More on India's need for the 2'nd ammendment

India? Liberal?

Maybe a combination of liberalism and an antique religion. There may have been some sort of an "antediluvian peace" prior to the flood; afterwards man was given permission to protect himself from other animals.

which religion out of many that are in India? And what peace? there is little peace in India. You don't know much about India, do you...

From the article:


"Last year, the Delhi Metro train service hired a larger langur monkey to frighten off smaller creatures after a monkey boarded a train and scared passengers by scowling at them for three stops.

Another langur is on the government payroll to scare off monkeys from Delhi's top federal government offices."

How do you HIRE a monkey, for Pete's sake?

Check his credentials. Get the proper references. Clear it with HR. This isn't rocket science, you know.

And check to see if his shoes are polished.

From a recent Lear/Zogby poll on politics and entertainment in America...
http://www.learcenter.org/html/projects/?cm=zogby

Re: More on India's need for the 2'nd ammendment

Arming the people wouldn't help this particular problem.

Breathtakingly ironic, that 'gunga' prefix.

Re: More on India's need for the 2'nd ammendment


There are enough people in a place like Delhi who would shoot the fricking monkeys, and the hindus would get over it.

Re: More on India's need for the 2'nd ammendment


Mein Gott...

The vast, vast majority of people in Delhi are Hindus. I doubt they would 'get over it' in the way you say.

Cycloptichorn

On average, one Indian farmer committed suicide every 32 minutes between 1997 and 2005. Since 2002, that has become one suicide every 30 minutes. However, the frequency at which farmers take their lives in any region smaller than the country ?- say a single State or group of States ?- has to be lower. Because the number of suicides in any such region would be less than the total for the country as a whole in any year. Yet, the frequency at which farmers are killing themselves in many regions is appalling.

On average, one farmer took his or her life every 53 minutes between 1997 and 2005 in just the States of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh). In Maharashtra alone, that was one suicide every three hours. It got even worse after 2001. It rose to one farm suicide every 48 minutes in these Big Four States, and one every two and a quarter hours in Maharashtra alone. The Big Four have together seen 89,362 farmers' suicides between 1997 and 2005, or 44,102 between 2002 and 2005.

K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), who has studied farmers' suicides between 1997-2005 based on the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, divides the States into four groups. The worst of these is Group II which includes, besides the Big Four, the State of Goa which shows a high farmers' suicide rate (FSR) ?- that is, suicides per 1,00,000 farmers. However, Goa's rate is based on tiny absolute numbers. All Group II States have high general suicide rates (GSR) ?- suicides per 1,00,000 population ?- and have seen large numbers of farm suicides.

Of these, Andhra Pradesh shows some decline in 2005. And the government claims the numbers have fallen further in 2006. But there is no NCRB data to support this as yet. In all, if the NCRB data are valid, then Andhra Pradesh saw 16,770 suicides between 1997 and 2005.
Decline in Andhra Pradesh


Andhra Pradesh was the first State after the 2004 polls to appoint a commission to go into the agrarian crisis. Based on the commission's advice, it also took some steps towards handling that crisis. It restored compensation for the suicides that had been stopped by the previous regime in 1998. It persuaded creditors to accept a one-time settlement of debt in several cases. This possibly helped see a decline after the terrible years of 2002-04. However, Andhra Pradesh has begun to mimic Maharashtra in one unhappy aspect. The number of "non-genuine" cases ?- those the government does not accept as distress-linked ?- keeps mounting each month while the "genuine" suicides decline.

There are other problems too. Several States, notably Maharashtra, have made identification of farmers' suicides extremely difficult by using indicators that rule out vast numbers from being categorised as such. One problem with such corruption of data is that it will eventually reflect in and distort future NCRB reports as well.

Karnataka too records some decline in 2004 and 2005, after a disastrous five-year period. And the State's 15 per cent increase in non-farmers committing suicide in the 1997-2005 period is five times higher than the rise in farmers' suicides (3 per cent). But the damage of those earlier years was huge. Karnataka saw as many as 20,093 farm suicides in the period. Again, it is unclear whether the lower numbers for 2004-05 were largely due to policy measures or whether there have been new and creative accounting techniques.

"Madhya Pradesh appears to have long been a problem State for farmers, though this has not been so far acknowledged," says Professor Nagaraj. "The increase in farm suicides over the nine-year period 1997-2005 is not so high, at 11 per cent, but the absolute numbers have been very high for a long period. Much higher than in many other States. However, here too, the rise in non-farmer suicides, at 48 per cent, is more than four times the increase in farmers' suicides." Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh) saw 23,588 farm suicides in the 1997-2005 period. However, Madhya Pradesh has mostly escaped the media radar as a farm crisis State. In Group II States, farm suicides as a percentage of total suicides reached 21.9 in 2005 against a national average of 15.5. In short, more than one of every five persons taking his or her life in these States that year was a farmer. Also, one in every four suicides in this group was committed using pesticide.

One State outside the Big Four that has seen high numbers of farmers' suicides is Kerala. It saw a total of 11,516 in 1997-2005. Worse, many of these occurred in small districts such as Wayanad. Kerala shows a fluctuating but declining trend over the nine-year period. The years 1998 to 2003 were clearly its worst period. More than 70 per cent of its farm suicides occurred in those years. From 2004, the numbers begin to drop. So much so that unlike the Big Four, it shows no increases in farm suicides for the whole period. The post-2003 fall, in fact, makes its overall figure minus 7 per cent.

Kerala created a "Debt Relief Commission" soon after the change in government there in 2005. The Commission held a case by case scrutiny of the debt problem, while the government halted aggressive loan recovery measures by banks and money lenders. On the Commission's advice, the government also decided to declare the entire Wayanad revenue district distress-affected.
Kerala still vulnerable


The improvement is quite fragile and could easily see a downturn. Kerala's farm suicide rate for the period is very high, and the State remains vulnerable to volatility in the prices of, for instance, coffee, pepper, cardamom or vanilla. A fragility enhanced by the fact that major relief on the debt front requires Central help. Besides, State bureaucracies are extremely hostile to debt relief for farmers. Also, India's free trade agreements with nations and neighbours that produce the same cash crops as Kerala hurts badly. The State's balance on the farm suicides front is very delicate. Complacence would be, literally, fatal.

Group I States are those which have very high general suicide rates. That includes Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, West Bengal, and Tripura. "However, Group I's share of both total suicides and of farmers' suicides declined between 1997 and 2005, even as that of Group II steadily rose," points out Professor Nagaraj.

Group III States (Assam, Orissa, Gujarat, and Haryana) are those which have "moderate general and farm suicide rates," while Group IV States (Bihar including Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh including Uttaranchal, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and Rajasthan) report "low general and farmers' suicides rates."

Generally speaking, the Gangetic plain region and eastern India have seen fewer farm suicides. States such as Uttar Pradesh (including Uttaranchal), Bihar (including Jharkhand) and Orissa report very few suicides of this kind. These States are in many respects the opposite of the Group II or ?'Suicide SEZ' States. These are overwhelmingly food crop regions. They are not intensive input zones, and their costs of cultivation are much lower. Use of chemicals is not anywhere at the levels it is in the Group II States. Government support prices for food crop provide some minimal stability. And there is obviously a better water situation.

States such as Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat also report few farm suicides but their data have been challenged. Haryana, for instance, reports fewer suicides but its increase over the nine-year period was 211 per cent. This springs not from the recording of huge increases in recent years, but because the base year data appear highly flawed. For 1997, Haryana reports a spectacularly low 45 suicides. Which distorts the figure of increase in farm suicides across the period, pushing it upwards. "It could just have been that the counting operation was really shoddy or that it collapsed or was incomplete when data were sent in 1997," says Professor Nagaraj. The numbers after the low 1997 figure remain roughly within a 170-210 range each year. Which again is strongly contested by farm unions and activists.

There are peculiar indications in Gujarat. Pesticide suicides ?- a common tool in farm suicides ?- are 84 per cent higher here than farm suicides. At the national level, they are just 28 per cent higher. Why is the gap three times bigger for Gujarat? Even for Group II States, pesticide suicides are only 21 per cent higher than farm suicides. Which raises the question whether several deaths in Gujarat ended up being recorded as just "pesticide suicides" without being acknowledged as suicides by farmers
http://www.hindu.com/2007/11/15/stories/2007111554771300.htm

Religion: Is ever-present in Indian life. Whether it is the loudspeaker-aided call of the Lucknow muezzin or the raucous din of the Kolkata puja-pandal, the stray half-starved cow meandering through a gully or the profusion of fruit-cake in the stores at Christmas, the presence and influence of religion is everywhere apparent. Hardly a foundation-stone is laid, ship launched or hazardous ascent by car begun without the ritual smashing of a coconut or the offering of a puja to propitiate the gods. Fundamentally, Indians are a religious people, even if (as in the case of the enthusiastic young Kolkatans who collect 'donations' for the betterment of their local Durga-puja-pandal) they claim to be communist. Three of the world's major faiths ?-Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism ?- originated on Indian soil, as did several of the minor ones (the Jains and the Qadianis, for instance) and most of the others ?- notably Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism ?- have found fertile ground here. Unfortunately, though, in India as elsewhere, religion has also served to justify injustice, to provoke division and to whip up hatred: the faithful rarely live up to the gentle precepts of their faiths. But India, of all countries, remains the living embodiment of the dictum that there is only one religion, though there are a hundred varieties of it.

Renaming: Renaming streets and monuments is a highly-developed Indian art, though nowhere is it more refined than in Kolkata, where a Left Front government managed, during the Vietnam war, to rename the street on which the US consulate was housed after Ho Chi Minh. (The Americans, however, were cleverer, changing their letterheads to reflect a side-gate that opened onto the less disconcerting Little Russell Street, which was not named for Bertrand). Where this becomes more disconcerting is when whole cities are renamed: in the 1990s Pune, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata entered the consciousness of English speakers. The nativism this bespeaks sits ill with the cosmopolitanism to which India has been laying claim at the beginning of the 21st century, but we shall have to list it amongst the many contradictions that constitute the Indian paradox. It's a great pity, though, to lose centuries of brand-name building, especially for Bombay and Madras; and to do so out of nothing but a petty chauvinism, a reassertion of pride in the right to label rather than the capacity to build. As i wrote at the time, our civic leaders seemed to be saying, in an admission of their own smallness: if we can't create, we can at least rename.

Sari: The sari is to Indian dress what rice is to Indian food, its prose as well as its poetry. No more graceful garment has been invented by man, nor one more truly flattering, for the sari can conceal flaws that other dresses only accentuate, and hint at features that other costumes only hide. It has adorned Indian womanhood for at least two thousand years, but it has never gone out of fashion, primarily because it has adapted with the times. Worn straight or pleated between the legs, with pallavs flung over the left or the right shoulder, below long-sleeved high-necked blouses or backless cholis, saris have retained an appeal that cuts across all distinctions of rank, religion, age or shape. Tied primly beneath the breastbone or low in 'hipster' style, knotted at the waist or pinned to an undergarment, in plain colours or patterned prints, polyester or poplin, heavy silk or sturdy cotton, saris have survived every sartorial change from the burqa to the mini-skirt. In Pakistan, the sari has resisted the blandishments of the official churidar culture and is triumphantly worn on special occasions; in Bangladesh, the battle did not even need to be fought. In India, alas, its use by the impatient younger generation is fading, and when I appealed in these columns to "save the sari from a sorry fate", i was met with a feminist backlash that left me reeling. So there is something of rueful defiance in this glossary entry: the sari is a triumphant achievement of Indian culture, but only Indian women can save it from being reduced to ritual wear, donned only to temples and weddings.

Secularism: Is an article of faith in the Indian political ethos, but where dictionaries define it in opposition to religion, Indians equate it to toleration of all religions. Either way, secularism presumes that the state shall grant no favour on the basis of religion, even though 82 per cent of the population may have one in common. In an intensely religious nation like India, this credo is easier stated than adhered to, but there is widespread recognition among opinion-leaders that India can no more abandon secularism than it can democracy.

At least at the top, secularism has worked well, with armed services chiefs having represented every major community and Rashtrapati Bhavan having been home to Presidents of three leading faiths. The important thing, however, is that for all the attacks upon "pseudo-secularism", the overwhelming majority of Indians remain non-communal, wedded to the chronic pluralism of our civilisation, of which secularism is merely the official reflection.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/S_Tharoor_Religion_thrives/articleshow/2532276.cms