workshop: First Prize # 17 http://cms.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Articles&ArticleID=10262

In our world of growing inequalities and injustices the blindfold over the eyes of Lady Justitia must be removed to enable her to fathom hidden human intentions and reestablish a healthy connection between narrow interpretations of the law and broader demands for universal justice. Objectivity and impartiality cannot be achieved by neglecting identity, money, power and human weakness which gnaw at the roots of justice. Law itself is born in violence and gains legitimacy after getting inserted in a sovereign institution. Even just institutions are subject to the vagaries of human behavior and the partisan interests of a ‘contractarian’ state. Justice therefore gets separated from law and functions as justness only for those within the system. From this point of view, the ideas of Gustavo Gutierrez based on human solidarity are more important than John Rawls’ conception of contractarian laws and communitarian fairness. The contractarian mode of justice, once developed by Hobbes and later pursued by Locke, Rousseau and Kant, is not fair to all. We have to develop governmental institutions, private organizations and an enlightened public opinion to endorse these ideas and see that they are implemented in favor of the poor and the dispossessed. It would not do to quibble with definitions and justifications of legality but unravel real intentions and ensure justice for all. The emphasis on broader forms of social, economic and political justice arising from the use of legal institutions (nyaya) rather than just procedure, rules and institutions (niti), and endorsed by governments and influential organizations, may bring about some kind of global justice and reduce global conflicts.

Interrogating Justice

Our notions of justice have always been based on the way we conceptualize the world we live in, the society we create, the laws we write, the identities we imagine, and the social relations we develop. Justice is therefore contingent on human behavior, group intentions, institutional laws and the ways we interpret such laws. Our modern conception of justice is based on the western idea of a universe governed by rational principle of fairness and communitarian ideals. Our laws are guided by the Magna Carta which promises fair and good laws, but between the conception and the creation fall the shadow. We need to constantly negotiate the divide between the laws we frame and the justice we deliver to others. Identifying injustice may involve reasoning but reason itself cannot fully explain the complexity of the tragedy.

Justice comes from the Latin justitia which means just. It can be defined as “the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness.” The ethical component in the word justice is rather high. In ethical terms justice implies “the principle of fairness that like cases should be treated alike” and also “a particular distribution of benefits and burdens fairly in accordance with a particular conception of what are to count as like cases.”

Lady Justitia is the Greek goddess of justice and personifies the moral component in the judicial process. She is usually sculpted as a matronly figure carrying a double-edged sword (symbolizing the coercive power of reason and justice) and scales (measuring the strength and weakness of a case) and covering herself with a blindfold (representing objectivity and blind impartiality). She can be seen in courthouses and edifices connected to justice. The representation of Justitia underscores the adage that justice may be done though the heavens may fall expressed in the Latin phrase fiat justitia ruat caelum. But this is easier said than done.

The concept of justice is rather slippery though it has been the subject of philosophical interrogation right from Plato and Aristotle. Justice invariably embodies the conceptions of dominant social groups relating to notions of self and society and the role individuals play in it. Today as nation states become weak and new nation states more muscular, we are once again witnessing a renewed interest in the conception of justice and the way it is administered. Also burgeoning globalization is transforming societies by making it both easy and difficult for peoples to cross borders. As we welcome these peoples we also close our borders to them. We now once more reconfigure and reinterpret fundamental rights enshrined in our constitutions against the concepts of communitarianism and particularism on the one hand and cosmopolitanism on the other. How far is the reach of justice? Are our ideas of justice only limited to specific nation states or go beyond to encompass the globe?

The Greeks and the Anglo-Saxons

We owe a lot of our ideas of justice to the early Greek philosophers like Plato and Diogenes of Sinope. In Plato’s Dialogues the young Sophist Thrasymachus argues that justice implies what the strong decide for the welfare of the weak. Socrates contradicts this statement and then elaborates upon his conception of the just state embodying the four great virtues of courage, wisdom, temperance and justice. In the Republic justice is seen as a virtue inherent in both the individual and society. Everything ethical falls in the category of justice. The ethical component in justice has remained as the hallmark of any legal system often tempered by, logic, human behavior and the way institutions are constructed. Rational justification of legal decisions has always been central to western jurisprudence.

Most of the logic employed in justifying one type of justice over another dates back to Rene Descartes, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. In our own times Rawls, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and Gutierrez have pontificated on the concept of justice with some fundamental disagreements. Obviously we have thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Rawls who are interested in establishing indices of just institutions, while there are other thinkers like Adam Smith, Wollstonecraft, Bentham and Marx who look at the realization of social justice as a byproduct of institutions and human behavior. It is rather idealistic to imagine that once ‘just’ institutions are established they will be able to function impartially and administer justice for all.

Adam Smith introduced the archetypal figure of the “impartial spectator” who constantly evaluates a scene to identify injustice. From this perspective democracy has more to do with decision-making through discussion and consensus rather than following specifically laid-down election procedures. Smith’s impartial eye can help us understand our practices, prejudices and predilections when exercising justice. From this point of view argument for and against capital punishment must interrogate their respective positions impartially. We, for example, need to take cognizance of where we live. If we live in advanced societies we owe an obligation to our less fortune brethren in other parts of the world. A more comprehensive understanding of justice would involve endorsing some of the ideas of Adam Smith and not of Emmanuel Kant.

Indian Jurisprudence

We conceive of the enlightenment project as a typically western phenomenon without knowing that Indian thought has always laid special emphasis on the concepts of reason, justice and liberty. The conception of justice in the non-western world is much older. It is not that only the western tradition has evolved strategies of scientific rationality, but other non-western traditions like the Indian have laid special emphasis on the significance of rational argument and tolerance.

The Sanskrit tradition of jurisprudence separates the concept of justice into correct behavior and institutions or niti and realized and actual justice or nyaya. Nyaya is both a religion and philosophy and aims at eradicating human suffering by understanding the world through four ingredients of knowledge—perception, inference, comparison and testimony. Though detached observation and logic are important in nyaya, it is more important to remove human suffering than to be logically correct. Both Manusmrti and The Bhagvad Gita elaborate on the concept of justice and many Indian emperors like Asoka and Akbar were quite tolerant of others. Obviously rational and secular ideas of fair play and contract are important ideas for the world but they are not exclusively western in nature.

Tolerance and acceptance are key components towards establishing an ideal theory of justice. Justice is not just reason-based arguments but includes individual and social behavior as well. Democracy is not only to do with national institutions but directly connected to global institutions and the concept of global justice. An independent media can play a significant role in promoting these ideas. Today our world involves concepts of universal human rights, human security and universal freedom promoted by various UN charters to which most nations are signatories. Though reason may be the central pillar of justice it cannot stand without human solidarity and justice for all.

Rawls and Sen on Justice

Both Rawls and Sen differ in the ways they conceptualize the notion of justice. Rawls campaigns for just institutions, while Sen sees human behavior and narrow interpretation of laws compromising the execution of global justice. Rawls presents a historicist and pragmatic analysis of justice in The Law of Peoples where he establishes some general principles. He assumes that peoples are free and independent and therefore they ought to respect human rights and not intervene in the affairs of other societies. This could bring about a realistic utopia—“Our hope for the future of our society rests on the belief that the social world allows a reasonably just constitutional democracy existing as a member of a reasonably just Society of Peoples” (Rawls, 2001 11). The non-interventionist conception of justice may not be wholly compatible with an increased global interdependence.

Rawls’ ideas on justice are also contained in A Theory of Justice which continues to remain influential even after its publication four decades ago. Rawls argues for basic liberties and distribution of social and economic goods to all in the spirit of Stuart Mill. He defines justice as fair play, contractual in nature and the creation of just institutions.

Over the centuries philosophers have argued the significance of different principles of distributive justice but it is rather difficult to decide a consensual principle of justice. We invariably use utilitarian traditions maximizing the satisfaction of the largest section of society, for example best grades for those who submit best quality assignments and largest quantity of work. Some traditions are racially unjust like the slave system and need rules of justice which can be applied to society in a just manner. But whether it is Greek concept of justice or Anglo-Saxon and Indian, the ethical component in its conceptualization is quite pronounced. Rawls too introduced a limited concept of ethical justice through his concept of ‘difference principle.’

Rawls method was neither utilitarian nor tradition-based. He wanted to move away from the Anglo Saxon political philosophy and find a method of justice that was “systematic alternative to utilitarianism.” He argued that utilitarianism cannot guarantee “basic rights and liberties” of citizens on a “free and equal” basis, a condition on which all democratic institutions rest (Rawls, 1971 xi-xii). For him justice involved “no natural rights of private property in the means of production” and no “natural right to worker-owned and-managed firms” (Rawls, 1971 xvi).

Rawls began with an original position by stating that we are all rational and self-interested persons but stand behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ if we are not aware of our sex, race, physical shortcomings, generation, and social class. We want to select things that are advantageous in an enlightened manner. But being rational we are aware of the possible situations we may find ourselves in, the impact of human psychology and the influence of human nature. If we are enlightened and self aware we would eschew categories of race, gender or sexual orientation and establish fair non-discriminatory principles to adminster justice. We would like to find a fair and equitable distribution of resources for all generations both present and future.

Rational and enlightened people, Rawls believes, must choose two principles of justice to organize their real world: first equal right to liberty for all and second, greatest advantage for the least advantaged people and positions in society open equally to all. Justice is egalitarian as it is distributed equally both in terms of liberties and opportunities. It is not egalitarian if it provides benefits only to talented and does not protect liberties of all. Rawls “difference principle” means that some people get more power, income and status but ethically all have opportunities to a decent standard of living. The difference principle is fired by a socialist idea of ensuring that the least advantaged must be protected. This is a Rawlsian ideal.

Rawls however fails to address issues dealing with international aspects of justice by restricting its scope to redistributive social justice. Obviously greater inequalities exist amongst nations than within their societies. By this standard there are no global people and global social orders. The good point about Rawlsian argument is that he brings back the discussion of justice to solid substance which had once drifted away in the mid-twentieth century into an inquiry about language and meaning. Societies are not hermitically sealed entities as Rawls wants us to imagine, but more complex and interactive. The actions of one social group may impinge upon the other as issues connected to environmental pollution have revealed.

If justice is possible only within contractarian frameworks then those outside the contract such as future generations, foreigners and animals would be excluded. The case of Ukrainian national Lulila Stelmakh versus the Government of India highlights the contractual nature of the law. The Bombay High Court contended in November 2010 that a foreigner can be denied a working visa under certain conditions and he/she cannot be protected by the fundamental rights of the Indian Constitution as enshrined in Articles 21 and 14 which entitle Indian citizens the right to livelihood and right to equality.

Obviously there can be no single universal notion of justice, no ideal transcendent approach. But the need to ensure justice seems to be an emotional and a moral issue for many political philosophers. Amartya Sen states that, “It is sometimes claimed that justice is not a matter of reasoning at all; it is one of being appropriately sensitive and having the right nose for injustice” (Sen, 2009 4). There is always a plurality of positions and therefore no right answers to the concept of justice as pointed out by Sen in The Idea of Justice (Sen, 2009 6). Sen notes that some reasoning may always be involved in the “diagnosis of injustice,” but specific cases of injustice are far more “complex” and “subtle” than the evaluation of “an observable calamity” (Sen, 2009 4). The world is increasingly becoming an extended society, a global unity, whether we like it or not. Constitutional law can be interpreted either specifically or universally. When it is interpreted specifically it adversely affects the ‘other.’

Ideal conceptions of justice are hard to implement. Models in daily life are not measured against an ideal but against each other. Justice therefore is always a comparative on-going process, not an ideal. We wish to make the world a better place not an ideal place. Rawls places greater importance on setting up just institutions but does not think much about actual practices and human behavior which influence these practices. This becomes more difficult when we deal with international organizations which are structurally weaker than nation states. So, global justice is rather difficult to realize.

Gender Justice

Many other thinkers like Martha Nussbaum have expanded upon the ideas of Rawls by arguing about the need for “gender justice” especially for women in the third world regions of the world based on an ethical and egalitarian legal model. Nussbaum explains that only when government institutions support opportunities can the principle of equal liberty for the downtrodden succeed. Nussbaum concludes in Women and Human Development that “Women’s unequal failure to attain a higher level of capability, at which the choice of central human functions really open to them, is therefore a problem of justice” (Nussbaum, 2000 298). In fact Nussbaum takes her cue from the ‘difference principle’ of Rawls which allows inequalities in the distribution of goods insofar as these inequalities benefit the oppressed members of a given society. Again Nussbaum points out that the difference principle can work if both citizens and governments are committed to these ideals.

Derrida’s Force of Law

In his essay “Force of Law” Jacques Derrida draws a connection between law and justice. Derrida builds his argument by pointing out that law possesses a rather mystical foundation and gets its legitimacy through an act of violence (Derrida, 2002 239). Once law is inserted in the social order it begins to wield sovereign power—“law is always an authorized force” (Derrida 2002 223). Though law is evaluated on principles of justice, it is not authorized by justice. Justice gives birth to law in a violent and invasive fashion without allowing it to be autonomous. Since justice cannot provide a legitimate ground for law it makes law unstable. Therefore law betrays justice. In our world there is no such thing as a ‘just law.’

If this is true the consequences are huge. There can be no one-to-one correspondence between law and justice and the notion of global liberation is compromised. Though the separation of law from justice breaks a relationship, it is a fractured relationship. We need to configure this relationship. Derrida argues that since law deals with universals it expresses itself in relationship with equality. Justice on the other hand interacts with the singular ‘other—what the other ask of me? Since ‘I do not ask from the other, the other asks from me’ justice expresses a relationship of inequality. I therefore oblige someone creating an aporia to decide. A space therefore exists between the demands of law and demands of justice. It is in this space that undecided actions lie. If justice is unequal and non-reciprocal then how do I understand my relationship to the law when I am called to do justice? Since law arises in violence it cannot assist the demands of the other. The appeal to the law, when the law itself comes into conflict with justice is a betrayal of justice, as justice occupies absolute authority.

Gutierrez on Solidarity

In A Theology of Liberation and On Job, the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez elaborates on the conception of solidarity. In the first book Gutierrez explains how Christian theology attempts to “abolish injustice” and build a “new society.” The theology must be “verified by its participation to remove exploitation of the “exploited social classes.” An “authentic theology of liberation” includes the voices of the oppressed people and empowers them to express themselves “directly and creatively” in society. He further argues that all political, social and revolutionary theologies are useless if they do not “liberate humankind from everything that dehumanizes it and prevents it from living according to the will of the Father” (Gutierrez 1988 174).

In his second book Gutierrez makes Job not just an archetypical figure of individual experience but the experiences of all mankind. The suffering of the innocent acquires the larger dimension of injustice on a global scale. The argument runs in the following manner: God has a “predilection for the poor” and divine love therefore cannot be confined to “categories of human justice.” God gives preferential treatment to the poor as they live in inhuman conditions. God’s love for the poor is not only universal but also agapeic (Gutierrez, 1987 94).

Conclusion

When we say we are called to establish solidarity with the poor then we are expected to change our sense of subjectivity. The poor are neither asked to conform to the laws of the nation nor to our conception of justice. The demands of the poor are extra-legal or extra-constitutional. The appeal of the poor goes beyond the domains of the legal framework and enters agape or God’s love for mankind, especially the poor and disinherited. How do we understand our response and responsibilities to the other? Do we create a new legal system or destabilize the political order? Gutierrez believes that liberation of mankind is always renewing and changing itself as there are always those whom the law does not encompass and who demand our sense of justice. Justice therefore should always be in a state of self-questioning and laws in a state of revision if we look at those who suffer and need our help.

Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Gutierrez, Gustaro. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Trans Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. New York: Orbis Books, 1988..
Gutierrez, Gustaro. On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Trans Matthew J. O’ Connell. New York: Orbis Books, 1987.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Rawls, John. The Law of Peoples. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Sen Amartya. The Idea of Justice. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Clouds

2010-08-26T14:26:00.000+09:00

The taste of clouds,
damp,
yearning for those who have gone by,
wanting those who are yet to come,
unforgettable,
suspended,
injured,
insistent and inevitable,
a unique drop of a disappeared world
and a world yet to appear,
a globe quivering,
the heavens dissolving,
a complicity,
a deep agreement,
a fidelity,
we hold on,
we implore,
Leave me, but do not go.”

Fuji City

2010-08-17T22:02:00.000+09:00

Mukesh Williams

Fuji City is in Shizuoka Prefecture and is located on the banks of the scenic Fuji River. It is surrounded by Ashitaka mountain range with Mount Fuji sitting as a perfect jewel in its center. The spring water is really tasty here. The best thing about Fuji City is the rural countryside ambience with large stretches of tea gardens and a scenic view of Mount Fuji. During the Edo period, this was tenryo territory under the governance of the Tokugawa shogunate. There are lots of paper factories here including the famous Nippon Paper Industries. It is good to come in June, July or October to watch the Yoshiwara Gion, Festival, The Fuji Festival or the Karigane Festival.

Action Without Attachment

2010-08-03T15:35:00.001+09:00

Yajnarthat-karmano-nyatra lokoyam karmabandhanah;
Tadartham karma kaunteya muktasangah samachara.

The world is bound by actions other than those performed for the sake of yajna;
Do thou, therefore, O son of Kunti (Arjuna), perform action for this purpose alone, free from attachment.

Bhagvad Gita 3-9

BEYOND THE PRONOUN

2010-08-03T12:42:00.002+09:00

Beyond the pronoun
The present enters the future
And conveys all that
Grammar wishes to convey.

Language makes
The subject hostage
By mirroring subjectivity
Through imagined essence.

The ego relinquishes its
Utopian wishes for modernity
And enters the claims
Of a surrogate history.

Born in Allahabad

2010-07-25T22:45:00.002+09:00

To be born in Allahabad
Is to be surrounded by
Different histories and shadows:
The graveyards, the old havelis,
The stone cathedrals and
The hubbub of intellectual audacity.

You carry it in your teeth
On your tongue,
In your skin,
In the style of your being,
And when you enter the darkness
You know which way to go.

Bon Odori (盆) 2010

2010-07-24T22:12:00.002+09:00

On the 24th of July Takiyama 2 Chome celebrated the Bon Odori with dance, children performance and food. Bon originates in the Buddhist custom of remembering deceased ancestors but over the years the practice has evolved into family reunions and paying homage to ancestral graves or shrines. There are three kinds of Bon Odori. The first is called shichigatsu bon; it is celebrated in the month of July. The second is referred to as Hachigatsu bon and is celebrated in August. The last is called the Kyu bon which is celebrated on the 15th day of the seventh lunar month. Bon odori has been celebrated for over five centuries in Japan and has a rich musical and dance tradition. Today it is a community event where people drink, dance and socialize.

Travelling to Kyoto: The Fushima Inari Shrine

2010-07-24T11:51:00.000+09:00

Mukesh Williams

This is the main shrine built in the 8th century in Kyoto and is at the apex of nearly 30,000 shrines spread over Japan. The shrine celebrates the god of rice and sake and has been quite popular with the monarchy. The shrine runs for nearly 4 kilometers along a mountain trail with many red gates or tori donated over the years by various organizations including the local government. It is possible to see the Kyukoku University in this area. The shrine is just in front of Inari JR Station.

If you are in the Tokyo area you could either take a bullet train or shinkansen from Tokyo Central or from Shin Yokohama to Kyoto. Any of the shinkansen called Nozomi, Hikari, Kodama would take you to Kyoto. The train takes two hours to reach Kyoto and is quite conformable. So if you take the train at 8: 59 a. m. you are in Kyoto at 11:02 a. m. The journey would cost you about 26000 yen and you can return the same day if you plan carefully. Please check the timetable at the following website:
http://www.hirokim.ph/common/pdf/Eastbound.pdf

MELUS/MELOW CONFERENCE CALL, September 2011 Hyderabad

2010-07-18T11:19:00.000+09:00

CONFERENCE CALL

MELOW (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World) &
MELUS-India (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States)

Probable Venue: OUCIP (formerly known as ASRC), Hyderabad

Date: September 22-24, 2011 (to be confirmed)

IN SEARCH OF SOLUTIONS: THE CONVENTIONAL, THE EXPERIMENTAL AND THE BIZARRE

In a world that is rapidly changing it is inevitable that our parameters for the study of literature, culture and society are forever being re-defined. There are emerging spaces that cry for attention, black holes that have remained undetected for too long, alternative solutions that may provide an answer to many of our problems, and novel ways of negotiating issues related to the multifarious aspects of human life.

MELUS-MELOW 2011 focuses on these new approaches that (a) move away from the beaten track to clear fresh ground; (b) advocate the use of fresh critical / theoretical approaches to questions faced by human society; (c) focus attention on areas that have been under-represented ; or (d) provide new insights into prevalent issues.

Abstracts not exceeding 250 words may be submitted on the following sub-themes:

1. A Transcultural World: Emerging issues in a global approach to literature and culture

2. Global Solutions: From the national to the transnational

3. Strange and Unfamiliar ‘Other’ Worlds – the Fantastic, the Supernatural and the Surreal

4. Off the Beaten Track: Not-so-popular culture and cinema

5. Cyborg literature

6. The Old and the New: Re-interpreting the Classics

7. Lessons from History: The fictionalization of fact

8. Changing Seasons: Lessons from ecology, terror strikes, natural disasters

9. Watchdog Media: Journalistic literature, yellow journalism

10. A special MELUS-India Panel will be devoted to: Re-visioning the United States: The re-emergence of US Studies outside the Americas.

Tentatively, the Conference will be held in Hyderabad at the OUCIP (former ASRC). This venue will be confirmed at the soonest possible.

Prospective delegates will please note that we are focused primarily on literature but our attempt is to go interdisciplinary. We welcome approaches to literature from other perspectives.

The following information, in the given format, should be sent along with the abstract:

Title of Abstract

Name of Delegate

Official designation, Address and email id

Home address and Phone number

MELUS/MELOW conferences attended earlier (in which year and where)

Are you currently a member of MELUS or MELOW? Or do you need a fresh / renewed membership? Please specify.

• The subject line of your message should read “ABSTRACT 2011: [YOUR NAME] and [If applicable] - state if you are competing for the ISM award – for scholars below-40 from India"

Send the abstract with the necessary information by email (as part of the TEXT message, and NOT as attachment) to mjaidka@gmail.com with a copy to aneelraina@gmail.com

•Deadline for receipt of abstracts is August 31, 2010.

All abstracts will be peer-reviewed before they are accepted. Once acceptance letters are sent, full papers (approx 3,000 words) will be invited.

International Advisor: Mukesh Williams

Time Trappers

2010-07-18T11:12:00.000+09:00

See http://cms.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Poem&PoemID=5146

We are the time trappers
Alert to paradigms,
Passing fantasies of the flesh,
Calibrating myths, metaphors and mood,
Measuring our hopelessness,
Our ennui, our love patterns, our anxieties,
Against our heartbeats,
Wanting to say this,
Stuttering to articulate that,
Weaving dark veils
Of language and vocabularies,
Fabricating worldviews,
Categories, moral cognates,
Whispering through the tick-tock of cogs
Into the insurmountable trilogy of time,
Ensnared in its palladian.

July 17 ,2010

India's new rupee symbol unveiled

2010-07-16T14:16:00.002+09:00

By Andrew Buncombe, Asia Correspondent
Friday, 16 July 2010 Independent UK

The winning design for the new graphic symbol of India's rupee
India has finally got a symbol for its currency, the rupee. The government announced it had selected one of five short-listed designs it hopes will become as recognisable as the shorthand for the dollar, the yen and the euro.

"It denotes the robustness of the Indian economy," said information minister Ambika Soni, as he revealed the winning design, a cross between the Roman letter R and its Hindi equivalent. Last year, in a move that experts said underscored India's increasing global economic ambitions, the government invited entries for a contest to come up with a globally recognisable sign for the currency. Normally the rupee is designated by R or INR. Officials hope the rupee could become more important for international trading. The winning entry was submitted by D Udaya Kumar, a teacher of design at the Indian Institute of Technology. He will receive a prize of $5,350 (£3,500).

Representing India

2010-07-15T21:50:00.000+09:00

Representing India: Literature, Politics and Identities

Williams, Mukesh and Wanchoo, Rohit. Representing India: Literatures, Politics, and Identities. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008.

The last quarter century has seen a veritable explosion in the publication of books on South Asian history, politics and culture. The literature on South Asia reflects a whole range of ideological perspectives and academic traditions. As a result of the specialization within disciplines and the intellectual awareness of the need for inter-disciplinary work has not been sufficiently translated into academic discourses and practices. A fruitful interaction within and across disciplines is inhibited by the limitations imposed by the languages of discourse and disciplinary practices in different academic traditions and disciplines. The liberal and the Marxist, the modernists and the ‘critics of modernity’, the traditionalists and the progressives, postcolonial triumphalists and ‘critics of postcolonialism’ all possess languages and concepts of their own. Without subscribing to a principle of incommensurability, it is still an arduous task to pick up concepts from widely divergent perspectives. Nevertheless, there are insights in different perspectives, which would be of interest to students and scholars alike, if only, the pressures of specialization and academic production were less intense.

Extract from the Introduction, pages 1-5
This book analyzes and synthesizes work done in diverse intellectual traditions, with the objective of providing a framework for further inter-disciplinary studies on South Asia. Many Indian intellectuals have responded selectively, and with varying degrees of intensities, to Western intellectual traditions. Both postmodernism and dependency theory—two of the big intellectual influences from the West that have influenced scholars in Africa and Latin America—have enjoyed rather limited success in Indian universities and the media. It is possible to offer arguments for this intellectual preference, but the intellectual currents of the West have not been able to overpower South Asia. Indian universities may seem stagnant by Western standards, but they have developed a healthy skepticism about the intellectual fashions sweeping the West. A fear of Western intellectual hegemony, cutting across ideological barriers between the Left and the Right, has been the major factor in the selective response to Western intellectual traditions. The Indian intellectual tradition on the periphery has its own peculiarity that has to do with both the slow responses to Western tradition and skepticism about the relevance of ‘foreign’ traditions and their ulterior motives. There are some benefits of being on the periphery—a large number of academics are spared the effort to keep pace with dizzying change in academic fashion and discourses in the West. To be on the intellectual periphery has been a result of slow communication, limited academic exchanges and less significance and demand for academic publishing in the social sciences and literary fields. In the wired world, where students can download information from databases and websites at will, academics, whatever their personal predilections, have been dragged by their forelocks into discourses they may well have shunned earlier.

In the last two decades, the intellectual context of the Indian universities has changed. The performance of the IITs and their alumni have grabbed international headlines and influenced the way Indian education is perceived abroad. Critics of postcolonialism have often remarked somewhat cynically that one of the signs of postcolonialism is when third world intellectuals secure tenured professorships in the Western academies. Once Western universities accept intellectuals from the periphery, interaction between the Anglo-American world and South Asia increased substantially—the native informant has now become the postcolonial intellectual. The revolution in communication, neo-liberal globalization and recent migrations from India has had the effect of breaking down the moral and political certainties of the post-independent generation that has dominated the politics and society in India.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the retreat of the socialist ideal have had a deep impact on Indian academics and their liberal, Marxist ideas of universalism. While liberal and Marxists differed in their analysis of society and the programmatic conceptions of the future, they were completely unmoved by ideas of relativism and individualistic critiques of state power. For a long time, Indian scholars did not respond with enthusiasm to the ideas of Hayek, Nozick and Milton Friedman. On the contrary they were more influenced by Marx, Keynes or Gandhi.

In the last ten years, the older generation of middle class Indians and academics has received severe intellectual shocks from various sources—academic, technological and cultural. In a climate of heightened vulnerability the need for dialogue between different traditions has increased. It is possible to see a genuine search in our contemporary world for new ways to synthesize social changes and diverse intellectual traditions. The search finds expression in receptivity to multi-disciplinary methods. We would like to expand the new intellectual space opened recently, and, in doing so, contribute in some measure to its development. This ought to be the intellectual justification for such a book as this.

The book covers many large fields. Quite a few scholars have devoted their lifetime to some of the topics covered in a single chapter of this book. We have approached the subject of ‘nation and its representation’ in South Asia from the standpoint of those who are not burdened by the academic tradition or its specializations. It is not possible within the boundaries of the book to explore issues relating to gender and women’s empowerment, environment and sustainable development, nuclear power and disarmament, globalization and domestic liberalization. What we have tried to cover is ambitious enough by the standards of academic specialization, within which we have ourselves grown.

We can experience the impact of colonialism in several areas—the growth of academic disciplines like law, history and literature, on the one hand, and the enormous paper work and procedural culture in government, bureaucracy and trade, on the other. In a large measure, ‘orientalist ideas’ or other forms of colonial knowledge have influenced these areas. The early nationalists responded to colonial domination in primarily economic and cultural terms. The economic ideology of nationalism, and the critiques of colonialism, gained widespread acceptance amongst different shades of nationalists ranging from the Left to the Right and from Savarkar to Gandhi. The cultural critique was based on the benign perception of Indian society and religion deriving its power from the work of scholars like William Jones, Henry Thomas Colebrooke, Maurice Winternitz, Max Muller, Sir Henry Maine and others. The ideas about the significance of Sanskrit, the vitality of village republics and the spiritual heritage of India owed a lot to the work of these orientalists. Over the last twenty years, the work of scholars like Edward Said and Bernard Cohn have made us more sensitive to the power relations affecting the production of knowledge. Cohn has highlighted the role of the census and its impact on Indian self-perception. Scholars like Sudipta Kaviraj and Arjun Appadurai have brought out the transition from fuzzy identities to ones that are more rigid. Along the way, they have introduced the notion of majority and minority in understanding the dynamics of the South Asian body politic.

THE MAKING OF BHARATVARSHA AS ‘SOUTH ASIA’
Indians and non-Indians such as Persians, Arabs and Europeans have imagined India in quite different ways. Indian nationalists like Bipin Chandra Pal have argued that its people have always conceived of India as Bharatavarsha, a land located in historical antiquity, eliciting strong feelings of attachment. The Persians and the Arabs saw India as a geographical site located beyond the Indus River and called it Al Hind or Hindustan. For some Europeans of the early nineteenth century like the German philosopher Hegel, German orientalists and English colonizers, India was always a strange, far off land, rich in material, spiritual and linguistic wealth that was waiting for others to exploit. As its wealth began to be identified, exploited and categorized within a European intellectual tradition the understanding of India also underwent a change. From a land of economic and spiritual wealth in the nineteenth century, India became, by the middle of the twentieth century, a land of religious conflict, economic squalor, underdevelopment, epidemics and cheap labor. Since the 1980s, this rather negative image of India has once more transformed into a more positive one of professionalism in the areas of information technology, technical education and service industry.

The term ‘South Asia’ now effectively includes eight sovereign nation states—India, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and the Maldives—and carries within this complex definition its own border geographies, political identities and intra-national hegemonies. We can map the geographical identity of South Asia within the Indian sub-continent. From the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south, and from the Indus valley in the west to the alluvial plains of the Brahmaputra River in the east, South Asia provides an expansive geographical terrain and cultural diversity not available elsewhere in Asia. We may further stretch the eastern limit of South Asia, through colonial proxy, to include the last frontiers of Myanmar. About two billion people inhabit this diverse cultural, religious and linguistic region, with about 1.2 billion in India alone. It is the demographic strength of India coupled with its political, military and economic prowess that gives it a dominant position as a major player in South Asia. It is no surprise that we often use the term ‘South Asia’ interchangeably with India, to the chagrin of other minor South Asian nation states. The understanding of South Asia becomes more complex when we place the region within its 5000-year old history and the politics of European imperialism of the last few centuries. Andre Wink would like to introduce the geographical perspective in the understanding of medieval South Asian culture and urban space. Given the state of historical knowledge at the moment it is a task too daunting for any single book to attempt. We have therefore tried to use this overarching paradigm wherever possible to understand modern South Asia.

The geographical boundedness of the Asian sub-continent provides a metaphor for the cultural traditions of the peoples living in it, giving rise to the notion of cultural unity. This has allowed people to imagine South Asia as a region signifying ‘unity in diversity.’ Since the 1950s and 1960s, the growth of regionalism and nationalism in the region has weakened the belief in ‘unity in diversity,’ introducing the notion of ‘heterogeneity’ in culture, belief and language. Now, we can view almost everything ranging from national economies, infrastructure to diaspora and literature within the overarching framework of cultural heterogeneity. Undoubtedly, South Asia is a multi-religious and polyglot region. Its peoples speak over twenty important languages and two hundred different dialects. It is possible to find here, adherents of practically all the major religions of the world such as Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. There are nearly one billion Hindus (if we include India, Nepal and Sri Lanka) and four hundred million Muslims (if we include India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) in this region.

South Asia as a term to describe the subcontinent owes its emergence to three important factors—a legacy of colonial rule, the growth of American area studies, and the self-representation of the South Asian intelligentsia. First, South Asia owes its origin to colonial rule and expansion in India. The colonial rule encompassed most of the countries of South Asia, excluding Nepal but including Burma. Second, South Asia emerged as a political and academic category within the specialization of American area studies. Finally, the emergence of South Asia is born out of a need for regional cooperation in the subcontinent that responds to the changing economic and social realities. Many academics, media people and politicians of the third world find a self-description in the third meaning. In using the term ‘South Asia,’ we recognize not only the historical legacy of the British Empire but also the aspirations of the erstwhile colonized people to achieve greater cooperation and economic progress within the region.

The category of South Asia is more deeply rooted in history than the identity of South East Asia. The level of economic cooperation in ASEAN, although not very high as Benedict Anderson has argued in The Spectre of Comparisons, is nevertheless higher than that of SAARC countries. The discipline of South Asian area studies as it has emerged in America may not be as wide-ranging as we may wish it to be, but it studies the common features and interests of a large number of people in the South Asian subcontinent. For some time to come the appropriate unit of analysis for school curriculum may still be the nation state in all the countries of the subcontinent. At the level of academic research, the unit of analysis cannot remain just the nation state because of the shared problems of national and linguistic diversity in the region and problems of developing countries that transcend national boundaries within the region.

If you wish to read more please buy the book at Amazon.com

The French Revolution and Enlightenment

2010-07-15T21:17:00.003+09:00

© Mukesh Williams

The French Revolution was a watershed in the history of hereditary imperative and political privilege. It initially began as a financial crisis and gradually went out of control as the French elite began to seek political reform at the expense of the French monarchy. It rode on the twin wings of the American Revolution and the Enlightenment ideas. The first phase of the French Revolution saw emergence of constitutional government and the curtailment of the privileges of the Old Regime. The next phase saw the rise of radicalism in response to the threat of foreign invasion and the various maneuvers of the King, legislators and people. The radical phase became intense when Robespierre initiated the Regime de la terreur. At last a French general Napoleon Bonaparte seized power and initiated an unstable conservative government.

MARQUIS DE CONDORCET
In July 1793 Marquis de Condorcet wrote his now famous essay Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progres de l’espirit humain or The Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. In April 1974 he was executed by the Jacobins. The essay was published in 1795. The essay became the central text of the French Enlightenment and the idealistic manifesto of the post-Thermidorian reconstruction in France.

Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat or Marquis de Condorcet as he was called (1743-1794), was an aristocrat, a mathematician, an official of the Academy of Sciences, and a friend of Voltaire (1694-¬1778). He was one of the early French enlightenment figures who supported the French Revolution of 1789, but during its short-lived Radical period became a victim through betrayal and frankness. Though he could hide for a short while after the completion of the Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, he was arrested. It is said he killed himself by taking poison. Others say he was poisoned by someone as he was loved by the people too much and the authorities could not afford a public execution.

REASON AS THE HERO OF ESQUISSE
The hero of Condorcet’s work is reason that first appeared in philosophy, then in natural sciences and afterwards in moral and political sciences. With the coming of the printing press the full possibilities of reason, through the publication of books, became possible. Reason triumphed over the stratagems of priest, tyrants and hypocrites and gained great energy.

Condorcet’s concept of progress was teleological and involved the infinite possibilities of human perfection. He believed that the future could be predicted based on the general laws of the universe but it was more of a utopian dream. Condorcet thought that eventually everyone would enjoy racial and sexual equality and nations would share economic wealth as equal partners. This would allow the transformation of our biological nature and lead to the extension of human life. Condorcet’s Esquisse seems ironic today in the light of the atrocities of the two world wars in the twentieth century and various other human shortcomings. Condorcet confused faith in scientific progress with virtue and human happiness. But even today many hope that his dreams may come true through healthy public debates and enlightened mass education.

THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
A century later Max Weber began to expose the myths, stage models, social evolutionism and the dark side of Enlightenment. He argued that freedom and republican democracy did not constitute the telos of human history. The rise of capitalism posed a significant threat to freedom and democracy.
No one ever believed that the human mind would exhaust all the ‘facts’ or facets of nature, all the refinements of measuring and analyzing these facts, the inter relationship of objects, and all the possible combinations of ideas.

Condorcet believed that over the centuries nations had come to realize that they cannot conquer and colonize without losing their hard-fought freedoms. It was only in global federations that nations could find their interdependence and independence. If nations sought security then acquiring power was not the means to get security. The increased power of nations invariably brought in an increased sense of insecurity. The whole idea of economic progress at the cost of others had only resulted in bloodshed. He felt that his utopian conceptualizations would eventually come true.

He further stated that the false mercantile economy based on self-interest and prejudice must give way to an intimacy of peoples based on foundational principles of politics and morality. In such a world skills based on industry or exploitation of nature will be shared equally amongst natives and foreigners. This will become the surest way to eradicate national animosities and stereotyping. He avowed that,

Every thing tells us that we are approaching the era of one of the grand revolutions of the human race. What can better enlighten us to what we may expect, what can be a surer guide to us, amidst its commotions, than the picture of the revolutions that have preceded and prepared the way for it? The present state of knowledge assures us that it will be happy. But is it not upon condition that we know how to assist it with all our strength? And, that the happiness it promises may be less dearly bought, that it may spread with more rapidity over a greater space, that it may be more complete in its effects, is it not requisite to study, in the history of the human mind, what obstacles remain to be feared, and by what means those obstacles are to be surmounted?

Condorcet’s was a rather simplistic vision of the future for Kant who saw a gap between the “is” and the “ought. Kant argued that the only way to bridge the gap between the two was to introduce a universal moral imperative.

The New Indian Middle Class and Japan-India Partnership: Legal Restraints and Economic Opportunities

2010-07-12T22:52:00.004+09:00

(Lecture delivered at Ryokoku University, Kyoto Monday 12th July 2010)
© Mukesh Williams

The lecture deals with new trends in the rise of the new Indian middle class, middle class consumerism, Indian demography, the stability/instability of economic institutions, continuous women empowerment, Khap panchayats, strategies of economic survival, what Japan can learn from Indian example, the rise of elite institutions such as IITs and St. Stephen’s College, NRIs, the power of design, cooperation between Indian and Japanese business companies, areas of possible investment, and overcoming legal restraints and legal reforms.

In the last two decades India has seen tremendous economic progress and technological boom, giving rise to the new Indian middle class and opening economic and scientific opportunities for all classes both domestically and internationally. Since the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991 by the then finance minster and now Prime Minister Manmohan Singh India’s Gross Domestic Product has steadily risen from just 4 percent to over 10%. Even after the global economic recession in the wake of Lehman Brothers scandal in 2008, India still performed well. Its GDP has continued to grow at a rate of 6.5% per annum. Though China’s GDP is much higher, it is more from the manufacture and production side that China gains its strength. India’s strength lies more in the intellectual and professional class. It is speculated that China’s heated economy will cool down in the coming years while India’s intellectual strength will not decline.

INDIAN DEMOGRAPHY
Indian population is around 1.11 billion. And India has all religions of the world including Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and Islam. There are 14 official regional languages. The Mughals came in the 16th century and ruled until the 18th when they were displaced by the colonizing British until India gained freedom in 1947. The Muslim rulers bought Persian while the British English. India became a polyglot nation where most intellectuals were able to master more than two languages. Today both English and Hindi are used for official purposes. However it is English which dominates. There is a suggestion of evolving a common national language with Hindustani in Roman script. Till then Indian English rules the roost.

THE NEW INDIAN MIDDLE CLASS
Marx once defined the middle class on the means of production comprising of small business owners, self employed, managers and supervisors. The Indian middle class is estimated at about 300 million about the same as the population of the United States of America. As people from different strata and regions are joining the middle class it is becoming more diverse and heterogeneous. The rise of the middle class is a function of neoliberal policies of the government in the early 1990s celebrating the victory of capitalism over socialism. Since then there has been a great emphasis on market and privatization and retreat of government intervention.

The growth of the new middle class has been a function of the globalization of economy. This has created class conflict and friction between lower and new urban classes and resulted in the rise of the new poor and the new rich. Leela Fernandes in India’s New Middle Class locates the origin of the new middle class much earlier in the colonial period when they got access to English education, employment in modern professions, enhanced political awareness of public representation and self identification as neither colonial subjects nor marginalized groups (Fernandes, 2006 2). McKinsey Report suggests that today India has about 50 million new middle class who have disposable incomes of 200,000 to one million rupees.

NEW MIDDLE CLASS CONSUMERISM
As recently as 1985 about 90% Indians lived on less than a dollar. Now they are consuming high end cars and designer clothes. In 20 years India will surpass Germany, with its 5th largest consumer market. Today the middle class is over 50 million but in 2025 it will be about 583 million about 41 % of the population. These households will see their incomes balloon to 51.5 trillion rupees ($1.1 billion)—11 times the level of today and 58 percent of total Indian income. The popular cars for the upper middle class, new middle class and middle class are Audi A4 Sedan 16 million; Maruti Esteem 1 million yen; Maruti 800 half a million yen. They are also buying white goods such as refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, computer and music systems.

INDIAN INSTITUTES OF TECHNOLOGY
India missed the agricultural revolution. It missed the industrial revolution but it caught the technological revolution. Why did this happen? It is to do predominantly with the starting of higher technical institutes in the 1950s called Indian Institute of Technology or IIT. The idea of starting the IITs along the lines of MIT in America was initiated by Sir Ardeshir Dalal in 1946. The first IIT was established at Kharagpur in May 1950. Jawaharlal Nehru called it “India’s future in the making.” The IITs of the 1950s paved the way for India’s economic and intellectual progress in the 1990s. I am also a product of IIT Delhi and have taught at IIT Madras and St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. St .Stephen’s College began producing skilled students in the 1960s and 1970s who joined the civil services like Montek Singh Aluwalia, became lawyers like Kapil Sibal, professors like Manmohan Singh or went aborad to work in the Silocon Valley in California. Many joined the IMB, Microsoft and NASA increasing the Indian representation in these companies to 30% of the total workforce. Today the Indian community in the United States is called a ‘model minority’ for its intellectual excellence, law abiding nature and contribution to the American economy.

NON RESIDENT INDIANS
Indians aboard are called immigrants in other countries but NRIs or Non Resident Indians at home. NRIs have contributed substantially to India’s wealth through investment at home. The Indian banks especially the State Bank of India provides them with tax free foreign currency fixed deposits in USD, Deutschmark, English pounds and Japanese yen from 2.5% to 4 % per annum. Today there are 24 million Indian overseas making the Indian Diaspora only next to China in terms of intellectual and economic presence. About 24,000 live in Japan and 2.7 million in the United States. In Nepal there are about half a million living as expatriates.

THE POWER OF DESIGN
The demand for innovative and cheap design in India is really high—whether it is a car or a treadle water pump. The Nano model was produced by Tata Motors and priced at 200,000 yen. It is the cheapest car in the world and therefore rightly called “The People’s Car.” The Treadle Water Pumps
it is a human powered Pump which lifts water from 25 feet from below the earth and saves on energy and resources. It is now used in rural India. It increases cropping by 200-300 % and is marketed by IDEI under the Krishak bandhu ‘farmer’s friend’ program in east India here are roughly 7,50000 such pumps each pump costs 2400 yen.

ENLISH COMPETENCE
India’s competence is further accelerated by high competence in English proficiency and mathematics skills. English has been for all intents and purposes the official language of the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia. English is used as a tool to knit the country together, advance intellectual and scientific competence and conduct business. It is not used to understand the ‘culture of the other country.’ Schools in India teach English language but not universities where it is expected of students to use it as the medium of English at most universities is English.

In the last 160 years Indians have learnt the English language and transformed it into a local Indian vernacular. They can write it with ease and speak it fluently. The Indian accent has prompted some people to call it Indian English just as American accent has made English spoken in America as American English. Today there are 750 million English speakers more than the combined population of America (300 million; only 94% speak English) and Britain (61 million).The added strength of English speakers in the two countries is less than that of India.

ELITE ENGLISH EDUCATION
Where do the young who make the middle class come from? Obviously they come from elite English medium institutions such as St. Columbus, Jesus and Mary Convent, Mayo College, Xaviers, St. Joseph’s and Ravenshaw. A lot of them are referred to as Mission schools as they were either set up by the British to promote English education, opinions, morals and intellect or run by convent nuns or Jesuit priests. During the colonial period they served British interests but today they impart quality English education based on Scottish or English Enlightenment values of sound scholarship, critical inquiry and Christian brotherhood. Recently public schools like the Kendriya Vidhlaya or central schools have also come up to cater to the needs of the urban middle class. As compared to American or British schools, Indian schools are relatively cheap. The average annual fees for a student until high school would be approximately one million yen (for foreign students) and 250000 yen (for Indian students). Students studying at university colleges and living on campus may spend about 200,000 to 250,000 yen a year pursuing humanities or science courses.

UNIVERSITY ELITE COLLEGES
These students enter elite institutions of higher learning such as St. Stephen’s College Delhi, Loyola College Madras or Presidency College Calcutta. I taught for nearly 20 years at St. Stephen’s College where 99 % students go to the US universities with full scholarships and at the top of American colleges. St. Stephen’s was established in 1881 by the Cambridge University Brotherhood and has a strong connection with Gandhi, The Gadar Party and the Freedom Struggle. Originally it was set up to cater to the needs of the poor but today it is seen as an elite institution catering to the bureaucracy, politics and education.

This does not mean that Indian students will not come to Japan even when they are wooed. India is a vast country with 369 universities and 18064 colleges. Over eleven million students are enrolled at these universities and colleges where English is largely the medium of instruction. Japan has 726 universities with over 2.8 million students. There are thousands of students in India who do not belong to the prestigious institutions named earlier. They come from middle-level universities and see Japan as a possible destination to secure a future. Such students may not have found a good American or European university to go to and they would be most willing to try their hand at a Japanese university. The bind however is that Japanese universities do not want such students; they want the very best. More and more Japanese students should also be allowed to study at Indian elite institutions and find jobs wherever they wish to.

THE STRANGLEHOLD OF CASTE
As a result of both elitist and egalitarian learning the stranglehold of caste is gradually loosening. Caste has not gone altogether, nor will it ever go, but it is getting linked to other social factors such as class and lower caste job reservations. It is possible to see students from various minorities (such as Muslims and Christians (and backward castes and tribes (such as SCs and STs) getting education alongside upper caste Hindus. In urban area excellence and skill has replaced caste lineage, though in matters of marriage caste still plays a significant role.

THE KHAP
There is a greater preference amongst the young to choose their own partner from their school, college, workplace or other associations they belong to. These days the new trend is a mixture of arranged and love marriage where the girl or boy first select each other, then their families arrange their match according to custom and practice. However in some village in Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh, Rajashthan and Punjab there is a reemergence of prohibiting same clan marriages. The khap means a group of villages of the same clan. The khap panchayat or clan court was established by upper caste jats in the 14th century to oversee same clan marriages called gotra marriages. The idea is that all boys and girls within a clan are considered siblings and therefore are ineligible to marry. The khap forces such couples to either commit suicide or conduct honor killings. Honor killings have got much publicity in the media. The national government is now formulating a legislation to seek criminal indictment in khap killings. The khap on the other hand either deny this altogether or justify their acts and want the marriageable age to be reduced to 15 to prevent adolescent girls from running way with their lovers. However in cities more women are choosing their own partners and entering elite work places which were earlier reserved for men.

WOMEN EMPOWERMENT
It is now possible to see women working in information technology, space technology, education, business, medicine and bureaucracy. Today’s India’s ruling Congress Party chairman, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the President Prathiba Patil, many governors of states, chief ministers are women. However the disparity in opportunity between rural and urban women is great. Most rural women do not have access to proper education or rights to self-empowerment. Though sati, johar and devadasi practices are banned, women still do not enjoy a safe social environment. More work has to be done for continuous empowerment of women in rural areas.

INDIAN FINANCIAL SECTOR
Finance is the science of money management. A system involves institutions, agents and practices, liabilities and markets. The Indian banking and financial infrastructure was always more conservative when compared to the US. It has a highly modern NSE, ATM banking, cell phone banking and other infrastructure. Unlike US banks it is not generous with its loans. Most Indians who returned from the US complained about the tight-fisted policies of the Indian Reserve Bank of India. It has deposits of over half trillion US dollars and accounts for three quarters of the country’s financial assets. It has grown annually at a rate of 18%. For example if you wanted a loan of 4 million yen you would have to show collateral in terms of property or a job which would ensure your ability to pay back. Only then you would get a loan around 70% of the original demand that is 3 million yen. It was not possible to get a 100 % loan even after surety. But if India faced an economic crisis like the US would India survive? Our banking needs to be regulated.

Globalization and liberalization has increased financial opportunities for India. This helped business to survive and banks to remain healthy. But there are problems .Since capital is not easy to get Indian banks offer reasonable interest rates on investments to encourage financial savings. The government takes most revenue from savings at low rates and leaves Indian business weak. About 80% of the banking system is in the public sector while only 20% in the private sector. About 3% of the total deposits are in the private sector. We need to strengthen our slow legal system, remove corruption, make financial working more transparent, implement rigorous norms and give appropriate incentives.
With the rise of corporate culture and liberalization the bureaucratic problems called the license raj are slowly becoming less. The authoritarian rule imposed by the government is slowly receding. Business is freer and functions with less constraints and government support. India is now trying to attract foreign business and create a one-window access for business.

LEGAL SYSTEM
Though our legal system is cumbersome and slow it works quite impartially at the High Court and Supreme Court levels. Even if justice is mislaid in lower courts in the case of Jessica Lall and Priyadarshini Mutto cases, the High Court usually rectifies them. However the justice system needs many reforms such as increasing the number of functionaries, speeding the judicial process, protecting witness and removing police corruption.

THE INDIAN MEDIA
The Indian media operates with a relative degree of freedom in India unlike China or other countries such as Singapore and is quite critical of various institutions including the government and other agencies. A free press is quite important for the smooth functioning of democracy. There is a fair degree of transparency in hiring judges and other legal functionaries. Job vacancies in universities are also advertised in the press and are followed by a fair process.

INDIA-JAPAN PARTNERSHIP
India is a new republic though it has an ancient culture. It is possible for India and Japan to expand the present areas of cooperation especially in the areas of pharmaceuticals, raw materials and human resource. Japan can invest more in Indian infrastructure, financial sector and nuclear technology. It has already invested in the areas of automobile technology, urban railroad development, fabricating business corridor and IIT education.

CONCLUSION
India is growing rapidly and has a great business and intellectual potential which Japan can exploit profitably. In the last decade the cooperation between the two nations has been growing. Japan's total loans to India were $4,239.0 million in 2004, grant aid $ 399.2 million, while technical cooperation totaled $ 179.5 million. Major Japanese companies are making profit in India and wish to expand their business in future. Though there are differences in culture, business practices and environment, the Indian market is potentially big. There are possibilities for Japanese business to invest in Indian transport, power and telecommunications. Japan ranks seventh in terms of cumulative foreign direct investment (FDI) in India, accounting for US$ 3.61 billion in the period from April 2000 to December 2009, of which US$ 1.08 billion came in the period April-December 2009. The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor with Japanese cooperation is about to complete. The success of this enterprise will further encourage Japan to invest in India and make profit. Other areas for future exploitation are medicine, higher education and information technology.

Domo arigato gozaimata.
(My special thanks to Professor Manoj Shrestha, Konan University, and to the law, business and economics major students of Ryukoku University)

TAKING A POSITION

2010-07-08T22:34:00.000+09:00

THE TEXT: MEANINGS, IMPLICATIONS, AND DISTORTIONS

Mukesh Williams

Anything we confess or profess implies taking a position. A position would imply apart from other things an act of laying down of a proposition or a thesis. Even opening up a debate, seeking genealogies or simply deconstructing are all acts that take up a position even when they deny doing so. Nothing is neutral. Every act intervenes. The signature in a text points at an intention, to some hidden agenda. Hegel had once pointed out that inversions and displacements are created through what is said and what is meant. Though academic deconstruction has claimed to be apolitical Derrida has always insisted of the political nature of the exercise. Perhaps Edward Said was right when he suggested that American deconstruction was overtly neoconservative. The message of a text may be misconstrued or used for ideological advantage and may have nothing to do with the original meaning or implication of the text. But then is the author responsible for the distortion of the text? Derrida points out that the “effects or structure of a text are not reducible to its ‘truth,’ to the intended meaning of its presumed author, or even its supposedly unique and identifiable signatory” (Derrida, The Ear of the Other, 1985 29). Does it mean that the author relinquishes all responsibility of the ideas he proffers?

ETHICAL ASSUMPTIONS AND THE PARADOX OF GIFT, HOSPITALITY, FORGIVENESS AND MOURNING

2010-07-08T16:07:00.002+09:00

by
© Mukesh Williams

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.

Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” The Foucault Reader, 343

The self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles. What is at stake for the self, in its being, is not to be. Beyond egoism and altruism it is the religiosity of the self.

Levinas, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence, 117

The methods to draw ethical assumptions and the way to investigate them have always dominated western philosophical inquiry right from Plato to the present. The seriousness of this pursuit in moral philosophy can be measured by the fact that seminal European philosophers such as Kant and Hegel were deeply involved in the ethical project. The western ethical inquiry was also deeply connected to the investigations about spirituality, consciousness, the construction of being and the act of knowing. Levinas states, “For the philosophical tradition of the West, all spirituality lies in consciousness, thematic expression of being, knowing” (Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence, 99).

In recent times both ethics and ethical behavior are seen more as puzzles that may not be fully realized but unsurely grasped in their assumed contradiction. Foucault was suspicious of the ethical alternative offered by the Greeks. He was skeptical of their ethical assumptions and worked on the genealogy of ethics rather than on seeking a solution or an alternative. He cautioned us of its dangers and warned us to be always busy to do “something” (Foucault, “On The Genealogy of Ethics” 343). By ‘something’ he meant the interrogation of ethical issues that instead of liberating us often imprison us. Derrida goes beyond the totalizing narratives of ethics and reveals the aporia or paradox that lies buried deep in social practices connected to gift giving, hospitality, forgiveness and mourning.

APPROACHES TO ETHICS
There are three fundamental approaches to the understanding of ethics—theoretical, utilitarian and practical which includes Kant, Rorty and John Rawls. Winston Churchill’s famous statement in a 1941speech to the British Parliament during a debate on how to rebuild the House of Commons destroyed in the aerial bombing by the Luftwaffe: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” This must be read with Heidegger’s concept that technology surrounds us. Architecture possesses a presence, a mood and a texture that subtly and patiently shapes our sensibility and guides us into observations of ourselves and the world we live in. A virtual architecture gives rise to a reflexive architecture or a virtual environment imagined and fantasized by a linguistic architecture.

HUME, MILL AND UTILITARIANISM
Early philosophers attempted to define human nature and built their ethical standards in terms of either self-love or benevolence. David Hume saw benevolence as an essential human component of nature, something that ultimately gave rise to morality. Hume argued against Hobbes’s theory that private interest was the prime motive in human action. Hume suggested that it was not ego but benevolence that was the fundamental aspect of human nature. He felt that ego was connected to fear and ambition while benevolence to more altruistic emotions. Benevolence implied virtues based on goodwill, generosity and love. These emotions became a part of virtues operated in friendship, charity and compassion. Hume did not reject the ego but saw it as a mixture of the dove-wolf-serpent metaphor. He saw both benevolence and justice as social virtues but felt that benevolence was primary human nature while justice was a normative human convention.

The proponents of utilitarianism especially John Stuart Mill argued that the ‘greatest happiness’ principle or utility defined moral standards and laid the foundations of all ethical behavior. An action was right if it promoted human happiness, and wrong if it did not. Duty, obligation and right were all subordinate to this utility principle. The utilitarian philosophy argued that utility was the supreme ethical standard.

KANT, RORTY AND RAWLS
Though Kant rejects the centrality of the utilitarian principle he located it in duty and beneficence. The virtue of benevolent actions must spring from duty and not from friendly inclination. It is only duty which is performed without personal gain. Benevolence based on friendly inclination has no limits but duty does as it is both clear and precise. However Kant does not define the limits of beneficence or duty. Bernard Gert believes that the concept of beneficence has no moral rules but only moral ideals that prevent people from causing harm. Gert believes that the goal of morality is to lessen evil but not to promote good. Rationality may help to lessen evil but cannot promote eternal good.

Rorty takes his cue from the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham by presuming that all discussions on morality are firmly rooted in the individual ego. Values are therefore personal possessions. Marxism sees human nature as a “totality of social relations” and not as “idiosyncratic fantasy” (Marx 1963; Rorty, 1989 42). Rorty camouflages ideas in vague language such as the following when he explains the purpose of social organization: “the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that the goal requires besides peace and wealth, the standard ‘bourgeois freedoms’” (Rorty, 1989 84). There is too much personal choice in the phrase “to the best of his or her abilities.” The statement does not acknowledge the constraints placed by society on individual effort. Charles Taylor believes that most of Enlightenment utilitarianism takes up an unacknowledged moral position because it is primarily interested to debunk moral statements which it sees as arising from religious authority (Rorty, Sources of the Self 339-40).

Rawls’ principles of justice enunciated in A Theory of Justice are libertarian and egalitarian. His principles include equal liberty and greatest social and economic benefits to the least advantaged. He introduces the concept of ‘difference principle’ which advocates giving more power to the underprivileged in terms of income and status. He discusses the socialist idea of distributive justice where responsibilities in society are distributed according to ability and benefits. Martha C. Nussbaum develops Rawls theory further by incorporating Amatya Sen’s idea of substantial freedom and argues that opportunities have to be real supported by governmentality which direct political institutions to allow everyone to participate in political discussion and shape their own lives (Nussbaum, Women and Human Development). She adds that both citizens and governments must be made to commit to create a threshold of real opportunities.

DERRIDA’S PUZZLES
Towards the end of his life Derrida was relatively preoccupied with philosophical impasses, social paradoxes and irresolvable puzzles, what today we term as “possible aporias-impossible aporias.” Aporias or puzzles have affected our important social rituals such as hospitality, forgiving and mourning where the conditions that make them possible are the very conditions that negate their possibility. Derrida interrogates these rituals to see if they possess ideal authenticity.

Derrida not only problematizes the simple social and personal acts of giving gifts, forgiveness mourning and hospitality. He reveals that these acts are never completely genuine. It is only in their denial that they achieve authenticity. There is an aporia, a paradox, in them that deny their authenticity. Perhaps Derrida’s interrogation is born out of his own sense of discrimination and loss. He questions the totalizing vocabularies of the Enlightenment and the moral and humanistic tradition of our times. His attempt is not to debunk these important practices but to open them up to see their paradoxical positions. Such knowledge would allow us to act responsibly.

Responsibility is the key component in his interrogation. It is rather naive to assume that debunking is the only post-modern condition of philosophy. Derrida wants to show that our certitudes are not stable, that there are paradoxes embedded in our beliefs and assumptions. Aporias therefore leave us with a discourse that is at once informative and puzzling.

THE GIFT
In Given Time Derrida argues that a authentic gift must escape the oppositional logic of giving and receiving and must transcend self interest or rational calculation. A gift cannot just appear by itself as it will soon be cancelled out by a recompense or equivalence. Even the mere knowledge of a gift will destroy it being termed as a gift. A simple ‘thank you’ cancels a gift by acknowledging its presence and suggesting equivalence. ‘Thank you’ suggests the erasure of indebtedness to the giver and the conclusion of the act. Else a cycle of receiving and giving begins to operate following the logic of one good deed deserves another. A gift often functions as a command to respond; the receiver is expected to acknowledge the giver. A gift can be manipulated for personal advantage and then cancels its original purpose altogether. It may be rather difficult to give without gaining some psychological satisfaction but Derrida is not analyzing the psychological issues connected with the ego. He is merely questioning the process of giving and receiving an authentic gift.

An authentic gift must be anonymous without the slightest hint of getting something in return. The person who gives should not realize that he has given a gift—let not your left hand know what your right hand has given. He should not be in a position to congratulate himself of his goodness. A genuine gift involves the separation of the self from the other and that makes the giving of an authentic gift almost impossible. For Derrida the existential problem of gift giving is this: it is impossible to realize unconditional philanthropy. The incommensurable nature of authentic giving and receiving escapes the dialectic of amalgamation. In brief, though we look for genuine giving, the act always eludes us.

HOSPITALITY
It is impossible to practice authentic hospitality before strangers. Absolute hospitality involves the giving of everything we possess to others and the difficulty of doing so. Within this tension the concept of hospitality is afloat. In order to give you must possess something to give—house, country, nation—and that involves control or mastery. Hospitality is a function of power which requires ownership of property, some sort of dominant identity, some sort of power over the hosted. If the hosted uses force to occupy the host’s house then the ritual of hospitality ends and the logic of forced occupancy punishable by law comes into existence. In wider terms this involves closing of borders and excluding certain ethnic groups. Hospitality selects some to be included in the hospitality ritual but simultaneously excludes others classifying them as ‘aliens’ or ‘refuges.’ The placing of limit or invoking trespass makes hospitality inhospitable. Hospitality without conditions implies welcoming everyone and relinquishing property claims. This seems as impossible hospitality. But if you allow this condition to occur then the notion of hospitality gets erased as the host does not exist.

FORGIVENESS
It is impossible to really forgive the unforgivable—a mortal sin for example (Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 32). If we can forgive something then it is actually forgivable. This forgiving is based on our reason. In effect we do not genuinely forgive. Forgiving involves a kind of madness, an unconscious act that functions outside the framework of political or legal rationality. Forgiveness may involve an unconditional clemency without seeking apology from the guilty person, though a tension between conditional forgiveness and apology may exist. This process is evident in amnesty and reconciliation and does not therefore constitute genuine forgiveness. Derrida reveals an inherent paradox, an eternal rupture, in the entire process of forgiveness that cannot be resolved as it depends upon the separation of self from the other. Derrida argues that, “genuine forgiveness must engage two singularities: the guilty and the victim. As soon as a third party intervenes, one can again speak of amnesty, reconciliation, reparation, etc., but certainly not of forgiveness in the strict sense” (Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 42).

Derrida points out that it is not possible to imagine a face-to-face encounter without the mediation of a third party—even when the third party is language itself—then the empirical paradox acquires the condition of aporia. Absolute forgiveness requires a direct involvement of the self with the other, while mediation breaches this category. If we know of the motive of the other person through language or a third party than genuine forgiveness is not possible. Though this impasse may not be overcome evaluating both sides is the only responsible action.

MOURNING
Derrida’s interrogation of mourning is born out of the pain of losing a friend in Paul de Man and the latter’s Nazi affiliation. A successful mourning is never possible as the other is interiorized and becomes a part of us. Since the other loses his indisputable alterity a complete mourning does not take place. The refusal to mourn successfully prolongs the alterity of the other—“an aborted interiorisation is at the same time a respect for the other as other” (Derrida, Mourning DeMann 6). In a sense a successful morning is the condition when we are unable to mourn—“success fails, failure succeeds.”

In “Fors” Derrida expands upon his concept of mourning with some help from post-Freudian theories. He distinguishes between introjections which implies the “love for the other in me” and incorporation which means retaining the other as within one’s own body. Derrida agrees with Freud, Abraham and Toruk successful morning involves introjections of the other but he does not valorize this process—the more the self “keeps the foreign element inside itself the more it excludes it” (Derrida, Fors xvii). Incorporation invariably turns pathological but retains the alterity of the other. Derrida’s loss is the loss of exchange and the opportunity of transformation de Mann presented. In the process of mourning the “otherness of the other” opposes both introjection and incorporation. We must therefore emphasize both respect for and resistance to the other (Derrida, Mémoires: for Paul de Man 160, 238).

We reject the ethical paradigm and reorganize another structure not against incommensurable but the deficiency of its internal logic. In Structures of Scientific Revolutions published in 1962 Thomas Kuhn suggests that a paradigm is rejected not from the outside but for reasons that arise from within it. Kant warned us in his The Critique of Pure Reason that everything would come under the ambit of criticism and reason: “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit.” What is important for the interrogation of both ethics and the self is to go beyond egoism, altruism and the “religiosity of the self” (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence 117). We can take a leaf from Levinas when he says that the self can be free in its being when it decides “not to be.”

Works Cited

ATTRIDGE, ed. Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992.
BRAULT AND NAAS TRANS. Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999.
CORNELL, CARLSON AND BENJAMIN EDS. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, (inc. “Force of the Law”). New York: Routledge, 1992.
DERRIDA, JACQUES AND DOFOURMANTELLE, A. Of Hospitality, trans. Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
________. Circumfessions: Fifty Nine Periphrases, in Bennington, G., Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
________. Dissemination. trans. Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
________. Politics of Friendship, trans. Collins, New York: Verso, 1997.
________. Positions, trans. Bass, London: Athlone Press, 1981.
________. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994.
________. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Kamuf, ed. McDonald, New York: Schocken Books, 1985.
________. The Gift of Death, trans. Wills, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
________. The Work of Mourning, eds. Brault & Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
________. Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
________. ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
________. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok”, trans. Johnson, in The Wolfman’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, Abraham, N., & Torok, M., trans. Rand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
________. “Hostipitality” in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 5, Number 3, Dec 2000.
________. “Le Toucher: Touch/to touch him”, in Paragraph, trans. Kamuf, 16:2, 1993, p 122-57.
________. “Nietzsche and the Machine: Interview with Jacques Derrida” (interviewer Beardsworth) in Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 7, Spring 1994 (NM). Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976.
________. “Ousia and Gramme: A Note to a Footnote in Being and Time” trans. Casey in Phenomenology in Perspective, ed. Smith, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970.
________. “Psyche: Inventions of the Other” in Reading De Man Reading, eds. Waters & Godzich, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
________. “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” in Who Comes After the Subject? eds. Cadava, Connor, & Nancy, New York: Routledge, 1991, p 96-119.
________. Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’: An Introduction. trans. Leavey, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978 (1962).
________. Given Time: i. Counterfeit Money, trans. Kamuf, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
________. Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: Galilée, 2000.
________. Limited Inc. (inc. “Afterword”), ed. Graff, trans. Weber, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998.
________. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
________. Mémoires: for Paul de Man. trans. Lindsay, Culler, Cadava, & Kamuf, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
________. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Brault & Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
________. Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Mensh, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
________. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, 2001.
________. On the Name (inc. “Passions”). ed. Dutoit, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
________. Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986. Points… Interviews, 1974-1995, ed. Weber, trans. Kamuf et al, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
FOUCAULT, MICHEL “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Rainbow, ed. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
GERT, BERNARD. Morality. New York : Oxford University Press, 2005.
LEVINAS, EMMANUEL. Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence. Alphonso Lingis trans. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1999.
MARX, KARL. Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. trans T. B. Bottomore, ed. T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel. London: Penguin Books, 1963.
NUSSBAUM, MARTHA C. Women and Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
RAWLS, JOHN. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.
RORTY, RICHARD. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
TAYLOR, CHARLES. "The Dialogical Self" in The Interpretive Turn edited by David R. Hiley and others. New York: Cornell University Press, 1991: 304-14.
________. "Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition" in Reading Rorty, edited by Alan Malachowski. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990: 339-64.
________. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1982.
________. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers v 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
________. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
________. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
________.Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, v. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Academic Writing: Writing an academic essay

2010-07-07T11:29:00.001+09:00

1. The topic sentence usually comes at the beginning of a paragraph. It is generally the first sentence in a formal academic paragraph. Not only is a topic sentence the first sentence of a paragraph, but, more importantly, it is the most general or all-purpose sentence in a paragraph. What does the term ‘most general or all-purpose’ mean? It means that there are not many details in the sentence, but the sentence introduces an overall idea that you want to discuss later in the paragraph. Remember that the opening sentence establishes your style and sets the tone of your essay. It should be direct, brief and punchy. Brevity is the soul of wit. If your opening sentence is short and interesting, it will pull your reader right into your experience or the idea you are presenting.

2. Since the topic sentence is both general and all-purpose, details should appear later it the paragraph. The second and third sentences are called supporting sentences as they support or explain the idea expressed in the topic sentence. Of course, paragraphs in English often have more than two supporting ideas. On an average you should have at least five or seven sentences in your paragraph.

3. In formal paragraphs you may come across a sentence at the end of a paragraph which summarizes the information that has been presented earlier. This is the concluding sentence. You may like to think of a concluding sentence as a sort of topic sentence in reverse. Therefore a topic sentence may either come in the beginning or at the end of the paragraph. In some cases it might also come in the middle to give you an idea of what happened before and after.

4. A common image used for teaching paragraphs to students is called the hamburger. Consider a hamburger that you can buy at a fast-food restaurant. A hamburger has a top bun (a kind of bread), meat, cheese, lettuce, other ingredients in the middle of the hamburger and a bottom bun. If you examine the hamburger carefully you would notice that the top bun and the bottom bun are very similar. In a way, the top bun is like your topic sentence and the bottom bun like your concluding sentence. Both buns ‘hold’ the meat, onions and other ingredients. Similarly the topic sentence and concluding sentences ‘hold’ the supporting sentences in the paragraph.

5. Whenever possible, you should include enough details in your paragraphs to help your reader understand exactly what you are writing about. Why are details important? Consider the example of the hamburger mentioned above. If the hamburger buns are the topic and concluding sentences, then the meat, the cheese, the lettuce and the sauce are the supporting details. Without the food between the hamburger buns your hamburger would not be delicious! Similarly without the supporting details, your paragraph would not be interesting. To further make your paragraph interesting vary the length of your sentences.

6. In addition to having a particular type of structure, academic paragraphs are different from ‘ordinary writing, such as letter writing, in that certain kinds of expressions are not commonly used. For example in formal essays, you should not use contractions such as don't or aren't. Instead you should write out the words in full for example do not and are not.

7. Also in formal essays you should avoid the first and second person. That is, do not use the pronouns I or you unless you are writing an autobiography. The pronouns we and us are sometimes used in formal essays in some major fields but in general you should not use these unless you are certain that they are customary in your field and/or your professor allows them. It is safer simply to use the third person and write in the active voice.

8. While sentences provide the meat of a paragraph, there are three concepts in paragraph writing that may be considered the sauce. These ideas provide the conceptual framework that holds all paragraphs together:
A. Unity: it means that you fully explain or prove one key idea or subject in a paragraph.
B. Coherence: it implies that you repeat one key idea from sentence to sentence until it reaches its full development in the conclusion.
C. Development: it means that you adequately explain, illustrate, and provide details or proof for each point in the paragraph.

If you take one key idea and state it clearly, then follow it up with a sentence for each detail or piece of evidence, and finally restate your idea, then you can write acceptable, clear paragraphs. Always check spellings and grammar before submitting your essay.

Here are some resources on the web to help you with paragraph writing:
The 5-paragraph essay at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_paragraph_essay
Paragraph writing at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/606/01/).
Video at http://www.ehow.co.uk/video_4987170_write-5paragraph-essay.html

FRAMING SOME QUESTIONS

2010-07-03T11:31:00.000+09:00

© Mukesh Williams

1. Who has the right to ask a question and why?

In an age which is increasingly questioning privilege and authority, how can we find a common yardstick to define the right to ask a question? Do individuals, nations, communities or philosophies possess this right? If so why? Is asking a question a discursive strategy or a more fundamental issue of authority and rights? If we decenter or ‘liquidate’ the subject as Lacan said, then can we ask the question? Heidegger felt that there was subjectivity in questioning. But if subjectivity goes away from philosophy would philosophy come to an end and with it all questioning?

2. Is it possible for human beings to share worldviews, values, sensibilities and global futures?

Today globalization and its accompanied discourses of immigration and change have brought together economies, nations and communities closer and yet values, sensibilities, worldviews and global futures have acquired a deeper schism. There are more contentious debates between the rich north and the poor south about controlling the resources of the world. There are debates about clash of civilization theories and return to an ideal past.

3. Can local communities coexist with global societies?

As the world becomes increasingly complex, both local and global forces shape our lives and identity in often incompatible ways. Can we retain our old tribal and communal loyalties and yet act globally? Can we inherit the benefits of modernity and still function effectively within our traditional ethos?

4. Can we overcome the dichotomy of body and mind?

Symbiotic philosophies like Buddhism suggest that oneness of body and mind is possible, while neuroscience is discovering that it is difficult to resolve this dichotomy.

5. Is the concept of human freedom compatible with scientific discoveries of the mind?

If we are free agents we are responsible for our actions but if we are not then can we be responsible for our actions?

6. Is the universe organized only in bits and parts or there is a comprehensive scheme that is hidden from us?

This is an age-old problem expounded by T. E. Hulme and others who believe that the universe has no pattern but we place a pattern on it. We organize the world in parts, the rest is burning cinders. However the Kantians and the foundationalists disagree.

7. On what should we depend to answer the questions: Who am I? Or who are we?

The 1960s was a momentous decade. Lacan began to attack the concept of the embedded self and posited the notion of a de-centered self. The dominant theory thesis and hegemonic ideas connected with it began to give way to micro politics. By 1970s it became rather difficult to say, both on the individual and group level, “Who am I? or Who are we?” As we go into the 1980s again new groups are formed such as Yuppies and DINKS. Identity was no longer what we learn or experience but something to be consumed and used. The consumer culture acquired greater intensity during this decade. Today it is difficult to assert an ‘authentic identity’ as postmodernism undercuts modern history, psychology and philosophy. Cloning, genetic tinkering and transforming memory has further destabilized our conception of who are we.

8. How to find the right information in an age of information glut?

Information has spread rapidly like a web of knowledge breaking the hierarchical modernist framework of top down flow. We now float in a world of information but have a problem to find reliable knowledge. We need new skills and techniques to find what is reliable and accurate. Can we do it?

9. Can we retain hundred percent intellectual property rights in an age of plagiarism, intermixing and amalgamation of knowledge?

Today when information and ideas spread quickly, we still talk about retaining hundred percent IPR. Can we share 40 percent free and charge on the rest?

10. Can we discover ideal ground to make collective decisions and arrive at rational consensus?

Since World War II we have promoted the idea of collective decision making and rational consensus through the UN and Bretton Woods institutions but failed? Are there global standards of rationality and collective decision-making beyond partisan politics and self-interest? Can postmodern philosophy show the way?

11. Can we arrive at a consensus at defining universal justice?

This is distinctively a hegemonic idea, a function of a unipolar politics of the 21st century. However everyone would like to know if the answer would come from philosophy, religion or sheer brute strength of nations? We live in an unequal world and if so can we find a universal definition of justice? Thomas Hobbes believed that justice cannot be achieved outside the nation state. John Rawls would like us to believe that justice involves a notion of equality amongst people living in a nation state. It does not apply to the choices individuals make. An ideal world must have ideal institutions and ideal nation states to realize ideal universal justice.

Foucault on Kantian Enlightenment

2010-06-29T14:14:00.001+09:00

© Mukesh Williams 2010

Foucault understands Kantian enlightenment as blackmail. For Kant enlightenment is an “exit” and a “way out.” It is a “difference” that the present introduces with respect to the past. Therefore Kant’s Enlightenment is located “at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history.”

DISCURSIVE SYSTEMS
Foucault believes that certain discursive systems—the ways in which objects, concepts, and enumerative modalities are organized—generate specific strategies that are finally embodied in themes and theories. He talks about a diffraction in discourse when two incompatible objects or concepts emerge under similar conditions and occupy the same discursive space (either/or). However, the conditions that become a part of the discourse exist outside the discourse as a kind of discursive constellation. Discourses are also shaped by authority which decides who can say and who can spend. The field of authority is in turn governed to some extent by the field of desire—fantasy, forbidden and satisfaction.

KANT’S PERMANENT CRITIQUE OF HISTORY
Kant introduced a new kind of philosophical inquiry in western thought that reflects upon man’s relationship to the present, his historical mode of being and his individual self as an autonomous subject. Kant according to Foucault introduced a permanent critique of our history and changed the philosophical environment we inherit. According to Foucault we should not get trapped in either accepting or denying the project of Enlightenment. Instead we should see it as an ongoing critique of our historical practices.

ENLIGHTENMENT AND HUMANISM
Foucault points out that we should differentiate between the concept of Enlightenment and humanism. The notion of humanism comes from religions, science and politics. The concept of humanism enters religion and ideology—whether it is Christian humanism or Nazi humanism—and creates a conception of man. Enlightenment forces us to reinvent ourselves, while humanism gives us an unexamined conception of man. Enlightenment does not seek “formal structures with universal values” but investigates into the nature of events—as to how we think and what we do with our thinking. It functions as archeology, design and method not as metaphysics or moral action which is the domain of humanism.

Foucault argues that there is no “complete or definitive knowledge” of our historical limitations. However in spite of knowing this we still wish to go beyond it. And this is seen as a contradiction in Foucault’s epistemology and thought. Foucault wants us to believe that though we do not have a definitive knowledge of our historical condition we always want to begin anew. We always wish to critique the present.

HABERMAS AND TAYLOR
Foucault has been criticized by Jurgen Habermas for his lack of normative standards in his philosophical inquiry. How can we have a permanent critique of power without an analysis of truth inquires Habermas. Charles Taylor talks about rescuing freedom and truth from a discourse of discursive practices and power. The claims to power, Taylor argues, belongs to a linguistic field from which categories of truth and freedom cannot be excluded. How can we understand Foucault if he does not deal with our liberation from dominating forms of power? If we talk of illusion, mask or disguise that control us, then we should also talk about a standard of truth that can be used in unmasking them. A Foucauldian irony which does not take sides is not enough to resolve our dilemma. There should be one standard to critique the present otherwise it becomes a totalitizing exercise of philosophy. If there is no single standard we would lack a position from which to judge. A panoptical gaze is not enough.

STYLE OF DISRUPTION
The argument against the objections to Foucault is that such criticism forces him into a binary opposition. Foucault himself considers these objections a kind of Enlightenment blackmail. He interrogates the multiple uses of language by interrupting the epistemological, normative and rhetorical narrative through different claims on the subject. He asks questions to show how social practices shape us, bind us and limit our understanding of self, truth and rationality. His style of disruption follows earlier iconoclastic philosophers such as Socrates and Nietzsche. He is not anti-self. We can see in his writings that on the one hand he ridicules and dismisses the self that has come about as a result of power-knowledge regime, but on the other hand allows the self to establish a relationship with itself in an act of reconstitution. There are some pro-Foucauldian scholars who see Foucault’s language and lack of a single standard as exciting us into action rather than limiting us into inaction.

MODERNITY
We can understand Foucault better if we see his understanding of modernity as an attitude, an ethos—“a mode of relating to contemporary reality.” Modern man therefore constantly tires to “invent himself” and produce himself; he does not possess an essence. So producing and inventing ourselves is what ethics means.

Geertz and Foucault: Culture and Symbolic Anthropology

2010-06-28T12:59:00.001+09:00

Mukesh Williams

The interrogation of alien cultures from the standpoint of the west was further aided by the rise of symbolic anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Symbolic anthropology significantly influenced cultural poetics which later came to be known as new historicism. American anthropologist and liberal humanist Clifford Geertz simultaneously confronted the data collecting approach in social sciences and the universalizing discourses of Marxism. He explained culture as symbolic "patterns of meaning" that men and women employ to communicate and develop "attitudes toward life." His ethnographic model employed "thick description" to explain social expressions of an alien culture that were somewhat confusing and enigmatical to the Western mind.

In the opening essay, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture," Geertz remarks, "Analysis is sorting out the structures of signification--what Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cipher clerk when it is much more like that of the literary critic--and determining their social ground and import"(p. 9). This statement had a great impact upon the method and procedures of both anthropologists and literary critics in the middle of 1970s (Geertz, 1973 9).

Geertz in After the Fact elaborates upon the post-positivist critique of empirical realism, which questioned the traditional theories of truth and knowledge and introduced an indefinite "quest" after the fact in anthropology (Geertz, 1996 168). In the beginning symbolic anthropology was "suspected as European, literary, or worse, philosophical." And to quite an extent these suspicions were well founded. In an attempt to restructure anthropology and formulate graduate programs in it, anthropologists overhauled curricula driven beyond the boundaries of their discipline into an area of new intellectual practices arising out of a combination of "the linguistic, the interpretative, the social constructionist, the new historicist, the rhetorical, or the semiotic"(Geertz 1996 114).

Now the ethnographer's task was not only to re-conceptualize his discipline but to adapt the new methodologies to his discipline. In Available Light, Geertz explores issues in political philosophy, religion and psychology through a postmodernist and multi-cultural perspective. Here he brings to the surface the symbolic significance of the concepts of nation, country, identity or self and how their unstable meanings change through time and place. But he makes an interesting remark in the beginning of the book, which would gladden the hearts of literary critics. Geertz wrote,

A lot of people don't quite know where they are going, I suppose; but I don't even know, for certain, where I have been. But all right already. I've tried virtually every other literary genre at one time or another. I might as well try Bildungsroman (Geertz, 2000 3).

Geertz's light-hearted statement of becoming a novelist and writing a bildungsroman has far-reaching implication both for anthropology and literature. A bildungsroman narrates the story of the psychological development and moral education of its protagonist, and now anthropology is called upon to do the same. The thin margin that once separated the imaginative text of a writer and the scientific text of an anthropologist has almost disappeared by now.

The interpretative and exhaustive method of anthropology was quickly appropriated by cultural historians, and subsequently by literary critics, more as a narrating practice than as a cultural theory. Literary critics particularly employed the interpretative narrative technique of this ethnographic model to understand literary culture and the literary ethos. Interestingly Geertz's interpretative ethnography was criticized within the field of anthropology by fellow anthropologists as reducing economic and material conflicts in society to impressionistic understanding of local cultures. His use of thick description failed to relate "cultural texts" to a larger tradition of literary, economic and social change.

The Geertzian method of finding indigenous cultural significance to the exclusion of social laws has drawn criticism from critics such as Roger Keesing, Dominick La Capra, Vincent Pecora and Aletta Biersack (Pecora, 1989 243-276). These critics point out that culture can be both mazes of "mystification" or streets of signification. It all depends on who constructs cultural meaning and interprets culture; and what are his ulterior motives.

Naturally new historicist practices have also come under attack. Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse sees literary conventions and linguistic constraints impacting on the writing of history (White, 1978; 1987). The historical discourse now becomes a narrative prose discourse that represents past structures as models in order to explain their meaning. In Metahistory, White sees the historian functioning as a chronicler of events that happened in the past and constructing a story from it (White, 1973). The controversy about the new methodology continues. The linguistic turn towards culture in history, sociology and anthropology has been dealt with exhaustively in Beyond the Cultural Turn which analyses different aspects of the narrative mode and offers a postmodernist critique of knowledge seeing the body and self as important sites intersecting culture and society (Bonnell and Hunt, 1999). Walter Cohen sees the new historicist reliance on "arbitrary connectedness" between different aspects of social reality as a significant lack of an "organizing principle" (Cohen, 1987 34).

Postmodern Philosophy: On Bernstein's The New Constellation

2010-06-22T17:18:00.002+09:00

A Brief Note
Mukesh Williams June 2010

In short, one might say that once 'we' fully experience the rupture that has occurred with the 'postmodern' moment, once 'we' grasp the full force and sting of the critiques of humanism that trace their lineage to Nietzsche, then even the 'non-foundational pragmatic humanism' which I had been developing must be discarded--thrown into the abyss of failed metaphysical and philosophical projects. Needless to say I do not accept this judgment nor am I impressed by what has now become a cliché among many ‘post-modern’ writers, i. e., that humanism is passé, to be dismissed by laughter. But I do recognize that these critiques and deconstructions call for a strong response.
--Richard Bernstein, The New Constellation , 1992

In the book New Constellation Richard Bernstein examines the ethical and political dimensions of the modern-postmodern debate. Bernstein argues that the debate must be understood more as a protean “pervasive” mood created by thinkers like Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Rorty and MacIntyre than an intellectual revolt. However he admits that these ideas have had a profound impact on the culture of thinking in our times. Their contributions have created a distinctive constellation of ideas in the realm of politics and ethics and renewed the old Socratic inquiry ‘How should I live?’ The image of the constellation holds the book together after the emergence of the postmodern stimmung or mood. In Hegelian terms post-modern philosophy keeps the ‘other’ as other, since the postmodern negation of reason does not help it to provide a unified whole. Bernstein questions the post-ness of post in the word postmodern and suggests a more pluralist world of ideas that could involve some kind of integration with other philosophical notions that came earlier. The highly illuminating sections in the book deal with Heidegger’s concept of technology and his unwillingness to disown a contentious Nazi past and Rorty’s liberalist utopia and anti-foundationalist ideas. It is possible to understand through this book some of the forces that shaped the Anglo-American and Continental traditions in our times.

The Nakasendo Way

2010-06-22T14:07:00.000+09:00

Mukesh Williams June 2010

No one inhabits these ancient highways
Except wildlife, words and emotions,
But the curve of the road, the wooden houses,
The stone steps, the steep climb,
And the unreachable horizon
Are still covered with heavy snow,
Pug-marked by raccoon dogs hunts,
Collaged with clog footprints
And terraced by winter blizzard.

Words can still recreate the history of
Matrimonial alliances, political intrigues
And economic transactions,
Emotions can still trace the travel of
Princess Kazunomiya from Kyoto to Edo
On the Hime no Kaido to marry a shogun
Leaving sentiment and family behind
Like a hungry animal, lost traveler or a storm,
To strengthen an empire, forfeit the self.

Leslie Fiedler

2010-06-22T13:38:00.002+09:00

(1917-2003)

There was something of
An attacking lion in him
He would take issues
To their precarious conclusions,
Till they were tamed or devoured.

When he closed his eyes
His memory circled
Like an eagle in the clouds
Wrenching details from a vast repertoire
To support his argument.

Sentences flowed from his mouth
Just as they did from his pen
But he was a stickler for details,
He just had to revise everything
No less than seven to eight times.

A hard man to work with
But if you were patient,
Willing to learn and
Did not give up half-way,
He could teach you things
That perhaps no man could.

His pugnacity and prowess
Was stranger than fiction
He was always making bold plans
To cross the border, close the gap,
Scrupulously surveying the terra incognita
Like a lion, eagle or a mahatma.

April 2006, Tokyo

Geertz's Symbolic Anthropology and Foucault's Epistemic History

2010-06-22T13:22:00.001+09:00

Symboloic Cultural Systems and Foucault's Epistemic History

© June 2010 Mukesh Williams

The anti-historicist idea of dealing with "a shared code" in medical and theatrical practices takes its cue from Geertz's notion of collective and symbolic cultural system and Foucault's epistemic rather than causal construction of history. In an essay "Return to History" published in Aesthetics, Method and Methodology, Foucault rejects historical causality in order to seek discontinuity and to find the emergence and center of an event. He concludes:

Structuralism, by defining transformations, and history, by describing types of events and different types of duration [duree], make possible both the appearance of discontinuities in history and the appearance of regular, coherent transformations. Structuralism and contemporary history are theoretical instruments by means of which one can--contrary to the old idea of continuity--really grasp both the discontinuity of events and the transformation of societies (Foucault, 1998 431).

In effect, Foucault argues that both the structuralist and historicist methodologies help us to understand the discontinuities of events and the change in societies.

The new historicist cultural model, however, seems to function within a closed ideological framework, quite similar to the framework built on formalist assumptions. If culture is a symbolically shared system then it is ideologically closed too. And if tropes are more important than causes, the critic analyzing the text in an intercultural framework becomes limited by the very nature of his singular perspective. Also cultural processes have an uncanny mind of their own, and are invariably incompatible with ideological conflict and change.

The ideological assumptions of new historicism and the models they used to analyze cultural processes limited the scope and nature of their analysis. Their study of European Renaissance drew upon the twin problems of ideology and resistance to ideology within a culture, which was later reframed in the binary terms of "containment" and "subversion." This was a procedure easy to apply but gave limited results as it was not sophisticated enough to encompass the subtle dynamics and change in cultural processes. But after nearly two decades these terms are seen as vestiges of a Cold War ideology somewhat incongruous to the globalizing processes of the post-Cold War era. And within Anglo-American criticism there seems to be a new shift in position, just as there is one in the ideological and psychological construction of the West after September 11, 2001 suicide attacks on American cities.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

2010-06-22T09:59:00.002+09:00

Background

© June 2010 Mukesh Williams

1. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 1820 and the story takes place in a rural valley filled by a strange unearthly quiet. This place is near Tarry Town in the Catskill Mountains, of New York State. The short story is based on a German story but set in America. It reveals the conflict between different opposing themes—conflict between reason and superstition, city and country values, brain and physical strength, greed and love. It is also a story of greed and romance, of two young men wanting to marry the rich and beautiful village girl Katrina Van Tassel. The city man Ichabod Crane gets attracted to Katrina’s wealth and property but is chased away by Brom Bones who doubles up as the headless horseman. The story is full of humor and vivid description, the hallmark of Washington Irving’s story telling technique.

2. After four decades when the stories of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle were published in the Sketch Book, the readers in the United States and England loved both. Together the two stories laid the foundation of the growth of serious and literary narrative in American literature. In 1864 The Sleepy Hollow was published as an illustrated book and since then there have been many editions of the tale. Though Irving is largely forgotten today but his characters such as Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman have become a part of the American folklore and literary imagination.

Summary

3. The story is told in the first person by a man in a tavern called DK or Diedrich Knickerbocker, the fictional author of Irving’s earlier book. Before Washington Irving begins his story he wants to establish its authenticity by placing it amongst actual papers left by a man who is dead now. Placing a fantastic tale within the framework of day-to-day history makes the tale both dark and real.
The narrator places the story in a strange and comfortable Dutch village—“one of the quietest places in the whole world”—in a “remote” period of American history. It is not just a remote village but a magical village under the spell of a witch—“under the sway of some witching power that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in continual reverie.” The spookiness of the place has directly entered the American tradition of terror and incorporated in the Halloween.

4. The story is part of the papers left by the deceased Knickerbocker and begins with an idyllic poem where dreams float on a summer sky. The actual story begins by describing a market town called Tarry Town and its dreaming rural community. The pace is called Tarry Town as husbands here like to while away their time in taverns on market days. This town is protected from the natural elements by a cove. Not far from this cove is the Sleepy Hollow dozing peacefully by the Hudson River, untouched by time and modernization. The narrator finds the sleepy village so quiet on Sunday that when his hunting gun goes accidently off he feels irritated.

Ichabod Crane

5. Ichabod Crane comes from Connecticut to live in this enchanted village and work as a schoolteacher and singing instructor. His family name Crane suits him quite well as he is tall and lanky. He is also sharp-featured and wears clothes which are rather small for him. His ears are too big for his face. Though Crane is a strict teacher and liked well by his students and their parents he has no real friends in the community.

6. We must remember that in those days teachers were expected to hit their students when they misbehaved or made mistakes. Crane believed in the maxim “spare the rod and spoil the child.” But he did not physically punish weak students. Outside the premises of the school he was kind to his students and friendly with the old ones. He usually helped the younger students reach home safely and in the process he would often get a good dinner or meet their pretty sisters. He was more willing to “play” with the girls than with the boys. But this also shows his kind nature.

7. Though he was arrogant and pompous he treated his students fairly. He believes in the idea espoused by the Dutch school of Van Eyck that education must be imparted in strict and normative manner. He still kept his distance with his students, believing in the idea that there must be a civilized distance between the philosopher and the student. He did light chores for families and told entertaining stories and gossip to rural housewives. In return he got some food to eat and a place to stay. The simple village folks admired his intelligence and his erudition as he had “read several books.”

8. He wants to marry Katrina Van Tassel not because he loves her but because his father is wealthy. Ichabod also likes the food that is served at the Tassels. Katrina on the contrary prefers Brom Bones. Disappointed by her refusal Ichabod let’s his imagination run wild into the rural wilderness.

9. To add to his intense imagination is his interest in witches and witchcraft. His favorite book is Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft and no tale was “too gross or monstrous” to swallow. He was gullible by character and temperament.

Katrina Van Tassel

10. She is beautiful but coquettish. She knows her father is wealthy farmer and she is proud of it. She loves music and becomes a student of Ichabod. She plays with Ichabod but loves her roughneck suitor Brom Bones. She prefers physical strength and honesty to mental weakness and cunning. As she dances with Ichabod, Bones broods darkly in a corner. When the conversation turns to legends, Bones boasts of chasing the Headless Horseman a few nights but the specter always vanished in ball of fire when they approached the church bridge.

11. When Ichabod leaves the party with his nag Gunpowder he is chased by the headless horseman or Bones in disguise. As Ichabod races past the church bridge the specter throws his head at Ichabod. The schoolteacher is hit on the head and knocked off his horse. The next morning Gunpowder returns without his master. No one can find Ichabod but when they reach the bridge they discover Ichabod’s hat and a shattered pumpkin. Immediately thereafter, Bones and Katrina get married. When they talk of Ichabod, Bones gives a knowing laugh. Seemingly Ichabod destroyed himself because of his gullible character.

Romantic Fiction

12. The story possesses strong elements of romantic fiction. The love angle, two suitors, the presence of ghosts and supernatural events are the very essence of romantic stories. In the early nineteenth century many individualistic themes in America and Europe dealt with nature and death. There was a belief that emotions were more powerful than logic and dreams had greater significance than logical thinking. The Romantics as they were called also has a strong love for the supernatural.

13. The story of Sleepy Hollow has all these elements. It is not only set in rural and beautiful surroundings but is also quite romantic. The place is quiet and bucolic. You can hear the murmur of a brook, the whistle of a quail and the tapping of a woodpecker. The ghost story of the headless horseman is part of the ghost legends and typical of English Romanticism.

14. Irving was a romantic writer and was deeply influenced by the struggle between enlightenment values and puritan rules. He used nature and gothic imagery to impart a comfortable sense of the beautiful. But below this quiet the headless horseman gallops every night. The conflict between emotion and reason is highlighted by the fact that a very rational schoolteacher also comes to believe in ghost stories. By doing this Irving gives credence to the idea that such events cannot be completely understood by scientific and logical reasoning. Without wanting to he emphasizes the importance of emotion over reason.

City and Country life

15. The conflict between city and country is one of the great themes of American literature and folklore. In literature there are two sets of themes that are played out. The first scenario: The city is seen as civilized, rich and safe and country as ugly, dirty and dangerous. The second scenario: the city is dirty, swindling and dangerous while the country is simple and beautiful. Irving utilizes this city-country divide quite effectively in Sleepy Hollow.

16. During the early days of American colonization, the Dutch from the Netherlands settled in New York. In 1609 an English gentleman Hendrick Hudson who worked for the Dutch East India Company sailed from New York City to Albany along the Tappan Zee which we now call the Hudson River. The Dutch always laid claim to New York because of Hudson’s explorations under the Dutch East India Company. However NYC came under British control and subsequently under American domination and the Dutch lost their claims.

17. Irving wishes us to believe that the Sleepy Hollow is more in the domain of a legend than a myth. A legend is a narrative or tradition handed down from the past. It is distinguished from a myth by possessing more historical facts and less supernatural elements. Americans wish us to believe that Sleepy Hollow is a legend and not a myth.

Legends and Myths

18. The community of Sleepy Hollow abounds in legends handed down from the past. There is one legend of a German doctor bewitching the residents of the rural community. There is another one of an old Indian chief who cast a tranquil spell on the area. And there is the legend of the Hessian trooper who was decapitated during the Revolutionary War. He is occasionally seen riding at breakneck speed at night on his black horse searching for his head. Irving places his ordinary story of love and greed in such extraordinary surrounding creating horror and mystery in its telling.

Halloween in Sleepy Hollow

19. People today love to hold parties in the yard of the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow Country. After nearly 186 years of the writing of the spooky story, modern day fright seeks go to Tarrytown to catch a glimpse of the supernatural prowls. Between October 27th and 29th the Philipsburg Manor is lit by candle lanterns and bonfires to create a congenial atmosphere where ghouls, witches and apparitions can move freely. Even the pumpkin carvings and Headless horseman encounters are recreated for the fright seekers. In the beginning the area of Sleepy Hollow was an agricultural district but gradually it character changed and it became a manufacturing center producing steam-powered automobiles, shoes and batteries. Its proximity to Manhattan attracted the attention of American millionaires like Anson Phelps, Ambrose Kingsland and John D. Rockefeller who built grand mansions which are open to public viewing.

Tsuru in the Japanese Tradition

2010-06-19T13:04:00.001+09:00

The Japanese Crane

© June 2010 Mukesh Williams

There is a saying in Japan that the tsuru (crane) lives for one thousand years while the kame (tortoise) for ten thousand. Both symbolize longevity and endurance. The crane is a strong and elegant bird which also represents honor and loyalty in Japan. It travels far and wide looking for food. It is believed that if someone folds one thousand cranes he can fulfill any wish.

The red-crowned Japanese crane is a migratory bird and is also called the Manchurian crane. It has a total population of 2700 in the world. In Japan where most cranes live, their population went down in the nineteenth century. In 1920 their number was recorded as 20. In Japan new protection measures including artificial breeding in winter has once more increased the population of cranes to 1200. The cranes feed on deep water marshes and often wander into dikes and agricultural fields foraging for food.

In Japanese tradition cranes are believed to bring prolonged existence and good fortune. They are therefore usually associated with weddings, family crests, tea ceremonies and traditional dresses. It is quite common to find cranes woven or crafted on kimonos, obis, temple wood carvings, chinaware, teapots, cups, stone and calendars. One of the Second World War Japanese victims Sadako Sasaki popularized the idea of folding one thousand cranes to fulfill a wish.

There is a legend in Japan of a crane wife symbolizing gratitude and skilled perfection. Once a young man freed a captive crane and in return she turned into a beautiful woman to marry him. Her only wish was that he would not look into her room at night what she was doing. Every night she would weave beautiful kimonos that everyone wanted. One day her husband out of curiosity peeped into the room and discovered she was a crane and was using her feathers to weave those beautiful kimonos. The story has different versions and one of the most popular ones is that of Osamu, the poor sailor and Yukiko the crane wife. Osamu takes care of a wounded crane that returns to him as Yukiko and weaves a magic sail that helps the couple to become rich temporarily. But one day he peeps into her work and she flies away.

DISCOURSE ABOUT FOOD, MIDDLEMEN AND METAPHORS

2010-06-16T22:09:00.001+09:00

FOUCAULT ON GREEK, CHRISTIAN, POSTMODERN CONCEPTIONS OF FOOD

© June 2010 Mukesh Williams

In Use of Pleasure Foucault explores the overarching discourse on food, the body and pleasures as a function of subjectivity and argues that the Greeks were quite preoccupied with the process of eating and yet their ethics emphasized the mastery of the self over appetites, pleasures and passions. The ethical substance in the Greek episteme was aphrodisia or the “acts, gestures, and contacts that produce a certain form of pleasure.” Aphrodisia were forms of pleasure associated with eating, drinking and sex. Though they are natural they need to be moderated. However early Christianity began to see a dichotomy between the carnal and the spiritual. It started to deny the natural appetites. Most of the modern scientific discourse about food and health was created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries out of the Christian religious and philosophical preoccupation with gluttony, indulgence and excess. This food and health discourse entered the social organization of home, school and hospital emphasizing nutrition as moral in nature. Children are often told to eat healthy food and avoid junk food and chocolates. Obesity is therefore occasionally referred to as moral laxity or degradation.

MIDDLEMEN
We should do away with middlemen that may enter between philosophers and their readers. Middlemen often adulterate food and convert accident into cuisine.

NIETZSCHE ON WORDS AND ORIGINAL ENTITIES
Nietzsche argues that though we use words to describe “original entities” and celebrate metaphors in poetry and rhetoric there is no clear one-to-one correspondence between metaphors and things. He writes,
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873).

Master Discourse

2010-06-14T22:50:00.002+09:00

The Power of Master Discourse

Four Statements of Michel Foucault
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."

"Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions."

"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."

"The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play)."

© 2010 Mukesh Williams

From time immemorial human beings have been fond of telling stories to each other. They have imagined their fears, anxieties, dreams, and have expressed them through words into a composite whole. From childhood to old age we are influenced by stories. We reject some stories as untrue and we accept some stories as true. There are, however, stories we accept tacitly without even analyzing such as “everyone must work hard” or “we are always progressing towards a better future.” Michael Foucault was the first thinker to unravel the power of such stories and their impact on our lives. He called these stories narratives and divided them into master narrative, minor narrative and counter narratives.

MASTER NARRATIVES
Master narratives are most powerful. They are the controlling discourses of modern societies, discourses such as self, ego, gender, class, race and nation. Though they are mostly imagined and constructed through language and signs they in due course acquire a social sanction and legality hard to refute or deny. They provide enormous benefits to the individual when they are followed and punishment when infringed.

Master narratives tell us that we are separate individuals and that our interests are often in opposition to others. The games we play when young teach us to win and take all. We are told not to help others in a competition as it breaks the rule. Winning in life matters and this is further reinforced by T.V. programs where winners are celebrated. We love competition. Our perceptions and language does not connect us with nature and with others but instead separates us from them. We do feel that love gives us happiness.　

DERRIDA AND THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
Derrida tells us about the power of language. Language reinforces the separate self. It represents everything including ourselves as objects. Language uses signs and signs define objects against each other. White is understood against black. Our first personal narratives define boundaries through personal pronouns such as I, me and mine. These pronouns are different from you and yours.

Culture and society curtail our construction of an autonomous, free self. Though we use out skills, accomplishments, possessions and appearance to create ourselves in opposition to others, it leaves us dissatisfied as we feel we can do better or worse others can do better than us. Master narratives do not clearly define a referent to us which is in the final analysis no other than ourselves. On the one hand we are separate from others and on the other we are intrinsically connected to others. We depend on others for warmth, sustenance and support. Our DNA is connected to others. Our cells do not compete but cooperate.

THE DISCOURSE OF INDIVIDUALITY
Individuality is of recent origin. Before the eighteenth century, pre-modern Europe did not see individuality in a positive light. The medieval world saw a preordained hierarchy of kings, feudal lords and church functionaries running the world. This divine worldview was rigidly enforced and you did what your status allowed you to do. Your position in society was predetermined. If anything individual identity worked against you. The eighteenth century writers brought in reason and tried to decenter the master narrative of European aristocracy. The age of democracy developed the concept of the self and gave right to everyone to acquire power. Individualism became more powerful and began to involve creativity, autonomy and a unique personality. But events in Europe such as the Holocaust and existentialism revealed that we cannot escape our moral responsibility and freedom of choice. Even in mature democracies we find that our liberty and freedom are curtailed. Money and politics undermine democracy.

We believe that our understanding of a separate self is associated with notions of freedom and happiness. The notion of individuality though linked to free society and democracy has been forged in the fire of bloody revolutions which in turn has been influenced by counterrevolutions. Though we feel we are free individuals but we fail to create the world we envision. We also believe that competition is healthy. Freud legitimized the idea of the ego and our selfish motives. We feel that everyone must serve us and our needs. When we are infants we just live to satisfy our needs, functioning within an id. Gradually we develop a superego which stands for society. If we can successfully negotiate between id, ego and superego we can lead a healthy life; we can self-evaluate ourselves and self-improve ourselves regularly. The Freudian narrative continues to explain our separate selves as given and legitimate.

Foucault shows us that the ego narrative creates a psychological discourse that both limits and manipulates our freedom. Advertising, marketing and business strategies use methods to create desires and then force us to fulfill them. We think that we are free agents making informed choices. When we imagine ourselves as egos we see everything as an accessory to be used and do not find happiness in connecting with nature or others. Though we do not like to be called egoistic or selfish but in truth we are. As long as we believe that our self is separate from others we cannot but be self-centered.

The master narrative of the ego which is just an imagined idea sees others as objects either helping us in our goals or hindering us. We try to control others, denying them identity or personhood. We understand ego narratives to encompass group identity such as social cliques, tribes and nations and then construct our own sense of superiority and other’s inferiority. At the center of these identities are mental constructions comprising of words. We can create a world, which conforms better to our goals and aspirations.

GENDER ROLES
Gender is the fundamental expression of the ego narrative. Though gender undoubtedly has biological base it is predominantly cultural in nature. Gender generates different responses in people and a lot of it is inherited through language and socialization. We treat boys and girls differently. We hold boys facing outward and girls facing towards us, telling them how they should play their roles in society. Boys will find a place for themselves in the outer world, girls in the inner world. Blue blankets are for boys, pink for girls. Guns and tools are for boys; pretend jewelry and dolls for girls. The feminist movement beginning in the 1950s with Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique defined new gender roles for women. The slogan personal is political took women out into the market place and led them to self-actualize themselves. The Feminist movement of the 1970s tried to show that gender roles were more cultural than biological in nature. Women now acquired the foresight to become lawyers, scientists and teachers.

Obviously males and females are different but culture defines their roles more sharply. Most cultures spend more time in gender socialization. The master narrative tells us that males are expected to dominate women. Boys are therefore allowed to be aggressive, they are persuaded not to cry or be sissy. Women need love and companionship. The problem is that men too need the same. Western literature is filled with the heroic figure of the solitary male hero who seeks to conquer the world alone. We are told that only men face the problem of bonding with other males. Women by nature find it easier to bond with others.

The female narrative grows upon the notion that the feminine ideal embraces the male ego and, therefore, is the very opposite. Hiding below the feminine pursuit of beauty, pleasure and love for baubles is the feminine ideal of service, cooperation and communication. Early in life girls are taught to be cute, speak cheerfully and act caring. The stories told to girls and the games they are expected to play deal with romance and motherly love. They play with dolls to learn the art of mothering and later in life read romantic stories to find a prince charming. From their seniors, such as mother, sisters and friends, they learn to be seductive and by the time they are ready to marry they have become adept in playing psychological, domestic and sexual roles.

We often do not recognize that sexual morality and reproductive function embrace a created language of gender. There is no hierarchy in morality or biology. Male and female both work together to give birth to a child and there is no hierarchy in reproduction. The narrative of dominance does not help us to understand the intimate and the erotic in human relationships. The ego prevents us to participate freely in the emotions of ecstasy, wonder and beauty.

The female narrative also includes a separation of self and belief in order to win in society. Though women do not usually resort to violence they compete quite aggressively to become desirable as a woman or a mother. They also look for success by wearing alluring clothes and wanting an expensive house. They also compete with men in workplace and can ‘play the game’ of currying favor with their boss with equal finesse.

The Victorian model of morality and sexual ethics had once placed strict social control on the behavior of men and women. Promiscuity in men and coquetry in women were reproached. Though sexual behavior per se was freed from social control in the twentieth century we still feel sexual repression. Our heterosexual bias still plays a big role in determining our sexual preferences. We still have not been able to accept same sex love or other sexual relationships which we consider ‘abnormalities.’

SOCIAL CLASS
Social class constitutes another category of the master narrative. It believes in the survival of the fittest in society and has given greater preference to self-interest than to altruism. Biology however teaches us that cooperation amongst proteins is the key to the survival of living organisms. Our knowledge and belief teach us that we should take as much from nature as we can. The belief that our lives are separate from our surroundings allows us to take everything. Altruism is seen as a foolish thing. Only recently we have come to realize that nature is hitting back at us through global warming and climate change.

The ego narrative also creates an economic system based on the primacy of money and directed by self-achievement. The word economics comes fro the Greek word ekos and nomos which mean the rules of the house. House rules determine our economic relations and are therefore created by us. If we change our house rules (for example in communism) but do not change our master narrative of the ego we will not go far. Communism preaches that individuals can create their own rules through violent revolutions but since the ego narrative remains in communism, it provides a new hierarchy of corruption and economic inequality. However that does not mean that the home rule of capitalism or free enterprise is any better either.

Money decides who lives and who dies, who eats and who goes hungry, who gets education, health care and employment and who remains illiterate, sick and unemployed. Money also decides who can travel and enjoy life and who cannot. The narrative creates a moral climate that allows us to enjoy life without bothering about the poor and down trodden. The free market economy reminds us that by nature we are lazy. So greed is wonderful. The force that helps us over come our laziness is fear. Middle class fear the loss of their livelihood if they do not work hard while the upper class their position. The ego pushes us to get more in order to succeed, but still we need admiration and esteem. We acquire goods to satisfy our desire and get the admiration of others.

We rarely find democratic functioning of institutions. Instead we see people using social position and family connections to succeed. The ego narrative works against all principles of enlightenment. It works for personal gain against the common good. In terms of global relations ego gets translated into economic egoism of developed versus developing nations. Multinational organization use poor countries as a source of cheap labor and refuse bin for toxic wastes.

RACE
The master narrative of race gets linked to the ego narrative and tends to exploit others more savagely. Slavery had a great effect on the narrative of race. Africans and Europeans had a history of slavery in their own geographical regions for a long time. The development of maritime trade made possible the growth of inter-regional and intercontinental slavery. Once trading in black slaves began an attempt to justify such trade through scientific racism, eugenics or anthropology also began.

We do not just psychologically imagined Freudian egos but also biological agents looking for emotional comfort and a sense of community. Our post-Enlightenment culture reminds us through the constitutions that we are all equal—“we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Though on a fundamental level we believe that everyone is equal and that birthright does not count, we still see a different truth in the functioning of governments and social systems.

CONCLUSION

Through master narratives, especially through religious discourses and linguistic paradigms we perceive the world as a place, a terra firma, and the cosmos as the result of some first cause. We call it power, God or force. To be engaged with a subject whose subjectivity is greater than ours leads us into a reference area outside time, space, reason and human understanding. By the late seventeenth century a reaction set in against the kind of religious model. A new secular model used scientific evidence and logic to explain a new cosmology that conformed to human inquiry and laws. In Argument of the Second Epistle Alexander Pope asserted, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/The proper study of Mankind is Man.” Now the world of nature was seen as a big machine. Therefore a theory could be developed which could predict and control everything that happened in the future.

The secular model builds a moral world based on Emmanuel Kant’s notion of categorical imperative which posits a universal standard for individual behavior. Though this ethical principle keeps egoism in check by condemning corruption and deceit, it nonetheless perpetuates inequalities by allowing free competition and the victor take all syndrome. Scientific discourses teach us that nature does not function with a mind and we have no responsibility for the various problems of the world. Everything follows a certain law and we are not free to make a moral choice. Obviously all this is changing now. Both the Nobel Prize Committee and the Australian electorate are choosing people who highlight our responsibility for protecting nature. But these two paradigms are more intertwined than separate. There are post modern secularists who believe in the existence of radical evil and pre-modern religionists accepting democracy and human rights. National discourses also prevent us from seeing our larger identity as members of the planet earth.

The ego is more imagined than real. It is more cultural than biological. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre our ego depends on our consciousness and not the other way round. Both Foucault and Derrida unraveled the mysteries of the master narratives and decentered them for us. If we can change our notion of the ego and pick up other non-ego narratives can have more freedom and be happier.

Representing India: Literature, Politics and Identities

Utilitarianism and Utilitarian Education

2010-06-13T14:33:00.001+09:00

© 2010 Mukesh Williams

Utilitarianism is a philosophy based on a minimalist view of human beings that explains human nature in terms of economic relations alone. It believes that the moral significance of an action is judged by its utility to people. Though it has many contradictions it was responsible, in some measure, for reforms in administration, sanitation and education. Utilitarianism promoted a theory of laissez faire and came to represent a streamlined civil service and centralized administration. G. D. Klingopulos highlights the contradiction in utilitarian thought by saying that though “in some matters, such as the agitation for cheap bread, the utilitarians were friends of the working man, in others, such as the regulation of conditions in factories, they were his enemies” (Klingopulos, 1970 30-31).

BENTHAM AND ADAM SMITH

It was difficult to reconcile the Bentham’s idea of general happiness, based on enlightened political and legal principles, and Adam Smith’s self-harmonizing economic principle of laissez-faire (minimum intervention from the law). Dickens seemed to be both a victim and a chronicler of a contradictory response to utilitarianism in Hard Times. This contradiction is evident both in his treatment of education and trade unionism.

Dickens’ polemical response to industrial growth, utilitarianism, capitalism, education, economic self-interest and trade unionism is also reflected in the novel through his representation of Coketown, Gradgrind, Bounderby, Mr. M’Choakumchild, Harthouse and Slackbridge.

COKETOWN

The redbrick Coketown is presented in the novel as soot-coated, black and savage. Its daily life is repetitive, monotonous and grinding (HT, p. 22). Both its streets and inhabitants have lost their uniqueness,

It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next (HT, p. 22).

The repeated use of the word “same” and the phrase “like one another” reveals both the tedium of Coketown and the drudgery of its inhabitants. In a prophetic vision at the end of the novel the author tells us that five years later Bounderby would die of a fit on these very streets (HT, pp. 217-8).

Everything in Coketown is “severely workful” and the idea of sameness extends to the eighteen churches of different “religious persuasions,” the jail, infirmary, town hall, school and cemetery. Its blasting furnaces become hot as hell and gas from them fills the air asphyxiating the people. In Dickens’ own words,
The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels (HT, pp. 85-6).

Dickens brings out the unreality of Coketown and its ominous power. It stands at the edge of doom stifling the lives of its inhabitants. Yes it’s the unreality of the town that stands out as if it seems that Dickens did not understand Coketown as well as London. The sense of intimacy, the closeness, the insider’s perspective is missing. The serialization technique and polemical confusion further limits his vision. However, in spite of the unreality of vision Coketown is definitely an ideal setting for the manifestation of a utilitarian philosophy.

SCOTTISH EDUCATION AND M’CHOAKUMCHILD

Dickens campaigned for structuring education and wished to do away with unqualified teachers in schools. He strongly felt the need to provide training to teachers. He introduced Mr. M’Choakumchild, fresh from a training college, accompanied by his wife, about to deliver his first classroom lecture. The satire, both in the choice of the name and presentation of character, seems inescapable. M’Choakumchild is after all a representative of a new school ideology. His Scottish-sounding name obviously refers to the import of trained Scottish teachers in English schools. Obviously M’Choakumchild possesses too much useless knowledge in his own conceited way. He bores and confuses his simple-minded but ignorant students. Dickens writes:

He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmology, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, M’Choakumchild (HT, p. 12).

M’Choakumchild’s “ten chilled fingers,” and his “stony way” point to the fact that though he may be extremely knowledgeable he has lost the ability to enjoy or make his innocent wards enjoy life. His hard facts stifle the imaginative “fancy” that is “lurking within” each child. Dickens concludes his sketch of M’Choakumchild by saying that, “If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!”

Through M’Choakumchild, Dickens expressed some of the popular criticism against training schools of the time. Dickens wanted training schools to instruct teachers in teaching methodology and help them to develop the intellect of children, not just impart some erudite scholarship. Educators felt that Dickens’ account of M’Choakumchild and the object lesson at Gradgrind School were only partially correct. Scuh presentation could be just Dickens’ own middle class emotional reaction to an educational system that he disliked. Monroe Engel believed that Dickens was not attacking but dissociating himself “fully and publicly from the Benthamites” (Engel, 1959 160-62).

THE ILL EFFECTS OF UTILIARIANISM

Chapter two of the novel is entitled “Murdering the Innocent” framed within one of the three sections of the book “Sowing.” The other two sections, “Reaping” and “Garnering” also come from an agricultural vocabulary—a vocabulary that describes, and sets in contrast, the mechanical world of Coketown. Klingopulos believes that the school setting and the title of the chapter help Dickens to “go beyond matters of economic theory to strike at those psychological and educational ideas, which formed the ‘philosophical’ part of utilitarianism” (Klingopulos, 1970 34). Gradgrind’s boast that he can easily reduce “any parcel of human nature” into “a case of simple arithmetic” underscores his cold intellectuality. Gradgrind’s over-confidence exemplifies the misguided belief of utilitarianism in the efficacy of their educational content and method at the primary level. Gradgrind is absolutely certain as to what the children require and the way it ought to be given to them. The vocabulary of Hard Times is loaded with this sentiment—children are passive “little vessels’ or “little pitchers” to pour utilitarian “facts” into. His approach stands in stark contrast to the understanding gained by the senses, based on feeling and mutual respect for others. The episode where Gradgrind asks Sissy to define a horse and Bitzer’s successful definition of it is an example of the twin approaches to life.

Benthamite utilitarianism argued for “the greatest good for the greatest number of people” but failed to realize it. Though few succeeded most people continued to live in grinding poverty. Dickens felt that there was more to life than just economic success. It was not just to brand the discontented and disenchanted as dregs of society and send them to prison. Bentham believed in moral principles and disciplinary institutions for the betterment of society. He campaigned for the building of Panopticon prison which allowed an observer to observe the prisoners without being noticed. Through this design Bentham wanted to bring about social and legal reform based on the concept of invisible omniscience. Foucault saw the Panopticon as a reflection of nineteenth century rule-based institutions to police the individual. The terrible discourse of state control does not result in human progress or happiness.

Works Cited
KLINGOPULOS, G. D. “Notes on the Victorian Scene,” in Boris Ford ed., The Pelican Guide to English Literature Volume 6. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970.
ENGEL, MONROE. Charles Dickens, Hard Times. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.

Identity Claims and the Media

2010-06-10T22:43:00.003+09:00

© Mukesh Williams

We all make identity claims for one reason or the other. Usually our identity claims reflect our concerns, anxieties and desires. Usually our identity claims are harnessed in our self-interest or the interest of our community, tribe or nation. A selfless identity claim is a misnomer. Though nations may be imagined, they nevertheless provide an opportunity for people to make specific identity claims (Anderson, 1991; Hall, 1997). When we have a soccer match between two countries and the captain of the winning team drapes his country’s flag around him he is making an identity claim that spectators can relate to and identify with.

IDENTITY AND ADVERTISING

Advertising also lays claim to our identity. Successful modern advertisements force us to place ourselves in the situation occupied by one of the characters and identify ourselves with what they say or do. Image advertising also works in similar fashion. Media photographs work for us if they excite our emotions of pity, anger, joy or resentment. We then indentify ourselves with them and claim them as they claim us. For example a bird covered in oil sludge, a child crying from hunger, soldiers killed in war, a volcanic eruption and so on. The picture implicates us, forces us to produce meaning in the act of looking. As we enter this fantasy world again and again we become a part of that world.

COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

People come together into a group and imagine an identity. We have many identities—such as racial, local, city, gender, national and religious—and we use different aspects of these collective identities to our advantage. Identity is therefore neither single nor fixed but constantly reconstituted and in a state of eternal flux. We give meaning to things through the use of language. At the same time we are reconstituted by those collective identities we use to define or redefine ourselves. The reconstitution and redefinition of our identities have been further accelerated by digital and mobile technologies.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WORLD

There are different strategies to understand the way we signify, the way we represent and the way we create meaning. It is possible to divide theories of representations into three broad categories: reflective, intentional and constructionist. The first implies that meaning is inherent in objects, persons, ideas or events and language merely acts as a mirror to reflect such meaning. The Greek notion of mimesis grew out of this conception of the world where painting and drawing mirrored the real world of nature. The reflective theory of representation is therefore often termed as mimetic theory. Obviously visual arts do attempt to represent the shape and texture of objects, but they also represent objects as two-dimensional signs. Literary theory is full of it. The second theory argues that the observer, speaker or author gives meaning to the world through the use of language. Meaning therefore depends on intention. But language is a social discourse organized along shared codes and conventions and must follow a well-formulated pattern in order to be intelligible. The third premise moves away from the first two approaches and argues that meaning does not lie in objects but we create meaning using signs, signifiers, concepts and strategies. We are constructionists in our representation of the world. The material world exists per se but meaning is created through the discourse of language and linguistic practices (Hall 1997, 24-25).

MODERNITY, POST-MODERNITY AND IDENTITY

Both modernity and post-modernity have deeply affected our sense of identity—the way we constitute it and the way we are affected by it. Modernity brought in a new urban revolution in our inner psychological space and outer physical space. Both our ways of thinking and the city spaces we live in changed radically from the earlier medieval times. In the post-modern era, though the urban landscape is still present, it is the mass media that defines our sense of individuality and cultural identity. Some of the ill effects of modernity felt in urban architecture, knowledge areas and psychological spaces are reduced in post-modern world. The oppressive effects of modern city spaces and rules of behavior are somewhat lessened in postmodern city spaces where the individual becomes once more important. The process of globalization as a function of late modernity has further accelerated an economic process that connects with mass migration and reassertion of pan identities on new levels. The “cultural resonance” of postmodernism as a “structure of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams phrase, distracts us from its impact upon economic organizations, marketing and advertising (Jameson, 2001 xiv).

IDENTITY CRISIS

The notion of identity crisis is a post-structuralist idea that began to dominate the sub-discipline of structuralism from the 1960s. With the breakdown of the old world order old collective identities lost their validity. Micro level identity politics connected to lobby groups, localism and even nationalism began to dominate the identity project. The individual in the postmodern world was more fragmented than alienated (Jameson, 2001). Alienation assumed a unitary core self but the postmodern self is seen as unstable and multiple. Therefore the concept of alienation within identity is replaced by anxiety. The Internet further destabilized identity by creating a “culture of simulations” by substituting reality with virtual communities (Turkle, 1997).

The 1960s was a momentous decade. Lacan began to attack the concept of the embedded self and posited the notion of a de-centered self. The dominant theory thesis and hegemonic ideas connected with it began to give way to micro politics. By 1970s it became rather difficult to say, both on the individual and group level, “Who am I? or Who are we?” As we go into the 1980s again new groups get formed such as Yuppies and DINKS. Identity is no longer what we have learned or experience but something to be consumed and used. The consumer culture acquired greater intensity during this decade. Today it is difficult to assert an ‘authentic identity’ as postmodernism undercuts modern history, psychology and philosophy.

Works Cited

ANDERSON, BENIDICT. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991.
APPADURAI, ARJUN. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
HALL, STUART. “The Work of Representation,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Stuart Hall ed. London: Sage, 1997.
JAMESON, FREDRIC. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
TURKLE, SHERRY. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Academic Writing: Writing Scientific Lab Reports

2010-06-08T14:29:00.001+09:00

Writing accurately and scientifically helps us to share our hypothesis and conclusions with the rest of the world and contribute towards the advancement of documented and written forms of knowledge. Scientific lab reports add to the cumulative knowledge of man. They help us to verify our conclusions, concepts, procedures and practices. They become the focal point for our research paper writings, conference presentations and submissions to scientific journals.

Scientific Reports: All scientific reports employ the scientific method based on two kinds of logic—inductive logic (particular to general) and deductive logic (general to particular). We use inductive logic to develop a hypothesis and then employ deductive reasoning to verify the hypothesis. At times our hypothesis does not stand the test of our deductive reasoning and we have to abandon it. Then we think of a new hypothesis for renewed testing.

Scientific Practice: Over the centuries scientific practice has developed its own unique procedures and exactitude. Invariably lab reports are organized around seven sub-themes namely: title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion, conclusion and literature cited.

1. Title: A title should be succinct and provide all the factual details of the lab experiment. It should be between five to ten words and use keywords to catch the attention of the reader.

2. Abstract: An abstract is usually a short, single paragraph which summarizes the research experiment without providing too many details. However an abstract presents the major findings and the procedure followed.

3. Introduction: While writing a scientific introduction you should clearly state your objective. An objective involves what you have set out to prove. Then you must explain the context, why this work is singular and important. At last you should state the lab you are working for, name of your supervisor and significant dates including the start of the project and its completion.

4. Materials and Methods: Materials and methods fall in the category of instruments, methodology and procedures. In this sub-heading you must explain the materials connected with your research experiment, instruments and procedures. This section should also show the way of tabulating or calculating the results. Sometimes the materials used can be separated from the methods.

5. Results and Discussion: This is the most important section of the lab report as it provides the results of the scientific experiment based on calculations, tables and graphs. The data should not be left unexplained. A clear discussion of every graph and table must be provided and how a particular conclusion follows from it.

6. Conclusion: The conclusion summarizes the test results and procedures. It explains how, what was stated in the objective, has been realized. The conclusion also states what new knowledge has been acquired through the scientific experiment and how it advances the scientific field under investigation.

7. Literature Cited: This section lists all the scholarly books and research articles actually consulted and differs from a general bibliography where lots of information is provided. Remember that most scientific journals have their own specifications for citations but citations must be alphabetically arranged.

Language: The language used in writing a lab report must be precise, objective and verb-loaded. Writers are often advised to use the passive voice (the verb to be+ the past participle of the verb) while elaborating upon methods and procedures.

New technologies: Researchers now take recourse to new technologies and computer programs such as GNU Octave, Mathcad, Maple, Atlas/ti, Jasymca A MATLAB or Baudline to organize their research data.

Charles Dickens Hard Times

2010-06-07T15:30:00.006+09:00

© Mukesh Williams 2010

TURNING MEN INTO MACHINES
There is no domestic sweetness in the novel, no lover for Sissy, no wedding bells. Louise escapes her foolish husband Bounderby only by becoming a widow. Though she dreams about future happiness we know it is just wishful thinking. The novel is a dark novel made darker by the bleak landscape of Coketown. Even the familiar landscape of London is missing. Hard Times is a harsh indictment of the relentless industrialization of the nineteenth century made in the name of progress that was making men into machines. In the name of economic growth people were becoming greedier and heartless. Their misguided sense of social welfare and profit was destroying the healthy and natural tenor of English social life. Hard Times is a novel of social transition when values and social life were in ferment.

INDUSTRIALIZATION
Industrialization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century introduced machine-based production of textiles, iron manufacture and the use of refined coal. Canals, railways, steam power and water wheels greatly expanded trade and profit. Industrialization helped Britain resolve its problem of feeding the population and generating sufficient energy for the nation. As Eric Hobsbawm pointed out industrialization was not just a function of western capitalism but also of British control of world trade through naval supremacy and a concerted foreign policy to make profit overseas. However, the keen desire to realize economic and social progress through industrialization forced people to lose their natural rhythms and become a victim of mechanical rhythms. Trying to become a part of industrial progress most people lost their emotions, humanity and imagination. Both Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby are products of the industrial ethos. Gradgrind tries to bring up his children and pupils through the study of hard facts, while his friend Bounderby exploits the factory workers for his own profit. Both, the children and factory ‘Hands’ of Coketown, lead a life of drudgery.

RATIONALISM AND SELF-INTEREST
Gradgrind further degrades the life of Coketown by his misdirected rationalism and self-interest. He believes that strict rules must govern school and society and compassion and imagination must be rooted out. But in this atmosphere life becomes hard to live. Though he wants his children to be happy and economically well off he fails in his attempt. Lousia gets into an unhappy marriage and ends up loving someone else. She makes her father realize that his method of child rearing was unnatural; it made her unable to integrate herself in society. Tom becomes wayward and gives in to drinking and gambling. He is contemptuously referred to as a whelp and brings discredit to the Gradgrind family. Bounderby lives a life of boastful deceit and is presented as an insincere and ridiculous man—am inflated balloon and an immense soap bubble. Here is a moral fable with Bounderby as an example of a dramatic monster. Dickens does not allow his characters to succeed just to underscore the detrimental effects of utilitarianism and rationalism. He exposes the morally corrupt characters like Bounderby but praises upright people like Stephen Blackpool and kind-hearted Sissy Jupe.

BENTHAMITE UTILITARIANISM
Benthamite utilitarianism argued for “the greatest good for the greatest number of people” but failed to realize it. Though few succeeded most people continued to live in grinding poverty. Dickens felt that there was more to life than just economic success. It was not just to brand the discontented and disenchanted as dregs of society and send them to prison. Bentham believed in moral principles and disciplinary institutions for the betterment of society. He campaigned for the building of Panopticon prison which allowed an observer to observe the prisoners without being noticed. Through this design Bentham wanted to bring about social and legal reform based on the concept of invisible omniscience. Foucault saw the Panopticon as a reflection of nineteenth century rule-based institutions to police the individual. The terrible discourse of state control does not result in human progress or happiness.

FACT VERSUS FANCY
An excessive reliance on facts leads to a disjointed view of the world. Though facts are important they are also a matter of perspective and interpretation. Dickens provides examples to prove his point. Bounderby saw the factory Hands as lazy and too demanding while the factory workers saw themselves as industrious and exploited. Dickens believed that opposing interpretation of facts cannot be synthesized as they are just different perspectives. He went further to explain that “facts” can also be seen as individual “taste.” Therefore fiction had its place even in a mechanized and matter-of –fact society. Even Gradgrind admits that though Sissy has not learnt much about utilitarian facts, she has become “an affectionate, earnest, good young woman” (p. 91). Dickens presents to us a new society guided by a new principle of life guided by mathematical and scientific methodologies. This worldview rooted out everything else—the circus, the imagination, idleness and Sissy Jupe.

THE FEMININE PRINCIPLE
The Victorian society gave great importance to the feminine principle which was seen as kind-hearted, morally untainted and psychologically receptive. It was believed that women by and large were able to resist the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization more than men. In the novel Rachael’s gentleness and fortitude gives strength to Stephen. His monotonous factory life is lighted up by her presence. She is therefore called a guiding angel. Sissy brings love and kindness into Gradgrind’s family restoring those human qualities in Louisa which had been lost by her father’s misguided training.

NATURAL RHYTHMS VERSUS CLOCK TIME
It is possible to see the rhythms of the seasons placed against the calibration of time measured by mechanical clocks. Both Gradgrind and denizens of Coketown measure time through the “deadly statistical clock.” Dickens suggests that time in the industrial city is both mechanical and monotonous—“Time went on in Coketown like its own machinery” (p. 90). In Coketown both machinery and its movement marks its own time. Dickens however divided the novel along agricultural rhythms governed by the changing seasons—the three books of Hard Times are called “Sowing,” “Reaping” and “Garnering—referring to the process of planting and harvesting and laboring. The “varying seasons” bring their rhythms. Even the “wilderness of smoke and brick” in Coketown cannot prevent the change of seasons. Seasons come naturally breaking the monotony of life in Coketown. Even Gradgrind feels that Sissy carries a primordial rhythm of life that she has inherited from her forefathers. Even if she has not learnt all the utilitarian facts she has grown into “an affectionate, earnest, good young woman” (p. 91).

SMOULDERING SERPENTS
The smoke above Coketown hangs as poisonous serpents blinding Bounderby and people like him to their own moral and social responsibility to society. Instead of recognizing his greed, Bounderby sees the smoke serpents as indications that the factory is manufacturing goods for profit. Dickens uses the smoke to show the inability of Bounderby to recognize his inhumanity and the grinding poverty of the factory workers. In a biblical sense smoldering serpents could be seen as something sinister and evil that industrial progress had brought about.

INDUSTRIAL UNREST
Though the novel has an industrial agitator in Slackbridge who exhorts people to rise against the oppressors, there are no industrial strikes or labor unrest. The novel does not present any confrontationist politics between labor union and the management. The action is never intense but only critical and evaluative. We only see the factories floating like “fairy palaces” pushing their steam engine pistons “monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” This melancholy madness is more important as sentiment and emotion than the actual presentation of common industrial issues such as poor working conditions, unemployment and child labor. Blackpool though he is represented as an honest workman is not “particularly intelligent” and dislikes all shades of opinions.

Discussion of Foucault’s Archaeology Chapter 5

2010-06-06T21:25:00.004+09:00

Notes on Foucault’s Archaeology

Here are some of the points of Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (1972), Chapter 5, that we discussed at the last meeting of the Philosophy Society:

1. Prejudices are latent in conceptualization, classification, schemata and succession. There is always a selection that takes place in using these intellectual paradigms which is more emotional than logical.

2. The field of memory is highly selective as statements are forgotten both intentionally and/or unintentionally. There is no continuity in things; it is always created and imagined whatever be the theme or discipline.

3. What we remember is what we want to remember. Things that we are not concerned with do not possess continuity. This is so because we are not aware of them.

4. Procedure is a function of prioritizing or privileging what we want. A holistic scheme is just a notion, a figment of the imagination.

5. The transcription method is discursive in nature and therefore only approximates itself to perception, measurement and description. The latter processes are not exact. Discussion which invariably employs these skills is therefore artificial.

6. Rules operate within a discourse both anonymously and relentlessly. We must use these rules if we follow or enter a discourse. A discourse functions within a set of frames, practices and rules. However these rules are not universally valid but typical to a particular time and discourse.

7. Rules in the formation of objects or concepts are not located in an ideal or empirical “progress of ideas.” They are neither things nor words. Also they cannot be related to the knowing subject or to the psychological individual.
© Mukesh Williams May 2010

Class Notes on Charles Dickens' Hard Times

2010-06-03T22:41:00.001+09:00

Dickens’ Hard Times

© Mukesh Williams 2010

SERIOUSNESS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Though Dickens was a great entertainer he was not included in F R Leavis’s The Great Tradition of the English novel as he lacked seriousness something that Henry James and Joseph Conrad possessed. However Leavis felt that Hard Times has complete seriousness that could excite the adult mind. Leavis praised the novel’s tight story, clear symbolism, moral values, sharp dialogue, natural style and convincing denouement. Hard Times was seen as a great moral fable that captured the writer’s moral vision.

LIFE OF FACTS
“I want facts sir! What I want is facts, sir!” the teacher’s voice booms in chapter one. It is a classroom scene where only the voice of the teacher echoes. The one word that comes out of the lesson is ‘facts’ and next ‘reason.’ The voice of the teacher is imperial and authoritative. Dickens is ironic here. He presents the school as a model school in which Bitzer is the best student defining a horse clinically and dispassionately. There is no heart or creativity in education, just dry scientific facts.

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Dickens was born in 1812 and was a product of the Industrial Revolution, a revolution that saw the rise of factories in England between 1770 and 1840. Dickens was rather poor, had no proper education and worked in a blacking factory. All this made him unhappy. He worked hard to educate himself and write novels to make a decent living. Dickens, like Gradgrind, had no time for idle fancy.

COKETOWN
The people of Coketown have no life at all, as people of Great Expectations do. We feel that characters in Hard Times have no energy at all. Dickens knew London better than Coketown but he could still bring out the listlessness of the townsfolk in Coketown. Dickens shows the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization in urban Victorian society but does not show details of the environment. English factories were destroying the bucolic landscape and the economic power that was arising from them was changing the social order making some wealthy while leaving others rather poor. The soot-coated, black and savage Coketown gives the feeling of repetitiveness, monotony and drudgery. Both its streets and inhabitants have lost their uniqueness and they look alike. The repeated use of the word “same” and the phrase “like one another” reveals both the monotony of Coketown and the drudgery of its inhabitants. Everything in the redbrick Coketown is “severely workful” and the idea of sameness extends to the eighteen churches of different “religious persuasions,” the jail, infirmary, town hall, school and cemetery. The blasting furnaces of Coketown make it hot as hell; the gas-filled air makes people feel asphyxiated.

SOCIAL CRITICISM
Social criticism saw the novel as a novel of “passionate revolt” where there were no villains or heroes, but only oppressors and victims. And the culprit, if there was one, was industry. Socialists saw the machine as a symbol of oppression when controlled by money-making capitalists. Dickens has lost his good humor. His tone becomes quite serious. Cecilia Jupe and Louisa are serious and suffering characters. Though humble and natural, Sissy is predictably bookish. Louisa is tragic.

THEMATIC BALANCE IN THE NOVEL
The novel ends in a thematic balance. The novel begins with the childhood of the mind and ends with the childhood of the body. Dickens begins the story with reason and hard facts and ends it with fancy and imagination. He believes that both machine and social graces should make life beautiful and worth living. The loss of balance in society was undoubtedly lamentable.

VICTORIAN UTILITARIANISM
Dickens brings out the negative effects of Victorian Utilitarianism are seen in the characters of Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby. The practical utilitarianism of Gradgrind and the egotism of Bounderby destroy the creative spirit and fellow feeling. Utilitarianism was a philosophy based on a minimalist view of man that understood human nature in terms of economic relations alone. Though riddled with self-contradictions it was responsible in some measure for reforms in administration, sanitation and education. Utilitarianism, though inspired by the theory of laissez faire came to represent a streamlined civil service and centralized governance. It was difficult to reconcile the Benthamite idea of general happiness of a political and legal kind with Adam Smith’s self-harmonizing economic principle of laissez-faire (minimum intervention from the law). Dickens seemed to be both a victim and chronicler of such a contradictory response to utilitarianism in Hard Times, both in his treatment of the theme of education and trade unionism.

RESTRUCTURING EDUCATION
Dickens wanted to restructure education and do away with unqualified teachers in schools. He strongly felt the need to provide training to teachers. As such, he introduced Mr. M’Choakumchild, fresh from a training college, accompanied by his wife, about to deliver his first classroom lecture. Though the satire, both in the choice of the name and presentation of character, seems inescapable, M’Choakumchild is after all a representative of a new school ideology. His Scottish-sounding name obviously refers to the importation of trained Scottish teachers in English schools. Obviously M’Choakumchild knows too much in a somewhat conceited way. He bores and confuses his simple-minded but ignorant students. Through M’Choakumchild, Dickens expressed some of the popular criticism against training schools of the time. Dickens wanted training schools to instruct teachers in teaching methodology and develop their intellect, not just impart some erudite scholarship.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PARENTS
Hard Times develops the conventional theme of nineteenth century fiction that it was the responsibility of parents to get their sons into a financially rewarding profession and their daughters into a financially secure marriage. Till they got comfortably married, education for women was seen as developing skills to protect themselves against the greedy instincts of men. Gradgrind is no different from a typical Victorian father who has the welfare of his daughter at heart. Though it hurts Dickens’ sensibility, just as it does ours, Gradgrind finds no trouble with the idea of marriage as a financial transaction. He understands that her middle-class daughter needs money to set up an establishment. It is, therefore, commonsense to look for a man of means like Bounderby.

MARRIAGE AND POWER RELATIONS
Tom Gradgrind, more than his father, sees Louisa’s marriage to Bounderby as strengthening of “power relationships” between the two families apart from providing a good financial deal to his sister. Tom employs a mercenary approach. He views matrimonial alliance as economic advantage or exploitation. And he is not wrong in doing so.

POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM
Edward W. Said in his book Culture and Imperialism argues that the English novel in the nineteenth century continues the narrative of a stable British empire and its imperial policy. The novelist, insofar as he believes in the general idea of free trade, sees outlying colonies available for convenient use in developing themes of “immigration, fortune, or exile.” It is only later that the Empire becomes the main subject in writers such as Kipling, Haggard, Doyle and Conrad. Fictional discourse about the Empire is also accompanied by discourses in ethnography, administration, economics and historiography. Furthermore, belief in liberal individualism and free trade were hard to reconcile with the maintenance of a vast colonial empire overseas. In Hard Times Dickens is alive to the debate of unionism, utilitarian education and worker’s predicament. Apparently the novel reveals the inherent tensions, ideological conflict and the muddled intellectual position of the author.

DECONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM
The conflict between facts and imagination is also played out along ideological lines. The opposing values of utilitarianism in schools and traditional humanism of the circus are played between utilitarians and emotivists. Gradgrind employs metaphorical language to control others. He believes in equivalencies while the circus folks see language as dialogue to empower others. A tension exists between metaphorical language of domination and broken language of dialogue.

NEW HISTORICISM
New Historicists, such as Catherine Gallagher, situate the text in the English industrial society and analyze Dickens’ attempt to suggest social cohesion through an intricate process of linking cooperative family life to competitive public life. Dickens attacks the unhealthy link between money and morality. And yet his novels reveal the unwillingness of the family to participate in larger social issues of the day. Dickens’ withdrawal into middle-class family values of self-discipline, responsibility, domesticity, self-sacrifice and dedication seemed at times to work against the idea of individual freedom. Critics have pointed out this lapse in Dickens’ writing, and, more seriously, have condemned him for his lack of enthusiasm at resolving his own ambiguous position vis-à-vis these issues.

FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM
The single hard fact about Hard Times is that it is a male-dominated and patriarchal novel. Obviously, this gives rise to the issue of gender and opens up related issues of,

A. the way Victorian society was constituted,
B. the way people saw themselves and constructed the other, and
C. the way sexual politics controlled women in private and public life.

Dickens explores feminine discourses such as female affection and sympathy much to the chagrin of his male-dominated critics such as George Henry Lewes (George Eliot’s companion). Dickens reveals a linguistic structure that attempts to control literature and more especially the entry of women in public life. Dickens also challenges the power structure of male-dominated Victorian society by presenting the world through female terms and conditions. Though speaking as a male and from the outside, Dickens speaks against the controllers of power thereby enhancing his position as a novelist. Feminist literary criticism, originating in the 1960’s out of the feminist movement demanding equal rights for woman, had gained strength and popularity in subsequent decades. It presupposed that, by and large, most cultures tend to be patriarchal if not outright misogynist. Feminist critics commonly agreed that concepts of gender tend to determine aspects of masculinity and femininity in any given culture. Therefore, unlike human sex, which is anatomical or biological, concept of gender has a social construction. They tended to agree with Simone de Beauvoir that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

Foucault’s Terminologies

2010-06-03T22:10:00.001+09:00

© Mukesh Williams 2010

Michel Foucault rejects the vast unities imagined by historians in historical periods and instead suggests “rupture” and “discontinuity.” He uses the notion of discontinuity as both the “instrument” and “object” of research. He objects to the themes of “cultural totalities” and “search for origins.” Instead he develops his own theory and procedure to explain the paradox of discontinuity.

1. Archaeology

Foucault identifies various discourses as they emerge in society and get transformed in the process of their implementation. Archeology is a unique method of investigating their emergence and transformation. Foucault does not unravel the hidden meaning of discourses or the deep structure of their rational content. He is not interested to access the larger impact of discourses on the collective unconscious or group psychology. Unlike Derrida he does not wish to investigate the traces or outside implications of discourses. Foucault uses this archaeological method to study the positive aspects of existence. He believes that the method of archeological investigation creates the requisite detachment necessary for a historian to evaluate and clearly explain an archive. The method of archeology involves the distance a historian must maintain while chronicling events. Therefore history can be defined as a system of difference. Archaeology describes the verifiable and positive aspects of a discourse, as if was describing an artifact or a monument.

2. Archive

An archive is understood to be a set of available texts in a given historical period. Foucault analyzes the conditions which give rise to an archive, the relations and institutions that allow statements in texts to become archived. An archive is neither a collection of artifacts nor a set of statements. It is a series of relationships—“the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.”

3. Oeuvre

Foucault interrogates the concept of oeuvres, commonly understood as a set of texts approved by an author in his lifetime. However there are various texts, manuscripts, oral recordings and materials of an author collected posthumously. The author takes various positions from which he makes statements. These positions are independent from the author’s approved position. Therefore the notion of the oeuvre is not a pure category of totalities but a fragmentariness of an author’s works ranging from thoughts, experience, and imagination to unconscious and historical determinants that influence him. An oeuvre is also the secret origin, something that cannot be “quite grasped.” Any person can write from any of the positions not approved by the author and the author himself can express his thoughts from multiple positions. An author’s book contract details and scribbling on a paper napkin do not occupy the same status as an approved manuscript of a book. Foucault therefore destabilizes the conventional meaning of an oeuvre.

Global Cultures and Civilizations

2010-06-03T22:02:00.000+09:00

Archaeology of Cultures and Civilizations
The terms culture and civilization are the two most debated words in modern thought and practice and have been used by nations, communities and individuals as notions to create histories, identities and hegemonies. Are the terms culture and civilization residual essences, literary and philosophical discourses cultural anthropology or graspable artifacts? There is no clear agreement amongst scholars as to what these two terms imply and the battle which began in the Anglo-American world even before the 1940s, and heated up in the 1950s, still lumbers on (Geertz, 2000 12-19). Old stalwarts like Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski and Edward Sapir have given way to Arif Dirlik , Arjun Appadurai, James Clifford, Sidney Mintz, George Marcus, Eric Wolf and Michael Taussig, Philip Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. But we cannot ignore the twin notions of culture and civilization nor can we jump out or over them. We need to interrogate these concepts as best as we can and once again in the light of new advances in critical theory and philosophy make some sense of both.

In recent times there has been an emphasis on “thick description” of culture and civilization which forces us to believe that cultures and civilizations are not essences floating in the air but directly rooted in geography and socially established codes. As such they encompass the political and religious conflicts of the times and are increasingly given to incommensurability relativism and perspectivism. But cultures, languages, civilizations and traditions are not self-contained entities but always interacting with each other, crisscrossing, extending beyond and overlapping. Languages too are not complete air-tight units but open and permeable. Since people speaking different languages interact amongst themselves, languages come in close proximity and tend to borrow from each other. The belief in sealed entities or “windowless monads” gives us a false picture of concepts that can hold us “captive” and prevent us from “get[ing] outside it” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2001 115). Karl Popper warns us that we must not fall a prey to “the myth of the framework” and become deluded (Popper, 1996).

Culture has been generally understood as progress in art and science that has helped mankind to develop their faculties and character. But with the rise of eugenics and later anthropology, culture became linked to the study of language, customs, beliefs, consciousness, ideas and practices of the non-European ‘Other’. Based on this assumption E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class redefined the concept of class as involving “human relationships” and not just economic and occupational indices (Thompson, 1963). He further argued in the “Preface” to the aforementioned book that,

By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and consciousness. I emphasise that it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a ‘structure’, not even as a ‘category’. But as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships (Thompson, 1963 9).

According to Thompson class is not only historical in nature but constitutes a web of human relationships over an extended period of time.

Some of the early anthropologists such as E B. Tylor believed in the power of scientific inquiry and cultural evolution to unravel the mystery of the development of civilizations. The Indian understanding of culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was guided by Darwinism positive science methodologies. It was therefore largely influenced by Tylor who advocated the study of ethnography and anthropology in understanding human cultures. Tylor used the terms culture and civilization interchangeably and saw culture referring to beliefs, laws and customs of the people. He wrote in 1871 that,

Not merely as a matter of curious research, but as an important practical guide to the understanding of the present and the shaping of the future, the investigation of the early development of civilization must be pushed on zealously. Every possible avenue of knowledge must be explored, every door tried to see if it is open. No kind of evidence need be left untouched on the score of remoteness or complexity, of minuteness or triviality. The tendency of modern enquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere. To despair of what a conscientious collection and study of facts may lead to, and to declare any problem insoluble because difficult and far off, is distinctly to be on the wrong side in science; and he who will choose a hopeless task may set himself to discover the limits of discovery (Tylor 1924 24).

His passionate plea for scientific investigation and for collecting ‘facts’ reminds us of Charles Dickens’s opening schoolroom scene in Hard Times (1853) where Mr. Gradgrind tells his class “Now what I want is facts.” The Benthamite utilitarianism became an important part of the scientific investigation.

There has been an overwhelming dependence on science and logic to understand culture and the human psyche. Edward Hall laments the debilitating and chaotic power of Western logic to understand and examine the world. In Beyond Culture he argues that,

Two widely divergent but interrelated experiences, psychoanalysis and work as an anthropologist, have led me to the belief that in his strivings for order, Western man has created chaos by denying that part of his self that integrates while enshrining the parts that fragment experience. These examinations of man’s psyche have also convinced me that: the natural act of thinking is greatly modified by culture; Western man uses only a small fraction of his mental capabilities; there are many different and legitimate ways of thinking; we in the West value one of these ways above all others—the one we call ‘logic,’ a linear system that has been with us since Socrates. Western man sees his system of logic as synonymous with the truth (Hall, 1976 9).

Later in the 1930s and 1940s Malinowski also developed his scientific functional approach to understand culture based on human needs. He divided anthropology into two parts—physical anthropology dealing with physiological structure and cultural anthropology relating to heritage, artifacts and values (Malinowski, 1944; 1931 621-23). In the 1970s American anthropologist Clifford Geertz elaborated upon the symbolic aspect of culture arguing that culture interprets the web of cultural meaning rather than lays down scientific laws (Geertz, 1973 5). His understanding greatly influenced the construction of culture n subsequent decades. Recently Geertz has retracted some of his earlier statements. In his book Available Light admits that the fieldwork of an anthropologist lacks a scientific base and is no different from the craft of the novelist writing a bildungsroman (Geertz, 2000).

The Rhizome and the Tree Structure
In the late 1990s new perspectives in the archeology of knowledge further destabilized the scientific and functional understanding of culture. Western knowledge and categories have been constituted along a Hegelian hierarchy; a pattern symbolized by the tree structure with trunk and branches. Giles Deleuze introduced the concept of the rhizome such as a potato that “ceaselessly establish [es] connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances” and like a “tuber agglomerating very diverse acts” (Deleuze, 1993 30). If we sketch a rhizomic map of the world today it would highlight demographic concentrations of relationships controlled by a privileged few who imagine the rhizome as a hierarchical tree. It is not that a rhizome has replaced the tree but seemingly the tree controls the rhizome. However the rhizome also breaks free of such controls in its characteristic fashion as can be seen in cultural dissent and demand for political concession based on culture and ethnicity. The rhizomic view of a hyphenated world united by fast food culture may be good for business but it is not good for immigration. Developed countries seek to open borders for their French fries and electronics but do not welcome a reverse flow of migratory labor. The rhizome does not compete with the tree or is subsumed by it but fights with it for more economic and political space.

MELUS/MELOW CHANDIGARH FEB 2010

2010-05-29T13:02:00.000+09:00

http://melusmelow.org/news.html
MELOW
(The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World)
NEWSLETTER - SUMMER 2010

This year MELOW collaborated with Panjab University and the Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi to hold its 10th International Conference on “Literature and Culture Since 1980” from Feb 25 to 27, 2010. After holding a successful 2008 conference at the University of Vishwa Bharati, Santiniketan, West Bengal, the place associated with the Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, members were back in the City Beautiful, Chandigarh, for another conference. Scholars from Nigeria, US, Japan, US and UK, and from almost every corner of India were present.

After all the rigorous screening, the rejections and corrections of the papers, the submissions were filtered down to match the international standard of the MELUS-MELOW Conference.

The three days of the conference were filled with friendly reunions, academic discussions, paper readings, lectures and presentations that went on simultaneously in four parallel sessions.

The conference began with a warm welcome by Prof. Gulshan Kataria. The Special Guest of the morning was Shri Pradip Mehra, Adviser to the UT Administrator. Apart from the welcome address and the Chief Guest’s remarks, the inaugural session included the announcement of the Isaac Sequeira Award and a Book launch (of selected papers of the last conference). This was followed by a keynote address by Prof. Harish Trivedi who, with his scholarly address on “India, America and World Literature,” held the audience spellbound.

In the parallel sessions, as many as four were held simultaneously. These were chaired by senior scholars including Tejnath Dhar, Sudhir Kumar, Gulshan Kataria, Mita Biswas, Anil Raina, K.B. Razdan, Sushila Singh, Lovelina Singh, Anu Celly, Mukul Sengupta, Vijay Sharma, Mina Surjit Singh, Sushi Dutta-Sandhu, Meera Malik, and Himadri Lahiri.

The second Keynote Address, ‘The American Gulliver and World System – Cooperation and Consensus,’ was delivered by Prof. Mukesh Williams from Soka University, Tokyo. Focusing on the issue of dominance, Prof. Williams spoke of the bipolarity that exists in the world today because of globalization on the one hand and religion on the other. “A cosmopolitan consciousness is in conflict with ideology today”, he said. Chairing the session was the eminent academic, Prof P.L. Mehra, former head of Panjab University’s History Department, who followed the lecture carefully and gave some valuable insights in his concluding remarks.
On 27th February, the first Isaac Sequeira Memorial Lecture was given by Prof. P.C. Kar on ‘Aesthetics of Modernism.’ Prof Kar, who knew the late Prof Sequeira personally, shared some of his thoughts with the audience, recalling the academic endeavors he and Isaac were together a part of. In a free-wheeling talk on literature, he focused on the continuity of literary traditions, emphasizing that all endings are in a way the origins of new thoughts and movements. Literature being a never-ending stream, records the flux of life to which we all, academics and scholars (like Isaac) contribute in our own ways. There is no finality, only an ever-ongoing process. Prof Kar’s talk, personal as well as scholarly, brought the conference to a fitting close, leaving delegates of MELOW in a mature, mellower frame of mind.

The conference presented an interesting mix of senior, middle and entry level scholars. There were young and upcoming researchers along with student volunteers. One of the research scholars, Navreet Sahi, made a film presentation on “The Virtual Life of Michael Jackson”. The legendary singer’s last performance that never took place, recorded in the documentary ’This is it’ was screened. The delegates also enjoyed watching a performance at the Open Air Theatre of the Panjab University where The Trojan Women in Hindustani was staged by the Dept of Indian Theatre, chaired by the well-known theatre personality Neelam ManSingh.
The MELOW General Body meeting was held to discuss future events and to elect office bearers for the coming term. There were changes in the executive board with Prof. Sushila Singh succeeding Prof. Gulshan Kataria as President of MELUS-MELOW and Somdatta Mandal being elected as Vice-President. In the Executive Group too there were some changes, all of which have been listed below.

A unique feature of this Conference was that it dove-tailed into the First Chandigarh Literature Festival which comprised Face-to-Face Sessions with eminent writers like Shashi Deshpande, Mamta Kalia, and Namita Gokhale in conversation with equally well reputed writers / critics, Manjula Padmanabhan, Malashri Lal, Pratibha Nagpal, Sudhir Kumar and Madhav Kaushik, In addition, there were story and poetry sessions in English, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. The Hindi poetry session was chaired by Mamta Kalia and the English Session by Prof. Sushila Singh.

The Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu segments had award winning poets like T N Raaz, Yojana Rawat, Roshan Sharma, B D Kalia, Rupa Saba, Taaran Gujral, Santosh Dhiman and Atul Vir Arora share their thoughts on life and living. The English poetry session included Nirupama Dutt, Kailash Ahluwalia, Balpreet Kaur, Lalita Jagmohan, Aradhana Sharma, Saurabh Gupta and Debasish. Nature, relationships and pain formed the leitmotif of the verses shared by the authors with an appreciative audience, striking a responsive chord in many a heart.

The story sessions in different languages were also well received. Participating in these sessions, reading their stories, were some local writers like K.L. Zakir, Chander Trikha, V. Mehndiratta and Jaideep Chadha, along with some of the delegates from abroad attending the MELOW Conference.

Among the names that stand out in the LitFest segment is that of Shashi Despande, Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi awardee for her novel, That Long Silence. Mamta Kalia, Director, Bhartiya Bhasha Parishad, is the author of the award winning 'Beghar'. Namita Gokhale is the brain behind the Jaipur Literature Festival which has become a literary landmark in the country. Manjula Padmanabhan, playwright, artist and cartoonist, also made her presence felt, contributing to the animated discussions with the panelists.

A Book Exhibition was held in the foyer and delegates were seen browsing around in their free moments.

DATES FOR THE NEXT CONFERENCE are still being finalized. Tentatively, the Conference will be held in Hyderabad (OUCIP) in the last week of September 2011. Information will be circulated as soon as we can confirm with our colleagues in Hyderabad. The conference theme will be circulated separately.

Office Bearers for MELUS-India, 2010 onward (for the next two conferences):

• President: Prof Sushila Singh, BHU, Varanasi.
• Vice-President: Prof Somdatta Mandal, Viswabharati, Santitniketan, WB.
• Secretary: Prof Manju Jaidka, PU, Chandigarh.
• Jt. Secy: Dr Manpreet Kaur, IPU, Delhi
• Treasurer: Prof Anil Raina (PU, Chandigarh)

Executive Members:

Prof MG Ramanan (U of Hyderabad)
• Prof Gulshan Kataria (Pbi U, Patiala)
• Prof Tutun Mukherjee (U of Hyderabad)
• Dr Mukul Sengupta (Calcutta)
• Dr Himadri Lahiri (Kolkata)
• Dr Vijay Sharma (Delhi)
• Dr RG Kulkarni (Sangli)
• Dr Nandini Bhadra (Mumbai)
• Dr Roshan Sharma (Solan, HP)
• Dr Meenu Gupta (Chandigarh)

Editorial Board:

• Prof Anil Raina and
• Dr. Debasish Lahiri

International Advisory Board:

• Prof Paul Giles, Oxford University
• Prof Mukesh Williams, Soka University, Japan
• Prof Sushi Dutta-Sandhu, University of Michigan, Kalamazoo

Keynote addresses by Professors Harish Trivedi and Mukesh Williams at the MELUS-India / MELOW International Conference, Feb 25, 26, 2010

2010-03-15T22:48:00.003+09:00

Professors Harish Trivedi and Mukesh Williams delivered keynote addresses entitled First "India, America and World Literature"(MELOW)and “The American Gulliver and World Systems—Cooperation and Consensus” (MELUS) at the MELUS-India / MELOW International Conference on “Contemporary Issues: Literature and Culture Since 1980” held at Punjab University, Chandigarh, India from 25th to 27th February 2010

The MELOW keynote address was delivered by Prof. Harish Trivedi, Post-Colonial scholar and visiting Professor to many national and international universities. Focusing on ‘India, America and World Literature’, he spoke of the very meaning of the word “ethnic”, which comes into play “when you are not where you should be, when you are not where you belong”. But he also said that this was a definition that cannot be applied to literature, the buzzword in fact, being ‘World Literature’ and the need to be “ethically sensitive rather then ethnically sensitive”. “Today world is the circumference and the US is not the centre”, Prof. Trivedi said.
The MELUS keynote address was delivered by Prof Mukesh Williams.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
MELUS/MELOW Conference Chandigarh, February 26, 2010
Culture of Capitalism and Consumerism
The American Gulliver and World Systems—Cooperation and Consensus

We find ourselves at a historical moment that is both bewildering and critical. We want to make sense of what happens around us through information, analysis and knowledge but are invariably left confused. Every nation presents its own picture of the world. Within a nation there are multiple voices. Only the most powerful voices are heard around the world. And the voices in America are the most powerful. They can be heard around the world and they shape a large part of our reality. America has become the most “indispensable nation” in the world as Margaret Albright once put it. What does American mean for India. A lot of our business, technology and education are intrinsically connected to America. At the same time we also suffer from cross-border terrorism for which we partly blame America. We find it hard to dismiss terrorism in India as just regionalism, separatism or civil unrest. We are a beneficiary and a victim of US policies in the past. We still have to maintain a delicate balance between the US and the Soviet bloc as we have done decades ago.
As we confront the present crisis in world history it becomes obligatory for all disciplines including American Studies to seek “new avenues of inquiry” by “asking new questions.” We must ask questions about the relationship between knowledge and power, the conjunction between culture and conflict and the intricate workings of political empires and their self-interests. Edward Said once did this for us. Today America itself is asking these questions (Lipset 1997 31).

President Obama’s Nobel speech highlighted the role that America has played in the last 64 years as both “superpower” and “moral force” to bring peace to the world. He elaborated on some of the “most elemental questions” relating to “war and justice” that America needs to answer. It is better to negotiate a hard-nosed peace with the enemy, he said, than to fight an Armageddon. He rejected Martin Luther King’s concept of nonviolence in Niebuhrian terms. But he accepted King’s idea of Christian love as the major principle of American foreign policy. He underscored the fact that war cannot be eradicated by signing treaties. (Widmer 2009 9) Unlike Bush, Obama affirmed that America should always adhere to the rule of international bodies and at all times wage a just war. Today’s I will reflect upon some of the issues connected to cooperation and consensus that Obama raised. I will also see how these issues affect foreign policy, culture and our disciplines.

THE AMERICAN GULLIVER
In public discourses the US has been called the American Gulliver, American Oceania and Uber America because of its national strength, economic power and military involvement in different parts of the world. It has surpassed the might of the Roman Empire as an imperial republic (Aron 2009). Its might is felt both by Americans and by people around the world. No country can ignore America or fail to have some kind of relationship with it. American global power has far reaching consequences not only in the realm of foreign policy but also in all areas of human endeavor. America affects and defines political values, civil liberties, social sciences, economics and literary endeavors around the world. Sometimes this impact is positive and at others negative.

John Ikenberry explains why America acquired the power to direct the world order. He proposes that ‘rare historical junctures’ occur in international relations after major wars are fought, wars such as the Thirty Years War (1648), The French Revolution (1713), Napoleonic Wars (1815), The First World War (1919) and The Second World War (1945). Nations that emerge victorious after such upheavals, find themselves at a historical juncture where the old world order does not work. They acquire unprecedented power to reconstruct world politics. After World War II America acquired the legitimacy to design rules governing world order. These rules were based on stability and cooperation. It created global bodies like the League of Nations, NATO and Bretton Woods institutions (such as the IMF, World Bank, IBRD and GATT). During the Cold War era it used the power of these bodies to acquire legitimacy to direct the politics and economies of the world. Usually it tailored such rules to suit its own needs (Ikenberry 2001). It also strengthened its resolve to market American exceptionalism more aggressively. There was a belief that American history was not only different from other nations but also superior to them.

WHAT AMERICA CAN DO?
America can reform the world order by using the consensus model that could highlight both cooperation and mutual benefit through the production of public goods, creation of intellectual capital or the revitalization of the economy. What we call in Hindi anukulta aur sahyog or paraspar labh. It could convince other nations within international bodies to endorse its agenda by overcoming objections and promising benefits. There are examples in global diplomacy when a proposal lacked justification but was still accepted as it represented the interests of other nations. Harry Truman’s extension of American rights over the continental shelf near territorial waters (1845) and the recent Proliferation Security Initiative to destroy weapons of mass destruction on sea, land or air are examples. The aim of American diplomacy should not be to supplant the existing order but to carry it forward with minor changes.

America may no longer be a universally acceptable role model but it still occupies a preeminent position as it did when it initiated the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan to contain the march of communism. It once more stands at a critical juncture to use its egalitarian principles and enlightened leadership to shape the postmodern world order. It can be both communitarian and particularistic in its approach. It can develop a world economy without ignoring its own, it can create global markets where its own markets find an important place, it can initiate information sharing to counter threats, and it can engage other nations in dialogue and opinion making. We in India have always had our own ambivalent reactions to our association with America. Our nuclear deal with the US may be of some advantage to us, but the one with the Soviets is even better as it places no conditions. But the US deal is hyped in India. America has shown to the world through the Obama moment that it can override its internal prejudices and surprise the world. 　

MELUS Internatiional Conference Keynote Address by Mukesh Williams, March 26, 2010

2010-03-08T21:44:00.001+09:00

Contemporary Issues: Literature and Culture since 1980
The poetry sessions were the highlight of the second day of the 10th International Conference on ‘Contemporary Issues: Literature and Culture since 1980’ and the first Chandigarh Lit Fest currently underway at Panjab University.The Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu segment had award winning poets like T N Raaz, Yojana Rawat , Roshan Sharma, B D Kalia, Rupa Saba, Taaran Gujral, Santosh Dhiman and Atul Vir Arora share their thoughts on life and living.The English poetry session included Nirupama Dutt, Kailash Ahluwalia, Balpreet Kaur, Lalita Jangwan, Aradhana Sharma, Saurabh Gupta and Devashsish. Nature, relationships and pain formed the leitmotif of the verses shared by the authors with an appreciative audience, striking a responsive chord in many a heart.The keynote address was delivered by Prof. Mukesh Williams, Soka University, Tokyo on the theme ‘The American Gulliver and World System - Cooperation and Consensus’. Focusing on the issue of dominance, Prof. Williams spoke of the bipolarity that exists in the world today because of globalization on the one hand and religion on the other. “A cosmopolitan consciousness is in conflict with ideology today”, he said. The multiple technical sessions were chaired by intellectuals from North Carolina Central University (USA), Soka University (Tokyo), University of Michigan (USA), Visvabharati Univesity, Shantiniketan, Jammu University, Lucknow University and Panjab University. Paper presentations ranged from critical perspectives of Dalit Literature to representation of contemporary reality in award winning novels. An interesting and topical presentation was on the depiction of homosexuality in the film Dostana. Another was on the presentation of terrorism in Indian visual media. Many papers took up the issues of identity and conflict in world literature and the negotiation of transition that is embodied in this conflict. Still others spoke of the culture of consumerism and the political dichotomies as reflected in a multiethnic literary landscape.The final day of the Conference will see some award winning novelists behind the lectern - Shashi Deshpande, Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi awardee for her novel, The Long Silence; Mamta Kalia, Director, Bhartiya Bhasha Parishad and award winning author of 'Beghar' and over 25 other books; Namita Gokhale, writer, publisher and Founder Director of the Jaipur Literature Festival; Manjula Padmanabhan, playwright, journalist, comic strip writer and children's book author - just to name a few. Noted litterateurs like V. Mehndiratta and Indu Bali will also be participating in the proceedings.

http://bharatsandesh.com/bharat/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14015&Itemid=1

Seikyo Culture Seminar at Tochigi

2010-02-10T21:11:00.003+09:00

Mukesh Williams's speech covered in Seikyo Newpaper.

Seikyo Culture Seminar at Tochigi
Lecture delivered by Dr. Mukesh Williams, Soka University
The Seikyo Cultural Seminar was held at Tochigi Peace culture center on the 7th of February. After greetings by Mr. Narumi, head of Tochigi's branch of the Seikyo Press, Dr. Mukesh Williams of Soka University delivered a lecture on the theme "The History of the Friendship between India and Japan" (photo)
Dr. Williams remarked that President Ikeda is greatly respected within the Indian society. He concluded that the efforts of President Ikeda in bringing hope and imparting courage to the common people is respected the same way in which great historical figures such as Gautam Buddha, King Asoka and Mahatma Gandhi are. Further he mentioned that the Buddhist belief that Karma can indeed be changed has gained a lot of interest among the well-informed people. In closing, there were greetings by Dr. Masami Kita of Soka University and others.

Utsunomiya Castle

2010-02-09T21:47:00.000+09:00

The picture of Utsunomiya Castle was taken from a moving car on the 6th of February 2010. The castle is famous as a resting place of the shogun when he visited Nikko. It was burned down during the Boshin War and reconstructed in 2007. It is possible to see the fortifications made by Fujiwara Hidesato in the Heian period about 1062. The castle was under the control of the Utsunomiya clan who continued to rule for about 500 years. During the Sengoku period many battles were fought around its precincts. During one such battle Hojo attacked and burned a large portion of the caste and since then it became heavily fortified with high walls and a deep moat around it. After the defeat of the Utsunomiya by Hideyoshi, the land including the caste was taken away in 1597.

Nothing is Outside the Framework of Poetry

2009-07-27T15:39:00.003+09:00

Nothing is Outside the Framework of Poetry
An Interview with Mukesh Williams
By Rohit Wanchoo
Published in The Copperfield Review Volume 8, Number 3, Summer 2009
http://www.copperfieldreview.com/interviews/williams.htm

Nothing is outside the framework of poetry but it all depends what a writer wishes to include in it. Poetry is not a single message to the world but multiple messages that escape the intention and control of the poet. Each epoch, century and generation must reinterpret its own world, represent its own reality and create its own priorities. Within these reinterpretations, representations and priorities poetry must find its original telos.

—Mukesh Williams

Rohit Wanchoo: Do you think the Aristotelian idea of poetry has lost its meaning today?
Mukesh Williams: During the time of Aristotle there was no clear separation between the principles of rhetoric and poetry. This is one reason that his Rhetoric was far more popular than his Poetics. It is only later, during the Enlightenment period that his theory of poetry, especially his pronouncements on tragedy, became popular and influenced many writers and their representations of the world. For Aristotle poetry included a wide range of genres such as the lyric, epic and drama. Of these he gave greater importance to drama and especially to one aspect of drama that is tragedy. By and large Aristotle rejected the domain of comedy, which he equated to the orgiastic phallic tradition, which was quite popular in some of the Greek towns during his time. Even today this tradition survives in Japan in the kanamara matsuri enjoyed by young and old alike. Perhaps that could be one reason that serious poetry journals today caution poets not to submit scurrilous or prurient content in poetry. It is quite difficult to explain most of the things Aristotle says and its relevance today in such a short span of time, but out of his key concepts of mimesis, catharsis, peripeteia, mythos, ethos, dianoia, anagonrisis, hamartia, melos and opsis it is the first that is mimesis which has acquired great significance in modern times especially through the Auerbach’s writings and later through the historical investigations of Michael Foucault and Hayden White and Clifford Geertz. Aristotle understood mimesis as both imitation and representation but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries things were so grossly misrepresented that the postmodern thinkers began to interrogate concepts related to practically everything modern—nation, political boundaries, national literatures, dictionaries, history, cartography, identities, and social sciences. The shift has brought into focus the fixing/unfixing of the narrative and the history of representation both in creative writing and academic research. Other aspects of Aristotle such as purgation, reversal, and miscalculation, what the Romantics called a tragic flaw in character, have lost their importance. Lexis and melos are still quite important but spectacle has lost its power. Modern predicament itself is a spectacle and we poets cannot do better than the television, Internet or the newspaper in creating awesome spectacles. When we were in college we studied Aristotelian notion of tragedy and we still remember by heart its definition,
Tragedy then is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play, in the form of action, not of narrative, through pity and fear effecting the proper catharsis of these emotions.
I remember we had to explain the word catharsis as the purgation of the excess of emotions of pity and sympathy as our drama teacher would think we were complete idiots if we could not recite these lines. However, in modern times, life itself is so tragic that talking about tragedy is rather meaningless.
R.W.: Do you think poetry should communicate emotions recollected in tranquilly, should possess negative capability, use objective correlative or escape from emotion?
M.W.: Yes, the ideas of Wordsworth, Keats and Eliot have partial validity today, but these ideas also create hegemony of sorts, literary theories that tend to be dictatorial in nature. Aesthetics and literary theories have limited validity and sometimes none beyond a framework. Look who reads The Sacred Wood today? Who reads Keats’ letters to understand his concept of negative capability, the uncertainties of the poetic endeavor? Who reads Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads to understand the “spontaneous overflow of emotions” or “emotions recollected in tranquility?” Poetic theories are expressions of the philosophical, political and social thinking of the times and cannot be therefore separated from them. Today these theories about poetry have little value.

For more read The Copperfield Review

Japan and Intellectual Property Rights

2009-07-27T14:54:00.003+09:00

My 17th July lecture entitled "Japan and Developing Nations: Expanding and Redefining Trade and IPR Safeguards" is now on the UCIP homepage at the follwing web address http://ucip01.ucip.jp/procenter/portal/card/EDUCATION
They have translated the speech from English into Japanese. So the homepage contains both my English text, my Japanese synopsis and their Japanese translation of the entire speech. The speech was well received and had many positive responses. UCIP was quite happy with it. Many Japanese business professionals, university experts and my students from Soka and Keio attended. Here is a synopsis in English and Japanese:

Japan and Developing Nations:
Expanding and Redefining Trade and IPR Safeguards

by
Mukesh Williams

Abstract in English

In the last 15 years trade amongst countries in Asia has increased generating issues related to non-tariff barriers and protection of intellectual property rights. Developed countries doing business with developing countries find themselves at a disadvantage when dealing with a weak civil society, lack of awareness of IPR culture and cumbersome administrative and legal process in developing countries. At the same time developing countries find the exorbitant price of IPR goods beyond their reach. There is a strong need to expand and redefine IPR rules to make them flexible to benefit everyone and not just big corporations from the developed world. As a developed nation Japan wants to do business with developing countries such as China, India, Vietnam and Thailand and at the same time protect IPR with strong redress systems. Japan must use the business and academic machineries in its own country and Asia to generate more egalitarian IPR awareness and negotiate IPR treaties that can protect business and the poor and create a win-win situation for all. In 2008, Japan’s trade with India was 5 billion yen while that with Vietnam 1.45 trillion yen, Thailand more than 2.8 trillion and with China 25.7 trillion yen. There are great possibilities to explore in the domain of trade and IPR with India, Vietnam and Thailand in the near future.

Abstract in Japanese　

先の15年間のアジア諸国間における貿易の増加とともに、知的財産権の保護や非関税障壁に関する問題が増えてきています。途上国とビジネス面での関わりを持つ先進国は、現地において、貧弱な市民社会制度や、知的財産権に対する意識の欠如、複雑な事務的・法的手続き制度に対処する際、不利な立場にあることを自覚します。同時に、途上国も、知的財産関連商品が、購入不可能なほどの法外な価格であることを知ります。先進国の大企業のみならず、全ての人々が利益を享受できるような知的財産権に関する規則・法律を拡大・再定義することは、強く求められています。先進国として、日本は、中国、インド、ベトナム、タイのような途上国とのビジネス関係の構築、及び、強固な制度による知的財産権の保護を望んでいます。知的財産権に対する平等主義的な意識を喚起し、企業と貧しい人々の保護とWin-Win状況を実現することが可能な知的財産権に関する協定・条約を締結するために、日本は、自国とアジア諸国のビジネス・学術機構を活用しなければなりません。2008年の日本とインド、ベトナム、タイ、中国の貿易額は、それぞれ、50億円、1兆4,500億円、2兆9,000億円、25兆7,000億円でありました。近い将来、貿易と知的財産権の側面において、日本、インド、ベトナム、タイの関係がさらに深まる可能性は高いでしょう。

MUKESH WILLIAMS

Beyond Luminous Consecration

2009-07-25T22:18:00.002+09:00

Into labyrinthine light,
Around leopard shadows,
In the by lanes of wasting perceptions,
You must find yourself
Or leap instinctively beyond
The imagined terra firma.

2009-03-22T12:31:00.002+09:00

俳

the red plum bonsai
hidden behind the stone frog
reveals its blossoms

The Hibernating Black Bear

2009-02-19T12:45:00.000+09:00

Amidst the falling berries and cherry leaves
You curl into a tight black globe
Of winter lethargy
And shuffle a pelt-warm dream
Of open fields, larger family and aplenty.
Along with raccoon dogs, skunks and chipmunks,
You hide in dark inaccessible places
To let nature die of predatory instincts,
And unmindful of the snow and wind
Slumber till early spring into a vision realized.

This poem was first published in the Poetic Portal, February 19,2009. To read this poem in the original published format or browse other poems by Mukesh Williams please visit the website Poetic Portal.net

2009-02-16T12:36:00.002+09:00

Wild Grass

The amber softness and
The figural logic
Of the wild autumn grass,
Sway gently in the night wind,
Divesting conviction and emotion,
Leaving a yearning for the imponderable.

Its bewitching long aureate wings
Reify symbols, concepts, philosophies,
Challenging in their audacity
Even the dusty gold of the moon
That spreads its gilded icons
In a bewildered expanse of eidolon.

First published in Best Poem: A Poetry Journal, January 26, 2009

To read more poems by Mukesh Williams please go to The Copperfield Review and Best Poem: A Poetry Journal by accessing the following websites http://www.copperfieldreview.com and http://bestpoem.wordpress.com/

Cogitating the New Year

2009-01-05T20:16:00.003+09:00

We calibrate time,
Imagine temporal structures,
And celebrate the New Year,
Welcoming the sweet misery of life,
Measuring months, weeks and days,
Converting them
Into an expectant whole and
In elation or despair,
Enter the etesian time zone
At the stroke of twelve;
Believing that the cog
Has served its purpose.

We miss the seasons,
The fog on the mountains,
The sunshine on the rooftops,
The dark corridors of our fantasy,
The quiet contemplation of the mind,
The snow footprints of the badger,
The fluttering of the cicada,
The bespattered maple leaf,
The budding branch,
Our very heartbeat itself;
Life passes us by and yet
We look for virtue in chronology.

We seek the New Year
In a department store
In cheap bargains,
Steam ejecting gadgets,
Discounted apparel, foundation cosmetics,
Stuffed toys, plastic insects,
Imitation shrubbery,
Tinsel, doodads,
Chocolates and pasties,
To sweeten our choice;
We wish to seize the celestial universe
In pretentious artifice.

Representing India

2008-06-17T15:50:00.000+09:00

Conceive her in any way you wish to
In any language you want to,
You may choose Persian, Arabic or
Any of the modern European languages
To locate the hypostasis of Al Hind, Hindustan, or India,
You may dig into its geological, linguistic or technological warrens
And come up with religious conflict, squalor and disease,

You may as an Indian envision her
As an iconographic matryabhumi,
Mythologize her to serve a nationalist cause,
Even transform her into a male entity of King Bharata
And call her Bharatvarsha
Or eulogize her rectitude and aesthetic
Through the lyrics of Tarana-e-Hind,

You may imagine her as Mother India or Mother Teresa,
Privileging social justice over family revenge,
Serving irrefragable bahujan hitye,
You may try to contain her
Through your imagination, literatures,
Myths, celluloid representation, but
India will always have something more to prefigure.

You can also read the poem on Boloji.com, June 15, 2008
at the following address:
http://www.boloji.com/poetry/4001-4500/4288.htm

The White Magnolia Tree

2008-03-26T18:02:00.003+09:00

Towards the end of March
When the white magnolia flowers
Open upon black barks
Like unblemished bridal dresses
Expectant, quivering, immaculate,
Feeling the primordial emotion of clouds
Like any other cherry tree,
They little know the world they inherit.

As you stand under the white lanterns
And sway with their enceinte desire
You are compelled to believe
In the purity of good intentions,
The joys of elemental fecundity,
Not in the least suspecting
The jealousy of the pink cherry tree,
Or the besotted mood of spring rain.

Representing India, The Nation and Its People

2008-01-02T13:16:00.000+09:00

Here is a recently published book on India that you might find interesting. If you wish to read a review of the book please visit Literary India at the following website under the title "Representing the Indian Nation and its People" by Ruchika Mohan:

http://literaryindia.com/Literature/World-Literature/Book-Reviews/Representing%20the%20Indian%20Nation%20and%20Its%20People.html

Representing India: Cultures, Politics, and Identities by Mukesh Williams and Rohit Wanchoo published from Oxford University Press, 2008, Pages 368, Price: £ 24.99 (United Kingdom), Rs. 695 (India) Hardback ISBN-13: 978-0-19-569226-6
The book can be bought from any of the amazon websites.

Obviously every book gives you something, but you have to wait till the very end of the chapter or sometimes even till the very end of the book to find something useful and significant. Representing India gives you tightly packed information in every page. It is obvious from the beginning of the book that Williams and Wanchoo know the subject as well as the best in the area. The book is unique in the sense that it is simply written taking the reader step-by-step from simple to difficult concepts. Both the authors have used their rich and wide-ranging experience as teachers and scholars, both in India and Japan, to deal with the most complicated ideas in a simple, matter-of-fact language. If you wish to write a research paper on India or get an overall view of Indian diversity, the book is worth reading. To give you an idea of the large sweep of the book here is a list of the chapters included in it:

1. The Sanskrit Heritage: Bengali and Hindi Literatures
2. English and Indian English Literature
3. Representing the Nation in the Hindi Media
4. Hindu Politics and the Nation
5. Religious Identities and Politics
6. South Asian Disapora: Negotiating Des Pardes

The footnotes are a beehive of well-documented references and cross-references. It is possible to use the footnotes to develop your newly acquired knowledge about India and delve deeper into any of the areas treated in the book, from languages to Diaspora.

All Saints Cathedral

2007-09-08T22:35:00.001+09:00

Who says colonial history
Doesn’t speak to us anymore.
Just look at the gothic spires,
The ballflower ornament,
Of the cream and red sandstones
Of the All Saints Cathedral and
You will see the darkening moss
Spreading like a sermon,
Telling a story of mango-dappled afternoons,
Guava scented mornings,
Where Christ became global
In form and content.

The cloisters are still
Dark and cold in summers,
The stained glass baptistery
Silently biblical and apocalyptic,
The reredo behind the marble alter still redolent
Of a belief in miracles,
The nave with dark teak pews
Echo with the voices of childhood.
If you strain your ears you can still hear
The dull soft choir of yesteryears
Now mixed with the cooing of roosting doves
And the decrepit stain of impermanence.

First written in December 1992, Allahabad and subsequently published in Bestpoem: A Literary Journal, January 7, 2008

Takiyama Kaido

2007-09-08T22:23:00.001+09:00

The rain shimmers, slants, swirls
In the brightly-lit Takiyama kaido while
Cars speed past in rain-smoking wheels
Towards many a wonderful pastime.

In the semi-darkness of the sidewalks,
Made darker by sakura tree branches,
Young girls in umbrellas speed-past on bicycles
Laughing and chatting loudly.

The michi-no-eki frogs
Carousing in paddy fields
Sing unequivocally in a chorus
Of the rural past of Hachioji.

As you walk past shuttered windows
You realize the two worlds fighting for survival:
The one fast asleep by late evening,
The other reluctant to go home early.

June 2007, Hachioji

Takiyama Kaido

2007-09-08T22:23:00.000+09:00

The rain shimmers, slants, swirls
In the brightly-lit Takiyama kaido while
Cars speed past in rain-smoking wheels
Towards many a wonderful pastime. .

In the semi-darkness of the sidewalks,
Made darker by sakura tree branches,
Young girls in umbrellas speed-past on bicycles
Laughing and chatting loudly..

The michi-no-eki frogs
Carousing in paddy fields
Sing unequivocally in a chorus
Of the rural past of Hachioji.

As you walk past shuttered windows
You realize the two worlds fighting for survival:
The one fast asleep by late evening,
The other reluctant to go home early.

June 2007, Hachioji

The Nakasendo Highway

2007-09-08T21:49:00.001+09:00

It climbs up into the sky
Curving at the point
Of the distant horizon
Where ideas meet emotion
Then vanishes like a wild animal
Between wooden houses in the
Overnight heavy snow.
In the morning it can only be
Recognized by occasional pugmarks
Of a pack of raccoon dogs,
Small clog footprints or
A lonely raven’s
Caw caw for food.

When the cedar forests
Are swollen with snow,
And their swooning pollen
Is caught
In the tight grip of winter,
When the buds of the
Peach, plum and cherry
Hide in their protective barks,
A dwarfish figure approaches
The barn, somewhat bent,
To clear the snow
Over the ishidatami
For no particular reason.

The snow
On the Hime No Kaido,
Remembers,
Apart from other
Nubile girls,
The princess Kazunomiya
Who also took this road
On her way to Edo
To marry a shogun,
Even while engaged
To another man,
Just to give more power
To the empire.

As her large retinue
Wound its way slowly
Through small towns
Making friends with people,
And rested on the shores
Of the vast blue Biwa Lake,
The princess looked back
Towards the wooden Kyoto
With wistful regret,
And had an inkling
Of things to come;
A married woman
Becoming a nun.

Hirosige’s floating world
Of 69 stations have
Now given way
To modernized expressways,
Streaking shinkansens,
And the distractions
Of the civilized world;
The beautiful post towns,
The secluded sukego villages,
The houses along the highway,
The old world of Nihonbashi,
The bookshops of Kanda,
Lie in ruin, or are nearly gone.

But the seasons remain and
The mountains of Sekigahara,
The Ise shrine of Amaterasu,
The snow of the Japanese Alps,
Come to life again in seasons
Of falling snow,
Of floating cherry blossoms,
Of cicadas chirping from trees.
And if your strain your ears
You can still hear the princess,
The daimyo and his horses,
The common people, breathing
As they negotiate the Nakasendo.

(Tokyo, 2006)

Black Grapes

2007-08-15T20:27:00.000+09:00

In a canopy of tangled vines
They hang bunch after bunch,
Ripening in the August sun.

Thick, warm and succulent
They reveal the limitless sky,
In a Keatsian sensuousness.

Twinkling, innocent, inebriated
Enter the celestial paradise,
Smear your lips with their taste.

August 2007, Takiyama

Stone Steps

2007-08-13T14:01:00.000+09:00

When you make a staircase,
Sketch its geography, and
Then embed it in nature,
It can last for centuries.

It needs no care,
It needs no cleaning,
It needs no repair and
It needs no adornment.

The wind cleans its surface,
The brook slakes its thirst,
The silver grass adorns it,
The cedar protects it.

Sit under the shadow of the tree,
Stretch your vision in a yearning
Beyond the cavernous hollow
And collapse within yourself.

Let your eyes brush past
The shadow under each step,
And watch the grasses sway
And the water glimmer.

Soon you can apprehend
The symbolic significance
Of a journey and the need
To hide in the universe.

August 10, Takao

Moving Spaces, Changing Places

2007-08-04T16:55:00.000+09:00

As the train rushes
Towards its destination
You begin to realize that
Nothing belongs to you forever;
Even the coziest place that
You’ve managed to create
By gently shifting your body
And arranging your bags
Exists in a temporary liaison.

Even if you make friends with strangers,
Exchange information about
Weather, music and people
They soon depart with a goodbye
Leaving an aching hollow behind;
You cannot ask for their names,
Or promise to contact them later,
They vanish drop by drop,
Step by step from your consciousness.

You reflect upon the protean condition
And soon realize that movement
Pushes desire into ever-changing shapes,
It leaves incomplete sentences,
Half-formed fantasies in its path.
Desire drips unceasingly
With its own evanescent sadness,
Its own inner cosmic spaces,
Its dissatisfying denouements.

August 2007, Tokyo

Get your own copy of my latest book: Moving Spaces, Changing Places

A Door

2007-07-07T20:34:00.000+09:00

A dark Burma teak door opens
Silently on its brass hinges,
Leaving its archway brooding
With many thoughts intruding.

It reveals an empty space
Of shadowed light traceries,
Where time’s phantoms find
Ancient knowledge confined.

The door, in its quartefoil hides
A tradition rich in grain and thought,
Giving a glimpse of mysteries sublime
Opening silently the door of the mind.

April 1984, Delhi

Japanese Hedge Bindweed

2007-07-03T16:56:00.000+09:00

Just for a brief moment
You can imagine
The delicate innocence
Of primordial creation.

Just for a brief moment
You stand witness to
The past emerging
In the present.

Just for a brief moment
You see enigmatic creation
Emerging as eternity
In innocent transience.

July 2007, Tokyo

Reality’s Barometer

2007-07-03T07:25:00.000+09:00

Sit in a barge
Sailing on a moonlit night
On the shimmer of the river,
Then wakeup
With a stiff shoulder and
A recriminating hangover.

Watch at night how fireflies streak
Through the dark foliage
Like magical beings,
During the day you soon realize
They’re just a bunch of
Crawling insects.

Takiyama Kaido

2007-06-22T21:13:00.000+09:00

The rain shimmers, slants, swirls,
In the brightly-lit Takiyama kaido, while
Cars speed past in rain-smoking wheels
Towards some planned sojourn.

In the semi-darkness of the sidewalks,
Made darker by sakura tree branches,
Young girls in umbrellas speed-past on bicycles
Laughing and chatting loudly.

The michi-no-eki frogs,
Carousing in paddy fields,
Sing unequivocally in a chorus
Of the rural past of Hachioji.

As you walk past shuttered windows
You see two different worlds:
The one fast asleep by late evening,
The other reluctant to go home early.

June 2007, Hachioji

The Vanishing Ganga

2007-06-19T14:42:00.001+09:00

Before this century is gone
The Ganga would have returned
To the heavens from whence it came,
So say the environmentalists.

The Gomukh glacier is receding
Faster than we had anticipated,
The greenhouse effect is now
Taking a toll of the devabhumi.

Look, religious tourism is on the rise!
Everyone is out to get a piece
Of the sacred ice before it is gone;
We all want moksha before it is too late.

You think this is reason enough to worry,
But wait a minute:
Global warming and human greed
Only fulfill a prophesy in the sastras.

We knew all along that in kalyug
The Ganga would return to the heavens
From whence it came, and watch benignly
From above, the goings on of mankind.

Once that happens you will see her
Only in the rainy season
Whistling through the dry ravines
As another mountain stream.

We, with the tonsured head, can tell you
There’s nothing to worry at all.
Once the Ganga vanishes, we will
Still worship her like Saraswati.

We will still seek moksha,
We will still take a dip at Prayag sangam,
We will still do the kriya at Haridwar,
We will still do all the rituals as of yore.

June 2007, Tokyo

Tokyo Central

2007-06-15T22:56:00.000+09:00

In the midst of Edo and Dutch
Red bricks and black granite architectonics,
Tourists, homeless, old, and drunk,
Sit here and there on grass patches,
Impassively munching snacks for dinner.

Two male cobblers
Are vigorously polishing boots
In the company of drunks
Their hands matching the
Speed of the motley traffic.

People are rushing to and fro
Going in different directions,
Some waiting at traffic lights,
Others engrossed, looking inward,
Matching speed with speed.

There a tourist sits with a homeless,
Here an old man with a drunk and,
Perhaps they wonder at the heart’s squalor,
The mean hurry of daily life,
The real value of diligence and enterprise.

June 2007, Tokyo

Quiet Contemplation

2007-06-14T13:07:00.000+09:00

As you drink steaming hot coffee
In a proper white china mug, you can
Relax within a perfumed ambience
Of quiet contemplation.

If you grab a silly plastic coffee bottle
From a convenience store
You’ll miss the subtle aroma,
The quiet contemplation.

March 2006, Tokyo

Excerpt from Chuo Line and Other Poems by Mukesh Williams

Disappointed

2007-06-10T13:23:00.000+09:00

In an ostentatious display
Of joie de vivre
She was observing
The delicate shape of her hand,
How her thick round fingers
Tapered into long slender nails.

Then she checked
If anyone was watching her,
Disappointed,
She went off to sleep.

Excerpt from Chuo Line and Other Poems by Mukesh Williams

Triveni Sangam

2007-06-09T21:18:00.000+09:00

If you are frightened of
The turbid waters of the triveni sangam,
Extortions by boatmen, pandas, diya boys,
The crocodiles, and the dead bodies,

Then you will miss
Brahma’s most relaxing presence,
The mesmeric collapsing of time,
The play with the cycle of birth and death,

A discourse on the Bhagvad Gita,
The once-in-a-lifetime darshan of a guru,
The chant ‘Ganga maiya ki jai’
At Bharatvarsha’s only teerath sthan.

The Vedas, Ramayana, Mahabharata,
The Puranas all see it as a part
Of a greater cosmology—the samudra manthan—
Where devas and asuras fought

To posses the amrit in the pot,
And during this fight
A tiny drop fell at Prayag,
Giving it a super sanctity.

It is here Harshavardan gave away
All his earthly possessions,
It is here the Siddhartha meditated
On the Middle Path,

It is here that itinerant
Chinese, Greek and Indian scholars—
Megasthenes, Huien Tsang and Shankaracharya—
Came to experience the efficacy of Ganga water.

It is here, close to the confluence,
By the banks of the Yamuna,
Akbar built the Allahabad fort
That includes Mogul and Hindu icons—

The Saraswati well, the Patalpuri Temple, and
The immortal Akshaya vat,
Or the banyan tree
And the Ashoka pillar from Kausambi

Now as evening expands from the
Remote horizon to the shore,
And spreads upon the waters
Against the backdrop of the cable bridge,

A few men in white dhoti and kurta
Are busy carrying pots of Ganga water
Back to their village that
They will place on their family alter.

Whatever you might say in the West,
Whatever the Far East might do
To purify the Ganga water
With modern technology

Here is the source
Of immortality,
A function of the higher consciousness,
Purity has nothing to do with hygiene.

Here in midstream,
Where triveni sangam happens
You can stand in waist-deep water
And see the spin

Of muddy yellow Ganga
Against a turquoise blue Yamuna
And imagine a subterranean Saraswati
Rising from deep below the kund.

You are now surrounded by pandas
Who stand with their holy threads,
And tilak on their foreheads
On small wooden platforms

In the middle of the rivers
Reciting Sanskrit slokas,
Helping pilgrims
With ablutions for a fee.

In the evening oil-wick diyas
Go at great speed over the water
What a splendid way to say goodbye
To all your negative karma

If you are brave enough
You can meet your childhood in youth
And see your old age
In a splash of water;

You can understand
Your entire future
In the intricate play
Of light and shade.

They are all here for something big:
A belief, a quest, a realization,
Or a divine intervention.

On a few Kumbh days once in 12 years—
On Makar Sankranti, Basant Panchmi or Maha Shivratri—
You could see all kinds of folks,
Sadhus, ordinary people, and tourists.

You could see Naga babas
Moving around naked
With ash smeared bodies
In a defiant swagger.

You could hear the Parivajakas
Who have owed not to speak
As they make a way through a crowd
By ringing small bells.

You could see the Kalpvasis
Bathing in the Ganga thrice
Drinking its water,
And protesting at the rising water pollution.

You could see the Shirshasins
Who stand on their heads to
Meditate, rest, sleep and
See the world upside down;

Or the Urdhwavahurs who,
In doing severe austerity,
Find solace and peace
In mid and body.

They are here
Waiting at triveni sangam
When Jupiter enters Aquarius
And sun enters Aires.

They are waiting for
The water of the Ganga
To turn to amrit
And then to taste one drop;

To realize this phenomenon
Called moksha.
Some feel it’s a foregone conclusion.
Some feel there’s no harm trying.

Here is civilization at its best
That can take you
Not only into a remembered past
But beyond into an unmediated time,

To the roots of your origin
This is what an old civilization
Like ours
Can do.

There has to be something in it
When so many people
Have thought about it
For so long.

August 2005, Allahabad

Shifting Shadows

2007-06-05T10:14:00.000+09:00

(A reflection on the Latin,
pulvis et umbra or
of our dusty shadowy existence)

The shadow sticks to you
When you depart from it,
Indicating something
In its faint outline.

In its pastel contours
It reveals, for a moment,
An imperfect representation
Of a shadowy existence.

Somber in the pale shadows
Of its adumbration
The penumbra hides the
Bright light of the universe.

June 2007, Hachioji

Himeji Castle

2007-06-03T20:11:00.000+09:00

It glides like a white bird
On a mountaintop,
Gently swaying in the wind,
Touching the clouds,
Immaculate,
Waiting to be invincible,
Watching secretly
The comings and goings
Not only of the enemy but
Of powerful clans and,
Loving families.

Beating its
White flawless wings
In the stillness of the sky
It climbs higher
On the bamboo-scented breeze
Remembering the sliding shoji,
The delicate hand of princess Sen,
The box tree comb,
The whizzing of arrows,
The closing of huge doors,
Moving, yet not moving.

June 2006, Tokyo

Summer Crickets

2007-06-02T22:01:00.000+09:00

There are so many kinds of crickets that you will be astonished to know their names. There are field crickets, ground crick, tree crickets, ant crickets, Mormon crickets, cave crickets, mole crickets, Weta crickets, Jerusalem crickets, sand crickets and so on. These are shy, nocturnal creatures and in many cultures, like the Brazilian, their chirping brings money or rain. However to most of us, the chirping of crickets can be most relaxing and can put us to sleep. Here is a poem about crickets in Hachioji, a semi-rural suburb of Tokyo:

Silence,
Silence at last,
In the dark,
Soft bed;
Becoming one
With the chirping
of crickets.

Night descends
Every moment,
Slowly and quietly,
Lulling the senses;
The wind sleeps
In the chirping
Of a dream.

May 2007, Hachioji

Hachioji Matsuri

2007-06-02T20:24:00.001+09:00

In Japan, the oppressive heat of the summer makes day-to-day existence unbearable. The Japanese have found an excellent method to alleviate the misery of hot and muggy afternoons by relaxing with chilled beer, wearing comfortable cotton dresses, dancing to the beat of heavy drums, eating at outdoor stalls, and mingling with friends and strangers alike. Hachioji, a semi-rural, sleepy suburb of Tokyo, springs to life on such a summer Matsuri. Here is a poem that captures the atmosphere and the spirit of a Hachioji Matsuri.

In the middle of the summer heat
Thousands of yukata-clad women
Dance to the slow beat of Hachioji song
Along the koshu kaido,
While children eat
Steamed potato with butter,
Finding the new-found freedom
All too exciting.

August 2006, Hachioji

The Haiku in Japanese and English

2007-06-02T13:46:00.002+09:00

By Mukesh Williams

The haiku is perhaps the most important literary genre that has become popular since the late nineteenth century not only in Asia but throughout the western world. In the process of globalizing the haiku form has jumped the linguistic barrier and is now being written in English, Spanish, French, Bengali and other languages as well. It, however, continues to conform to the images of the four seasons and the three-line structure of 5-7-5 syllables. In Japanese the haiku dexterously combines three distinct phrases and introduces a clear grammatical break called the kireji or cutting letters, either after the first five or twelve syllables. At times a haiku can also use kake kotoba or hanging words. A kake kotoba can also function as multiple puns. Writing in Japanese, Takahama Kyoshi (1874-1959) used standard kireji in the following haiku:

higashiyama
shizukani hane no
ochini keri

a feather shuttlecock
gently falling—
higashiyama hill

In English the kireji is often replaced by punctuation marks such as a comma, semi-colon or an ellipsis. Since a Japanese haiku has three clear phrases and a kireji it is written in a single line, while the English haiku is separated into three lines to mark the difference. Therefore many Japanese literary critics feel that forcing a fixed form of kireji and kigo on other languages makes little sense. Others are of the opinion that literary forms are forever crossing borders and getting transformed in the process, enriching both language and experience.

Every haiku must express a single emotion arising from observing common, day-to-day occurrences, but in a unique way. Most traditional haiku writers in Japan build their haiku vis-à-vis, the natural world and use images related to the four seasons or kigo. It is possible to find images of cherry blossoms, emerging crocus, flitting fireflies, leaves falling, frogs croaking, snow falling or moon rising in the works of many haiku masters. It is important to remember that in a successful haiku the image is not just a means to an end but the end itself; that is, the image is the poem.

A haiku falls under the category of a short poem, but it has a long history. In Japan short poems written by Shinto priests to mark a ceremony or a ritual can be found as early as 759 A.D. These poems were called Manyoshu or Collection of Myriad Leaves anthology and expressed a sense of inherent sadness in ordinary things of the world called mono no aware in Japanese. The poems in the Myriad Leaves anthology are in the form of prayers, songs or lyrics composed to appease gods, eulogize emperors, and represent agricultural rituals or marriage rites. In the beginning of the fifteenth century emerging middle class began to assert itself in Japanese society and threw sake-drinking parties where they made merry by composing erotic, slapstick verses called haikai no renge or comic linked verses. The four writers who are considered as the chief exponents of the haikai forms were Yamazaki Sokan (1465-1553), Arakida Moritake (1473-1549), Matsunaga Teitoku (1571-1635) and Nishiyama Soin (1605-1682). Of these four haikai writers Teitoku founded the Teimon School which emphasized colloquialism and word play, while Soin established the Danrin School which playfully wrote about day-to-day events and at times turned frivolous.

Teitoku had a deeper influence on the subsequent history and development of the haiku form. He cleaned the form of its vulgar elements and taught it to his student Matsuo Basho (1644-1649) whom we all know as the foremost haiku writer of Japan. Basho popularized the haiku form through his large acolyte following and travels throughout Japan. Remember that Basho made a living writing and teaching poetry. It is believed that when Basho died he had over two thousand students studying under him. Other haiku poets such as Yosa Buson (1716-1783), Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), Kawahigashi Hekigoto (1873-1937), Taneda Santoka (1882-1940) and Nakamura Kusatao (1901-1983) made it a truly popular genre.

The history of haiku poetry has always been dominated by male writers but there were many women writers as well who wrote excellent haiku such as Den Sutejo (1633-1698), Kawai Chigetsu (1634?–1718), Shiba Sonome (1664–1726), Chiyojo (1703–1775), Enomoto Seifu (1732–1815), Tagami Kikusha (1753–1826), Takeshita Shizunojo (1887–1951), Sugita Hisajo (1890–1946), Hashimoto Takako (1899–1963), Mitsuhashi Takajo (1899–1972), Ishibashi Hideno (1909–1947), Katsura Nobuko (b. 1914), Yoshino Yoshiko (b. 1915), Tsuda Kiyoko (b. 1920), Inahata Teiko (b. 1931), Uda Kiyoko (b. 1935), Kuroda Momoko (b. 1938), Tsuji Momoko (b. 1945), Katayama Yumiko (b. 1952), Mayuzumi Madoka (b. 1965). Their works were published in an anthology by Makoto Ueda called Far Beyond the Field: Haiku by Japanese Women, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).They wrote some excellent haiku, not just “women haiku” and made significant contributions in the development of the haiky form. Take for example the following haiku by Enomoto Seifu:

like a fish
in the sea, this body of mine
cool in the moonlight

The haiku form became popular in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and South Asia in the twentieth century through the efforts of Japanese American, Afro-American, Jewish American, WASP and vernacular writers. In fact an entirely new haiku called the Jewish haiku developed which combined the Japanese literary tradition with Jewish humor. American writers also popularized the form in America providing a unique fusion of Japanese and American sensibilities and eastern and western aesthetics. They were able to retain the simplicity, seasonal relevance and surprise of Japanese haiku and combine it with typically American themes. Latin American and vernacular Indian writers introduced their own variation and flavor to a distinctly Japanese literary form. We can find writers such as W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to Amiri Baraka, Jorge Luis Borges Octavio O Paz writing excellent haiku. Here is a haiku by Jack Kerouac written in 1959:

Early morning yellow flowers,
thinking about
the drunkards of Mexico.

The haiku has the season but the context is strikingly American.

The haiku form has also affected poets in the Indian vernaculars such as Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and Urdu. In the 1950s Hindi poets like Srikant Varma, Sarveshwardayal Saxena, Ashok Vajpayee and others developed a minimalist style comparable to the haiku form. Shrikant Varma for example wrote the following verse in Hindi:

The first shower of rain
The sky has thrown
Its roots on earth.

All these writers understood the brevity and element of surprise hidden in the haiku form and harnessed it to their own literary ends.

The modern haiku in English has evolved in strange ways, some inspiring while others quite frustrating. The following haiku by Ezra Pound in Ts’ai Chi’h perhaps brings us close to the Japanese masters:

The petals fall in the fountain,
The orange-colored rose leaves,
Their ochre clings to the stone.

This brief explanation can help you not only to read other haiku, but also to compose your own in the near future.

Four Haiku by Mukesh Williams

1.
The white summer rose
Tells you nothing of
Your conceit.

2.
Every blossom
Of the persimmon cannot
Become a fruit.

3.
The summer moth
Merges with the brick wall:
Teaches subterfuge.

4.
A duck waddles
From one pond to another:
A soul in transit.

Huntington Road, Cambridge

2007-05-31T21:01:00.000+09:00

Sometimes,
In the intimidating proximity of shadows
You want to retreat
Into the very sensations of the body
From where you wish to escape,

But the vanishing road escarpment,
The artifice of colonial history,
Leaves you somewhat disembodied
And agitated
By the spirit of things to come.

August 1997, Cambridge

The Chuo Line

2007-05-29T14:19:00.001+09:00

This is the morning rush hour
On the Chuo rapid to Tokyo,
Men are holding their jackets or
Have folded them over their satchels
In their lap and gone to sleep;
Women are not far behind.

As the hot air from the radiator
Warm their thighs and bottoms
Some women lose their modesty and
Go to sleep with bedroom abandon;
Men reading folded newspapers
Take an occasional peep.

Squat houses whiz by outside,
Bicycle stands appear and disappear;
An entire metropolitan geography opens
In the somewhat muggy morning
Made muggier by packed commuters
And sudden lurches and jerks.

High school girls in sailor uniforms
In triple folded skirts at the waist
Show their pudgy cream thighs
As they stand eating breakfast,
While boys push down their trousers
Holding them by their buttocks.

There is pin drop silence except
For the periodic cackle of the PA system,
Or the hydraulic hiss of
Opening and closing doors.
Stations arrive and go by
As if in a fantasy or a dream.

The train whistles by with
So much of self involvement,
An occasional foreigner like me
Tries to behave as any other local
But what a waste of effort:
They eye me furtively when I doze.

February 2006, Hachioji

Alone

2007-05-22T16:48:00.000+09:00

The Gangotri glacier throbs beneath,
My feet, deep and voluminous,
Twisting old mysteries into life.

Huge chunks of ice growl
From below its huge caverns
Feeding a wish-fulfilling Gomukh.

A throbbing silence penetrates
Time without beginning and
Echoes incomprehensible eternity.

Reflected in Tapovan’s emerald blue waters
The caves of Indian hermits are now quiet
As thoughts of some rarified beings

The terra firma, more like a lunar world,
Shapes strange images of the unfamiliar,
Overwhelming the senses.

Crowned with sharp white snow
Shivling’s bewitching divinity lingers
In a translucent darkness

If you were to wait here any longer
You might lose the desire
For human company altogether.

Takiyama Mountains

2007-05-13T20:21:00.000+09:00

The night breathes quietly
The Takiyama Mountains
Elbow a hush
Into the valley below
Crickets chirp
A rising colonnade of history
The impenetrable castle
A powerful daimyo
Pushing for control
The Honmaru embankment
Still holding together

Thoughts get startled
By the zoom of a scooter,
The thud of an object,
In the apartment building
Across the road
The thump of a door,
Somewhere
In the neighborhood,
An accelerating car
Jumping a traffic light
Near the Hiyodoriama Tunnel

The Orion constellation
Light up the sumi-colored night
And there is a distinct
Smell of perfume that
I can recognize
As the door of a car closes
With a thump and then the
Cloperty clop clop
Cloperty clop clop
Of a woman in high heels
Put me to sleep

A Coffee Shop

2007-05-06T05:31:00.000+09:00

An old style French coffee shop
Wafting warm coffee smell
In a light drizzle,
A soft piano music
Quiet between an occasional
Clutter of cups,
Chopping of salad,
A brief conversation
A pretty waitress
In white and crimson dress
A drizzle of piano music
And nothing else to do,
No hurry,
Just a quiet reflection
Unwinding itself

Fog

2007-05-04T06:43:00.000+09:00

Stray dogs yelp
In the growing fog
At night.

Perhaps
They got
Frightened

In the garbage dump
By some foraging pig
Doing a midnight jig.

Kalkaji

2007-05-04T06:42:00.001+09:00

Early morning fog
Of January
Turning into
Large droplets
Against
The windowpanes.

The fog swirls
Around trees,
On the roads,
Across the bridge,
Hazing headlights,
Slowing traffic

The sound of
The brass bell
Of the
Prachin Bhairon Mandir
Rides
The fog

The washed
And sanctified
Stone parikrama
Is cold against
The naked feet of
Men and women

Homeless men
Huddled against
The huge stonewall
Of the temple
Breathing slowly
In their dirty blankets

Here
They wait
For the
Early morning
Devotes who will
Offer them some food.

The Nakasendo Highway

2007-05-04T06:38:00.000+09:00

It climbs up into the sky
Curving at the point
Of the distant horizon
Where ideas meet emotion
Then vanishes like a wild animal
Between wooden houses in the
Overnight heavy snow
In the morning it can only be
Recognized by occasional pugmarks
Of a pack of raccoon dogs,
Small clog footprints or
A lonely raven’s
Caw caw for food.

When the cedar forests
Are swollen with snow
And their swooning pollen
Is caught
In the tight grip of winter,
When the buds of the
Peach, plum and cherry
Hide in their protective barks
A dwarfish figure approaches
The barn, somewhat bent,
To clear the snow
Over the ishidatami (*1)
For no particular reason

The snow
On the hime no kaido (*2),
Remembers
Apart from other
Nubile girls
Princess Kazunomiya
Who also took this road
On her way to Edo
To marry a shogun,
Even when engaged
To another man,
Just to give more power
To the empire.

As her large retinue
Wound slowly
Through small towns
Making friends with people
And rested
At Lake Biwa,
She looked back
Towards Kyoto
With wistful regret
And had an inkling
Of things to come;
A married woman
Becoming a nun.

Hirosuge’s floating world
Of 69 stations have
Now given way
To modernized expressways,
Streaking shinkansens,
And the distractions
Of the civilized world;
The beautiful post towns,
The secluded sukego villages,
Houses along the highway,
The old world of Nihonbashi ,
The bookshops of Kanda,
Lie in ruin or are nearly gone.

But the seasons remain and
The mountains of Sekigahara,
The Ise shrine of Amaterasu,
The snow of the Japanese Alps,
Come to life again in seasons
Of falling snow,
Of floating cherry blossoms,
Of cicadas chirping from trees,
And if your strain your ears
You can still hear the princess,
Daimyo and his horses,
The entire nation breathing
As it traverses the Nakasendo

(*1) Stone tatami
(*2) The road of the princesses

Three Summer Haiku

2005-06-11T12:30:00.000+09:00

The white summer rose
Tells you nothing of
Your conceit.

Every blossom
Of the persimmon cannot
Become a fruit.

The summer moth
Merges with the brick wall:
Teaching subterfuge.