Eva Wiseman in The Guardian
My friend and I bought the same book on Amazon, and it changed us, but in quite different ways. The book was Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, an examination of the gruesome way poultry and cattle are slaughtered to produce cheap meat for people like me. A quarter of the way through I closed it, tucked it on to the shelf – I knew that if I continued to read I would no longer be able to enjoy roast chicken, or Peking duck, or oily lardons knotted in spaghetti. I knew I’d have to be a better person; I’d have to live a slightly less lovely life. I stopped reading. While it opened my eyes to my failings and limits, Becca, who finished the book, became a vegetarian.
As I read about the ethical problems with Airbnb, Uber and every other smiling company that makes our lives easier, I am under no illusions about my own goodness. I believe it is almost impossible to live ethically as a human being. There is no way for humans to inhabit the world, is there, without spoiling something crucial. We are massive ruiners. If we want to stay clean and warm, and if we want to have a laugh, it is highly likely somebody or something will feel the negative effects of our basic joy. And when we do act ethically, isn’t the main gain simply a “sense of wellbeing”, perhaps the most vanilla of the senses? However hard we try, there will be something we get wrong. Since giving up meat, Becca brushes off regular questions from local bores about things like the carbon footprint of her salad, yet on she crunches, trying.
Here are some of the ways in which I am dreadful. Regardless of the books I buy, whether on meat eating or true crime, I continue to buy them from sites that avoid tax and treat their workers like machines, because they arrive so promptly and because they cost 10p plus postage. I pay that 10p on a phone built under slave-like conditions with materials the profits of which may or may not have funded a genocide. More: our flat is on the market for wild and pretend money, which means I am becoming part of the problem crippling my beloved, disgusting city. I even arranged flowers on our kitchen table with the quiet thought that potential buyers might pay even more for a place that smells of sweetpeas. I am scum. Worse, when I see people trying to be better – when I have lunch with Becca, with her peanut noodles and fishless fingers – I feel a silent judgment. It comes from inside me; she doesn’t care what I eat. It’s me. I feel bad about the route my sandwich filling took to get to my plate, and sitting with her reminds me of that, so I will be tempted to try and undermine her choice by asking about the leather of her shoes. Scum. But I guilt-barter. We each have a certain moral budget, and I choose to spend mine on meat and Amazon. I choose my thing.
When you stare straight into the horrors of the modern world, they can blind you. There’s a moment before I click to buy the 10p book when I begin to add up the wrongs I’ve committed that day, that hour. The long shower, with the exfoliator that kills fish, the bottle of water I bought on the way to work. The £7 dress, the potentially trafficked manicure, the leftover lunch I threw away, the lights I left on, the heating in May. And I vow to be better, soon, as payback. My attempts, however, like signing an online petition, barely touch the sides of my shittiness. It is impossible to live ethically.
But how bad should we feel, really? Surely the responsibility shouldn’t all be ours. Products and services should not come to market if there is any chance they have passed through the hands of a slave. It doesn’t sound like too much to ask. And shouldn’t there be an equivalent to the nutritional facts on tins, a label with quantities of evil? We’d be able to budget more effectively – an Amazon Prime here, a speak-up-when-an-acquaintance-makes-a-racist-joke there. That’s how I’m learning to live. A charity bake sale, an Uber home. A meat-free day, but wearing a really cheap T-shirt.
Putting down that book has made me look at how much I choose not to see. It’s no revolutionary realisation, but as we find increasingly meaningless ways to balance our ethical chequebooks, I am embracing my limits. As long as we try not to be the complete worst and accept our scumminess, then there is little point in asking how to be good. The answer, surely, is to try and simply be good enough.
'People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right - especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.' Thomas Sowell
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Sunday, 12 June 2016
Saturday, 11 June 2016
Economics Struggles to Cope With Reality
Noah Smith in Bloomberg
There are basically four different activities that all go by the name of macroeconomics. But they actually have relatively little to do with each other. Understanding the differences between them is helpful for understanding why debates about the business cycle tend to be so confused.
The first is what I call “coffee-house macro,” and it’s what you hear in a lot of casual discussions. It often revolves around the ideas of dead sages -- Friedrich Hayek, Hyman Minsky and John Maynard Keynes. It doesn’t involve formal models, but it does usually contain a hefty dose of political ideology.
The second is finance macro. This consists of private-sector economists and consultants who try to read the tea leaves on interest rates, unemployment, inflation and other indicators in order to predict the future of asset prices (usually bond prices). It mostly uses simple math, though advanced forecasting models are sometimes employed. It always includes a hefty dose of personal guesswork.
The third is academic macro. This traditionally involves professors making toy models of the economy -- since the early ’80s, these have almost exclusively been DSGE models (if you must ask, DSGE stands for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium). Though academics soberly insist that the models describe the deep structure of the economy, based on the behavior of individual consumers and businesses, most people outside the discipline who take one look at these models immediately think they’re kind of a joke. They contain so many unrealistic assumptions that they probably have little chance of capturing reality. Their forecasting performance is abysmal. Some of their core elements are clearly broken. Any rigorous statistical tests tend to reject these models instantly, because they always include a hefty dose of fantasy.
The fourth type I call Fed macro. The Federal Reserve uses an eclectic approach, involving both data and models. Sometimes the models are of the DSGE type, sometimes not. Fed macro involves taking data from many different sources, instead of the few familiar numbers like unemployment and inflation, and analyzing the information in a bunch of different ways. And it inevitably contains a hefty dose of judgment, because the Fed is responsible for making policy.
How can there be four very different activities that all go by the same name, and all claim to study and understand the same phenomena? My view is that academic macro has basically failed the other three.
Because academic macro models are so out of touch with reality, people in causal coffee-house discussions can’t refer to academic research to help make their points. Instead, they have to turn back to the old masters, who if vague and wordy were at least describing a world that had some passing resemblance to the economy we observe in our daily lives.
And because academic macro is so useless for forecasting -- including predicting the results of policy changes -- the financial industry can’t use it for practical purposes. I’ve talked to dozens of people in finance about why they don’t use DSGE models, and some have indeed tried to use them -- but they always dropped the models after poor performance.
Most unfortunately, the Fed has had to go it alone when studying how the macroeconomy really works. Regional Fed banks and the Federal Reserve Board function as macroeconomic think tanks, hiring top-level researchers to do the grubby data work and broad thinking that academia has decided is beneath it. But that leaves many of the field’s brightest minds locked in the ivory tower, playing with their toys.
Fortunately, this may be changing. Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan professor and well-known economics commentator, recently presented a set of slides at a conference celebrating the career of Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Olivier Blanchard. The slides, although short, are indicative of the sea change underway in the macro field.
Wolfers discusses how some of the main pillars of modern academic macro theory are now being challenged. The idea of “rational expectations,” which says that people on average use the correct mental model of the economy when they make their decisions, is being challenged by top professors, and many are looking at alternatives.
But that’s just the beginning -- far deeper changes may be in the offing. Wolfers suggested abandoning DSGE models, saying that they “haven’t worked.” That he said this at a conference honoring Blanchard, who was an important DSGE modeling pioneer, is a sign that the winds have shifted.
In place of the typical DSGE fare, Wolfers suggests that the new macroeconomics will focus on empirics and falsification -- in other words, looking at reality instead of making highly imaginative assumptions about it. He also says that macro will be fertilized by other disciplines, such as psychology and sociology, and will incorporate elements of behavioral economics.
I’d go even farther. I think the new macroeconomics won’t just be new kinds of models and a more empirical focus; it will redefine what “macroeconomics” even means.
As originally conceived, macro is about explaining national-level data series like employment, output and prices. Eventually, economists realized that to explain those things, they would need to understand the smaller pieces of the economy, such as consumer behavior or competition between companies. At first, they just imagined or postulated how these elements worked -- that’s the core of DSGE.
Economists now realize that consumers and businesses behave in ways that are much more complicated and difficult to understand. So there has been increased interest in what’s called “macro-focused micro” -- studies of businesses, competition, markets and individual behavior that have relevance for macro even though they weren’t traditionally included in the field. Examples of this would include studies of business dynamism, price adjustment, financial bubbles and differences between workers.
Let’s hope more and more macroeconomists focus on these things, instead of trying to make big, grandiose, but ultimately vacuous models of booms and recessions. When we understand the pieces of the economy better, we’ll have a much better chance of grasping the whole. If this continues, maybe the ivory tower will have more relevance for the Fed, the financial industry and maybe even for our coffee-house discussions.
There are basically four different activities that all go by the name of macroeconomics. But they actually have relatively little to do with each other. Understanding the differences between them is helpful for understanding why debates about the business cycle tend to be so confused.
The first is what I call “coffee-house macro,” and it’s what you hear in a lot of casual discussions. It often revolves around the ideas of dead sages -- Friedrich Hayek, Hyman Minsky and John Maynard Keynes. It doesn’t involve formal models, but it does usually contain a hefty dose of political ideology.
The second is finance macro. This consists of private-sector economists and consultants who try to read the tea leaves on interest rates, unemployment, inflation and other indicators in order to predict the future of asset prices (usually bond prices). It mostly uses simple math, though advanced forecasting models are sometimes employed. It always includes a hefty dose of personal guesswork.
The third is academic macro. This traditionally involves professors making toy models of the economy -- since the early ’80s, these have almost exclusively been DSGE models (if you must ask, DSGE stands for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium). Though academics soberly insist that the models describe the deep structure of the economy, based on the behavior of individual consumers and businesses, most people outside the discipline who take one look at these models immediately think they’re kind of a joke. They contain so many unrealistic assumptions that they probably have little chance of capturing reality. Their forecasting performance is abysmal. Some of their core elements are clearly broken. Any rigorous statistical tests tend to reject these models instantly, because they always include a hefty dose of fantasy.
The fourth type I call Fed macro. The Federal Reserve uses an eclectic approach, involving both data and models. Sometimes the models are of the DSGE type, sometimes not. Fed macro involves taking data from many different sources, instead of the few familiar numbers like unemployment and inflation, and analyzing the information in a bunch of different ways. And it inevitably contains a hefty dose of judgment, because the Fed is responsible for making policy.
How can there be four very different activities that all go by the same name, and all claim to study and understand the same phenomena? My view is that academic macro has basically failed the other three.
Because academic macro models are so out of touch with reality, people in causal coffee-house discussions can’t refer to academic research to help make their points. Instead, they have to turn back to the old masters, who if vague and wordy were at least describing a world that had some passing resemblance to the economy we observe in our daily lives.
And because academic macro is so useless for forecasting -- including predicting the results of policy changes -- the financial industry can’t use it for practical purposes. I’ve talked to dozens of people in finance about why they don’t use DSGE models, and some have indeed tried to use them -- but they always dropped the models after poor performance.
Most unfortunately, the Fed has had to go it alone when studying how the macroeconomy really works. Regional Fed banks and the Federal Reserve Board function as macroeconomic think tanks, hiring top-level researchers to do the grubby data work and broad thinking that academia has decided is beneath it. But that leaves many of the field’s brightest minds locked in the ivory tower, playing with their toys.
Fortunately, this may be changing. Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan professor and well-known economics commentator, recently presented a set of slides at a conference celebrating the career of Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Olivier Blanchard. The slides, although short, are indicative of the sea change underway in the macro field.
Wolfers discusses how some of the main pillars of modern academic macro theory are now being challenged. The idea of “rational expectations,” which says that people on average use the correct mental model of the economy when they make their decisions, is being challenged by top professors, and many are looking at alternatives.
But that’s just the beginning -- far deeper changes may be in the offing. Wolfers suggested abandoning DSGE models, saying that they “haven’t worked.” That he said this at a conference honoring Blanchard, who was an important DSGE modeling pioneer, is a sign that the winds have shifted.
In place of the typical DSGE fare, Wolfers suggests that the new macroeconomics will focus on empirics and falsification -- in other words, looking at reality instead of making highly imaginative assumptions about it. He also says that macro will be fertilized by other disciplines, such as psychology and sociology, and will incorporate elements of behavioral economics.
I’d go even farther. I think the new macroeconomics won’t just be new kinds of models and a more empirical focus; it will redefine what “macroeconomics” even means.
As originally conceived, macro is about explaining national-level data series like employment, output and prices. Eventually, economists realized that to explain those things, they would need to understand the smaller pieces of the economy, such as consumer behavior or competition between companies. At first, they just imagined or postulated how these elements worked -- that’s the core of DSGE.
Economists now realize that consumers and businesses behave in ways that are much more complicated and difficult to understand. So there has been increased interest in what’s called “macro-focused micro” -- studies of businesses, competition, markets and individual behavior that have relevance for macro even though they weren’t traditionally included in the field. Examples of this would include studies of business dynamism, price adjustment, financial bubbles and differences between workers.
Let’s hope more and more macroeconomists focus on these things, instead of trying to make big, grandiose, but ultimately vacuous models of booms and recessions. When we understand the pieces of the economy better, we’ll have a much better chance of grasping the whole. If this continues, maybe the ivory tower will have more relevance for the Fed, the financial industry and maybe even for our coffee-house discussions.
Friday, 10 June 2016
Working-class Britons feel Brexity and betrayed – Labour must win them over
Owen Jones in The Guardian
When presented with a vote on the status quo, it is no surprise that those with the least stake in it vote to abandon it. The same happened in Scotland’s independence referendum. Threats of economic Armageddon resonate little with people living in communities that feel ignored, marginalised and belittled. “Economic insecurity beckons!” people who live in perpetual economic insecurity are told. A Conservative prime minister lines up with pillars of Britain’s establishment with a message of doom – and it makes millions of people even more determined to stick their fingers up at it.
The leave campaign knows all this. It is Trumpism in full pomp: powerful vested interests whose policies would only concentrate wealth and power even further in the hands of the few, masquerading as the praetorian guard of an anti-establishment insurgency dripping in anti-immigration sentiment. It is political trickery long honed by Ukip, a party led by a privately educated ex-City broker that claims to be the voice of the little guy against a self-interested powerful clique. If Donald Trump succeeds across the Atlantic, the terrible cost of leaving millions of working-class people feeling both abandoned and slighted will be nightmarishly clear. The same goes for this referendum.
What of Jeremy Corbyn, assailed for not making his voice heard more loudly? He is accused of secretly wishing leave to triumph. This is unfair. He is undeniably sceptical about the European Union in its current form, which puts him closer to the mainstream of British public opinion than a pro-Brussels ideologue. Stay in the EU to change it: that’s a message that certainly needs more emphasis. But the key fear of the Labour leadership is the Scottish scenario: if discontented Labour voters see their leaders parading with business tycoons and Tory cabinet ministers in a campaign of fear, they will abandon their party. Scottish Labour voters who opted for yes defected to the SNP en masse: this time, the fear goes, Ukip could be the beneficiaries.
It is certainly true that Labour’s coalition is fracturing. The Labour left – which has now assumed the party’s leadership – is in large part a product of London and its political battles from the 1970s onwards. London, of course, has increasingly decoupled from the rest of the country, economically and culturally. As the commentator Stephen Bush puts it, Labour does well “in areas that look like [the] UK of 30 years hence”: in particular, communities that are more diverse and more educated. In many major urban centres Labour thrives: witness the victory of Labour’s Marvin Rees in Bristol’s recent mayoral election. It is in working-class small-town Britain that Labour faces its greatest challenge. And it is these communities that may decide the referendum – as well as Labour’s future.
That’s why Labour’s remain effort needs to bring voices that resonate in northern working-class communities to the fore, such as Jon Trickett, who represents Hemsworth in West Yorkshire. These voices need to spell out the danger of workers’ rights being tossed on to a bonfire; to emphasise the real agenda of the leave leadership; and to argue that we can build a different sort of Europe. It would be foolish for either side to call this referendum. But unless a working-class Britain that feels betrayed by the political elite can be persuaded, then Britain will vote to leave the European Union in less than two weeks.
Patriotism and Matricide
Dr. A.K.Biswas in Outlook India
In the high noon of euphoria over mother, motherland and Bharat mata it is apt to recall what it all means or implies in a historical perspective. In bygone colonial India people chanted 'vande mataram' for invoking blessings of the divine mother for the cause of the motherland. But since mid-1930 it excited controversies which turned more complex on Rabindranath Tagore's outright rejection of the song as one that would unite all communities in India. In his letter to Subhas Chanda Bose (1937), the great poet wrote, "The core of Vande Mataram is a hymn to goddess Durga: this is so plain that there can be no debate about it. Of course, Bankim Chandra does show Durga to be inseparably united with Bengal in the end, but no Mussulman [Muslim] can be expected patriotically to worship the ten-handed deity as "Swadesh" [the nation].......When Bengali Mussulmans show signs of stubborn fanaticism, we regard these as intolerable. When we too copy them and make unreasonable demands, it will be self-defeating."1
Does the same logic and arguments Tagore advanced for Vande Mataram apply to Bharat mata ki jai?
Fanaticism albeit fundamentalism is not wanting even now as then. Manifestation of it in various part of the country has not been wanting among people with woeful proclivity, though they can be considered responsible and well meaning. Vast sections of Indians stood aloof from garish parade of patriotism in colonial days because of social reasons and factors hurting their dignity as human beings.
Sati or widow burning vis-a-vis patriotic pretension:
Till 1829. murdering women as sati on the altar of religion was a considered a sacred act till Lord William Bentinck banned sati. In the garb of religion, in a large portion of India, widows were mercilessly burned alive with the dead body of their husband, denying them the right to life. Saints, sages and seers were exponents of morbid doctrines against women. Sons, who nonchalantly burnt their mothers alive and claimed—and received too—unique respectability and recognition from the community and the country. What moral uprightness, in the circumstance, was there for such a son to resort to sloganeering: mother and motherland superior to heaven? Does such pretension edify the noble perception of the motherland for a son who, as religious duty, remorselessly committed matricide? At the beast he can claim a homeland, not or never a motherland. There is intractable or a baffling paradox. To elaborate the point two illustrations are fielded:
"A middle-aged Brahman widow, who would have inherited a fortune of Rs 3000 to Rs 4000 left by her husband, was burnt on the pyre by her husband's brothers, and no notice was given at the police station, which lay only four miles off. The miscreants were committed to the court of circuit and found guilty of having committed a blamable act, and to be liable for punishment; but the Sudder court acquitted them on appeal on ground that the practice was not prohibited by law. In 1829 Lord Bentinck put suttee into the category of crimes."2
Solely driven by pecuniary motives, brothers of the dead man in Rungpur had put the widow to death depriving her of the right of inheritance in Dayabhaga of the law of inheritance enunciated in by Sanskrit scholar Jeemutvahan. Their matricide did not stigmatize them as heinous offenders.
The Hindu was conditioned by dinning into his mind the teachings drawn from his scriptures. Angira, credited with compiling Rig Veda and one of the saptarishis (seven sages) had lent his stamp of approval to sati:
"There are 3,50, 000,00 hairs on the human body. The woman who ascends the pile with her husband , will remain so many years in heaven.
As snake catcher draws the serpent from its hole, so, she, rescuing her husband (from hell) rejoins him."
"The woman who expires on the funeral pile with her husband purifies the family of her mother, her father and her husband."
Such indulgence are are promised by grave authors."4
High pitched preaching of insensitive dimension perpetuated widow burning. In 1987, the sati of teenaged Roop Kanwar in village Deorala, Rajasthan, did not bring heads of vast section of Indians down by senses of shame or mortification.
Let me cite another ignoble direction on sati from Brahma Puran:
"If the husband be out of country when he dies, let the virtuous wife take his slippers (or anything else which belongs to his dress) and binding them (or it) on her breast, after purification, enter a separate fire."
Burning a widow with her husband's slippers? What a shoddy treatment prescribed by the scriptures for a widow! Bengal actually did boast of an instance when a widow was consigned to fire with the dress of her husband who died in far off north India.
What a son did to his mother in 1796 at village Majilpur near Jaynagar under district 24-Parganas some 15-20 miles to the south of Calcutta, was not only indelible disgrace to the Mother India but a tragedy for one who bore such a son for 10 months in her womb. The incident was as follows:
On the death of one Bancha Ram, a Brahman, his widow went to be burnt as sati with her husband's body. When all preparations for the event, as prescribed in the scriptures in this matter, were completed, she was fastened to the pyre, and fire kindled. The night was dark and rainy. According to Ward,
"When the fire began to scorch this poor woman, she contrived to disentangle herself from the dead body and creeping from under the pile, hid herself among some brush-wood. In a little time it was discovered that there was only one body on the pile. The relations immediately took the alarm, and searched the poor wretch; the son soon dragged her forth, and insisted that she should throw herself on the pile again or drown or hang herself. She pleaded for her life at the hands of her own son, and declared that she could not embrace so horrible a death—but she pleaded in vain; the son urged, that he should loose his caste, and that therefore he would die or she should. Unable to persuade her to hang or drown herself, the son and the others present then tied her hands and feet, and threw her on the funeral pile, where she quickly perished."5
Imagine a mother begging and beseeching for mercy from her son. The relentless and remorseless son simply stonewalled her fervent pleas. She implored but he brushed aside all soulful entreaties for fear and plea of losing his caste! Caste was above mother. Mother was not above caste. Still Indians believe mother is superior to heaven? Mother being below caste, heaven too is below caste.
What a delicious equation! India's time honoured psalm: mother and motherland are superior to heaven warrants rephrasing as—caste and caste-land are superior to heaven. Can such men who placed caste above mother's life have a 'motherland' when a son did not favour his mother with her life. Such sons cannot even hypothetically have a motherland which, instead, at the best be called 'homeland.'
Globally people of many nations place their country on a very high pedestal and hail them as motherland but nowhere has any of them committed matricides on one hand and pretended, on the other, that the motherland was superior to heaven.
In the high noon of euphoria over mother, motherland and Bharat mata it is apt to recall what it all means or implies in a historical perspective. In bygone colonial India people chanted 'vande mataram' for invoking blessings of the divine mother for the cause of the motherland. But since mid-1930 it excited controversies which turned more complex on Rabindranath Tagore's outright rejection of the song as one that would unite all communities in India. In his letter to Subhas Chanda Bose (1937), the great poet wrote, "The core of Vande Mataram is a hymn to goddess Durga: this is so plain that there can be no debate about it. Of course, Bankim Chandra does show Durga to be inseparably united with Bengal in the end, but no Mussulman [Muslim] can be expected patriotically to worship the ten-handed deity as "Swadesh" [the nation].......When Bengali Mussulmans show signs of stubborn fanaticism, we regard these as intolerable. When we too copy them and make unreasonable demands, it will be self-defeating."1
Does the same logic and arguments Tagore advanced for Vande Mataram apply to Bharat mata ki jai?
Fanaticism albeit fundamentalism is not wanting even now as then. Manifestation of it in various part of the country has not been wanting among people with woeful proclivity, though they can be considered responsible and well meaning. Vast sections of Indians stood aloof from garish parade of patriotism in colonial days because of social reasons and factors hurting their dignity as human beings.
Sati or widow burning vis-a-vis patriotic pretension:
Till 1829. murdering women as sati on the altar of religion was a considered a sacred act till Lord William Bentinck banned sati. In the garb of religion, in a large portion of India, widows were mercilessly burned alive with the dead body of their husband, denying them the right to life. Saints, sages and seers were exponents of morbid doctrines against women. Sons, who nonchalantly burnt their mothers alive and claimed—and received too—unique respectability and recognition from the community and the country. What moral uprightness, in the circumstance, was there for such a son to resort to sloganeering: mother and motherland superior to heaven? Does such pretension edify the noble perception of the motherland for a son who, as religious duty, remorselessly committed matricide? At the beast he can claim a homeland, not or never a motherland. There is intractable or a baffling paradox. To elaborate the point two illustrations are fielded:
"A middle-aged Brahman widow, who would have inherited a fortune of Rs 3000 to Rs 4000 left by her husband, was burnt on the pyre by her husband's brothers, and no notice was given at the police station, which lay only four miles off. The miscreants were committed to the court of circuit and found guilty of having committed a blamable act, and to be liable for punishment; but the Sudder court acquitted them on appeal on ground that the practice was not prohibited by law. In 1829 Lord Bentinck put suttee into the category of crimes."2
Solely driven by pecuniary motives, brothers of the dead man in Rungpur had put the widow to death depriving her of the right of inheritance in Dayabhaga of the law of inheritance enunciated in by Sanskrit scholar Jeemutvahan. Their matricide did not stigmatize them as heinous offenders.
The Hindu was conditioned by dinning into his mind the teachings drawn from his scriptures. Angira, credited with compiling Rig Veda and one of the saptarishis (seven sages) had lent his stamp of approval to sati:
"There are 3,50, 000,00 hairs on the human body. The woman who ascends the pile with her husband , will remain so many years in heaven.
As snake catcher draws the serpent from its hole, so, she, rescuing her husband (from hell) rejoins him."
"The woman who expires on the funeral pile with her husband purifies the family of her mother, her father and her husband."
"If the husband be a brahmanicide, an ungrateful person, or a murderer of his friend, the wife by burning with him, purges his sins."3
What a long rope of temptation for paradise offered to the families of the husband, mother and father of the poor widow. As a caged and helpless animal, she had no escape route from the jaws of death on her husband's death. Angira was not alone to offer temptations. Another citation of the scripture designed for collection of crowd reads:
"The bystanders throw on butter and wood: for thus they are taught they acquire the merit exceeding ten million-fold merit of asvamedha (horse sacrifice). Even those who join the procession from the house of the deceased to the funeral pyre for every step are rewarded as for an asvamedha.
What a long rope of temptation for paradise offered to the families of the husband, mother and father of the poor widow. As a caged and helpless animal, she had no escape route from the jaws of death on her husband's death. Angira was not alone to offer temptations. Another citation of the scripture designed for collection of crowd reads:
"The bystanders throw on butter and wood: for thus they are taught they acquire the merit exceeding ten million-fold merit of asvamedha (horse sacrifice). Even those who join the procession from the house of the deceased to the funeral pyre for every step are rewarded as for an asvamedha.
Such indulgence are are promised by grave authors."4
High pitched preaching of insensitive dimension perpetuated widow burning. In 1987, the sati of teenaged Roop Kanwar in village Deorala, Rajasthan, did not bring heads of vast section of Indians down by senses of shame or mortification.
Let me cite another ignoble direction on sati from Brahma Puran:
"If the husband be out of country when he dies, let the virtuous wife take his slippers (or anything else which belongs to his dress) and binding them (or it) on her breast, after purification, enter a separate fire."
Burning a widow with her husband's slippers? What a shoddy treatment prescribed by the scriptures for a widow! Bengal actually did boast of an instance when a widow was consigned to fire with the dress of her husband who died in far off north India.
What a son did to his mother in 1796 at village Majilpur near Jaynagar under district 24-Parganas some 15-20 miles to the south of Calcutta, was not only indelible disgrace to the Mother India but a tragedy for one who bore such a son for 10 months in her womb. The incident was as follows:
On the death of one Bancha Ram, a Brahman, his widow went to be burnt as sati with her husband's body. When all preparations for the event, as prescribed in the scriptures in this matter, were completed, she was fastened to the pyre, and fire kindled. The night was dark and rainy. According to Ward,
"When the fire began to scorch this poor woman, she contrived to disentangle herself from the dead body and creeping from under the pile, hid herself among some brush-wood. In a little time it was discovered that there was only one body on the pile. The relations immediately took the alarm, and searched the poor wretch; the son soon dragged her forth, and insisted that she should throw herself on the pile again or drown or hang herself. She pleaded for her life at the hands of her own son, and declared that she could not embrace so horrible a death—but she pleaded in vain; the son urged, that he should loose his caste, and that therefore he would die or she should. Unable to persuade her to hang or drown herself, the son and the others present then tied her hands and feet, and threw her on the funeral pile, where she quickly perished."5
Imagine a mother begging and beseeching for mercy from her son. The relentless and remorseless son simply stonewalled her fervent pleas. She implored but he brushed aside all soulful entreaties for fear and plea of losing his caste! Caste was above mother. Mother was not above caste. Still Indians believe mother is superior to heaven? Mother being below caste, heaven too is below caste.
What a delicious equation! India's time honoured psalm: mother and motherland are superior to heaven warrants rephrasing as—caste and caste-land are superior to heaven. Can such men who placed caste above mother's life have a 'motherland' when a son did not favour his mother with her life. Such sons cannot even hypothetically have a motherland which, instead, at the best be called 'homeland.'
Globally people of many nations place their country on a very high pedestal and hail them as motherland but nowhere has any of them committed matricides on one hand and pretended, on the other, that the motherland was superior to heaven.
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