A Factory or an Ashram?

By Girish Menon

In the Malayalam cult classic Chintavishtayaya Shyamala, Mukundan the protagonist wishes for a carefree life playing and hanging out with friends despite having a wife and two school going daughters. As the pressure grows, from his wife and other members of his extended family, to change his ways Mukundan runs away to an ashram where the sadhus are known to meditate for moksha (release from worldly cares). After 6-7 months at the ashram, the head sadhu (note the hierarchical corporate structure) invites Mukundan for an interview (6.17). The head sadhu mentions that Mukundan had not yet volunteered to either teach at an ashram school or offer to take care of the ashram cattle. In the following scene Mukundan mentions to a fellow sadhu, ‘I did not know this was a factory. If I had to work, I could have stayed in town and not come this far’.

Today, in an increasingly religious India, such ashrams seem to burgeon all over the land. Amazingly, these ashrams seem to be run by unpaid volunteers who work from 5 in the morning to 9 in the evening, seven days a week. Many of these volunteers are retired from corporate jobs and have chosen to spend the rest of their lives obeying the diktats of a saffron clad guru and his managers. More importantly, these volunteers claim that their minds are at peace doing seva (service) for the guru.

There might be some inner need which the ashram job seems to fulfil and which the modern corporations are unable to do so with their workforce. I have seen some of these ashram volunteers complain incessantly when they were working at their corporate jobs. Today, the same person uses all her waking hours advancing the cause of the ashram without any material gain. Some of them have been known to give up their personal homes and even pay rent to the ashram for an opportunity to provide seva.

Of course, there is a difference in the profile of the volunteer as compared to the corporate worker. The volunteers are usually retired, have an empty nest and are at a loss to spend their waking hours. The corporate workers are younger, aspirational, have demanding partners and kids and are perennially short of time.

David Cameron, the former British Prime Minister, made a good point that volunteers need to be encouraged to take over large sections of society. This has increased the number of volunteers running sports clubs, charities etc. in the UK.  Usually, some of the older volunteers bring a lot of worldly experience which could enable their voluntary organisations to perform better than with younger paid employees. In India, the saffron clad gurus have shown their smartness by recruiting such zero-cost volunteers to enhance their corporate goals. However, this begs the bigger question i.e. is India forcibly retiring its experienced workforce too soon?

‘Essay factory’ offers 2:1 degree or your cash back

 

Liz Lightfoot

 
IT is the academic equivalent of "phone a friend". Students are being sold foolproof dissertations written for them with a cashback guarantee if they fail to get at least a 2:1 degree.
 
Instead of burning the midnight oil, all the students have to do is put the cost on their credit card. The company selling the service also says its contributors can ghost-write a first-class version of the essay for £1,440. An MA dissertation will cost up to £15,000.
 
The offers by the website UKEssays.com are the latest evidence of the growth of "essay mills", widely condemned as cheating aids. The firms claim they do not encourage dishonesty and say they tell students to use the essays as a "resource" and not hand them in.
 
The tailor-made work is becoming increasingly popular as universities become better at detecting direct plagiarism from the internet.
Most universities now use anti-plagiarism software to scan work that students submit, but they have done little to combat the essay mills.
 
UKEssays.com promises to put the completed essay through its own anti-plagiarism scanner to make sure it cannot be detected.
The firm is among the most successful of the essay mills. Its parent company, Academic Answers Ltd, recently reported profits of £241,598 for the year ending November 30, 2008. Its founder, Barclay Littlewood, 31, a qualified solicitor, has an estimated fortune of some £7m, according to The Sunday Times Young Rich List.
 
The company claims to have 4,000 contributors, ranging from serving lecturers to solicitors, retired doctors and recent graduates, who write the essays on behalf of students.
 
It says it has regular customers from universities including Durham and York. It claims none of the essays it recently provided for 240 students at Nottingham and Nottingham Trent universities to pilot its new guarantee was detected.
 
Many university degrees now award all marks — or nearly all — through coursework and dissertations rather than final exams, making them vulnerable to students plagiarising work or buying essays online.
 
Last week a Sunday Times researcher posing as an Edinburgh University undergraduate asked the company about providing a final-year dissertation and essays for a course in English literature and classics.
 
A member of staff at UKEssays.com told her that a 6,000-word dissertation, which would count towards her final degree, would cost £1,440 at first-class standard and £720 for a 2:1. She advised that students should not try buying essays that were of an improbably high standard.
 
Tony Eynon, managing director of UKEssays.com, based in Nottingham, said the new guarantee was a "real breakthrough in contemporary academia".
 
Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think tank, said: "It is potentially very serious and undermines the whole fabric of higher education."

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