The Art Of Giving And Receiving_ PETER JONES

As the Governor of the Bank of England wades into the fray, it does not seem too much to ask of bankers to make it clear that they are spending a portion of their bonuses on the Big Society.  Those who already are must overcome their modestry and let us know about it.

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Euergesia - "benefaction, philanthropy" - was a virtue of the well-born Greek.  Many inscriptions and statues, erected by the euergetist to himself or by a grateful people, attest the practice.  The culture spread to Rome.  Over 11 years, Pliny the Younger spent two million sesterces on his home town in benefactions.

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Discussion about the theory of giving was intense.  In general, euergetism was personal and reciprocal: it served the interests of the giver - everything from patriotic display to political self-advancement - as well as that of the recipient.  But in fifth-century B.C.  Athens, radical democrats thought a lavish benefactor might be seeking political advantage.  So they invented the leitourgia (out "liturgy"), under which the 300 richest citizens in any years were ordered to subsidise state activities.  Greeks then started to argue that the generous man did not look for a return.  But this meant that, if one was done a good turn, one should refuse on principle to respond.  If so, did this make receiving the benefit a nuisance?  Some argued it did.  To get out of this bind, the Roman Stoic Seneca defined a beneficium as "an action which gives pleasure and finds pleasure in so doing, from a natural and spontaneous inclination".  Seneca does agree that "everyone who serves another has thereby served his own advantage" but goes on to insist that the advantage consists not in what one gets back, but from the fact that all virtue is its own reward.  Aristotle by contrast drew an analogy with the artist, who rejoices in something he has created.

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A famous Greek benefactor, T. Claudius Atticus, offered to hand over his vast fortune to the emperor Nerva.  "Keep it", said Nerva, "and use it well".  Come on, you bankers, do the same: prove you are a load of euergetists.  You can start with launch of www.classicsforall.org.uk.... By arrangement with the Spectator...

How Gandhi became Gandhi... GEOFFREY C. WARD

Some years ago, British writer Patrick French visited the Sabarmati ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, the site from which Mahatma Gandhi led his salt march to the sea in 1930.  French was so appalled by the noisome state of the latrines that he asked the ashram secretary whose job it was to clean them.  A sweeper woman stopped by for an hour a day, the functionary explained, but afterward things inevitably became filthy again.

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But wasn't it a central tenet of the Mahatma's teachings that his followers clean up after themselves?

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"We all clean the toilets together, on Gandhiji's birthday,"the secretary answered, "as a symbol to show that we understand his message."

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Gandhi had many messages, some ignored, some misunderstood, some as relevant today as when first enunciated.  Most Americans - many middle-class Indians, for that matter - know what they know about the Mahatma from Ben Kingsley's Academy Award-winning screen portrayal.  His was a mesmerizing performance, but the script barely hinted at the bewildering complexity of the real man.  Who was at the same time an earnest pilgrim and a wily politician, an advocate of celibacy and the architect of satyagraha, a revivalist, a revolutionary and a social reformer.

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It is this last avatar that interest Joseph Lelyveld most.  Great Soul  concentrates on what he calls Gandhi's "evolving sense of his constituency and social vision", and his subsequent struggle to impose that vision on an India at once "worshipful and obdurate".

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This is not a full-scale biography.  Nor is it for beginners.  Lelyveld assumes his readers are familiar with the basic outlines of Gandhi's life, and while the book includes a bare-bones chronology and is helpfully divided into South African and Indian sections, it moves backward and forward so often, it's sometimes harder than it should be to follow the shifting course of Gandhi's thought.

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But Great Soul is a noteworthy book, nonetheless, vivid, naunced and clear-eyed.  The two decades Gandhi spent in South Aftrica are too often seen merely as prelude.  Lelyveld treats them with seriousness they deserve.

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"I believe implicitly that all men are born equal", Gandhi once wrote in the midst of one of his campaigns against untouchability.  " I have fought this doctrine of superiority in South Africa inch by inch".

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It actually took a long time for the Mahatma to turn that implicit belief into explicit action, lelyveld reminds us.  When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Durban from Bombay in 1893, he was a natty 23-year-0\old British-trained lawyer, hired to help represent one wealthy Muslim Indian trader in a dreary civil suit against another, and primarily interested in matters of religion and diet, not politics.

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Initially, Gandhi was simply affronted that discriminatory laws and bigoted custom lumped educated well-to-do Indians like him with "coolies", that impoverished mine, plantation and railroad workers who made up the bulk of the region's immigrant Indian population.  The non-violent campaigns he waged to bring about equality between Indians and whites over the next 20 years would lead him to advocate equality between Indian and Indian, first across caste and religious lines and then between rich and poor.

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Soon after returning to India in 1915, Gandhi set forth what he called the "four pillars on which the structure of swaraj would ever rest":  An unshakable alliance between Hindus and Muslims; universal acceptance of the doctrine of non-violence, as tenet, not tactic; the transformation of India's approximately 650,000 villages by spinning and other self-sustaining handicrafts; and an end to the the evil concept of untouchability.  Lelyveld shrewdly examines Gandhi's noble but doomed battles to achieve them all.  

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He made a host of enemies along the way - orthodox Hindus who believed him overly sympathetic to Muslims, Muslims who saw his calls for religious unity as part of a Hindu plot, Britons who thought him a charlatan, radical revolutionaries who believed him a reactionary.  But no antagonist was more implacable than Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the brilliant, quick-tempered untouchable leader who saw the Mahatma's non-violent efforts to eradicate untouchability as a sideshow at best.  He even objected to the word - Gandhi coined for his people - "Harijans" or "children of God" - as patronizing; he preferred "dalits", from the Sanskrit for "Crushed", "broken".

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Sometimes, Gandhi said Indian freedom would never come until untouchablility was expunged; sometimes he argued that untouchability could be eliminated only after Independence was won.  He was unapologetic about that kind of inconsistency.

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As lelyveld has written in Move Your Shadow, "Gandhi had hoped to bring about India's freedom as the moral achievement of millions of individual Indians, as the result of a social revolution in which the collapse of alien rule would be little more than a byproduct of a struggle for self-reliance and economic equality".  Foreign rule did collapse, in the end, "but strife and inequality among Indians worsened".

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Gandhi is still routinely called "the father of the nation" in India, but it is hard to see what reamins of him beyond what Lelyveld calls his "nimbus".  His notions about sex and spinning and simple living have long since been abandoned.  Hindu-Muslim tension still smoulders just beneath the uneasy surface.  Untouchability survives, too, and stand-issue polychrome statues of Ambedkar in red tie and double-breasted suit now outnumber those of the sparsely clothes Mahatma wherever dalits are still crowded together.

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Gandhi saw most of this coming and sometimes despaired.  The real tragedy of his life, lelyveld argues, was "not because he was assassinated, nor becuse his noblest qualities inflamed the hatred in his killer's heart.  The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his worlds."

......................... GEOFFREY C. WARD, a biographer and a screenwriter for documentary films, spent part of his boyhood in India and is currently writing a book about Partition....

GREAT SOUL CONCENTRATES ON WHAT HE CALLS GANDHI'S 'EVOLVING SENSE OF HIS CONSTITUENCY AND SOCIAL VISION', AND HIS SUBSEQUENT STRUGGLE TO IMPOSE THAT VISION ON AN INDIA AT ONCE 'WORSHIPFUL AND OBDURATE... IT IS A NOTEWORTHY BOOK... VIVID AND NAUNCED...........

TRUSTED AND TRIED... Sadguru

If you draw your own map while driving your own vehicle, it is wonderful.  But you may take a lifetime to cross an uncharted territory without a map.

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Let's say that you are going to Kedarnath.  Somebody is driving and the road ahead is laid out for your.  If you came alone and there were no proper directions, definitely you would have wished that if you had a map to tell you how to get there.

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On one level, a guru is similar to a map, a living map.  If you can read the map, you know the way and you can move ahead.  A guru can also be compared to a bus driver.  We sit in the bus and doze off and he takes us to our desired destination; but to sit in this bus and doze off, with peace of mind, we must trust the bus driver.  If with each curve on the road, we think, "Can this man take me safely?  Will this man go off the road?  What is his intention?", we will only go crazy.

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To live and survive, you need trust.  Daily, we trust a lot of things unconsciously.  Let us say you are sitting in a bus.  Unknowingly, you trust this vehicle.  You have placed your life in the hands of this mechanical mess.  We trust the bus unconsciously, and risk our lives while traveling in it.  The same trust, if it arises consciously, would do miracles for us in our lives.

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When we say trust, we are not talking about something new in life.  To be here, to breathe in and out, you need trust, isn't it?  Your trust is unconscious.  I am only asking you to bring a little consciousness to your trust.  It is not something that is impossible.  Life is based on trust and nothing in this earth will exist without this....SADHGURU JAGGI VASUDEV, A prominent spiritual leader, is a visionary, humanitarian, an author, poet and internationally-renowned speaker.  He can be contacted at www.ishafoundation.org.

Give Immunity to Bribe-Givers... THINKING ALLOWED... Antara Dev Sen

Talk of rotten luck.  Right when the government was readying to fight bribery and corruption, it was smacked silly by the ghost of bribes past.  Darn!  As we say, our bad luck is worst only.

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So just as Kaushik Basu, chief economic advisor in the finance ministry, stated that the government was looking at possible changes in law to give immunity to bribe-givers to help transparency, the cash-for-votes scam resurfaced with a vengeance to rock Parliament.  According to a WikiLeaks expose, sneaky American diplomats in India had reported that the last United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government had bribed members of Parliament (MP) to buy their votes during the no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2008.

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Dr Basu, of course, was talking of more mundane cases of bribery, in the context of a policy paper being prepared to combat corruption intelligently and through critical policy changes.  Right now, Indian law sees both giving and taking a bribe as offences.  And under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, a bribe-giver is protected only if he does it to nab the bribe-taker.  For years, many have been pointing out the unfairness of this law that further victimises the victim.  Now, finally the government seems ready to break the nexus between such shifty givers and takers that would help people report corruption without fear of punishment.  "Complete immunity should be available to the bribe-givers in all cases", Dr Basu said.

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And right then comes the charge revealed by WikiLeaks that the last UPA government doled out crores to buy the confidence of the House and stay in power.  Now, it wouldn't do to claim that the alleged bribe-giver (i.e., the government seeking the confidence of the House) should get immunity while those who received the bribe (i.e., voting MPs including those who are supposed to have happily pocketed the dough and then not voted for the government) should be prosecuted.  So "complete immunity" to "bribe-givers in all cases" may not work.  Perhaps, we need to look at the mechanics of bribery and the role of compulsion.

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Compulsion does fuel most of our corruption.  A study by Trace International, an anti-bribery organisation, found that 77 per cent of all reported bribes in India were out of compulsion, not real choice.  Most bribes - 51 per cent - were paid to access the timely delivery of a service to which we are entitled.  We have all faced this demand for chai-paani of varying lavishness, most of us have given in, the rest are probably still fighting to get their water connection installed or police case registered.  

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Next came bribing as self-preservation - to avoid harm, at 16 per cent.  Then there was the matter of the kickback, where 10 per cent had to be coughed up to receive your legitimate payments for services rendered.  All that's compulsion, wouldn't you say?  Bribing just to keep going, to live your life, to stay alive.

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Out of bribes given to gain unfair advantage, three per cent went to influence government officials, four percent to get inappropriately favorable treatment and five per cent to win new business.  So only 12 per cent of bribes were paid to get an edge over others.

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"IT TURNS OUT THAT 91 PER CENT OF DEMANDS IS FROM GOVERNMENT CHAPS.  CENTRAL OFFICIALS LEAD THE PACK WITH 33 PER CENT, THE POLICE A CLOSE SECOND WITH 30 PERCENT, STATEMENT AND CITY OFFICIALS COME A JOINT THIRD AT 10 PER CENT EACH."

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That bribes play a vital role in Indian business is common knowledge.  A couple of years ago Transparency International did a study on countries most willing to pay bribes abroad, and apna India topped that Bribe Payer's Index.  In certain areas, we have unparalleled expertise.

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From the angle of those demanding bribes in our country, it turns out that 91 per cent of demands is from government chaps.  National-level government officials lead the pack with 33 per cent, the police come a close second with 30 per cent, state government and city officials come a joint third at 10 per cent each, state employees are fourth and six per cent and after most of the pie is mopped up, representatives of the ruling party can still claim two percent.  And you thought government service was just about warming chairs?

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Our bribe-scape ranges from the sublime to the magnificent.  Right now, trapped in an unstoppable roller-coaster of scams - from the Commonwealth Games to the 2G spectrum scam, from Adarsh apartments to bulletproof jackets, from paid news to cash for votes, among numerous others - we have a kaleidoscopic vision of how money makes the world go round.  What we don't have, though, is a clear picture of how to stop it and get off.

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The Congress-led UPA government's attempt to curb corruption could bring this roller-coaster screeching to a halt, predictably with some unfortunate fall outs.  But to bring in real reform, we need intelligent changes in law.  And our legal system - though not beyond corruption itself - seems ready for it as well.

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This month, the Supreme Court made two significant rulings that refused to punish victims and went beyond legal statutes to deliver real justice.  First, it ruled in favour of decriminalising suicide, pointing out that one who attempts suicide was in desperate need of help and punishing him would be unfair.  In another case, it ruled that a woman and her family cannot be treated as an accused under the Dowry Prohibition Act for giving dowry at the time of marriage.  The woman is a victim of not culpable, it said.

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As a judiciary refuses to treat victims of crime as criminals themselves, the time is ripe to push for immunity for bribe-givers who are essentially victims.  I only hope that we do not get distracted by these high-profile, high-value bribery cases that shake up the national imagination.

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Even if it sounds unfair, immunity to all bribe-givers may work.  If the bribe-taker knows that he can be safely put away by the bribe-giver at any time, he may be less likely to accept so graciously.  The fact remains that no one can force a bribe down your throat - but a bribe-taker can indeed withhold services or endanger lives to force the giver to bribe him.  The two are never on par.

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Of course, it may seem more civilised to have a case-by-case evaluation of which bribe-giver gets immunity and which does not.  Sadly, that allows too much discretionary powers to decision makers.  Usually, in our country, discretionary powers are not conducive to justice.  They are used merely for profit.

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Why on earth did the silly old cash-for-votes scam have to erupt now?  Nah, our bad luck is worst only.......................  ANTRA DEV SEN is editor of The Little Magazine.  She can be contacted at :  sen@littlemag.com

OZONE! Global Warming Affects Us Mentally Too... sulogna mehta

It now seems that climate change is not only detrimental for the planet and ultimately, to our physical well being, it affects our mental health too.  Experts say that depressed and maniac people become worse with seasonal changes, while extreme climatic conditions affect people's behaviour, making them either "low" or aggressive.  Scientists also point out that micro-level mutation in our genetic constitution is possible with changes in temperature, which will manifest itself over a period of time.

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Dr. V. Pramod Kumar, superintendent of Government National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), said, "Patients suffering from clinical depression get worse in winter while the condition of those suffering from mania (displaying extremes of behaviour) deteriorate in summer.  These are also patients who show seasonally-affected disorder syndrome (SADS).  Accordingly, we have to alter the dose of medicines and vary the treatment for these patients."

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Dr D. Keshav Rao, president of Hyderabad psychiatry society, concurs with Dr Kumar that more mania cases are admitted to hospitals during summer and mood disorders and irritability are common when temperatures are extreme.  "Since dark, gloomy and cold weather leads to depression, those suffering from SADS, are subjected to photo therapy, by exposure to very bright light," says Dr Rao.

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Psychologists say that depression cases double during winter, while in temperate climates, cases of mental disturbance, mood disorders and irritability come down.  Clinical psychologist and trauma therapist Seema Hingorrani says "When it's very cold cloudy or incessantly rainy, there's usually a 40-80 per cent increase in anxiety and depression cases.

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Again, thanks to global warming, the extreme heat, especially during summer, coupled with pollution and traffic snarl, leads to more incidents of road rage, hot temper, mood swings, irritability and aggressive behaviour."

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Increase in the release of green-house gases leading to global warming has resulted in unpredictable weather conditions, untimely rains or draught......