Modern Marriages - For Better or For Worse

By Girish Menon

Recently, I heard the story of somebody who was married for over 30 years and had a hostile spouse for an equivalent time period. This person it was revealed had no moments of intimacy from the outset but they performed the sexual act in a spirit of mutual need. The couple still retain their marital status and one of the partners told the other, ‘I will destroy you but not give you a divorce”.

On the other hand the courts in Mumbai receive over 3000 cases each month. The traditional Indian idea of a family is metamorphosing quickly and even rapidly catching up with the western world. My cousin has this quip,‘ While the Indian woman has changed the Indian male has failed to adapt to this change’.

From an economic point of view this increasing divorce rate is a good development. In this era when GDP growth is the altar that we are duty bound to worship, then more divorces mean an increased contribution to GDP growth. Every splitting couple will employ a minimum of two lawyers, they will need separate houses and their children will need some childcare. All of this creates economic opportunities and contributes to the GDP counter. Second marriages and divorces also further contribute to economic growth.

Among Malayalees the absence of ‘yogam’ is the catchall phrase used to explain away any failed marriage. In simple terms, it means the couple were not meant to be successful in marriage. This is a post hoc rationalisation akin to the use of the term destiny.

But is there a good predictive method for choosing a partner of longevity?

In economics, the process of mate selection could be looked at as an imperfect information problem. Horoscope matching, family compatibility, cultural similarity and many other factors have been used to establish the suitability of a partner. Unfortunately, none of them have proved sufficiently reliable. In true rational spirit modern couples have experimented with living together for long periods of time to overcome the imperfect information problem. However, anecdotal evidence seems to reveal marriage dissolution even among such couples. The reason could be the inability to predict and cope with unforeseen future events that hit every marital boat.

Fortunately, I have no advice to give in this matter. All that I have noted is the failure to observe Christian marriage vows ‘for better or for worse’ by many separating couples. However, even such vows are put to the test among long surviving couples; as an aunt remarked when my uncle retired, ‘I married him for better or for worse but not for lunch’.

When it comes to meat, the kitchen is a battlefield – and conscience is a casualty

Ian Jack in The Guardian


When he was a schoolboy, the great polymath Jonathan Miller won a reputation as the finest chicken impersonator in north London.

The pleasure his friends and family took in his performance had encouraged him to get the linguistics absolutely right. Rival impersonators at his school were happy to make do with “buk, buk, buk, buk … bacagh” but the future satirist, actor, opera director and neuropsychologist noticed that the noise chickens made wasn’t so regular, that “chickens liked to lead you up the garden path”, as he wrote in Granta magazine in 1988.

“They would lead you to expect that for every four or five ‘buks’ there would be a ‘bacagh’ … What I noticed, after prolonged examination, was an entirely different pattern of chicken speech behaviour. Thus: Buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, bacagh, buk, buk, bacagh, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk, buk … BACAGH, buk, buk …”

There was a war on – rationing, a shortage of eggs. Miller knew chickens intimately because his father, a military psychiatrist, kept them, and towed them in a trailer behind the car as the family moved from one hospital posting to the next.

My own family’s chickens, perhaps kept a little later than Miller’s but for similar reasons, weren’t so well travelled. They merely moved out of their shed in the daytime and back again at night, through a little door that could be lowered and raised like a shutter in an old-fashioned railway booking office.


The industrialisation of the meat supply, which began in the 19th century, worked both for and against compassion

When we got rid of the chickens this sliding door was nailed shut, to survive until the shed’s demolition 50 years later as a mysterious architectural feature that made sense only to those of us who’d seen the creatures stalking cautiously through it – “buk, buk, buk” – in those faraway days of cod liver oil and powdered egg.

What happened to the inmates? My memory is inexact, but I remember a scene in the kitchen: a hen fluttering and squawking (“BACAGH”), my father laughing and half-crying at the same time. “I cannie do it, I just cannie do it.” The hen was a favourite of his called Betty, and what he couldn’t bring himself to do was wring her neck. I don’t know what happened next, or what became of Betty’s four or five companions – perhaps they were sold or given away, or had their necks successfully wrung.

I also don’t recall eating any chicken, and chicken on the menu would have been rare enough to be memorable then, and in our house and many other houses would remain so into the 1960s. All that remains is an image: a frightened hen and its frustrated would-be killer.

Two weeks ago, when the Guardian and ITV published their undercover investigation into dubious work practices at a West Midlands chicken factory, that memory prompted a fantastical calculation. The plant’s owner, the 2 Sisters Food Group, kills and processes 6 million chickens every week. Other firms in the UK kill another 11 million chickens, which means the country contributes about 875 million chickens every year to the global total of more than 50 billion that are reared and killed annually for food.

If only a tiny proportion of these birds were looked on affectionately by the people who killed them, the distress added to humankind would still be considerable: my fantastical calculation imagined that kitchen scene of 60-odd years ago multiplied many million times, like frames in a very long film, each flickering with remorse.

Of course, the ever-moving production lines of the industrial food system spare workers no time to reflect. And they’ve come after all – from 36 different countries, in the case of 2 Sisters – to make money rather than campaign for animal rights.

And of course, the point of the Guardian-ITV story was to raise concerns on the consumer’s behalf rather than the animals’, with footage showing chicken pieces being retrieved from the factory floor and thrown straight back on to the production line, and evidence that packets contained chicken older than the sellby dates suggested.

But while these malpractices may threaten human health, they carry much less emotional weight than the sight of the slaughtering and cutting process itself, no matter how hygienic or well run. They seem like small breaches of discipline in the corner of a gory battlefield that we usually take care to avoid any sight of.

The industrialisation of the meat supply, which began in the 19th century, worked both for and against compassion. On the one hand, it broke the relationship between the animal and his human keeper by taking slaughter out of the farm and the butcher’s shop and confining it to the municipal abattoir, where beasts were literally poleaxed by slaughtermen whose only business was killing. On the other hand, it made a later generation uneasy about the invisible cruelty in their midst. In an increasingly urban and technological society, where animals were sentimentally attractive, the notion of “preventable suffering” grew.

Under the banner of its irreconcilable title, the Humane Slaughter Association campaigned for the humane mechanical killer – the stun gun – that was already used in parts of continental Europe when the association was founded in London in 1911.

By 1913 a Birmingham company, Accles & Shelvoke, had come up with something rather better – the captive-bolt Cash pistol, named after the animal welfarist Christopher Cash, who first had the idea. Since the Slaughter of Animals Act in 1933, Cash pistols have stunned most of Britain’s cattle, calves and sheep and made the fortune of Accles & Shelvoke, which surprisingly still exists to make them.

Poultry are not prepared for death that way. The big processing plants have two methods. In the older, the birds are hung by their legs from a moving line that swings them head-first into a bath of electrified water, which according to the strength and frequency of the current can either just stun the birds (if religious tradition insists they be kept alive for bleeding), or kill as well as stun them. In the newer method, using gas, the birds pass through a machine with a controlled atmosphere that makes them first unconscious and then dead.

If consumers knew how farmed chickens were raised, they might never eat their meat again



These aren’t pleasant facts, and yet in most cases they represent a kindness – a quick and sure death – that has been absent in a typical chicken’s life until that point.

Felicity Lawrence, the Guardian’s writer on the food industry, has vividly described the effects of the genetic research that has gone into finding the most economically efficient bird. Fleshy breasts are particularly important in the broiler chicken. “By day nine, the broiler’s legs can barely keep its oversized breast off the ground. By day 11, it is puffed up to double the size of its [egg-laying] cousin … By day 35, it looks more like a weightlifter on steroids … bones, hearts and lungs cannot keep up. A large proportion of broilers suffer from leg problems … Birds that sit in foul litter suffer more skin disease. Deaths from heart attacks or swollen hearts that cannot supply enough oxygen to their oversized breast muscles are also common.”

Poultry now accounts for about a half of all meat eaten in Britain. It’s cheap. The cruelty that goes into the making of it is unconscionable.

On British Rule in India

An Era of Darkness - Shashi Tharoor Review by Karan Thapar

Is vegetarianism and veganism about animal welfare or moral superiority?

Leslie Cannold for the Ethics Centre in The Guardian

‘There is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.’ Photograph: Wong Maye-E/AP




The western obsession with rights makes it difficult to see their limitations. We speak about rights as if they were the only moral value with meaning, ignoring other important moral values like responsibilities or duties. In fact, responsibilities are the counterparts to rights – you can’t have one without the other.

Philosopher Carl Cohen writes that, “If animals have any rights, they must have the right not to be killed to advance the interest of others.” Another way of putting this is that those who assert the rights of animals are in effect asserting – first and foremost – a right to life for all animals.

But for an animal to realise its right to life, farmers, hunters and researchers must collectively accept a duty not to kill them. Similarly, citizens, consumers and patients must refuse to eat, wear or use food, clothes and medicine that require an animal to die.

As I’ll be arguing in the IQ2 debate “Animal rights should trump human interests” in Sydney on Tuesday night, the assertion of an animal right to life is non-sensical. It would require us – just as one example – to stop animals from hunting one another, just like we stop humans from killing one another. But more importantly, it is unnecessary to achieve what is required to improve the lot of animals.

Even Peter Singer, one of the intellectual fathers of the animal rights movement, doesn’t believe animals have a right to life. In his seminal text Animal Liberation he says we must refuse to contribute to – and act to stop – the unnecessary suffering of animals.

But he does not contend that animals have a right to life or that they suffer by having their life taken from them.

Instead, what he claims is that intensively farmed animals suffer because of the cruel and tortuous ways they are made to live and are slaughtered. We have a duty to do what we can to stop this by boycotting businesses that treat animals cruelly.

Having done that, we have a choice. We can go without wearing make-up and without eating or wearing animal flesh that required the torture of animals, or we can source and buy cruelty-free cosmetics and eat and wear ethically-farmed and slaughtered animal products.

In other words, while it might have been true that when Animal Liberation was written in the 1970s, the result of a boycott was a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, this is no longer the case. Today, there is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.

Indeed, given clear, cross-cultural evidence that only around 1.5% of people are willing to try or stick with a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle – figures that have not changed over time – the promotion of an ethically carnivorous life is likely to be a far more effective way to reduce the suffering of animals.

To me, this is so obvious that I have to ask why in 2016 animal rights groups continue to advance vegetarian and veganism as the only legitimate way to end animal suffering. A 2014 study funded by Voiceless, found that 70% of Australians agreed that “human beings have an obligation to avoid harming all animals”. This sort of sentiment had led “substantial proportions” to buy “free range” meat and dairy and cruelty-free products. Despite this, the Humane Research Council – authors of the study – advised animal rights advocates that while they ought capitalise on “widespread support for incremental improvements” they must also continue to press people to “abstain from animal products entirely.”

Why not press people who have chosen to make a difference through buying cruelty-free products to buy more of them more often? Or to buy them exclusively? Is it possible that vegetarianism and veganism continues to be promoted as the sole way of meeting our obligations to animals not because it is, but because it makes the promoters feel morally superior?

If it were, it wouldn’t be the first time the eco-left stymied mass behaviour change with unpalatable prescriptions delivered in self-righteous tones.

Analysis has revealed that mass communications around climate change provoked feelings of powerlessness rather than a desire to act in many people. Often the wrong moral note was struck, too. Environmental activist and philosopher Sarah Bachelard wrote at the time, “There can be a tone of self-righteousness ... a kind of shrill moral indignation ... We know that we are on the side of the angels, and in our own way we can fail to do justice to the complex reality of most human action and motivation. We get something out of ‘being right’ ... (and) satisfaction from making those who do not agree with us wrong.”

The truth is that an ethically carnivorous life is possible so long as we ensure the animals we consume have lived and died without unnecessary suffering.

Do animal rights trump human interests? Not if the animal right we are talking about is a right to life, and the human interest at stake is health. But I join with most people in believing we do have an obligation to stop animal cruelty and to fulfill this duty through the choices we make about what we eat, wear and do every day.

Where Cruelty Is Kindness

Those who promoted laissez-faire economics required an explanation when the magic of the markets failed to deliver their promised utopia. Malthus gave them the answer they needed.

GEORGE MONBIOT in Outlook India

Kindness is cruelty; cruelty is kindness: this is the core belief of compassionate conservatism. If the state makes excessive provision for the poor, it traps them in a culture of dependency, destroying their self-respect, locking them into unemployment. Cuts and coercion are a moral duty, to be pursued with the holy fervour of Inquisitors overseeing an auto da fé.

This belief persists despite reams of countervailing evidence, showing that severity does nothing to cure the structural causes of unemployment. In Britain it is used to justify a £12 billion reduction of a social security system already so harsh that it drives some recipients to suicide. The belief arises from a deep and dearly-held fallacy, that has persisted for over 200 years.

Poverty was once widely understood as a social condition: it described the fate of those who did not possess property. England's Old Poor Law, introduced in 1597 and 1601, had its own cruelties, some of which were extreme. But as the US academics Fred Block and Margaret Somers explain in their fascinating book The Power of Market Fundamentalism, those who implemented it seemed to recognise that occasional unemployment was an intrinsic feature of working life.

But in 1786, as economic crises threw rising numbers onto the mercy of their parishes, the clergyman Joseph Townsend sought to recast poverty as a moral or even biological condition. "The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action — pride, honour, and ambition", he argued in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws. "In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them onto labour; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger."

Thomas Malthus expands on this theme in his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798. Poor relief, he maintained, causes poverty. It destroys the work ethic, reducing productivity. It also creates an incentive to reproduce, as payments rise with every family member. The higher the population, the hungrier the poor became: kindness resulted in cruelty.

Poverty, he argued, should be tackled through shame ("dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful") and the withdrawal of assistance from all able-bodied workers. Nature should be allowed to take its course: if people were left to starve to death, the balance between population and food supply would be restored. Malthus ignored the means by which people limit their reproduction or increase their food supply, characterising the poor, in effect, as unthinking beasts.

His argument was highly controversial, but support grew rapidly among the propertied classes. In 1832, the franchise was extended to include more property owners: in other words, those who paid the poor rate. The poor, of course, were not entitled to vote. In the same year, the government launched a Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws.

Like Malthus, the commissioners blamed the problems of the rural poor not on structural factors but on immorality, improvidence and low productivity, all caused by the system of poor relief, which had "educated a new generation in idleness, ignorance and dishonesty". It called for the abolition of "outdoor relief" for able-bodied people. Help should be offered only in circumstances so shameful, degrading and punitive that anyone would seek to avoid them: namely the workhouse. The government responded with the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which instituted, for the sake of the poor, a regime of the utmost cruelty. Destitute families were broken up and, in effect, imprisoned.

The commission was a fraud. It began with fixed conclusions and sought evidence to support them. Its interviews were conducted with like-minded members of the propertied classes, who were helped towards the right replies with leading questions. Anecdote took the place of data.

In reality, poverty in the countryside had risen as a result of structural forces over which the poor had no control. After the Napoleonic wars, the price of wheat slumped, triggering the collapse of rural banks and a severe credit crunch. Swayed by the arguments of David Ricardo, the government re-established the gold standard, that locked in austerity and aggravated hardship, much as George Osborne's legal enforcement of a permanent budget surplus will do. Threshing machines reduced the need for labour in the autumn and winter, when employment was most precarious. Cottage industries were undercut by urban factories, while enclosure prevented the poor from producing their own food.

Far from undermining employment, poor relief sustained rural workers during the winter months, ensuring that they remained available for hire when they were needed by farms in the spring and summer. By contrast to the loss of agricultural productivity that Malthus predicted and the commission reported, between 1790 and 1834 wheat production more than doubled.

As Block and Somers point out, the rise in unemployment and extreme poverty in the 1820s and 1830s represented the first great failure of Ricardian, laissez-faire economics. But Malthus's doctrines allowed this failure to be imputed to something quite different: the turpitude of the poor. Macroeconomic policy mistakes were blamed on the victims. Does that sound familiar?

This helps to explain the persistence of the fallacy. Those who promoted laissez-faire economics required an explanation when the magic of the markets failed to deliver their promised utopia. Malthus gave them the answer they needed.

And still does. People are poor and unemployed, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith claimed in this week's Sunday Times, because of "the damaging culture of welfare dependency". Earlier this month, Duncan Smith, in a burst of Malthusiasm, sought to restrict child benefit to two children per family, to discourage the poor from reproducing. A new analysis by the Wellcome Trust suggests that the government, which is about to place 350 psychologists in job centres, now treats unemployment as a mental health disorder.

The media's campaign of vilification associates social security with disgrace, and proposes even more humiliation, exhortation, intrusion, bullying and sanctions. This Thursday, the new household income figures are likely to show a sharp rise in child poverty, after sustained reductions under the Labour government. Doubtless the poor will be blamed for improvidence and feckless procreation, and urged to overcome their moral failings through aspiration.

For 230 years, this convenient myth has resisted all falsification. Expect that to persist.

Some cruelest foods

Menaka Gandhi in Mathrubhumi

In the last 5 years meat eating has risen to the highest levels it has ever been. The reason for this is that India is, thanks to TV, turning non-vegetarian. Soon we will lose the magic and mystery of India, the soul and the gurus who have kept it alive, and become just another struggling, boring nation full of viciousness. According to the Mahabharata, the Kalyug started on the day that man discovered he could eat his fellow creatures. From there it was a short step to wars, slavery and wickedness to all humans.

All animals that are grown for meat are raised, trucked and killed with extreme cruelty. But man has taken unkindness to an art form. Let me give you a list of the cruelest foods. I am sure I can give you at least 100, but let me start with ten.

1. A Japanese dish , Ikizukuri means 'prepared alive'. It is the preparation of fresh raw meat, usually of fish, cut into thin slices made from live seafood and served as sashimi. The victims are fish, octopus, shrimp, and lobster. You choose the animal. The chef uses his skills to partially gut and cut the animals up and serve it. He must cut the fish without killing it. With its heart exposed and beating, gills still working, trying to gasp for air and painfully conscious while its body is being cut up. Often the chef will take the pieces he cut from the fish and 'reassemble' them like some nightmarish jigsaw puzzle. The Chinese have Yin Yang Fish, which involves dipping the living fish into oil and frying it alive, but again just enough that it is still living right up until you plunge your fork into it and put it wriggling into your mouth.
2. Ortolan is a tiny songbird native to most European countries and west Asia. It is about six inches long and weighs just four ounces. The French capture these birds alive, blind them using a pair of pincers and then squeeze them into tiny cages where they cannot move. The bird is fed millets, grapes and figs till it reaches 4 times its size. Then it is drowned in a liquor called Armagnac, roasted whole and eaten, bones and all, while the diner drapes his head with a linen napkin to preserve the aroma of the brandy – and probably to hide from God.
3. 'Foie Gras' means 'fatty liver,' and it comes from ducks or geese. Adult ducks and geese are taken to a dark room and put in fowl coffins. A long metal pipe is shoved down the bird's oesophagus and a machine pumps pounds of fat greased corn mix directly into their digestive systems, which then gets deposited in their livers. This goes on till their livers reach six times their normal size. The birds writhe in pain for three weeks but they are stuck in boxes where they cannot even spread their wings. Then their throats are cut and the cancerous liver taken out and sold as a delicacy for rich people.
4. This is a dish invented by people who are known for their culinary cruelty – the Japanese. The victims are baby Dojo loaches (Mudfishes). The recipe calls for boiling water. When the water is heating up, a block of soyabean tofu is placed in the vessel. The baby loaches are added and they try to escape being boiled alive by plunging straight into the still cold tofu. The tofu starts cooking and the little fish are cooked alive inside it. The final product resembles Swiss cheese, the holes created by panicked baby loaches trying to escape boiling water.
5. A product of that other compassionate civilization, the Chinese who brought it to Tibet – or vice versa - Feng Gan Ji means 'wind dried chicken.' The chicken is not killed. Its stomach is sliced open and its intestines are cut out and replaced with spices and herbs as stuffing. The stomach is sewn up again in the still living bird and it is then strung upside down to die and dry in the wind.
6. Another dish known in China as Huo Jia Lu meaning 'Live Donkey'. The animal has its legs tied and its body held down, while the cook cuts its body and serves it immediately to the diners who quietly eat it among the ear splitting cries of the animal. The flesh is actually eaten raw without cooking. The diner uses a special fork and spoon to scoop out some of the flesh from the donkey. The meat is dipped into the fresh red blood before it is eaten. A variation of this dish is called Jiao Lu Rou ('Water Donkey Meat'), where the donkey's skin is pulled off and boiling water poured on its raw flesh until it is cooked.
7. Nagaland has its dog variation. A dog is tied to a tree and kept hungry for a week. It is then given a bucket of rice, lentils and vegetables to eat. It stuffs itself. It is then turned upside down and its stomach split open while alive and the food scooped out and eaten.
8. Nothing like eating your own relatives. A monkey is forcibly pulled to the dining table, tightly bound with hoops over its hands and legs. One of the diners uses a hammer to create a hole in the live monkey's head. Its cracked skull opens from its head and the diners use a stick to extract the brain. The monkey usually screams terribly before dying. Diners use their spoons to scrape through the bloody monkey's brain. Others dip the raw brain into a herb soup in order to add to the aroma while eating.
9. We in the Northeast have another amazing way to eat the most intelligent and emotional animal on the planet – the pig. A sharp iron rod is poked through the pig's anus and pushed in till it comes out through the mouth , tearing up all the organs on the way. The still living pig is then roasted over a fire.
10. Another popular Far Eastern dish - a newly born rodent and a selection of vegetables are brought to the table. The diner uses a special skewer to stab the live rodent. The rodent, who cannot bear the pain of being pierced, squeals as it is impaled on the skewer. The diner dips the still-live rodent into the boiling oil and then eats it.

Next week I will tell you 10 more. Put yourself in the animal's place.

I cannot imagine the people who enjoy this – and then believe that praying to the gods will result in something good for themselves.